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i.
At the bottom of philosophy, there is something very simple and very true: everyone is hungry all the time. Everyone is starving.
You see, here’s the thing about Hinata Shouyou. He did not, for a single moment, ever plan on volleyball.
It is also very true that life doesn’t often care about what you do and don’t plan on. At age ten, though, Shouyou might not know a lot about the big questions, but he knows a lot about the little ones. He asks Why is water wet? and Why does rain in winter smell different than rain in summer? and Why can’t I ever look at the Sun straight on? and, once, after his mother got pregnant with Natsu, Mama, did you swallow the moon on accident?
He never gets any answers as fast as he can ask his questions, which he, personally, considers one of his best traits, but he still gets his fair share of exasperated sighs and annoyed looks for his trouble. His teachers call him “enthusiastic, but loud and disruptive,” and his mother calls him “too curious for his own good,” and very recently, Natsu has taken to calling him “Sho-sho”. That last one doesn’t really have to do with the point, but Shouyou thinks it’s so cute he could melt.
It’s not like he doesn’t know it. But the world is very wide and sometimes he lays down on the grass outside their house, which is far enough away from town that the lights don’t disturb the night sky, and he can see thousands and millions of little tiny dots in the dark, like little rips upon a blanket, and he feels so unbelievably small.
Sure, he always feels small. He’s too tiny for his age, he’s told, and considering that his mother isn’t all that tall either, there’s no telling how much he’ll end up growing as a teenager. Which is frustrating as all hell, but as of now, still feels like one of the big questions.
“Don’t you annoy yourself, asking this much?,” his mother had snapped at him one time, when he started insistently tugging at her skirt while she washed the dishes. His mouth had been open to ask her why ants walked together all the time—where they like family?—but that made it snap shut.
And then, of course, open it again. “I think that if I ever stop asking questions I’ll die,” he said, all eight years old and grass stains and scraped knees, not really knowing what death was, but sure that it somehow meant that.
He’s told that it’s a phase all children go through, when they’re too young and want to know everything about anything. “You’ll grow out of it soon enough,” was his mother’s stilted answer, to which he pouted and grumbled, “I’ll never grow anything, ” and she laughed, and that was the end of it.
And it comes back to haunt him. Why wouldn’t it?
He’s riding his bike through downtown—it’s a shortcut he usually takes when he’s late to one of Kouji’s soccer games, which happens way too often. The field Kouji plays at is just a few ways away from their middle school, and while that isn’t close to Shouyou’s house by any measures (his mother inherited her mother’s farmhouse, so they live outside of town; sometimes it’s almost too complicated to justify it, but he can work around it), he likes to think he’s gol a certain amount of timing down.
Of course, timing doesn’t apply when he’s simply running late, because Natsu had started crying while his mother was busy cooking ahead for their dinner, and then she started screaming, and all that noise made Shouyou want to crawl out of his skin, or bounce around his room like a basketball until all the excess adrenaline was out of his system. By the time that was over, he’d looked at the clock on his bedside table and thought, with all the terrifying amount of certainty a ten-year-old can muster, Oh, I’m screwed.
He isn’t as much riding his bike as he is racing, and the only reason he slows down at all is because this particular street is way too bumpy and ill taken care of to speed through without losing control and breaking his nose, which he doesn’t want. A mild corner is the best way to describe it: none of the buildings around are taller than three floors, and the only stores around are family owned businesses and small delivery restaurants, and the only street there is to speak of is actually only a very large sidewalk, with few people walking past. It’s the kind of calm silence Shouyou doesn’t mind, and it’s probably why he ends up lingering a bit in the first place.
The place he stops in front of is an electronics store, owned by an old man with a kind smile and a face so wrinkled he may as well be an oak tree. There’s a TV on display in the window shop, the sound only a tinny buzz, just loud enough to hear something, and there’s two other people watching it half-heartedly, as if they were just on their way to somewhere else but got distracted by something. Shouyou does the exact same, slowing his bike to a stop, and placing one of his feet on the ground, leaning slightly sideways. His eyes squint at the screen, trying to make sense of the bright colors against the sunlight.
The moments that define lives aren’t always obvious. They don’t always scream ledge, nor do they howl at you in warning, and nine times out of ten, it doesn’t feel like anything’s changed at all. Because what is a life? Is it a sequence of moments, or the sum of its parts? How do we know what’s about to happen next, how do we sidestep ourselves before we fall into something huge, and how can we ever stop to catch our breath when we realize?
Maybe because everything is always changing in our lives all the time. Maybe because a life isn’t necessarily the sum of its parts, but the wholeness of it. Maybe if Shouyou hadn’t stopped at that exact moment, he would have become someone else entirely.
