Chapter Text
“Attention! Bow!” you announce to your classmates, leading Class 1-4 in morning greetings as Yoshida-sensei walks in for homeroom. Social Studies as your first period class was a little on the heavy side, but Yoshida-sensei’s playfulness makes up for it most of the time.
“Good morning, everyone!” He greets back cheerfully, giving the class a warm smile. “Let’s get started today, shall we?”
You lift your head up from the respectful bowing position you were in and the rest of your classmates do the same. You take a deep breath, getting ready for your next announcement.
“Be seated!” you declare with utmost clarity, as the familiar sound of friction from the chairs scratching the floors echo inside the classroom. You straighten up your posture once you get seated, opening up the materials you need for today’s lesson.
The feigned smile you’ve rehearsed over the course of your life slowly erases itself from the depths of your face after fulfilling its role. The impotent curve does that everytime you remember who you really are.
A dirty little liar.
“And with that being said, I’d like you guys to take on this project for our geography unit in groups of three,” Yoshida-sensei snaps you out of your thoughts while explaining your new assignment.
“We’re going to the Sendai City Museum next week in order for you to finalize the information you gathered.” He continues explaining the instructions. “Regarding groups, let’s see…”
The class begins to groan at Yoshida-sensei’s mischievious hesitance, all dreading the thought of possibly being assigned group members. As for you, well, you really couldn’t care less who you end up with since you’re probably going to do most of the work anyway.
“Alright, alright, I get it,” Yoshida-sensei interrupts the revolting noise of his students with a defeated shrug, but also with a slight smirk on his face. “You guys are going to find out through a draw!”
The dire feeling of dread swamped your class once again as disappointed groans echo throughout the classroom. Yoshida-sensei only grins frivolously as he goes around the room with a discoloured box, giving you and each of your classmates a slip of paper.
You open up the folded note and read that you drew the number ‘17.’ Your gaze lingers on the piece of paper for a few seconds until you place it inside your palms to look around the classroom for your assigned group.
“Tsukki! I got number seventeen! What did you get?” A voice that belonged to a green-haired boy announces cheerfully at the back of the classroom, getting your attention.
You get out of your seat and lightly tap on the boy’s shoulder. He turns around to face you and you recognize him as Yamaguchi.
“I got number seventeen too,” you smile at your new group member. His eyes widen a bit at you, but you focus intently on his features that were now in clear view.
You swiftly look at his face and notice several freckles connecting themselves on his cheeks. They carefully bend with the sweet smile he presented at you, giving him a really approachable aura which you felt welcomed in.
“Oh, y/n-san? You’re number seventeen as well?” He turns his head slightly while awaiting your response. You give him a nod to which he responds to with a smile. Knowing his new group member, he tells you to follow him as he heads towards the third person who would be joining the two of you.
Based on how softly his voice sounded when he greeted you, you can tell that he was a really kind person.
You approach him a little closer to make it easier for both of you to communicate amidst the chaos of the “group-member-finding” happening around the classroom. As you were about to take a seat at the nearest desk beside Yamaguchi, you were met with a spectacled blonde with white headphones that covered his ears.
“Y/n-san is in the same group as us! Isn’t that great, Tsukki?” he turns to his friend who is clearly, most definitely, ignoring him as he speaks.
Okay. Rude.
Yamaguchi sighs defeatedly as he turns to you once again. “Sorry about that, y/n-san,” he faces you apologetically. “Anyway, we look forward to working with you nonetheless!”
You put a smile on your face as you slightly bow at him and carefully mutter a “yoroshiku onegaishimasu” to show your appreciation at his effort to get along.
Unlike a certain someone.
While eyeing that certain someone down, you hear Yoshida-sensei slam his teaching materials down on the table placed at the front of the classroom, the loud thumping noise gathering everyone’s attention.
“Now that everybody has found their group members, I’ll be coming around to assign everyone their research topic, understood?” He announces to your defeated class, as he gathers the paper print-outs and goes around the room to hand over specific ones to each group.
Seated together at the back of the classroom, the air of awkwardness between you and the blonde—who hasn’t even bothered to introduce himself—was painfully obvious to the freckled sweetheart you just became acquainted with a few moments ago.
“S-So y/n-san, you’re our class representative right? Isn’t that a challenging role? Especially as a first-year and all,” Yamaguchi attempts to make conversation with you to lighten up the atmosphere.
“Well, it’s something I’m used to doing since I’ve been class representative throughout junior high, so I guess it’s not as bad as you may think,” you answer him truthfully, contradicting basically everything you’ve ever said for the past month of your first high school year.
Even through Yamaguchi's attempts to get the group to function, the four-eyed prick just keeps gazing at the window without a care for anybody else’s existence.
Hell, you really wondered just how interesting the damn window could have been to make this asshole of a human being to completely shut himself out of your classroom’s events for the past ten minutes.
