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Before the fall, there was flight. Gravity suspended, the fluorescent gym lights dulled to a glow, the cheers muffled like midnight sobs. Before the fall, there was just Atsumu—twenty-four years young and terrifyingly stupid—soaring through the air like he belonged there. And then the fall happened, and everything went to shit.
Suddenly, he was sprawled on the court and he couldn’t move. The refs were blowing their whistles, and someone was shouting his name like a prayer, and Atsumu couldn’t fucking move. From here on out, the memories begin to muddle. His captains assure him that forgetting is a natural response to pain, but Atsumu knows better than to blame his injury for the lapse in memory. His memory blurs like a finger painting because if he forgets the injury, then he’s marginally closer to a universe where it never occurred. Forgetting means that, just maybe, he’s closer to a different plane of reality—a correct plane of reality—where he’s still an active player for the MSBY Jackals.
None of this was supposed to happen, after all. When Atsumu packed away eighteen years into two suitcases and moved to Higashiosaka, an ACL tear wasn’t in his cards. He didn’t promise his mother that he’d be safe in the big city while expecting to sever fibers that tie bone to bone. Atsumu was supposed to be better than this. He had to be better than this, or else the biting comments and arrogant stares and lack of friends in high school amounted to nothing. Atsumu had to be better than this sorry fate or else he, himself, meant nothing. How do you make nothing out of something?
Somewhere into the daydream that is life following his injury, Osamu decides to move in with him. Don’t try to fight this, Tsumu, his brother tells him over a string of loud-mouthed texts. You've never been able to take care of yerself, but now it’s even worse.
Naturally, Atsumu tries to fight this. He fights this up until the moment Osamu is knocking on his door, demanding to be let in. Ultimately, Osamu uses a well-muscled shoulder to force his way into the shitty studio apartment, knocking over a very stubborn Atsumu and nearly tearing his knee again.
Osamu slips off his shoes, crosses his arms. "Yer place looks like shit."
Atsumu rubs circles into his knee, still seated on the wood floor. "Hello to you too."
And the thing is: Osamu's not wrong. Atsumu's place has never been the prettiest to begin with, but with the injury, any consideration for aesthetics has gone out the window. More than ever before, it looks something like an apartment post-zombie apocalypse raid—laundry scattered across the floors like a patchwork quilt, furniture all resting at slightly the wrong angle. Osamu grimaces at the disaster and immediately gets to work cleaning. He banishes Atsumu to the living room couch for the duration of this process; Atsumu watches poor reality TV and ices his knee using the offensively cubical machine Inunaki senpai lent to him. Time crawls by. It does that more, lately.
Some hours later, once the sun isn’t quite as high in the sky and the pain in Atsumu’s knee has hushed, Osamu brings up surgery.
“Have ya thought about it?” He takes a seat next to Atsumu on the chaise of the couch, puts his socked feet up on the coffee table.
“Take yer feet off the coffee table, ya heathen,” Atsumu says, then proceeds to put his good leg up on the coffee table. “And, of course, I’ve thought about it.” He bites up on his bottom lip, shifts his jaw back and forth. “I just haven’t gotten around to callin’ or anythin’, ya know?”
Osamu sighs, then gives Atsumu a look that reads, “No, I really don’t know, you absolute moron.” He rises from his dip in the sofa to fetch his laptop.
Within the next few hours, Atsumu has an appointment set up with Aizawa Kento.
Aizawa sensei is an Osaka born-and-raised surgeon who specializes in sports injuries. He’s a little under 190 centimeters himself, with a head of thinning gray hair and dorky glasses that Atsumu definitely would’ve made fun of if he were still in high school. Their appointment is cold, direct, and over in less than an hour. Aizawa sensei metes out unpleasant truths like the morning news, or a weather report, or something else equally not fucking terrifying, and Atsumu tries not to twitch.
He and his brother exit the clinic with a glazed look in their eyes and twin surgery events in their Google calendars. But for what it is worth, a previously unacknowledged weight has been lifted off their broad shoulders.
They step into the car and buckle their seatbelts. Osamu drives—not because Atsumu can’t, but because he shouldn’t.
