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Shouyou leaves for Brazil in two hours.
Atsumu’s cosmic catastrophe of a life has been wrought by an aggravating two phase as of late. Two minutes tardy to practice on Tuesday. Two-dollar piss-poor coffee yesterday morning. 2 A.M., presently; two hours to Shouyou’s twenty-two-hour flight he booked for 4:02 A.M because he, you know, straddles the brink of beautiful, batshit insanity at all waking hours of the day.
Two hours until the sensational Black Jackals’ setter-hitter duo stops being two, and wanes to one.
It shouldn’t be a big deal. It is decidedly not a big deal. The judgmental clock that glows spooky neon-green informs him that it is 2:02 A.M., and Atsumu grumbles, senses smothered by a too-hot room, too-cold draft, too-loud mind. The fan at the corner hurls stale, insipid air across the space, holding sleep hostage as it taunts his airways.
Two more cursed minutes putter by. His phone lights up once, twice, screen flaring headache-bright in the dark. Grunting, he tugs the device closer and squints at the offending flash in disdain. Then stares at it more closely, and opens the notification with his pulse puddling in his throat.
It’s a text from Shouyou to their group chat, following a snapped picture of one of the Jackals’ promotional photoshoot spreads that Atsumu can’t for the life of him remember the purpose of, but that is apparently being boasted gold and sleek at the Sendai International Airport at 2:02 A.M.
look!!! Shouyou’s sent. we look so cool!!!
Reluctant amusement bullies his lips into a half-smile. omi-kun’s hair looks funny, he types back, because he’s charming like that. Then, like a broken record, hav a safe trip
I WILL!! comes the instant reply. atsumu-san y are u awake ?? hahhaha
In-fucking-deed, Atsumu-san, he thinks grimly. Why the hell are you awake? His vision and sanity are bowling over like tragic little dominoes as he stares at the message, fingers teetering atop the keyboard.
Another blinding flash of the screen. A private message from Shouyou swings into view, reading atsumu-san you shouldn’t sleep so late it’s bad for u !!
There are a multitude of things that are bad for Miya Atsumu. Namely: Hinata Shouyou. And: Hinata Shouyou.
u tryna lecture me punk??? he types out half-jokingly. Then backspaces. And wishes for the backspace of his own existence. The pitiable speck of sanity he has left, that sounds alarmingly like Suna Rintarou, is telling him he’s really not that funny, he’s really trying too hard, and that he should really. Go. The fuck. To sleep.
goin 2 sleep now, he settles on finally. Then adds a thumbs-up emoji for some extra spice.
After a painstaking twenty-two seconds, Shouyou’s response arrives in the form of a precious little animated turtle sticker. It’s huddling into itself, limbs disappearing and head retracting inside its green-brown shell. The obnoxiously bubbly good night crowds around the animal like a halo as it snores on, blissfully unbothered.
Atsumu is now jealous of a turtle. He sets his phone down and stabs the charger in viciously as if a shock of circuitry will somehow fry all his problems to ash. Then does it again, a fraction gentler, because he missed the first time.
Slipping back under the duvet, he takes an extraordinarily gallant stab at mimicking a turtle. But this shell of his is hollow, brittle, molded amateurly with insistent thoughts of Hinata Shouyou. The typical accompanying warmth is absent, this time, leaving his fingertips iced and aching. He gives up attempting to be a turtle and instead resigns himself to cocooning up his polyester blanket like some ugly goddamn caterpillar.
Maybe when he wakes up, molten skin will be shed and he’ll emerge a beautiful fucking butterfly. Or maybe when he wakes up, sleep will have taken pity on him with a serene, restful night and he’ll smile in the way animated stickers do, with the bouncy, hot-pink letters assaulting his head that read Good Morning! or Cool! or XOXO!!
Maybe when he wakes up tomorrow morning, at 6:30 with the sun folding sleepy along the horizon, Shouyou won’t be on a plane to Brazil.
+
Alright. Back to the beginning.
Despite the accusations that may regularly let loose from Sakusa Kiyoomi's (masked) mouth, Atsumu, in fact, is not entirely stupid.
He’s had trysts with high-school crushes. He’s had girlfriends, boyfriends, flings—if he dares to count the two and a half times he made out passionately with his gym instructor. It sounds more indie-movie-esque to name it a fling. He’s had a fling; he’s cool like that.
Atsumu’s not stupid. He has self-proclaimed very sexy, amber-brown eyes that work swimmingly; he knows Shouyou is attractive—catalogues the information along the same vein of Bokuto’s biceps, the slick curve of Sakusa’s mouth, Meian’s diamond-cut jaw. He knows Shouyou is attractive the way he knows the Earth spins around an axis. And it’s fine. This wretched planet twirls steady in its trajectory through the galaxy, the sun torches across the sky, and Shouyou continues to be attractive. It’s splendid.
It’s not. The cosmos fails him on a Tuesday.
“Shoot.”
“Atsumu-san? What’s wrong?”
Atsumu tips his chin up from where he’s seated on the locker room bench, watching the washed fluorescence of the space soak through Shouyou’s eyes. “Sorry, Shouyou-kun. Just realized I ran outta tape. S’nothin.”
Shouyou peers over, gaze curious. His vision lowers to the present travesty laid out in front of Atsumu: the four fingers of his left hand are wound tight with vibrant white volleyball tape; the other hand is despairingly empty. His extra roll of tape is lurking somewhere in the depths of his apartment, mocking his forgetfulness and probably off frolicking with his extra pairs of socks.
“Oh,” Shouyou says, before he perks up. “I have some!”
God bless for Hinata Shouyou. “You tape your fingers?” he asks, interest peaked. “I’ve never seen ya do it before.”
“Ah, I don’t,” Shouyou hums, as he turns back around to rummage noisily through his bag. Atsumu stares at orange-red hair huddled at his nape while he does so. Everything about him is jarringly loud, unapologetically bright. “But I found out all of my teammates in Brazil do! So I bought some just in case I wanna try it out when I’m there.” He brandishes a fresh roll of tape triumphantly, and Atsumu swallows back the huff of amusement that swells in his throat.
Shouyou’s torso angles back towards him. Atsumu expects the roll to be tossed to him—doled out easily like everything else Shouyou has to offer: smiles, hugs, opulent affection.
