Ace of Hearts - Haikyuu || Short Stories || One Shots || Creative Rambles

I'm Not Ready || Azumane Asahi

Three weeks more.

That's all the time he had left to prepare himself for the biggest change in his lifetime. 21 days, give or take a few hours, stood between him and the biggest, lifetime challenge he would ever face.

To say he was a mess would be underestimating his capabilities to completely fall apart. He was a massive wreck — the kind of absolute disaster where he couldn't tie his shoes right because his hands were shaking so much, where he put salt in coffee instead of sugar, and where he was considering investing in his own concealer to hide his growing eye bags — but, dammit, he was trying his best to hold it together. There were times when a man really had to be strong and this was one of them.

The moment Minoru had walked up to him with a tiny stick in her hands and tears in her eyes, whispering a breathless "guess what," he swore he was going to pull together all the flailing fibers of his being and become the type of man she (and their forthcoming child) could depend on. He would become the blanket that would protect the both of them from the coldness of the world, even if he could hardly handle it himself.

His new-baby-coming-surge of heroic-level confidence only lasted so long. Well, lasted until he opened his very first "what to expect" book — past the foreward, the introduction and the section about questioning if you're really pregnant, because please he wouldn't have picked up this God-forsaken book if Minoru wasn't pregnant — and suddenly he was floating in the perilous head space of too many choices, too many decisions to make and far, far too many "what ifs" lingering.

The only reassurance he felt in that moment was knowing he wasn't capable of dying from anxiety, because if he could die from it, he'd be dead already. What would Minoru do then? Pregnant and widowed before 35; his poor wife. He just couldn't do that to her.

And so, while things were generally okay in the first month of knowing about the pregnancy, weekly breakdowns about all the possibilities for failure on his part became the norm — as did the sight of Minoru hunched over the only toilet in the apartment, trying to sooth her husband in between heaves as he fretted about the frequency of these bouts and whether his wife was hydrated enough to ensure both her and the baby's health.

As if going grey over all the possible ways the two of them could possibly (and not probably) mess up during the pregnancy, the deeper he delved into the world of education on child rearing, the more frequently he tugged out his hair tie, digging his fingers through his hair before standing up to pace around their home.

It didn't even help that Minoru seemed to have this unwavering confidence in him because it just seemed so unfounded. Like, how could she believe that he'd make a good dad when every time he even thought about life on the other side of pregnancy he'd have to take to writing kanji on his palm just to ease the swelling tide within him.

"What if I don't have what it takes," he had asked her, seven months in, while they relaxed on the couch together, watching some subtitled Netflix original about young love. "What if you die and leave me alone to raise our child and they get their heartbroken by some kid they accidentally sent a love letter to? What will I do then? I'm too much of a mess to help someone else!"

"I highly doubt that specific scenario will play out for you, baby," Minoru responded, shifting her feet a bit on the pillow in her husband's lap.

"But it could!" he argued. "Or what if we have a son and he asks me how I scored his mom? I don't even know. I could end up cursing our son with a loveless life due to taking his dad's dating advice."

"Asahi," she cut in suddenly, sitting up and pausing the movie. "Do you love me?"

For just a brief moment, Asahi took his eyes off the ground and looked at Minoru with an absolutely incredulous look. What kind of question was that?