Chapter Text
Shinsuke tells Atsumu this:
“Find me in four years and if you still think the same, I’ll say yes.”
It’s his graduation, the ceremony having already passed. Atsumu’s eyebrows pinch together as he swallows and tries to interpret Shinsuke’s words. His gaze makes a minute detour to confirm that Shinsuke’s second button is missing.
Shinsuke dips his hand into the pocket of his slacks, takes the oval, plastic button between his thumb and index finger. He lifts it over his face to look through four of the tiny holes in it, first at the blue sky, then at Atsumu. He tucks it back where he’d gotten it from.
“Why?”
Atsumu seems on the verge of spewing more questions, to take the remaining step between them, to try and intimidate him into answering.
“Can I be honest? No kickin’ about the bush.”
Atsumu nods, hands clasping tighter at his sides. His lower lip twitches but he holds his ground. Shinsuke wants to say it in a softer manner, maybe cushion it, to soften the blow.
“I don’t believe you’re in love with me.” Shinsuke tells him. “I think you look up to me, might have a crush. But it’s not love.”
Atsumu’s jaw ticks, his eyes now glassy, shining with abrupt tears he doesn’t shed.
“Mingle with people, look up to somebody else and see if it’s the same feeling. Date somebody. Explore your emotions. Compare them. And if you’re still as certain as you are now - I’ll say yes.”
It’s cruel to give him the middle finger when his kouhai has evidently been mustering all his courage for the past month. However, he doesn’t want to hurt both of them by complying with a teenager that has more spite and ire in him than any other human being he’s met.
In a way, Shinsuke is a coward. Because he wants to say yes, yet fears the pain that will ensue.
Maybe one day Atsumu will prove him wrong.
Today, he lets Atsumu embrace him and whisper through the uncontrollable hiccups, “Just you wait.”
In full honesty, it sounds more like a threat rather than a promise, in typical Miya Atsumu manner.
☆
Shinsuke had decided a long time ago that he doesn’t want to be a doctor, a teacher or a physicist. The unyielding need to have something of his own has driven him for the majority of his life. It saddens him like nothing else, that one day his gran won’t be with him anymore and he doesn’t want to stay in that house, to be reminded of it all.
Another cowardly move.
He’s proven right in a few years. It’s an ordinary death due to old age. She passes in her sleep and Shinsuke has no regrets. He spent last night with her, for the first time in a month, free of any university obligations. Just him and gran, on the veranda to stare at the twinkling stars and the extraordinarily big moon. They’d had her favourite white tea with orange peels, along with a light dinner consisting of miso soup, pickled vegetables, rice and some grilled salmon.
He swears he gets awoken sometime in the night, a phantom touch of a calloused but overly soft hand in his hair, stroking his forehead, and a loving voice tells him, “Sleep well, Shin-chan.”
The next morning Kita finds her in her futon, peaceful, with a smile tugging at her thin lips.
He cries for the first time this year, has a brick lodged in his throat, his tear ducts overworked. He doesn’t have anybody else to tell, apart from a few neighbours who loved her as well. The following procedures breeze past him like a gust of wind and by the end of them, he’s left with an urn containing her ashes. He doesn’t have enough money to buy land and bury them. He considers telling somebody about what's going on with him, maybe Aran, but he has a tournamentship. Ren has his own family problems. Michinari too has a lot on his head.
The phone screen lights up Shinsuke’s face as he lies in his futon. A fresh bout of tears elicits a dull throb in his eyeballs. His fingers hover over Ren’s name in his contact list, however he stops in the last possible moment and pushes the side button to turn off the screen.
He inches forward, until he’s curled into himself. The movement pulls at his thighs given he’s sitting with his legs crossed, but he welcomes the discomfort. He wants to talk, lay it on the table just so he can get this anguish out of him.
Instead he falls asleep drowning in the uncontrollable sorrow that doesn’t seem to be nearing any end.
---
Shinsuke is rudely awoken by the buzz of his phone as the device slides against the bare wood next to his head. He ignores it without looking at the caller. He does that a second and a third time, convinced it’s those people who pester you into buying shit you don’t need. The phone lights up again.
He almost drops it on his face upon seeing the ID.
Atsumu --- incoming call
A part of him is curious as to whether Atsumu will call a fifth time. He must be very serious and in need to talk to him if he’s so insistent. What on earth can he possibly need Shinsuke for? And couldn’t it have been any other night but this one?