He does not expect Shouyou to swing a leg over and straddle the bench, proximity giving way to the smell of a raspberry sports drink tickling his breath. Pungent, dizzying. His lips are half-parted, tongue sitting guilelessly behind pearly whites. Shouyou takes Atsumu’s right hand like it’s been given to him.
“Uh,” Atsumu manages.
A pair of calloused palms cradle his fingers. Then tape being laid in attentive, thoughtful stripes across his hand and babbling that glides into his ears. “I don’t know if I’ll like it though, you know?” A touch. “Kageyama never used to tape his fingers.” Warm skin grazing against his. “He said it made him feel uncomfortable.” His thumb, pressed low into the curve between Atsumu’s ring and pinky. “But you always play fine with it!” Fingertips tracing over tendons, down the dips of his knuckles, over flesh. “Is it uncomfortable, Atsumu-san?”
Tape tucked under creases of white. Shouyou’s hands flipping his kidneys inside-out. Eyes. Blinking, wondrous, he’s asking a question. He’s—holding Atsumu’s hand.
“Uh.” Atsumu is very uncomfortable. “No?” He clears the uneasy lump out of his throat. Digs his voice out of his lungs again, pulse shuddery under his skin. “I mean, not now it ain’t. It was weird at first, but ya just get used to it. After—” That’s a gentle rub across his cuticle. (Is that legal?) “After, uh, a lotta practicin’.”
Shouyou hums in consideration, hands nimble as he cups Atsumu’s middle finger. His gaze flutters up for a short, electric second, mouth curving into something honeyed. Voice dangerously earnest when he says: “Atsumu-san, you’re amazing.”
Right. Atsumu knows Shouyou is attractive the same way he knows the Earth spins around an axis. This—tape-wrapping, raspberry-flavored, thumbs-over-his-knuckles-Atsumu-san-you’re-amazing nonsense—gathers every ordinance of the universe and twists it into a clusterfuck pretzel.
Earth’s spinning dizzy like a top; compass be damned, axis disposed. Through the unwelcome vertigo and frenzy of it all—heated fingertips on his, scalding.
Atsumu doesn’t want Shouyou’s hands to drift out his orbit. He wants to draw them in close and sandwich them flat between his palms. Carefully, tenderly. Like, forever-ly.
“Shit,” he mutters aloud.
Shouyou’s brow creases. “Atsumu-san?”
Again, Atsumu is not entirely stupid. He realizes he has mushy-gushy feelings for Hinata Shouyou that spin deeper than attraction. So he realizes his brain is currently dreaming up sixty-three different rom-com indie-film snapshots of time. Kisses in sepia. Oversaturated laughter. Touches sheltered in monochromic low light. So he realizes this. So what.
Shouyou leaves for Brazil in two weeks. Then he’ll be lost in translation and toasted golden skies and hands that are not his. Atsumu is not stupid.
“S’nothin’,” he replies casually, tampering down the heat on his cheeks. “Don’t worry ‘bout it.”
Shouyou blinks and nods, light winking off his hair.
His movements continue. Atsumu wants to run out of tape for the rest of his goddamn miserable life.
Shouyou leaves for Brazil in two weeks. There are no justifiable reasons to inform him of these mushy-gushy feelings of his. There are, on the other hand, an endless list of ramifications that could arise if he did. Time is limited. Shouyou is limitless. Atsumu, for once, limits himself.
But, because he's still a little selfish, a little greedy, a little child, at heart, he sits as still as a lovestruck body permits on a grime-lined bench. He lets Shouyou wrap sun-warmed hands around his. He lets Shouyou wind tape around his fingers and a silver-spiked chain around his heart. He lets and he takes and he pockets—these glassy little bubbles of shared time, all prismatic color and boyish awe. Because, well, he’s twenty-three, and he’s still allowed these petty crimes, sometimes. To stick grubby hands in a cookie jar. To marvel at bubbles. To be stupid.
“Done!” Shouyou announces cheerfully. The fading warmth of his hands leaves a sad, gloomy little depression in Atsumu’s chest.
Two weeks. “Thanks,” he says, ducking his head and massaging freshly taped fingers together. Feeble attempts to rid his skin of an emotion already tied tight into his veins. “Ya didn’t have to.”
+
(“’Samu,” he says, solemn. “Listen ta me—”
“Hold up, I fuckin’ know that voice, I swear ta god—”
“Hinata Shouyou,” Atsumu half-yells over him. “I—”
Samu hangs up. The absolute menace. That was six seconds earlier than predicted.
“Goddamn.” Atsumu turns around to share the revelation with his dying succulent instead. It’s about time they bond. “Hinata Shouyou,” he just mourns.
The succulent stares back, unimpressed. Its purple-green hue titters, idiot. Atsumu tells the Echevaria Elegans to go fuck itself. Just because it’s a darling gift from grandma doesn’t lend itself to judgement of his romantic escapades. Or lack thereof. To Osamu, he delivers a fresh batch of middle finger emojis.
ur stupid is all Osamu offers, gracious as ever. isn’t he leaving in like a week
Houseplants and twin brothers. Time. Distance. Emotions. The sheer existence of Hinata Shouyou. What did Atsumu ever do to piss off the deities of the universe this much.
Pray tell, please. What did Atsumu ever fucking do.)
+
“Hinata called yesterday!” Bokuto announces brazenly at practice. “His new dorm is tiny, like, I got a tour in less than five minutes! Tiny, dude.”
“How is he?” Meian asks, body folding at the waist as he stretches.
Bokuto launches into a cinematic description of him and Shouyou’s hour-long facetime call. Complete with avid gestures and tone shifts and closed captioning, probably. Atsumu stares at the dirt smudging sneakily along his volleyball shoes. No, Atsumu is not jealous.
Sakusa’s head inclines towards him. “Don’t tell me you’re jealous,” he says flatly, because everyone in Atsumu’s life is apparently clairvoyant.
Please never become friends with Kita Shinsuke, Atsumu wants to say. “You're jealous,” he mutters instead. Sakusa blinks once, as dispassionate as the succulent on Atsumu’s windowsill, and rolls his eyes before resuming his warm-up.
