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The sun might as well be the flames of hell for all Suga cares when the bright, golden beams shine through the narrow gap in the curtains and lands on his face. He groans, lifting a hand to block out the light but the limb feels like somebody’s tied one of Tsukishima’s dumbbells onto it, and he only succeeds in dropping his hand into his face with a resounding smack . It hurts like hell, mainly because his knuckle hits his eyeball, and Suga groans, wiggling around. Warped starbursts and galaxies blossom under his eyelids and he rolls onto his side, trying to ignore the way his stomach feels strangely airy and hollow. The bed is really stiff, Suga noted, frowning as the side of his head starts to hurt. Where is my pillow?
A misshapen lump blurs into view when he cracks open an eye, which feels gritty with gross eye crust and is awfully dry. Suga moans and makes a weak grab for the shape, dragging it closer to himself. His pillow is ridiculously heavy, what the hell? Lumpy and kinda angular, too— since when did pillows have elbows? And necks? And a hair and ears and a face that looks absurdly like Daichi’s—
Suga opens both his eyes and raises his head.
He squints at the passed out body of his captain that he’s been spooning for a full ten seconds before something clicks.
He screams.
+
“This is the worst,” Asahi mumbles, his voice pained as he rests his forehead against the sofa. “I feel terrible.”
“Join the club,” Daichi mutters, massaging his temples in a futile manner to stave off the hangover burning through him.
Suga takes a moment to think about that. They’re hungover. They’re all hungover. Never in his life has he ever felt so crappy and so thoroughly alcohol-soaked. It’s like all his cells have become sponges and just absorbed every last drop of liquor he’d consumed the night before.
But— high school students don’t drink. They shouldn’t be drinking. How did they end up drinking?
“Nishinoya,” Asahi says, poking the unmoving lump next to him. “Nishinoya, wake up.”
The memories are vague (always a bad sign) but Suga manages to piece together a blurry and atrociously out-of-sequence recollection of returning to the hotel after joint practice, eating dinner, then the members of the various volleyball teams barraging into their room. After that? Only a hell of a lot of noise, staggering bodies and, for some reason, a lot of bread.
“Don’t touch me,” Nishinoya mumbles hoarsely, his voice somewhat muffled in the cushion of the sofa, which definitely did not have that many questionable stains on it the day before. “I’m gonna break into tiny pieces. Everything is sore.”
“At least you crashed on the sofa,” Daichi sighs. “Suga and I fell asleep on the floor. My back feels like an old man’s.”
It is 7:15 am, the four of them are sitting meekly together on the ground in their room, and one look is enough to inform anybody that their hotel suite is beyond trashed. Pillows are lying on the ground, blankets, clothes, suitcases and shoes are strewn everywhere and Suga’s pretty sure he spots a Nekoma jersey tossed haphazardly over the lampshade. Somebody had also taken all the hangers out of the closet and had stuck them behind the headboard of the bed, and there is pair of boxers hanging from the curtain rods. It’s electric blue and has little UFOs decorating it.
“We are gonna be in so much trouble,” Daichi mutters dazedly, apparently surveying the disaster zone like Suga is. “The vice-principal is going to have our heads. We’ll never be allowed on an excursion ever again, holy hell.”
“What even happened?” Asahi sniffs, looking panicked already. He’s shirtless, his hair is straggly and stubble has grown in overnight. Some kind of weird toga-like cloth is wrapped around his lower half and only one sock is dangling from his left foot.
“Move, move, I gotta puke,” Nishinoya whimpers as he sits up, face a sickly shade of white. He leaps off the bed with a level of agility a hungover person shouldn’t possess and hurtles for the bathroom, nearly tripping over somebody’s pants as he goes. Suga feels nauseous watching him move, so he just lowers his head and tries to breathe through his nose as Nishinoya bursts into the bathroom and the sounds of retching and splattering stomach acids begin.
“I hope he made it to the toilet, because I’m not cleaning that up,” Daichi mutters, eyes slightly glazed as he stares up at the ceiling (like avoiding looking at the aftermath would make the mess disappear any time soon). Suga silently agrees and makes peace with the awful combination of laboured breathing and the sounds of somebody puking for about a minute until Nishinoya’s heaving dies down.
A second later, the libero stumbles out of the bathroom, his expression oddly blank.
“Um,” he says. Daichi groans.
“You missed the toilet, didn’t you?”
“Not exactly,” Nishinoya replies, sweating a little now. “I, um, puked into the bathtub.”
“Better than the floor, isn’t it?” Asahi mumbles into the sofa.
“Yeah, I guess. But then I looked and there’s a dead guy in the tub. And I puked onto him.”
A second passes, and Suga screams for the second time that morning.
