Spoiler alert: This chapter contains spoilers for the outcome of Seidou's summer campaign, including the final game against Inashiro, so you may not want to read it if you haven't got past Chapter 190 of the manga, or Episode 62 of the anime.


Fragments


In which Oota can't puzzle the kids out


Oota always did his best to understand teenagers. After all, he'd made it his vocation to educate and guide them to the best of his ability. When he was baffled by their behaviour, he tried to put himself in their shoes and remember how he had felt when he'd been in his teens. It usually gave him enough insight, when students were being difficult, to determine if he should sympathise, be encouraging, verbally knock sense into them, or come down hard on them.

But for nearly a month now, he'd had an impossible time comprehending several kids. The strangeness had begun in the lead-up to the quarter-final against Yakushi, just after the principal had flown into a panic and Kataoka-kantoku had had a word with Miyauchi, Miyuki, Kawakami and Sawamura. It should have been the foundation for the boys to right matters and settle into their old routines. However, their emotional conflict must have been stronger than Oota had guessed, because things only grew off-kilter in a different way, and the circle of affected team members widened.

Oota didn't actually write down any of his reflections, of course. But in his head, he arranged the fragments he'd seen and heard, like the bad essays he was always marking, under several sub-headers.

First, the Miyauchi-Kawakami issue.
With Oota's and Kataoka's intervention, and Miyauchi backing off, Kawakami ought to have been able to resume normal interactions with the catcher, and the subject of Miyauchi's declaration need never have come up again. But it hadn't panned out that way.

Things had started going awry for Oota's barely-recovering peace of mind during the Yakushi quarter-final, when everyone thought Kawakami was pitching timidly because he was unnerved by the home run Todoroki Raichi had hit off Sawamura's pitch minutes earlier. But Oota had noticed Kawakami glancing towards the bullpen, where Miyauchi was helping Tanba to warm up. And those glances made Oota wonder for the first time if Miyauchi was also on his mind. This was confirmed for him on the evening of the same day, when he'd encountered Shirasu Kenjirou heading towards the dorms, alone.

"Shirasu, wasn't Kawakami with you a moment ago?" Oota stopped him to ask.

"Oh – Oota-sensei – yes, he was, but he's decided to attend the evaluation meeting conducted by the catchers," the boy replied.

"Isn't that meeting meant only for the first-year pitchers?" Oota queried.

"Hmm, yes, but he wanted to be there."

He wanted to be there, knowing Miyauchi would be present? Oota wondered, parting from Shirasu. At the indoor facility, he stood discreetly at the back, near the doorway. Kawakami was there all right, seated on the ground beside Furuya and Sawamura, listening to Chris, Miyauchi and Miyuki offering their assessment of the pitchers' performance in the Yakushi game, and advice about where they could improve.

At the end of the meeting, Kawakami had approached Miyauchi and asked if they could talk. This perturbed Oota. There was no need to talk, surely? All Kawakami needed to do was act like nothing odd had ever happened, and it would soon really be as if nothing out of the ordinary had taken place.

They didn't look surprised to see Oota – after Kataoka's counselling, they'd have known the adults would want to keep an eye on their interactions with each other. They directed their steps towards the far end, where he could see them, but might not necessarily be able to hear every word.

Among the things he did hear, however, was this part of the exchange, with Kawakami saying: "… I've only ever been attracted to girls. So I can't – I don't – feel the same way you do. But if I were ever to go out with a guy, it would probably be someone like you – kind and dignified and strong… I thought long and hard about whether to say this to you in case it's like leading you on, or giving you mixed signals, but it's how I honestly feel…"

Kawakami blushed his way through his speech but was able to look steadily at Miyauchi, and Oota watched Miyauchi take it like a man as he replied: "Thank you for being honest with me – truly."

Well, surely things would go back to normal now, right? Oota thought impatiently. But they didn't. For some reason, Kawakami and Miyauchi actually started hanging out more with one another, along with Tanba. The ace made an odd chaperone, but by the time the semi-final with Sensen Academy swung around two days later, Miyauchi and Kawakami were comfortable enough with each other for the catcher to sternly tell Furuya in front of Kawakami that "MiyaKawa comes first!" when the younger pitcher had tried to butt in on his throwing practice with Kawakami. And Kawakami had gone on to close the game crisply.