Bokuto is still painting misshapen but endearing images of Shouyou’s dorm with his clumsy words. Something about a cramped kitchen, lighting fixtures that wobble, brown-edged photograph frames and really pretty windows. Shouyou’s last text to Atsumu was dated two days ago, when he’d sent a link to an upbeat, electro-house song in Portuguese, with the simple caption, a teammate showed me this i think u would like it atsumu-san!! reminded me of u haha
What, like that wasn’t the equivalent of plunging fingers through his ribcage and playing fucking cat’s cradle with his heartstrings. He had to take a leisurely stroll around his apartment before his emotional stability gathered itself from where it’d fractured on the kitchen floor, rebuilt, and granted him shaky permission to click on the link.
Practice tumbles by tepidly, waves of incessant receives and sets and serves that rock the floor with their intensity. Atsumu’s thoughts drift astray. How are the waves in Brazil? Maybe they’re stumbling over Shouyou’s bare flesh as he speaks. Chasing tanned skin and coaxing a laugh out of him. All things Atsumu has never had the courage to do.
“Unbelievable,” he hears Sakusa mutter under his breath.
Damned clairvoyant. And that’s practice.
Two days later, Shouyou calls him out of the blue.
Atsumu’s just finished scrubbing a spine-chilling nightmare about Shiratorizawa’s little shit of a setter from his skin. He’s in a ratty Onigiri Miya t-shirt he’d sniped from Osamu’s inventory and worn to death. He’s a walking abomination and let it be said things are more brutally honest in the early hours of the day. His appearance. His tongue. His soul, bare like his feet.
He picks up anyway. Mushy-gushy feelings and all that.
“Atsumu-san!” Shouyou exclaims the moment their line connects. “Hi!”
Absolutely fuckin’ ridiculous, Atsumu thinks, as his heart does an atrocious, unrehearsed little tap-dance in his chest. Shouyou’s phone camera is absurdly high-quality, and his grin from across the world takes a searing bite out of Atsumu’s skin, setting it ablaze.
“Hey,” Atsumu just says back, smile already inching across his face. “How are ya settlin’ in?”
“Really good! I miss you guys, though.”
“We miss ya too,” he answers casually; an ambiguous truth. Shouyou beams, and then his small mouth holding infinite words unfastens and Atsumu is helpless to the torrent of updates Shouyou hurls in his face. Everything from the taste of Brazil air (warm) to the color of his new walls (teal) to the captivating practice match he’d played in a day prior (they won!).
Shouyou breaches the topic of his new team eventually. Of course he does. Eyes dazzling as he babbles on about a tall blocker, a cool captain, a not-tall and not-cool and not-sexy setter. Atsumu’s liberally tacking on some descriptors.
Atsumu, twenty-three, idiot extraordinaire, tries to tease through unreasonable jealousy, “So your new setter’s better than me?”
Shouyou wrinkles his nose immediately. “It’s not fair to compare like that, Atsumu-san! Our setter’s really good, too. You guys are both super duper good.” The beginnings of silence snake up, before he tacks on, “But I miss your sets!”
And me? He swallows down the petulant question. Shoves it into his stomach to digest later. “Yeah,” he just says elegantly.
“Oh, I tried taping my fingers! It felt kinda funny, but I think it was helpful.”
Atsumu is yanked back to dulled locker-room ambience. His heart hangs low in his chest at the memory. Like overripe fruit seconds away from splattering gracelessly all over the ground. Sweet, but oh so heavy. Oh so tender. Oh he’s so fucking stupid.
“Good thing ya practiced on me, huh,” he jokes airily.
Shouyou blinks a few times, confusion dotting his expression, before his eyes lift upwards in recollection. Then an absentminded “oh.” His mouth forms an endearing little circle and long lashes flutter a few times, as if the memory has only now resurfaced in his mind. A flimsy, insignificant little thing among other volleyball thoughts, likely. Eyes sweep back down to the camera to pierce straight through his ribcage. “Yeah! I forgot about that. Thanks, Atsumu-san!”
A smile he desperately wants to categorize as fond crosses over the planes of Shouyou’s face.
Shit. He's adorable, horrendous, stunning, liquid sunshine bleeding through every smile, and Atsumu runs a thirty-nine-point-one-degree Celsius fever every time Hinata Shouyou halts in his rabid ascent to the top of the world and slants his gaze downwards to grace him with a second of his time.
It’s awful. It’s harrowing. It’s hysterical.
If this is how Shouyou had felt, body and spirit wholly collapsed into sweat-stained linoleum at his first Nationals, Atsumu doesn’t know how the hell anyone could ever bounce back from a sensation so debilitating. His own fever blisters unrelenting beneath his skin. Wracks his chest with hapless desire and curls tight around his torso, leaving his sanity bedridden in the pitiful little room of his right atrium that stores every damned chord of Shouyou’s laughter.
Thirty-nine-point-two, now. Miya Atsumu is sick to his stomach to his heart to his motherfucking soul.
“Shouyou,” he blurts out.
Shouyou’s eyes are round and devastating. “Hm?”
“Uh,” Atsumu tries. Crap. “I hafta tell ya somethin’. When ya get back.”
“Tell me what?”
“I just said. I’ll tell ya when ya get back.”
Through the call, Shouyou cocks his head, puzzlement mowing over his features. His eyes. They’re so round. So devastating. “But why not now?”
Atsumu gnaws at the skin inside his cheek and fixes his gaze on some incorrigible speck of dust in the distance, cursing it. Thoroughly. “You’ll see.”
“Did someone die?” Shouyou whispers, horrified.
“NO,” he screeches immediately. “Well—” His sanity. His health. He’s still running this goddamn fever: thirty-nine-point-three-point-fuckass-infinity. “No. No one died, Shouyou-kun. Yeesh.”
A pregnant pause threads through the line. He’s shooting laser beams with his eyes at that particle of dust. The air in his apartment is sweltering, merciless pinpricks across his skin as Atsumu briefly contemplates the recent misfortunes of the universe. Why’d he go and say that. Why couldn’t he find the Japanese translation of the lyrics to that Portuguese song. Why is his succulent still dying. Why—
“Atsumu-san,” Shouyou starts, still whispering.
