Archive of Our Own ^beta

It starts like this.

Tonight, Hajime is a little too lost, and the shōchū has made his hunger a little too jagged. The song is something slick, unknowable, sinking its teeth into the base of his neck as he throws his head back. He thinks that if he moves any faster, he might cut himself on the edges of his own want.

It’s somewhere between midnight and three thirty, and Koutarou’s apartment is a throbbing, neon beast of a party. Under the sickening pink strobe of lights, they could be anyone. There, twisting to the thick bass of the music, they could even be lovers.

It starts like this.

Tonight, Atsumu is watching him, like he always is. He’s been drinking steadily all night, shirt open just enough to bare a slice of pale skin. Hajime isn’t looking back. Hajime isn’t looking at the way the silk of Atsumu’s shirt whispers across his chest when he laughs. Hajime’s spinning lazily in the middle of the room, shot glass held aloft. He’s thinking about another party, another beautiful boy, another blackened night. He lets the song shiver up his spine and breathes the name into the air, lets it dissolve into the hazy warmth of too many shots. Too—

“Iwaizumi.”

Hajime tilts his head up to see Wakatoshi standing in front of him, eyebrows furrowed in concern.

“I think you’ve had a little too much.”

Hajime huffs out a laugh, the mirage of that long-ago night blurring back into this one, shaking itself loose at the edges.

“I can always count on you to find me, Ushijima.” He offers his empty shot glass to Wakatoshi, who takes it without a word. “But I’m right where I need to be.”

He looks over Wakatoshi’s shoulder to meet Atsumu’s gaze head-on. Something in his chest starts to come undone, shivering fever-bright at the slow blink he gets in return. Atsumu’s smirk drops with the next slash of violet light and for a moment he’s still, watching Hajime watch him back. He takes another sip of his drink, and Hajime wants to bite at the slick red tilt of his mouth.

(The day after Hajime’s first training session with Miya Atsumu, asshole extraordinaire, Wakatoshi had been quiet. He’d listened to Hajime complain about the setter over pastries, and he’d ordered them matching black coffees when Hajime had kept grumbling about that shitty attitude and doesn’t know his own limits and he’s always smirking at me like he knows me. “Be careful,” he’d said. Hajime had scowled, opening his mouth in instant rebuttal before he’d seen the understanding look on Wakatoshi’s face. “He’s too much like him.” Hajime had looked away, and his coffee had gone cold. “It’s dangerous.” The name, left unspoken.)

Wakatoshi turns to follow Hajime’s gaze, a quiet sigh leaving him.

“Be careful,” he repeats. Tonight, he’s warning him again. But tonight, Hajime is tired. Tonight, Hajime is a little too far past buzzed. Tonight, Hajime wants.

“I can take care of myself,” he’s saying, and he’s lost sight of Atsumu when he feels clever fingers twisting in his belt loop, pulling him away from Wakatoshi, and Atsumu is there. Another hand smoothes up the side of Hajime’s waist and, distantly, he thinks something might be burning. How else can he explain the taste of burnt ash on his teeth? How else can he explain the heat flaring lightning-sharp in his stomach as Atsumu slides his fingers up, up?

Hajime doesn’t say anything, just drops his forehead against Atsumu’s shoulder with a groan, his own hands curling in the back of that ridiculous, silken shirt. Atsumu lowers his head, mouth burning against the shell of Hajime’s ear.

“I’ve been lookin’ for ya.”

Hajime starts to sink back into the thudding pulse of the song, body unfolding in slow, sinuous movements.

“I think you’ve been watching me all night.” He doesn’t need to see Atsumu’s face to know he’s smirking into his hair, eyes sliding shut as he starts to move against Hajime.

“Then ya kept me waitin’,” Atsumu hums back, fingers tightening around Hajime’s waist. Hajime pulls Atsumu’s hips against his with a jolt, grinning savagely at the stutter in his breath.

“Problem?” he sighs back, but he’s not thinking about what he wants to say next. He’s thinking that he wants to feel every tremble of this body against his. He’s pressing his nose into the sweat at the curve of Atsumu’s neck and thinking that he wants to bite, wants to speak his hunger into the raw slide of tongue on skin. He wonders if it would burn.

Atsumu is drawling something back, honeyed voice thick against Hajime’s ear, but Hajime isn’t listening. He’s only aware of the clumsy shape of his mouth around blurred lyrics and the scorching line of Atsumu’s body against his. He feels carved out with desire, no longer Iwaizumi Hajime but sound, heat, the trickle of sweat down his spine. He swivels his hips forward again, visceral, wanting. Atsumu hisses out a breath and Hajime finds words in the way he traces fingers over sharp hipbones and presses lips to Atsumu’s collarbone. He knows this well, this language of salt and skin and teeth.

“Iwa,” Atsumu mumbles, and Hajime wants to lean into it, wants to close his eyes and hear him say it again, say it a little different, wants to pretend that he’s known the body against his for decades and not months. The thought breaks through to the surface of Hajime’s touch-fractured mind: he wants to taste that name gasped wetly against his mouth, wants Atsumu to call him—

He twists back with a sharp gasp, chest heaving as he stares at Atsumu with wide eyes. Fuck.

Atsumu’s blinking at the sudden loss, hands stilling in the air between them.

“…Iwa-kun?”

“Don’t call me that,” Hajime bites out, pressing a hand over his eyes. “Fuck. Fuck.” He stumbles back, colliding with someone behind them, and turns away before Atsumu’s face can soften into another. “Don’t follow me.”

He thinks that maybe his hunger has always been this: desperate, uneven, the slant of Atsumu’s mouth around the wrong name.

He plunges back into the party, and this time, his hands are shaking, stomach turning at every accident of sweat-slick skin. The pulsing lights throw unearthly, magenta shadows across the faces swimming around him, and he lurches away from all those neon shades of desire. He can’t do this. Not again.

He manages to stumble into the bathroom and falls against the sink, gripping the cool basin with both hands. When he looks up at his reflection, he recognizes the longing torn wide open across his face.

“Damn it,” he whispers. “Damn you.”