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“Shit. I think I cut my gum.”
They’re having dinner together for some reason. Bokuto probably roped them all into it to stave off his boredom, but he offered to pay, so Sakusa went along with it, and because Sakusa went along with it, Hinata went along with it, and because Hinata went along with it, Atsumu went along with it. He suspects Hinata would’ve said yes from the start, but Sakusa started lecturing them on the perils of Korean BBQ restaurants, so Bokuto staved him off too with the cash thing. Sakusa is a practical person. Sometimes.
Anyway, Hinata winces as he says shit I think I cut my gum. Then he smiles like he’s really happy about it and Bokuto’s eyes go all round like volleyballs and he slams his hands on the table. Sakusa tells him not to put his hands on the table. Bokuto ignores him.
“Are you okay?” Bokuto asks.
“Yeah,” Hinata says, making a weird face while he feels around in his mouth with his tongue.
Atsumu tries to think of something intelligent to say and draws a blank. “Let me see,” he says instead. He’s sitting next to Hinata because Sakusa doesn’t trust Bokuto to share a grill with him. Bokuto is sitting next to Sakusa because he can’t share a grill with him but he wants to either try to get to know him better or piss him off. If nothing else he’s definitely succeeded at the latter.
“Huh?” Sakusa stares at Atsumu like he thinks he’s stupid, which he probably is. “The fuck are you trying to see?”
“The, uh,” Atsumu begins, but Hinata opens his mouth for him for some reason and he forgets to finish his sentence.
“I can taste blood on the right side of my mouth,” he offers.
“Uh,” Atsumu says again.
Bokuto stands up and leans over the table because Bokuto is immortal and will not be wounded by the likes of a Korean BBQ grill. “Do you need a flashlight? My phone has a flashlight.”
“Who the fuck doesn’t have a flashlight on their phone,” Sakusa says, staring at Bokuto like he thinks he’s stupid.
“Me,” Hinata offers. Hinata is using an iPhone model from the Stone Age.
“Stop talking and let me look at your gums,” Atsumu says, looking at his teeth. He has made a discovery: Hinata has very nice teeth. This aligns nicely with the other nice things he has noticed about Hinata’s face, like his eyebrows and the softness of his mouth. Hell yeah. Atsumu is in love.
“You’ve been looking at his gums for over a minute, Atsumu. Have you found anything.” Sakusa.
“Yeah,” Atsumu confirms. “There’s a cut.”
“Shit, where?”
“There.”
“Can you show me?”
“Oh, no.” Sakusa pushes his chair away from the table. “Atsumu. Don’t do it.”
Atsumu is really fucking confused. “What am I supposed to not do?” He’s still thinking about Hinata’s face. You have to get really close to someone to look inside their mouth. Close enough to kiss them. Is this what intimacy looks like?
“Are you gonna put your fingers in his mouth?” Bokuto, in a moment of clairvoyance, has caught onto the source of Sakusa’s terror. He sounds proud of himself.
“Are you?” Hinata looks at him innocently.
Atsumu puts his fingers in his mouth.
::
Sakusa Kiyoomi followed Inarizaki’s match against Karasuno in his second year of high school from a livestream on his phone because he wanted to minimize contact with the crowds in the gymnasium as much as possible. The match being an Inarizaki match, had attracted an especially large and diverse crowd of spectators. Nonetheless, they were united by the fact that they were all screaming. At first they were screaming because the Miya brothers were winning. Later they were screaming because the Miya brothers were losing. Then they finished losing, and Kiyoomi scoffed at them behind his mask while he wondered how Miya Atsumu was taking the fact that he had blown his first match at the Spring High.
Later he would recall the way Atsumu had looked at Karasuno’s orange-headed number ten. Kiyoomi, being the calm and logical person he is, would detect the complex twist of fascination and admiration that lay behind the twins’ duplicate of the freak quick. He might even begin to form a coherent thought about Atsumu’s motivation for executing such a shaky attack. This would involve a careful perusal of the few years of friendship between them and an evaluation of Atsumu’s taste in sports, men, and sportsmen. Then someone would cough in his direction from thirteen meters away, and he would get so mad at them he would forget all about it until he met the two of them again as teammates in the MSBY Black Jackals and Atsumu put his fingers in Hinata’s mouth.