He drags his eyes reluctantly back to the boy on the other end of the call, with the round eyes, the devastating smile. But there’s an odd curve to his voice. It’s bending all lopsided and out of character; it sounds like hesitation. It sounds unlike him.
“Um.” Shouyou pauses, lips pursed. “Do you like me?”
Atsumu, twenty-three, definitely hallucinating, chokes on his spit.
“Because I like you!” Shouyou’s rambling, eyes roving in every direction but the camera. “And I thought—”
He stops listening. His ears are deluding him. The cosmos is cackling in his face. His dreams are transforming into something terrifying and hyper-realistic, equipped with a high definition, smiling Shouyou that most definitely wants him dead.
“—sorry if that was really sudden!” Shouyou is laughing, the sound crisp and ever so lovely. “I just wanted to tell you, Atsumu-san.”
“I—” Atsumu’s entire internal homeostatic system is wobbling all over the place. His organs. They’re fucking playing Tetris. “I—shit. Yeah. I. Me too,” he says dumbly. A dry swallow. “That’s what I was gonna tell ya. When ya—” Another swallow. “When ya got back.”
“Oh!” That’s Shouyou-I-like-you’s earth-shattering smile. “Yay.”
There are a thousand buzzing questions swarming around in his pharynx. Mostly what the hell and What The Hell, but before they can spill messy from his heart, Shouyou, Shouyou-because-I-like-you, just grins impossibly wider and says, “I wasn’t gonna tell you, Atsumu-san. But then I saw you and I just felt like I couldn’t keep it in any longer, you know.”
What the hell. “Shouyou-kun,” he mutters weakly. “Can ya warn a guy next time ya say somethin’ like that.”
A fluttering laugh. Shouyou’s mouth curving up without a care in the world. “I’m just really happy!”
Atsumu is, like, stupefied. “You're cute,” he just says. Because—fuck. Because he’s allowed to say that now.
Shouyou blinks at him, owlish, before breaking out into another megawatt grin that has his phone’s CPU shrieking through tears.
He doesn’t fluster in the slightest, and Atsumu is struck across the face with that crystalline confidence Shouyou has sewn into his own skin, that catches light upon its fringes and shoots blinding daggers into innocent corneas. A reminder, constant, that he’s grown. That boy, that adult, that Hinata Shouyou. “So are you, Atsumu-san,” Shouyou replies, beaming. And so organ-Tetris continues. Then he tilts his head, says, blunt, “Um, are we dating now?"
There are a million more unanswered questions on his tongue about to slip off all sideways and stupid, but Atsumu swallows all of it whole—the foreign uncertainty, nervousness, just lets his heart thud along his gums as he summons a response.
"Sure—"
A clamor over the connection swallows his voice. Then Shouyou's face, scrunching into a precious grimace as he turns to look at something in his periphery. "Shoot, I have to go now! Sorry!! Talk to you later, Atsumu-san!!”
"What, wai—"
The line sputters out.
Well now there’s a billion and two questions. Did Shouyou hear him? Dating? How do they do that? Long distance? What the hell? Dating? Should they tell the rest of—
A loud ding from his phone; a groupchat notification.
ATSUMU-SAN AND I ARE DATING NOW!!!!!!! :DDDDD
Okay. Well. A billion and one.
Atsumu’s phone vibrates with an instant twenty-six new messages. Shit. His fingers fumble and he declines Meian’s incoming call by accident. Shit.
Shit. But there’s a hopeless smile kissing at his lips. There’s a hearth behind his chest cooking slow-broiled glee. There’s an ominous typing bubble by Meian’s name. There’s a boy who likes him back on the other side of the world. There’s thirty-five new messages. There’s a boyfriend. There’s thirty-seven. There’s Hinata Shouyou. There’s this. There’s that. There. Here. Theirs.
He tosses his phone haphazardly on the bed and makes towards his closet, heart thundering like it’s just won Olympic gold. There’s a jog to go on. There’s a goddamn day to start.
There’s Miya Atsumu, grinning.
+
So this whole relationship thing.
Here’s the crux of the matter. When it boils down to it—it being the stone-cold, threadbare truth—him and Shouyou are, above all else, volleyball players first.
Their lives revolve around a ball spinning through the air. Not around each other.
Yeah, so they’re awful at this. Because Shouyou’s off to a lovely team dinner, or Atsumu is hunkering through serve practice, or Shouyou’s washing away the woes of a loss under a showerhead, or Atsumu is dead-to-the-world asleep after a five-set-match, it takes sixty-seven ill-timed text messages and eleven attempted calls just for Atsumu to finally get a peace of mind and wheedle the truth out of Shouyou, to demand all the important details like how long, and didja know, and an obligatory you know, you're kinda crazy.
“So, uh, how’re we gonna do this?” He lets out, gnawing just a bit anxiously at a post-morning-workout granola bar.
The mildly blurry Shouyou through the call yawns a little, before stifling it into the sleeves of his hoodie. “Do what, Atsumu-san?”
“This.” He’s making liberal use of this granola bar to gesture manically between them. “Uh.” More fervent movements. “You know. You're in Brazil. I’m—” Shit. A chocolate chip takes a nosedive. “I’m here.”
“Ummm.” Shouyou’s cheeks puff out, considering. “Hmmm.”
“Hmmm,” he echoes back.
There’s a blazing, determined set to Shouyou’s jaw that endures for a total of five seconds before it melts away to something shy and sheepish. “Uh, I don’t really know?”
Yeah. Awful at this.
“Atsumu-san.” Shouyou’s giving him a sleepy, pixelated smile. “I think—” Another yawn. “I think it’ll be okay.” Right, it’s late there. The lights on Shouyou’s end are dimmed, spilling across skin and pooling honest beneath his eyes. He looks like a jewel. He looks like the truth.
“Mmm. Ya think so?”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah,” Atsumu repeats, quiet. His chest feels all spongy and cluttered. He’s feeling too much, too little, too hard. “Okay. Yeah. You should prolly go ta sleep.”
If this were a weeping, teenaged love story, maybe Shouyou would brush him off stubbornly and insist on talking through the night. Maybe they’d call into concerning hours of the morning, until one of them goes silent, having fallen asleep halfway through to the honeyed lull of the other’s voice.
