Chapter Text
A drop of sweat threatens to slip down Kageyama’s neck and into his shirt as he’s sitting in the unbearably hot carriage. It’s too hot to even put his headphones around his neck, let alone listen to music. It’s the first Friday of July and it’s searing outside, oh how he curses his aunt for calling in that favour now. She helped him once, only once and that wicked creature made sure she would get something in return. He had to sign a contract and everything!
Still grumbling, he arrives at his stop and gets off. The heat’s coming off the pavement in waves and Kageyama can feel it through his flip-flops. He pulls his weekend bag up on his shoulder and sets off to his aunt’s cottage at the edge of the beach.
He rings the doorbell and his aunt opens with a huge grin on her face; it seems that she’s barely containing her urge to coddle him. “Tobio! Haven’t seen you in a while, come in, come in!” Kageyama steps inside and follows his chattering aunt to the kitchen. “I’ve been so lonely Tobio! I’m so glad you could come and help me this summer, we’ve been severly understaffed ever since last year. Want some tea?” She offers him a mug.
“No thanks, aunt Rika.” No wonder she was lonely, winter by the sea isn’t really exciting, and with her husband gone...
“Oh well, you’ve never been much of a tea drinker anyways, why did I even ask? Stupid Rika. Anyway, I should probably show you your room for the weekend. And many weekends to come!” She giggles as she turns on the water cooker for herself and heads upstairs.
That’s right. He’s tied here for every weekend of summer vacation. Helping his aunt in her ice cream parlour. With little kids coming in en masse. Every day. Great.
At least he gets to rest at home during the week. And play volleyball. Especially play volleyball.
~+~
Next weekend he’s again sitting in the scorching train cabin, dreading the moment he has to stand up in fear of the skin on his thighs sticking to the seat and tearing off. It’s that hot. Then something breaks through his heat-induced delirium, a small orange ball of… hair? Bounces up and down fervently, the person attached to it apologizing profusely, and in a very animated way, to an older gentleman for bumping into him. It couldn’t have been a very hard collision, the ginger is seriously tiny. A middle schooler maybe? Though the logo on his backpack says otherwise, it looks a lot like the logo of his aunt’s old high school… You can’t be serious, this guy’s in high school? Kageyama can’t be 100% sure, since the ginger’s not wearing a uniform, if the ginger's school even has a uniform. It could still be an elder sibling’s backpack.
The commotion has calmed down a little and Kageyama lets his head dip again, ready to doze off for a second and forget all about the tiny energetic ginger.
Kageyama wakes up at his stop, as per usual, and sees the tiny ginger with headphones on, swaying to the music. He can’t linger any longer though and hurries to get off the train. During the walk home he couldn’t shake the image of the softly swaying ginger out of his mind and he almost forgets to greet his aunt, who is, again, exponentially happy to see him. She doesn’t offer any tea this time.
~+~
It’s the third weekend he goes to help his aunt, and the heat hasn’t diminished a single bit. Traffic to the parlour is good though, and normally it should calm down a bit by next weekend. The last weekend of July should be the calmest, since everyone who took a month off has to get back to work. Not that working at the parlour was unpleasant, not at all. Seeing the little kids cheer up with a cone of ice cream in their hand after being scared to tears by his face was a tiny bit less unpleasant than expected. Luckily he managed to soften his expression a little bit, making it just a little less likely for them to burst out in tears on first sight.
By some miracle he managed to not fall asleep by the second stop, and his efforts were rewarded with a pleasant surprise. Three stops after Kageyama got on, he saw the ginger step on the train and take a seat a couple of rows in front of him. He’s sitting next to an apathetic blonde with headphones who immediately turned the other way as soon as the ginger sat down. The ginger doesn’t notice the waves of ‘screw off’ wafting off the blonde and pulls out his own pair of headphones after flashing the blonde a smile. A smile which is met with a cold, annoyed glare. He doesn’t even notice the frigid stare and starts swaying softly, tapping his finger and presumably humming, because the blonde’s expression turns even more sour. It wouldn’t surprise Kageyama if the blonde asks to trade places with someone. He secretly hopes it would be him.
Wait.
What?
What the hell did I just think? Why would I want it to be me?
He doesn’t get a lot of time to ponder further, his stop is coming up and he has to hurry to get to the doors in time.
And honestly, the less time spent on that thought, the better.
