Summary: Everything has a cost.
Disclaimer: I own nothing. Prince of Tennis is property of Konomi Takeshi; Yahari Ore no Seishun Love Comedy wa Machigatteiru is property of Watari Wataru and Ponkan8.
The Price of Tennis
1.
Hikigaya Hachiman hated mornings. His were violently filled with a mass of action. They were meant to be moments of peace; the afterglow of sleep was meant to be a lull, if not a continued stretch of sleep. Most importantly, it was his time to be alone, away from the world, in the quiet of his room.
But still, he rose in the midst of the dark, before dawn at four, every day, without exception. He complained and grumbled, snarled and cursed, but he never - on any day - relieved himself of his stresses and exercises. He had no choice; he loved sleep, but he loved tennis more.
2.
Hikigaya Hachiman liked to study. So he was a vigorous watcher of all things tennis. Like many, his favorite player was Federer. But of course, admiration and imitation did not always match. The realization was swift and it was powerful. He would never become Federeresque. And he would never try to be.
The player he seemed most like in sense? Nadal. The player whose tennis made the most sense for his body? Djokovic. The more he studied the pinnacle of tennis, the more he came to appreciate the vast canyon between them and any other player. They were not infallible; they were susceptible to playstyle counters, to age, to illness, to a bad day and many other things.
But the evidence was clear to his eyes: their tennis was sublime and inordinately so. In contrast, his own was not quite ugly but definitely closer to that than it was to his ideal tennis.
Thus, to overcome and ascend, there was no other choice. He had long since given up his ideal style of tennis in favor of the tennis that made him good. It was sad to leave behind some of his dreams but in order to fulfill the others, the path in front of Hikigaya Hachiman was obvious.
3.
Hikigaya Hachiman dreamed of being lazy. He imagined himself constantly yawning and stretching, tossing and turning as was his favorite thing to do well into the afternoon. He imagined his back against the headboard of his bed as he turned the pages to his favorite novels, as he hunched forward with intensity to push past a boss on his beloved Vita-chan.
But he also dreamed of being something and was left at a quandary. Eventually, his thoughts rectified themselves and his convictions fulfilled him. Thus, he put his sweat and tears into abandoning his childhood fantasy of becoming a househusband because despite his laziness, he also understood that he was never going to be just right to be a stay at home partner.
4.
Hikigaya Hachiman was good enough at singles to stand out. By the time he became a professional, word in the circuit was that he was the next big thing from Japan. But that was it. He was just the next big thing from Japan. Not the next big thing. Projections held his esteem to be locked between the numbers sixty and eighty. Projections that saw his peak, if not the latter half of his career.
And while that was not a terrible outcome for any person who aimed to be a face among millions, there was another more painful realization. One that came from within Hikigaya Hachiman himself. His forte happened to be his doubles play. Thus, he sacrificed some of his stake in singles to become a top forty tag team with a player he could barely stand to look in the eye.
Tennis taught Hikigaya Hachiman that he was just a frog in a well and that the world outside of that small tunnel was far beyond his imagination. It took from him the satisfaction of mediocrity and instilled in him a perception of depth.
5.
Hikigaya Hachiman knew that he would never live up to the expectations set by players like Tezuka Kunimitsu and Echizen Ryouma. No matter how high he climbed, he could never escape them. Their nationality bound them together. His face was worse, his skill was worse, his personality was worse. Nothing he ever did overtook even the most minor of actions or accomplishments from either of them. He resented them, even though they had both been retired for ten years by the time he even set foot on the court as a professional.
But he endured every criticism and comparison without lashing out just so his own career could last past an afternoon because he loved the feel of grass, the way clay gripped the ball and wrestled the pace from him, loved the hard court where he had first learned to serve and smash and volley.
He learned to smile at both of his coaches, even though deep down, he hated the both of them for making him who he was.
6.
