Chapter Text
“Can’t you see how fortunate you are? You have worn yourself out through ceaseless striving, you have filled your muscles with pain and anguish.
And what have you achieved but to bring yourself one day nearer to the end of your days?”
– The Epic of Gilgamesh, Sîn-lēqi-unninni, 2700 BC –
– ☾ –
January bites at their heels.
Feet ache, wounds throb, and complaints layer over each other into a terrible harmony of inability. Winter is sharp when it hits them again in stubborn winds, knocking against, then through, until the air chills the bone. Kageyama looks over his shoulder to find the others lagging behind. Footsteps sluggishly melt into one another, like snake-trails in the snow.
Without electricity, the dark is unrestrained. It swallows them whole. Moonlight is barely enough to make out the form- there’s nothing for the color, the specifics, who is who or what is where. There are only shapes, indications, impressions: a downed tree here, a street-curb there, a useless traffic light, an even more useless car.
“Keep moving,” he says, though the chill makes his words hop unevenly.
Reluctantly, and without complaint, the group shuffles through the night: it’s ill-placed, by nature, by a biological center that dictates darkness is a phase of rest, a recovery period, a quiet time-out in the constant movement of life. Night was for warm beds and stuffed animals and sinking pillows. Not for stumbling, or aching, or escaping.
But there was always something to escape from. Noise, or the absence of it. Light, or the absence of it. Each other. Mistaken silhouettes for threats, whispered apologies and reassurances, the occasional headcount. One shadowed form limps behind the others.
“Is it your ankle?” Kageyama prods. The voice that returns sounds nothing like its owner, not anymore.
“Wrong person,” Hinata responds. Teeth clack and chatter- they’re all cold, for daytime had the mercy of the hijacked spring sun. Nightfall had nothing. Kageyama barely spares another glance as he keeps moving- he doesn’t need sight, not when there’s the sound, like shy ocean waves against a sizzling beach, like flour through a sieve. Snow was louder than he remembered.
“Then what’s the hold-up?”
Hinata says nothing, but his figure doesn’t move. Another stumbles back a few paces to join him. He hears a whisper, as if the stars themselves were listening in, paranoia by another name. From the gentleness of the movement, he guessed Sugawara
“Is it your arm? Do you think it’s bleeding again?”
Wrong again. Yamaguchi poses the concern instead, and Kageyama tries to thread his memories of their faces and demeanors into an even bigger knot in his throat. Hinata shakes his head, or so he thinks. The shadows don’t make it clear.
“Tired.”
A sigh, then a raised hand, a wiry limb that catches the moonlight like a beacon.
“Me too,” calm admissions, still laced with the usual snappishness. Kageyama can just barely make out the glint of Tsukishima’s broken glasses. Another hand. Then another.
“We should stop,” Yamaguchi begins, a lack of urgency remaining to finish his sentence. Kageyama turns around knowing full-well how his scowl melts into the absence of light around him.
“No- nobody stops. No stopping. If we stop, we’re done for. Keep going.”
Silence. Collapse. One of their number has become one with the snow beneath, letting it carry his weight and sting his palms.
“Just a break, just- just a little one. This hurts pretty damn bad.”
Tanaka, surely, gesturing to his ankle. Machinery that broke when it shouldn’t have, then continued to operate under the shattered pieces. A constant positive-feedback-loop of making the injury worse. Kageyama doesn’t slow his pace.
“Get someone to help you up. Sugawara?”
“No. We should call it quits for tonight.”
This time, the voice is loud, assured. Not Sugawara. Nishinoya- the height makes it easier to tell.
“If we walk until we pass out, we’ll get sick, or worse. It’s not worth it. We need to find somewhere to hide.”
“If we stop, then we’ll never get moving again. We have enough momentum to get through the night, so don’t stop. Not once. Break your other leg too for all I care- we just have to find a way out of this.” There’s a pair of sneakers missing from the shuffle harmony, growing smaller and more insignificant with the distance, tiny and polite. Kageyama tries to find the source of it.