+
The good news is the dead guy isn’t actually dead. He was only passed out. Suga almost started hyperventilating in relief because for a horrific twenty seconds he could almost taste the school expulsions, lawsuits, jail time and parental disappointment on his tongue— or maybe that’s just the residual contents of yesterday’s night’s drinks.
The bad news is, depending on one’s standpoint, is that Oikawa Tooru was the one lying in the tub, and since his revival he is currently sitting with the group of Karasuno upper years, green-faced and creased tank top stinking of Nishinoya’s vomit.
It has also become apparent that he was the one who supplied the teams with alcohol yesterday night.
“You are dead to me, pretty boy,” Daichi growls in rare moment of real anger, and he’s doing the scary face he uses when the first years aren’t listening to him. Oikawa laughs weakly and attempts to brush everything off with his usual sparkling smile, except the bags under his eyes are literally purple and make him look like he’s aged twenty years overnight.
“It wasn’t so bad, you guys didn’t look like you did anything ridiculous or out of the ordinary—”
“Did I stutter?” Daichi hisses, verging on homicidal now. “As soon as the ground stops tilting and I can figure out which of the three versions I’m seeing of you is real you are ground meat.”
“Wow, Tobio-chan wasn’t kidding when he said you could be scary as hell.”
“You got that right—” Daichi snaps, but Suga is struck by a sudden, horrible realization and he grabs Daichi by the arm, jostling him.
“Daichi! Where are the first years and Tanaka?!”
“What? What? Stop shaking me, Suga, I’m getting dizzy—”
“Shouyo! We’ve lost Shouyo! And Kageyama! And Ryu!” Nishinoya cries in a panic, apparently resurrecting from where he’d collapsed by the bathroom door. “Asahi! We gotta go! We gotta save them!”
“Stop shouting,” Daichi groans, pinching his temples. “They’re in the other room, probably.”
“That does absolutely nothing to reassure me,” Suga retorts, and he gets to his feet even though his knees feel wobbly and weak. “We are going to check up on them now, Daichi, because they’re minors and we can’t possibly let anybody find them when they’re in a vulnerable, hungover state!” That, and the fact that Hinata and Kageyama are a disastrous combination when not on court and Tanaka doesn’t even remotely constitute as parental supervision. Plus, they’re all country hicks who thought every steel tower was the Tokyo tower, and Suga doesn’t even want to imagine what would happen if they found their way downtown.
“Okay, okay, just please stop yelling,” Daichi pleads, staggering upright as well. “You three, get up.”
“Seriously?” Oikawa asks, managing to look exasperated even through his winces as he stands. “I’m sure the orange-haired shorty will be fine with Tobio-chan and your monk teammate, y’know.”
“Yeah, this isn’t a negotiation,” Daichi retorts. “You caused this mess, Oikawa, and you are doing damage control with us.”
“Fuck,” Oikawa groans, rubbing the heels of his palms into his eyes. “You crows really don’t know how to party at all.”
“To be honest, I’m not sure I ever want to party ever again,” Asahi sighs, and Oikawa smirks at him. A second later, his gaze seems to have redirected to the alien-patterned underwear dangling from the curtain rod and his face lights up at once.
“So that’s where my boxers went!” he cries, and begins to unbuckle his belt.
“Good god,” Suga says, and shoves a petrified Asahi out the door.
+
One sweep of Hinata, Kageyama and Tanaka’s room reveals an even greater mess and zero Karasuno teammates, but sitting in the room like he belongs there is Nekoma’s Kuroo and also, to Oikawa’s delight, a passed out Iwazumi is motionless on the ground. Kuroo’s hair has reached a new level of ridiculousness and he’s got almost all the sheets draped over himself like a cocoon as he taps furiously away on his phone, back turned pointedly away from the window.
“Iwa-chan!” Oikawa chirps, bouncing over to Iwaizumi’s best imitation of a facedown starfish on a pile of towels on the floor. Kuroo flinches and gives Oikawa a dirty look.
“Who brought the loud one in here?” he demands, squinting at Suga and the others like he’s gaging the level of guilt on their faces, or perhaps a sign that says I DRAGGED AN OVERLY EXCITABLE AND LOUD OIKAWA TOORU INTO THE PREMESIS over their heads.
“Why are you in our kouhais’ room?” Nishinoya shoots back instead, and Kuroo shrugs.
“Dunno. I woke up under the mattress this morning with Aobajosai’s vice-captain on the floor. Have you guys seen Kenma anywhere?”
Indistinct memories of laughing people and rowdy cheers and a large tree pop into Suga’s mind, but he can’t think of anywhere the quiet cat-eyed setter might be, so he shrugs his shoulders. Shaking his head just makes everything spin dangerously.
“Crap,” Kuroo groans, rolling over. “Can’t believe I actually lost Kenma. What is he, a sock from the wash? Nobody just loses a person.”
“To be fair I’m pretty sure you were as wasted as we were yesterday night,” Daichi points out, and Kuroo snorts.