::
“Dude you have to tell me why you did that,” Bokuto says. He’s leaning on Atsumu’s shoulder because he’s drunk and it’s a Friday. Bokuto only drinks on Fridays. This is a fact of life. If he could have it his way he would apparently drink on several days but Akaashi the shounen manga editor vows to wipe out seven generations of his family if he does. Therefore he abstains.
Atsumu wishes he would abstain from leaning on his shoulder. “I do?” he wonders aloud. He is drunk as well. Luckily Bokuto is more drunk so Bokuto cannot admonish him. Atsumu holds all the power in this situation.
“Yeah dude you were blushing like crazy.” Drunk Bokuto doesn’t use punctuation. It does not register on his list of things that exist in the universe. One time Atsumu made a bad life decision and crashed at his apartment; that night he overheard Bokuto talking to Akaashi the shounen manga editor on the phone, sounding like a bullet train with a caffeine addiction. Every once in a while Bokuto would fall silent. Then he would make an abrupt sound like a deflating balloon, presumably interrupting whatever Akaashi was saying, and there would be no more silence to be had for the next thirteen minutes. Atsumu felt very sorry for himself all night. He also felt very sorry for Akaashi, but less so since he had chosen to saddle himself permanently with Bokuto unlike the rest of them.
“Dude.” Drunk Bokuto says dude a lot.
“No,” Atsumu says.
They have almost reached the train station. Atsumu can see it blinking in the distance with its glowing signs and other artificial shit and he is so fucking glad for it. He manhandles Bokuto into the station and props him up against a pillar once they reach the platform. Bokuto’s coat is slipping off his shoulders. Atsumu pulls it back up.
“Do you think he was weirded out?” he asks later on the train. The soju he chugged after sticking his fingers in Hinata’s mouth is wearing off and primal fear is starting to set in. Suddenly he finds himself deeply regretting everything he has done since Hinata joined the Black Jackals. Spending so much time practicing that quick attack with him was a mistake. Buying him chocolate as a joke for Valentine’s Day was a mistake. Walking back to the train station alone with him after spending too much time practicing that quick attack, watching the way Hinata had laughed at his dumb jokes as they moved through the neon blur of the city was a mistake. Now he's in love and Sakusa's going to make fun of him. Sakusa has alien-like sensors installed in the back of his head which allow him to notice everything important in life before Atsumu does. Ah, Atsumu’s drowning in regret. He’s going to die.
“Nope,” Bokuto says cheerfully. “Hinata’s a good guy.”
Atsumu broods. “Good guys can be weirded out too, y’know.”
“Nah. He likes you.”
“What are you, psychic?”
“Hell yeah I’m psychic.”
::
Bokuto is not psychic. He’s just a fundamentally nice human being who gets an endorphin kick out of supporting every single person who comes within a hundred-meter-radius of him. Okay, Atsumu wants to say. Okay, so you want to support your teammates and your friends and shit. That’s great. But what if two of those teammates are At Odds with each other. What if you have to pick one.
Atsumu and Hinata are At Odds with each other. On the bright side, they’re both old enough to draw the line between work shit and personal shit so it doesn’t spill over into their professional lives. They are alarmingly civil during practice. The Black Jackals continue to get their ass handed to them by the Adlers. On the dark side, Hinata won’t so much as breathe in his direction off the court, which is pretty fucking miserable.
The best part is Atsumu doesn’t even realize he’s being ignored until Sakusa points it out to him. He’s spent the last week in denial and is actually growing kind of comfortable with this new lifestyle. He doesn’t have to deal with the fact that he has feelings for the guy who pissed him off in his second year of high school; he also doesn’t have to deal with the fact that he stuck his fingers in his mouth last Friday. Maybe Atsumu should just end his friendship with Hinata Shouyou. They can start over as business partners. Make a joint venture.
But of course, Sakusa points it out to him. “I know you think you’re being really fucking slick by ignoring Hinata all the time, but I must sadly inform you that he’s actually ignoring you as well,” he says, examining his nails absently. “Plus I think he’s trying harder at it.”
Sakusa smells like eighty-five different brands of shampoo. “I hate you,” Atsumu says.
“Your hatred means nothing to me,” Sakusa replies, unfazed.
::
The first time he and Hinata played together in an official match, Atsumu remembers thinking that he was glad he let Osamu set up his onigiri shop and pushed ahead with volleyball alone after all.