Yoshida-sensei finally arrives at your group’s table and places the hand-out in the middle of your desk. As you read the title and the description of your research topic on the top of the page, the blonde pulls his white headphones away from his ears, finally showing some sort of interest.
Oh, and some basic human respect.
Yoshida-sensei smiles at your group and takes out another sheet of paper in his hand, preparing to further explain the topic you received.
“So for the requirements of this project, you are to hand in your research, a paragraph summarizing your discoveries, and a few photos from the museum to further support your analysis,” he enthusiastically explains to the three of you.
While listening to him speak, you realize that you still had the slip of paper from the draw in your hand; the same paper that led you to the green-haired freckled angel and his window-obsessed douchebag of a friend.
Curiously, you flip the paper around to find a poorly-drawn smiley face on the back of it. You smile at the clumsy but cute gesture of your social studies teacher.
Putting the slip of paper back into your hands, you look up at your group members as you continue to listen to Yoshida-sensei describe the project’s instructions.
“And here comes the best part! You guys are the ‘dinosaur fossils’ group! With this topic, you guys are going to look at fossils at Sendai City Museum and gather evidence about the dinosaur species that lived in Japan throughout the past.”
Oh?
Did the blonde prick just slightly, just slightly, smile?
What was he smiling at? Was he thinking about his beloved windowsill?
No, he couldn’t have been. All the possible reasons flow into your head, but you erase the window-related ones because they didn’t fit with the timing of the anomaly.
You could’ve sworn he briefly smiled when Yoshida-sensei said the word ‘dinosaur.’
Before you know it, you hear Yoshida-sensei clear his throat as if he wanted to gain your attention back. “Is the assignment clear to you now, group seventeen?
“Yes it is, sensei,” you reply back in response to him. He turns to you after a few seconds of nodding and smiles.
“Well, y/n-san is in this group so everything should be fine,” he comments with a hint of expectation in his voice, momentarily making you freeze. “Wishing you guys luck either way!”
You look down as you swallow the lump in your throat, a tight line forming on your lips instead of one of your rehearsed smiles.
“Y/n-san?” Yamaguchi moves himself closer to you with a tiny bit of worry plastered on his face. “Are you okay?”
“O-Oh y-yeah, um, yes,” you gather your attention back to your group with a feeble smile that curved itself on your cheeks, replacing whatever was on it beforehand.
“We should, um, divide the work equally so that we get everything done on time,” you suggest to Yamaguchi, hoping that the other one beside him is listening to your idea too.
Yamaguchi hums in agreement and turns to the blonde. “Which part do you want to take, Tsukki?”
He holds the paper in his hand and finally looks up at you and Yamaguchi for the first time. Surprisingly, his eyes widen a little bit when his golden hues stop in your direction. He averts them as quickly as they landed on you though, clearing his throat in the process.
“I can take the research portion and help Yamaguchi out with taking the pictures,” he explains to you with a voice that definitely did not cause a certain riot of butterflies in your stomach.
Nope, it definitely didn’t.
“If you want, you can take the paragraph, um, y/n-san,” he finishes explaining and looks up at you again, piercing you with his amber eyes that look way prettier than you’d like to admit.
Just what exactly is wrong with your stomach today? Why does it keep tumbling and turning at every word this douche says?
Also, did your name ever sound that heart-wrenching? You were pretty sure names weren’t something that should send the heart into madness upon hearing it.
Curse this project.
No, scratch that.
Curse the number seventeen and that stupid smiley face for putting you in the same group as this blonde pain-in-the-ass.
You nod at the blonde menace’s statements, viciously wanting to shake off certain thoughts along with it.
“Y-Yup, that’s fine with me,” you say in an attempt to cut the conversation short. “So I’ll do the paragraph, Yamaguchi-kun takes the pictures, and Tsukki-kun does the research portion—”
“It’s Tsukishima,” the seemingly annoyed four-eyes interrupts the attempt you made at summarizing roles for the project. “Just please call me Tsukishima.”
“Oh, right, Tsukishima-kun,” you reply back to him with a slight bit of confusion in your tone. You look back at Yamaguchi who was the reason why you called him the ‘Tsukki’ in the first place.
“I call him ‘Tsukki’ as a nickname since we’ve been friends for a long time,” the freckled-boy says to you in a slight whisper. “Sorry for the confusion.”
“No, no, it’s fine,” you reply back to Yamaguchi in an understanding voice to ease his thoughts.
“Regarding the project though, I think we should briefly meet up to plan out and organize ourselves before the trip to the museum on Friday,” you suggest to your two group members.
“As expected of the class representative!” Yamaguchi blurts out and you just feignedly smile back at him. “But since me and Tsukki have volleyball club activities after school, we won’t be free until around 6:00 pm. Is that okay with you?”
