The Great Wide Open Black. Colourless. Lifeless. An endless mouth cave with no beginning, no end.

He could move. He took a step. Something soft, gritty, granular. He stepped again, felt the ground flicker in a flurry of fine particles behind him but landed again on a padded mass that felt gentler than salt.

And so, he walked.

It didn't really matter. He couldn't see anything. And there was nothing, and no one, here. And no matter how far he walked or where he walked to, everything was the same. A chilling silence. A deadness. Like limbo but eternal. Every step was a tug as if he lugged an invisible ball and chain - a pointless, unrelenting heaviness.

Later, he realised he was crying. He could feel the tears roll down his face. A drop fall off his chin.

'Why??'

Oh. He had a voice too. The sound emitted centimeters in front of him.

'WHY?'

He heard and felt the reverbration in his chest.

'WHY DID IT HAVE TO BE LIKE THIS???!!!'

He screamed, and it got swallowed up by The Great Nothingness.

Vrrrr.

A vibration. Against his leg.

Through the darkness, his hand touched his side, felt material, a pocket, a -

Phone.

He could feel the cold hard exterior of plastic and glass. He used his thumb to unlock the device and -

LIGHT -

Burst from the darkness -

The irony.

He didn’t want to be here. He didn't want to be in the black. He didn't want to be surrounded by Nothing and No One, for the world before him to be Non-existent -

But the one sole perk, the one sole thing that would'vebeen good, if anything good could've come from this at all - the one thing and piece of solace he would've taken, in this abysmal empty land, if he lost everything, was at the very least, his phone to have been swallowed up and taken as well.

But no.

That same fucking screen -

Mom: I am picking you up straight after school

Mom: we'll talk later

He choked on a sob.

He was about to throw this device that he could not escape down to the grainy soft ground beneath him when, what one percent prefrontal functioning cognition he had - made him, through tears and sobs and snot and sniffing, use his thumb and -

Hinata: Hey Toru. My mom is picking me up after school straight away. She wants to talk about my grades. I'm so sad because -

Tears blinded him. He collapsed, phone in hand, message half constructed, to the ground, weeping. The light from his phone illuminated nothing but more dark.

Our time has run out.

How many more days did they have together? One? Three? Ten? Fifty? A hundred? How many more things were going to try and rob him of Toru? Every meeting now felt as precious as a lone red rose bud miraculously blooming in winter's cruel hand.

Hinata gritted his teeth. No. This could not, would not, be the end.

Even if his life depended on it.

Hinata: I so badly wanted to see you tonight but hopefully I will see you tomorrow.

Send.

Press. Phone locked.

Black. He was ravaged by the darkness yet again, but there he still lay on invisible sands.

Throb.

A heart of rock, jagged, black, it's cracks shimmered with live, slithering lava, spellbinding, red, orange, yellow. Pulsating. Burning. Boiling.

Inside of him.

She was there. On the dot. Right outside Karasuno's gates. The perfect spot.

He could almost feel the anger, sadness, worry and stress from thirty yards away, radiating off the car like lime-green waves of negative aura.

Or maybe that was just how he felt.

One moment he had been in the Principal's office, he'd blinked, and now, he was here. Somehow he had survived the day, had resisted smashing his phone to smithereens, had managed to text Yachi -

Hinata: pls let the team know my mom wants to speak to me about the bullying seeing as someone told the Principal about me and Toru dating so I won't be at practice today

That rock of red rage had pulsed in him even as he'd typed the text, bubbling in the grip of his hand.

His phone had blown up with all sorts throughout the day so that he'd put it on Do Not Disturb mode, with the exception of his mother, Toru and Yachi. Yachi had called him and texted him during lunch (Yachi: where are you???).

At one point in the day, when he was out of it, standing outside, not far enough from the school building, he heard a whiny annoying singy-song voice from somewhere above him: I just wanna see Torrr uuu. I just wanna be back with himmm!! Wawa wawa wa!!

Laughter erupted above him but when he'd looked up, the culprits had fallen away from an open third-floor window, hidden.

Hinata had grabbed a stone and thrown it at the window. It flew, small, and sharp, hit the concrete building, barely seven feet above him, and bounced back.

Beneath the surface, under brown and black, molten veins like yellow snakes slid under his skin, blotchy with red, making the swords in his back twitch -

This is Kageyama's fault.

In his gut, in his blood, in his bones. The only thing he knew more was that he loved Toru.