There’s no map. There’s no navigation besides what they knew at day- that the nearest government building was that one bank by the market district, the one with the fence and the tacky tile pathway. There’s no directions but forwards and back where the road stretches on. No left and right- those are all trees and growths, and tonight, the plants are carnivorous. They know better than to tread it. Back- behind- there’s a body, by now sunken under a layer of snow to be found some odd weeks later by first responders who are more volunteers than they are professionals. Behind that is an empty, broken store. Behind that is the wreck of concrete and classrooms. Nothing to return to.
Worse than the lack of direction is the absence of a threat, paradoxically implying that there is always a threat. Had that noise been from one of their own? Was that tree a bit oddly human shaped? Was that brush of heat against skin a person, or an animal, now more ecosystem than evolution? In the never-ending dark, there is nothing, no forms, no colors, no sounds that raise alarm. The absence screams fear into every one of them: maybe it’s not that there was no threat, because that could never be true. Maybe, just maybe, it’s that they simply hadn’t seen it yet.
Mistakes. Failures. Newer failures, these ones, irreversible failures- a slip of the hand, or the ankle, or the arm, or the mind- and that was it. Kageyama frowns at the thought alone. He didn’t believe in things like luck, not by their traditional definitions.
But that was all that it was: the playing, the growing, the learning, the living. Manufacturing his own good luck and minimizing the bad until he found balance. Not seeing something before it saw you was never just bad luck. Not stabbing at every vaguely-animal shaped silhouette he saw was not just bad luck. That was the food chain, after all.
Animals that saw a smaller animal first were the winners. The smaller animals that ran away first were the winners.
So to press on was just that. Manufactured good luck. If they never stopped, never broke down, never allowed weakness in, then they’d have generated their own fortune. The only defense against the unknown, because by the time the unknown would have revealed itself, they’d all be dead.
Had the flood been more merciful, there’d be buildings flanking either side of the street. Things to hide in or under. Somewhere safe and dry, even if structurally unsound or unappealing. Instead, the springtime had eaten them all. Greenery made foundations into trellises and carpeted the floors in moss that tingled to the touch. When there’d still been some of the sun’s dying light left, they’d seen it: the birds, the little animals, subsumed into the grass and the leaves and the wood. Melted into walls and floors until all the calcium from their skeletons had been drained dry.
Kageyama turns back around. Hinata hasn’t moved a single step. In return, he marches forward and breaks through their huddled formation- grabs the shorter by the remaining wrist and drags him forwards relentlessly.
A part of him expects resistance. Heels digging into the snow. Squirming and pulling. Fighting and yelling. Hinata only goes quietly.
“No stopping,” the setter repeats. Whether he’s graced with a response or not is lost to the wind.
But the snow howls back, it layers upon itself until they forget what season it's even supposed to be, a thin veneer between spring and winter that shifts with the light. Kageyama hates how his fingers start to feel warm, how his face seems to heat up, how his lungs shrink under the temperature change.
It can’t be that cold. Not yet. It wasn’t cold yesterday.
Nor the day before, or the day before that. Still, he can feel the ice on his lashes, the condensation whispering out of him with every foggy breath. Why is breathing getting so difficult?
One foot crashes into the other. He stumbles and trips to make up for it before finding his center of gravity again, nearly letting go of Hinata in the process. His blunder does not go unnoticed when Tsukishima remarks:
“Whether you want to or not, we’re going to have to rest eventually. We might as well find a place to hide while we still have some control over that.”
It’s no longer up to him. Hinata is seized away- someone else has taken him by the wrist, led him out of Kageyama’s grasp. Kageyama can barely make out the anxious expressions of his teammates in the dark. He takes in a deep breath, even as it prickles against his lungs.
“Fine then! Where do you expect us to stop, huh? We can’t see five feet in front of us!”
“Anything with a roof,” Sugawara mumbles back, as if to scold Kageyama on his volume. “Anything that’ll hold.”