-
That evening Kageyama absentmindedly picks at his food. He can’t concentrate; the taste doesn’t even register on his tongue, he’s completely off this world. His mind keeps twisting his thoughts back to the train ride, to the ginger. He only saw the ginger twice, why would he even remember him? Okay, the bright, orange, fluffy ball of hair did stand out, but why does the image of the gently swaying boy keep flashing before his eyes? His fascination with the content expression on the ginger’s face puzzled him. His round eyes, soft jawline and plush lips all mesmerized him. He thinks. These details might just be his imagination overcompensating for the lack of detail he actually got to see, thanks to the distance between their seats. This realization takes a while to register, but when it finally does his fork halts its pricking motions and he stares mildly shocked at the lukewarm dish before him. He’s thinking, no, fantasizing about the boy’s lips . Confused and slightly disturbed Kageyama stands up abruptly and says to his aunt: “Aunt Rika, I’m full, I’ll put my plate in the sink.”
“Tobio?” His aunt asks dubiously, “You’ve barely touched your food.”
“I’m fine aunt Rika.” Kageyama dumps his plate into the sink with a loud clink, “absolutely fine,” and heads for the stairs.
“Tobio, what’s up? Please tell me, I’m wo-” He shuts the door to the stairwell, cutting off his aunt mid-sentence. It’s nothing for her to worry about, he’s got to figure this one out by himself, he thinks as he flops onto his bed.
~+~
Suffocating.
The train is full. Too much people. It’s hot. There’s people standing. Everyone’s uncomfortable. Kageyama’s especially uncomfortable.
Sweaty. Warm. Too warm.
Kageyama had to choose a seat closer to the front of the carriage instead of the back, the back seats were all taken. Four stops later, the ginger sat on the only available seat after offering an old lady his spot by the window, she said she would get motion sick if she couldn’t see outside.
As luck would have it, the only available seat was right next to Kageyama. Now he was only barely avoiding touching the ginger’s thigh with his own. He can smell just the barest hint of citrus. Probably his shampoo. If he looks towards the window he can see the ginger’s face in his peripheral vision. he quickly shifts his gaze a little farther to the side and discovers the light smattering of freckles, and in the same second, light brown eyes looking at him. He blinks and looks outside the window again. I couldn’t have imagined that. He was definitely looking at me.
~+~
The carriage is the emptiest it’s been all vacation and there are only two people beside him in this carriage, a proper man in a suit and, of course, the ginger. He can’t catch a break, now can he? Even though he’s secretly very thankful for the lack of spectators. He tries to sneak a peek every once in a while, but he ultimately ends up bluntly staring anyway. What is he supposed to do when the ginger is sitting only a row farther, much less when he’s facing him! He knows the ginger is aware that he’s staring, why else would the ginger be smiling back, giving him a knowing grin? He knows for sure the damn ginger is toying with him.
Kageyama has to halt his musings there, he feels sleep laying heavy on his eyelids, dragging them down, demanding he catches up with all the hours of missed sleep. He has been unable to catch even a teeny bit of shut-eye, all thanks to the way-too-intriguing-for-his-own-good-feelings concerning a certain ginger. Kageyama tries to fight off the inevitable but to his grand dismay his eyes close of their own accord, not caring that their owner wants to keep watching the ginger.
Warm brown… Orange… stars… no, not stars, freckles… yes, fre-
“Uhm, sir? Isn’t this your stop?”
Kageyama startles awake, only to come face to face with his ginger.
“Uh, I-I, ” he swallows, throat suddenly tight, “I-I-INEEDTOGOBYE!”
All he hears is the rush of blood behind his eardrums as he races through the streets, arriving at his aunt’s cottage in no time. When she opens the door he chokes out a breathy greeting and stumbles inside. “Tobio, oh my god are you okay!?” His aunt bustles about, trying hurriedly to discern if her cousin needs first aid. “Are you hurt? You look like you’re about ready to pass out, Tobio!” Kageyama swallows in a vain attempt to moisten his dry throat before he croaks out “No aunt Rika, I don’t need any help, I just... ran really hard on the way here.” Aunt Rika looks at him with suspecting eyes in a face of worry. He assures her that he’s fine once more and takes his bags upstairs and to his room.
He flops onto his bed, all he can think about is the ginger. Their faces so close, close enough to make out the different speckles of colour in his eyes. Why were we so close, it wasn’t necessary at all, who the hell wakes a stranger at that proximity?
The word ‘stranger’ feels weird to use, the ginger feels like much more than a stranger to him. More than an acquaintance even. The vague familiarity makes Kageyama want to get to know him better, so they could be much, much more than mere acquaintances.
He suddenly feels like falling through the ground. Through his bed, past his aunt’s living, the cellar, all the way to the other end of the world. He groans and flushes at the thought of them being closer than strangers should ever be. The need to drown out his feelings with music arises and he reaches for his headphones, usually around his neck or in his bag. The lack of hard plastic around his neck alarms him, but the absence of headphones in both his bag and room makes him panic. After whirling through his room for a while, distress steadily growing, he abruptly stops his frantic search.
I left them on the damn train.
-
He works as though in a daze, worried about his headphones. They had been a gift from a very precious person, a gift he absolutely doesn’t want to lose. The constant looming cloud of worry blocked out even thoughts about the ginger on the train.