The person who told the Principal that he and Toru were dating -

It was a no-brainer.

Just like all roads led to Rome, every mishap, every root, of every problem, in his life, slithered its way down to that surly black-haired boy that Hinata could not live with or without.

It had gone past 3 o'clock but the sun felt unbearable. His insides felt like someone kept pushing and scraping them with a dough cutter to one side of his body, then the other, as if his organs were a disconnected, loose, bloody mess. His blood was moving in the wrong direction, making him dizzy, disorientated, like the circuits had been reversed: blood was coming into his heart now through the aorta, and leaving through the right atrium. His empty stomach was in actual fact full of lead while his shoes had been cemented to the ground.

The dusty sandy planes. This hard concrete ground. He hated all of it.

The hairs on the back of his arms and neck trembled from a slight breeze.

Hinata stared at his mother's car, like a surgeon staring at an infected hand, incurable.

I love you, Toru -

He took a deep breath -

So I will do whatever it takes -

and stepped forward, onto pavement -

To protect you.

She'd been crying.

He could see it even through the windshield. He walked around the car and got in on the passenger side. Closed the door. Sat in, transported, to another dimension. Here the barren wastelands rolled endlessly, cascading hills of withered wheat, fruitless trees, interspersed with shallow graves. Grief hung low in the air like a swarm of ever-hungry man-eating locusts, like this was their favourite feasting and breeding ground. More than that - like this was their home. The death below, the destruction of life - what Grief loved the most. Hand-in-hand, the locusts swam, ravaging everything in their wake.

Her white knuckles. Her latest encounter with Devastation. Staring straight ahead. As if she'd been in a coma, and woken to find the end of the world.

Shadows circled them, nudged each other.

'Ma… can we -?'

'Who are you?'

She turned to him -

Eyes screaming white with red spidery veins. Pupils like gunshots. Lines and crinkles etched into her forehead, cheeks, around her mouth like a thousand year old tree. Her black hair (she'd dyed it back, cut it short, in a bob, for a change) gripped around her pale face like the claw of a monster squeezing her scalp.

'Do I know you at all?! Aren't you my son?!!!'

Hinata's eyes flickered to the windshield, at the shadows with their red X eyes, watching.

'Ma please!! '

'Should I not know what is going on in my son's life?!!'

'Ma please not here!!! Please let's go home, please let's talk quietly -'

'Fighting???! Bullying???!!! Dating?!?!? A - A boy?'

Tears formed in her eyes and like a mirror, they sprang in Hinata's eyes as well.

'Please. Stop - we can -'

'How about drugs? Alcohol? Gambling maybe?? Prostitution????'

'PLEASE STOP!!!!!!!!!!!!'

More and more shadows stopped and stared, growing a dark cloud around the car.

'I can't believe you just said that to me. How can you say that to your own son?'

'Are you my son? I'm not sure who you are. Because I can't believe all the things you've been hiding from me.'

She sat back in her seat and glared at the shadows through the windshield. And just like that - the wall of shadows began diffusing into the air. Grabbing her seatbelt, she buckled up and Hinata quickly did the same. She turned the key in the ignition but Hinata only felt a smidgen of relief, like someone had lightened his load of fifty kilograms to forty eight.

'Go to your room, Natsu,' Hinata's mom barked as soon as she walked through the door and de-shoed.

And Natsu, sensing that this was going to be a good one, grabbed some caramel corn puffs and scampered up the stairs, along the corridor, opening and closing the door to her bedroom to make it sound like she was in her room.

Hinata hadn't even finished crossing the threshold, didn't even have two feet through the door, when she started.

'Fighting - not just at school but at summer camp as well? Bullied - for - for -'

She welled up again and Hinata felt the bottom of his stomach being torn away.

Here it was: what he never wanted. The conversation he never wanted to have. The inevitable.

She dumped her bag and keys on the round table. Placed her hands on her hips. Hinata avoided eye contact and slowly peeled his shoes off using only his feet, leaving them in the genkan and stepping into his home in socks.

'How bad is the bullying?' she asked, softer.

He stared at the keys on the table.

'The Principal said he doesn't know the half of it, only what he's seen - the online bullying, your fight with your classmate and someone tried to pour milk on you -'

She burst into tears.