He picks up either way.
Silence.
Shinsuke’s voice is rough and groggy when he says, “Yes?”
An intake of breath. And, “I’m sorry.”
It’s a croaked out response, entirely unlike his former kouhai who always has and most likely still is the most boisterous person in the vicinity. But people change. He hasn’t been in contact the past year and Atsumu didn’t try to reach out either. The logical conclusion was that Shinsuke was right all along, further proven with the scandal of “Black Jackals’ power couple: Miya and Sakusa” hitting national TV with full force.
“I’m-- You--- when’s the burial? I can help, if you want. Anything you need, Kita-san.”
Ah.
But how does he even know when Shinsuke hadn’t told anybody?
“It’s alright.”
“I mean it.”
“I know.” Shinsuke swallows the resurrected lump lodged in his throat. “It was yesterday afternoon. But thank you for the sentiment.”
Atsumu doesn’t need to know his financial status prevented him from making a proper burial.
His voice is about to crack. His heart keeps hitting at his ribs while the rest of his insides grow cold and form a ball of multiple emotions, all forced together like colours until the ball turns black when the merge is complete.
“I need to go. Thank you, Atsumu.”
He catches the protest as he hangs up, places his phone on the floor when he turns off the noise and vibrations and goes back to sleep, curled around the fluffy pillow his gran made for him when he was six.
---
Shinsuke doesn’t touch his phone the upcoming two days, only sits on his laptop to send a few mails to fellow colleagues, to ask if it’s possible for them to help him with some of the material he’s missed. To his professors, he sends the same copy-pasted mail detailing his situation. The remainder of the time he looks for a house in the countryside.
---
Coming back to reality is a struggle that takes all of his remaining strength. At first, his mind is empty, apart from the single thought that the room is too hot.
Shinsuke turns his head to the left, sees a big mug of water next to him, at a calculated distance from him in case he turned in his sleep. There are two white pills next to it, not identical.
Then the memories flood back like sluggish drops of water seeping out of a crack in a wooden bucket.
His gran’s passing, the funeral and the consequent fever from the stress.
A strong shiver up his spine. A strange pull under his ribs.
Shinsuke reaches for his phone and there sit four missed calls from one Miya Atsumu. But Shinsuke hadn’t answered either one of them. A quick scroll to check his call history and the realisation that the conversation was a twisted conjuring on his mind’s behalf.
Shinsuke goes on autopilot, checks his emails, is greeted by eight unopened ones. Two from his colleagues, five from his professors. The only thing that wasn’t a fable was the emails he’d sent them.
The rest was wishful thoughts served to him on a silver platter, with a spoon coated in a poison of his own design.
☆
Shinsuke finds a supposedly haunted house in the outskirts of his city, sold for 0 yen, the evening after he wakes up from his broken fever. His gran had told him jokes of the akiya and how lonely the spirits there must be, deserted in an abandoned home. With no light or warmth that could only be bestowed to them by the owners.
It's not in an isolated place or anything, but it's not that close to civilization either.
He calls the number on the web page, has a short conversation regarding available seeings and dates he can come by. He knows that’s his new home before he hangs up the phone.
The upcoming two and a half weeks are overflowing with deadlines for university, loads of documents he needs to fill, meetings with the previous inhabitants of the house and a notary, along with a second notary in arrangements to sell his gran’s house when he’s done moving. He’s present for it all, yet has very few recollections of the events past the vital information he needs to know.
Three weeks after his gran’s passing, be it because of the previous owners’ need to get the old house off their hands or the vast resources they had on hand to finish up the ordeal faster, he steps into his new home. He knows he’s too lucky to have done it so quickly, with all the documents and procedures, it’s almost eerie in a way. But he tells a thank you to whatever let this happen.
The truck he’d hired with the little savings he possessed had departed a short while ago, after having deposited his belongings. The pictures he’d first looked at and the seeing of the house itself left him calm on behalf of the lack of damage. The previous owners had tried renting it as a side income, however after a year of lost time they’d given up. In the meantime they kept an eye on it, made sure it was in living conditions. The plumbing was excellent for a borderline ancient classical house, any leaking pipes were fixed. They’d even left an old refrigerator, a washing machine and a stove that was the refrigerator's senior.
