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“What are you thinking?”
It’s become a habit for Kageyama to ask him. It works for every occasion, really. He’s said it coated thick with annoyance when Hinata refused to communicate. He asked it when he first told him how he really felt, laced with anxiety and defenselessness. He’s used it to fill silences, back when those made him nervous.
Nowadays, he mostly asks ‘cause he feels like doing it. He’d say anything to get Hinata to keep talking.
He asks it today, as they’re walking by their street in the early evening. Kageyama swings a plastic bag full of snacks. The sun is starting to set behind them.
Hinata mulls it over before he responds. “I’m thinking that I’m hungry. I’m thinking that it’s getting cold, and I think I’m gonna have a bath when we get home. And...hm.” He looks up, thoughtful. “I was thinking today that I just wish voting was mandatory for every citizen. What about you?”
Kageyama ignores the question. He was more interested in the other stuff. “What do you want for dinner? Don’t worry, we’re almost home and we can turn up the heat. And I don’t know. Wouldn’t that lead to people making dumb votes?”
“I think I want ramen. I’ll make it later! Extra eggs, just how you like it. And yeah, that’s mostly why I’m excited about taking a bath. I’m gonna make the water so hot that I’ll get third degree burns. And hm, that’s a good point. But there’s no dumber vote than no vote at all, right?”
Hinata has no intention of breaking their triple-team back and forth, and this makes Kageyama smile. A surprising amount of their conversations turn out like this, with Hinata throwing out his thoughts like seeds, and Kageyama insisting on giving equal time to each of them. As always, Kageyama is always running to keep up. Not that he minds. “Ramen sounds good. The last time you took a bath like that, you were actually red for like six hours. And how would you punish someone for not voting? Would it be a fine? Or, like, prison?”
“I think it should be a fine, yeah. And maybe you don’t even have to pick someone. There could even be an option to abstain from choosing. You’d just have to show up.” Hinata looks at him. The sunset glows around him, and his hair sways gently in the wind. He narrows his eyes. “You have to tell me what you’re thinking, too.”
“I think that the sunset is a good look on you.”
“Blegh. I’m never prepared when you try to be cute, Tobio.”
“It would be dumb to have the option to abstain the vote. There would be no point if people just don’t vote anyway.”
“You’re wrong. People usually don’t vote because they don’t care, not ‘cause they haven’t decided. So choosing to vote at all would lead them to take action and be more involved.”
They continue this until they get home, and they finally agree that mandatory voting would be a good idea, but only if accompanied with more resources for poor and working class communities, because they’d be the ones who’ll probably get excluded from the process. Hinata takes a bath with boiling hot water—literally boiling, he used a thermometer to make sure—that Kageyama forced him to cut short. They end up making the ramen together instead, the abundance of fried egg happily swirling around the noodles.