Gravity Always Wins

Notice: All the italics are his monologue, to make it clear all the italics words are his thoughts.

This is my very first chapter hope you guys go easy with me

Chapter 1: Gravity Always Wins

Toru Nakamura knew exactly three things with absolute certainty:

1. He had just blown the National High School Volleyball Championship finals

2. Ten thousand people had watched him do it

3. He wanted to die

Funny how the universe listens sometimes.

"NAKAMURA! SET!"

The ball hung in the air. Perfect height. Perfect distance from the net. All he had to do was get his hands up and make the connection. A set he'd made ten thousand times before.

His fingers touched the ball.

And then—nothing.

His brain just... stopped. Like someone hit pause on only his nervous system while the rest of the world kept moving. They called it "the yips" in baseball. In volleyball, they didn't have a name for it yet.

They would after today. They'd call it "pulling a Nakamura."

The ball slipped past through his fingers, dropping pathetically to the floor. The arena went silent for exactly 1.5 seconds before the opposing team erupted in cheers.

"WHAT THE HELL WAS THAT?" His captain's face was only inches from his, veins popping on his forehead. Behind him, their ace spiker looked like he was contemplating murder. In the stands, Toru could see his parents trying very hard to appear supportive.

Did I just ruin my life? he thought. Is this the moment where everything falls apart?

The answer, as it turned out, was no.

That moment would come exactly three months later.

---

3 months later

Toru stood under the shower spray, letting the hot water wash away another day of nothing. After the championship disaster, he'd stopped going to practice. Then he'd stopped going to classes. Then he'd mostly stopped leaving his room.

His phone buzzed on the bathroom counter. Probably his mom, asking if he'd eaten. Or the school counselor. Or maybe spam. At this point, spam felt more personal than actual human contact.

This is pathetic, he thought, reaching for the shampoo. I'm seventeen. I've got my whole life ahead of me. So I messed up in one volleyball game. People move on from to calling me the worse.

But they didn't move on from being "The Freeze Guy." The video had gone viral. 4.3 million views. There were memes. Someone had even autotuned the commentator's reaction into a song.

He closed his eyes, working up the shampoo into a lather.

Maybe in a few years, this will just be a funny story. "Hey, remember that time I froze on national television and became a social media joke? Good times."

He took a step back to rinse.

His heel hit something slick.

There was that suspended moment—the same feeling he'd had when his brain froze during the game—where he knew exactly what was about to happen but could do nothing to stop it.

Oh. This is going to be embarrassing.

His foot slid out. His arms windmilled. The back of his head connected with the tile wall with a sound like an overripe melon being dropped onto concrete.

And then—

Brightness. Too bright to see anything. Too bright to think.

So this is death, Toru thought with surprising clarity. Kind of anticlimactic. Slipping in the shower is statistically more common than I realized, but still. Couldn't I have gone out doing something cool?*

The brightness began to fade. Shapes formed.

Wait. Is that... my ceiling?

"TORU! GET UP! YOU'LL BE LATE FOR SCHOOL!"

His mom's voice. From downstairs.

He blinked. This wasn't his bedroom. Well, it was, but not the one he'd had for the past two years. This was his old room. From middle school.

And his body felt... wrong. Smaller. Weaker.

He sat up slowly, head spinning. On his wall was his old volleyball poster. Except the players in it were... floating? Their feet definitely weren't touching the ground. And one of them had what looked like blue lightning coming from his fingertips as he set the ball.

What the actual hell?

He looked at his hands. Small. Soft. The calluses he'd built up from years of volleyball—gone.

"This is a dream," he said aloud. His voice cracked mid-sentence. "A very weird dream."

He stumbled to the mirror on his closet door.

A fourteen-year-old boy stared back at him. His hair was shorter. His shoulders narrower. His face still rounded with baby fat.

"I'm dead," he whispered. "I died in the shower and now I'm... what? In heaven? Hell? Purgatory?"

His phone buzzed on his desk. Not the smartphone he'd had. This was his old flip phone from middle school.

The date on it: May 15, three years in the past.

"TORU! IF YOU MISS THE BUS AGAIN I'M NOT DRIVING YOU!"

I time-traveled. Or I'm hallucinating while bleeding out on my bathroom floor. Either way, this is A LOT to process before breakfast.

He stumbled to his closet and pulled out his middle school uniform. It fit perfectly. Because of course it did. If this was a hallucination, it was thorough.