That’s more than enough for him.
He cleans it from top to bottom, laments some of the unsalvageable shogi doors that were worn down with time, leaves the garden for when he feels more physically able. He might grow herbs and vegetables, plant an orange tree, maybe even a lemon tree.
There’s plenty of space.
☆
Shinsuke had the plan of a bachelors and a masters degree. But the old man that inhabits the house closest to him pushes his life in an entirely different direction.
☆
Takeshi-san is a 80 year old man that lives alone on what is actually a rice farm. Shinsuke finds out only when Takeshi-san visits to give him a pack of fresh rice as a welcoming gift, hands it to him with a broad smile as warm as the summer sun.
Shinsuke feels like this is the first real human contact he’s had in a while. He’s talked with other people, yes, but Takeshi-san’s radiant character lights him up for the first time in almost a month. He actually enjoys the hour and a half they converse over a few cups of tea.
“It’s nice havin’ youngsters again!" Takeshi-san’s grip on his cup grows hard, his bony hands bearing numerous scars from a hard life. "Young folk keep movin’ away nowadays. It’s sad, really.”
He’s undoubtedly a lonely man with a big heart, stayed behind in the farm so his children could go live in the big cities. His accent is even more pronounced than Kita’s. Like his gran’s was.
Shinsuke is aware of the growing sympathy that has already sprung a leaf simply due to his recent loss and his mind’s attempt to compensate for it.
“Can I help with anythin’? I don’t know a lot but I can learn fast. Winter is almost here and I can’t imagine that being easy for you in a relatively rural era.”
The nearest bus stop is an hour by foot. The hospital is another half an hour on said bus. The third house in the vicinity is 5 kilometers away. Shinsuke is nearer, with only 1 kilometer between his home and Takeshi-san’s farm where he’s also lived for the past 40 years.
Takeshi-san reaches over the small table to pat the back of Shinsuke’s hand. “Worry ‘bout yerself, young man. I’ve survived worse.” a cloud passes over his eyes, a sad memory by the looks of the mournful smile. “But I thank ya for yer kindness.”
From then on it’s shared lunches whenever Shinsuke doesn’t have university. Then it gradually becomes an exchange of recipes. Takeshi-san’s dog, a Beauceron named Hoshiko, is one of the most lovable pets he’s encountered. She’s only two years old, a ray of sunshine like her master. She takes a liking to Shinsuke the same day he meets her, to the point of her running the distance to his house, to say hello for an hour or three on the days he can’t stop by the farm.
As he told Takeshi-san, he learns fast and it’s a little less than two weeks since he’s moved when they have a more serious conversation.
“So ya have no idea of what ya want ta work?”
Shinsuke shakes his head, rubs his fingers over Hoshiko’s head, then at the base of her floppy ears. “I think I’m gonna quit university.”
“Oh?” Takeshi-san puts his cup on the table, taps the worn surface of it with his palm to bring Shinsuke’s attention to him. “My boy, do what ya need. Life ain’t as thrillin’ when ya take the big road instead of swervin’ to a hidden pathway. Take it from a veteran.”
He laughs at Shinsuke’s astonishment, clapps when Shinsuke’s face contorts into a genuine smile and even Hoshiko barks her excitement, tail hitting the floor repeatedly.
He studied economics for two years, wasn’t fond of any subject, nor did he enjoy even a tenth of the material. He ultimately settled on business management, because that’s what’ll give him a stable job. Maybe.
Now here he is, at 22, having just gotten home from his last exam before he freezes his second year of business management in case he regrets his decision.
And he knows he’s taken the right one when a thought floats to the surface.
Gran would be proud that I’m thinking of myself.
☆
He hasn’t been in touch with his former classmates since the funeral, has been dodging text messages, calls, even desperate emails.
Poof.
He’d vanished in the span of three weeks.
They can’t even find him in his gran’s house because he managed to sell it, didn’t tell any of his old neighbours where he’s going. None of his friends were in Hyogo at the time, so they couldn't have swung by to check up on him. And Shinsuke had cut off their last form of contact.
In retrospect, his actions are the complete opposite of his logical behaviour. While he’s having his morning cup of tea, observing the sunrise seated on the porch, Shinsuke berates himself for his rash actions and lack of consideration. Sending a message of reassurance isn’t hard, yet he hadn’t found time for it in almost two months.