Hikigaya Hachiman did not begin his journey toward professional tennis when he was a child, contrary to the popular trend. He had never intended to play tennis at all. In fact, while fairly athletic compared to an average teenager, he rather disliked sports. Tennis was not an exception. He had only dabbled in it during physical education. In other words, he had no actual experience or desire to play tennis.
But then he was dragged along by someone else to a public court and had the experience of seeing Fuji Syuusuke play against Tezuka Kunimitsu and his life was forever changed. He stumbled onto the court and swung miserably, missing left and right, his body awkward and his coordination lacking. He missed easy shots as his eyes were irrevocably drawn to the match down the other end, his mind stuck on the beauty between those two players.
That night, he tossed and turned, sleep unavailable to him. And even when it did, his dream was filled with the sound of a well-matched game. And when he woke, he laid there, silent and brooding. It was the first time something had haunted him so.
7.
Hikigaya Hachiman wanted to quit tennis more times than he could count. Even fighting through the amateur circuit was a slap to the face, a harsh reality check for someone seemingly with a fair spare of talent. But he did not.
It was not a matter of having no other options - against all odds, he had actually landed an entry into Toudai of all places! And was in fact the only student in his entire district to do so, in spite of Yukinoshita Yukino's efforts - or having no will to do so. It was simply that his will to play the game was greater than his desire to abandon it.
His stubbornness could have been attributed to the fact that he hated to lose. But personally, he thought it was his inability to let things go. When he got involved with something, it was his. Tennis was no exception. To Hikigaya Hachiman, it existed solely for him and him alone. It was his.
8.
Hikigaya Hachiman loved Hikigaya Komachi with all his heart. And she loved him. But between them was a wall insurmountable. A barrier between the two siblings who had never had such for a great portion of their developmental years.
As much as Hikigaya Hachiman loved Hikigaya Hachiman, it turned out that he loved her with all of what was left of his heart. The rest of it was dedicated solely to his one true love, his deepest passion. And for that, there was undoubtedly resentment locked away under Hikigaya Komachi's smiles.
She had never once thought anyone or anything could split them apart. But she was wrong. When she graduated high school, she clapped and cried and laughed and cheered with everyone else, waved to her parents in the crowd. Yet she also broke at the lack of her older brother who was finally able to enter his first Slam as a wildcard draw.
9.
Hikigaya Hachiman was a liar. But he was an honest liar. He knew when to lie, how to lie, and why to lie. Thus, he never lied to himself when he decided to commit to tennis. He knew exactly what it was going to cost him. The road was not gilded, nor was it silver. It was not the path untaken, though it was still a thorny walk. The trials and tribulations were evident to his rotten eyes, and yet, the cost of it all did not frighten him. Instead, it thrilled him.
When he talked to Echizen Ryouga about it, the older man laughed, patted him on the head, and informed Hachiman that everyone who had looked at such a road was already on their way to madness. Their lot was already cast. Tennis was a fickle mistress and a temperamental master. It demanded everything and gave nothing. It simultaneously demanded nothing and gave everything.
Tennis could not be lied to, no matter how many times its promises lied to him.
10.
Hikigaya Hachiman knew that he cheated himself out of a normal life but he also had not expected to cheat himself of a professional life. He should have been given the opportunity to network, should have been given a life of sponsorships when he made it to the top one hundred, should have been given something for his efforts, but he had not received any of those.
People did not like the way he looked. They never did. From childhood to his teenage years, even well into adulthood, he had never been what anyone might call handsome. Thus, when presented the chance to talk to people from all societies, the only ones that even spared him the time of day were his own fellow players but even they were scarce and almost exclusively Japanese. His looks would detract from the sale of clothes and he was good but not good enough to earn a shoe or racquet, companies said. So after perhaps the two hundredth meeting, his agent quit and he was forced to manage his own affairs.
Worst of all, no matter how much he invested, he was never able to overcome the final hurdle. No Slam was ever in sight, no cup close enough to grasp. He was forever set to the side. He watched as his competitors swept past him and clutched at victory while he stared off into the distance.
11.
