Archive of Our Own

“I wanna tell the guys about us,” Tanaka blurted at lunch, where they sat under a tree shoulder to shoulder.

Ennoshita gawked at him. “You know high school is the shittiest place on the planet to come out. Please tell me you know that.”

“Yeah, Chika, I’m not an idiot.” Ennoshita scoffed, and Tanaka merely grinned. “C’mon, man. It’s our teammates. Our brothers from other mothers. Our dudes. Our pals. Our —”

His rambling was halted when Ennoshita elbowed him. “One more metaphor and I’m making you watch Casablanca again.”

Tanaka blanched, his newly discovered hatred of black and white movies flaring to life. But it shut him up, and Ennoshita went back to his lunch.

When they were packing up, ready to return to their classroom, Ennoshita paused and grabbed Tanaka’s hand. “All right, we’ll tell them. I don’t like keeping it from them, either.”

Tanaka beamed. “You want me to do it?”

Ennoshita shrugged. “When it’s the right time, we’ll figure it out.”

“Gotcha.” Tanaka smacked a loud kiss on Ennoshita’s lips and propelled them toward the clubroom to get ready for afternoon practice.

Practice that day was spectacularly normal, with the second years chirping at each other and the other third years splitting their efforts wrangling practice (Kinoshita and Narita) and disrupting it (Nishinoya and also Kinoshita).

“You still good?” Tanaka asked, and Ennoshita knew he was offering a chance to change his mind if he wanted.

These were their friends, their teammates. Just seeing the utter normalcy of the day gave Ennoshita the courage to push forward. After all, learning that the team captains had been dating since early spring would hardly be the strangest thing to happen in this gym.

“Yeah, I’m good.” WIth that, the two of them headed for a corner of the gym to start stretching.

Soon one of the more exhausting drills was underway. Get in line to spike, run a lap around the gym, get in line to receive, five push-ups, go back to the spiking line.

Ennoshita’s turn to spike was nothing to write home about. He got decent contact off of the first year setter’s ill-aimed toss, but Yamaguchi was able to get under it on the other side. Ennoshita ran his lap and caught his breath in the receive line.

He nearly groaned out loud when it was his turn to receive. On the other side of the net, Tanaka was smirking with some bizarre iteration of anime shark teeth that was so unbelievably ridiculous and so unbelievably him. Yep. This was the guy he liked.

Gaze following every one of Tanaka’s movements, every dart of the eye, Ennoshita poised himself for the receive. Kageyama’s toss was impeccable and right where Tanaka liked it, and a Mikasa-brand scud missile sped to the far end of the court.

Ennoshita moved on instinct, feet moving in concert with his bead on the ball, and he dove to the floor. One balled up fist made it under the ball, which popped into the air and dropped right where the setter would have been.

Not bothering to get up, Ennoshita rolled over to do his push-ups. When he hoisted himself off the floor, however, strong and very familiar arms banded around him like a vice, hugging him straight off his feet.

“Dude, Chika, that was awesome!” Tanaka beamed at him, and Ennoshita’s heart tripped over its shoelaces and tumbled down a few flights of stairs.

“Thanks, Ryuu. I —” All thoughts, words, and pretty much anything else melted away when Tanaka’s lips pressed to his for a breath-stealing kiss. Eyes fluttering shut on instinct, Ennoshita groaned against Tanaka’s mouth and slid his arms around Tanaka’s waist.

Slowly, surely, with a red face, Ennoshita’s eyes opened and widened and stared in something akin to horror when his stupid monkey brain remembered where they were. At practice. In front of their teammates. “Oh, god.”

All sound, all activity, all attention for anything else ground to a screeching halt. Well, except Kageyama, who set the ball to Hinata as planned, only for it to drop uselessly off the top of Hinata’s head. He nearly started railing at Hinata for not paying attention until he followed Hinata’s gaze, as well as everyone else’s, to the scene on the other side of the court.

The silence in the gym was cracked when Kageyama snapped at Hinata to get back to the attack line and try the spike again. Slowly, practice went back to normal — as normal as it could be with a horde of first years taking every spare second to gawk at their captain and vice captain.

Tsukishima didn’t seem all that interested, but Yamaguchi and Hinata were and Yachi never actually stopped staring.

In fact, the least shocked out of all of them were the other third years. Nishinoya sent Tanaka sly little thumbs-up, while Narita chuckled to himself and Kinoshita gave a half-hearted admonishment of, “You guys know you did that out loud, right?”

So that’s what happened when the team’s vice captain kissed the captain full on the mouth for everyone on the team to see, and Ennoshita kind of wanted to die. Then he saw the satisfied smirk on Tanaka’s face; then he wanted to take Tanaka down with him.

He was fairly certain he didn’t execute a single play properly for the rest of practice, save for the part where they fetched all the balls and put them back in the cart. That, he could do while his brain was stuttering some bizarre cocktail of ‘that actually happened’ and ‘oh god, that actually happened’.

It was all anyone was talking about when they thought he and Tanaka couldn’t hear. “Gwahhh! Tanaka-senpai and Ennoshita-san are dating! Why doesn’t anyone tell me these things?” Hinata complained.

“Because I don’t care,” Tsukishima answered, followed by Yamaguchi’s earnest, “I’m happy for them. I thought there was something going on, but it’s none of my business.”

Hinata turned his attention to Kageyama, who grumbled, “Also don’t care.” Kageyama glared at Tsukishima, as if daring him to purport that their respective levels of don’t-care were in any way equal, to which Tsukishima merely rolled his eyes and turned his attention back to packing his gym bag.

And that was that. The entire team finally knew that Ennoshita and Tanaka had been dating for some time now, and the world spun on. Tanaka had assured him that would be the case, but somehow it had taken a truckload of empirical evidence to convince Ennoshita.

He almost hated Tanaka’s plethora of worldly knowledge. Almost.

They left the clubroom hand in hand that day. A few of the more Bambi-like first years still gawked at them, but the rest of their teammates were business as usual. Hinata and Kageyama still sniped at each other, Tsukishima still gave color commentary on it, and Yamaguchi still chided him for it.

Nishinoya sent them more finger guns than any one person had the right to do, and Kinoshita and Narita couldn’t stop smiling at the two of them.

Everything was . . . just fine. Ennoshita wasn’t the kind of idiot who thought that would be a universal experience, but one thing he had learned in the past few years was to have faith in his teammates because they always had faith in him, even when he probably didn’t deserve it.

“Sorry I kind of sneaked that in there,” Tanaka said, his smile tight and truly apologetic. “I did it on instinct, but as soon as I did it, I knew it was the right time.”

Ennoshita squeezed Tanaka’s hand and chortled. “Yeah, I know. It’s nice to have that over and done with, though. And you were right. Nobody really cared.”

“What was that?” Tanaka leaned in, grinning like a cat who caught the canary. “Did you say that I’m . . . right?” He let out an oof when Ennoshita planted his elbow into his ribs, but Tanaka’s smile never flagged.

“Yeah, I said you were right.” Despite the late May heat, Ennoshita hooked his arm with Tanaka’s and hummed in contentment. “Don’t let it get to your head. Even a broken clock is right twice a day.”

“Hey!”

Ennoshita laughed as they continued their trek home together, with their houses being only a few blocks apart. He may have been ridiculous and loud and a few other things that would normally drive Ennoshita insane, but damn it all, the best thing Tanaka was — at least to Ennoshita — was his.