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Sawamura Daichi wakes up with the sun on the day of his high school entrance ceremony. There’s no use trying to fall back asleep—even as he lies there trying, tension sits on his stomach, keeping his eyes open. His new black gakuran hangs on the back of the door, and he finds himself staring at the second button. When he’d told Ikejiri they wore gakuran at Karasuno, his friend had joked, well, I suppose you’ll have an easy time with love confessions, then.
He walks to school in the tail end of daybreak, admiring the trace pink disappearing over the mountains. He gets there so early the gym isn’t even open yet, so he sits on a stoop and waits and observes the smell of new April flowers blooming and the way the air fills his lungs with each measured inhale.
People start to arrive. The principal and the teachers and a few senpai, perhaps the ones who will speak during the ceremony. They file past him into the gym, he gets a couple of smiles and nods but no real greeting. Then there are more students, boys in black gakuran like his own, girls in skirts. Parents, though Daichi’s own are busy with work.
“Sawamura!”
Michimiya appears in her new Karasuno uniform, hands clasped together. She has a glint in her eyes when she looks at Daichi, and it fills him with guilt see it, though he doesn’t know why—not yet, anyway, he’s only 15.
“Michimiya. How are you?”
“I’m well. The ceremony will be starting soon, do you want to walk in with me?”
His mouth pops open and he eyes the entrance to the gym, now crowded with his peers. The feeling over his stomach, the one that had woken him up that morning, intensifies. His hands tighten around the handle of his bag. “I think I’ll wait a few more minutes.”
The smile on Michimiya’s face flinches with disappointment, but she gives him a quick nod. “All right. I’ll see you afterwards. Maybe you can practice receives with me, later?”
“Yes, all right,” he breathes, relieved at the opportunity to make it up to her. She’s a good person, Michimiya, and he probably owes her something just for that.
Watching her go in, he puts a word to what he’s been feeling all day. He’s scared. Not the kind of knee-knocking, palm-sweaty fear you might call cowardice, but something born from uncertainty. He doesn’t know what lies on the other side of that door—it’s not a reliable victory, and Sawamura Daichi prizes reliability.
The crowd outside the gym starts to thin and Daichi doesn’t move. If he doesn’t go in soon, he’ll miss the beginning of the ceremony, and that would be thoroughly unacceptable. He’s remembering how to move his legs when he tilts his head up—and something small and hard hits him right in the eye.
Now, after three years of volleyball, he’s pretty used to taking face hits, but he usually has some awareness that they’re coming. Not so with this one—he yelps and clamps a hand over his eye, the delicate skin stinging. The projectile, whatever it was, tumbles down his front and clinks across the concrete walkway.
“Sorry! Oh no, I’m so sorry, oh—” Daichi’s eyes are screwed shut but he hears this voice, presumably belonging to his assailant, growing louder, closer. When he manages to pry them open he sees that this person has come very close indeed—so close that there are mere inches between his face and the face belonging to—a boy.
The morning sun backs his ashy blonde hair (shorter now than it will be in a few years, when Daichi’s grown accustomed to the dips and curls and thinking of how soft it might feel against his fingers) and this boy looks translucent, like he’s made of light himself, like he leapt down from heaven with the daybreak. He has a beauty mark above his left cheek, which is bizarre, and thrilling, and between that and the slight flush on his skin he looks terribly intricate. Compelling. You could stare at him for hours and keep finding new ways the parts make a perfect whole. He’s a lesson in art.
Daichi finds that his heart beats very fast and he starts to fall back, away from that face, and a hand wraps around his upper arm, catching him. He’s touching me.
The boy’s mouth moves. A wet spot on his bottom lip. “Are you okay?” Daichi manages to wobble his chin, which is something like a nod. The boy smiles. “I think that might bruise.” He hovers a long finger over the stinging spot under Daichi’s eye. “I’m really sorry. I was struggling with the strap on my bag and one of my buttons popped off.” With those same long fingers, the boy picks up the button from ground. Daichi’s vision clears and he can see the empty spot on the boy’s uniform jacket—a void where a second button ought to be.
A second button. Poetic.
“It’s okay.” These are the first words he’s managed to choke out in several minutes. His voice sounds hoarse to his own ears, but it seems to relax the boy. Maybe he’s relieved not to have caused offense, which is—sweet. Take it down a notch, he thinks, kicking himself. The kind of advice he might give to an overexcited player on game day. He feels blessed to have never been much of a blusher.
“Good,” says the boy. He straightens up—he had been crouching to get close, Daichi realizes—and offers his hand. Daichi takes it. When they’re standing he has maybe three centimeters of height on this kid who he’s already compared to angels and art despite not knowing his name. The kid who beams at him with just the right amount of glow, not harsh or overbearing, just inviting. “I really am sorry, I messed up your nice face on the very first day.”
Nice face. He doesn’t seem at all embarrassed to have said this; his brown eyes drift down the walkway, toward the gym. Daichi swallows. “I’m Sawamura Daichi.” Between the pain of the forming bruise and the churning of his stomach, every nerve in his body twitches with awareness. It would be a perfect time to play volleyball, he’d make every receive like this.