Hikigaya Hachiman paid for his efforts and eventually, he was too weary to continue. His body had grown tired, his spirit had retired, and his skill had declined. It was a sudden realization that was several years away from the need to actually quit, but it had occurred to him that he, like every other professional, was addicted. The first step to saving oneself from addiction was admitting one possessed a problem.
So he took the next one and left the world of tennis altogether.
He had given tennis so much of his life. His hours, his mind, his body, his love, his hate, his rapture, his grief, his burdens, his lightness, his hopes, his dreams, his failures, his successes, his worst, his best; tennis took everything and more. Yet tennis had given him everything he had. He never once forgot that fact. But it did not give him everything it had.
He faced that fact every day. He lived with that knowledge for all of his days. Even after tennis was taken away from him.
12.
Hikigaya Hachiman was an opportunist. That did not mean he was very fortunate. Still, with what limited things he was granted, he made the most of them. Because he was afraid. Very afraid. Always afraid. Chances only came once in a lifetime; if he threw one away, another would never come. That was how he lived and breathed. But that never blinded him to his own faults and failures.
Every moment he faltered, he looked again and stood up to see if there was another chance. And every second after a misstep was one of those. Thus, in the end, Hikigaya Hachiman created his own luck and made his own opportunities just as much as he missed them and threw away his fortunes.
When it came to tennis, however, there were limits. Limits called the human body. And there were sometimes, no matter how much he prepared, how much he tried, he was unable to grin and bear it. Instead, he bared his expressions openly.
His first loss in a Slam's top eight was at Wimbledon, three years past the Tokyo Olympics. He had forged a path to victory, finally capable of putting it all behind him. He was one step away, one swing shy. And yet that one step was all too close to the sun.
Those wings of wax melted and fell as he watched the last point of the match fly by. Crumbled under the raucous thunder that tore through the stadium as the crowd roared. A service ace that struck true, a bolt from the blue.
His touch was never again this close to Apollo, but he was damned if he let himself drown beneath the sea.
13.
Hikigaya Hachiman was a traitor. Not to his morals, but to his ethics. His heavy heart took him and tore away his confidence. He had been trained all his life to resist being shaken down. He had more experience than anyone else he knew.
And yet, in his deepest thoughts, he never embraced the world about him. He was unable to live up to the expectations he had set for himself. The world around him did not matter to him except that it was his plaything; it was his little treasure box from which he had every right to pick at and plunder. But for all that, he was never able to claim a prize he truly cared for.
He had given all his cares to tennis and left nothing for himself that was not tennis. But in doing so, he had forgotten what tennis meant to him and why every fibre of Hikigaya Hachiman was for tennis.
14.
Hikigaya Hachiman never had his own signature moves. What enticed him into the world of tennis was not something he could ever reproduce. Perhaps that was the reason that he was just another face. His style was only imitation, never his own.
Even players much worse than him had something to call their own. A piece of tennis given to them, taken by them. But he went his own way his entire career without anything like such. It ate at him to watch Fuji Syuusuke's elegance and his counters. To watch Roger Federer's infamous SABR. To have someone as childish as Niou Masaharu whose very existence was reliant on others to exercise perfect copies of said others' techniques to the point that everyone feared who he could become.
But he persevered. And in the end, no one really remembered Hikigaya Hachiman even four years after his retirement. His place in history notched only by the scoreboards and the opponents he played rather than the tennis he built his whole being upon.
15.
Hikigaya Hachiman left behind a life of comfort for unease. All life is susceptible to variance and change; but the degree to which is often within one's hands, no matter where one treads. Still, it could not be denied that a life of an average citizen was well within Hikigaya Hachiman's means. The life of one whose sole purpose is for the sake of tennis was not.
His climb throughout the tennis world had not just been filled with a lack of recognition, it had also been filled with an insurmountable fluctuation. He had thought that as soon as one became a professional, their footing would have been found and the road was clear.
He had been wrong. Very, very wrong.
