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You are a 16-year-old boy living in the middle of Miyagi prefecture and you are certain that you are going to die.
The reason behind this is so simple and stupid and shouldn’t even be happening in the first place. There is no room for this in your body, no compartment in your brain for this thing to be, and you’re slightly worried, if it continues, that it’s going to start impacting your game performance.
You are so certain that this is a fluke, some little tease from the gods reminding you to study for that English test (or else), that you bet yourself 1500 yen that it will fade in a week.
It doesn’t.
You continue to deal with this life-threatening curse and you fail your test and pay your own stupid self 1500 yen. You let the speed of your heart thrum harder in your chest at every passing moment when you get too close, you sit by yourself at lunch and think about the feeling of hands in your own. You try not to stare too long at eyes that weren't made for you and you try even harder not to get slightly bewildered at the flock of friends he seems to collect like river water after a storm.
You are Kageyama Tobio, in love with your best and only friend, and you are absolutely fucked.
—
You remember very clearly the first time you ever saw him.
He looked like a pitiable idiot, curled up in the hallway by the bathroom and the water fountains. Some of your underclassmen who clearly didn’t even care about the game stood tittering around him, joking at his expense when they weren’t even on the roster, which annoyed you to no end.
“Oi. Second years.” You could hear yourself saying before you could let your brain to mouth filter do its work. “Warm-ups are starting. Get moving.”
They had hesitated for a moment before hurrying towards the fountains to fill their water bottles, still muttering insults under their breath about the kid and his team.
You don’t remember much about the aftermath, at least not fully. Things escalated, the second years ran off, you may have possibly gotten into a slight argument with the boy yourself, but not because of the same reasons. You lectured him about self-care a little. He tried to snap back only to sputter about helplessly. Somewhere along the way, he told you that he could fly, and you wondered for a moment if it could be true. He had no reason to lie, so you believed him.
You played a game and won. You saw a human grow wings for the first time. You watched a boy as short as an elementary schooler (and just as good at volleyball) seem as tall and as bold as a seven-foot giant.
You walked away from this one encounter, your first and last view of this boy who breathed sunshine, captain of a mismatched team of rookies, on top of the moon.
You had always imagined you’d never know what love is, not really. Crushes weren’t exactly a foreign concept to you; pretty boys come and go as easy as the world rotates, and it’s not like you were romantically interested in the six volleyballs you kept in your closet, even if you had embarrassingly practiced kissing one of them back in second grade. But the end of the day, silly grade school crushes and closet volleyballs aside, the thought of “true love” or “soulmates” were some of the most foreign, far away concepts you could imagine. Volleyball came first, always. Above anything and everything else.
For the first time in your life, as you lay in bed trying not to think too hard about red curls and that look, you wonder if you can have both.
—
The second time you see him, he is pointing his tiny little spiker hands right in your face and asking you what you’re doing in your own high school’s gym.
You ask him the same question, you two bicker, and everything that happened last time occurs again. Things escalate, you two maybe probably definitely knocked the vice principal’s toupee off his head, and you and the boy (you know his name is Hinata, now) are banned from the volleyball club until you can learn to be teammates.
You don’t think things could get any worse.
You get there, eventually, after much trial and error, after many failed tosses and harsh words exchanged. By now, you have seen him backlit by sunrise and sunset and midday sky and all the stages of daylight in between. You have seen him eat his weight in bread from convenience stores and watched him throw it all back up a few hours later after practicing for longer than people see fit (you both think it’s just right). You have seen him fly for you, for the tosses you give him. You have won something, together.
As far as you’re concerned, you’ve conquered the world two weeks into your first year of high school.
Hinata still sucks. He’s still a clumsy idiot. But he has all the fixings of a perfect opponent, someone you can write home to your sister about (you do), someone you could practice with, bicker with, race with. He still sucks, but maybe he’s not so bad. Maybe this could work out.