But nobody lives on maybes.
There’s a volleyball game playing on TV. The court is nothing like Shouyou’s seen in the very few elementary school matches he attended—instead of light, glossy wood, it’s a concrete block of red and green, crisp and professional. He doesn’t know a lot about the game: there are two teams, and one net. One ball. A player dressed in dark blue and orange speeds forward, and leaps.
Under the buzzing of his own skin as he watches, Shouyou hears one of the commentators say, And that is — the Little Giant of Karasuno High, ladies and gentlemen. Standing at only 1,70cm, the team’s ace is flying above the block, and surely —
The Little Giant scores. The camera focuses on his face breaking into a wild grin, and the cheers of his teammates as they slap him in the back, before getting ahead with the game as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened.
Flying, Shouyou thinks, dazedly, is a very different word than soaring.
And it’s an odd thing, really. He knows next to nothing about volleyball, other than the obvious, and a specific sport has never really been his thing, like soccer is Kouji’s, or basketball is Izumi’s; it never even crossed his mind, that this is something he could do, that this is something he could be. You never really know until it’s glaring at you, and grabbing at the front of your shirt, and your ears are ringing, and you are only the blood in your veins and the marrow in your bones, and at ten years old, you learn what the word want means for the first time.
Shouyou isn’t lonely. He has his friends and school, and his mother, and a sister he’s learning to love more than anything else in the world. His position in this world is like a coin with too many sides: he’s cheerful, but he’s loud; he’s encouraging, but he’s overbearing; he’s a happy kid, but he is too much.
It’s hard to find something that belongs only to yourself when you’re a kid. You scrape all your edges to fit into something else’s corners, and then turns out it wasn’t even what you were looking for in the first place. Being a person is such hard, hard work. No one knows that better than children who are too much.
(When a boy is left alone for too long, he hungers.
That’s Shouyou’s first answer.)
Philosophy says everyone is starving.
Shouyou doesn’t know all that much about philosophy, nor will he ever. But he watches the match till the end, until his legs are numb and he’s missed Kouji’s game, and he keeps his eyes wide, wide open. And his stomach gnaws.
ii.
He’s barely even opened his mouth to ask before Izumi is groaning and shaking his head, covering his ears with his hands as if to protect himself from the inevitable words that are about to come out of Shouyou’s mouth.
“Come on, Shouyou-chan,” Izumi whines, scrunching his nose at him in displeasure. “I just got done with training, and it ran late today. I don’t think I can stay standing for more than ten minutes, much less keep tossing to you for another two hours. And don’t try to tell me it won’t be two hours,” he adds, when Hinata tries to open his mouth again. “You can fool yourself, but you’ll never fool me.”
Shouyou pouts. “Now, that’s just mean,” he says, playfully, bouncing the volleyball off the ground a couple times. If he does that just so he has an excuse to not look Izumi in the eye, that’s nobody’s business but his own.
Izumi softens a little, crossing his arms in front of his chest. “You know I don’t mean it like that,” he says, “but seriously, Sho, I’m tired.”
Yeah, no kidding. His eyes keep sliding to the door as if he’s just waiting for the right chance to escape, which would be hurtful if coming from anyone else. It’s hard to get truly upset with Izumi, because you just know he never truly means it. Between the slight eye bags that are stark against his pale skin, and the still dried up sweat on his light hair, Shouyou doesn’t really have the heart to ask for a second time, so he doesn’t.
He knows his friends are indulging him. It feels like that has been the basis of their friendship ever since that fateful day three years ago, when the saw Karasuno play at Nationals, and suddenly it was like there was something screaming inside his chest, and the palms of his hands were itching, and he went up to his homeroom teacher at school the next day and asked if he could join the volleyball team.
His school didn’t have a volleyball team. Not many boys are interested in the sport, these days, his teacher had told him, with an entirely not-subtle look of pity in his eyes. There are enough girls to form a small team for it, but not at a competitive level. There’s just no traction, is all. I’m sorry, Hinata.
Those words. Shouyou hates them. What the hell is he supposed to do with sorry? Sure, he’s aware it’s a common courtesy and a platitude, but they felt like a punch that left him winded. He’d just found something that could be his, that he could make his, and then told he couldn’t have it. What the hell is he supposed to do with that?
Suggesting that he join the boy’s volleyball team, becoming its sole and only member, probably wasn’t the best idea ever, but it was the only one he had at the time. And Shouyou knows his situation isn’t ideal, which is why he still admonishes himself for doing—well. He’s practiced, and jumped, and spiked balls hard enough to make his hands bleed, and ran until his legs gave out. He’s trained by himself, with Izumi and Kouji, with the girl’s volleyball team, and with the neighborhood volleyball team; he’s run everything he has, and cried one too many tears of frustration, and given nothing else than absolutely everything.
