Work Text:
In hindsight, you really should have gotten an earlier start to your paper.
Should you be blaming your poor time management skills for your current predicament? Perhaps. You definitely should have been more mindful of your upcoming deadlines before accepting all those requests to help out your professors, but what else could you have done? Turn them down? Disappoint them? Prove to them that you weren’t who they made you out to be?
A constant need to prove yourself. That was probably your fatal flaw. If you were the main character in a tragedy, that would have been the hamartia leading to your demise. You weren’t the best at anything. All you had was your ambition and a stubborn, relentless drive to improve.
So here you were, rushing your final paper for the year on a quiet Monday morning. A quiet Monday morning that you were supposed to have spent in lecture, but it’s not as if the instructor took attendance. Instead, this quiet Monday morning was being used for something more productive.
The bells to the coffee shop rang, signifying the entrance of a customer and snapping you out of your thoughts and back into reality.
“What the fuck? Go crawl back from the rock ya came from and take yer ugly face with ya,” the owner cursed.
Well. That was surprisingly aggressive.
“Oh piss off,” the visitor retorted with a scoff. “We have the same face, ya moron.”
In the back of your mind, curiosity settled in. Who could have elicited such a response from the usually calm owner? And what did he mean by having the same face? But you knew better than to turn around in your chair and look. Drama like this would only serve as a distraction, and with 2 hours left to finish the remaining quarter of your paper, you didn’t have the luxury to find out.
Guess this will stay as a mystery I’ll never find the answer to, you thought as your fingers continued to fly across the keyboard.
“Empty seat?” A deep voice suddenly questioned from your side. You could see from the corner of your eyes that the person was gesturing at the seat next to you.
“Be my guest,” you responded monotonously, eyes never leaving your laptop screen. It really didn’t matter to you who sat beside you. It wasn’t as if they were going to finish your paper for you anyways.
“Quiet day today, huh?” Asked the man, who had since taken the seat to your right. You hummed in agreement, not offering any other response to them.
You heard a light shuffle, and figured that the man had probably turned over to face you. “Usually people are all over me when they see me, so this is nice. Having a nice and quiet conversation with a random stranger,” he continued with a merry tone in his voice.
You rolled your eyes and heaved a sigh in annoyance. How self absorbed was this guy?Finishing the sentence you were working on, you spared a glance at the man sitting next to you. Who did this guy think he was?
“Are you a Marvel superhero?” You deadpanned as you went back to work, clacking away at the keys once more. You had noticed from your quick glance that the man had taken off his cap momentarily to run his hand across his bleached hair in response to your comment.
“I guess my good looks are superhero class, huh?” He smirked, sending a wink in your direction as he returned the cap back onto his head. You huffed in response.
“It’s cause you’re wearing a black baseball cap and black shades indoors,” you stated matter-of-factly, gesturing at his get-up as if to prove your point. “Marvel superheroes always wear that get-up when they’re “undercover”, as if people can’t recognize them,” you continued, raising up your hands to form air quotations around the word.
The blond tore off his sunglasses to shoot you the worst glare he could muster up. You rolled your eyes once more, but stopped what you were doing and turned your head over to properly look at him when it finally caught your attention.
His face.
“Have I seen you somewhere before?” You asked, leaning in ever-so-slightly closer to get a better look. It was on the tip of your tongue, but you really couldn’t quite put your finger on where you had seen his face before. Yet, you were near certain you had never met the man elsewhere before. You’d remember someone as insufferable as him.
“Playin’ hard ta get, aren’t ya?” He asked with a sly smile on his face. “I’ll play into it,” he mused as he leaned in closer, the smell of his cologne —you guessed that it was the expensive kind — slowly creeping into your senses.
“No you just look really familiar,” you responded, unyielding to the man’s actions as you returned back to your work. “I feel like I’ve seen your face before somewhere… Somewhere I frequent—”
You were cut off by the sound of someone clearing their throat next to you.
“Here’s yer fuckin’ stupid vanilla latte with peppermint and chocolate sauce. No whip, decaf, extra hot, extra useless, extra foam, complete waste of space, complete waste of time,” the man who had suddenly appeared beside you announced as he set down a mug in front of the blond man sitting next to you.
“Is that even coffee,” you mumbled as you looked over at the coffee shop owner and then back at the drink, wrinkling your nose in disgust at the latter. The owner laughed and smacked your seat mate on the back. “‘Tsumu’s too much of a baby to drink real coffee, so he gets stuff off the kid’s menu.”
“Oi, shut yer trap, ‘Samu,” fumed the blond as he picked up the mug and took a sip. “I get nine hours of sleep daily. Don’t need somethin’ like coffee.”
“Yeah, cause real adults with real jobs are unfortunately too busy to sleep, dipshit,” the owner replied as he turned around to head back over to the counter, flipping the blond off while doing so.
You looked over at the owner, and then looked back at “‘Tsumu”. Rubbing your eyes to make sure that it wasn’t your lack of sleep or the excessive caffeine giving you double vision, you whipped your head back and forth once more to verify the sight before you.
“Oh,” you said as you smacked your fist against your palm. “That’s where I’ve seen you before.” Atsumu looked over at you and placed his mug back down on the table, leaning his head into the palm of his hand.