But that’s ridiculous. Shouyou has practice at the asscrack of dawn tomorrow morning. Sleep is as good as gold for any athlete; Atsumu knows this like it’s law.
And so Shouyou mumbles a slurred g’night, Atsumu-san, and procures a small smile that stamps big across Atsumu’s chest. He returns the words in a whisper, tucks the softening of Shouyou’s eyes close to his ribs, and watches the screen go dark.
And so they’re volleyball players first, human beings second, and somewhere down an endless list of devotions and titular commitments—a bumbling pair of clueless boyfriends.
Yeah, it’ll be okay.
+
“Okay, we didn’t actually have a betting pool.”
“The hell?!” Atsumu keens over, fingers scrubbing at his face. “So you were lyin’ ta me!”
Inunaki grins, devilish.
“I had an inkling,” Sakusa mutters.
“Ya don’t count,” Atsumu shoots back. Damned clairvoyant.
A snort escapes Inunaki’s mouth. “I don’t think anyone else on the team besides Sakusa and me really noticed, if that makes you feel better.”
Atsumu’s gaze slides towards their libero, mildly curious. Inunaki Shion is not a clairvoyant. He’s occasionally terrifying, but not in the eerie way Sakusa is, with his Medusa-eyed stares and artillery of hand-sanitizer packets. It helps that he’s a tad bit vertically challenged, not that Atsumu will ever utter a word. He does, after all, value his life. “How’d ya know, Naki-san?”
Inunaki fixes him with a look that reduces Medusa to tears. “You two are the most volleyball-obsessed wackos I’ve ever met in my life. It just made sense, somehow.” Then, laughing deeply into Atsumu’s stunned silence, he asks, “Anyways, how’s the whole long-distance thing going?”
Bokuto slams a spike down from across the gym, the sound bold and deafening as it punctures the air. It makes his bones rattle. He pauses a little to listen to the finicky rhythm of his heart as it sits on Inunaki’s question.
“S’alright,” he murmurs finally, eyes sightlessly tracing the outline of a missing head of orange curls.
Atsumu is well acquainted with the art of bending over backwards to deliver to someone else. But that’s on the court. This: his and Shouyou’s hilariously disjointed good morning texts, nonsensical snapchats of even the most mundane daily occurrences, scheduling—yeah, scheduling video calls, this feels like more than a ball in the curve of his palm. It’s shared sentiment waxing and waning between liquid and solid, molded into something terrifyingly new every day. An exchange. A two-way street. A ball tossed—and then, surprise!—returned.
Atsumu has no clue what sport this is. But fuck if he isn’t going to try and ace it.
“S’alright,” Inunaki repeats, brow arching.
“S’alright,” he affirms, nodding dumb like a bobblehead. Or maybe that’s oversimplifying it.
‘Cause there’s the fairy-lights-dazzle of it all: when the time difference bows in their favor and Shouyou calls him on a Brazil Saturday night, Japan Sunday morning, says the beach has cajoled him out for an evening walk. And his hair is lined with unflattering street-lights, smile shadowed, but Shouyou has that uncanny ability to absorb any space he encroaches on and let it leak gorgeously through his soul. So Atsumu feels the breeze giggling across his skin. Tastes the humid, salty tang of coastal air. Allows sand to cut his skin open and flood golden-ichor-affection between his joints.
The conversation weaves through yesterday I and I tried this new and in Brazil they do and what about you, Atsumu-san? And shit, this whole relationship thing. This whole making-room-for-someone-else-in-your-life thing. This whole willingly listen-to-someone-ramble-about-a-bug-they-killed-by-accident-during-practice thing. This beautiful, luminous thing.
Then there are the unseen little B-sides to all these romantic title tracks: Atsumu’s appalling mental math harasses him into adding the Brazil world clock widget to his phone. Shouyou forwards him a link to a mildly intimidating article about long-distance-relationships courtesy of his mom. Both their phone bills run treacherously high. Sometimes, oftentimes, life pilfers them away from each other, with urgent business that needs attending to, or plans that can’t be shirked, and a planned call bumbles over into later-tomorrow-next-week-actually-maybe-lets-just-give-up?
It’s another ordinary Thursday when he posts a selfie on Instagram. It tips over into unordinary when Shouyou leaves a blinding swath of adorable emojis in the comments not even a minute after it’s up. Embarrassment wrangles the slope of his neck. Casually, ever-so-casually, he texts Shouyou, do u have post notifications on for me or sth
A conspicuous length of time passes after the message ticks read. Then Shouyou replies, five minutes later, ummmm yeah hahhahsha
Oh. So maybe they’re both sporting dumb matching fire-blushes behind screens, miles apart. Maybe they’re both taking silent strides to mold this nebulous, putty-like relationship thing of theirs.
Atsumu’s mushy-gushy feelings take the reins and have his finger tapping the dial button before his mind can exercise self-control.
Shouyou answers immediately, voice positively angelic. “Atsumu-san?”
“I can’t believe ya have post notifications turned on for me.”
A bashful, endearing trickle of laughter. Then, indignant against his ear, “What’s wrong with that?!”
Christ. Atsumu’s heart is about to swell hot-air-balloon style and hightail off to Mars. “Nothin’,” he mumbles back. “Nothin’s wrong.” A pause, muted voices threading in from Shouyou’s end. “We still watchin’ a movie later?”
“Mm,” something rustles over the line. “Maybe? Natsu said she wanted to call me. We usually talk for a loooong time.”
“Oh.” He blinks. “S’fine then.” He sandwiches his phone between ear and shoulder as he rolls out tired wrists. Thinks to an adorable shock of orange hair and a high-pitched giggle. “Tell her I said hi.”
“Don’t wanna,” Shouyou whispers conspiratorially. “I think she has a crush on you.”
A loud laugh bubbles out his throat. Atsumu’s grinning like an idiot for an audience of no one and everyone in the world. Empty apartment, filled-to-the-brim heart. He snorts. “S’not like I’m gonna—"
“I know,” Shouyou cuts him off, sounding faintly smug.
Warm. He feels so warm. “You're cheeky, y’know that?”