“Yeah, that’s perfect actually since my part-time job ends around that time too,” you reply back relieved that your schedule works with them. “Can I get both of your LINE ID’s so that we can communicate easier?”
Yamaguchi hurriedly pulls out his phone and happily shares his ID with you, while Tsukishima puts his headphones back on as he stares at his beloved window once again.
That may have looked like a casual action to most, but it actually kind of seemed like a way to avoid giving his contact information out to you.
Jerk.
As you look at the beanpole with furrowed eyebrows and a visible scowl on your face, Yamaguchi’s name pops up as a text notification on your phone.
‘I’ll add Tsukki to the group chat, so don’t worry. :)’
You smile at the angel-seeming human while mouthing a ‘thank you’ for being such a life-saver while dealing with the demon residing in the same group as you two.
The school bell suddenly chimes for lunch and it wasn't until now that you realize how thankful you were for that stupid ‘ding-dong-ding-dong’ sound’s existence. You really needed to deal with whatever was going on with your stomach earlier as soon as you possibly can.
You bid “Freckled-Angel Yamaguchi” and “Tsukishima The Asshole” goodbye as you rush to the bathroom to recollect yourself.
Walking past whoever you bump into, you think about the countless awards you’ve won about your exceptional organizational skills. Considering the fact that you were the biggest mess right now, you kind of come to the conclusion that those were lies too, like everything else about your life.
You arrive at the bathroom sink and take out your hands in preparation to rub them as hard as you can in order for them to be clean again.
As you were about to, you were met with the slip of paper you drew earlier resting inside your dry and cracked palms. Though the way it looked like now was entirely different from the way you received it in class.
The paper was covered with the wrinkles that were formed by the crumpling it experienced in your pockets, and its poor legibility was definitely caused by the smudging from your sweat during the brief duration you spent with a certain spectacled beanpole.
The number ‘17’ that you blamed everything upon was now barely visible on the piece of paper, along with that stupid smiley face which was poorly-drawn at the back.
You put the slip of paper inside your blazer pockets and proceeded to turn on the sink, surrounding the world around you with a sound to drown out the pitter-pattering emotion filling the inside of your heart.
｡･:*:･ﾟ☆
If only Tsukishima's headphones could play a melody loud enough to block out everything he didn’t want to hear.
Canceling out the foolishness of the two menaces he had to have for teammates would probably be one of the top things on that list. Maybe also the constant ringing of his phone due to you and Yamaguchi’s text messages.
Even after another rigorous day of practice, the orange-haired idiot and his tyrant of a partner never manage to fail to make his irritation levels skyrocket. Your reigning persistence added on top of it was the icing on the cake.
As soon as practice ends, he grabs the remainder of his things and heads to the club room to change. He doesn't even spare the two idiots a second glance as he mutters an "otsukaresamadesu" to the rest of the team.
His freckled green-haired friend trails behind him in suit and notices his fowl mood turn into a slight state of confusion—followed by his usual 'tch.'
"What's up, Tsukki?" Yamaguchi asks his childhood friend.
"I forgot my headphones in the classroom," he replies passively after checking the contents of his bag. Tsukishima couldn't help but dread the fact that he would have to delay his walk home for a little while longer, as he needed to drop by his desk on the third floor to grab them.
"You can head home first," the tall blonde suggests out of consideration for his freckled friend. "Your mom needs help with the cooking today right?"
"Yeah," Yamaguchi hums in agreement.
"Guess I'll head out first then,” he exclaims, as he greets Tsukishima with a wave. “See you tomorrow, Tsukki!"
Tsukishima bids Yamaguchi one last nod as he finishes organizing his things in his bag. After changing out of his practice clothes, the blonde proceeds to walk towards the school building with his hands in his pockets.
The days that pass by in Tsukishima's current year of high school seemed quite mundane to him to say the least. He couldn't help but feel like every day that goes by was just a repeat of the previous ones.
He'd go to class, go to the volleyball club, and then head home. That was the routine he had built for himself.
But every once in a while, he'd stop and stare at the sky.
He doesn't know when this habit of his developed, however it quickly became something that he couldn't seem to avoid.
Climbing up the stairs towards his classroom, he quietly notices the way the sun fills the corridors of Karasuno High School with an orange hue as it sets; the tiny specks of dust floating in the air becoming more visible through the rays of amber slipping from the stairwell's glass window panes.
He thought about the phase it would enter next. The golden hour being overpowered with the dark tint of night was undeniably his favourite. Maybe it was because his name resonated with the moon. He's never thought about questioning it though.
He always seemed to hope for the celestial body to be accompanied by a sparkly star, as he found that it felt more.... right that way. As if, that's how it was meant to be.
