Work Text:
Title: Time Away
Prompt: Road Trip | Day-off | Planning
“Nothing is missing?” Tsukishima asked when Kageyama brought out the last suitcase and put it in the back of the car.
“I don’t think so,” Kageyama replied, but his expression was that of contemplation.
“Phone? Wallet?” Tsukishima listed, and Kageyama’s eyes widened. He immediately groped for them in his jeans pocket. His phone was there, but his wallet wasn’t.
“Where’s my wallet?”
Tsukishima double checked the suitcases, making sure that they prepared everything from shirts and socks to underwear. “I saw it on the TV console yesterday morning. Not sure if you moved it.”
“I didn’t.” Kageyama abruptly turned back and paused in front of the elevator. Someone was using it up on the tenth floor. Cursing under his breath, he hurriedly ran back up to the fifth floor of their apartment complex. He was lucky he was an athlete, or else fainting from running up and down to fetch forgotten things may not be a rare occurrence.
Tsukishima shook his head at his boyfriend’s forgetfulness. Starting up the car, he looked at the gas level and made sure the car was in a perfect condition for a long trip.
Kageyama got a room reservation at an onsen ryokan in Kyoto, which was an 11-hour drive from Miyagi. It was free though, an offer from Schweiden Adlers to its players. Tsukishima had refused to go when Kageyama came home with a reservation ticket for a hotel in Tokyo. He had suspected that Kageyama’s teammates probably got the same place booked--free things never came with a variation--and there was no way he was going to spend their day-offs in a place where they could run into an acquaintance any minute. Kageyama, the good boyfriend he was, really went back to the Schweiden Adlers facility and asked for a different place. If possible , Tsukishima told him to add to the end of his sentence so that it wouldn’t sound like a demand.
The result was a room reservation at a luxurious onsen ryokan in Kyoto. And somehow, instead of a double room like the Tokyo’s ones, Kageyama brought back a one king-size deluxe room ticket.
The cocky idiot , Tsukishima had mused when the answer came to him that Kageyama wanted to sleep in the same bed like they did at home.
The door on the passenger side was pulled open. Kageyama got into his seat with a light pant. “Got it.”
Smirking, Tsukishima teased him with a “nice sprint, King” and pulled out of the parking lot. He set the navigation to the ryokan and attached his phone onto the holder next to the steering wheel, letting the program lead the way. Their ride was in comfortable silence after that.
Kageyama looked out of the window. It was seven in the morning, but the sky was still dark. The sun is always lazy in winter. They had a plan to spend three days and two nights at a traditional ryokan, but the place itself was not their only goal. It had been Kageyama’s idea to go on a relaxing and a self-satisfying trip. He had seen people on a travel TV program go around Japan without a real destination in mind and just get off at any tourist attractions that they passed. Kageyama liked that idea. Tsukishima called it a road trip because they would stop at any interesting places along the way to sightsee and maybe take a couple photos.
“Did you bring any motion sickness medicine?” Kageyama asked a little while after they drove into Shiroishi district at the edge of Miyagi. Tsukishima was prepared though. He knew that Kageyama sometimes had motion sickness when he tried to read or was on his phone in a moving vehicle.
“In the panel on your side. There’s a bottle of water in there too.”
“Thanks.” After five years into the relationship, Kageyama learned that Tsukishima was more observant than he had given him credits. Sometimes the blonde acted like he didn’t care or treated things that Kageyama said lightly, but he memorized them all. Kageyama still found himself surprised at Tsukishima’s attentiveness from time to time, like when Tsukishima took one look at his troubled face and told him to take that teammate, whoever he was, to a meal and apologize for whatever he had done wrong, all before Kageyama even had to tell him what had happened. And he wasn’t even wrong in assuming that the problem was with Kageyama that time.
Tsukishima glanced at Kageyama to make sure he took the right number of pills to effectively keep nausea away before looking back to the phone that had a map opened. “There’s a fox village a couple kilometers from here. Do you want to go see what they have?”
Kageyama’s eyes lit up. “Fox?”
Honestly, it still amazed Tsukishima how wide a range of emotion Kageyama conveyed through his eyes. And it amazed him even more that some people couldn’t see it and assumed that Kageyama was a close-off person with a bad personality.