The numbers added up. They simply did not add up in his favor. Every day, he tried his best to cast it all aside. So he did. But every time he stepped outside of that box, the mental taxation hit, a tidal vortex, a constant barrage of weight that sunk him as it dragged his mind through the crevices of the ocean floor.
Everything was not okay. But despite that, he still had tennis.
16.
Hikigaya Hachiman once dreamed of being someone who was helpful towards others. But in the end, he abandoned that dream. He had no time or thought for such. Tennis had given him things he wanted and things he had asked for and things that he did not. One such thing was that it took from him his first desires and substituted them with new ones.
Yet in the end, tennis still stole away those thoughts of his. When he had told Echizen Ryouma, he had only received laughter and a haunted smile. And that was when Hikigaya Hachiman knew that he had not been the only one.
17.
Hikigaya Hachiman was thankful he met everyone he did. He was, like most humans, a social creature. He was unlike most humans, however, in that he was very limited in so. Thus, when tennis stole from him the day to day interactions he would have been forced to conduct at school, he was grateful. He no longer had to put up false pretenses and could move forward without reservation.
There were no more worries in that regard. But perhaps there should have been. In his pursuit of passion, Hikigaya Hachiman forgot what it meant to live a life like other people who could not afford such a luxury. As such, he was confused whenever he met someone who did not live as though every moment was for one solitary discipline, one confined practice.
And with that, Hikigaya Hachiman lost his connection toward social normality, lost the edge he had gained from years of quiet observation, meticulous study of human habits. Humans became incomprehensible to him.
18.
Hikigaya Hachiman tired of the repeated motions for every little action. He loathed it because he was a man and not a robot. But he endured and embraced it little by little because it was his life. Humans, he had come to conclude, were not meant for lives like this. And yet the entirety of their societies were founded on such blocks. Excellence was a habit, after all.
Humans were cyclical by nature and bound to such a chain of events. Their whole lives were dedicated to such practice that it was praised and called mastery. As such, the practice of sport was almost entirely designed for human functions, especially after the compounded millenia that comprised modern living.
But because he was so consistent, it was perhaps unsurprising that Hikigaya Hachiman managed to become excellent and never extraordinary.
19.
Hikigaya Hachiman was an avid reader of books. He enjoyed them not purely for knowledge's sake or for use; he enjoyed the technique used to craft them. Every word and line meant something. He just had to figure out what, how, and why.
His study of tennis was much the same. He learned by watching as much as he did playing. Footage of the Big Three dominated his spare time after he had made it to the professional level. But before that time, when he was just a stumbling new player, he watched countless videos of the decades that preceded him. From foreigners like McEnroe, Sampras, Agassi, Bjorg, Lendl, Becker, Chang to even players local to his home country. Of the latter, he was entranced by Yukimura Seichi and Sanada Genichirou most of all aside from the haunting presence of Fuji Syuusuke and Tezuka Kunimitsu.
However, he did not only study the beautiful. He also praised and absorbed the things he loathed. The playstyles of Oni Juujirou and Houou Byoudouin were anathema to him and yet, they too were glorious in their strengths. First and foremost, Hikigaya Hachiman was a technician. But even he understood that power was power. It, too, was skill when brandished to win.
Eventually, time became less and less for film and much more for conditioning and practice, though his regiment of study was still carefully maintained. To adjust, he created a system to help him adapt. A science developed for the sole purpose to appreciate the very game that stole him from the world.
20.
Hikigaya Hachiman never understood what it meant to be cruel. Despite all the things he was and was not, all the things he had done and not done, said and not said, he had never intended to be malicious. Even if they were hurtful. He simply acted; the results spoke for themselves, sure, but he had never once tried to be a dagger in the back or a blow to the fore.
He was straightforward and piercing in his own pursuits, like an arrow that soared through the sky and pierced the air until it made way into its target. That was perhaps a mindset given to him by his intense focus; however, it was something that he was grateful for.
Notes and Acknowledgements:
I was thinking of doing a Prince of Tennis story, another crossover. I started typing and wondered what about making a play on the title - so I wrote this instead.