The voices on Shouyou’s end crescendo abruptly, curiosity steeping through the line, and Shouyou lets out a tinkling peal of laughter that bundles his senses in comfort, wraps his heart in tape. Then he’s saying something in rapid-fire Portuguese. Mouth turned away from his phone, and the only word Atsumu can clumsily parse out is nomado, because Shouyou had taken the time to teach him what it meant—boyfriend.
Shouyou’s voice is back spinning gold into his ear. “I’m not cheeky!”
It’s a strange thing, all of this. Flirting thing, boyfriend thing, long-distance thing.
“Sure,” Atsumu answers. The sun drifts lazy through his windows. Snagging on corners, sleuthing around curtains, kissing the periwinkle paint on his wall. It trails along his mouth, lifting it up. It’s a good day; it’s a good thing, all of this. “Whatever ya say.”
+
Shouyou hasn’t texted him in two days.
Objectively, this is rather abnormal. Subjectively, Hinata Shouyou now hates his fucking guts. Probably.
The beginning to this intricate, convoluted entanglement unfolds when Atsumu wakes up on a Thursday morning to a concerning tally of zero new messages. The last exchange between them is documented in a twenty-minute long call they had shared the night prior before weariness had tried to sew his eyelids shut and heckled him into bed. And now Atsumu is blinking down at a familiar chatroom, staring in confusion at an unfamiliar absence, and something frigid and clumpy and icky is drenching his skin from the inside out.
His fingers float over the keyboard, hesitant. The usual good morning looms dauntingly under his screen, the black edges of the hiragana characters catching silver and twisting into furious little knives. His thumbs shy away. It’s 7 P.M. in Brazil. Shouyou’s been awake for twelve hours. He hasn’t texted Atsumu in eight.
Maybe he’s overthinking it. Is he overthinking it?
He pockets his phone in his sweats. Pivots around a dresser towards the shower. Shimmies his mind through a few sets of mental gymnastics and thinks—well, okay.
Still no texts three hours later. But there’s a singular, captionless snapchat of a fruit bowl and a blurry peace sign. Atsumu sends back a singular, captionless snapchat of Sakusa’s glare. The light that cobbles in through their gym window is flimsier than usual, cascading strange and diagonal across his cheekbones. It frames his sour face horrifically.
“Stop,” Sakusa just grumbles, shouldering away.
It’s a pretty funny picture; Atsumu thinks it warrants a giggle or two in response.
A few minutes later the little red triangle empties out, marking opened.
And opened. And opened, opened, still opened, four hours later. Okay, so Shouyou went to sleep. Without replying. Whatever. Opened.
Four turns to eight turns to twelve and now Shouyou’s awake, he definitely is, but the chatroom sits empty and weighted, slowly coasting down his list as he gets texts from Bokuto, Aran, Mom, everyone else in the damn Milky Way, until Shouyou’s name is sitting in disquieting silence, suspended between manager and coach where it stands out utterly baffling like a wrinkle in the sky.
Maybe Atsumu should text him first. Is he overthinking it? The radio silence frosts at his fingertips each time he scrolls (scrolls) to find their chat. Shit. Maybe he’s overthinking it.
Then Samu calls. Bitching about whatever he usually bitches about. Then Mom calls. Then his grandma, asking about that devil of a succulent. Atsumu falls asleep to the entire Miya household ragging in his ears, voices that do little to abate the slick, permeating crawl of unease.
Yeah. So now it’s been two days without a text message from Hinata Shouyou, professional volleyball player, twenty-two, real nice eyes, diabetic-sugary laughter, hopefully still Atsumu’s boyfriend, probably hates his guts.
The hiragana gleam like blades. Call icon, video button, puddles of molten anxiety waiting to sear his skin off. And Atsumu’s selfish on the court, yeah—for the ball, for victory, for serves and plays and points that steal the audience’s breath away in rapt attention. Is he allowed to be selfish for this? Shit. Atsumu misses him.
Shit. Atsumu misses him. He skates his finger around, slices flesh down to skittering nerve, and taps the little camera with his pulse hopscotching across his skin.
One ring, two rings.
Then Shouyou’s face—his stupid, lovely, light-adorned face descending upon his screen. “Atsumu-san?” he asks, hesitant, subdued and shit—
“D’youhateme,” he blurts out elegantly.
“What?” And now Shouyou’s spluttering, eyes infinitely wide. “Wh—no! Atsumu-san! Why would I—what?”
Okay. Maybe overthinking it. He wrestles his heart into something like submission, pinning it down against his diaphragm before he says with just the barest, slightest, teeny-tiniest hint of petulance, “Well, ya didn’t text for two days.”
Shouyou’s face snaps to indignance. “You didn’t text for two days either!”
“Yeah, but—” He squints until Shouyou fuzzes out into a Cheeto-lookin’-glob. “But you started it.”
“Well that’s—” The flare behind Shouyou’s eyes wavers, abrupt, before his mouth twists all funny, strips of gold and pink from the Brazilian sunset ushering uncertainty across his face. “Um, you kinda seemed like you were in a bad mood, Atsumu-san. Like. Mad?”
Atsumu stares at him, utter confusion guiding his mind as it flips through memory. “The heck? When?”
“When we called! You were all hhhggrhhn and mmnngh and stuff.”
He squints at Shouyou again; Atsumu is scavenging his head to wit’s end and has no fucking clue what he’s talking about. Was he all hhggrhhn? What does being mmnngh even mean? Now there’s a whole other language barrier: Japanese-Portuguese, Atsumu-Shouyou, fatigue mistranslated into anger.
“So,” Atsumu feels a headache suckling at his brain. “So that’s why ya didn’t text.”
“Isn’t that…” Shouyou looks like he’s never thought harder in his twenty-two years of life. “Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do? Um, like, give someone space? Or something? I think?”
Atsumu blinks. Then looks at him for a heartbeat.
Sunset is creeping into dusk on Shouyou’s end, shadow overtaking cotton-candy light, and as the glimmer edges out, he’s—he’s just Shouyou, chin resting on calloused hand, eyes bright but running tired, a human—as mistake-prone as everyone else, as lost in navigation along a jumbled map of adulthood, still as beautiful as ever. Earnest. Genuine.
“Shouyou,” he just mumbles finally. “I thought you were mad at me.”
