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Hinata Shouyou likes Kageyama Tobio.
At least that was what he concludes as he stands there in the middle of the court during practice one day as the realization strikes him like lightning when Nishinoya yells out “Rolling Thunder!” in the back ground real loud.
There is a boom and clap, followed by pain and he thinks that Nishinoya has somehow perfected Rolling Thunder in a literal sense, but as he lies with his back on the gym floor and stares up at the lights above, Hinata realizes that he isn’t hit by thunder, but by a flying volleyball.
“Hinata, are you okay?” he hears Suga asking him, followed by a frighten, “I’m so sorry!” from Asahi.
He is about to bounce back up with a laugh and say that he is fine when a dark shadow looms over him, silencing whatever sound is stuck in his throat.
Kageyama’s face is twisted into a scowl and Hinata swears that each time he frowns, every line on his face just gets deeper and deeper and as much as a part of Hinata wants to poke fun at him by commenting on how the guy was going to look like a wrinkly grandpa if he doesn’t stop making those sorts of faces, survival instinct is faster and he quickly scrambles onto his butt and scoots back a few meters away from the fuming human volcano in record speed.
“Don’t daydream in the middle of practice, dumbass!”
Kageyama comes trudging over to him and as his head is put in that agonizing grip, Hinata can’t help but wonder why he likes this guy in the first place when he is subjected to these kinds of things every single day.
It isn’t like Kageyama is a bad person. Not at all. Talk bad about him and Hinata will surely come to his defense. The thing is that Kageyama is just…well, Kageyama—the towering, gloomy king with an award winning scowl permanently etched onto his face that would send most people scurrying the other way for fear of their life. The guy is pretty cool looking and if he would just lighten up the atmosphere and smile a bit more—okay no wait, the smile has been proven not to work—then Hinata is sure that he will have more friends and maybe even girls flocking to him. So really, aside from his superb skills in volleyball, Hinata sees nothing very appealing in this guy.
Or at least that’s what he used to think anyways.
He doesn’t know when it had started, but the more time they spent together, Hinata started to notice little things about Kageyama that he never noticed before.
Kageyama doesn’t really pay that much attention in class. He may be looking at the board, but the pen in his hand had stopped moving fifteen minutes ago in the middle of a bullet point he never completed, and there’s a distant look in his eyes, staring at something that only he can see. Hinata sometimes wonder what Kageyama is staring at and he too will stare ahead even though it proves futile.
Or perhaps not, because knowing Kageyama it is probably something that has to do about volleyball. There are times when Hinata can’t really tell, but sometimes Kageyama will get this really focused look in his eyes—a spark of fire in the midst of blue. His jaws will tense up slightly and his eyebrows slightly furrows. And that is when Hinata knows that Kageyama has volleyball on his mind—a new way to improve or a new kind of play perhaps, and he is mapping it all out in his mind, trying to visualize it as clear as possible.
Then the pen in his hand will move as he twirls it around his fingers, and his knee will shake up and down with a restlessness and urge to play. Hinata seeing this will start fidgeting in his seat as well because darn it, he really wants to play volleyball now! Sometimes the teacher notices him and asks if he wants to go to the bathroom or scold him for not being able to sit still. This earns him a funny look from Kageyama which normally just says, “Dumbass”, because really, that’s the best insult he knows. And Hinata usually replies with a goofy smile to which Kageyama will roll his eyes in response to.
Well, this is your fault in the first place!
But Kageyama never knows that.
Kageyama also never knows that when he smiles naturally, it makes Hinata’s heart do what he sees happen in cheesy shoujo manga: skipping a beat.
He is more than sure that he is not some shoujo manga heroine that his female classmates and even Natsu read about, but why does he feel just like one whenever Kageyama smiles for real?
Like that one time when they find two abandoned puppies in a box on the side of the road on the way home. Of course, the puppies takes an instant liking to Hinata, licking his hands and face, but when Kageyama tries to pick one up, it starts wailing, struggling to free itself from those hands.
“Geez, you’re scaring it!” Hinata shouts, quickly taking the puppy away. It stops crying in almost an instant. “Animals must really hate you, huh?” he says, holding back a snicker because hey, there aren’t many opportunities that he could make fun of Kageyama.
“…Yeah, they do.”
Hinata does not expect that kind of response from Kageyama in that kind of voice; he sounds like a kicked puppy left out in the downpour instead of the little guys he is holding. He…really looked upset.
Hinata is dumbfounded for a moment before he places the puppies back in the box. “Wait right here!” he tells a confused Kageyama before dashing off.
Ten minutes later he comes back with a bag of puppy treats that he had asked from a house not too far away because he remembered them having puppies.
“Here,” he drops some in Kageyama’s hands who stares at the round treats and then at Hinata’s face. “Get on the same level as them and feed them!” he explains the obvious.
And when Kageyama kneels down on the ground with his hand stretched out and the puppies carefully makes their way to him, slowly taking the treats, Kageyama’s whole face lights up and there’s this innocent smile on his face that resembles that of a happy child. It is so-not-Kageyama-like, yet at the same time, so-Kageyama-like, and it makes heat rush to Hinata’s face and he wants to whip out his phone right there and then to capture this never before seen moment because for the first time ever, Hinata discovers that Kageyama can actually be placed as a definition next to the word ‘cute’ in the dictionary.
He continues to stare with his heart beating fast and with no way to calm it down.
But there is another time that Kageyama makes Hinata’s heart beat faster than ever.
On the court.
Those special tosses meant especially for him, the fulfilling and burning feel of the ball in the palm of his hand when he slams it down on the other side of the net—the other side of the net and the view of the horizon beyond those walls that he is able to see thanks to Kageyama.
“As long as I’m here, you’re invincible!” Kageyama had told him and continues to tell him.
Hinata hangs onto those words, believes in them, engraves them onto his heart, allows it to resonate within him.
And he swears that he too will make Kageyama invincible as long as he is here.
Because Kageyama has given him so much, Hinata will work twice as hard to give just as much back.
There’s so much feeling inside of him, beating and pounding with such vigor that Hinata just cannot contain them in anymore
“I want to stand on the court!” (“Yeah, of course.”) turns into “I want to stand on the court with you!” (“If it isn’t me tossing to you then who will it be, dumbass?”) which turns into “I want to stand by your side” (“Putting it that way sounds weird…”) which turns into “Stand by your side as in, you know, not just on the court…” (“Hah? What the hell are you trying to say, dumbass?”) which then turns into “What I mean to say is that…I uh…like you!”
Kageyama falls completely silent and Hinata is sure that he is mad at him. He drops his eyes to the ground, looking at his feet before there’s an explosion of “Dumbass! Dumbass, Hinata! Dumbass!” from above him.
Hinata looks up and is faced-to-faced with a very red Kageyama and Hinata doesn’t know if the color is from anger or embarrassment or both.
“Dumbass, dumbass, dumbass, dumbass!” that deep voice shouts over and over again, and if words are actual bullets, Hinata would have twenty holes in him by now.
He doesn’t run away, only watches Kageyama tire himself out, chest heaving from the outburst. Kageyama then looks away.
Minutes passes before he looks back at Hinata and those sharp eyes are much softer than before—than Hinata has ever seen them—and it makes his heart beat like crazy inside his chest to the point that he is sure that Kageyama can hear it.
He just about dies—in a good way—at Kageyama’s next words.
“That’s my line, dumbass. I like you too.”