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The first time Kageyama met Hinata, he wanted him.
Well, not at that first moment outside the bathroom. He thought then that the short knock-kneed kid was just strange and overly brash, if not quite as annoying as his second-string Kitagawa Daiichi teammates flaunting their superiority with nothing to back it up.
But later on the court, when they faced the ill-fated Yukigaoka team - there, Hinata moved with a singular fierceness that Kageyama had never seen before: only ever felt within himself. It gave him the dizzying sense of looking into a mirror, but one in a warped funhouse - the kind where, if you pushed the glass, you could fall right through into an alternate dimension.
That greed for the perfect touch, to keep playing as long as the ball was up, to stay on the court for just one more game, please, just one more god please I’ll do anything: the desire reflected in Hinata's eyes was searing. For Kageyama, it was like coming face to face with the hellish incarnation of his most private intense emotions made flesh.
That kid should have been a joke. He was a joke. But seeing his teammates dismiss Hinata’s team and not take the game seriously - it was like a match to the dark oil boiling inside Kageyama. Because that’s how they dismissed him as well: too serious, too unforgiving, too demanding. How dare he want too much.
Years later, he would feel a twist of regret at how he had impulsively fisted the net after the brutally short game and snapped at Hinata, head down and still wrecked from the loss: “What were you doing for the past three years?” He had no idea then of the bitter salt his voice had poured into wounds left open from hours spent alone, hitting a volleyball against a brick schoolyard wall.
On the wrong side of the mountain, Kageyama had been surrounded by others - yet just as painfully isolated. Mocked and belittled by Oikawa, ignored by his teammates, abandoned by his hitters: day after barren day in a throne they had chained him to.
Unknowingly, he’d burned with desperation for someone who would take him - and this game that was no game at all - as seriously as he took himself. And that whole time, Hinata might as well have been an ocean away.
Now when there was only the net between them, Kageyama felt the unshed weight of three wasted years in his snarl, and he saw Hinata’s eyes widen with frustration and absolute fury.
The match dropped, the oil flared, and oh, how he wanted.
Having Hinata was even worse.
At Karasuno, his presence seeped effortlessly into Kageyama’s pores: always running, chattering, challenging. He blazed too brightly and unapologetically wrested all the attention away. And that’s why, Kageyama reminded himself, Hinata made such a good decoy for their opponents.
It didn’t explain why Kageyama couldn’t look away either.
At first, it was easy to be verbally dismissive during tryouts - second nature to him by now. Hinata was pure instinct and no strategy. And Kageyama meant what he had said: that he wouldn’t toss to anyone who wasn’t essential to winning.
But with Hinata, Kageyama knew it was only a matter of time before that toss came - and his hands itched for it. Not because he knew what Hinata was going to do, but because he didn’t. On either side of the net, the one person he kept finding hardest to read on the court was Hinata. Too unpredictable, always the X-factor - that’s what made him dangerous for a setter.
Of course, as a person, Hinata was refreshingly simple: he ate, lived, and breathed volleyball, and he wanted to win at everything. It was a relief to Kageyama after years of trying and failing to parse complex social interactions. Instead, their relationship was a series of shoulders bumping hard enough to rattle, arguing over the last bun or milk box, slumping against each other in exhaustion on the bus back from a match, pencil jabs in extra study sessions, and full-out races over the mountain. They quickly developed a reputation: if you want to find one, just look for the other yanking his chain.
Kageyama had been the untouchable king, and now he found himself dethroned daily by an irreverent poke in the stomach or a wrist grabbed too-tight in excitement, leaving swollen flesh behind. The human contact spread, as the steady beam of Hinata’s sun reflected onto what had previously been a solitary moon in the sky. Now Nishinoya would slap Kageyama on the back after an especially good serve, Tanaka ruffled his hair, and Suga dropped fond sighs that might as well have been an embrace. As if Kageyama - “Tiredyama! Crankyama!” - had always been a mere mortal, no more heroic or flawed than the rest.
And yet even among these fragile new bonds, Kageyama had never had anyone trust him so completely the way that Hinata did. Others dismissed as a fluke the way that Hinata would leap without hesitation for Kageyama’s quick with his eyes closed, arm out in total supplication. They didn’t know what Kageyama did: that if he were to send the ball over a cliff, Hinata would follow it with total unshakable faith in his toss.
The feeling was heady. Kageyama had always been drawn to the role of the setter as the team’s control tower, but he had never truly felt that degree of sheer power answering to his call. Yes, the drug was risky, but the hit could rock your world. And for an addict, there’s no other choice.
It was the first time they lost to Aoba Johsai that Kageyama knew he had a problem.
In the last play, it felt like he was frozen: watching the ball hit the floor from Seijoh’s three-person block of Hinata's spike before he even processed that he had sent him the quick. Typical sharp-eyed Oikawa had known even before he knew himself: when he was under stress and crippled by fatigue, his unconscious would toss not to the team’s ace - but to Hinata. The one person he knew would always meet him completely without fail. As Oikawa told him later, and he knew it was a criticism: Karasuno #10 has you wrapped around his little finger.