"Coming!" he called down, his voice cracking again. "Stupid puberty," he muttered. "Bad enough the first time."

As he headed for the door, he noticed something else on his desk. A volleyball. He picked it up, feeling its weight. Muscle memory made him set it up in the air.

Except the muscle memory wasn't there. His fingers fumbled, and the ball bounced off at an awkward angle, knocking over his lamp.

"Great. So I get a second chance at life, but with the coordination of a newborn giraffe. The universe has a weird sense of humor."

He grabbed his backpack and headed downstairs, mind racing.

If this is real—and that's a big if—then I've gone back to before everything. Before high school. Before the championship. Before "The Freeze." I can do it all differently.

His mom looked up as he entered the kitchen. "There you are! Your breakfast is getting cold."

She looked exactly as he remembered. Every detail perfect. If this was a dying hallucination, his brain was really putting in the effort.

"Mom," he said cautiously, "do you believe in second chances?"

She rolled her eyes. "If you're talking about staying up late playing video games again, then no. You're still grounded from last week."

Right. Context. I need context for my existential questions.

He sat down and started eating, trying to remember what his life had been like at fourteen. He'd been... average. A decent volleyball player but nothing special. He hadn't made any of the elite teams. His growth spurt was still a year away.

"Oh," his mom said, sliding an envelope across the table. "This came for you yesterday. Looks important."

The envelope was thick, cream-colored, with a silver embossed logo: a stylized mountain peak with a volleyball suspended above it.

"Skyrise Academy?" he read aloud. "What's that?"

His mom's eyebrows shot up. "Only the most prestigious volleyball school in the country! The one you've been talking about for months! The one that's impossible to get into!"

Toru frowned. "I don't remember—"

"Open it!" she urged, excitement radiating from her. "They only invite a few students each year for tryouts!"

This never happened. In my... previous life? Original timeline? Whatever. I never got invited to Skyrise. It exists, but it's for volleyball prodigies. I was good, but not Skyrise good.

He opened the envelope with shaking hands.

"Dear Toru Nakamura," he read aloud. "Your performance metrics and dimensional aptitude scores have placed you in the top 1% of candidates for this year's incoming class. We invite you to attend selection trials at Skyrise Mountain facility..."

The letter continued, but Toru had stopped reading. Dimensional aptitude? What did that even mean?

"Mom, I don't remember applying to—"

"You didn't have to! They track all the middle school tournaments. They must have seen you play and been impressed! Oh, Toru, this is amazing!"

But I wasn't impressive. I was just... fine. And what is "dimensional aptitude"?

He flipped through the rest of the papers. Registration forms. Medical releases. And—most strange of all—a waiver acknowledging the "experimental nature of Zone training methodologies."

"What's Zone training?" he asked.

His mother looked at him like he'd grown a second head. "The Zone? Only the thing all those volleyball stars on your posters can do! The reason Skyrise exists!"

Toru looked back at the papers, his heart pounding.

This isn't just time travel. This is... something else. A different world. A different reality.

"I need to go check something," he said, standing abruptly.

He ran back upstairs to his room and stared at the volleyball poster. The players weren't just jumping high. They were literally suspended in the air. One had blue energy surrounding his hands. Another seemed to be in two places at once, his image blurred.

Toru sank onto his bed, mind reeling.

"I died," he whispered. "I died and woke up three years in the past in a world where volleyball players have superpowers."

He started to laugh. It was absurd. Completely absurd.

And yet.

He walked to his window and looked out at the morning sky. Everything looked normal. Birds. Trees. The neighbor's annoying dog.

But the poster on his wall said otherwise.

He picked up the volleyball again, holding it carefully.

"Okay, universe," he said quietly. "I get the message. Death by shower was embarrassing, but now I've got a second chance in a world where volleyball is even more important than in my first life."

He tossed the ball up experimentally, trying to set it properly. His fingers fumbled again, but it was a little better this time.

"My brain remembers, but my body doesn't," he realized. "Great. I'm a volleyball sage trapped in a weak teenage body. This isn't a second chance—it's a challenge run."

The bus honked outside.

"TORU! BUS!"

He grabbed his backpack and the Skyrise invitation, taking one last look at the strange poster on his wall.

"At least this time," he said with a determined smile, "I won't freeze when it matters."

He had no idea how wrong he was.

Or how right.