“What! Atsumu-san, I thought you were mad at me!”
“Wha—why the hell would I be mad at ya?!”
“I don’t know!” Shouyou cries. “Why would I would be mad at you?!”
There’s a breath held, suspended through the line alongside their raised voices. Quivering silence, rosy-apple cheeks. A bubble blown to comical enormity, clutching frustration, disbelief, perplexity between its fingers.
“Fuck,” Atsumu breathes out at last.
And then a huff is threading apart tension until they’re both hiccupping, laughing, guffawing, smiling through a twelve-hour time difference and sharing aching bellies across seventeen thousand kilometers. “Fuckin’,” he’s forcing out between heady gulps of air. “Jesus fuckin’ Christ.”
Shouyou is giggling with so much force he’s slouched over diagonally, swaying in and out of frame as stuttering breaths wrack his frame. “I sent you something on Instagram, Atsumu-san! And you never responded.”
“Ya did? The hell?! When?”
“Like, five hours ago!”
“Shit. Okay, guess I didn’t see it. Wait, ya didn’t reply to my snapchat, though!”
“What snapchat?” A beat. A slant of the head. “Oh, the one of Omi-san! I went to go shower and then I fell asleep…”
“…And you didn’t say anything when ya woke up?”
“Well you—” Shouyou’s cheeks are pufferfish-esque. “Well it—well you didn’t respond on Instagram!”
Social media, Atsumu thinks with deep, soul-wrenching certainty, is an absolute fucking sham.
Shouyou’s in a colorful state of dishevelment. All twenty-two years of glorious honesty, head pillowed on broad arms as he stretches a hand out to readjust his phone. They’re so far; they’re so close, heartbeats an arm’s lengths away. If he listens closely, Atsumu can half-hallucinate the rapid pitter-patter snuggled behind Shouyou’s chest. Echoing his. Listening back. Morse-code love lettered thing.
“I didn’t think ya thought s’much about stuff like that,” he settles on finally, a half-mumble.
Shouyou blinks at him, then there’s budding embarrassment, hesitance, muted shades of vulnerability traipsing across his face. “I didn’t think you thought so much about stuff like that either, Atsumu-san.”
Idiots, the two of them. The cosmos must be having a heyday.
Atsumu rubs his face, skin chafing on stupidity alongside pink ears and a snickering soul. I-di-ots. When his vision clears, Shouyou’s just smiling, teeth sunk into wobbly lips to contain laughter. He traces the curve of Shouyou’s mouth, bend of his nose. Pencils it all into his chest and folds it careful against his heart. “’nyways,” he mutters, face warm. “What’d I miss in two days?”
“Oh, I’m flying back for Christmas and New Year’s!”
“Wh—” Atsumu’s heart honest-to-god hiccups. He blinks sixteen times in rapid succession at the phone. Stares bug-eyed. “Wait. Fer real?”
Shouyou’s grin pushes his eyes into crescents. “For real!”
“And ya didn’t bother tellin’ me?!”
“I thought you were mad at me!” Shouyou protests, shoulders drawing up defensively. “And you thought I was mad at you! Or something! Agh!!”
He sounds so helplessly flustered. Atsumu is so hopelessly enamored.
We don’t need memories, is the mantra his life has been molded around for years. True, they’ll blink and chatter and laugh and this horrifying two-day game-of-silence will be swept away white-watered with other trivial bits of debris. But what he’d give to keep making new memories with Hinata Shouyou. So vibrant, incandescent, that even when blurred by time, will stay tattooed for all eternity.
“Yeah,” he sighs. “We’re real stupid, huh. So what day’s your flight?”
+
It dawns on him as he’s watching Shouyou shuck stubby leaves of rosemary into a pan of ingredients he will likely never be able to pronounce that they’re doing this all wrong.
His boyfriend’s doing whatever the Japanese equivalent of Gordon Ramsay would do while he’s poking listlessly at his grotesque attempt of a fruit parfait. Spoon overturning strawberry, blueberry, smushing violet-blue-red into snow-white yogurt and crackled khaki granola. Sweet things. Good things.
They missed the whole honeymoon phase thing, Atsumu’s thinking. Yeah, he’d been all dopey-eyed and over-the-moon like a fourteen-year-old’s first kiss after that entire I like you thing. Drunk on Shouyou’s smile and heart pinballing so furiously there might still be bruised divots along his chest. Then life had sauntered over and roundhouse kicked his ass to Saturn and told him, Brazil, remember?
There was never a chance to twine fingers together and scrape blunted nails along a pot of honey. To stew in rich, saccharine affection and let it drip slow into an obsession. Distance scooped them out. Lifted them up on a little dipper stick and licked them clean with a tongue that spelled reality.
Atsumu honestly feels like he might be Picasso incarnate sometimes. There’s an art to navigating around another person’s schedule—hacking out little nooks in his own to fit Shouyou in, grappling with daily little losses and growing accustomed to regular defeats.
He’s never even held Shouyou’s hand. They confessed through a damn iPhone X. First date took place in the clown-circus of his brain tissue. Then they hop skip jump leapfrogged over to whatever wrinkled old couples do. Bicker. Watch each other cook. Sit in comfortable silence that blankets their bones and embraces them tight and seals in years of togetherness.
And they’re still volleyball players first. Still, many things first. A human, a friend, a brother. What, like Atsumu’s going to try to fight Hinata Natsu for Shouyou’s attention? The girl breathes fire for a living. Part-time dragon. Sparkling gems of eyes, a love for Shouyou so undeterred and unfiltered it rattles tectonic plates whole.
Shouyou’s pinching something between thin chopsticks and tasting whatever green clump that is with a pensive look gracing his face. Then a shake of the head, orange wisps cutting through the screen. Now a shower of what might be thyme is descending down upon the stove. The pan sizzles. Hums. Satisfied.
“Ya ever think we’re doin’ this all wrong?” Atsumu blubbers aloud.
A few more hisses of the pan filter through. Then slow blinking eyes meet his, white kitchen light refracting everywhere. “Doing what wrong?”
“Y’know.” Yogurt is clinging on for dear life as he swings his spoon uselessly in gesture. Déjà vu washes over him and he takes pity on the wobbly granola crumbs. His hand stills. “This. Dating thing.”