“Finally admittin’ that ya put on a show to grab my attention?” He hummed, his flippant personality from earlier once again resurfacing.
“No, you look identical to the owner. That’s where I’ve seen you before,” you concluded as you went back to work, not bothering to look at the shocked expression on the blond’s face.
Atsumu nearly choked on his latte. You had to be shitting him, right? There’s no way that you didn’t recognize him. He was Miya fucking Atsumu. The star setter of the MSBY Black Jackals, previous, and probably future because his newly debuted hybrid serve was sure to help him reclaim it, holder of the title of best serve in the entire league.
“Surely ya must’ve seen me somewhere else, right?” He asked. There was no way you didn’t know who he was. You had to be pretending to not know him. Why? At this point, he wasn’t really sure, but he was never one to give up. A tricky one, ain’t ya?
“Nope,” you said as you tapped on the period key one final time before saving the document. Oh thank god I finished this in time, you thought as you quickly opened your portal to submit your assignment, paying no heed to the increasingly exasperated expression on your neighbor’s face.
“The name Miya Atsumu not ringin’ any bells?” He asked, starting to doubt his earlier resolve.
With your assignment finally submitted, you smiled to yourself and turned over to take a closer look at the man. “The store’s owner’s name is Miya,” you finally responded with a nod of your head.
OK, maybe she’s not a volleyball fan, Atsumu thought to himself. I’m still a big deal, though.
He pointed at the center of the billboard in plain sight directly across from the shop. “Ya see the man in the center? That’s me,” he said, lifting his head up ever so higher in pride. “I’m a pretty big deal in the volleyball world, y’know.”
“I don’t see it,” you observed, looking back and forth to compare the man sitting next to you with the man standing in the center of the billboard. “That can’t be you. You don’t have a middle parting,” you concluded.
“The man on the CENTER RIGHT,” he clarified, his voice unintentionally starting to waver. Just how dense were you? It was as if you were purposely riling him up.
You narrowed your eyes and looked over at the man. “OK fine,” you admitted, agreeing with Atsumu that he was indeed on the billboard. “But that’s not the centre. That’s like, where the King’s retainer would be standing.”
Atsumu’s eye twitched ever so slightly, and he could hear his twin’s chuckle from where he was standing behind the counter. OK, so what if his nickname wasn’t something fancy like “King of the Court” like Kageyama’s? They still played the same position! They were teammates on the national team! Honestly, why did V-League put Kageyama in the center anyways? Is it because of the curry rice campaign he did? That stupid commercial? Did he have to do a stupid curry commercial to be featured in the center of the league’s promotional material? He’d probably do a better job, but why hasn’t anyone reached out to him yet about—
“Hey, I’m sorry,” you said, snapping Atsumu out of his thoughts. He looked over at you and simply stared. “I admit that I was just messing with you in the end,” you confessed as you looked over to the side. Direct eye contact seemed a bit heavy in a situation like this, after all. “I didn’t expect you to suddenly get all quiet and not argue back, you know? You seemed to me like someone who had a clever response to everything, so I thought…”
A low chuckle rumbled from the man’s chest, which soon erupted into a loud laughter. “Yer right about that,” he wheezed between laughs as he tried to calm himself down. “I usually do. Don’t know what got into me there,” he continued once he regained his composure. That may have been a lie —he always did feel a little unsettled about his old underclassman’s frightening presence— but you didn’t have to know that.
You nodded your head as you closed the lid of your laptop. Despite how reassured Atsumu was that you had not caught onto his lie, something in you just knew. It was a familiar feeling —the feeling of always being worried that you weren’t good enough .
But if I were in his position, I wouldn’t want someone to point it out, you thought.
“I’m sorry regardless,” you said as you looked back at his face and into his eyes. Huh, his eyes are warmer in color than his twin’s… How does that work?
Atsumu started to protest, giving you a small laugh as he waved his hand in the air, but you shook your head. “I’m serious.”
Noticing the darkened look in your eyes, Atsumu reluctantly nodded and heaved a sigh. “Look,” he started, offering his hand out to you. You took his hand in yours and gave it a small shake, though he didn’t let go after. “I’m not one to get offended that easily, alright?” You nodded as you narrowed your eyes at his grip on your hand.
It wasn’t a tight grip. The man looked quite well built, so it wouldn’t have surprised you if he held your hand with a death grip and cut out all circulation in your hand. This was a firm grip: strong and confident, but definitely something you knew you could get out of any time as long as you so wished.
But you didn’t. You held on. Why? You weren’t sure.
“How about this,” he tested, his eyes flickering across your face as he searched for the words to translate his thoughts. “Get me a coffee from my stupid brother’s coffee shop tomorrow and we can call it even, yeah?”
“I don’t know how comfortable I feel ordering off the kid’s menu, though,” you teased as a small smile danced across your lips.
Atsumu responded by rolling his eyes and releasing his grip on your hands. “Buy me a “real” coffee then if yer so cultured,” he huffed.
You laughed and reached out to grab his hand to return them to your hold once more.
“I’ll get you a real coffee tomorrow then.”