Tsukishima just simply found it quite interesting. The fact that during certain times of the day, it would forcefully paint its surroundings with a colour of its choice—spreading that vibrance in every corner with an ethereal glow. But somehow, nothing seemed to ever want to escape it.
Not even him.
Not when it was that beautiful.
Though he would never admit that.
Which is why he deemed his white pair of "Somy" headphones to be something like it. Rather, it would be more accurate if he referred to the music it played. The music that gave him another world.
He described it as, “A pretty place without the idiots.”
The thought reminds him of his purpose of being at school this late and proceeds to pick up his pace. Moving swiftly with his long legs, he reaches Class 1-4 and carefully slides the door open.
He wished never did.
You, who stood in front of the windowsill, stopped all of his movements.
The window that you opened had let the chilly spring breeze carry its journey towards the tips of your hair, kissing your rose-tinted cheeks as you took a deep breath.
You sang.
A melody so beautiful, yet so tragic.
A voice that strummed the blonde's heartstrings in a rhythm he has never heard before. A frequency that would definitely forever drift beneath the echoes of his soul.
A song so beautiful; one that won against the sky, the sun, the moon and all of its stars.
You smile as you swiftly turn around while removing the wire that connects your ears to the last notes of ‘Hold On,’ only to meet the blonde’s golden orbs. Taken by surprise, you let out a small startled gasp as you put your hand towards your face to wipe the small bits of tears that formed in your eyes.
“You scared me,” you mutter out carefully, still in shock of the boy’s presence. He continues to gaze at you with his amber eyes, the colour slightly shining a little brighter in the setting sun’s glow.
You quietly look around in a slight panic, as if you were caught doing something unforgivable. Well, technically you may have been. Since the person you wanted to see the least was the one who had to show up in front of you.
You swallow the lump of uncertainty in your throat and speak weakly.
“Did you… hear me?”
He doesn’t answer. All he seems to be doing is continuing to look your way. Your eyes scan the room to assess if there was something else in the vicinity that he could’ve been staring at, but as you do, he finally regains control over his body and proceeds to walk towards the area of the room you were in.
Realizing the overwhelming height of the person walking towards you, you stood still in place as he approached you closer and closer. He stops at the desk in front of where you were standing, and reaches for something from inside the storage crevice.
Tsukishima grabs his white “Somy” headphones and holds it firmly in his hands. He slowly turns towards you and his golden tinted stare comes back to meet your eyes; as if he’s trying to tell you something he could never voice out loud.
The air is still with tension underneath the setting colours of the sun. Dust flies by the distance between you and the blonde, and the sky starts to blur with the dusk of night.
Tsukishima sighs.
“Yeah, I did,” he replies to your question that had seemingly been hanging in the air for a while.
“Sorry about that.”
After his brief and insincere-feeling apology, he heads towards the door, distancing himself away from you. Shutting the door completely was the only thing he wanted to do right now. But the hands that held his precious headphones proceeded to contradict his desires.
“That song...” He quietly tries to comment on your performance, tightening his grip on his white music-playing gadget in the process.
He turns to look at you with a slight amount of fondness in his golden hues. The moments that passed in between felt so tranquil—so fleetingly tender. It felt like the world had halted in its tracks for a while.
It felt like music had connected the both of you, in a space where you could completely understand the thoughts of the other.
Tsukishima realized that the song you sang was one of his favourites. One of the few songs he found that he really liked. A pretty song fit for the “pretty place” that was music. Surely, that’s all it is.
He was sure that the reason why he’s hearing the frantic heartbeat in his chest right now was because of the feelings the song portrays. It definitely wasn’t because of the familiarity he heard in your voice. It was only because the song was pretty and all.
So why was he thinking that the person who sang it was even prettier?
He realized what he just admitted in his head and proceeded to break the silence by clearing his throat, aiming for it to terminate whatever you two were in the midst of sharing.
“Nevermind,” he swiftly closes the door behind him after bidding you a farewell, placing his headphones on his ears while walking away.
He puts his playlist on shuffle and turns the volume of the song that popped up as high as it could possibly offer. He hoped that by persistently digging his fingertips onto the volume up button on his smartphone, it would shut everything out completely.
He hoped it would shut you out completely.
Yet, it still couldn’t silence the deafening thoughts that scrambled themselves inside his mess of a brain.
How could it?
That tune that left your rosy lips, began a new beat from somewhere within him that he never thought he had.
Tiny gimlets of trepidation burrowed quickly in his chest, while mixing in with the unsettling feeling piling up his stomach. Slowly but surely, the sound that tenderly engraved itself inside the deepest corners of his heart…
It couldn’t help but linger. And he hated that.
But no matter what he tried to do, he came to the agonizing conclusion that nothing could describe what he heard when he opened that door.
Not a single pair of headphones would ever be good enough to muffle out the sound of you.