The boy looks back to him. He’s beautiful—shut up, Sawamura. “Sugawara. Koushi. I like Suga, though. It’s my first year.”
“Suga,” Daichi repeats. Suga nods happily. The sun shines brighter. “I’m a freshman, too.”
“Oh! What class are you?”
“Four.”
“That’s the same as me!”
Fuck my life, Daichi thinks, and then has to do the kicking himself thing again. “I guess we’ll be classmates, then.” Suga’s lips curl upward at this proposition and Daichi’s chest swells so much it starts to ache.
“Look at that,” says Suga, “The entrance ceremony hasn’t even started yet and I already gave one of my classmates a black eye.”
“You do seem like the delinquent type.”
This quip—if it’s even a quip, it just falls off Daichi’s tongue—draws a melodic little laugh from the other boy, a sound like wind chimes might make. “We’ll be late if we don’t go in now, Sawamura Daichi,” Suga observes.
“You’re right.” So they start down the walkway to the gym. A couple of teachers are standing there, waiting to close the doors, as the stragglers arrive to the noisy room. Daichi notes the fist at Suga’s side, holding his stray second button.
As they enter the gym, he has the rogue, shameful hope that in three years, that button will come back to him, by some miracle of fate and Sugawara Koushi.
Approximately eight years later they leave a party at that same gym; a reunion for the Karasuno Boys Volleyball Club, wherein everyone had either more than enough or far too much drink. They’d all gotten to talking about old times and now Suga skips down the walkway ahead of Daichi, a big smooth smile on his face, their hands linked loosely. Daichi, who had only the one drink, will have to drive.
They get to the spot in the walkway from forever ago. Daichi recognizes it as significant before he can say just what that significance is, until it comes back to him: the button, the sun at Suga’s back, his hand on Daichi’s arm. Suga stops short—has he remembered, too? Somehow Daichi has always felt that encounter was less significant for his friend and partner than it was for Daichi himself, but they’ve never discussed it. He never got the second button—things didn’t happen until they both returned home from their first year at university and realized just why it had been so difficult to be apart.
“Here,” says Suga. So maybe he does recall.
“Yes?”
He spins to face Daichi. His cheeks are pink from the drinking. “The first day of high school.”
“Yes,” Daichi laughs, since Suga seems self-satisfied to have put his finger on it.
“What did you think about me when we first met?”
Some really gay shit, he muses. “Are you trying to embarrass me?” In the gym behind them, he can hear two of their former teammates arguing about something trivial.
“Always,” Suga chirps. “You’ve got to tell me. It’s like a rule.”
“A rule?”
“Yes, one of the Sugawara rules. Rule three, Daichi should tell me what he thought of me the first time we met.”
“That rule is a little too convenient, I think,” Daichi replies, but he’s grinning.
“Please!”
He sighs, and glances out into the darkness beyond the walkway, then feels hands grip the bottom of his shirt. And there’s Suga, close to him, biting his bottom lip excitedly. “Okay, okay,” he mutters, cradling Suga’s elbows. “You drunk.” Suga shakes his head, nose wrinkled. It’s cute. “I thought… I wished that I’d get your second button back, someday.”
The excitement melts from Suga’s face—he stares at Daichi, open-mouthed, still cute but it’s a little alarming. “I never gave you my button,” he says in a low trembling voice, and Daichi winces.
“That’s not what I meant.”
“I never…”
“Suga—Koushi!” Suga has started to paw at his upper chest and Daichi struggles to stop him, because this is all too weird—Suga jerks his fist away from his chest and nearly nails Daichi in the throat, and he’s about ready to pin his boyfriend’s arms to his sides when Suga thrusts something tiny into his palm, and then goes still. The expression on his face is intent and—expectant. Daichi eyes him for a moment, and then opens his hand.
In his palm is a tiny white button from the shirt Suga’s currently wearing. It’s rather ordinary and has a couple of threads sticking out the middle. He glances up at the shirt—a crisp white collared one, Suga had worn it to work that morning—and it is indeed the second button from the top.
“With this button, Sawamura Daichi,” Suga announces, sounding winded, “I confess my love to you!”
There’s a beat wherein Daichi tries to place the appropriate reaction. They’ve been together long enough now that this declaration isn’t news, and with the clear influence alcohol has had on Suga’s mannerisms, it strikes him as… funny.
And he laughs. Hard.
Suga pouts impressively. “That’s rude of you.”
“No, it was sweet. Very sweet and absolutely hilarious.”
“Hmph.” But Suga leans into him anyway, snugging his face into the crook of Daichi’s neck sleepily, and out of habit and comfort Daichi’s arms fold around him. “Even though you’re very mean, Sawamura Daichi,” Suga mumbles (his breath is sticky on Daichi’s skin), “I am glad I met you.”
The ash-blond hair is as soft as he used to imagine it being, and when he pressed his face into it he can almost smell the new April flowers again. “Best black eye I’ve ever gotten.”