But, when they prod and poke at either side of the street, explore the dark shapes with their hands and tell apart wood from drywall from concrete, there are only ruins and splinters waiting for them. Hours- hours whittle away with this, the searching, grasping at empty lots and piles of debris where there’d once been a town.
Hinata aimlessly tries to help with what he has, letting the grooves in the wood beneath his palm inform him that he’s touching a foundation beam, or a doorframe. Next there’s-
Ouch.
Broken glass, the usual recoil. Window. Again, slower, more careful this time, Hinata identifies the shape of it, catches glimpses of the moonlight sifting through clouds to hit the jagged edges. If he didn’t know any better, he’d think he was adjusting to the dark fairly well.
Then, a texture he doesn’t recognize. Gentle and smooth like skin, crinkling like foil and flexible the way reeds were. He runs his hand over it again, notices sharp, trimmed edges and a large surface area. Right. Paper. Treated with something, something that made it shiny or preserved it somehow.
A bitter memory assaults him with the realization: probably a poster, an advertisement or a welcome sign. Maybe someone was in it, maybe they’d posed for a photograph, doing something they love. Maybe their friend had taken it to show people how wonderful their efforts were. Maybe it was something awesome, something inspiring.
But it was too dark to see it, now.
The building creaks and groans. Not sound. He moves on to the next with even less enthusiasm.
A small eternity passes before Yamaguchi finally manages to find something- a roadside pop-up market that’d collapsed in such a way that it formed a sort of triangle, exposed to wind from the front but sheltered and dry underneath. He pries against the wood that blocks it, ripping it out even as the splinters bite at him. Wordlessly, the others go to help.
There’s barely enough room for them all. Tanaka insists on taking the spot by the corner so he’ll be the last to leave in the event of an emergency- the slowest, the weakest, putting himself on the outskirt no matter how bitter it makes him feel inside. Nishinoya sits beside him- Sugawara beside Nishinoya, the three of them huddled together. Hinata goes in next, center-most, with the gravest injury. Kageyama is soon to follow. Tsukishima reluctantly takes his spot beside the setter, and Yamaguchi follows close behind.
Here, packed like sardines under a broken and rotting pile of wood that could collapse over their heads at any moment, they’re allowed some room to breathe. The ache in Kageyama’s legs makes itself known the second they stop. It was easier to ignore the pain when there was always fresher agony to be had elsewhere, when each step was worse than the last. Now, here, every single step came back to haunt him.
The wind picks up outside, the snow beginning to fall and whip around in plentiful amounts. It’s cold. Teeth begin to chatter, shivering begins to set in. The survivors inadvertently huddle even closer to seek warmth.
The snow doesn’t stop.
– 𖤓 –
You’re barely a teenager when the winter rolls around. When he’s gone.
You stand in a suit that chokes your neck and itches in the back. Someone put flowers in your right hand. The picture in front of you is too happy to be framed in black, to be placed on what it is now.
Someone asks you to go. Go where? With them? When all you want to do is stay here- with your favorite person? It was unavoidable. His health has been getting worse, after all. But you don’t want to leave.
A hand pulls you away. It's been hours, of you staring, saying goodbye. You spend the next few weeks in a haze- rotting on your mattress, barely managing a few glimpses of food every now and again. It tastes like a chore.
Instead- you run. You run the way you’ve been taught. Around the neighborhood. Up and down. Dawn till dusk.
Momentum. It keeps you going. That’s all you really need- the momentum, the inertia. An object in motion will stay in motion, so someone once said. If you stay in motion, you feel alive again. You can ignore the way your teammates whisper behind your back. You can ignore the way your captain glares at you. You can ignore all of it because you don’t even give it the time to hurt you. You’ll outrun it.
So you don’t stop. Even if it means you come back home frozen inside and out. Even if it means your legs ache, and your breath stings when you’re done.
Stay in motion. You always do it. You can’t control the other side- but you can control your own, can run, can set. So you do it until your hands are sore.