~+~
Head down, thoughts several miles away, Kageyama waits for his train, not looking at the time. He almost misses the train, but luckily an adorable little muffin of a child with a straw sunhat tugs on his sleeve about two minutes before the train arrives to ask for a tissue and pulls him back to the present. The small, round, freckled face lights a bulb in a faraway place, but he can’t get a grasp on it. His head is still in the clouds when he gets on though, still full of worry.
Kageyama finds a seat and sits down. He stares dead ahead, numerous thoughts flitting through his head.
I've called the train company's lost and found a million times, they haven't seen them, no one's brought them in. So much for trusting the kindness of man. He scoffs at the thought. The least I can hope for at this point is that my parents won't get too upset with me for losing them, though I'm absolutely sure they will flip their shit if they find out.
He’s managed to keep them off his tail the past week by hurriedly explaining his jitters and tenseness as frustration with a particular set he’s been trying to get the hang of in volleyball training. His father raised an eyebrow at this, knowing all too well how adept his son is at setting. But when Kageyama brought up the time he was learning a precision set at the beginning of the year and the subsequent fight that broke out because he couldn’t master it in time, his parents settled down and didn’t pry any further. Kageyama thinks they didn’t notice the absence of the headphones. Hopes they didn’t.
Whilst remembering the rather unpleasant quarrel he and his teammates had, he slowly registers that there’s someone standing in front of him. Someone in a pair of sky blue shorts. It kinda hurts to look at. Then the person before him waves in front of Kageyama’s face, as if to say ‘up here, buddy’ and Kageyama looks up, only to be stunned to silence. Somehow the ginger’s hair looks even more radiant than before, what with the light hitting it in all the right ways, and he fears that if he were to speak, all that would come out of Kageyama’s mouth would be a garbled mix of ‘cute’, ‘sun god’, ‘wow’ and the sound of his lungs deflating all at the same time while his blood rushes to his cheeks so fast it leaves him dizzy.
And if his looks weren’t enough to consider him a celestial deity, the ginger rummages in his bag and produces a pair of headphones. Kageyama’s headphones. Kageyama’s presumed-to-be-lost-forever headphones. He wants to cry. But this is a public place and he needs to thank the ginger for saving his life and restoring his faith in humanity returning his headphones. Kageyama reaches up, takes the headphones from him and stutters out a “Th-th-thank you!” but even in his haze, he manages to notice that the ginger’s a little flushed too, that his breathing’s the tiniest bit labored and for a moment, but only a moment, he wonders if it’s because of him, if it’s him making the ginger blush, and his heart dares to skip a beat. Such a thought doesn’t even surprise him any more. That idea is quickly thwarted when the ginger speaks up:
“I searched through all the train cars to find you, you weren’t in the usual one... Anyway, glad I could get them back to you.” and with a friendly, wide smile the ginger walks off and sits down a little farther, next to the door.
Kageyama’s heart skips another beat, for not an entirely different reason. He woke me up for my stop, took care of my headphones, searched for me, and… flirted with me? Not now, what just happened wasn’t flirting, was it? The smile the ginger gave him merely seconds ago flashes through his head, so does the time they locked eyes while awkwardly sitting next to each other, the grins the ginger gave him when he caught Kageyama blatantly staring… and now the look the ginger gives him from by the door. He is totally flirting with me.
Only when he turns the other way and moves to plug in his newly-returned headphones, does he notice the note stuck to them. Lined paper, most likely torn from a notebook, if the jagged edge is anything to go by. He slowly unfolds it, careful as if it was a sacred relic, and read the hastily written message in blue, ballpoint pen chicken scratch.
‘found these on your seat, you look lost without them ;3’
A warm smile overtakes him, momentarily forgetting he’s on a train, in public, with the ginger most probably watching him to gauge his reaction. Once that thought enters his mind, he whips his head up and looks straight into the ginger’s eyes, who’s snickering behind his hand, desperately trying to hide the laughter. It might not be so desperately though, on second glance it’s more like a thinly veiled mocking. Red as a london bus, Kageyama looks away quickly, he doesn’t need the ginger to think he was some kind of blushy, timid high school girl with a mad crush on the inside (which he totally is, and he totally knows it.) Kageyama dreads the moment the train reaches his stop, for when it does he’ll have to walk by the ginger. Walk by him with rosy thoughts of sharing milkshakes and earbuds floating around his head.
When that awful moment arrives Kageyama hesitates just a second, but then rushes to the doors, passing the ginger and (almost unwillingly) glances at him. This one glance, a fraction of a second, was worth pretty much all of the embarrassment. The downright flirty grin combined with honest and warm eyes and the tiny little crinkles of laughter surrounding them will be forever burned in his mind, filed away in the steadily growing folder with the ginger on it.