“I actually have no idea what I ate yesterday night, but after hurling into the toilet this morning I can accurately tell you there was pizza and broccoli involved.”
“Jesus Christ, you are disgusting,” Daichi snaps and Nishinoya clutches his stomach, going green. As Asahi frets and flutters around the shorter boy, Oikawa succeeds in dragging a groaning Iwaizumi up off the floor and tosses him onto the bed.
“Blerghfarstd,” Iwaizumi yelps as he bounces a little. “What the fuck? What the hell?”
“Mornin’,” Kuroo says monotonously, and goes back to feverishly texting.
“What?” Iwaizumi repeats, and he swivels around to stare at everybody in the room. There’s sleep marks on his face and dried drool on his chin. Suga winces at the sight and wipes a hand over his own face to check for any unsavoury liquids.
“How’re you feeling, Iwa-chan?” Oikawa asks cheerily, leaping onto the bed after Iwaizumi. The combined impact jolts Kuroo, who bounces backwards off the bed with a shout. It doesn’t seem too bad, though, because all Suga hears is a ‘pwoof’ as the blankets Kuroo had burrowed into cushion his fall, so all eyes are on the Aobajosai pair as Iwaizumi screeches and punches Oikawa in the face, screaming something along the lines of you bastard and you brought us liquor and I am going to kill you ten times over.
“I think he might actually kill Oikawa,” Nishinoya says in awe, and Asahi covers his face with his hands.
“That’s no good,” Daichi mumbles to Suga, crossing his arms. “Half my team is missing; I was gonna make him help me find them.”
“Oh, I am going to maim you when I find something sharp enough!” Iwaizumi growls as he grinds Oikawa’s face into the mattress. “Distributing alcohol to minors?! Do you want to get arrested?”
“It was only a bit of fun, Iwa-chan!” Oikawa cries tearfully, squirming out of his friend’s death hold and lunging forwards with a hug. “I’m sorry! I won’t do it again!”
“Get the fuck off me! You stink! Is that vomit on your shirt?”
“Technically that’s my puke,” Nishinoya says, but Iwaizumi had already kicked Oikawa off the bed with a surprising amount of energy.
“Can we just please go find the others?” Suga sighs, pinching the bridge of his nose.
“Mind if I tag along? I gotta find Kenma,” Kuroo adds.
“Right, sure, whatever,” Daichi groans, and begins ushering everyone out the door once again as Iwaizumi grabs Oikawa around the waist and drops him using a vertical suplex.
+
Fifteen minutes, four closets, two bathrooms and an accidental side trip into the women’s change rooms for the pool by the lobby, Suga finally understands why there’s a tree involved in his warped memory.
“Kuroo,” Kenma hisses dangerously. “Get. Me. Down. Now.”
“I’m telling you, I can’t help you if you don’t let go of the branch!” Kuroo cries in exasperation, throwing his hands up to the sky, the heavens or the passing airplane for guidance. “Seriously, you’re not that high up.”
“People can still break bones from seven foot drops, y’know,” Tsukishima mutters, squinting at them with a peevish expression. “I saw a documentary on television once. Some girl tried to leap off a set of stairs and snapped her femur in two. There was a lot of blood.”
Kuroo shoots the blond a deadly glare as Kenma pales and tightens his death grip on the tree branch high above their heads. The group found the trio of Kenma, Tsukishima, and Yamaguchi in the hotel’s back garden, where they’d somehow managed to migrate during their ridiculous night of partying and thoroughly destroy the area too. Tsukishima’s glasses are missing, Yamaguchi’s hair had been sloppily dyed an electric blue and somewhere along the way, Kenma had climbed up into the tree in his drunken daze and gotten stuck there, like a cat.
“He’s just like a cat, isn’t he?” Nishinoya says curiously as Kuroo shouts upwards and Kenma delivers scathing replies back. “Maybe we should call the firefighters.”
“I think they’ll just consider it a prank call,” Yamaguchi says dejectedly, yanking at the flaky strands of blue hair amidst the haphazard chunks of remaining dark hair. Suga seriously doesn’t even want to ask how that happened. Tsukishima snorts.
“Watch out, cat boy, you never know if the branch isn’t going to snap all of a sudden and send you crashing to the ground.”
A high-pitched noise suddenly sounds and it takes everybody a moment to realize that Kenma is the one making the noise, and his hair is literally starting to stand on end. Daichi digs his elbow into Tsukishima’s side and grinds out, “For the love of god, Tsukishima, please find a better personality ASAP.”
“Sure thing, Captain,” Tsukishima grunts. “If I can see where I’m going.”
“I’ll help you look for your glasses, Tsukki!”
“No thanks, Yamaguchi.”
“Kenma! Just let go of the frickin’ branch already!”
“No! I’ll fall, Kuroo!”