The front door flings open under your hand. Your sister protests- its too cold to go out running. That night, you develop a fever. The heat in your head feels like he’s still here. A hand on you. Encouraging.
You’ll run again tomorrow.
– ☾ –
“Don’t you think it’s about time to throw in the towel?”
Sleeping had been impossible in the cold. Naturally, the only other thing to do was conversation.
Even the chattering stops. In that close-packed huddle, trying to conserve what little warmth they’ve got, the remark slips into consideration so quickly that it’s frightening. It’s almost natural in that way: giving up had its own soft comfort to it, in a morbid sense. Kageyama’s nose wrinkles at the statement as though it’d given off a bad scent.
“T-The hell do you mean by that?”
When Tsukishima speaks again, there’s a strange quality to his voice like that of the silence before a storm, the quiet contemplation of the clouds above. It’s airy and removed from itself all at once.
“Oh come on. Don’t tell me I’m the only one that’s- it-that's been mulling over it,” he pauses, tries to cover up the embarrassment at shivering mid-sentence. “We did our best. We really did. I know I did. But, I’m pretty sure- and don’t quote me on this, that we’re all going to freeze to death before we ever get anywhere close to help.”
“Well, aren’t you r-real optimistic,” Nishinoya retorts, ever quick to the punch.
But Tsukishima doesn’t stop. He doesn’t stop even when a hand wraps around his own, and he can just tell from the way the thumb rubs over the back of his own that it’s Yamaguchi, signaling, begging for him not to bring it up again, not to give in.
“We can do ourselves a favor and call it quits on our own terms, o-or we can be popsicles by morning. Not much of a choice, is it?”
Light intrudes on them, so violent and blaring that it makes eyes sting. Kageyama flips open his broken phone, reaching over Hinata to hold the time right up to Tsukishima’s face.
“Two and a half hours until dawn. Quit whining.”
Tsukishima holds in his next remark, only resolving to rest his head against his arms to hide from the phone light. Kageyama flips it closed. Light was precious now, regardless of how quickly the sun would come up.
“I-It’s not that serious,” Yamaguchi pipes up. “Don’t say drastic things like that. We made it this far, right?”
To his surprise, the next person to speak isn’t Tsukishima.
“Not t-to back up Mr.Doom-and-Gloom over here, but, I do k-kinda see where he’s coming from,” Tanaka sighs.
“What?!”
“I-I’m just- it’s just that I’ve been thinkin, y’know?”
“Oh, that’s new,” Tsukishima ghosts a snide remark, a last-ditch attempt to get his mind off his own proposal.
“Shut up- look, I just wonder sometimes, if things would have been easier if someone else…I don’t know, if they made it, and not me. If we would’ve covered more ground then.”
It goes silent again.
“Don’t. Don’t think about that kind of thing,” Nishinoya scolds.
“How can I not t-think about it?! If I didn’t break this stupid ankle, we could’ve been there by now, we could’ve found help- why didn’t y-you spend your time fishing someone else out of the building? Why me? Huh?”
His exasperation is palpable, but stinging regardless. The accusatory tone he takes on is only barely softened from the clacking of his teeth. Nishinoya digs his hand against the snow that’s seeped in beside him.
“Maybe it was a mistake,” Tanaka grits out. “Maybe- maybe I wasn’t ever supposed to have made it out of there. Not when the others didn’t.”
“That’s not up to you! You made it out because you survived, okay? And we’re going to make it out of this too. We’ve been through worse! So much worse! It’ll be morning soon, so enough with all this depressing crap!” Nishinoya rasps.
“And if we don’t?”
Kageyama snaps his head around. Finally. Finally, Hinata says something, his voice duller than he’s ever heard it before. There’s a long pause- it’s as if not speaking for an hour or so was all it took for him to be forgotten, for his voice to become foreign and therefore dangerous. Kageyama flips the phone open again. Just to see his face, to see what he looks like when he says this. Hinata rests his chin on his knees, one arm wrapped around himself while what remains of the other hangs at his side, the rest of him huddled against Kageyama’s own crouched figure. The setter feels his spine freeze faster than the rest of him. His eyes are that of the birds trapped in the walls, of the students buried under the rubble in the school, vacant. Lifeless.