MiyaKawa? Oota had rolled his eyes in the dugout upon hearing the slash-fic-like conflation of names floating over to him from the bullpen. Ah, well, whatever keeps you kids mutually happy…

Then two days later, they'd played the final against Inashiro, and lost by a single run. In the wake of that defeat, the end of their summer campaign to reach Koushien, and the retirement of the third-years, Kawakami was the player who took it the hardest. In truth, every player – and the coach, too – was blaming himself, in his own way, for his own shortcomings, real or imagined; but one by one, they picked themselves up and moved forward. Not Kawakami. He'd faulted himself for not being able to close the game cleanly, permitting play to be extended, and failing to hold off Inashiro. He remained downcast for weeks; in practice games, he crumbled miserably, walking too many batters far too easily.

Despite his teammates' and Oota's continued efforts, no one was able to coax Kawakami out of his depressed state. It was painful for Oota to see him like this, but surprisingly, he found it almost as painful to watch Miyauchi holding back, agonisingly uncertain of how far he was allowed to go to help Kawakami, uncharacteristically keeping his distance because… probably because he simply didn't know if he would overstep those fragile boundaries should he try to help.

Even more uncharacteristically (and surely it was a desperate move), Miyauchi even asked new team captain Miyuki – Miyuki, of all people, the one kouhai he resented and had probably thought of for two years as a disrespectful upstart – to get Kawakami back on his feet.

The other catcher, however, was as lost as Miyauchi on the matter of how to achieve that miracle. In the end, some three weeks after the final, it took Isashiki Jun's inimitable tactic of flinging open the door to the players' meeting room and yelling at Kawakami to wipe that gloomy look off his face to shock the boy into pulling himself out of the misery he'd been wallowing in.

Miyuki took over from there, organising practice sessions and rebuilding Kawakami's confidence. Miyauchi looked satisfied, Oota breathed again, and it looked for now as if things were holding reasonably steady on that front.

But the Miyauchi-Kawakami matter wasn't the only head-scratcher for Oota.

Tanba and Chris were another puzzle.
A few nights before the game with Yakushi, Oota had been working late in the staff room. He cleared his assignment-marking workload for the day, then decided to make a final check on the players who were still up, before going home. That was when he'd seen Tanba walking quickly away from the indoor training facility, face and hands tense, leaving a lone figure by the doorway of the building – Chris.

That night, and the next day, and the next, Tanba had slogged his guts out in self-arranged pitching practice sessions. He'd pitched furiously, over and over, against the strongest third-year hitters: Yuuki, Isashiki and Masuko, joined by Kuramochi, Kadota Masaaki, Kusunoki Fumiya and Sakai Ichirou. Even Miyuki – hardly Tanba's favourite teammate – was in the thick of it, energetically catching for him to help him regain match fitness.

Something had happened between Tanba and Chris, and Oota had no idea what.

At the post-Yakushi game evaluation, Oota had of course mostly been paying attention to Kawakami, and later to Miyauchi and Kawakami's tete-a-tete. But he'd also observed Chris gazing at Sawamura a good deal, and looking particularly thoughtful when Miyuki crouched in front of Sawamura and touched his fist to the boy's chest, to tell him that the coach believed in the strength of his heart. The look in Chris' eyes then had been poignant – to Oota, he appeared to be smiling, but somewhat ruefully, as if… as if he was coming to the decision to leave something behind, to give something up.

Then on the morning of the semi-final game against Sensen Academy, Oota had been talking to the student-managers in the players' canteen when he saw Chris walk up to Tanba, who was eating breakfast alone. Tanba had actually looked surprised to see Chris approaching him – why should he look surprised when he and Chris had long been good friends? Had whatever happened between them made him think that Chris wouldn't want to speak to him again?

"How's your condition today?" Chris had asked, pulling out a chair at the table to sit facing Tanba.

"Not bad, I think," the ace had said cautiously.

"You look fit," Chris had added, with a smile.

After a second's silence, Tanba had also smiled, part shyly and part cheekily, and asked softly as his face reddened a little: "Is that your best pick-up line?"

They'd exchanged a few more words that Oota had not been able to make out because Yoshikawa Haruno was asking him whether they should take along extra boxes of energy bars and energy drinks that had been donated by former Seidou players. Then right after that, the entire players' canteen had exploded in hysterical laughter when Masuko Tooru walked in with an unintentionally freshly shaved, so-bald-it-was-gleaming pate – and whatever else Oota might have been able to hear being said between Chris and Tanba was lost to him for good.

