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From where he sat on the sidelines, Kozume Kenma could see the whole court’s battle unfold.
He didn’t need to move his body; his eyes flickered faster than he could have possibly turned, watching serves and receives being doled out from the left to the right and back again. The other team was giving his players a workout, which meant it was easy to pick up on the things that needed to be improved. Takahashi-san’s footwork was a little sloppy (stayed up too late studying, definitely); Sato-san was lagging on her reflex time (probably hungry); surprisingly, Maeda-san was performing at the top of her game, like the school they were facing had inspired her to actually try.
Good. An inspired Maeda-san was a Maeda-san that meant she’d be an asset against this team if she faced them later, which was something to keep in mind with someone as hotheaded as she was — pulling up his team notes on his phone, he tapped in a bullet point under Maeda-san’s player file, a ‘Karasuno = rival character(s)?’
Kozume nodded to himself, both as an affirmation and a way to shake off the slowly-building exhaustion. Games as high-tension as this one always tired him out, no matter how serious they were, and the matches in this supposed friendly interhigh bonding tournament were no exception to his overriding sleepiness.
But he wasn’t asleep yet — not when he had a job to do.
Kozume had only inherited the position of manager after the last one, a boy who’d taken up the mantle in an attempt to meet girls, had chucked it to the nearest first-year he could find who would be willing to inherit his job when he graduated.
With no way to look the third-year in the eye and say no, Kozume had been the one who had ended up with the task.
At first, Kozume had only agreed to get out of the exhaustion and the fighting for power that came with being on volleyball teams — he’d played in junior high school with his best friend, Kuroo, and the plan had been for Kuroo and Kozume to join the high school boy’s volleyball team together as soon as they had started at Nekoma High School. Kozume’s accidental diversion from Kuroo’s plan had frustrated Kuroo, but he’d eventually come to accept it, claiming that he would always, definitely have a spot on the boy’s team if Kozume changed his mind.
Kozume had agreed.
Then, as he tended to do with most matters of breaking pattern, Kozume had just never quit being the girl’s team’s manager.
He’d settled into a routine, from the practices to the actual matches they played when they could qualify. His team had their own weaknesses, and when he pointed them out to their third-year captain from the perspective of a manager, he hadn’t been shouted down. He hadn’t been bullied into silence.
The captain listened.
Kozume had found a position where his ideas would be listened to, without the grade hierarchy shutting him up. They’d listened to him, they’d implemented his ideas, and they’d been willing to impartially discuss why his ideas might work or why they might fail.
Maeda-san’s trusty floating serve had been an idea Kozume had brought up, thinking it would work well with her serving style — watching her drift it towards the Karasuno players, their practice match opponents for the day, he knew it’d been a good idea.
Most of Nekoma’s playing pattern was built on plans he and Captain Watanabe had devised with the coach, but Kozume didn’t have any problem picking them apart. If they weren’t working, they weren’t working, and that was just that.
Sato feinted left to give Watanabe room to go for a strike, but in the process, she crashed directly into an in-position Takahashi — that maneuver needed some work, Kozume noted with a quick ‘Brigade Commander Attack Mode = practice practice practice!'
In theory, the moment where he lifted his eyes back to the court should have been exactly like any other one, fingers tapping notes into his phone faithfully for him to analyze and suggest improvements to later.
But his hand stalled when he looked across the court and saw a bustle of motion from the Karasuno side.
Someone was late, it looked like, the commotion from where the coaches were seated on the sidelines suggesting that it wasn’t a player. A coach? No — their coach was there, her focus as locked on the court as his had been a moment ago. Their manager was there already, a sturdy third-year Kozume only knew as the intimidatingly friendly Sawamura-san, but he was yelling at someone Kozume didn’t recognize.
The stranger had vivid orange hair, and he looked pint-sized next to the Karasuno manager, a splash of orange coming up to the dark shoulder of Sawamura-san’s jersey.
Curious but not enough to keep paying attention, Kozume’s focus drifted back to the court. He allowed himself one more brief glance back up to the bleachers, the unanswered question of who the supposedly important stranger was prickling at the back of his mind, and —
And he found himself staring the stranger down, the indistinct chatter of the volleyball court fading away against the sudden flush of heat under his skin.
His eyes were wide, locked with the curious gaze of someone he’d never met but someone he almost wanted to, a bursting familiarity that made him feel less as if he was being scrutinized and more along the lines of someone who was just interested. In the other side of the court, in Nekoma, in what Kozume was doing, in Kozume.