Which is a long winded way of saying that ever since the junior volleyball tournament, he feels scraped raw.
Shouyou isn’t stupid. He knows that he was probably the only one in his team—if it could even be called that—that went into the game thinking that they could do anything else but lose spectacularly. And it isn’t even about winning; if he played only for the sake of winning, he wouldn’t be playing at all. It’s not that it hurt to lose, nor that no one seemed to take him seriously the entire time, nor that goddamn setter with the smug look on his face. People can look down on anything from high enough above, and that includes him.
He just wants to keep playing.
“It’s okay, Izumi-san,” Shouyou says, flashing a grin at his friend. “I can manage by myself right now. I know you have that game coming up soon, so you should rest.”
Izumi looks a bit startled at getting away so easily, but he hides it quickly behind a small frown. “Are you sure? I mean, yeah, but, I wouldn’t want to leave you alone—”
Shouyou bounces the ball a few more times for good measure, the sound echoing through the empty gym. “Don’t worry about me,” he says, and that, at least, he means. “I can practice alone just fine. I can spike a hundred times, and not get tired at all!”
Izumi rolls his eyes, fondly. “Well, we all know that,” he says. “But still, you keep asking for me or Kou-chan to set for you. All the time.”
“Well,” Shouyou says, “you can never play as well as you can when there’s someone else next to you.”
Izumi blinks. Shouyou blinks. They stare at each other, and for a moment, he’s sure he can see his own thoughts spelled out in his friend’s mind: Just because we’re friends right now, doesn’t mean it was a forever kind of thing.
High school is less than a year away. Maybe that’s making him melancholic. But Izumi only shakes his head with a small grin, tells him to get home safe, and closes the door behind him. And Shouyou is alone, alone, alone.
In the gloom of the setting sun, the harsh light of the gym is even brighter than usual, making the glossy wood of the floor glare back at him when Shouyou squints his eyes. The squeaking of his shoes sound louder than usual, even, but that’s only because there’s no one else with him; technically he isn’t allowed to be inside without any kind of supervision, but he knows the coach is still in his office somewhere in the building, so as long as neither of them tell, it’ll be fine.
There isn’t a net set up, but Shouyou doesn’t need one. He walks to the edge of the gym, right between one of the goals used for soccer practice, and holds out the ball in front of his eyes. The yellow-and-blue is as familiar to him as the color of his own hair, and something in his chest settles as he looks at it. He gets in position, squares his shoulders, and sends the ball up straight on top of him.
Practicing by himself is something he’s had to master; without anyone to set for him, he has to do it much higher than usual, so as to give him enough time to do a run up for the jump, and then get the timing right to spike the ball where he’s aiming it. The target is usually the spidery crack on the paint in the wall, when no one’s looking, or a water bottle on the ground, when someone is. The only sounds he hears are the squeaking of his feet, and the rising and falling of his breath, and the bang his palm makes against the ball as he hits it full on. It bounces off the wall, and back to his hands.
Now settled into a rhythm, Shouyou does it again and tries very hard to pretend that he isn’t picturing Kageyama’s face as he spikes.
Shouyou has never played to win, but meeting him is the closest he’s ever felt to wanting to.
He knows that Kageyama doesn’t even remember his name by now, which is infuriating, because Shouyou isn’t sure he’s even able to forget him in the first place. It’s crossed his mind that maybe it’s just — he’s never met someone else who loves volleyball as much as he does before. The girl’s team seems to do it for fun, and it annoys and exasperates his friends more than anything, and it’s not that everyone has to like the same thing Shouyou does, but.
He can’t see a life without volleyball in it anymore. How terrifying is a realization like that when you’re fourteen?
And Kageyama—from the short, yet vivid image Shouyou got when they met—might have been an asshole, and snobbish, and smug, and all the other nouns that go with it, but he got it. The ball hasn’t dropped yet, Shouyou had said, straightening up after going for a failed save, and Kageyama’s eyes widened.
It’s barely anything, but it’s enough. Because after the game, when Kageyama goes up to him and asks, What have you been doing for the past three years?, he doesn’t sound mocking. He sounds frustrated. And the first thing Shouyou thinks is, I have been doing everything. I have been doing absolutely everything, and immediately after, But I can do more.
He didn’t say either of those things, of course. He told Kageyama he’d beat him eventually, and pointedly did not cry, thank you very much. Winning and losing are easy things to talk about. It isn’t easy to find someone who would understand what Shouyou means when he says playing volleyball feels like lightning. That it’s the fullest ever is.
Shouyou isn’t as tall as it would be expected for him to play when he gets to high school—but he’s hungry enough.