“If we don’t what?” the question sounds too much like a jab when it comes from Nishinoya, a dangerous poke at what’s left of Hinata.
“If we don’t make it out. I’m tired.”
Those two words. I’m tired.
Alarms blare in Kageyama’s mind. Something out of place. Wrong. It was all wrong. Hinata, the greatest decoy, the one with endless stamina- tired. Boundless energy Hinata. Tired. Excitable, over-enthusiastic, ridiculously impulsive Hinata. The same one that found immeasurable joy in small things like four-leaf-clovers and snacks going on sale and bad movies from the theater and from beetles in the garden. Stupidly small things, so miniscule that Kageyama forgot about them the second they were out of his sight.
Tired.
Hinata glances beside him, meeting Kageyama’s eyes. The setter’s expression spells out everything: his knitted brows, his mouth barely agape, his eyes flickering to study every bit of Hinata’s absent stare as if merely looking was all it took to find where his spirit had gone, to figure out what the hell happened to the Hinata he was remembering. The one who’d never say something like that in a million years.
“Sorry.”
A smile. Soft and small, apologetic over its own existence, apologetic for not being able to find who Kageyama was looking for. He watches the last of Hinata’s light leave when that smile fades.
“I think we all are,” Sugawara admits. Loud this time. Unafraid. How Kageyama wishes that for once, he’d resolved himself to whispering, given that slight chance that his statement could be unheard.
“Y-You guys are freaking me out,” Yamaguchi whispers. “Please stop.”
He’s on the verge of tears when he says it.
Kageyama can’t help it. Sharply, without remorse, he pulls Hinata closer against him, only then notices just how cold he really is. He’s been shivering involuntarily now, a little shaking thing at his side that barely breathes.
“If we don’t make it out, then we die. So we have to make it,” he snaps. Hinata hums in response, leaning his head onto Kageyama’s shoulder as if his neck alone couldn't support the weight.
“...’Yama. I’m tired.”
A whisper, like a secret.
Even worse than the exhaustion is the warmth. He’d craved it before, down to a biological level, but not like this. Not as he can hear a heartbeat- his or Hinata’s, he’s not quite sure, moving what he’s relatively certain is one beat slower than it’s supposed to. Weakening. Not when the warmth only goes to his ear tips and fingers, not when it refuses to be where he needs it. Moving gets harder. Cold. So cold.
But he doesn’t miss the spring. He’ll never miss it, he tells himself, because of what it’d done to them. How hungry it’d been. The frost had been a gift when it first fell, but nature never operated in mediocrity, nor did things in simple amounts. There was rain, and then there were things like tsunamis and storm surges and typhoons. There was snow, and then there were hail storms and blizzards. Riptides. Earthquakes. Sinkholes. The snow was doing exactly what it’d been made to do, fulfilling its role in the natural order. It was making things stop.
Kageyama tries to move his hand, but the nerves are unresponsive, his fingers numb. It’s only thanks to the group’s collective warmth that he manages to thaw them with enough effort and bring them close to his chest. When he goes to reach for Hinata again, he’s even colder than he was before, eyelids half-down.
The wind howls outside.
No- not yet. Not yet. Just give me a little more time, please. I just need a little more time. I just need the sun to come up.
He gives Hinata a nudge. He doesn’t react. Again, sharper this time. Nothing.
“Hinata?”
His shivering slows. Killing all movement. Stopping all energy. That was what winter did, fundamentally. That was what they’d begged for from the spring. If only the things that’d chased them had run out of energy, if only the crows would stop cawing and the plants would stop growing and everything would exist in tepid peace.
