Chapter Text
Perhaps predictably, it's Kageyama's presence which changes things entirely.
Yachi's, too, Daichi thinks, scrolling through the Newsnet article for the fifteenth time. Newsnet is a national platform not known to accept pitches at all, let alone cover campus activity. At some point during the night after the protest, Kageyama and Yachi hunched over a borrowed laptop at Tanaka's dining table, they'd put together something remarkable enough for the current affairs editor to give it a shot.
The cover image leaves him breathless every time. The bulk of the police station looms in the background, the sun just low enough that the chrome edges of its die-cut sign catch the light. The cluster of students telegraph relief and exhaustion with every gesture. To one side, Tanaka's broad hands are lifting Ennoshita's chin with clear delicacy to inspect the chafing on his neck, Kinoshita and Narita hovering as if they can't stand to take their hands off him or each other; to the other, Michimiya's held so tight in Aihara's embrace that the fabric of her jacket is visibly warping. Right in the center of the picture is, well, Daichi's torso. Suga's half-slumped in his arms, the sharp edge of their jawline barely visible propped on his shoulder, cane dangling loosely from the arm thrown around his neck. Their other arm, gripping his bicep, is in front, and the post-processing makes Suga's skinned hand and the scraped-raw elbow peeking through what's left of their shirtsleeve even more stark against the baby-pink plaid.
Daichi's hands look huge, one pressed flat at the small of their back, the other nearly brushing silver curls at their collar. The flex of his knuckles speaks of such immense tension that he feels like he's intruding on a private moment by looking at the picture. Two people washing the scent of fear off each other, where nobody can see them.
It's... anonymous enough, but anyone who knows them would recognize them at first sight. The other pictures in the article take away Daichi's plausible deniability entirely. There's one of him in profile, inspecting Tsukishima's handprint-bruises with a cop's defocused scowl in the background; another, grabbed from the television coverage, of his back as he crossed the van's path to join his friends. The second full-width image doesn't have him in it at all, but it's telling all the same: Suga, rumpled but calm, being manhandled through the hall's doors, flanked by a dozen officers cast blue in the van's lights.
The indomitable Sugawara Koushi, the caption reads, continued to exercise their right to attend the meeting despite the reality of violent retaliation.
Daichi's parents... have not been pleased, to say the least. His name isn't even mentioned, but as far as they're concerned he's permanently destroyed the family legacy in more than one way. He's taken to arriving home to sleep and disappearing again as early as he can. Some nights, not even that: more and more often, he's over at Tanaka's instead, wrapping himself around Suga in the spare room's single bed and accepting increasingly elaborate Tanaka-sibling pranks as the price for their hospitality.
Toward the end of semester, Suga puts the lid back on another box of those accursed noodles and catches Daichi watching them fondly instead of reviewing his mock exams.
"I've been thinking," they open.
"Surprising," Daichi says, almost on instinct at this point, and gets the usual eyeroll.
"We should start looking for a place."
Hang on. "Together?"
"Yes, you big goober." Suga leans across and smacks him gently on the nose, like a particularly overgrown cat. "In an ideal world, we'd both have cool apartments and take it slow, but... y'know. I don't want to outstay my welcome with Saeko, and it doesn't sound like you much want to stay at home."
"You're not wrong," Daichi concedes. "I haven't... thought about it, to be honest." But he kind of has, now that he thinks about it. How many mornings has he woken up with Suga tucked against his back and thought that this would be so nice in a bigger bed, or even just looked at them and thought let's go home?
Suga nods. "If it helps, I was thinking that it'd probably be most affordable to look for a place with a master bedroom big enough for the two of us, and split rent with whoever is willing to put up with us being embarrassing in the kitchen."
"That sounds really nice, actually." Somehow, over the six months he's known Suga, he's let more people into his heart than he had in all his adult life before then. It'd be nice to have a few of them around all the time. Close enough to reach out for, if he needs. He's working on letting himself need people. In a very different way, he knows Suga's trying to do the same. That they haven't insisted on trying to find a place by themself just to prove that they can is a huge step.
"Sugawara Koushi," he says, seriousness only half-exaggerated. "It would be an honor to share a home with you."
Renting, as it turns out, is a nightmare that's only traversed because the two of them somehow get mistaken for a straight couple by a private landlord desperate to rent out a poor investment that's about as not-child-safe as it's possible for a habitable house to be. It's... not in good shape at all, aging wallpaper painted over, linoleum curling and cracking with abandon, windowpanes loose in withering wooden frames. But it's big, with a large, old kitchen and a back porch that Daichi can see them enjoying with a guitar on summer nights. The master bedroom has the ugliest built-in headboard and shelves, boarded over what was clearly once a fireplace before the chimney collapsed. Suga loves it.
"Can you have bond in cash tomorrow?" their would-be landlord asks. Daichi hesitates.
"Yes," Suga says, clear and sure. It figures that they needed his boring polo-shirted self to get a foot in the door, but that he'd still be following behind Suga every step of the way.
They shake on it, fill out the forms, and that's it. Pretty anticlimactic after weeks of signing over credit history information and skipping lectures to run to last-minute viewings, but the house is theirs.
Neither of them has much to their name. It takes a couple of weeks of scrounging together extremely dubious furniture from charity shops and friends "donating" things old flatmates left behind before their living room and bedroom are remotely furnished. Tsukishima and Yamaguchi move into the two smallest rooms, opting to put their bed in one and set up a study-and-music room in the other; Ennoshita takes the respectable one with the dilapidated bay window, immediately constructing an impressive series of bookshelves and a desk out of zip-tied milk crates and plywood stolen from the back alley behind the shops across the road. That back porch, before they know it, is strung up with fairy lights, more milk crates serving as seats around a construction sign of unknown origin which has become an excellent tabletop.
It's here, Tsukishima tipsy enough to be coaxed into strumming the same four chords over and over as their friends fill in any song that fits the meter, that they're having their housewarming.
Tanaka's dug two soup spoons out of the silverware he's just gifted them and is setting the beat with them held back to back, whole body bobbing with the rhythm. Asahi, one of Daichi's oldest friends, has finally relented to Aihara putting his hair into an elaborate figure-of-eight with the pearl-topped pins she's pulling from her own hair. A little further away, Tadashi's lighting tealights in a bowl of water, placed for tonight among the collection of succulents and newly-transplanted cuttings they're rapidly gathering, Yachi's hands carefully cupped to protect the lighter from the wind. Kageyama and Ennoshita are audible from inside, arguing over the precision necessary when adding water to store-bought cake mix with no measuring equipment whatsoever.
It's not the worst, Daichi thinks, even before Suga pads out the back door and settles as a warm weight against his back.
"Fancy running into you here," Daichi murmurs. Suga chuckles, delighted and musical.
Beyond the twinkling of distant streetlights and fairy lights and laughter and cutlery, Daichi sees a future for himself. It's not the wife and kids and dog and white picket fence he would've said he wanted, if he'd been asked before this year.
But it's his, and it's perfect, and maybe he'll have some of that with his Koushi too, one day.