(The hunger that permeates this story becomes a dull ache after a while. People can get used to living with anything. Living without, though, is a different matter. When you’re without, you’re only looking towards it.
Shouyou sets his own ball and spikes. One, two, three, four. Bang-bang-bang-bang.
What a sound. It echoes till morning.)
iii.
The ball doesn’t quite hit him full in the face, but it’s a close enough thing. Shouyou dodges at the last moment and then glowers at Kageyama, glaring at him until his eyes are nearly closed.
“Dumbass,” Kageyama says, “you’re supposed to be paying attention.”
Shouyou glares harder. “I’m always paying attention, Bakageyama.”
“Hinata,” Suga says, not unkindly, “you forgot to eat your lunch yesterday, when it was sitting right in front of you. For a full hour.”
Tanaka laughs loudly as Shouyou splutters, hitting his knuckles against the door of the gym. He’s already halfway out, wearing his regular uniform, bag thrown haphazardly over his shoulder. Suga is right in front of him, twirling the gym keys between his fingers as he assesses Kageyama and Shouyou with a knowing look. “You two are staying until later?”, he asks, which is almost rhetorical.
“For just a few more minutes!” Shouyou says, bouncing on the heels of his feet. He reaches down to grab the ball Kageyama had thrown at him, and gestures with it as if for peacekeeping. “There’s only a week until the match, you know.”
“Oh, we know,” Tanaka says drily, and then his face breaks into a wide yawn. “Which is why we have been training every. Single. Day. How you manage to have enough energy to practice after hours is beyond me. Tsukishima is already halfway to his house when Coach Ukai finishes saying good work today. ”
“Tsukishima is a coward,” Shouyou says, because he can’t help himself, and they know he isn’t being serious. Well, not that serious.
Kageyama gives him the stink eye, which is almost nice of him. “We don’t want to get you in trouble,” he tells Suga, “but we are staying behind.”
Suga sighs. “We don’t want to get you in trouble,” he echoes, “but we are getting you in trouble. Oh well.” He tosses the keys to Kageyama, who catches it still in the air. “Good riddance, perfect school record. I’ll tell my parents it was all your fault.”
“How did we end up with such troublemakers as kouhais,” Tanaka laments, then flashes them a salute before slipping out the door.
“Says the delinquent,” Suga calls after him, before turning to Hinata and Kageyama. “You already know, right? No being too loud, no staying in here after the school closes, clean up and lock the door when you leave—”
“And don’t lose the keys,” Shouyou says, and hears Kageyama echo him, though much more half-heartedly.
Suga nods. “Alright. Take care of yourselves. See you tomorrow!” And then he’s out, calling out for Tanaka to wait for him.
Shouyou turns to Kageyama, raising his eyebrows. “Ready?”
Kageyama raises one eyebrow back. “Ready.”
Practicing just by themselves isn’t new, though it feels a bit like it. The fight they had just before the training camp still feels tender and aching, like a slow-healing wound. It’s—complicated to think about. Shouyou doesn’t like to delve any more than he absolutely has on complicated feelings, which is why this particular thing has been annoying him so much. Nothing about Kageyama is anything less than extremely complicated, except his love for playing. That’s very simple. He loves it the same way Shouyou loves it: because how could he not?
They haven’t talked about it. They don’t talk about it. But it’s hard to love the same thing and not come to some sort of understanding.
(It’s hard to love the same thing and not love—)
Shouyou tosses him the ball. Kageyama sets. Shouyou opens his eyes wide, wide, runs, and jumps. He’s aiming for the upper left side of the court, within bounds, and it’s a close enough thing to an out from a judge to make him hiss in frustration. “Again,” he says, before the ball’s even stopped bouncing, but Kageyama was already moving to grab another one.
“Stop thinking so hard about it,” Kageyama says when he settles back in position. “It doesn’t suit you.”
“Says Mr. Brainiac,” Shouyou says back, crossing his arms. “How does it feel walking around with all those brain cells, Kageyama? Is it hard?”
Kageyama gives him one of his certified death stares, pointing a finger at him with the hand still holding the ball. “Shut it.” Then he turns back to his neutral face, and says with the flattest voice Shouyou’s ever heard, “Remember what I said about watching the back of your head. I keep my promises. You’ll never know what hit you.”
Shouyou screeches. “That wasn’t a promise. That was a threat. You were threatening my well-being. ”
Kageyama huffs a breath. “Someone has to. Are we still doing this?”
Shouyou opens his mouth to argue back, and then snaps it shut. He has enough presence of mind—and self awareness—to know that if he and Kageyama get going so early during practice, they’ll get nothing done, and then get mad at each other. Shouyou isn’t really keen on another go at that.