He figures he’ll always be a little bitter about how his high school volleyball career ended. It’s like how he still hates the everloving shit out of spicy food but has developed a tolerance for it due to his teammates’ dietary preferences. The sensation will never be pleasant, but he gets through it. He drinks a shit ton of water. After their meal he treats himself to dessert from a nearby convenience store and makes someone else pay for it out of spite. Sometimes they agree. Other times he winds up paying for his souffle cheesecake himself. But fuck it, whatever, it’s sweet.
The first time he and Hinata played together in an official match they unleashed their new freak quick in front of Kageyama Tobio and like half of Japan’s previous high school volleyball circuit. At the moment in which the ball he set went up in the air and Hinata made contact with it, Atsumu had the distinct sensation that the rules of the world had been quietly rewritten. It was akin to having a fully-grown deer ram its antlers into your chest, shattering your ribcage instantly. He couldn't hear himself anymore. Just the crowd.
Take that, he said with his eyes after Hinata scored that first sweet, sweet point, smiling at Kageyama like a switchblade. Hinata’s ours now.
Upon closer examination, what Atsumu actually meant to say was: he’s mine.
::
Why didn’t he say that, you ask? Because he’s a fucking idiot, of course. By this point Sakusa had already caught on to his feelings. If you had looked carefully at the background you would have noticed him squinting at Atsumu at various points throughout the match with three percent more intensity than usual. The rest of his attention was reserved for the ball, but he devoted three percent to Atsumu. This is Sakusa we’re talking about. Three percent is significant.
::
There is a boring romantic subplot in one of the manga that Akaashi’s magazine serializes. Unfortunately it’s about a boy and a girl, so it was probably destined to be boring from the start. But the brilliant thing about it is both the girl and the boy realize they have feelings for each other in chapter thirty and then proceed to make zero progress in their relationship for the next two hundred chapters.
“Why don’t they just get together?” he asked Akaashi once. They were having hotpot in Bokuto’s apartment. Because it was Bokuto’s apartment they got Akaashi as a freebie. Akaashi had brought wagyu beef.
“The author doesn’t feel like it.” Akaashi’s glasses kept getting fogged up by the steam. He looked like a character from a detective movie.
“Oh. Is the author single?” asked Atsumu, who was single.
“Yes,” said Akaashi, who was not single.
“Are you hitting on my boyfriend?” Bokuto called from the bathroom. They ignored him.
“Aha,” Atsumu said triumphantly. “I knew it. The author clearly has no experience. It pisses me off that they keep hinting at their feelings without getting to the point.”
“That is fair.” Akaashi had decided to take off his glasses at risk of stabbing someone in the face with his chopsticks.
“Alternatively, you could remove the romantic subplot altogether. I doubt much would change.”
Alternatively he could chase Hinata down after practice on the way to the train station. It would be snowing, because snow is pretty and makes everything look soft and cinematic. Atsumu would call out Hinata’s name as he approached him from two hundred meters away. He would be out of breath because everyone’s constantly out of breath in romantic cinema. Hinata would telepathically know that Atsumu was here to confess his undying love for him and hide his blushing face in his scarf.
Alternatively, they could have dinner together at a stuffy candle-lit restaurant. Only this isn’t a manga, and Akaashi isn’t the editor, so Hinata is still practicing serves in the gym when Atsumu appears in the doorway, still reeling at the realization that he’s been ignored for a week.
Well then. He scrolls through Instagram to pass the time.
::
When he’s done, Atsumu offers to help Hinata with clean-up. “Thank you,” says Hinata rather reluctantly, still not breathing in his direction.
“You know,” Atsumu says, feeling very tired. He’s too tired to beat around the bush. He has decided to eat the bush. “I can tell you’re ignoring me.”
Hinata creates distance under the guise of picking up loose balls. “Mm.”
“Why?”
Hinata squats down in front of a ball. Atsumu walks over and squats down beside him. The ceiling lights are fierce and bright above them, and Hinata’s face is tilted away from it. Atsumu can’t read his expression but he can see his ears, which are pink, and the side of his neck, which is pink as well. In this position, from this angle, Hinata’s musculature is even more stunning than usual; biceps, shoulders, back. This shouldn’t be a surprise given that they’re all adults now instead of petty high school kids with grudges as big as clenched fists. But if asked right now what the prototypical volleyball player should look like, Atsumu would point at Hinata and say: that guy.