Hinata seems to take your newly-founded indifference as an invitation to get as close to you as humanly possible, which wouldn’t be a problem if this wasn’t the first time anyone’s ever wanted to be around you for more than five minutes in one sitting and if not for the fact you are far more sensitive than people seem to believe. You flinch when he touches you, it’s hard to interpret everything he’s saying when he describes it all in noises, and you just can’t possibly understand what he’d want with you in the first place.
You wish it was easier for you to let it all happen. It shouldn’t be hard, really, but it feels like swallowing Vitamin D capsules without water and plunging headfirst into an ice-cold lake all at the same time. Maybe if your head didn’t make it so hard, you could have a friend, a real one.
Hinata doesn’t seem to care that you’ve never played a video game in your life or that you go rigid when you get uncomfortable. He called you king once and stopped immediately after you told him not to. He doesn’t care what you were like. He doesn’t care about anything but the fact that you’re here. That seems to be enough for him.
You decide it’s enough for you, too, even if it’s scary, and you aspire to allow yourself this one good thing.
—
You’ve seen him plenty since then, his smile and his laugh and his calls for one more the most consistent thing in your life, now, even above volleyball (though you suppose Hinata and volleyball never stray too far from each other). Each new day gets easier for you, and every moment with him is better than the last. You fall into a routine, into sync on and off the court, and everything is comfortable and safe. You have a partner. You have a friend.
But little do you know that doom is setting over Miyagi, and you’re it’s first victim.
“Jeez, the rain is really heavy today!” Hinata grunts over the sounds of trickling on the sidewalk and muted claps of thunder in the distance. It’s dry under the awning of Sakanoshita, and the light from the inside is somehow reassuring after being in the dark, wet atmosphere while running from school gates. You hum your agreeance.
“Here, hold my jacket while I find my wallet.” He slings his dripping club coat over your shoulder and you can’t do much more than hiss in response as the feeling of cold water suffocates your neck. “Sorry. Just one second."
It’s much harder to get mad at him now, which you’ve found is both a blessing and a curse. The less you yell at him, the more comfortable he gets, but the less you yell at him… well, the more comfortable he gets. He was never entirely scared of you by any means, but you kind of miss the way he used to have some semblance of restraint. Now he treats you like a coat rack.
You hate that you don’t actually mind it at all.
He finds his wallet in the outside slot of his bag after you reminded him he hadn’t looked in there (you could only grin triumphantly at his silent grumbles when he found it in “That pocket? I already checked it, Kageyama!”).
You both walk through the door, him just barely making it in first, before you grab your own wallet from your coat pocket and begin to count out the money needed for two buns: one curry for you and one barbecue pork, both warm. Hinata makes his way to the back to buy you both drinks (one milk product, preferably banana, and one juice of some sort) because he paid for the buns last time. You patiently wait for him by the front, because there’s no way you’re going back out in the rain before he does.
You think it’s a good system. He hops up to you, grinning, after paying for your drinks. He opens your straw, stabbing it into the hole at the top. He’s taken to this ever since you told him the feeling of the plastic wrapper is weird to you, like his thing with styrofoam (he hates the sound and the way it feels on his fingers).
“Here you go, milk boy.” He cackles at your grimace and you shove the paper bag in his face before you can pretend to be mad (recently he’s just been more spurred on by it). You two leave silently and bid your farewells to Coach Ukai, making your way back under the awning.
“Are you going to be okay getting home?” You ask Hinata. The thunderstorms flay the trees as your body floods with heat from the steaming bag you hold close. Looking at his face you can’t help but notice his cheeks look as billowy and smooth as the bun he’s devoted to shoving into his mouth whole.
“Mmm, yef-” He swallows his bite. “Yes. I think. I just have to go a little slower, because my tires don’t grip as easily.”
You nod, turning back to look at the overcast sky, before getting a headstart into the rain. You race Hinata halfway home like you always do and watch him call something over his shoulder as he leaves. It sounds similar to “Let’s hang out soon, Kageyama!” but the rain had covered his voice and he’s already too far gone to ask him to repeat himself.
Your shirt is soaked. It’s 6:30 pm on December 1st, your heart is beating a little too fast to be considered normal, and you trudge back home.