Kageyama nudges at the people around him- shakes Sugawara and Yamaguchi to begin with, specifically. They’re cold too. Quiet.
“K-keep m-m-moving, keep your eyes open. D-don’t close them.”
But his own eyelids only get heavier, dawn only gets further. Colder. Colder. The cold bites through his clothes and skin, phases through every fiber and muscle until it gets right into the marrow of his bones, drinks up all the warmth he has and leaves him with nothing. He buries his nose in Hinata’s hair, tries to exchange whatever he has left.
Shit. He’s freezing.
But the sky’s getting bluer- he can see it seep through the wreck above them, see the night fade. They’re so close. He can barely work his fingers around his phone again, barely manages to flip it open and check the time. Forty-five minutes to dawn. Then, another hour or two to a full sunrise. Unable to close it properly anymore, he lets it drop to the ground beside him.
With the sun would come the spring warmth. The seasons seemed to align themselves with the night and day, flood and frost, growth and decay. Pollen in the day. Snow at night. Earth to water and back again. Kageyama lets his head sink for a second, only a second. If it went down for any longer, all the movement, all the momentum- it’d be over, and it couldn’t be over. It couldn’t be. Not this way.
God, if you’re up there, just give us a little more time. Just a little bit more. Please. Please.
“H-H-Hinata-” he stutters, shaking him again. His eyes have been stuck at half-closed for too long to be comfortable. Snowflakes sprinkle his hair. No response.
“Oi, Hinata! C-Come on, s-s-stop falling- stop falling asleep!”
But no amount of shaking makes his heartbeat return to normal, or his body any less tense, or his eyes any more open or closed. Kageyama can tell from the cold light of his phone screen- his fingertips are going blue.
“W-wake up!”
Again.
“Wake! Up!”
Again.
Tears barely make it halfway down his face before they begin to crystalize. The only sound he can hear above the wind is the shuffling of the only two still awake- Yamaguchi and Nishinoya, shivering, fidgeting, anything to keep themselves awake. It’s fighting against an unwinnable pressure, it’s keeping their eyes open after what feels like months of not sleeping. Kageyama hates how his own body begs for rest. How his hands, the hands of a prodigy, are no different than those of his teammates who’ve stopped fighting, who let the cold lull them into a rest.
They have to wake up.
Only human. Kageyama is only human- he repeats it to himself in his head, his thoughts and stream-of-consciousness freezing into an ugly sleet of panic. I’m only human. I can’t- have to- have to stay awake. Keep eyes open. Keep going.
But the tears won’t stop. He can’t find the strength to try and shake Hinata awake anymore- only brings his small, frozen, rigid frame closer into his embrace, trying to shield him from the things outside. The painful things, the things that never get tired, never sleep, never get full, never stop. The cold. The growth. The bleeding.
The forms begin to melt into each other. Foundations meld with the ceiling, window-slots empty it into the air outside, shadows stretch and cover his vision. Begging for him to close his eyes. Waiting for the inevitable.
Inevitable.
Kageyama hears his heartbeat echo against Hinata’s, waiting for a response- a lone signal, a sonar, a blink, a plea. A siren without an answer. A matched pair missing the other half.
His eyes close.
– 𖤓 –
Light erupts over every bit of him.
The first thing he hears is the murmuring of people he doesn’t recognize, blobs of color without faces or names. The next thing he hears is the rustling of tools, paper, plastic. Life. Sound. Noise.
He coughs and sputters- there’s something over his nose, warm and discomforting. Someone carefully takes it off of him. The ceiling of blinding white settles into a texture he recognizes, plastic stretched over a metal wireframe, like a tent. He’s not sure what he’s lying down on.
The thin blanket over him crinkles when he sits up, and a person insulated in gloves and scrubs rushes to his side. He sees that same virulent desperation in their eyes that he’s certain are in his own, the kind that only the lucky or unlucky few who’d withstood the flood had.
Am I dreaming?