(An ACL tear is deceptive like that, Aizawa sensei had explained during their consultation. An athlete can rip the tough ligament in half, and more likely than not, still be perfectly capable of limping off the court and driving themself home. In fact, some people can go days or weeks without realizing they have a devastating injury.
“The thing about an ACL tear,” Aizawa began, running his hand along Atsumu’s bruised knee, “is that only some of them heal on their own. And very few of the ones that professional athletes suffer from fall into that category.” He sucked his brittle teeth into a smile. “You’re quite lucky that you noticed this before it was too late, Miya senshu.”)
The drive back home is quiet. Osamu keeps his eyes laser-focused on the road, the only aberration from this pattern when he reaches to turn up the radio for a JPop song he likes. It’s a long ride to the apartment. After the fourth thirty-second stoplight, Atsumu leans his head against the window and closes his eyes. He contemplates a faraway world where he didn’t notice his injury right away. In this world, after he collapsed on the court, he bounced right back up. And he finished the match and took victorious selfies to share on Instagram, and he drank too much sake at team dinner, and he stumbled back to his apartment complex with Shouyou and Bokkun each holding up one of his arms.
It’s a nice world. It’s an unrealistic one, though. Atsumu concludes that if he hadn’t recognized his knee pain during the light of day, it would have appeared in his dreams. The fear of a career-ending injury haunts most professional athletes, and it would take a true idiot—not just someone stupid like Atsumu—to ignore that fear.
He stares at his botched knee and withholds a chuckle. What a life.
The drive back home is quiet. Atsumu is learning to relish silence.
The surgery comes a day or a week or a month later. Osamu drives him to the clinic and fusses like their mother the whole while, pointing out all of the places in the car he’s stashed puke bags.
“Tsumu. Hey, Atsumu!” Osamu snaps furious fingers in front of his face. “Ya gotta pay attention to this now cause you ain’t gonna remember shit when ya come outta the operating room. Ya got all that?”
Atsumu—who's been doing the non-spiritual equivalent of astral projecting for the past three days leading up to his surgery—nods. “Yeah."
Osamu pulls into a parking spot, twisting the wheel like it owes him money. “Yeah? What’d ya mean, ‘Yeah’?”
“I mean yeah, Ma, I know where all the damn barf bags are in the car.” Atsumu pulls one out of the cluttered glove compartment, makes a show of gagging into its bright blue abyss. “Yer naggin’ makes me wanna puke on the floor just to piss ya off. Are we good now?”
The sound of the emergency lock clicking into place grates against his ears.
“You know what, Tsumu?” his brother sneers, ripping his keys out of the ignition. “I hope they operate on the wrong fuckin’ knee.”
The two of them enter the building side by side, and it takes all of Atsumu’s willpower not to jab his brother’s stomach with one of his crutches. They’re separated before any real violence can occur, though. Atsumu’s crutches are traded out for a shiny new wheelchair and he’s escorted down the hallway at the speed of light into a small patient room. It’s empty save for a neat hospital bed and a slender nurse. Once again, Atsumu’s mind starts to get a bit hazy here. He thinks that the stick-thin nurse is the one who lifts all 80 kilograms of him into the hospital bed, but that doesn’t really make sense, so he can’t be sure. And he’s relatively confident he gets injected with something or another, but again, there’s no way to guarantee this.
The only thing Atsumu is certain of is that, at some point, the tiny nurse furiously scribbles on his legs in permanent marker. And the only way he knows this for sure is because when he wakes from surgery, he’s surprised to find his left and right knee reading, respectively, “THIS ONE!” and “NO NOT THIS ONE ABSOLUTELY NOT THIS ONE!”
The field of medicine will always be a mystery to him.
Osamu enters the room a few moments later. Rather than congratulatory, postoperative flowers, he shoves a cell phone camera in Atsumu’s face. “We gotta document yer loopiness, Tsumu,” he explains, snapping a photo of Atsumu vaguely gesticulating in protest. “I promise it’ll be hilarious to watch back in a couple ‘a days—fuckin’ hilarious!”
The nurse sends Osamu a caustic look. He raises a sheepish hand in apology for his vulgar language, then continues to spew profanities.
