How to fly with clipped wings (English ver.) HAIKYUU!! FAN FICTION

Chapter 54: The Disaster

A/N: Prepare your tissues, ladies and gentlemen

Their loss from the Inter High hurt.

Mikaela let herself be mad about it for a day. It was weird, because she was normally an 'explosive' sort of angry, in which she just wanted to yell and hit things and cry until all of her energy had left her body.

Losing to Niiyama gave her silent fury. She fumed to herself, her mind blank and her blood boiling. She was mildly unresponsive too, and Kageyama pointed it out. That was when it hit her- if Kageyama noticed, then it must've been bad, so she did her best to swallow her anger for the time being and transform it into motivation. At least, that was the plan.

The boys lost in the finals against Date Tech. It had been a tight match all the way through, but Mikaela's heart broke for them all the same. She could feel the frustration from all of them, particularly Tsukishima. He'd been modeling a lot of his technique off of Date Tech, so that must've stung.

Mikaela upped her practice time. She went in with Kageyama in the early morning then jumped over to the girls' practice when they showed up for training, then trained after school with the girls' team and sometimes the boys' team when the girls had the night off. Even then, whenever practice was finished in the afternoon, Mikaela just headed over to the other gym with the guys. There was always someone there, no matter how often Ennoshita tried to kick everyone out at a reasonable hour. She'd even managed to set up a miniature gym in her basement to train on the weekends.

She wasn't strong enough. She wasn't fast enough. She needed to be better, stronger, smarter: that wasn't going to happen by sitting around.

"Mikaela," Sudou asked her one morning as she stretched gently, leading their stretches for their early morning practice, "how are you always so energetic this early in the morning?"

Kikuchi hummed in response, leaning forwards to touch her toes. "You're always way more pumped up than the rest of us."

She shrugged. "I'm a morning person."

"How?" Taki complained, struggling to reach her toes. It wasn't really her fault; she had long legs. "I can barely drag myself out of bed!"

"I get up at 5:30 ish most mornings, actually."

"What?" several girls on the team chorused in astonishment.

"What do you do for the hour and a half before practice?" Shoko asked curiously, folding her legs into a butterfly position and curling in on herself.

Mikaela shrugged again. "Depends. I go on runs with Tobio for a bit and then we head to the guys' gym, if Shoyo wants to go, which is almost always. We do that for an hour and then I come down here for seven."

The girls all stared at her blankly, and she frowned. What? "You mean to tell me," Sudou said evenly, "that you've been practicing for over an hour already?"

"Yep."

"What about the mornings we don't have practice?"

"Training with the guys."

"Weekends?"

"Work out, practice in the park with Tobio."

"Do you still get up at 5:30 on weekends?" Taki said with a gasp.

Mikaela laughed. "No, I sleep longer on weekends. Sometimes as late as ten, or eleven."

The group collectively released a sigh, relieved that she was sort of normal after all. "I don't get up until two on the weekends," Shoko muttered, and a few of the other girls hummed in agreement. Mikaela understood the not-wanting-to-get-up, but two in the afternoon? A bit wasteful.