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He watched Hinata watch the world watch him. There would never be anyone else.
Kageyama had once been promised a lot of things. His grandfather, namely, had promised that there would come a time where he could eat curry for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and no one would care. Kazuyo had also promised him that he would meet someone even stronger than him one day, or more specifically, that said someone would come find him. How could Kazuyo have known? Kageyama wondered about that sometimes, the fortune telling predilections of his grandfather. Because Kageyama had met someone, and he would keep meeting someones, and not all of them were stronger than him. Some of them were weak. Flawed. And then, years later, he would ask himself this: weren’t they all weak, in some way? Hadn’t he been weak, too?
But only one of the someones could be the someone, and he hadn’t been weak or strong or anything, really. Kageyama had never seen a person with hair that orange before.
They were fourteen and Hinata was wearing a green uniform. The color combination was jarring and mildly ugly; he looked like an inverted carrot. He also looked extremely weak. His whole team was. They played together like six scraps of cardboard attempting origami.
The boy led them into battle with no armor. He wanted too much. That, Kageyama thought, was obvious, and it made him angry. Hinata wanted victory like it had been promised to him, a branch of fruit hanging just out of his reach, and if he just jumped high enough, he could grab it. How could anyone fight with their eyes closed and their hands tied behind their back? Kageyama was angry because he had once been unarmed, too, and Kazuyo had left before he could tell him how to keep going. He’d kept at it because he could, and because if all else was gone, he would at least have volleyball. Hinata didn’t even have volleyball yet; he was fighting to have volleyball, to belong to it despite all the years that he had gone without it.
And Hinata had promised him something else that day. The sunset was blending into his hair. The tears were blending into his cheeks. Another prophecy, spoken into existence.
They kept meeting each other again, which Kageyama blamed on Hinata’s tendency to reinvent himself. He was born and born and reborn after Nekoma and Seijou and Datekou and Shiratorizawa and training camps and Tokyo and first year and second year and third year and Brazil. Kageyama must have met a dozen Hinata Shouyous in his lifetime, but all of them fit inside of each other like a set of Russian dolls. The one on the outside—the big one, the one that kept all the smaller ones together—liked cracking an egg yolk on his rice, laughed at jokes that weren’t funny, and talked in his sleep. The big one hadn’t changed, after everything. He loved volleyball. He lived and breathed volleyball. Sometimes Kageyama thought Hinata just was volleyball, in an abstract way that didn’t really make sense. People couldn’t become sports. Except in Kageyama’s head, he thought about Hinata in Brazil, and the look on Hinata’s face when they’d lost their last match in third year, and the way that Hinata had fought, all tooth and nail, in his green, middle school uniform.
Kageyama knew he’d always have volleyball. He wondered if that meant he would always have Hinata, but Hinata didn’t belong to anything except for volleyball. He’d at least earned that much, because Hinata had probably never had anything promised to him. He'd had to work and run and scrape by for everything that danced just out of his reach.
Someone even better. Was there anyone better than Hinata? Of course there was; Ushiwaka was still stronger, Hoshiumi was still taller (as if that even mattered), and there were ten dozen people, probably, who were older than all of them and more experienced in all that was volleyball. But Hinata—he had started very, very small, stick-skinny and still bright-eyed, clad in his stupid green jersey with the captain's number embroidered big and bold on the back. He'd grown like a weed through the fissure of concrete; through the bleeding cut of a sidewalk; through gnarled and blistered skin of the earth. No one else had done the insurmountable. He was the sole exception of the world, the universe's one give-in. They were all rooting for him, knuckles white as they gripped the edges of their seats, praying for his inevitable evolution. And evolve he did.
Hinata stopped by the other side of the net. His eyes were still brown. Kageyama didn't know why he'd expected that to change, too.
"You made it," Kageyama said, instead of, "Your eyes are still brown," because that would be a stupid thing to say.
"Yeah," Hinata said, with the kind of smile that only victory could bring. "I'm here now." It sounded like a promise.