He’d hid to the point of having switched his phone off. He has his laptop when he wants to watch a movie or just waste time online, never opening his inbox, just hovering the mouse over the ever increasing number, then backpedalling at the speed of light.
Shinsuke never could have predicted his gran's passing would affect him to such a degree that it’s as if he’s broken a limb, has had it suffer irreversible trauma and is currently learning how to live his everyday life anew.
Today, he has ample time to answer.
He learns they'd found out about the funeral within a month, but at the time it was already too late. Shinsuke had managed to move to his new home by then. That’s when the emails start. From all of them - Ren, Aran, Michinari, even Atsumu, Osamu, Gin and Suna.
He doesn’t want to know what the number of messages on his phone is.
Shinsuke reads through the mountain of emails. The thing that makes the guilt poke him in the belly is that they haven’t given up, the last mail is from Osamu, mere five hours ago. Considering how precautious the second years, apart from Atsumu, were at his presence during high school it comes out as a surprise they hadn’t stopped reaching out. True, they’d had get-togethers and he might have possibly underestimated how close of a friend they think him to be.
He also finds out that Michinari and Ren had finally been able to get some time off to come back to Hyogo, just to see if they’d find Shinsuke in his university. Just a little after Shinsuke had frozen his second year. They might have even missed each other by a day, if his memory serves right.
Shinsuke answers their questions to his best ability in his own emails and if Atsumu’s is a little shorter than the others’, despite the fact that he’s the one who’s sent the most, well. Shinsuke still hasn’t been able to completely cut the strings and until he’s done that, then leveled any romantic emotions towards Atsumu, he’ll keep a stable distance.
Time mends all in the end.
But maybe the slogan he didn’t find logic in is what he is now in need of,
‘We don’t need things like memories’
☆
After having explained his situation to his friends, they stop with the email bombarding (they just tune it down a notch). Atsumu doesn’t answer Shinsuke for an entire day before sending him a passive-aggressive answer, closely followed by an apology half an hour later. The rest accept it to varying degrees, Aran, Ren and Michinari being the ones closer to Atsumu’s level of pissed off.
But they get used to it. Shinsuke answers their mails every morning while having his tea. Alright, almost every morning.
He doesn’t tell them where he is, not even after Aran threatens to hire a detective to sniff his traces out, nor when Michinari is close to promising to blackmail him back into social media, “Suna style”. The prospect of never having Ren’s cookies again almost makes him cave, he’ll admit.
When he picks up the courage to pluck his phone into the charger and bring it back to life, the first person he calls is Aran, to congratulate his fairly recent win, just last night. He’d read about it on his laptop, even watched snippets of the match on Youtube.
“You are the most insufferable person I’ve met and I want to punch ya and hug the livin’ daylights outta ya at the same time.” is what he tells Shinsuke after he screams upon hearing his voice. Apparently, he hadn’t checked the ID of the caller.
After they talk for a whooping 4 hours, Kita is almost on the verge of telling him of his home.
“I get it. I don’t like how ya went about things, but I understand ya, Shinsuke. And, uh, ya might wanna beat some sense in Atsumu ‘cuz that brat has been raisin’ havoc since ya came back.”
He finds out that upon reviving contact, Atsumu had started fucking with the media, just so he could get Kita’s attention. Talk about creativity. Not one sane person is going to think ‘Oh, you know what? I should start a fight with the paparazzi to get a person-who-until-recently-has-been-MIA’s attention because apparently they still go online to follow the news’. Apart from Miya Atsumu.
Two days after Aran’s conversation Shinsuke calls Atsumu only to say,
“Cut it out with the media stunts and stop embarrassing your team. You’re an adult. Behave like one. And being passive-aggressive ain’t gonna make me answer faster, Atsumu.” he promptly hangs up, but not before hearing Atsumu sputter, then the boisterous laughter of numerous people, one of which might have been Hinata Shouyou.
Thankfully, Atsumu takes his words to heart and ceases with the dramatic behaviour. Instead, he does something even more ridiculous during a live interview after a game, eyes pointed at the camera in front of him, as if he’s trying to look into Shinsuke’s soul.
“Miya-san, it is quite obvious there has been a shift in the mood recently, could you elaborate on that?”
This is the moment Shinsuke recognises Atsumu’s pensive face - he’s weighing his options and Shinsuke recognises the exact millisecond Atsumu’s brain offers him something entirely different.