“I’ll take that as a yes.” Tsukishima reached out to add the fox village to their stops, and the route adjusted itself a bit. It took about twenty minutes of repeated curves that almost made Kageyama puked his gut out before Tsukishima finally pulled into a parking lot in front of a gorilla statue.
“Sorry, I didn’t think the road would be this curvy.”
Waving his hand dismissively and quickly jumping out of the car, Kageyama inhaled the cold dry air of December and blew out his breath just to watch the air fog up. One hand rested over his belly to tame down whatever his breakfast had turned into during the past few hours.
Tsukishima gathered up his camera equipment while he let Kageyama come down from the nauseous feeling in his stomach by walking around. The camera battery was fully charged last night, but he brought along a spare one just in case. He turned off the engine and locked the car before looking around. The entrance was quite simple, a wooden kouraimon gate with a welcome sign. Tsukishima took a picture of the gate with the name of the place.
Kageyama came up to him and blew a breath. “Let’s go.”
They paid 1000 yen each for a ticket. They planned to reach Kyoto by tonight, so they didn’t have much time to linger. Kageyama read a brochure that was free to take in front of the information desk and made a beeline to the open area where tourists could get close to foxes. The lady at the front told them not to feed or touch the foxes because they might get stressed at the approach, but they were free to take a picture and get close.
“This is great. They are sleeping.” Kageyama said in a quiet voice when he saw that most foxes were lounging on pieces of wood that were laid around the place, their eyes closed and their body expanding and deflating in a stable rhythm. Most people would feel down if the animals they visited were asleep, but not Kageyama, whom animals seemed to think of as unpleasant. Their sleep time was the best time for Kageyama to get close without scaring them away.
Tsukishima took a picture of the sleeping foxes from different angles. Some of the awake ones looked at him with big, bright eyes from where they were lying down, so he took out his phone and snapped a selfie. By the time he took the tenth photo of the same fox, Kageyama had already gone ahead to the bench area where other fluffy foxes were lazily rolling around.
Seeing that unbothered behavior, Tsukishima thought that foxes might be his spirit animal.
He caught up to Kageyama, who was stealthily shifting closer to an orange fox step by step. When he got close enough, Kageyama crouched down and lowered his head until his eyes were at the same level as the fox. Tsukishima knew Kageyama didn’t dare reach out any closer, but just seeing curiosity reflecting in his blue eyes and rosy color on his cheeks from the cold was adorable enough for him to quickly find a nice angle to take a picture of this interaction.
Kageyama stayed like that for almost three minutes before he straightened up. Tsukishima noticed a fox that was lying on a wood swing and suddenly thought of someone with an irritating face. He stifled a giggle and nudged Kageyama’s shoulder to get his attention.
“Chotto, King, don’t you think that fox looks like the younger Miya twin?”
“Atsumu-san?”
Tsukishima pointed to the one that he was talking about, and Kageyama’s jaw dropped at the sight of a yellow-furred fox who was yawning with its mouth wide before settling down to its peaceful nap again. “That’s true.”
“Why don’t you make some funny pose with it?” I’m going to send it to Hinata , he thought but didn’t say the last part out loud.
Kageyama made a face that usually meant he was either thinking hard or constipating hard. Tsukishima could literally see the moment that a light bulb lit up in Kageyama’s head, when the man got a little closer and stood a couple feet in front of the fox. He did a volleyball receiving pose under the yellow animal and made a triumphant face that would drive anyone insane. It used to make Tsukishima want to rip his own hair out in high school, so he could testify to that.
Way to go , Tsukishima snorted as he took a picture of Kageyama receiving ‘Miya Atsumu.’
They had fun taking photos of the foxes and, in Kageyama’s case, trying to get close to any fox that wasn’t awake. Tsukishima kept the time. When he glanced down at his watch and saw that they had spent half an hour at the fox village already, he told Kageyama that it was time to get going. Kageyama nodded, waving a goodbye to the unconscious foxes. They got out of there, but not before buying a fox keychain from the souvenir store at the exit.
Getting on to the road again, Tsukishima plugged up his phone to make sure the battery didn’t run out before they reached Kyoto and let it resume its navigating duty.