“‘M not loopy!” Atsumu objects after an awkwardly long pause, but there's no merit in it. The word feels like silly putty in his mouth. His eyes couldn’t stay open even if he were willing them to—which, frankly, he’s not. “Not loopy at all.”
“Sure ya aren’t buddy,” his brother grins, patting Atsumu’s good leg. He turns toward Aizawa sensei. “So, what’re the discharge orders, Doc?”
The wheelchair makes its second appearance of the evening as Atsumu is escorted to the car. With the help of the nurse and Osamu, he’s draped across the backseat and then given another one of those godforsaken puke bags to hold on the ride home. As he thumbs the bluing plastic of the bag, he realizes the uncanny similarity between getting a sticker as a kid and a barf bag as an adult. He thinks about how some things change, but others don’t. Atsumu guffaws, loud and deep.
In the front seat of the car, Osamu frowns. “Is laughin’ like that normal? Ya sure ya didn’t operate on his brain or somethin’?” He lowers his voice, addressing the nurse. “He’s never been the sharpest tool in the shed to begin with.”
The paper-thin nurse sighs. “It’s just the drugs, Miya-san. They’ll wear off eventually.” Then she regales care orders to Osamu that sound like rock and roll music to Atsumu, and then sends them on their way.
The drive home is as brutal as to be expected. Atsumu tosses and turns in the backseat like a baby, head and knee throbbing in time. When he lets out his first audible wince, his brother asks if he’s doing alright.
“They just opened up my fuckin’ knee, Samu," he snarls. "How do ya think I’m doin’?”
Osamu doesn’t check in with him for the rest of the ride. Atsumu pukes four times, going through all of the blue bags his brother lovingly crammed into the nooks of the backseat.
In the days following the surgery, reality assaults Atsumu. To start, there’s the issue of sleep, or the lack thereof. Due to the invasive nature of his procedure, Atsumu has to ingest narcotics every few hours. This means being woken up by his brother halfway through the night, then having pills shoved down his unwilling throat. His bandages also constantly need redressing. (Should his knee be bleeding this much? It probably shouldn't be bleeding this much, right?)
On top of the situational insomnia, there’s the humiliation that comes with being immobilized. Miya Atsumu was walking before he could crawl, so being confined to a sofa smaller than his stretched-out body is hell. He winds up watching the first season of an old Korean drama, then all of the Alien movies to pass the time. In his half-alive state, nothing sticks in his brain. But the worst part of it all—worse than the embarrassment of couch captivity and sleepless nights and his brother’s nagging combined—is the physical pain. His bad knee aches every waking hour of the day, and then, just to spite him, it burns at night too. No amount of icing assuages the splitting within his ball-and-socket joint, and no quantity of pills can drown out the screaming pain around it.
It hurts real fuckin' bad. It hurts so bad that Atsumu finds himself thinking, on more than one occasion, that it would be less painful if he were six feet under. It hurts so bad that he wonders if he’ll ever be able to play volleyball again.
Atsumu spends the days drifting in and out of his soft imagination. He conjures another universe, a different universe, and warms it in his hands. This a universe where his life doesn’t revolve around volleyball and hunger. This is a universe where he can grow his nails out long enough to paint them and eat a McDonald’s hamburger whenever he feels like it. This is a universe where he has enough time to fall in love. This is a nice universe. It grows less abstract, less faraway by the hour.
A month into recovery, Osamu announces he’s leaving. He stands at the kitchen counter shaping onigiri into triangles. A bowl of shake and mayo filling rests to his right, a plate of nori to his left. He is wearing a bright red apron that reads "Kiss the cook!" with a dozen white hearts around it. (It probably reads that. Atsumu's English hasn't improved since preschool.)
Atsumu is sitting on the living room floor, pike stretching. He unburies his nose from between his knees and stands up as quickly as his knee can manage. “What?" he splutters, limping into the kitchen. "Why? Ya can’t!”
Somehow, Osamu’s announcement feels like betrayal. Perhaps there is something to be said about a motif of being let down by the things you love most in Atsumu's life.
“Well, I can, and I will.” Osamu tears a piece of nori in half, envelops the ball of rice in it like a warm blanket. “I run a business, Tsumu, and I’m healthy; I don’t got infinite vacation days right now like you.”