“Sorry about sticking my fingers in your mouth,” he says quietly, folding his arms together over his knees and resting his chin on top. And then, in a flash of inspiration: “Also, I’m in love with you. I hope your cut healed properly?”
Hinata finally lifts his face up into the light, and Atsumu is reminded of watching the rising sun spill across the surface of the sea in a NatGeo documentary. For a second he looks absolutely lost. Then he knits his brow, stares hard at Atsumu like he’s trying to do calculus in his head or something.
“About the cut,” he says, hesitating. “Why don’t you find out for yourself.”
Atsumu chokes.
::
It’s not like he hasn’t been in love before. In high school he had a crush on Kita Shinsuke that was so debilitatingly bad, he never even told Osamu about it. But Kita Shinsuke didn’t have a debilitating crush on him and he never went pro. They didn’t wind up as teammates again several years later when Atsumu finally figured out how to style his hair properly with gel. Kita vanished off the radar after high school with that unnerving smile of his. They haven’t seen each other since.
Anyway, Atsumu has a lot of complicated feelings for Hinata. At first he was pissed at him for teleporting off to Brazil for two years, and thinking that he could still brute force his way into a Division One team immediately upon his return. Then Hinata actually did that, and Atsumu spent several weeks sulking about their new teammate by refusing to so much as breathe in his direction. Eventually Sakusa sat him down in the empty locker room one morning and looked him straight in the eye from two meters away and said you want to set for him don’t you. After thinking about it for a while he realized that Sakusa was right. He wanted to set for Hinata Shouyou. Back in high school the feeling had arisen mainly out of spite and childish frustration. Now it was genuine.
So fine, maybe he likes Hinata a little more than he should.
They’re not high schoolers anymore. They’re old enough to know where to draw the lines between work shit and personal shit and risk-taking and stupidity. They’re supposed to know themselves better by this point. Like what’s your favorite alcoholic drink. What’s your taste in men and sports and sportsmen. Do you believe in miracles.
Do you believe in—?
“—This,” Hinata says. Atsumu realizes belatedly that he had missed the first part of his sentence but before he can try to figure it out Hinata fists a hand in his shirt and yanks him forward.
Oh no, Atsumu thinks. Hinata’s smiling. All crooked like a semicircle of sun. All pretty-like.
“Since that’s out of the way,” he says brilliantly, warm breath fanning out over Atsumu’s cheeks, moving closer still. “I hope you don’t mind if I just—”
Atsumu closes his eyes and lets Hinata pull him in. He’s old enough to know where this leads.
::
They’re having dinner together again for some reason. Bokuto roped them all into it to stave off his boredom because Akaashi the shounen manga editor is in Hokkaido on a business trip, but he offered to pay, so Sakusa went along with it, and Sakusa went along with it, so Atsumu went along with it, and Atsumu went along with it, so Hinata went along with it. The truth is they almost always go along with Bokuto’s whims because Bokuto’s a fundamentally nice human being and Akaashi brings the fanciest ingredients to their hotpot parties. It doesn’t actually matter if Bokuto offers to pay. Someone will start the reluctant-yes-train and then the rest will join in and before they know it, they’re all ducking into the doorway of a restaurant together.
“So was anyone gonna tell me that two of my teammates are dating,” Bokuto says, waving his chopsticks around grandly while Sakusa attempts to shield his risotto from the onslaught of loose rice grains. “Or was I just supposed to find out from Omi-kun here?”
Hinata’s eyes go wide. Atsumu, who had been chewing on a fry, doubles over coughing.
“ATSUMU. ARE YOU OKAY.” Bokuto’s feet are on the table. Sakusa is seeing God.
“Shit.” Atsumu winces, feeling around in his mouth with his tongue. “I think I cut my gum.”
“Let me see.”
“Uh, Hinata, you don’t have to do that, actually—”
“Are you going to do that thing again?” God bless Bokuto and his endless store of curiosity towards all things chaotic and doomed in the world. God bless Sakusa who has ascended to the next dimension. God bless Atsumu's poor gums.
Hinata beams at Bokuto. “No,” he says slowly, bright as a bonfire. “I’m going to kiss him.”
God bless them all.