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✧ ✧ ✧
Akaashi Keiji moves through life quietly.
He has always been a secondary character, off-center and in the background, softly supporting the boy he loves who shines brighter than a thousand stars. Bokuto is naturally like that—he doesn’t have to try; he merely exists as his fullest and most honest self, and the world is dazzled. Bokuto enters a room and yells Hey, hey, hey! and everyone turns their heads to look. Bokuto sees something he loves and goes bounding towards it without ever holding back.
Akaashi has never been able to bring himself to that volume. Akaashi is calm words of affirmation in the middle of matches, stolen glances whenever he tosses a ball across the court, guarded desires and whispers that never leave his tongue. But when his captain turns to him in the middle of a tournament with every single light in the universe shining in his golden eyes and yells, We are the protagonists of the world! Akaashi believes him. It’s the only time he’s ever felt like a protagonist.
✧ ✧ ✧
Akaashi Keiji knows many things
He knows exactly what to say when Bokuto gets in one of his moods. He knows exactly how to make a game-saving, split-second decision to send the ball in the right place. He knows exactly what his future holds.
He knows that volleyball is the highlight of his youth, but it will remain just that—a part of his youth. When he steps off the court at nationals his third year, he knows that this is the last time he will ever play volleyball.
Akaashi Keiji graduates from Fukurodani Academy with decent grades and teacher recommendations laced with praise, and he moves on. He embarks on a new chapter of his life at Hitotsubashi University and studies modern literature (it was always his strongest subject in high school). He trades phone numbers with classmates, pulls all-nighters writing countless papers, drinks too much at parties and regrets it the morning after when he tastes bile between his teeth. He falls out of touch with the brightest star in his life—between Akaashi’s heavy course load and Bokuto’s demanding pro-athlete schedule, the daily calls become weekly texts which become monthly check-ins which fade into near-nothingness—and he fills the hole in his heart with new friends, new extracurriculars, and even a few coffee dates that never pan out. He spends his winters at study sessions in the library and summers at unpaid and overworked internships, regrets his major when he’s 120 pages into his senior thesis and ready to give up, and eventually graduates with above-average but not dean’s list-worthy grades.
His parents come to the graduation ceremony and take him out to dinner afterward. It’s at a nice restaurant: not too fancy but distinguished enough for a celebratory meal. He looks around the table at supposedly the most important people in his life, and he tries to feel proud or excited or anything, really, but he mostly just feels a sense of completion. He has predicted every step of his life thus far, and right now he is standing on the precipice of yet another chapter that is closing. He does not know what comes next, but he peeks over the edge of the cliff and decides to not jump.
✧ ✧ ✧
Akaashi Keiji learns the art of settling.
He applies and gets rejected from a literary magazine but accepts a decent-enough job as a shonen manga editor. He goes to work, keeps his head down, and returns every night to his studio apartment. And Akaashi is happy, he really is. His job is not what he expected but it’s respectable, and he enjoys the process of making collaborative art with his coworkers. His apartment is small and the faucet leaks, but it’s close enough to the train station to make the convenience worth it. He goes out for drinks and occasionally stumbles home with a stranger who never feels quite right but is enough to satisfy his needs. He speaks up in meetings when appropriate and silently listens to music on his daily commute. He reads novels (without analyzing them) at night and writes creative fiction (that will never get published) during the weekends.
His life is extraordinarily ordinary, and he likes it that way. He is but a speck of dust in the vast expanse of Tokyo, of all of Japan, of the whole universe.
✧ ✧ ✧
Akaashi Keiji is, on occasion, a man of indulgence.
He tries to keep a firm grip on all aspects of his life, but he has always had a weak spot for his vices. When he stops by the konbini across the street from his apartment, he always buys a stick of Hi-Chew to soothe his sweet tooth. He has, more than once, returned home far too late for a weeknight because he glanced at a bookstore window display and got distracted by an interesting title. Back in high school, he was known as the level-headed and composed team setter, but Bokuto could always capitalize on the adrenaline of competition and drag an uncharacteristically ear-splitting victory scream out of him.
Maybe that’s why Akaashi Keiji, 22 years old, convinces one of his artists to board a two-hour, 11,000-yen train ride to Sendai with him to attend a professional league volleyball match under the guise of a sports manga pitch. He tries to ignore the voice in his head that reminds him he really, honestly, deep down is there for a boy he fell in love with when he was 17. He tries to blend in—He strategically bought tickets that situate himself and his coworker somewhere in the middle rows of the stadium, not too far in the back but not too close to the front, either. He even dresses in his most neutral outfit of a black turtleneck, dark jeans, and a brown coat—but still gets recognized as Fukurodani’s former setter by an onigiri vendor who turns out to be Miya Osamu himself. He shares snacks with his companion and makes polite, professional small talk. He claps and cheers when he’s supposed to but doesn’t yell alongside with the fans screaming BOKUTO BEAAAAAM. When the game ends, Akaashi stands up and starts to climb the stairs toward the exit, but he hesitates.
He should really leave, try to beat the crowd traffic, maybe even have enough time to buy a second batch of Onigiri Miya before he goes home. If he starts speedwalking now, he can catch the next train to Tokyo with enough hours to spare for a quiet Sunday evening at home. He’s an adult with a job to attend to tomorrow, and the responsible course of action would be to simply file this day away as a fun once-in-a-while work excursion and move on with his life.
Bokuto Koutarou, however, was and always will be Akaashi’s greatest indulgence.
Ultimately, Akaashi decides that he’s made it all the way here so he might as well say hello to his old friend. He slowly wades through the crowd to the front rail that separates himself from the court and takes a deep breath in a desperate attempt to compose himself. He tries to summon the nerve to call out the name of a star that used to shine so brightly in his life, a name that has not left his tongue in nearly five years.
Bokuto is right there, surrounded by adoring fans he didn’t have when Akaashi last saw him, but he has the same broad shoulders and gravity-defying hair and face-splitting grin that Akaashi remembers from a lifetime ago.
Akaashi never gets the chance to call out the name because before he can even open his mouth, Bokuto whips his head around and looks directly at him, and the world melts away like he's in a goddamn movie. And when Bokuto calls out Akaashi’s name loud and clear over the buzz of the crowd with the same light in his eyes as half a decade ago, Akaashi finally feels like a protagonist again.