The comment isn’t meant to be cruel, but it sticks a little knife in Atsumu nonetheless. Instinctively, he reaches down to massage his bad knee. He treks back to the living room, falls onto the couch. “So, this is it,” he utters to the television set in front of him. Somehow, the screen has switched on to a wall of static.
“So, this is it,” Osamu agrees. “Food'll be ready in five."
Because Osamu is Osamu, he’s privy to the anxiety about recovery that skulks in his brother’s bones. This isn’t twin telepathy or anything like that; it’s just the consequences of eating beside someone and sleeping beside someone and playing beside someone for twenty long, hard years. It’s simply the way things are.
So, two nights before Atsumu is to be thrown to the wolves, Osamu suggests a plan.
“Why don’t ya have on of yer teammates take care of ya?” he asks around a mouthful of seafood. They’re eating Korean takeout again, partially because Osamu is too exhausted to cook, and mostly because he is not insusceptible to the kind eyes of Ms. Kim down the block. “I’m sure any of them would be willin’ to.”
Atsumu looks at his brother like he’s stupid. “The fuck are ya talkin’ about, Samu? It’s still the middle of the goddamn season.”
Osamu scarfs down another bite of his meal. “I’m not sayin’ they’d have to give up their season too or anythin’, just that they could come check up on ya every couple days the way I’ve been doin’.” He dabs a napkin to his mouth, obnoxiously refined.
“I’d like to think they’d already do that,” Atsumu says after too long of a beat. “Even without me askin’.” He plays with the noodles of his jajangmyeon and revels in the way it makes his brother’s skin crawl. He's always been too cruel for his own good.
“They would,” Osamu agrees. “But I know ya like guarantees.”
There are no such things as guarantees in a world where you can be slingshotting toward stardom in one moment and then benched for six months the next, Atsumu thinks to himself, but does not say aloud. Osamu is trying to be considerate, and he knows that has to count for something.
Instead, he nods begrudgingly. He keeps his hands folded in his lap when Osamu reaches across the table for his phone and texts his entire team.
Proof that life will never cease to amaze you arrives at Atsumu’s doorstep three days later in the form of Sakusa Kiyoomi. Dark curls, hooded eyes, posture poor enough to make grandfathers cringe. Wearing an all black ensemble of athleisure, he looks exactly the same as he does at practice. (Did at practice. Atsumu hasn’t been to practice in a while.)
Atsumu glances through his peephole, rears back in confusion, then presses his face so close to the small glass he swears his eye wets it. He relies on muscle memory to unlock the door. “Hi, Omi-kun.”
“Hi, Miya,” his bewitching teammate responds blankly, fishing out a package of Calbee Pizza Potato Chips from his black tote bag. “I’m here to aid in your recovery.”
And just like, the spell is broken. Atsumu beams. “Bitch session?” he asks knowingly.
“Bitch session,” Sakusa confirms, already trading in his sneakers for a pair of soft cotton house slippers.
Here is the thing about Sakusa Kiyoomi: he is, objectively, a jerk. He is a terrible, awful, no good jerk, and Atsumu finds him fascinating because of it. Now, being a jerk doesn’t mean you’re a bad person; it just means you lack some tact when it comes to addressing people’s feelings. Atsumu is willing to admit as much in reference to his own jerk tendencies. But Sakusa, bless the man’s heart, somehow manages to have zero tact about things like emotions. Absolutely none. Sakusa Kiyoomi is twenty-three, born in the year of the rat, and decidedly not an empath.
Sakusa says what’s on his mind when it’s on his mind without bothering to weigh the consequences of his actions. He's not a fan of sweets, so he never sugarcoats, and he doesn't converse with people who aren't worth his time. Against all odds, Atsumu finds this bluntness refreshing. It’s comforting to be around someone as straightforward as himself. It's relaxing to not always have to be good.
Atsumu brings a kettle of water to a boil in the kitchen and prepares a cup of green tea for Sakusa. His teammate wrestles a ceramic bowl from Atsumu’s quite literally collapsing cabinet to pour the pizza potato chips into. There's a domesticity to the rhythm of it all. Once the snacks have been prepared, the two of them take seats on opposite ends of the couch from one another and begin to complain.