He wonders, a little, if they were really mad at each other back then. Frustrated, certainly, more than usual. Shouyou feels every single one of his emotions until they make his spine throb, and he still isn’t sure what came over him when Kageyama grabbed him by the shirt and started screaming. It was a flash of anger and resentment and shame so overwhelming it burned his throat, making his voice raw, and all Shouyou knows is that he said too much. The small scar under his jaw still stings sometimes when he thinks about it, though it’s probably only in his head. They both said too much, and that too much made the silence between them get heavier and heavier, until it was just impossible to say anything else. So he didn’t.
Shouyou doesn’t like to think about complicated things, which is why he never stopped to analyze his relationship with Kageyama much. They’re more rivals than friendly, more pissed at each other than not, and he hasn’t gotten home without his throat raw from screaming at him since the beginning of the school year. But with the way they’ve been marketed because of their quick, and how Coach Ukai always puts them in the same team during three on three matches, Kageyama has sort of become part of his mental wallpaper. He’s there, and has been there, and will be there. For however long that is.
Which is to say, Shouyou’s fought with people before. He’s gotten into screaming matches with his mother, and with Kouji, and he was a bit of a wild card in elementary school. But the thing he told Yachi that night, when they walked together to the bus stop—it still comes back to haunt him.
It wasn’t that he was the first friend I made. It’s that he was a partner.
Kageyama isn’t his first friend, and he won’t be his last, but he was Shouyou’s first teammate. They’re a matched set, as Suga loves to say, and it’s a running joke in their team that it’s impossible for them to go anywhere without the other. He isn’t really sure why that became a joke, anyway—why would he go places with anyone else?
Hinata’s had friends, and he’s had great friends, and he’s had his heart broken by them once or twice.
Now he has Kageyama.
(Never again will you have friends like the ones you did when you were fifteen. Even if friend isn’t exactly what you want to settle for.)
He never understood what people meant when they said they trusted someone with their lives. And while Hinata wouldn’t say he trusts Kageyama with that, he trusts him to watch his back, and he trusts him with volleyball. And, really—is there even any difference at all?
To say he trusts Kageyama to not break his heart would be a stretch. Hinata is not a romantic.
Kageyama barks another dumbass at him, asking him What the hell was that quick? That was not the new one, we are practicing the new one, dumbass, do I need to say it again?, and Shouyou hisses at him. The baffled look on his face is enough to make him lose any semblance of seriousness he had for the evening, because laughing at Kageyama’s face is one of the purest forms of heaven a human being on Earth can experience.
“You look like a cat who tried to catch his own shadow,” Shouyou says, between wheezes, “and got offended when you didn’t grab it.”
He regrets it soon enough, because Kageyama comes bounding towards him with his face screwed up in annoyance. They end up in a tangled pile of limbs on the floor, because Shouyou dodged, but Kageyama’s momentum sent him toppling forwards and knocking them both down. Which somehow makes Shouyou start laughing even harder than he was before, only with Kageyama’s insults much closer to his ear.
Kageyama tries to prop himself up, but his elbows dig into Shouyou’s stomach and he chokes. “Shut up,” Kageyama snaps, as if Shouyou personally offended him by having sensitivity in his body, but stops doing that and resigns to laying his forehead against the floor. “I didn’t sign up for,” his hand gestures vaguely between both of them, “for whatever this is.”
“It’s a cuddle pile,” Shouyou says bashfully, craning his neck so he can try and catch Kageyama’s eye. “If I hug you, can I expect you to be charged with which degree of murder?”
Kageyama glares at him. Their faces are much closer than normal. “Which is the one with intent? ”
Shouyou’s eyes snap down his face for a moment, in spite of himself, before he flops back down into his primary position—which is, pinned down to the floor by Kageyama’s legs. “Unfortunately I’m not a lawyer, so no idea,” he says.
Kageyama doesn’t say anything for a moment. Then he doesn’t say anything for many moments, which makes Shouyou frown at the ceiling and try to raise his head to see him again.
Kageyama’s expression is—troubled, to say the least. Shouyou isn’t so great at reading people, but he’s pretty sure his face wasn’t that flushed when they first fell, and the way he keeps chewing at his lips, which are already chapped and bleeding in some places, makes him look almost nervous. And Shouyou’s seen Kageyama angry, and he’s seen him excited, and determined, but he’s never seen him nervous.
“I—” Kageyama opens his mouth to say something, but only a syllable comes out. He huffs an annoyed breath, and the way he decidedly doesn’t look at Shouyou. “I wanted to—”
He trails off again. Shouyou props himself up into a sitting position, shoving Kageyama’s legs off him, and leans closer, trying not to feel worried. “What is it, Kageyama? What’s wrong?”
