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flydotnet · 8 months

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Heart of Diamantine

WHUMMPTOBER, DAY 14: “Feed me poison, fill me ‘till I drown.” Flare | Water Inhalation | “Just hold on.”

I speedran this fic in a single hour so fuck it, if it has a bunch of typos, it's not my issue anymore at this point lmao (it is, but I'm past the point of caring).

This was very close to be an unashamed novellization of RONC's Musashi route, but in the end, I found a cooler idea and I went balling with it.

Also, get it. I'm writing a Misugi-centric fic on a 14th? I'm clever. I'm very clever, in fact. Biggest brain of the fandom my guy.

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Heart of Diamantine

Summary: 5 times a boy was told to just hold on, and one time a man got to say it back.

Fandom: Captain Tsubasa (I'm flooding tags everywhere)

Word Count: 2.1K words

AO3 version available here.

CW for brief discussion of childbirth.

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Just hold on is a thing Jun has heard a lot of time over his life, come to think of it.

The first time he did was absolutely horrifying to remember. He must’ve been no older than six years old – the memory is too fuzzy for him to remember and too forbidden for anyone else around him to ever speak of it, lest Mother replicate – but the fear from it still resonates vividly inside of him.

That was the first heart attack he could remember having. It was a sunny day outside, the grass so green and bright, the chirp of birds – and everything feeling odd and blurry at the edges. If you had asked him about it, back then, he’d have told you he felt sleepy, but it was weird because it was three in the afternoon.

For all of the blur in his memory, what he can still picture without issue is how Mother jolted up from her chair, letting her teacup break in a thousand pieces and spill onto the wooden board of the patio, as she ran to him, screaming his name in such a distorted way.

What ended up breaking through the haze and the cacophony of chest pains was her telling oh, my baby, just hold on. He was in too much suffering to really react in any other way than cry and let himself be cajoled, then dragged to a doctor whose face he doesn’t remember either. All that’s stuck with him was Mother pouring every tear in her body that day, the coldness of a stethoscope on his chest and the crestfallen looks of everyone around him.

Sometimes, he wonders if, that day, it wasn’t to herself that Mother was saying this – just hold on. Maybe it was her way to channel all of the worry and anguish that suddenly flared inside of her, her way to sustain the trauma this imposed onto her.

Maybe it wasn’t just for him, after all.

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The second time this sentence was so important to him is only so in retrospect – back then, it was just yet another time someone was going to smother his freedom and send him back to square one, to prove he could sustain himself in basic air composition.

It started like every single time his life just got slightly worse: someone found out he had a heart condition that wasn’t going to be cured any time soon. There just was one key difference, this time, though: it wasn’t a grown-up that saw him knelt to the ground, clutching his chest and clenching his teeth.

No, it was a girl he hadn’t really gotten to know quiet yet: Musashi FC’s recently hired manager, Aoba Yayoi. She seemed nice enough, and he was the one to suggest her to the coach because they could use the help and she was interested in soccer (unlike most of his school), but that was kind of it. He really didn’t know much about her.

It came as a shock, to her, to see him in such an unsightly state; but she quickly found her footing again, surprisingly enough. For someone so unprepared, she had the reflex to tend to him and bring him not directly to the coach, but to the clubroom and then get the man. His present doctor self and her present registered nurse self would probably find that stupid, now, but back then, it meant she could understand his reasons as to why keep it secret.

Just hold on, Captain, she told him as she walked him to the clubroom, carrying him with his arm wrapped around her shoulders.

He’s pretty sure, by that point, that his parents had told him that sentence a hundred times over, for so many things that it stopped making much sense; but this one stands out to him because… well, it’s Yayoi. It’s the woman he ended up marrying, of course it stands out to him just because it’s her who said it. Maybe she could’ve told him something else and it’d have stuck with him as well.

There’s no need to ponder upon what didn’t happen, though, that much she’s made him clear to him and vice-versa.

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The third time that this sentence etched itself onto his mind, it was during his very first real soccer match – the semifinals of Nationals, when he was (still) a twelve-year old boy oh so many people were idolizing him for some reason that he couldn’t entirely comprehend (and still can’t quite grasp it even now, why were people fawning over a twelve-year-old anyway?).

This was the grandiose finale he was going to show Father and Mother. This was his last showdown and he had carefully picked the brightest star to go around so, like a comet, he could burn away leaving a trail of light behind him.

It almost wasn’t, because Yayoi was too truthful and well-intentioned but overly clumsy about it, and Tsubasa wasn’t as strong in the mind as Jun thought he was. And even if it all went well in the end, gave the spectacle he was hoping for, praying for, the consequences are still here. They’ve been singed into his very core.

Nothing wrong with both of their reactions, in retrospect, because they were all children and very confused about how to handle his condition; but back then, it stung – it burned and burned like his heart as he ran around and tried to ignore everything that wasn’t going well with him. Everything about him was going to explode, at some point; but he wanted it to be on his own term.