They complain about every little mundane stressor in their lives for the next hour and change. Atsumu hears about Sakusa’s new neighbor who doesn’t understand that washing metal-buckled boots at 12 AM is unacceptable, and the gray cat that keeps finding her way onto his balcony and into his plants. He learns about the team’s latest failed combos and the worst of the worst dad jokes that Meian has told. He's told that Sakusa's worst compulsion as of late is lint rolling his bed before he sleeps on it. And as Atsumu listens to story after story of Sakusa’s life, he feels, for the first time in weeks, a bit more at home. They're unlikely friends, but they're friends nonetheless.
Once the bowl of potato chips has been diminished to orange crumbs and the kettle is drained, Sakusa poises to leave.
“Don’t go yet, Omi-kun,” Atsumu pleads, quite out of the blue, a hand reaching out blindly. His confession tinges the air of the apartment cyan. “I mean, we still got so much more to talk about."
Sakusa, who has never been one for bullshit, sits back down. He crosses his knobby knees toward Atsumu, and the ghost of smile settles in the seams of his mouth. “All right. Talk.”
Two months into his recovery, Atsumu learns how to make eggs. He wakes up early each morning to experiment with new recipe, and he sings like a kid as he slides a melting slice of butter across the fry pan. Putting pressure on his bad leg no longer hurts, so he can indulge in the cooking process. He makes scrambled eggs first, then eggs over easy, and then fried eggs. He perfects sunny side up and poached eggs during the following week. Soon, he's baking quiches. Every time Atsumu successfully completes a new egg recipe, he documents the final result and sends it to Osamu, who only ever responds with a thumbs up to the message, despite being the definition of a foodie.
Two months into his recovery, Atsumu doesn’t suddenly become enamored with food. He doesn't fall in love with the act of creating a meal with his own hands—of watching bland ingredients transform into something magnificent—but he begins to understand why some people do. He texts Osamu as much.
His brother thumbs up the message.
Sakusa’s visits become a routine. At around eight PM every other night, Atsumu’s most enigmatic teammate will knock on his apartment door with a gloved hand and slink inside. They'll chat for a bit, or just bask in the silence of one another, and then the two of them will proceed to try not to set the kitchen on fire as they cook dinner together. It’s a nice arrangement, really. They offer each other honest company. They draw out smiles from one another. And when Atsumu’s knee starts to give out, Sakusa is there to catch him.
There’s subtext underneath all of these evenings (and Atsumu is hoping it’s very queer subtext), but bringing it up to Sakusa means the facing the risk of losing their delicate balance. So he says nothing at all. He simply beams when Sakusa partner-stretches with him, and kneads his bad knee, and lets their ankles touch under the kitchen table. He simply buries his head against his pillow at night like a teenage girl and screams out his affections. Simple.
Three months pass, then four. Atsumu is walking without crutches now—walking without his brace more than he should, too—but he doesn’t go back to practice. He doesn’t even set to himself in his bedroom. Instead, he tries to excavate the parts of him that first existed before volleyball. He cooks and he cleans more than ever before, and his apartment begins to feel like a home. And when six months pass and he’s given the green light from Aizawa sensei to run again, he doesn’t bound back onto the court.
His teammates are confused more than they are offended. They ask why, and Atsumu has no answer. He starts journaling to search for one. The best he can come up with is a lousy metaphor, and he recites it to Sakusa over the phone one evening.
"It’s like how when ya use a dull razor, ya get accustomed to havin’ to have to drag the blade across yer skin multiple times," he begins, pacing around his apartment. "So then when ya finally get a new razor, yer all of a sudden surprised by how easily it cuts, even though that’s really how things should be in the first place." He pauses, staring down at his legs. His right quad is substantially bigger than his left, and maybe it always will be. "Does that make any sense?"
On the other side of the line, Sakusa is dragging something back and forth across a soft surface—lint rolling his sheets, Atsumu notes absentmindedly. He blows softly into the receiver, and it sounds like a lullaby. "It makes perfect sense."