But Oikawa had no idea how far the infection had advanced. For the first time, Kageyama felt rancid shame at his weakness. His post-game apology only inspired a violent rage from Hinata: “You don’t say sorry for tossing to me!” But for days afterward, he agonized, hitting serve after serve in penance until his palm turned an angry blistering red and his eyes pricked.
How can anyone trust in another person so fervently? It isn’t right, and it isn’t fair. That’s what Kageyama was thinking when he choked Hinata and threw him to the ground while Yachi screamed for help.
Over and over as the shadows lengthened, Hinata had begged for a toss that he just couldn’t deliver: a quick that Hinata could direct himself with full awareness. But it was so much harder than Hinata could conceive. Kageyama flushed with frustration and embarrassment; he’d been told he was a genius for so long that he couldn’t remember the last time he felt deficient in skill. Only Hinata dared to ask the impossible of him.
When Hinata wouldn’t let it drop, grabbed him by the wrist already fisted in his shirt, and declared that he needed to be able to compete on his own, Kageyama lost it. “Your selfishness is going to destroy the team,” he hissed with teeth bared, but he knew it was his own selfish need that was roiling inside him. How could Hinata be trying to move beyond him already?
They fought viciously, in a way that was far beyond their usual bickering until Tanaka had torn them apart. The only times he had ever felt this too-intimate resentment was when he fought with his mom about the time he spent on volleyball because she was worried that he wasn’t sleeping or doing well in school or making friends. It always made him feel too small for his body, like he might scratch out the eyes of this person who dared to keep looking at him with such trusting expectation, no matter how many times he let them down.
And the desire to be worthy of that person, whose sheer belief in you is that endless, is what forces you to evolve. When he was desperate enough to debase himself, Kageyama went to Oikawa, who didn’t hesitate to call him out: “Are you giving him the tosses he wants?”
Hinata wanted to be better, he needed to be better, and if Kageyama wasn’t going to help him, he would be left behind as wreckage in his relentless wake. Now that Kageyama had Hinata, he couldn’t imagine not having him.
He tried anyway. His mouth went dry.
By the time Kageyama got back from the Tokyo training camp, he was done with trying to quit Hinata. Now he was just trying to keep a hold of him in any way possible.
Every night in the dormitory, wrung out from playing with the best of the best, he had mentally excoriated himself with a useless litany: he is my weakness, he is my craving, my first and last urge. Wanting him is selfish, having him is wrong. He holds me back, he’s nobody, he’s no one no one.
During each day’s training, Kageyama struggled to form bonds with his new teammates; he’d forgotten what it was like to play with others who took his comments personally or with affront. He tried to be sincere and communicative, the way he’d learned in Karasuno, and he still ended up with that irritating “goody two-shoes” moniker.
He was relieved to get back to Miyagi, where it seemed like nothing had changed. But Yamaguchi laughed in the Karasuno locker room as he filled Kageyama in on the stories he’d had from Tsukishima: Hinata getting no respect at Shiratorizawa’s training camp, Hinata getting no tosses, Hinata as ball boy. He’s nothing without that #9 genius setter, they’d said.
Kageyama didn’t laugh because: if only they knew.
In truth, Hinata had gotten sharper while he was gone, like a knife that had learned to wield itself. Sharp enough that he could pick up on the strategic telegraphing of subtle movements across the net. Before, it had seemed like Hinata didn’t think at all, while Kageyama was running constant calculations of scenarios in his head. Now, he watched as Hinata’s eyes narrowed, his field broadened, and he absorbed what he saw so quickly that it became less science and more art.
Because of Hinata and his unflinching running commentary, Kageyama started to understand the others and what they needed from him too: the high toss for Tsukishima, the crisp setup for a line shot for Tanaka, a powerful cross for Asahi. They weren’t machines, and neither was Kageyama. They all got tired and cranky sometimes, and yet they would keep playing this beautiful game that had at some point changed for him from an equation to a dance.
The run-up to the Spring Interhigh only grew more frenzied. Sometimes it felt like the heat between him and Hinata - whether they were on the same side of the net in a match, or opposite during a scrimmage - would burn him right out of his skin. It didn’t matter if they stumbled like dead men walking after endless volleys: they always begged for one more serve, one more toss, one more, one more I swear just the last one. He wouldn’t know till he got home after practice and tried to take his t-shirt off - when his cramping arms couldn’t raise high enough to pull it over his head - just how much he had abused his body, chasing Hinata like one greedy crow veering after another.
One day, he knew Hinata would leave him. Oh, everyone would think it was the other way around: that Kageyama would get pulled up to the pros and then the Olympics, and Hinata wouldn’t be able to follow. But Kageyama knew that Hinata would do anything to keep playing volleyball, in any form, anywhere - and that didn’t translate to a quiet life in Miyagi. He would leave and take the fire with him, and Kageyama would keep playing too, just colder, and try not to remember what it was like to want.
But for now, he didn't have to think about that. He could raise his arms, bend over backward to hit the toss, and see in that moment Hinata framed perfectly between the triangle of his fingers: rising up in perpetual motion, his own to have and to hold until his hands ached.
This, he would dare to keep for himself, till nothing but the embers were left.