“Deliver me from these god damn people,” Daichi moans, and he burrows his face into Suga’s shoulder. Suga laughs weakly as Daichi’s hair tickles his nose, and he rubs his captain’s back soothingly.
“We’ll take a vacation after this, Daichi.”
“Sure. No brats allowed though.”
“Whatever you want.”
“Oi! I want to go on vacation with you guys,” Nishinoya cries indignantly. Tsukishima snorts.
“No way, ‘Papa’ and ‘Mama’ need some alone time away from you lot.”
“I’ll get you back for that, Tsukishima, but I don’t punch blind guys,” Daichi says into Suga’s shirt, and Tsukishima wisely backs off as he continues his search for his glasses.
“Not to rain on anybody’s parade regarding vacation plans,” Kuroo says nonchalantly as he yanks continuously on Kenma’s ankle. “But the faster we get Kenma down from this tree, the faster we can begin to look for your missing teammates before the coaches get wind of this.”
After that, it is only a matter of minutes before a lawn chair, Kenma’s iPhone and a rake was utilized to rescue a kicking and writhing Kenma from the tree in the garden.
+
Tanaka is laughing.
Kageyama and Hinata are not, and by extension, Daichi and Suga aren’t either, but the rest of them are slowly cottoning on to Tanaka’s wild screeches as he rolls around in Nekoma’s hotel room, where the last Karasuno trio had ended up.
“No, no, no, man, you don’t understand— Kageyama got smashed and tried to marry Hinata! Like, he draped the volleyball net over Hinata’s head and tried to walk him across the room, but then Hinata tripped and fell into all the bowls of ice cream they stole from the kitchens earlier, and Asahi then showed up wearing that stupid toga, grabbed that frankly pretty ugly Christmas wreath off the door, shoved it on his head and tried to officiate the ceremony! He looked like Jesus! Hinata and Kageyama were married by Jesus!”
“What,” Kageyama says, and the aura around him is positively dangerous. Asahi, on the other hand, looks like he might faint. Hinata’s face turns ten shades of different reds as he blabs incoherently.
“That explains the rather ambiguous white stains on Shouyo’s pants,” Nishinoya says brightly, and Hinata instantly bypasses maroon.
“T-t-t-that’s—!” he stammers, looking terrified. “I didn’t do anything indecent! I really didn’t! But I can’t marry Kageyama though! He’ll kill me! He’ll really kill me!”
“Shut up!” Kageyama hollers. “Why do you always assume the worst?”
“B-b-b-because you’re a really scary person!” Hinata cries, and Kageyama splutters incoherently for several seconds before forgoing words and skipping to the action by grabbing Hinata around the neck and giving him a painful noogie.
As Daichi and Tanaka hurtle forwards to separate the two, Kenma turns to Suga. “I thought they were already dating?” he asks monotonously, and somewhere behind them Asahi begins choking on his own spit.
+
“Alright, time to head home,” Daichi sighs, staggering back into the shared hotel room after murders had been deterred and underclassmen had been ushered back into their own rooms to pack. “We are never going on an excursion with Aoba Josai ever again. Never. Ever. Again.”
“Seconded,” Asahi mumbles, wringing the bottom on his toga.
“It was kinda fun though, wasn’t it?” Nishinoya grins. “But maybe we should wait until we’re legal to drink again.”
“Asahi can probably buy us liquor now, though, since he looks like a delinquent adult,” Tanaka smirks, but Daichi whips a pillow at him with a dangerous look on his face.
“Knock on wood, Tanaka. Let’s hope we covered the extent of the damage we caused yesterday night, because I seriously do not need to find out another one of our teammates married one another while a Jesus cosplayer officiated the ceremony.”
“I didn’t mean to!” Asahi wails at once, looking devastated. Nishinoya hops onto damage control like a second nature and does his best to assure the elder that no, Kageyama and Hinata aren’t actually married because Asahi isn’t certified to do so, and no, it’s not so bad to be able to cosplay as Jesus, and yes, Kageyama might murder Hinata but that’s a daily occurrence by now and nobody’s really that startled by death attempts anymore anyway.
Suga grabs a change of clothes and ducks into the bathroom, leaving behind his rowdy teammates. His t-shirt smells like sweat and other unspeakable drinks, so he strips quickly and chucks everything into his plastic laundry bag.
Well, at least we found anybody and didn’t do anything ludicrous, although we did come close a couple of times.
Suga is about to pull a clean shirt over his head before he catches sight of something in the mirror that makes him freeze.
Oh, no.
Oh, no, no, no.
There, tattooed on the entire lower left side of his back, was a scrawl of a crow taking flight and underneath it, flanked by two slightly misshapen green roses of all things, was the words Sawwanmaru Daiichi Always, incorrect spelling and all.
Suga stares at it.
(Knock on wood, Daichi had said.)
He screams for the third time that day.
+
End