July promises heavy rain and humid air. It also promises Sakusa over in his apartment more than ever before, hair cropped close to his ears and skin always covered in a thin sheen of sweat. Atsumu has long since accepted that the two of them will never label on their relationship, but things shift unexpectedly on a Saturday afternoon.
It is pouring outside, and Atsumu feels right as rain. He stands at the window staring out at the city. His tank top is too loose. His hands are curled around the sill. “Do ya think there’s another me out there who never got hurt?” he asks.
“That’s a silly inquiry,” Sakusa responds, because he always says what’s on his mind, and what’s on his mind is always right. “Of course, there is, if you believe in things like the multiverse theory." He pads through the apartment to wind up at the window with him. "But what difference would it make? You’re still you.”
“‘M still me,” Atsumu nods. He watches four drops spatter the window pane at once. “But don’t ya think that maybe I’d always be doomed to fall in some way or another, in every life? That maybe that’s what passion like mine does to a guy?
“I don’t know,” Sakusa mutters, not unkindly. “But I can say that you’ve always been Icarus incarnate in this life.” He hooks his chin over Atsumu’s shoulder.
The touch makes Atsumu’s ears burn. “I got no idea what that means, Omi-Omi," he exhales softly. "Was he some kinda Western saint?”
Sakusa snorts. His fleeting touch vanishes as he pulls back to double over in laughter. “Oh, there is no reality where I compare you to a saint, Atsumu.”
And, ah, there it is: the use of his first name. Atsumu has longed to hear his given name fall from those lips for years, and now, the only thing more paralyzing than his yearning is fulfillment. Atsumu. Atsumu.
“It still hurts sometimes, ya know,” Atsumu eventually manages to wheeze out. “When the weather changes, like now, I can always feel it. Right here.” Atsumu lifts his left knee to rest on the window sill. Gently, he traces the old incision wounds. The purple-pink sutures have sunken into his skin over the past year, like the last hues of a sunset returning to the earth. “‘M scared of gettin’ hurt again and havin’ to start all over again, Omi-kun.”
I am scared of love because I am so scared of what’s on the other side. I want to give you more but I don’t know where “more” ends and “everything” begins. I have never loved something that has not torn me apart. I have never understood love without self-sacrifice.
Atsumu wonders if Sakusa understands. It would be nice, he thinks vaguely, if he understands.
Sakusa is quiet for a long, long time, which is just a fantastic sign in Atsumu’s book. But then he speaks: “Kiyoomi.”
Atsumu blinks, turning around to face him. “What?”
“Kiyoomi,” Sakusa repeats, and he looks like something out of painting, eyes all star-washed and alight. His hair is unbelievably frizzy in the heat. “Call me Kiyoomi, Atsumu. Please.”
And Atsumu’s first thought then is, honest to god: well, this wasn’t supposed to happen. Because it wasn’t supposed to. But as he runs his tongue along his teeth, he remembers that none of these last twelve months were supposed to happen either, and for once, his memory is clear. Atsumu’s sharp eyes soften. “So it’s like that?” he asks hesitantly, the breath hitching in his throat. “Kiyoomi?”
Sakusa—Kiyoomi—sighs, and the sound is so fond it’s almost cloying. “Yes, you imbecile, it’s like that,” he confirms before leaning into kiss Atsumu stupid.
Later in the day, once their lips are kiss-swollen and the rabbit in the moon has come out to play, Atsumu reclines against a sleeping Kiyoomi’s chest. Muted jazz music from outside mingles with the draft in the room. And it must be because the temperature of the apartment is just right—because Kiyoomi’s t-shirt is just soft enough—that Atsumu reaches down to graze the surgical scars on his knee. Their faintness is a testament to both the time that has passed and the strength of his body. Now, they almost look as though they were made by accident. As if he happened to knick them at just the right angle while trying to shave his legs. It's a laughable thought.
As Atsumu continues to stroke the marred flesh, he’s acutely aware of how smooth the pads of his fingertips are. Spellbound, he pulls his hand away from his knee and holds it up eye-level. He rotates his wrist in awe, back and forth and back and forth.
He smiles, sad. Twenty years of blistered fingertips are beginning to heal.