What was going on between those two third-years?

Tanba had pitched very decently that day, considering it was his first time starting a game that summer, since his jaw injury. The Tanba-Sawamura-Kawakami relay had worked well, and Seidou was into the final. Pick-up line or not from Chris, nothing was hampering Tanba's form apart from the lack of match fitness, so whatever had gone down between those two seemed more or less resolved from Tanba's perspective.

As for Chris, Oota saw that pensive look in his eyes again the day after the Sensen game – he and Miyuki were discussing breaking balls with Sawamura in the bullpen, and when Miyuki told the first-year that he'd actually unknowingly pitched a breaking ball in yesterday's game, that strange look had come over Chris again, and that rueful smile was on his lips as he looked at Sawamura. Oota heard him murmur to himself when he moved off to the side of the bullpen: "Eventually, I will be letting you go…"

So this mysterious thing between Tanba and Chris must have involved Sawamura in some way – not that Sawamura had a clue about it, obviously, as the boy was as rambunctious as ever. But any further thoughts Oota might have had about this particular issue scattered when former student Azuma Kiyokuni suddenly dropped in on the bullpen, sparking chaos as he picked up his old – and very loud – dispute with Sawamura from 10 months ago, right where it had left off.

The Miyauchi-Kawakami and Chris-Tanba matters, though, were still not all that Oota was racking his poor brain over.

Miyuki and Sawamura were preoccupying him too.
Oota had of course heard with his own ears the ruckus in the dorm that night, when Miyuki had all but propositioned Sawamura right in front of the first-year's bedroom. After Kataoka's separate talks with Miyuki, Miyauchi and the two pitchers, however, the three teachers managing the baseball team had convened, and Kataoka had explained tersely that Sawamura hadn't understood Miyuki's drift at all, thinking it was a just a particularly tasteless form of the ongoing baiting the catcher had subjected him to for months. So no one was to make Sawamura more conscious about it.

Miyuki, in the meantime, had been told to continue building a close relationship with Sawamura as a teammate, but to keep a personal distance from the boy.

At the quarter-final against Yakushi, Sawamura in his naïve, playful way, had childishly shown he was still annoyed with Miyuki – when he'd first gone up on the mound, he'd ignored Miyuki's sign and pitched as he pleased, angering Miyuki enough to hurl the ball back at him with full force, conveying his displeasure at being disobeyed in a game. The ball must have been packed with Miyuki's businesslike emotions, because Sawamura seemed to receive every ounce of the catcher's ire, which jolted him to his senses.

To Oota, it looked very clear. Miyuki had, through the hurled ball, said in no uncertain terms to Sawamura: What's personal is personal, but this is business. We're in this battery, and I expect you to follow my lead. If you don't want to do that, I won't do a thing to lead you.

Sawamura had frantically nodded his understanding, and then obediently pitched whatever Miyuki had called for.

It was exactly what Kataoka had demanded of Miyuki with regard to Sawamura. So far, so good. But right after that, Miyuki had evinced odd behaviour which confused Oota. It later occurred to Oota that the catcher was in fact struggling to maintain that dichotomy between the personal and teammate-bonding arenas.

The unusual acts included Miyuki (for the first time, to the best of Oota's knowledge) apologising sincerely to Sawamura for making a wrong call that had allowed the Todoroki kid to hit a home run off his pitch.

Also, he'd done reckless, albeit effective, things in that game – like stopping Tanba's pitch with his bare hand – which must have stung dreadfully, though he didn't show it.

And then he'd apologised to Sawamura all over again, more cheekily this time, during the evaluation meeting in the evening. With hindsight, Oota felt it was as if Miyuki was trying to say to Sawamura: I'm sorry… I'm sorry, I don't know how to do this with you…

Sawamura, up until then, had apparently been in the state of blissful oblivion Kataoka had alluded to. But when Miyuki touched his fist to Sawamura's heart at that meeting, and did the same again four days later in the middle of the final game against Inashiro, it seemed to wake Sawamura up in a different way from the ball hurled in anger.

From what little Oota had gleaned from Takashima-sensei's sly hints about the tricky relationship between Miyuki and Sawamura, the catcher had, thus far, only made teasing physical contact with the pitcher. A cheeky arm slung around his shoulders, baiting Sawamura into grabbing him by his shirt and shaking him… but no serious contact.