During the ride, Kageyama turned on the radio, but the music was not to his taste. Looking over to Tsukishima, who couldn’t take his eyes off the road but quirked his brows as a question, he asked, “Can you play some music? The ones you usually play when you read.”
“Hm. You can look for it on my phone, just leave the navigation voice on.” He instructed, and Kageyama reached out to take the phone out of the holder. “The playlist is hoshizora .”
“Romantic,” Kageyama commented lightly and looked for the kanji of the word star and sky. A few seconds later, a soft violin and piano played from the car stereo that was connected to the phone via bluetooth.
The drive went quiet again, save for the soft music that played between them and Kageyama’s voice that pointed out something he thought was interesting along the way. When they entered the Onuma district of Fukushima, it was already noon. Tsukishima saw an interesting direction sign on the side of the road.
“No. 1 Tadami Bridge View Spot,” he read the kanji out loud. “What do you think?”
Kageyama searched the spot on his phone and nodded at the review pictures from other tourists. “Looks good. Let’s go, and then we can find something to eat around there.”
“There are some snacks in the compartment if you want to have something light before the meal.”
This time it took them ten minutes to reach the Ozekaido Mishima Juku Roadside Station, where they could park the car. The view spot was a bit further up the hill, and the only way to get there was to walk. Luckily, there wasn’t much snow on the ground, so the way up was less exhausting than it should have been.
The view spot was on a hill, next to a railroad bridge that linked together two mountains and spanned across a frozen river. It overlooked the snow-covered mountains on both sides of the old bridge, the emerald blue water of the river beneath, and also other mountains in the back that complimented the whole sight.
From the information brochure in Tsukishima’s hand, the train line was first opened in the 19th century, which explained the marvelling sensation that Tsukishima was feeling. It was the same as when he looked at magnificent century-old artworks at the museum. It was the charm of the past.
“We’re lucky. The train will come in a few minutes.” Kageyama said after reading the train schedule that was on the board at the view spot. The attraction of this place was the view of the bridge and the opportunity to take a picture of an old train while it was crossing the wide river.
Tsukishima readied his camera, setting the shutter fast enough to repeatedly capture the train when it was in the middle of the bridge. Reaching them before the train was its sound. Kageyama leaned on the rail that kept tourists from falling off and kept an eye on the rail line. When the front of the train emerged from the trees on one side, Tsukishima followed it with his camera and gave the shutter button a long press that triggered a burst function to continuously take pictures.
When the train passed and disappeared into another side of the treeline, Kageyama bounced beside him excitedly. “Did you get it?”
Looking at the dozens of pictures that he just took, Tsukishima found the one that captured the train when it was exactly in the middle of the bridge. “I think so.” He passed the camera to Kageyama to let him admire the pictures. Tsukishima took in a deep breath and slowly exhaled while looking at the entrancing combination of wintertime nature and vintage railroad in front of him. Taking pictures was important because it kept the memory alive, but appreciating the place itself while he was still here was good too.
After he was done looking at the pictures, Kageyama stood beside him and looked at trees, snow, the blue sky, and distant hills, one at a time. There was, again, comfortable silence between them that made the experience all the more memorable. They stayed at the view spot for a couple minutes longer, before Kageyama decided that it was time for lunch. They found a nabe restaurant nearby and had a nice, warm meal that chased away the cold for the time being.
They didn’t stop anywhere else for the rest of the day because they needed to get to the ryokan. The room was reserved from today to the next two days, so they had to reach the place tonight. They still had time to visit any spot that they had left out on the way back.
Kageyama switched with Tsukishima and drove for a couple hours until they reached Aichi Prefecture, and the rest of the trip was Tsukishima’s turn. They reach the onsen ryokan at almost ten at night. Kageyama, who had a strict sleep schedule, fortunately didn’t complain about it since it was a once in a year occurrence. They were starving by the time they were introduced to their private establishment that had a traditional japanese room and a private onsen at the back.
The ryokan’s employee who led them to their room was understanding enough with their food order even though it was late. She explained that the kitchen was usually open all night to serve the ryokan ’s customers who needed a late meal or wanted to sightsee at night, and that she would be back with two sets of kaiseki meals.