-
That night he lies in bed, reading the note over and over again, like the love-struck idiot he is.
~+~
Kageyama’s unconsciously searching for a shock of bright orange hair between the passengers trickling in one by one. A feeling of disbelief washes over him when it is nowhere to be seen. After that fades he is left with a tiny bit of worry, nibbling on the edge of his mind. The sneaky question of ‘why’ slinks its undesired way into his head. At first ‘why’ means ‘why is he not here, what happened, is he hurt?’ but then, slowly but surely ‘why’ starts to mean ‘why am I even worrying, why am I so concerned about his well-being, why can’t I stop looking for him?’
‘Why am I acting like he’s been gone for years?’
He tries to wave away the concerning thoughts before they turn into self-doubt. He tries to.
I shouldn’t even be this enamored with a stranger, what was I thinking? There’s no way this would ever work out, there’s no way I could hope, I’ve been working myself up every week for the past two months. For what, a stupid crush on a cute boy I see once every week and don’t even know the name of?
By this point Kageyama’s eyes are looking at the ground, no longer searching.
Once he looks up he sees the mildly disturbed stare of a preppy lady across from him and he realizes he’s been muttering under his breath all along. This sight temporarily shifts his thoughts into a lighter place and he manages to stay there for the rest of his ride, thinking about helping his aunt, the insane temperatures this weekend, only in the back of his mind echoes a sole thought:
Why do I feel like I’ve known him for years?
-
The weekend passes in a blur, afterwards he vaguely remembers his aunt commenting on his behaviour, which was even colder than usual. He never caught the countless worried glances his aunt sent him.
~+~
The last weekend of summer vacation is right around the corner. The last chance to see the ginger. It’s even more than likely that the ginger won’t show up. There’s nothing tangible tying them together other than one friendly act from one stranger to another.
But still.
There’s something.
There’s more than something.
In the eyes of others there may not be anything bridging them together, it might even be the same for the ginger.
Kageyama is staring into the abyss, eyes unfocused, when he sees the ginger outside the window. Deep in thought he vaguely registers the blob of orange floating in his vision, as it slowly takes a more solid shape. He focuses his gaze until the shock of orange, dulled by the murky glass, comes into view. The sullen look on the ginger’s face surprises him, but not as much as the shock of actually seeing him does.
His legs feel like jelly and the floor sways beneath him, dark spots swimming in his vision, lightheaded. A wave of relief crashes over him. He catches himself standing, having jolted out of his seat, staring slackjawed out the window and undoubtedly having caught a few stares.
He closes his mouth and sits down slowly, almost guiltily, expression frozen, eyes darting left, then right, before finally looking in front of him again, checking for the ginger.
Oh thank god, he didn’t notice…
Though it’s strange to not notice such a brisk movement only a couple armlengths away.
Is he that deep in thought?
Granted, he might have been facing away but Kageyama was too shocked to notice.
All of this couldn’t have happened in more than a few seconds, because the train doors are just opening and the crowd of people slowly files in.
I have to do something. I don’t even know his name, find at least that out, no matter how awkward it will most likely be.
In the meantime, while Kageyama is mentally pep-talking himself, the ginger steps into the train car. Without the barrier of muddled glass between them Kageyama is once again struck by how bright and warm the ginger’s hair actually is, contrasting against the stark cold white of his headphones.
The ginger gets nearer and nearer, all of Kageyama’s muscles tense, thoughts run a mile a minute, blood drains from his face, leaving a silently jittering mess with a white mask of death. His resolve is in there somewhere, buzzing around together with stage fright and a touch of anxiety among a buttload of kind-of-but-not-really-related-nor-necessary thoughts.
But the moment the ginger lays eyes on him, makes eye contact , Kageyama’s senses return to him and his resolve shines. He gathers his courage for the last time as the ginger approaches purposefully.
He has no opener prepared, no greeting, no nothing. He has nothing to go on but this weird connection they have.
The ginger sits down right in front of him, puts his backpack between his feet and Kageyama takes the chance to take in the sight.
The ginger, hands folded in his lap, light denim jacket over a pastel t-shirt, shoulders relaxed, pearly white headphones resting around his neck, soft, springy hair framing a round-ish face, freckles as pronounced as ever on his slightly tanned skin, that soft mouth, curled into a welcoming smile and finally those warm brown doe-like eyes looking straight into his dark grey ones.
He feels safe in the presence of this boy, just looking into each other’s eyes, both of them fully aware of what they’re doing. He feels at peace, content. He wishes their stop would never come and the rails went on endlessly, so they could stay like this forever.
But I want more.
Much more.
“What’s your name?”
The ginger breaks out in a grin, ”I thought ye’d never ask! Th’name’s Hinata.”
~+~