Until that gentle touch of his knuckles to the boy's heart.

The first heartfelt, non-teasing touch, and it was probably symbolic of Miyuki's conflict – that just when he was doing his best to be businesslike with Sawamura, he'd made contact in a seriously meaningful way, and something seemed to dawn on the pitcher.

This was where things started getting odd with Sawamura too. Instead of just yelling at Miyuki as he'd always had whenever he was annoyed with the catcher's irritating personality, he started to interact in atypical ways with him.

Like calling off Miyuki's requested timeout during the Sensen game, as if to say: I don't need you to coddle me – I need you to partner me.

Like letting Miyuki take him, Furuya and Kominato Haruichi to the toilet after the Sensen game so they wouldn't get lost. Oota would have thought that after the dormitory debacle, Sawamura would have rebelliously stomped off on his own to find the toilet so that Miyuki wouldn't "weird him out" again. (And Oota could swear that on the team bus, when Kataoka had heard the words "Miyuki's taken the first-years to the toilet", he'd seen a muscle twitch in the coach's face, as if the man was about to develop a serious facial tic. It must have hit a nerve relating to what Kataoka had vaguely mentioned about Miyuki being too interested in the pitchers' bathroom habits – something Oota decided he really didn't want too many details about.)

Like sulking and pouting, all puppy-ish, instead of hollering furiously in the bullpen the day before the final against Inashiro, when he'd clearly been miffed with Miyuki for not hearing him out earlier in the canteen, regarding his wish to learn a breaking ball.

But Miyuki was still holding back like Miyauchi, not knowing where he could step without crossing the line. And this led to disaster in the final against Inashiro, when Miyuki failed to call a timeout when Sawamura had been feeling the pressure – and then pitched a dead ball against Shirakawa Katsuyuki. Miyuki must have known that Sawamura was feeling the heat – he couldn't not have known. Earlier in the same game, he'd had no trouble requesting a timeout to calm Tanba down when the ace's pitches were hit. Yet, he didn't do the same to calm Sawamura in this more serious situation. Why? It wasn't like Miyuki to overlook the obvious.

Unless he'd been so busy trying to keep his personal distance from Sawamura that it was screwing up his normal judgement with regard to the boy, even in a game. And it wouldn't have helped that Sawamura was starting to interact differently with him, throwing his already fuzzy parameters further off base.

Oota didn't know how it had become this bad between these kids. He wanted to understand them – he really did – but grasping their motivations was starting to feel like a mountain he could barely scale a third of the way.

The final straw for him, of course, was Kuramochi.
He didn't know whether to call it the Kuramochi-Sawamura matter, or the Kuramochi-Miyuki matter, or the Kuramochi-Sawamura's Girlfriend matter, but it was only mixing him up in the head a lot more.

After the semi-final against Sensen, Kuramochi had met Sawamura's reportedly drop-dead-gorgeous girlfriend, Wakana, in person for the first time, and had practically had to scrape his jaw off the floor. That was all understandable to Oota so far. But then Oota had overheard Kuramochi say to Miyuki in training the next day: "You know, for a long time, it was either going to be girls or you. Then Bakamura came along and got under my skin and made it easier for me to kick you out of the picture. But if you're going to be all jealous and stalking us, I'll give you a bit of room – you can have him – for now, at least – because I'm going after his girl."

"She's not his girl," Miyuki had muttered.

"You seem bothered that people think she's his girl."

Then Kuramochi had laughed his grating hyena laugh, and Miyuki had grimaced and said: "Bloody switch hitter. You know damn well I can't have him now."

Which only made Kuramochi laugh louder.

That was it. It was all too much for Oota to fathom. He'd thought he could understand teenagers, but he couldn't understand this bunch, not right now, not before they untwisted themselves from these knots they'd tangled themselves in.

Hopefully, they would do that in time not to mess up their campaign in the autumn to aim once more for Koushien. And he hoped even more fervently that if they made it there, none of the residual hormonal mess would result in any Seidou players groping, propositioning or using pick-up lines on their teammates, live on national television.

It would just kill him.


Note: Many apologies to Terajima-sensei for taking events and embellishing dialogue from his manga, and contorting it all to match my headcanon for this story!