Kozume’s fingertips felt a little numb.
The Karasuno stranger could have been all Kozume looked at for the rest of the match, trying to puzzle out exactly what it was that made him shine so brightly, but the shouts of his teammates drew his attention back to the court.
He shook his head to clear out the residual glow and woke his phone up with steady fingers.
With his thoughts back on the players, the last half hour passed without Kozume thinking about much else. It was a hard-won victory, the sets bouncing out with 2-1 in Nekoma’s favor, but there was plenty to work on afterwards. Sato’s positioning in that specific maneuver, Maeda’s timing for some of the more advanced moves, maybe finding someone on the team to tutor Takahashi in whatever new schoolwork she was struggling to understand…
He was still typing out ideas when he realized someone was standing in front of him.
“So what’d you think?”
Kozume looked up from his phone, one finger paused just above the keyboard.
Looking back down at him was the Karasuno latecomer, an unfamiliar member of the support roster whose eyes were sparkling with that same curiosity about Kozume that took his breath away again before Kozume could even respond.
“I mean,” the Karasuno boy said, “You were on your phone the whole time I was here! Daichi-senpai and I don’t really take notes so I get kind of bored, but you definitely weren’t just playing a game because you were bored, you kept looking at our players like you knew where we were going next! Like bshooom bshooom laser scanning vision!”
Kozume blinked at the bshooom bshooom, but slid his gaze to the floor while he figured out how to answer the question.
“Your team is working hard,” he said, thoughts drifting back to the match to filter out specifics of the crows’ teamwork. “Your captain and vice-captain… They don’t have the 1 and 2 shirts because they’re third-years. I saw that today.”
Appearing to think this over, the Karasuno student nodded, then seated himself on Nekoma’s designated bench next to Kozume like it was the most natural thing in the world.
“Yeah! That’s Michimiya-san, with the hairclips, and Sasaki-san, with the ponytail. Michimiya-san is really tough sometimes, but she’s so good at being a captain! And Sasaki-san is super nice but scary too because she just wants to do as well as we can, you know how it can be, she tries really hard and sometimes people don’t get that, but we wouldn’t have a team without her.”
Kozume blinked at the girl on the opposite end of the court, her smile blazing like a sun even as her teammates were bemoaning their two-point loss. Karasuno’s Number 11 was crying into Sasaki-san — and Sasaki-san, for her part, had her arm wrapped around Number 11’s shoulders comfortingly. They were holding down the fort, despite the loss.
A flash of color caught his eye in the corner of the gathering, a Karasuno player in a bright orange jersey doing — of all things — warm-up stretches six minutes after the match’s end.
“Your… Number 8, the libero,” he started.
An enthusiastic rattle of the bench cut him off, and he turned back to find the Karasuno boy bouncing where he sat, his eyes alight with energy.
“Yachi-san! She’s really cool, right?”
Smoothing out the edge of his jacket, Kozume nodded.
It was true that Karasuno’s libero had gone for more missed balls than anyone else on the field, even more than any of the Nekoma players. When a ball had slipped by their defensive wall and that Yachi-san had been on the court, she would be there, arms outstretched and her body hurtling towards the ball with everything she had.
Cool might not have been the word Kozume would have used, but that choice of words definitely wasn’t wrong.
“She’s afraid of a lot of things, so she tries really hard, since if she tries and doesn’t win, it wouldn’t feel as bad as if she didn’t even try and let everyone down even more. I really think that kind of thing is the coolest, don’t you?”
“Like an action game hero,” Kozume offered.
“Exactly! Yeah, just like that, bam and whaaazam and she’s here to save the day!”
The noises still didn’t make sense to Kozume, but they seemed to have some sort of meaning that he would figure it out with a little more staring, so he eyed the Karasuno girls until his companion spoke up again.
“Oh, but,” the boy said with a grin so dazzling Kozume had to look away as fast as he’d glanced back, “Our ace is definitely just as cool!”
The ace.
From where the Karasuno players were gathered, through the nets and the milling girls in front of her, Kozume turned toward the ace only to realize she was staring right back at him.
There was none of the warm tingle spreading through his fingertips this second time he accidentally locked eyes with a Karasuno student — Karasuno’s ace was a setter that might as well have been crafted out of diamond, a tall tower of pure offensive force and a steel-sharp focus to match. People called her Karasuno’s Iron Warrior, Kozume heard, when she wasn’t around to hear them. Pinned under the force of her stare, he believed it.
