Disclaimer: Don't own anything that's familiar!
AN: I wrote this piece a long, long time ago, and recently rediscovered it so I thought why not just post it up?
HOMERUN
by Tangerine Tales
There are times when Takeshi isn't sure what he wants to do with his life. His fist is clenched tight around his baseball bat and the ball is coming right at him, and he knows all he has to do is swing his bat, and the ball will go flying out, out and away and he'll run as fast as he's never had to in his life and everything will be absolutely perfect because the team will win.
But he doesn't. The ball hits the catcher's mitt and Takeshi is standing there still and wondering.
Static. (On his feet, in his mind.)
All his life, he has been classified as a Baseball Star/Freak (*delete where appropriate)—pigeon-holed and categorized with little or no chance of ever escaping his little cubicle. Because why should he want to run away from who he is?
Because that's all he'll ever be, that's what everyone seems to tell him is his destiny: to good at baseball and nothing else (you know, if he actually bothered to study, realizes Tsuna later on during one of their study sessions, Yamamoto would be a really great student. It's just, while not a bad thing, his head is filled with base-ball all the time.).
He wants to be something more. (He knows he can be, he knows he must be.)
So the coach is yelling at him right now, chewing him up and spitting him out in globs of spit and spat and splatter onto his uniform. Takeshi finds it hard to listen to the game-play which is strange because he usually understands the plan immediately and this is incredibly disorienting — because this is what he's good at and if he's not, then well, what would that make him? Useless, redundant, without a purpose. Dazed as he lifts his arm to rub at his eye, he smiles, "Sorry coach, I'll do better next time. Don't worry!" but Takeshi notes down his distraction as an ominous sign and crumples it up deep inside him.
The next day, Takeshi trips over a baseball bat (he had thrown it there the previous day, frustrated and bruised from the game with a million unfinished thoughts running around in his head, with none of them making it back to home-base). As he is falling down, he's laughing—amused by how clumsy he is. Then somehow, by some cruel twist of fate, he lands on his arm, heavy-hard, and an electric bolt of pain shoots through it.
It's broken (Takeshi is standing in the rain outside his house letting the water soak through the cast and looking up at the grey-dark sky) and it will take a bit more than just a while to heal. "Haha, is that so?" Takeshi asks the doctor, scratching his head with his uninjured arm. "Ah, I guess baseball will be taking a break then. I'm so careless, haha."
He relays to his coach the same news with a sunny beam on his face and a light-hearted tone as fluffy as the clouds. There's a storm in the coach's eyes that's kept at bay. He nods his head—barely—and dismisses Takeshi. There isn't anything much Takeshi can now do. If Takeshi is still up to standard when he's recovered, then perhaps coach will let him back on the team again. But only just maybe.
It's broken (Takeshi finds himself up on the roof drawn to the vastness of the sky above) and it's going to take too long to heal. He can feel the seconds ticking away, being pulled rapidly down from the top of the hourglass down down bottom. That same gravity is acting on him too, as each grain of sand is drawn to the bottom, he looks down.
It's a dizzying distance, 7 stories of air before scratchy concrete. But Takeshi keeps on staring, transfixed. In the same way the immense sky opens up to him above, the ground calls his name: it takes a single step to unite them for a cosmic infinity. And Takeshi is tempted to see where this contract will lead him.