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There’s no word in any language to describe the end of the third set in a game of volleyball. Something that sounds desperate, maybe. Something that feels harsh in the mouth. Something that requires too much effort to say.
Kenma doesn’t really care about the linguistics of it — all he’s aware of by this point in the game is the court and the spinning ball above him, the blinding lights. Everything beyond those has blurred into a liminal space where the white lines mark the end of existence and his laboured breathing is all he hears.
Sweat blurs his vision. All he knows is heat and the synthetic leather of the ball in his hands for that one moment each rally. He’s always despised the tackiness of sweat on his hands, like dried glue on his palms in preschool craft classes, but right now he’d rather that than the slick wetness that threatens to derail each of his tosses.
On the sidelines, he knows Kuroo is watching, their coach is watching, what feels like the whole world is watching as he throws himself across the laminated court for just one more set. Like a beetle under a microscope, squirming under the pressure of the little glass slate.
One more. Just one more.
Connect, he hears in his head, Kuroo’s infuriating pep talk a constant echo, and for once he wills that to be true. Connect, connect, connect, and he’s diving for the ball absent-mindedly, knees protesting as they slam into the floor. The pain doesn’t register. All his attention is on the slow arc of the ball into the air, a tiny sun spiralling above him.
Oh, Kenma realises, muscles screaming for relief, salt dripping into his mouth. I don’t want this to end.
—
Kozume Kenma does not like volleyball. He makes this decision fifteen minutes into playing with Kuroo, who very much likes volleyball, and has dragged Kenma away from air-conditioning, and snacks, and the new Dragon Quest game. The dry grass crunches beneath him when he flops to the ground, scratching at his bare arms. Summer is too hot for long sleeves, no matter how much Kenma wants to hide from the sun in them.
“C’mon Kenma, it’s not that bad,” he hears from above him, and he rolls to press his face into the grass in feigned petulance. The stalks have lost their spring softness, but they smell like summer.
“Just one more? And then we can go home, and you can play your lizard game."
"It's about dragons," Kenma grumbles, but nonetheless he peels himself off of the ground and accepts the hand that Kuroo is offering to pull himself up.
He wonders how they ended up here and knows the truth in turn; Kuroo had pulled them away, his shyness dissipating in the cluttered space of Kenma’s bedroom. Had pulled out a ball and said here. I want you to play volleyball with me.
So far, they’ve done less playing than damage. Kenma has hit himself in the face twice trying to throw the ball to Kuroo to spike, and the stinging in his nose is less than pleasant. Kuroo looks at him with worry — he’s trying to hide it, but seven year olds are bad liars. It’s a fact of the world.
“Why don't you try setting?” Kuroo suggests, once Kenma has had the grass brushed off of him and is standing upright of his own volition. “It’s a bit harder than just throwing the ball, but I think you can do it!” He tosses the ball into the air to demonstrate, the ball bouncing off his fingertips with unmistakable lightness.
Summer is rising, June sticky under his shirt, and the synthetic material of the ball is slippery in his hands. Kenma flubs the first try, misses the second, and the third falls towards him, whistling through the dry air.
For one moment, the ball connects with his fingers, and rebounds in a perfect arc. And for that single second, Kenma realises what it is to want for something. Across from him, Kuroo grins, the kind of self-assured pride of children, before flinching backwards as the ball narrowly misses his head.
—
Middle school volleyball is hell. There is no nicer way of putting it, for all Kuroo tries to convince Kenma of it. It’s not a boss fight, it’s no quest, it can’t be solved with a button clicked and a spell. Sometimes things are better put simply, as Kenma tells his parents, and it’s simply that he hates everything about it.
He hates his team, he hates his teammates, he hates his coaches, who push him and push him and push him. He’s already skipping practices a few months in with carefully considered excuses. The fevers don’t help, either - he's grown used to the chills and the stress and the aches in his body after a long practice or match, but now they take hold of him for days at a time, leaving him in his dark room with the fan turned on high. In the night, it switches off automatically, and Kenma lies miserable in bed staring at the spot on the ceiling that could be a watermark or a spider or door to a new world, even though those kinds of things don’t happen to boys like him.
But Kuroo comes, and Kuroo goes, and most of all, Kuroo stays. The least Kenma can do for him is to keep going to practices, so not to leave Kuroo alone with the seniors, so that he has someone to set to him when he’s practicing his spikes, late after everyone has gone home.