They spit out sentences and questions that don’t sound like anything he can understand. Syllables melt and mold, consonants become discordant percussion. Chaos. Kageyama’s head feels full of water- maybe the ice that’d formed over him had melted. He grasps beside him for a shoulder, for a hand, for orange locks.
Nothing.
The absence knocks the air out of him, makes him gasp. He seizes the gloved-person’s arm with all the strength he can muster, interrupting whatever foreign language they’d been speaking in before.
“Where is he?!”
Hands go up to pacify, to soothe. That’s bad. That’s bad- they only do that if it’s bad. In the movies, in the stories, whenever someone wakes up like this. They give the terrible news with that stupid look.
He asks again, desperate, almost angry.
“Where is he? Where- where is he, H-Hinata, he’s- he w-was right beside me, he was-”
“Easy, easy. Calm down. Everything’s okay. You’re alright now.”
“No! Where is he, where are the rest of them? The people next to me? Where’d you put them? Are they alive?!”
“Settle down-”
“Please,” Kageyama begs. His tears are water, now. Free-flowing and safe from the frost. “Please just tell me they’re okay,”
“They’re alright, they’re okay. Just breathe for me first- that’s it, nice deep breath.”
They’re okay.
Kageyama doesn’t wait, doesn’t even let the gloved-person restrain him when he fumbles his way off the cot and winces as a needle snaps out of the crook in his arm. Each step is mismatched as he reaches for what he thinks is the exit.
Daytime. The sun basks him in its brightness- and despite the frost, it smells like spring again. His heart races a little bit faster. He scans the scenery before him- rows and rows of tents like the one he’d just walked out of, glove-people scurrying in and out of them like ants. There’s dirt beneath his shoes. The remains of the grass that's been ripped up to make room for the people, adapted against and overwhelmed. Tears and laughter, bundles of limbs and hugs and holds. Families. Partners. Friends-
But he doesn’t see him.
From across the dead field, he locks eyes with Tsukishima and Sugawara, the two already beginning conversation. There’s a band of white around Sugawara’s thigh: real gauze. It takes him a minute to recognize them- their clothes have changed, and it’s only when he squints that he sees they’ve kept their blankets wrapped around themselves.
Unexpectedly, all too casually, they wave to him. Kageyama waves back.
But he can’t join them. Not yet. He continues to look around, spots Nishinoya in the crowd before he disappears into a tent, then gets shoved out a moment later. Unwelcome. Yamaguchi is further away, but he’s already moving again, stumbling to greet Tsukishima and the others. There’s gauze around his hand- the silhouette is wrong. Unbalanced. When Kageyama focuses, he sees that he’s missing something as he waves- a pinky, a thumb. It makes him wince. Frostbite had taken a chunk out of him. A consequence of sitting close to the outside.
Nothing. Hinata isn’t there. He looks again- but there’s no glimpse of orange hair, no stupid weaving from a distance. Panic begins to overtake him. His heart races, his breath hitches.
How could he say goodbye like this?
Gutting, sinking grief. The kind that wraps all his organs into a little pit. Kageyama feels himself hyperventilate, like his lungs are remembering how to be lungs again, even when breathing hurts. They were supposed to go further than this- supposed to do more, see more. As if unaware of his distress, Tsukishima and Sugawara begin to walk towards him. Kageyama thinks he might faint.
They wave again. Beside him, blurred from the haze of daylight, someone waves back.
He turns.
They say nothing- because it could be a trick of the mind, a vision conjured up to deal with the loss. A mirage from the heat wave. A fleeting memory. Hinata’s smile is weak and shattered, a ghost of its former radiance, forced to grow up sooner than it wanted.
Still. It’s the smile he wears when Kageyama crashes into him.
“I-I thought-”
“Yeah,” Hinata whispers back. In sync once again. Kageyama digs his nails into his back, feels his heartbeat respond. “Me too.”
Two other arms wrap around them- huddling, crying, mourning and celebrating. Everything at once. Too many feelings to name.
It’s warm like the sunlight.
– ✦⚘✦–