Chapter Text
Keishin doesn’t mind sitting on the bench when Sato’s playing, when the flow of the game becomes immaterial, when there is no need to attend to anything else but his alchemy, as astonishing the thousandth time as the very first.
Sato is a rail-thin, ramshackle boy, elbows and knees and odd, sharp angles. He looks like eggshell, like he’ll crack--until he crouches down, until he bounds up to block, until he is transformed.
Suddenly, the awkwardness is gone, the gangling, and all that is left of him is a coiled, lithe power. A coltish command, and those bony hands are shutting out the spike like that’s what he was made to do.
He does not always make the point, of course. But on this afternoon, he does, impact just inside the line and he comes down onto lively knobbed ankles, smiling like the first lick of a popsicle in summer.
And Keishin is astonished, as dumbfounded as ever he is, because--because it’s never quite believable, when Sato does that.
But he always, always does, and it’s always, always...
“...Beautiful.”
Keishin doesn’t expect the voice, can barely parse it for as soft and shock-awed as it is. But he rends his eyes away from the heave of Sato’s slender breast, turns, and--there he has it. Takeda, the manager, his little notebook all forgotten in his lap.
His jaw hangs, his thick brows rise higher than high, and for a second Keishin thinks he must have heard him wrong--but there’s no arguing about that face, no arguing about the way Takeda turns to him then, face suddenly florid.
“I,” he squawks, “I mean--ahh,” he says, as if chastising himself. He chews his lip.
“A beautiful--a beautiful block!” It’s a declaration, an official line he takes.
Keishin shrugs with it, because there is nothing else to do with his body. Because Takeda is twittering, stuttering on about how he’s gone and done it again, how his mouth never stays shut. How he’s always saying things.
His pale hands wring, and Keishin feels like he does when they change for club, when, without meaning to, he catches sight of a sliver of one of his teammates’ trim bellies, taut thighs. Like he’s just seen something he really oughtn’t.
He laces up the muscles of his jaw, tries to think of anything to say.
All that comes out, though, is a lame and weightless yeah. Noncommittal, like he wasn’t really listening.
He wishes he hadn’t been listening, because then he wouldn’t know. Then it wouldn’t make sense--and really, it doesn’t, but it starts to take shape--why Takeda is here. Possibly the least athletic specimen in school, in Miyagi, in the world, Takeda, who signed up as the manager even though they all tried coaxing him to play.
Takeda, who sits at the side of the gym with his notebook, who takes down the scores, who wants to learn everything there is to know about volleyball without ever touching one. Takeda, who fumbles every practice toss he makes, who is happiest when watching wistfully.
Takeda is here because of Sato. Maybe a little bit for all of them, but it makes the most sense that he’d be here for Sato.
Takeda is here because he wants to see something beautiful.
Keishin wonders, does that mean he’s gay?
There are, of course, rumors. The sorts of things young men say among themselves, posturing, not knowing or caring how they’re meant. Keishin never liked it when the others talked like that, always answered flat and noncommittal when they asked him what he thought. Who on the girls’ team had the most striking attributes, who on the boys’ was a virgin. Whether their oddity, their sweaty-faced boy manager, was gay.
He always preferred to just… let Takeda sit there, on the bench at his side. Watching, the same way he did, waiting to be called on. He wasn’t bad company. He smiled, he was smart, he asked flurries of excited questions. Sometimes, when Coach wasn’t looking, he’d sneak Keishin a piece of his Pocky.
And he was, quite possibly, gay. Quite possibly the only gay person Keishin has ever met. Which is none of Keishin’s business, not everything is Keishin’s business. He knows this, has been fed on it since infancy.
It’s not his business, and he doesn’t want to know. He thinks, again, of flashes of muscle and skin in the locker room, of things not meant for him. It prickles the nape of his neck, the intimacy of it.
It feels overwarm, humid, like the afternoon following a summer squall, like schlepping through the streets with wet sneakers and catching his own face, warped in a rippling puddle.
Keishin was watching the same way. Keishin was thinking the same thing.
That he could bite his tongue against it, that he didn’t humiliate himself, that meant nothing.
He’s finished, he thinks, because suddenly all of his plausible deniability has crumbled, the way he watches his teammates, the players on TV.
There is a beauty there, and he wants to be beside it as much as he wants to make it for himself.
It’s not even news, he thinks, cynical with his teeth deep in his lip. He knew it was Sato for him, since that first afternoon, since the thrumming in his breast could not be chalked up just to the majesty of a vice-captain, an illustrious senpai.
He knows that, and he is here, and he has to school himself through his next breath, take the meaning of it. That he is the same as Takeda, sitting here starving at the outskirt of the gym, his eyes and blood and guts never where they are meant to be.
And he sits in that, swelling with it, until he is called on to get up. Until he fucks up every single toss he makes, until Coach roughs him up for it, over the coals.
Until it is finally, blessedly over, and he can breathe the clean air of the night and go home, lock himself away, brace his hands on the edges of the bathroom sink. Until he can wash his face, and then wash it again, and blow off all his homework and never get to sleep.
Takeda takes him, though, fingertips nipping at the hem of his sweat-soaked shirt, tugging him away. He follows him half-dazed, somewhere quiet, and knows well the panic on his round face.
“Please--!” he says, and the lilt of his voice goes all to pieces, and Keishin thinks he must have been sitting just as stiffly, next to him all night.
“Please, I--I’m sorry.” He chews his soft cheek, sets his jaw, continues. “I always say the wrong thing, or I say too much, and I--oh, everyone already thinks I’m gay, or they think the boy manager thing is weird, and I--Ukai-san, I love this club.” Takeda breathes, recentering himself around that truth. “I don’t want to be a laughingstock.”
His eyes crinkle, his lashes wet. He looks like he might cry. Keishin reaches for him, stretches out his hand halfway.
But what would he do with it, where would he put it? On his shoulder, his wrist? His round red cheek?
He tries not to think, any longer, of the possibility of that.
Just smiles, as best he can. Just says “hey, hey.”
“No worries,” he says, and Takeda glimmers in the dark.
And they walk home in that, and beneath Takeda’s chatter is a warm rushing undertow of knowing, understanding, of knowing that, come what may, Keishin is not alone at the side of the gym.