It was the shouting that drew Kei's attention. "Hey, he's crying!" "He cries about everything!"
Kei turned, raising a disdainful eyebrow at the sight. Three boys were crowded around a fourth much smaller boy with bright ginger hair and tearful brown eyes. The bigger boys were taunting the redhead, poking him with a forked stick and trying to make him cry, then laughing when they succeeded.
Kei sighed, rolling his eyes. He recognized the bullies; he had stopped them months ago from tormenting his friend Tadashi. Lucky Yamaguchi was sick today, Kei thought, who knows how much these guys would've scared him.
The bullies clearly heard Kei's sigh because they turned, leaving their victim to hurriedly rub away the tears that clung to his eyelashes. The bullies' eyes nearly popped out of their skulls; they clearly recognized Kei.
"Can you three get any more pathetic?"
The bullies didn't bother to comment that time. They just turned tail and ran. Kei turned his gaze on the redhead, who was standing and dusting himself off. He had gotten over it faster than Tadashi had, at least.
"Pathetic," Kei sneered, directing at the smaller boy then turning on his heel and striding away, stubbornly ignoring the annoying, angry shouts from behind him.
The ball slammed to the floor. Kei stared at it, not liking the way his stomach sank. Again. He had done it again, damn it. He had fucked it up not just for him, but the entire team.
No. Kei pulled himself together for long enough to shake the hands of the opposing team and leave the gym. He was the first to leave the locker room, bag slung over his shoulder, and headed straight to the bathrooms. They were empty, thankfully.
Kei locked himself in one of the stalls and sat on the closed toilet lid, drawing his knees to his chest and burying his face in his folded arms. He felt sick. Again and again and again, that ball slammed into the ground, the echo of rubber-against-wood buzzing in his ears. It was hellish. He was shaking and hypersensitive; every noise, every sensation was amplified tenfold. The way his erratic, hiccupped breaths echoed off the bathroom walls; the occasional footsteps from outside the bathroom; the cold of the toilet lid slowly crawling up his body and leaking into his bones; the way his tears dripped onto his hand, from the right eye then the left. He felt awful, hating the feeling of absolute failure. It wasn't anything new to him, but his hatred or it had only compounded since his first panic attack when he was six years old.
"Pathetic, pathetic, pathetic," Kei muttered, one hand clutching at his hair in an attempt to ground himself, to pull himself away from his emotional breakdown.
He kept repeating that word, over and over again, once for every time he relived the moment that he had let that damned ball slam into that damned floor. He ignored the memories it brought up, of Tadashi, of Shouyou, because both of the other boys were good and pure and didn't deserve to be dragged into a moment like that when Kei was at his worst; when Kei was the most pathetic thing he had ever seen.
There it was again. Shouyou smacked Kei on the back, then bounced away as if he was unaware of his own behavior. Over the last month or so, Shouyou had been getting touchier and touchier, especially with Kei. It was unnerving and disconcerting. Before, Shouyou had practically gone out of his way to avoid touching Kei, but then it was all he seemed to do. It felt to Kei like Shouyou was taking any and all opportunities to touch him. Usually, it was a congratulatory slap on the back or the shoulder or the arm, but that wouldn't have fazed Kei quite as much. No, he was doing other things, too; he would hand Kei a water bottle and intentionally brush their hands together; or Shouyou would loop a towel around Kei's neck after practice and pull him down so far their noses were almost brushing. Every time something like that happened, Shouyou would just grin brightly and skip away like he hadn't just left Kei red-faced, confused, and embarrassed.
Kei hoped Shouyou wasn't oblivious to what he was doing. If he was, there was a relatively high chance of Kei strangling him. It was unfair, how easily he could tie Kei's stomach into knots and completely destroy him so damned quickly. It was awful and unfair and Kei hated it. Or, at least, that was what he told himself.
In the rare moments when he was honest with himself, usually in the dead of night when his insomnia wouldn't let him sleep and he couldn't find the motivation to try, he let himself think it. He let himself repeat his darkest secret, the one not even Tadashi knew, mouthing the words to the darkness of his bedroom. He let himself admit it, even though he wouldn't ever let himself acknowledge its existence in the slightest when the digital clock on his nightstand didn't read something between 3:00 A.M. and 3:30 A.M. He let himself accept that hellish, anxiety-inducing fact without feeling like he was some sort of sick, twisted, disgusting monster from a children's cartoon; the one that everyone hated and cheered the death of.
I am in love with Hinata Shouyou.
It felt like poison, bubbling and boiling through his veins instead of blood. It was every moment of anxiety, every moment of pure terror every time Shouyou even so much as looked at him. It was the burning, tingling remnant of each of Shouyou's touches on Kei's skin. It was the awful, fluttery spasms that Kei's heart and stomach did every time Shouyou smiled so wide and bright that it made Kei's chest hurt.
It hurt. It hurt Kei to keep it in, to keep it away, to keep it hidden, to not blurt it out in the middle of a game with a giant grin on his face. Some days, it was all that Kei could do to keep himself from grabbing Shouyou and kissing him long and hard, consequences be damned. He didn't, though, because Shouyou was too good, too sweet, too pure for Kei to ever be willing to do something like that and risk tainting him.
Kei was able to sum it up in a single word.
Pathetic.