—
On the day you truly figure it out, it rains again.
It’s a week until your birthday and you stand dutifully outside under the tent of the gym entrance where you had been asked to. You watch a girl from your class whose name you don’t remember give you a carefully wrapped gift with trembling hands. Chocolates, she says, because I like you.
I’m sorry, you say back to her, as gently as you can while you bow, because you can’t think of anything better to say.
She refuses to take the chocolates back when she leaves, and you share them with Hinata because it feels wrong to eat an entire box of chocolates from someone you didn’t even know by yourself.
Hinata finishes the whole container in five minutes, and you watch him quietly.
He’s nice-looking, for sure. You’re not one to stray away from admitting people are attractive because it’s objective, of course, and it doesn’t affect you anyway, even if that person is your rival (best friend?).
You’ve found a dozen people pleasant-looking before. Your sister, Miwa, is beautiful, with the same intense eyes as you but warmer. There was this boy in your first-grade class whose hair framed his face like a crown, but not like the one you had worn. A boy you saw once on the streets of Tokyo, who had neon green hair and cool-looking piercings on his ears and his nose and even his lip. So when you had first laid eyes on this cloud-free, daylight-warm smiling boy of pure bottled sun, and the first word you thought of was cute, it didn’t completely shock you.
After that, it was annoying, then small, and then it was dumbass. You had been positive you would never think of Hinata as cute again, staring at him hovering outside a bathroom stall bent over at the arm on his stomach.
You were entirely wrong. Hinata is dumbass, he would always be dumbass, but he has crystal clear eyes of umber and hair that shone like sun or whatever and sure, it‘s cheesy and poetic and certainly very dumb but that’s okay because it’s true. You’re not one to stray away from admitting Hinata might be the cutest boy that ever lived, even if he is technically your rival (best friend).
“Do you want one?” You blink back into existence at the sound of your partner’s voice, shaking your head violently. “You can’t just stare at me and then pretend you don’t want one. Here.”
Hinata gives you the last singular little chocolate with his grubby, messy fingers, and the feeling of the tip of his thumb tracing over your hand gives way for tingles right up your spine and into your hair. Your breath catches in your throat.
It subsides as soon as you turn and see his face, however, because as pretty as he is, and as much as you like looking at him because of such a fact, Hinata eats like a pig. In the times when you would decide you should do lunch practice together, sitting down to eat after half an hour of receiving work, he’d end up with blobs of rice on his cheeks and whatever juice he had dripping down his chin. You can't help but laugh very, very quietly to yourself when you think about it.
It’s cute. Hinata is cute. Everything about him is cute, and if you were to just lean in a little bit, over where the tops of your knees clack together and brought your lips to meet a pair barely smaller than your own and-
Oh, no. Oh god.
You grasp aimlessly at the tiny morsel on the palm of your hand, far-too-aggressively plop the chocolate into your mouth, ignore the fact you don’t even like sweets that much and swallow it in one gulp. The corners of the chocolate tangle in your throat, but it’s not nearly as painful as the pounding in your head.
“Good, huh?” Hinata shoots a blinding smile your way. “I’m still mad you get confessions, especially with your face. You would’ve thought girls would’ve been too scared to-”
You tune him out. This couldn’t be. This couldn’t be. You didn’t care for anything that had to do with romance, really, besides the occasional little interest in a classmate’s smile. But you, at the fault of societal pressure you presume, were sure you were eventually going to fall deeply, madly in love with a girl who liked volleyball just as much as you did and matched your pace perfectly and could run alongside you always. So why did the feeling that stood in your chest, proud and brash and bold, feel so… sure?
“Hey, you okay?” Hinata’s voice sounds like it’s underwater. You can’t bring yourself to answer, making a random jerky movement with your head instead.
You sit, a scared little boy in the coat of a young man who has far too much confidence for someone who’s afraid of himself, and stare at the rain that falls around the outdoor covering in sheets.