While waiting, Tsukishima brought out his camera and walked around the large room. Even though he called it a room, this place was more like a house that was separate from other lodgings. The interior was laid with tatami flooring and light oak wooden structure that made the place easy on the eyes. He heaved a sigh of relief when the bed was a modern one, with a soft-looking cushion and a thick comforter, not the futon like he had imagined. Exhaustion must be taking over him because Tsukishima thought that the bed was beckoning him a welcoming hand.
“Tsukishima!” Kageyama yelled from a room over where Tsukishima thought was a dining area. “They said we can eat in the onsen. Let’s go!”
It was admirable how Kageyama managed to stay energetic even after eleven hours in the car.
Tsukishima walked back to where Kageyama was holding his own kaiseki dinner that was served in a wooden tray. Tsukishima picked his meal up and followed his boyfriend to the back of the lodging, where a large shoji door opened up, leading to a private onsen that was decorated with large rocks and plants to give a one-with-nature feeling. A considerable distance away was a tall bamboo wall and tree lines that protect their privacy from the outside world.
Kageyama slowly released his tray onto the water in the onsen and carefully lifted his hand away. When it stayed floating, he turned away to look for a towel. He brought a bucket of towels and bathing equipment from a table next to the door and laid it down at the edge of the pool. Tsukishima followed suit with the food tray and started stripping down.
There was no need for embarrassment. Kageyama had seen everything there was to see of him, and whatever modesty he had was chased away by the anticipation of warm water against his exhausted muscles. Tsukishima tested the water temperature with his feet and slowly sank down until the water surface reached his collar bones.
Releasing a blissful sigh, he turned to see Kageyama following him to the deeper part of the onsen, where the largest rock was, with their trays of food dragging behind him.
“It feels good...” Kageyama sat down beside Tsukishima and played with the water around him.
“Nn,” Tsukishima hummed in agreement. He stayed like that for a while until he felt the tightness in his arms and legs faded away and his stomach started to growl again after staying quiet for almost half an hour. Kaiseki was usually served in courses, but since Kageyama wanted to eat it at the onsen, he told the ryokan ’s employee to serve them all in a single tray. Tsukishima still ate it according to the usual serving order anyway. Let’s just say he did it for the aesthetic and not the Japanese tradition that was drilled into his head in one of his major courses in college.
The bathing was long and relaxing. Tsukishima didn’t notice how much time had passed until he went back inside and saw that the clock was pointing at twelve.
They left the empty food trays at the front gate for the ryokan ’s employee to retrieve and went straight to bed. They were still in white bathrobes, but neither of them cared. Sleep was calling, so sleeping they would do. Kageyama dug himself into the blanket and did a little shudder that usually happened at the transition between places with different temperatures. Tsukishima charged his phone and the camera battery and followed Kageyama into bed.
The soft mattress was a blessing to his back after a long day, and Tsukishima felt like he was melting into it.
“It was a good trip. The Tadami Bridge was pretty...” Kageyama said quietly, recalling the beauty of nature that he could see from on top of the hill.
“Yeah...”
“Did you send Atsumu-san the photo?”
Of course Kageyama would know his intention. Tsukishima shook his head, an action that made a rustling sound on the pillow. “I don’t have his phone number. I’ll send it to Hinata tomorrow.”
“Hinata will love it and tease Atsumu-san non-stop.”
“Hm...” Tsukishima hummed. The warm bath was good. Now that tension seeped away from his body, his eyelids were getting heavier by seconds.
“Are you going to sleep now?” Kageyama asked in the quiet room.
Tsukishima answered in mumbled words that almost didn’t mean anything. “I think so.”
“Alright.” The mattress on Kageyama’s side moved a bit until blue eyes were right in Tsukishima’s face. Kageyama leaned down and gave Tsukishima’s forehead a soft kiss. “Good night, Kei.”
“Mn...” Tsukishima peeled one of his eyes open to see Kageyama turning one side of his face to him, waiting for a customary kiss that they exchanged every night before bed.
Too lazy to move, Tsukishima pulled Kageyama down a little more and gave him a kiss on the cheek.
"Goodnight, Tobio."
The light was turned off, and they slept like a rock into the noon of tomorrow.