A wicked glint possesses his eyes, makes them crinkle in mischief before his lips pull into a feral grin. “I have a, uh, special somebody I gotta thank for that.”
He notices Atsumu fails to mention any details, thus leaving it as a clear jab - he’s ‘thanking’ Shinsuke for both the bad and the good shift in his mood.
As he says the last line, Atsumu lifts his hand to place over his heart and leans forward to loom over the microphone. “You know who you are. But also, pickled plums and hot lemon ain’t gonna cut it this time.”
Considering the lengths Shinsuke goes to keep a stable boundary between them, he can’t help but admire the balls Atsumu has. He used to curl into himself whenever Shinsuke scolded him in high school, then he’d follow him around with his tail between his legs.
He truly has grown up, if a little. Now he retaliates, he stands his ground, he finds different methods to provoke Shinsuke, each as bold as the last one. Shinsuke would have reacted, if he isn’t currently hostage to an emotion that flips him about, as if he’s in the middle of the ocean amidst a storm. Once he finds his way back to the shore, on dry land, he’ll clap back and admit that Atsumu’s ways truly are creative, if fueled by spite and petty grudges.
The day he opens his social media to check all the messages, Line notifies him he has 3,197 messages. At first he’s certain it’s a fluke or an error, before he clicks open all his chat history. 1,753 messages are from Atsumu alone, from the past month. The reason being he decided that texting with one or two words per message was a great idea.
Shinsuke reads them all either way, paying no mind to the minor detail that Atsumu will know he opened the chat. Half of the texts consist of Atsumu trying to taunt him into answering, like threatening he’ll go out in the rain just to petulantly catch a cold and shove it in his face. The hilarity of it being that Atsumu kept his word. A day later, he’d sent a selfie, evidently with a fever, and behind him is one pissed off Osamu who was mid taking the phone away from his most likely delirious brother.
Then the fun is over with. After that, Atsumu must have sunk into a realisation that Shinsuke actually wouldn’t answer, that it wasn’t a joke or a week off. Aran had told him of his gran’s passing, which is the last piece Atsumu needs to connect the dots that something is terribly wrong but also coming to the conclusion that he’s powerless and unable to do anything when Shinsuke has cut off all contact.
The desperation soaks up his messages, then it skyrockets when the final drop topples over the overflowing goblet - Shinsuke moving.
Atsumu was probably drunk at the time, seeing as his texts became a wall of hiragana or combinations of kanji that don’t make sense. He curses himself that he hadn’t taken time off from the tournament, for just a damn day, to go check up on Shinsuke in Hyogo. Whereas Shinsuke had been relying on it - the game being more important at that exact moment so he could have the time he needed to finish things up.
At one point, Atsumu also came to the conclusion that the four times he’d called were a little after the passing of Shinsuke’s gran and he kept on delving into the metaphorical tree, certain that he should have pestered Shinsuke into picking up. In reality, Shinsuke had been too delirious due to the fever, so it didn’t matter either way.
By the time he’s done with all 1,753 messages it feels like he’s gone through a short novel of a catastrophe that keeps blooming in front of his eyes, the remains still on fire.
Shinsuke’s ire sparks, not only at Atsumu. But at his significant other, Sakusa-kun, as well, for not stopping Atsumu before he’d spiraled down the rabbit hole of consuming guilt. Because in the beginning, it was fine, then all of a sudden Atsumu’s short messages had become full of detailed analysis after analysis that spoke of too much free time on his hands to obsess over something out of his control.
But.
In the end, their form of relationship is none of his business. Shinsuke sees, with his own eyes, how much Atsumu has grown. He has enough wit in him to know who’s good for him and Shinsuke won’t be the judge of the source of his happiness.
The last message Atsumu sent was eight hours ago, a simple “are you okay?”, to which Shinsuke responds with a simple “Yes. Thank you.” and it’s done with.
He doesn’t ask Atsumu how he is because that won’t be simple, it’ll inevitably create a difficult situation of back and forth.
Short and simple.
Boundaries and strict lines.
Eradication of memories he doesn’t need.
And one day, Shinsuke will be okay. After the hands of time have bathed him in their crystal water, purified his wounds with the salt of crashing stars, let him heal at his own pace, in his own nebula.