I’ve arrived, the rain seems to say, with its brazen assurance as it hits the concrete. A faraway rumble sounds in the distance, just like the one that covered Hinata’s voice as he pedaled off the other day.
“Hinata, it’s about to start thunderstorming. Let’s go sit inside.”
I’m here too, your heart resounds back at the heavens, tight and bound with worry and way, way too fast. The sky has no way to tell you that it would be okay, but you don’t know if you would’ve believed it if it had.
—
You are a 16-year-old boy living in the middle of Miyagi prefecture and you are certain that you are going to die.
It is 2 weeks after your birthday when you finally tell him. It’s an accident (of course it’s an accident), but Hinata just looks too cute standing outside in the snow with his little scarf and little hat and he’s just so perfect and happy and pretty and if you have to deal with this throbbing in your chest for even a single second longer you think you might actually have to be admitted to a hospital.
For your birthday he had given you a six-pack box of your favorite Gun Gun yogurt and a new volleyball, which you know he had to save up for. He told you he didn’t mind, but it was bothering you knowing you had lied to yourself about not caring about him back when his birthday had passed in June, so you hadn’t gotten him anything. You slip a gloved hand into your bag to write a quick note on your phone to “definitely make sure to buy him something good this coming summer. To win, of course.”
Even in the winter snow, where everything appears vague and slow motion and you feel your own face prickle with cold, Hinata is flushed by your side. He radiates the warmth of the space heater waiting for you in your room and you can’t help but feel a little dazed, looking at him in his winter get up and wondering if he’d still be that sweltering without it (you know he would).
You lean in by accident, bumping into his shoulder, drawn to his body heat like moth to flame, metal to magnet, and he turns to you expectantly. He looks like safety and smells like home.
You think of all the times you’ve bought him meat buns and all the times he’s thrown you words of encouragement without expecting anything in return. You think you could count the number of smiles you’ve given him on one hand, but the times he’s flashed his toothy grin right at you is probably greater than the number of stars in the sky. You think back to each and every time he’s raced you and won. You remember what it feels like to be alone, and then you never think of that again.
Hey, Hinata? Your mind whispers to nothing.
You’re too close, Tobio. Pull back. Your fear answers regardless.
“Kageyama?” Hinata says. You lean in closer.
For how much longer…
Tobio.
“Kageyama?” He whispers, so much softer this time. You can feel your partner’s breath fan your face.
… will you run alongside me?
The first gentle brush of lips is awful. You hit noses, and then chins, and as it turns out mittens are terrible for holding cheeks. You pull back, grumbling out a half-assed apology because it’s all you can do to not take off down the road in front of you. It seems very promising.
Before you can weigh the pros and cons of escaping on your own to live a secluded life in the forest, you feel a light pull on your sleeve and turn to see Hinata stopped behind you, eyes glossy and lip wobbling. You rush to his side. The forest can wait.
“Hey, hey, I’m sorry.” You fist your gloves into your coat pocket to hold his face in your hands for the second time and wipe your fingers under his eyes. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have done that w-”
And then are lips on yours again, firmer now. Hinata tilts his head so no noses or chins meet, and when he pulls back, it’s just to wrap his arms around your neck and kiss you again and again and again.
You feel high. Your breath is coming out shaky and you know your hands are trembling with happy-nerves and if this is what drugs feel like then you understand why they’re addictive. You think you could probably do this for the rest of your life. You think you might just.
And then,
“I like you.” He mumbles in between pecks on your nose, your cheeks, your forehead (when had you leaned down so far?), your lips. “I like you so much.”
You pull back for real this time and frown at his pout. “I was supposed to say it first.”
He only giggles in return. “Well, I did! 97 to 101! Now you tell me. Go.” He grabs your hand in his own, and it’s better than anything you ever imagined while sitting alone at lunchtime.
“I like you.”
“I like you more!” Is the only response you receive, and you two squabble about it all the way until you break off at your street. Your heart doesn’t settle for a long, long time.
You are Kageyama Tobio, in love with your best and only friend, and he’s in love with you.
You are absolutely fucked.