Kageyama looks askance at him. “Why do you assume something’s wrong?”
“Because you look like you’re about to confess to a murder,” Shouyou says, “and I know we were talking about that, and I don’t know if you know this, but I’ve never killed anyone before, and I wouldn’t even know how to hide a body, so if that’s what you need help with I—”
“Shut up, dumbass,” Kageyama says, with a normal amount of bite, and Shouyou feels something in his chest unclench. “It’s not that. You’re full of shit.”
“You’re full of shit,” Shouyou says immediately. Then, he adds, “So, if it’s not murder, what is it?”
Kageyama snorts, fiddling with his fingers. He doesn’t use tape in any of his games, and you can see why—his hands are calloused and rough enough that he probably won’t get hurt at all. Shouyou just hadn’t noticed before the way Kageyama seems to pick at his callouses, absently. He wonders if he does this whenever he wants to say something but doesn’t know how to.
“Well,” Kageyama says, gaze focused intently on his fingers, “kind of—out of nowhere, but. I’m glad we’re talking again.” He blurts out that last part, then seems to catch himself. “I—whatever. Not to say that—you’re still a dumbass, but—”
Shouyou feels his mouth hanging open. “Kageyama,” he whispers, with something akin to wonder, “are you trying to say you missed me?”
Kageyama flushes bright red, his shoulders rising up to his ears in self-defense. “Hey! That’s not what I said, don’t put words in my mouth—”
“You missed me!” Shouyou exclaims, delighted. His heart is doing something funny, like somersaults, and it keeps doing it the more Kageyama splutters, but doesn’t deny it. “You missed me, you missed me, you missed me—”
At that point, Kageyama reaches out and covers Shouyou’s mouth with his hand, and it’s so unexpected that Shouyou feels his words stumble to a halt and crash. His brain malfunctions for a second.
It’s not that he isn’t used to Kageyama’s touch, because he is. They’re roughhousing pretty much all the time, and when it’s not that, they’re walking or sitting next to each other—personal space is something that a lot of people seem to have a problem with, but not Shouyou. And not Kageyama, either. But this touch is different. It lingers.
Kageyama seems satisfied to have shut Shouyou up, and he retreats his hand, but Shouyou can still feel it against his skin. His heart is doing the thing again.
“What I meant is,” Kageyama says, and this time he sounds more composed, “is that playing with you has been good. And I don’t want to—I don’t want to not play with you.”
“Kageyama,” Shouyou says, “we’re going to win.”
He knows he’s hit the nail on the head by the way Kageyama winces, and he has half a mind to silently congratulate himself for reading someone so well. The other half of his mind is going, If Kageyama is scared of the match with Shiratorizawa, doesn’t that mean it’s time for absolute, utter panic?
He doesn’t have the time to say anything, though, because Kageyama takes a deep breath, as if steeling himself, and says, “I promised myself that if— when we win, I would ask you. If you wanted to. Hang out sometime.”
Shouyou frowns. “We hang out all the time. Why are you being so weird about that?”
“I mean,” Kageyama says, and he’s properly bright red now, “hang out. Just us.”
There’s a beat, in which Shouyou looks intently at Kageyama, and Kageyama looks intently at the floor. Then Shouyou says, “Yeah, you have to be more specific, because I have no idea what you mean right now.”
“Just us, ” Kageyama repeats through gritted teeth, like this is physically painful for him. “Just—”
He takes Shouyou’s hand, and threads their fingers together.
Shouyou is a fucking idiot.
“Oh,” he says. Then, louder, “Oh.”
“Yeah, dumbass,” Kageyama says, but the effect is killed by the way he’s turned pink to the very tips of his ears. “Oh.”
“You,” Shouyou says, pointing at Kageyama, and then at himself. “Me. Together?”
Kageyama nods. They’re still holding hands. Now Shouyou’s heart and his stomach are doing the thing.
He clears his throat. “Why,” he starts, and falters. He tightens his fingers around Kageyama’s, just in case he tries to pull back. “Why—after Shiratorizawa?”
“Because,” Kageyama says, and then nothing else. He seems oddly fixated on their intertwined hands.
Shouyou knows, though. Because I wouldn’t at all, otherwise.
He takes a deep breath. And then another one, and another, because he’s going to be cool and collected and extremely mature in this conversation. It’s fine.
If he’s being honest—he would be lying to say this is a surprise, but he doesn’t know how to wrap his head around it. So Kageyama likes him. And Shouyou doesn’t not like him back, and this hand holding is actually really nice, and he would really like to do that more times. Where does that leave them, then? What do they do?
His mom always told him to never try and rush along love, because it always arrived somehow. Shouyou isn’t sure if they’ve arrived anywhere, or if they’re still on their way, or if they’ve been exactly where they needed to be the entire time.