Having her stare him down brought back vague half-formed terrors of when he was little, the constant fear that people were grading him on some scale he couldn’t see, that everyone would think he was just a bug under a microscope to scrutinize if he’d done the wrong thing.
She blinked.
Kozume realized his new companion was standing on the bench next to him.
And just like that, the chill of the Iron Warrior’s judgement evaporated as quickly as it’d raised the hairs on the back of Kozume’s neck.
“I’ll be right there in a second, Shimizu-san! I was saying hi to —”
The Karasuno boy glanced down at Kozume, stage-whispering, “What’s your name? Sorry! I totally forgot to ask, don’t tell her I was so rude!”
He looks like the sun in winter, Kozume thought, feeling the same glow from the first time he’d seen this boy. That same something spread to the tips of his fingers and made his face heat up, his heart beating a little faster in the face of someone so utterly bright.
“Kozume,” he managed through his awe. “Kozume Kenma.”
“Kozume Kenma-kun,” repeated once, with an excited grin, then louder, “I was saying hi to Kozume Kenma-kun!”
“You don’t need to tell me his full name,” came floating back across the court, the Iron Warrior’s blank appraisal faded into a smile as awkward as Kozume’s own. Her arm was looped loosely around the libero’s, a solid fortification of unity that only further served to make Kozume certain that Karasuno did as well as it did through how the team could play their growing skills off of each other.
There was a reason the boys’ team at that school had always challenged their rivals at Nekoma without consideration for how many times they’d lost in the past. Karasuno had a fighting spirit that was all its own, a blazing energy that was still burning bright even after the match had been called, a torch carried proudly by every player on their teams. When they stepped off the court, they didn’t let the fire die out.
They lifted it higher and psyched themselves up for the next time they could put that energy into action.
Kozume understood, watching how Shimizu-san laughed in the same space she’d done battle ten minutes before and how this Karasuno stranger burst at the seams with delight to meet one of his enemies face-to-face, that these people really loved what they did.
Me too, Kozume thought, his phone’s lock screen coming to life with the same picture of his friends on the team he saw every day. His phone was filled with photos of them, notes on their performances, footage he’d taken of them to show ways they could improve.
I think I love this, too.
Kozume took a breath.
“So, I’m Shouyou Hinata, Shouyou is fine,” the boy dropped back down into a cross-legged position and cutting off Kozume’s train of thought, “And I’m the second manager at Karasuno! Sawamura-san is still the regular one, but he’s a third-year, so he’s leaving next year and he asked me to learn how to do his job.”
Kozume nodded.
“You’re a manager too, right?”
Kozume nodded again.
Just like that, Shouyou’s focus was back on Kozume, its intensity too strong for Kozume to look him in the eye.
The gaze wasn’t as bad as Shimizu-san’s had been — but Kozume was still nervous, his mouth dry for reasons he couldn’t find the words to explain to himself. Something about the way Shouyou looked at him made his stomach start acting up, from some combination of nerves and amazement that he didn’t quite understand, but that was dazzling nonetheless.
“I like your eyes,” Kozume heard, a half-coughed whisper that he would have missed if his full focus hadn’t been on Shouyou.
Unable to think of anything to do or say, with his face burning unexpectedly, Kozume nodded a third time.
They both sat there quietly for a moment, waiting for the other to say something, until Kozume pressed his feet together and Shouyou jumped up in the same instant.
“I need to go catch up with Sawamura-san, reports, manager things, so I should go — we have to play again soon, though, really and for sure,” Shouyou said, bouncing on his heels.
Their shared silence was still ringing in Kozume’s ears, but he pulled himself together enough to nod again, then pause when a thought occurred to him.
“Aren’t the players going to be... Well, the ones playing?”
Unsurprisingly, the energetic manager appeared undeterred as he spun, throwing his arms out to the court in front of him.
“We all play,” Shouyou replied, his palms open like he was gathering something essential in his hands, “You, me, the players, the coaches, everyone who comes to watch — all of us are important, because we’re here! We all have to do our part.”
I was right, Kozume was tempted to type into a brand new document on his phone, Shouyou really is the sun.
Smiling so awkwardly in the face of someone who could do it so seamlessly felt weird. It made Kozume feel like he was going to make a weird expression, somehow scare the sun into retreating where he would never catch a glimpse again, as if smiling was just another thing he could instinctively get wrong.
But with the strength of Shouyou’s enthusiasm bolstering his spirits, Kozume smiled and lifted a hand to wave, letting himself bask in that warmth.
“Then… Until next time, Shouyou.”
Shouyou beamed.