The pain was atrocious, of course, and unlike anything he had experienced before; that was the one thing the gilded cage of his parents’ mansion had protected him from, after all. But he told himself to just hold on, because this was his way of going out, and he was going out with a bang. That’s all that mattered, for forty minutes or so.

His recklessness this day wasn’t enough to kill him, thankfully – but it almost came to be. It did teach him to persevere, that’s for sure; and, in some way, it’s this event that defined much of what he is today.

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Oh, the fourth time it happened, it came from – it came from nowhere, actually. It was just a feeling that overwhelmed his body. It flowed from his thoughts down to his heart and then through his entire self, pulsing like his blood.

Just hold on. It’ll be over before you know it.

In fact, he’d go as far as to say the fourth time happened twice. Both times were so similar, it’s like a two-parter of sorts, with one time echoing the other, ripples in the vast sea that has always been his difficult relationship with being alive.

Just hold on. It’ll be worth it by the end, don’t let it slip.

There is, however, a major difference between both times.

The first time around, it was a selfish wish to face off against a formidable opponent again. He wanted to see Tsubasa again, so he had to beat Hyuga first, so he had to help out the team. He had to hold on so he could get to Nationals – and he didn’t.

The second time around, however, it really was just to help his team get over the threshold and qualify for the finals of a tournament that, back then, was truly going to be his last, at least for a long time, maybe forever. He had to hold on so they could do that, even if his heart was aching all the while – and they did. They won, twice over even.

That must’ve been the turning point in his life – the one thing that taught him to be patient with his body, with himself. It taught him to think of the others as well, now that he could channel both his frustration and his feelings into things much more positive. His ambition became that of helping others, instead of just helping himself by running away from people trying to protect him, to help him.

Considering he’s now a cardiologist of his own, he’d say it was a success, even if maybe the success was that he was still alive and very much kicking. Maybe that’s not a thing a lot of fifteen-year-old could say about themselves, but was he really any fifteen-year-old to begin with?

(Most people would say no).

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The fifth time is a mixture of so many voices and hallucinations Jun isn’t sure of how to untangle that mess, even a decade later. He’s not even sure of what happened: did he die and was somehow brought back? Was that just a near-death experience?

Whatever it was, all he knows is that he once again heard someone tell him to hold on. The circumstances – in the middle of a match, in front of shut-down teammates and unheard audience – make it so he doubts it was anyone but himself.

Yet, the voices he heard weren’t really his. It was his family’s, of his teammates’, of old friends’, that of the woman he wanted to marry. So many people he trusted and who trusted him, telling him to hold on. That he couldn’t let it all end now.

So he got up to his feet, swallowed immense amounts of pain like people with healthy hearts would down a bottle of sake, and continued playing. Continued living. Made it out of the match, tournament, country – whatever. He saved himself.

It was a sort of wake-up call, at the end of the day: he was going to die before most other people because of a thing he barely had control over, and that just how things were, unfortunately, and he needed to be hasty about some things. He didn’t have time to maul over decisions and let opportunities pass by him, or maybe it’d be too late for him, and he’d die with only regrets and what-ifs in his head.

Perhaps this is how it had always been – or, actually, it was just part of the solution. He finally found the balance: live well without worrying too much about the far future, but still think ahead enough to know when to preserve himself and continue living as long as he could. Have fun, have tranquility. And this meant he had to do at least one thing before it was too late, while he could still speak…

He told himself he’d just hold on until the very end, got down to one knee with a little box in his hand, and finally proposed to the one who had stuck by his side for so long no matter how high the tide.

(Somehow, as crazy as he was, she said yes).

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It’s bizarre for him not to be in the position of the one who’s hurting, Jun must admit. He’s so used to being the one on the operating or examination table, to have tools on his skin and inside of his body, that being on the chair next to the patient is just foreign to him, even now, even as he’s now a doctor himself.

Or perhaps it’s because he’s a medical professional now and standing there, unable to do much about a situation, isn’t part of his life anymore. There is no advice nor tool that he could use how to make things go faster for his own wife and it’s terrifying.

He has reasons to be worried, he has reasons not to be, and the constant switch between hot and cold is sickening. One moment he’s trying to smile, another he thinks Yayoi is clutching his hand too hard and it means she’s in trouble, and it may turn awry, because God knows births can go awry – his almost did, and if their child has inherited whatever he has, then it may be too late for them and – and then the midwife says she’s doing so well, and the cycle continues.

It’s very much not like himself to lose his composure like that, even if it’s just internal and, on the outside, he’s the reasonable husband who’s standing by his wife’s side at a moment of need. He should be taking the role so much more at heart than he is, at the moment, too; it’s a way to thank her for all of her deeds and show they’re in this together.

And there is perhaps one sentence he can use that would do the trick.

Just hold on, he tells her, it’ll be over before you know it.

It must be the first time in his life that he’s happy to hear someone cry.

#whumptober 2023 #no.14 #“just hold on”#captain tsubasa #fic #junyayo #unlike what it may seem i love this ship #i jsut think it's written like doodoo in canon #so it's my personal responsibility to handle it well #fly stop yassifying rising sun ch94 challenge (impossible)

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