Ascension│Bluelock x male reader

41. Loss

That night, Y/N fell apart.

He'd smiled the pain of the loss away throughout the entire time. When Loki had hugged him goodbye, promising to see him after the project ended, he'd smiled. When the World Five had left, he'd smiled. When each of his team had taken showers, one after the other, he'd smiled.

They'd spent the rest of the day doing normal things. They'd trained, cooled down, worked out, and ate dinner as a group. Throughout the entire time, they were talking about the World Five, praising the techniques, lamenting the loss, and looking up at them with all the awe of a five year old.

They'd praised Y/N too. Bachira and Isagi had fawned over him for a good hour after the match. They'd never seen such a good player, and him being able to hold his own against the World Five, even scoring three solo goals, was crazy to them. Aryu had grudgingly admitted that it was cool.

Rin didn't compliment him. Y/N didn't want him to.

And later that night, they'd discussed what might come up next. Y/N was the only one who knew about the big match, U-20 against Bluelock. For now, he kept that information hidden. What they didn't know couldn't hurt them.

So to the rest of the team, Y/N was quickly back to his normal bubbly self. He lounged across his large bed, laughed at Bachira teasing Isagi, and waved his arms exaggeratedly as he joked about the game.

But at nighttime, when he was sure that everyone else had fallen asleep, Y/N crumbled. Curled into a tight ball in his bed, pillow over his mouth to keep himself from making noise, he cried.

He knew he was weak. A stronger person wouldn't cry. A stronger person wouldn't feel sad in the first place, because they would've won. Not that this was sadness. No, to him, it was... different. It was fiercer, more painful. More piercing.

He wasn't just sad. He hated himself.

Because a better him would've won. A better him could've made so many better decisions. A better him wouldn't have let a single goal in. It didn't matter that Y/N had nearly ran himself into unconsciousness. A better him would've done it.

He kept thinking. What if he'd just been a tad bit faster? What if he'd noticed the traps they were setting up for him? What if his teammates were competent? What if he was smarter? What if he could manipulate them?

Those were nice ways to think about it. Plenty of goals for him to improve on, plenty of logical explanations to why he didn't win.

But then it would always hit him, harder than anything had before.

He lost.

He fucking lost.

And so he sobbed his emotions out into his pillow, fingers clawing at the fabric like a drowning man trying to pull himself ashore. He squeezed his legs to his chest, making himself as small as possible.

None of it helped, though. Because he lost.

So he transitioned from clawing at his pillow to clawing at his own neck. Y/N grasped his neck with both hands, choking on his next sobs. His strangled cries were drowned out in the pillow, inaudible to any of the other sleeping boys.

He wasn't just upset. And he wasn't just angry. The more he lay there, a third emotion began to circulate.

Fear.

He lost.

What did that mean? He curled himself impossibly more, barely able to breathe. He half expected Kuroi to appear out of the shadows, one long, ripped arm grabbing his shoulder and tossing him into the corner of the room. Kuroi would smile that sinister smile of his as he beat Y/N for every mistake he made, every single thing that caused his loss.