(He has Kageyama now.)
He reaches out a hand, and lifts Kageyama’s chin with his fingers. Kageyama’s eyes are wide and blueblueblue, and Shouyou has to bite down the sudden feeling that his heart has grown three sizes.
“So,” he says, in a steadier voice than he feels. “When we win. Where do you want to go?”
Kageyama doesn’t really smile with his teeth—you have to be looking for it.
iv.
We know how this story goes.
One boy leaves, and the other stays. They grow into themselves in different directions, on opposite sides of the world. One goes pro straight after high school; the other spends an entire year with scraped knees like he’s a little kid again, learning how to stand on his own for the first time. They don’t see each other for years, you know. Even when one boy comes back—not until they’re on opposite sides of a court again. Two teams. One net.
Us against you.
But just because that’s how that story goes, doesn’t mean it’s how it ends. How you say what you mean changes what you say. We’re just not there yet.
Hinata Shouyou leaves everything he knows behind for one reason, and one reason only: because being a person is such hard, hard work, and he’s been stalling. When you’re a kid, you always end up trying to shave off your edges for other people’s corners—but they always grow back.
Shouyou lets them.
He doesn’t want to say that Kageyama held him back when they were playing side by side. But, you know. Soaring is truly worlds away from flying.
So here’s the thing about Brazil: it does not have a place in this story. Not yet.
One day, Shouyou will miss it like a limb. He’ll miss the long winding walks down the calçadão by the beach in the richer neighborhoods of Rio, and the hot asphalt and too-soft sand under his feet; the street vendors yelling out their prices, and the girls and boys who’ll side-eye him with something like thirst when they hear his accent. He’ll get used to the unpredictable weather of São Paulo and the rain that smells of concrete and earth, its never ending skyscrapers and people, and riding the solid colors of the subway lines. The absolutely everything of Avenida Paulista, the salty breeze of Copacabana, the carnival hymns that stick to his head like the post-marching band glitter, which he’ll keep finding in odd places all the way till the next year.
Brazil can teach you one too many things. Shouyou will never hate the sun anywhere else the way he does it here. He will never love it as much, either.
But this story isn’t about that.
“Shouyou,” Kageyama says, for the umpteenth time, “are you sure you didn’t leave it anywhere else? At home? Maybe Natsu somehow got it?”
Shouyou shakes his head fervently, still sorting through his backpack. He’s taken all the contents out two times, put them back in, and even tried to shake the entire thing to see if he heard the clinking metal, but he can’t, for the love of him, find the keys to the gym. Which isn’t as much of an emergency as he’s making it out to be, considering that he and Kageyama are already inside—they didn’t have any problem unlocking it, but Shouyou just left all his stuff in a bundle after he changed out of his regular uniforms, and now he can’t find it. If they just talk to Takeda-sensei he won’t be mad, but he’ll be disappointed. Which is worse.
He tells Kageyama so, and his boyfriend just rolls his eyes. “You misplaced the key. They’re hardly going to kick you out of the club.”
Shouyou feels his heart stop. “Do you think they could? ”, he asks, voice shriller than he intended it to sound.
Kageyama startles, and frowns down at him. He’s standing by the door, already in his regular clothes, because it’s late afternoon on a Tuesday, and they came in for extra practice, a couple hours after regular practice was over. It was the first day for their first years—two of which are taller than Shouyou is now, as a third year, and it made Tsukishima laugh his head off, the smug bastard—and they didn’t want to pressure them by staying later than needed.
Okay, so he and Kageyama didn’t think that. Yamaguchi thought that, because he’s the captain and apparently responsible now. Don’t you remember how we were when we were first years?, he’d said. If our senpais had stayed for after hours practice, we would’ve thought it was a requirement. We don’t want to run them into the ground on our first week.
Don’t we? Tsukishima had asked, and Yamaguchi whacked him on the back of his head.
If you guys want extra practice, I won’t stop you, Yamaguchi had continued, but you will leave, and come back later.
He also somehow mastered Daichi’s scary-murderous-terrifying angry face, which Ennoshita had only kind of managed to put forth when he was captain. So Kageyama and Shouyou left after practice, went to Kageyama’s place to get something to eat, and came back.
And now Shouyou can’t find his keys.
“Stop freaking out,” Kageyama says, nudging Shouyou’s knee with his foot. “As if they would ever kick you out from volleyball. They’d have to drag you kicking and screaming.”
“And biting,” Shouyou adds, sadly.
“And biting,” Kageyama agrees.
Shouyou goes through the contents of his backpack one more time, to which Kageyama only rolls his eyes and leans against the door, making no move to leave. Shouyou appreciates that more than he can say.