Kenma learns to befriend the heady weight of sweat in the air, the pressure of the ball at the tips of his constantly bandaged fingers. The echo of a dropped set makes a space for itself in his ribcage, just as the sound of a spike does. He leaves training damp and sore, but the aches become something familiar. It's like his quests, almost, where the protagonist is dropped into a new world and starts learning how to win fights. Kenma learns to dodge and parry and cast spells, and eventually his health bar starts staying in the green all day.
It’s never to him what it is to Kuroo. Kuroo picked up a ball sometime in his seventh year of life and decided that he was going to hold onto it as long as possible, whatever that meant. Kuroo practices until his hands are bright red and smarting. Kenma will never understand it, but there's satisfaction in a good set, the same as a well timed attack. Winning a match is exhausting but it yields the same kind of victory that his handheld affords.
And, besides. It’s cool to think about being a master strategist, like Kuroo says, like on his handheld. It’s fun to feel like he has control over the match, to learn to change where he’s gazing, set without looking.
The first time Kuroo spikes one of Kenma’s tosses in a proper match, the ball whistling down across the other side of the net, Kenma has to fight back the sharp grin that threatens to draw his lips apart.
They land two more proper spikes in the same set, and lose the game. Kenma doesn’t know if he cares about the loss, honestly. It was something to do, at least. He would have liked to have won. But they didn’t.
He still says yes to extra setting practice, the next day.
—
The first year of high school is the same as any in middle school. Seniors will always find a way to assert their control over the ones below them, and Kenma finds himself as an errand boy for the third years, finds the practices even longer and more tedious than they had been in junior high. The inkling fondness toward the sport disappears faster than it took to arrive, buried somewhere between the basket of laundered uniforms he’s told to put away and the broom thrown after him when he leaves.
Kuroo finds him on the steps, then. Concrete warm under them, Kenma curled inwards, Kuroo slouched outwards. That’s how it’s always been; Kenma content in his space, Kuroo reaching out as far into the world as he can, no matter the students he almost trips with his legs, no matter that he drags Kenma out into it with him. He tries to talk Kenma into staying. “You’re good at this,” he tells him, fiddling with his phone as he talks. “You shouldn’t quit.”
“Just because I’m good at it doesn’t mean I have to do it. I don’t enjoy it in the way you do. It doesn’t really matter that much to me whether I stay or whether I drop it.”
Kuroo fixes him with a look, something that he probably thinks is stern but actually just reminds Kenma of how quiet he used to be when they were kids, cooped up in Kenma’s bedroom until Kuroo brought that blasted ball over that one day. Volleyball is something that Kuroo threw himself fully into. He was always the brave one. Kenma just followed two paces behind, dragging his feet.
Kuroo ends up sighing and looking out to where the thin haze of smog blurs the line between skyscrapers and the horizon in the distance. The evening light glows yellow, and Kenma stares at it until his eyes water, waiting for the inevitable begging to begin.
“It’s this or the weirdos in the anime club, Kenma.”
So Kenma finishes the year, and he weathers the end of summer, and second year clatters in like a car with a sputtering motor, like a game with janky fight mechanics.
In April, Coach Nekomata returns, and new first years replace the third years who had kept Kenma running for the balls in serving drills. Lev is terrifying, as is the new setter, and Kenma drags himself through practices since he’s now the team's starting setter. The floors squeak under his shoes like always, the ball is tough on his hands, and he plays like always.
Training is less stressful, Kenma observes quietly. He finds more joy in practice matches, now that he’s actually on the court. It feels more satisfying. He wonders why.
And then Hinata Shouyou comes and goes in a blaze of summer heat, so fast that Kenma is surprised he doesn’t displace the air with the speed he moves at. Well, goes is a bit of a stretch. He never really leaves.
Miyagi. Tokyo. Tokyo. Tokyo. Hinata Shouyou is inescapable. Volleyball is inescapable.
When they face Karasuno again, summer is sitting sticky on his skin, pouring over him when they sprint up the hill outside the practice gym, melting on his hands at lunch when Yaku forces a piece of watermelon into his hands as he’s talking to Shouyou and Akaashi.