Shouyou hums, turning away once more. A long, wooden spoon swings into view, perched securely in his hand as it folds into vegetables. “Maybe!” He’s smiling faintly at the pan as he stirs. “I like it, though.”
Yeah, me too, Atsumu finds himself wanting to say.
We're doin’ this all wrong, he still thinks. But it's alright. A reverberating crash half-cripples the line as Shouyou's camera goes dark, cushioned by a yelp that can only mean his phone has toppled over from where it'd been gingerly propped up against a salt shaker. Oceans apart, and they bridge the waters through a single silly smack on a granite countertop. A distressed squeak, a sigh. They're doing this all wrong, but it's alright.
Shouyou's sheepish expression pops back into frame. Sweat on his brow, flush staining his cheeks, professional volleyball player and video-call amateur, a boy cooking in a kitchen too small for his heart; God, Atsumu wants him forever. They're doing this all wrong, but it's alright. They're doing this all wrong, and it's alright.
+
(“I wish we could kiss, Atsumu-san.”
Atsumu drops his phone on his face. Everything claws into his skin; the corner of the god-awful phone case he needs to replace, Shouyou’s laughter splintering in six different directions through the speakers, his own mortification, pulse skyrocketing out his chest.
“Atsumu-san, are you—” A laugh. “Are you okay?”
“’m peachy,” he manages weakly, stabilizing his phone again. Wide eyes blink at him, and Atsumu despairs. He does. “Shouyou-kun, ya can’t just say shit like that.”
“Why not?”
“’Cause,” Atsumu mumbles, childish. The heat on his cheeks could fry an egg. Many eggs. “I wanna kiss ya too. But we can’t. So.” Shouyou’s lips pull into something plush, thoughtful and Atsumu does not stare at it. He drills holes through his half-cracked screen protector and looks instead at the quaint little junction between Shouyou’s ear and cheek as he tries valiantly to think about—about koi fish, or something.
“Huh,” Shouyou lets out suddenly, a frown tumbling across his face. He’s squinting at his phone. “Natsu just said they can’t pick me up from the airport because of scheduling stuff.”
Atsumu wiggles a little on his bed, flattening out the bunched fabric that’s knifing into his ribs. When he fixes his attention back on the screen there’s a bright, expectant pallor to Shouyou’s face. His words simmer through the line, boiling into implication. Atsumu pauses. Blinks.
Then it registers. “Atsumu-san,” Shouyou starts. His eyes are already leaking gallons of sparkles.
“I’m gonna kiss ya at the airport,” Atsumu declares immediately, voice vicious with severity. “I am.”
“Okay!” Shouyou throws his head back in bubbly laughter, sun scaling the length of his neck as he giggles. As he glows. His eyes find the camera again; the pixels are sharp, the eyes are soft, the high-resolution smile burns itself behind Atsumu’s eyelids. “I think Mari-san is gonna get mad at us, though.”
“Mari-chan technically ain’t your manager right now, ya know.”
“Does that mean I won’t get in trouble?” Shouyou whispers.
His voice bleeds caution. But his mouth is curving up, up, aiming for the stratosphere. There’s mischief cleaving his expression open and making him twinkle all the brighter, and Atsumu’s heart is absolutely, positively, giddy in its rhythm.
“Dunno,” he says, lips twitching. “But who cares?”)
+
Shouyou’s flight is in two days.
Okay, this two phase may be getting a tad out of hand. The cursed two's. The blessed two's. The terrible two's of childhood. That one American pop song about being twenty-two that had spurred Atsumu's two-week long crazed attempt at mastering the English language; the song that he and Osamu had been unfathomably obsessed with as grade-schoolers, despite not comprehending a word. The song that he kinda gets, now, if that song had been about love, youth, and all those other watercolored, polaroid clichés that spring to mind and exist across barriers of language, distance, reason.
Two days left. Until the two of them can exist as the two of them, together, and not in two separate corners of the world.
Shouyou’s folding t-shirts into neat little rectangles like a champ to stow away in a dark green suitcase. His figure bouncing in and out of frame on the iPad as a mellow, acoustic Portuguese song drifts through the connection and sighs cozy under their skin. Atsumu’s changed his and Suna’s chat colors thirteen times in the past five minutes, and is currently drafting an essay on the inherent beauty of mustard yellow when a faint, thoughtful noise spills out from Shouyou’s end. His fingers pause.
Then a gentle curve tickling Shouyou’s mouth. “We’re pretty good at this, Atsumu-san!”
Chat bubbles sway under his thumb, overtaken by Suna’s disgusting choice of light teal. Atsumu’s not thinking about that anymore. He’s thinking about this, and being good at this, and the lucid pixels on his screen, and all that you can make of seventeen-thousand kilometers.
“Ya think so?”
“Yeah!” Shouyou’s head pops out around a jacket to bare shining teeth into a grin. “We didn’t lose, you know?”
The quiet Portuguese song is crooning something sappy, probably. Shouyou’s clothes-folding endeavors take a seat on the bench as they shoot dumb matching smiles at each other.
Hearts are huge. Hearts are wide. Hearts can do the impossible and mold themselves around seventeen-thousand kilometers of distance. Atsumu knows this because that’s his damn heart embracing the length in its entirety—riddled tenderly with shared laughter, lagging screens, months and days and coveted little seconds of overlapping time.
Shouyou’s mouth is still stretched wide and candid across his face. Morning rays playing hide and seek between orange curls, unbridled affection teeming out the eyes. Distance, Atsumu thinks, has absolutely nothing on them.
“Yeah,” he murmurs. “Hell yeah we didn’t.”
+
They make a scene. They make headlines. They make out. Gratuitously.
They make, frankly, a Tokyo-sized shitstorm-load of trouble that gifts their manager with a ferocious, month-long migraine; but when Shouyou tiptoes up carelessly to lick warm into his mouth at the heart of Sendai International Airport, when Atsumu’s arms stumble down and all ten fingers meld into the dips of Shouyou’s waist, when Shouyou sighs soft, shaky, South-America-sweetened tongue tracing the roof of his mouth like he’s trying to drink up the entire goddamn sky—
Well. Atsumu’s pretty fucking sure they make some kind of history.