Hinata swallowed. He didn't want to hear these words. He didn't want to see her cry because of him. Hearing and seeing her cry, and talk about it, was like someone pulling back the curtain of a magic trick, showing the great reveal, ruining it all. He had spent weeks on this magic trick; he had painstakingly hand-crafted the illusion. So perfect, so refined, there were times even he believed it, and let himself get whisked away. The great nullification: if he assigned no meaning, if he took the hits and never spoke of it, it numbed the pain. He could find solace in the play - in acting like he was OK. So long as the curtains remained closed, so long as no one saw him - so long as he nailed the rug to the floor and the door shut so no one could enter but now -

The rug had been ripped off to show everything he'd brushed under it. The door banged wide open. The windows pushed up. The set for his play was all that it was - a set. Not real.

And here he stood, centre stage, like a fool who had been living and hiding in a theatre for months, and had convinced himself that this house plant was real and not a prop. The curtains had been drawn, and there in the audience, front row centre, was his mother, looking up at him as if he was as crazy as he was.

Could she just not react this way? If she could just agree with him, just act like none of it really mattered… If she could just join him, here, center stage, in this set he had built she'd realise - it wasn't that bad.

'Why didn't you report it? Why didn't you say anything? Why didn't you tell me? I'm your mother Shoyo your mother do you not think I want to protect you and know that you're OK? Instead you've been going to school miserable every day -'

She dissolved into sobs, and started searching for her packet of tissues in her bag.

Hinata needed to look at anything that wasn't her. He glanced instead at the stairs and caught a tiny triangle of orange disappearing from the top. Feeling her emotions was making him emotional but he could not afford to be, not yet; not when that lone rose bud was still in the snow, not when he still had something to protect.

'What else have they been doing to you? How else are you being bullied?' She wiped her face and nose with a tissue, watching him with her bloodshot eyes.

'I don't wanna talk about it -'

'Oh you are going to talk about it Hinata Shoyo right here right now!! What are those brats doing to my son?! What else????'

Hinata peered at the tips of his white sports socks, how stretched they were, faintly revealing his toes.

'You aren't going anywhere until you answer me!!'

'Nothing ma OK?!!? Just the online stuff and some fights and comments - people saying things when I walk past them in the corridor - OK someone tried to pour milk on me but that's it!! Nothing else -'

'And summer camp!?'

Hinata's innards shriveled to the size of a walnut.

'Wh-what about summer camp?'

'You fell or someone pushed you and you got ramen on you??!! What about that?'

'I - I tripped -'

'Because someone tripped you up?!?!? LOOK AT ME!'

His eyes flicked onto his mother, more terrifying than Hades.

'Who was it? Give me their names Shoyo. The boys at summer camp, the students at Karasuno - I already know the name Gaku Ogihara who you fought with last week - who else is bullying my son???'

'It's no one specific ma!' Hinata dropped his gaze, 'I don't know their names! It was some guys from another school at summer camp - and just random people at Karasuno who I pass by in the corridor. The milk incident - I don't know - '

'YOU'RE LYING!'

'I'm not lying ma!!! I'm telling the truth!!'

'Then I want NAMES Shoyo these are people you see every day at Karasuno - summer camp are people you're playing volleyball with for a week and you're telling me you don't know a single name out of all these people -'

'There's too many people!!!' he yelled back, and regretted it.

Seventy percent of the human body is made of water had to be a lie. As his eyes swam, having seen his mother's face crumple like a tissue, after hearing her wail like a dying whale, after feeling the force of his words against her chest like a swinging block of concrete, the human body had to be made up of ninety percent water, at least.

She gripped the back of a wooden dining chair to steady herself, as giant droplets fell like the first signs of a monsoon.

He could not recall the last time he'd seen her this upset. When father had walked out on them? That time she was suddenly made redundant? Comforting her sister on the phone, months ago, Hinata's aunt, begging her not to kill herself?

She was a wonderful mother: no matter what exactly she had going on in her personal life, no matter what struggles she faced, she rarely, if ever, took it out on him or Natsu, or let its adult contents spill into their adolescent lives. She was also not like one of those immature mothers who treated her children like they were her best friends, blurring the hierarchy, parentifying Hinata and Natsu so that they were the adults and she the child. No: she was perfectly, aptly, the embodiment of a responsible, caring, loving mother. She had raised them, was raising them, as best she could, as a single parent, working and providing, organising and sustaining them, and encouraging them in life.

Hinata felt guilt rip into him like a drill tank. Down down down it bore - through rubble and rocks and ground and metal - the dam - what dam? - what material could withstand such sheer power and force and might and sharpness? It struck the earth's core -

He ran to her -

She opened her arms -

They cried.