Kenma finds himself dragged into late night practices at training camps, summer heat translated into sweat and exertion and a slowly building weight hidden somewhere between his second and third ribs. The calluses on his hands and fingers toughen; the bruises on his forearms darken into plum. Nekoma takes what they have learned in that week, and still loses out in the Interhigh preliminaries.
No matter, they say. There’s still the Spring high. No matter. There’s still more time to play volleyball.
The practice camp repeats itself, and Kenma settles into the rhythm of volleyball, of wins and losses and bruises that darken around his joints where he falls and receives serves, of running out of sports tape because his fingers keep chafing from setting.
Spring high preliminaries come and go like a particularly strange fever dream. Fukurodani beats Nekoma. Nekoma beats Nohebi. The thrumming feeling in his bones seems to grow as the spring high in question arrives in the chill of an April morning, the cold pressing in on Kenma’s joints.
By the time they reach Karasuno, Kenma is halfway to collapsing on the floor and never moving again. Even so, there is something that keeps him pushing through the sets. This match has no 'second chances', Shouyou had said, what feels like a lifetime ago, that terrifying spark in his eyes that meant he either believed in no gods or simply believed that they were all on his side. Kenma has never known faith like that, but he knows the rhythm of a game. First set. Second set.
The tally for the third set leers in front of Kenma’s eyes, and he pushes himself further. His muscles ache. His feet are sore. He doesn’t want anything other than this, just the sight of the ball arcing over the net, over and over again.
This hurts. This is painful. I don’t want it to ever end.
— Haikyuu!! Chapter 323
Kenma remembers Kuroo looking at his arms as a child, mottled red with effort, and calling it internal bleeding. Remembers holding his Nekoma jersey in his hands, the fabric crimson. Kuroo's awful, cheesy, pre-game saying, where he has repeated and repeated through the years — we're the blood in our veins. Flow without stopping.
He knows his cheeks are the crimson of his team, can feel his heart rate rising, and rising, and rising. Rabbit pulses, as he throws himself across the court for just one more save, one more point, just one more minute, staving off the monsters on the other side of the net.
Kenma knows what it is to feel desperate for something, now. He has always put just enough effort in, but here, with a loss looming over his head and the end of the tournament only one point off, Kenma feels like he’ll die if this ball falls to the floorboards of the court.
It seems fitting then, that his effort is what loses them the game. Effort turns to exertion turns to sweat, and the synthetic leather of the ball slips out of his hands as he lines up a set.
Kenma does not see the ball fall. Maybe that’s for the best. Instead, what he sees is the faces of his team mates, sweat dripping down their foreheads, as the court falls into silence for two lifelong seconds.
The whistle blows. The game ends. There is the far-off sound of cheering from the stands. Kenma is standing there, beside a ball on the ground and the damp patches on the lino of the court, and the game has been lost.
He finds himself slumping to the ground in the time between the final whistle blow and the explosion of noise from Karasuno on the other side of the court. The coolness of the floor is a welcome relief against his fevered skin, a contrast to the past hour and a half living in fear of contact with the ground like some god afraid of mortality.
This loss is sour and bitter and will linger in the back of Kenma’s mouth forever. But even as it settles into his bones like a particularly lingering ache, there is a kind of victory to it, and Kenma bares his teeth in a grin.
Across the expanse of the court, across the net and the stray athletes, across the few metres that span like miles at day and inches in the night, he sees a lot of things. He sees, and he remembers. And he understands.
Volleyball is fun. Volleyball can be fun. His world is a little bigger, now that he knows this.
He says as such, stretched out on the ground, melting into the plasticky feel of the wood. Draws the words out, honest in a way that he knows in his bones. When the rest of his team crowds around the court, he pushes himself up, leaning backwards until he can meet Kuroo’s eyes.
“Kuro?” he asks, less of a question and more of a call, and watches as he turns to look at him, eyes rimmed the red of his uniform. Kenma will tease him about it later, the acerbic type of comfort he has learned for Kuroo. He’ll make him buy them dinner too, and maybe dessert, but now is for truths.
“Thank you, for getting me into volleyball.”
In the small, shocked silence that follows, Kenma looks up to the floodlights over the court. It hurts. It’s painful. He wants to literally sleep forever.
But even with all of that, he doesn’t want it to end. And with that promise made, Kenma lets himself be pulled up by his team and makes his way out of the floodlights, watching as Karasuno runs off the court.
Nevermind the bitterness of defeat. Nothing is over yet.