They’re comfortable in silence, like this. Their relationship came together in fits and starts: with the handholding, and kisses on the cheek after walks home, and the one time Tanaka saw them hugging and absolutely lost his mind. The general reaction from their friends had been “Don’t let it get in the way of the game,” (from Tsukishima), “Take care of each other,” (from Suga), “May I be the godfather of your firstborn?” (from Nishinoya), and “Yeah, I know,” (from Kenma.) Shouyou doesn’t know what he expected, but out of everything, he’s glad that’s what he got.
“Yama,” Shouyou says. “Are you scared for this year?”
Kageyama melts at the nickname, which makes Shouyou smile a bit, but then his eyes sharpen. “You have to be a little more specific than that,” Kageyama says. “Scared we won’t make it to Nationals? Scared the first years are fuck ups?”
Shouyou leans back, sitting on top of his legs. “Scared because this is our last year,” he says. “Not because the whole—every match could be our last, and all that. But because when it’s done, it’s done. And we have to go out and live our lives or whatever.”
Kageyama seems to mull it over, shifting his weight to one of his legs. “We’ve been living our lives this entire time,” he starts, and Shouyou is already booing him before he’s even done speaking.
“Boo,” he says again, for good measure. “You know that’s not what I mean.”
“Yeah, I know,” Kageyama answers, easily. “And I wouldn’t say I’m scared, because I know what I want to do.”
Shouyou starts stuffing back his clothes into his backpack, forlorn. “You’re going pro, yeah?”
“Yeah. So are you.”
Shouyou’s head snaps up so fast he can almost hear the wind it makes. “What?”, he asks, dumbly.
Kageyama blinks at him. “You’re going pro,” he repeats. Then his eyes widen, and he bites his lip. “I mean—you are, right? You’re not—quitting?”
He can’t even say the words quitting and volleyball in the same sentence, and Shouyou finds that kind of endearing, but that’s not the point of this conversation. “I’m not!”, he’s quick to say, waving his hands in a pacifying motion. “I’m not quitting, no. And of course I want to go pro! It’s just,” he sighs, a little bit frustrated. “I don’t know if that’ll happen straight after graduation.”
“You want to go to college?” Kageyama asks.
Shouyou shakes his head. “Not really, no.”
The crux of the problem: Shouyou’s future feels like a million scattered shards of glass, as if someone had shattered a mirror. He can see some sort of reflection, and he knows what image he wants it to form, but he has no idea which parts make up the whole. He doesn’t know what he’s missing.
Kageyama still looks nervous, but not as terrified as he did of the idea that he could go pro without Shouyou. “Well,” he says, as soft as his voice can go, “you still have time to figure it out.”
“Yeah,” Shouyou murmurs. “Guess I have.”
He’ll find the answer soon enough. This is not the story of what happens afterwards.
What is this story about, then?
Good question.
The long answer is that it’s about the scorching sun and the unsteady sand of the ground. It’s about the ache in your body after you’ve been running too fast for too long, and empty stomachs, and empty hands reaching out to each other. It’s about a sport and the people playing it, and how it has never been anything more than that—except we know it has. It’s about how it’s hard to love the same thing and not end up loving each other, too. It’s about how you’re never really a whole person until you realize you have always been standing on your own two legs, and you are only the blood in your veins and the marrow in your bones and a gnawing stomach. It’s about how a kid learns that too much can also mean just enough.
The short answer is that this is a story about hunger.
Shouyou stands up, legs screaming in protest from the lack of blood, and just as he moves, the distinct clinking of metal seems to ring through the entire gym.
Kageyama closes his eyes and tilts his head upwards, as if praying for patience. “It was in your pocket the whole time, wasn’t it,” he says, sounding tired.
Shouyou reaches into his own pocket as slowly as he can, and winces when his hand closes over the familiar shape of the crow’s nest key chain Tanaka had bought them last year. “No,” Shouyou says, and his voice cracks in the middle of the word.
Kageyama just looks at him. “For the love of the gods, Hinata,” he says. “I’m leaving you behind.”
Shouyou throws himself forward, grabbing Kageyama by the shoulders just as he turns to leave. “No, you’re not,” he sing-songs, shaking the keys next to his boyfriend’s ear so as to make the most amount of noise possible.
Kageyama sighs, pushing him off. “No, I’m not,” he acquiesces. “Come on, though. I’m hungry.”
Shouyou lets him go, moving to grab his bag. “Bossy,” he says.
“Dumbass.”
“Asshole.”
Kageyama glares at him, and Shouyou knows he’s won this time. Then his eyes flick towards the ceiling, where the lights are still on.
“Kill the lights,” Kageyama says.
And he kills them.