He fell. Into softness, into warmth, into the only other place he could find such love like this on the planet. This assured embrace. As promising, as consistent, as guaranteed as the rising of the sun in the sky. He hugged her back, inhaling her smell, so very different from Toru's - light, summery citrus - like Japanese orange osmanthus, freesia and mandarins.

This was here, under it all. Under the sharp tones and raised volumes, the accusations and demands, the fight to understand, the being misunderstood. Something that words alone, trying alone, couldn't seem to accomplish. Just good pure comfort in the form of physical touch, the great release of an unnecessary dam.

'It's not true, is it?'

Freeze. The freed water instantaneously froze over. Splinter. A crack in the ice.

'You're not dating Oikawa-san. You're not attracted to guys.'

She was still holding him, hugging him, her warmth, suffocating. Cracks and unevenness and tears in her shaky voice above him, as she tenderly lent her head on top of his. She couped him up, squeezed him tight, full of love.

'It's just a phase. It's a teenage thing. You like girls, don't you, Sho?'

Why did he feel like his stomach was suddenly a hive of bees? He was sure that when he opened his mouth he would fall to his hands and knees, and up from out his stomach, buzzing trapped winged insects.

'Tell me -' she released him and moved back, holding his shoulders in her hands, lowering her face to peer into his eyes so that she could see into his soul. 'That - that boy, Oikawa-san, the one who saved you during the earthquake, I know you two are close, and I know there was that video, and your Principal showed it to me briefly, but - but it was only made to look like - it looked like…' she started to cry again, because of him, all because of him. 'This is because... you don't have a father figure in your life... and so - so you're drawn to males who are older - who are strong, confident rolemodels for you - and you've attached yourself to the first older male in your life - and you've mixed it up - because I - haven't provided that for you - I cannot be a father-figure - and I haven't had time to date - and I tried, so very hard, as a mother, to be everything -'

Her mouth downturned in hopeless misery, in mourning - the marriage she could've had, the family she could've had, the life they could've had. There in these pinching squeezing cracking breaking faces full of pain and loss and failure, she wept an unintentional sea of poison her children could not help but drink.

Hinata placed his hands on top of her hand on his right shoulder.

Spotlight.

Center stage behind Hinata - something tall, cloaked in night. Ever seen, always hidden. In the middle of this scene, the very core of the set, the play, the whole reason the stage had been designed, the entire genesis of this grand act of deception and illusion - for this one thing solely. Cast in shadow. And in shadow, it would remain.

'Y-you're right.'

The swords that had been plunged into his back from his team - Hinata fell down, threw himself backward onto the ground, his own doing, to kill himself deeper, bring the hilts closer.

'I'm attracted to him, ma; I'm attached to him. I've... developed feelings - feelings I couldn't understand - I'm still attracted to girls - but with him its different and it must be because what you said… now… it all makes sense to me. These confusing feelings I have but -'

Hinata took a deep breath and forced himself to smile as the tears pooled out the corner of his eyes. 'You don't have to worry about this, OK? Because… he doesn't like me at all.' His voice broke. His face contorted. He released a sob. Why am I crying? Why is this breaking me? 'H-he is popular at school - he's been on TV - s-so many people like him and I'm - j-just, an underclassman, a kohai, to him, who survived with him, through an earthquake. He graduates soon anyway and is probably leaving. And I can then... focus on girls. Please don't cry. He has no feelings for me at all and I - just - look up to him. Maybe because… I've never known what the love of a father is like.'

His mother fell into him, sobbing, craddling him, holding him, leaning on him. Hinata wasn't sure if he was imagining it but he thought he heard the crinkle of a packet from somewhere beyond the top step of the staircase.

'I'm sorry, I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry Sho -' she kept saying, over and over again.

Hinata trembled in the middle front of the stage, under the burning spotlight, isolated, on his hands and knees. He'd thrown up - everything: his words, his heart, his soul. His duty to himself. Some bees too. His blood. His organs. The best performance of his life - the very contents of his being splattered onto this shoddy wooden stage spilling into the space below, the royal carpeted gap between the stage and front row. These liquids meshed - his blood, sweat, tears. His essence. His truth. Impenetrable, permanent, impossible to remove now from the wood or the fabric of this theatre.

But he'd won.

He felt it in the throbbing of his veins.

That Oscar. That reward. This set. This prize.

The rose had survived.

It would continue.

This illusion was his.

And how glorious it was.

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Chapter 74

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