At seventeen, Miya Atsumu throws his soul to the wolves.

It happens under cold white brilliance, the arc of a stadium—he pulls a switch and makes a brazen promise to the ground, the sky, and the boy across the net. Two pairs of carnivorous eyes turn their attention to him, tired, unblinking. Atsumu walks away before they can respond with something that will slam him into a wall, metaphorically or not. He’s not in the mood for vague epiphanies.

Osamu laughs at him later and gets an elbow in the ribs for it. Life continues, because it does—because it should. Volleyball continues. Atsumu learns to live with the throbbing ache in his chest. Atsumu continues.

(This part is omitted out of courtesy: Atsumu seethes, the kind that simmers just beneath the surface of his eyes, which he knows someone will only notice if they look close enough. He won’t let them look close enough. He allows himself this hollow disappointment, despite the opposite force that wells up inside his chest—the one that burns.)

Eventually, he finds himself lying awake at three in the morning on a Saturday, cheek pressed to a salt-wet pillow while listening to Osamu’s slow, even breaths from the lower bunk.

Crybaby, he’d say—he’s said it before. Atsumu imagines decking him. He imagines the sun lying in the spring-blue sky, his shadow cutting clear over the pavement. He imagines hunger.

Come dawn, when the first bird melody rises with the sun through the thick of the trees, he rises to go running. Osamu peels back an eyelid to watch him zip up his jacket. He makes no comment on the eye bags, nor the thin set of his mouth. What hovers in the morning chill between the doorframe and their beds finds them without words.

Osamu blinks at him once, twice, then rolls over. He sighs into his pillow. “Don’t lose the keys.”

Atsumu ventures outside the neighborhood a couple blocks farther than he’s used to, takes a detour, and stops to watch the sunrise, ultramarine shades bleeding into red and a medallion’s victorious gold.

Unbidden, he recalls Karasuno’s monster duo and the gleam in their eyes, tertiaries on the food chain. Kita-san’s back, outlined against a cloudless blue canvas yesterday. Their first and last match of the Spring High.

Volleyball, infinite.

No one’s around, so Atsumu curses to himself and tries to chase all thoughts of loss from his brain, tries to wash the bitter, medicinal taste from his mouth, and fails because he is human—disappointing.

The sky laughs at him. In retaliation, he clenches his fists and aims his mouth at it like a gun, with ammunition that bites himself more than they do the dancing, painless clouds above. It stings back with a dull sort of exhaustion.

What happens, in the end, is that Miya Atsumu learns of pain and more pain overlaying the insatiable hunger that cracks his nails in half, pulls him forward into the world’s maw, pulls him just that little bit more than it does his brother. (This is but a faint awareness they’ll have to address sooner or later.) He vows he’ll climb, stand the tallest of them all. He digs the pads of his fingers against his jaw until it hurts, until the certainty pounds in his blood. He will.

—

Aside from his newly styled, significantly less piss-colored hair from high school and a handful of centimeters added on to his height, twenty-three year-old Atsumu is, unfortunately, still the same Atsumu. According to a popular vote (read: Osamu), his personality has only grown in atrocity, along with his hair. The current hypothesis is that these two things are apparently connected because they grow at the same pace. (Osamu threatens to shave him bald.)

Atsumu plays in the V. League now, which comes as no surprise to anyone who’s spent more than a minute watching him on the court, and he is now legally allowed to refer to himself as an adult who is allowed to do adult things. His mentality says otherwise. Exhibit A would be that living with the MSBY Black Jackals tests his sanity on a regular basis. Yes, Atsumu has turned over the idea of joining some other team; he’s thought back to his debut and the enormous ego he developed from sponsorship requests and the other teams that watched him play and quickened their breaths and tightened the set of their mouths. Then he thought of gravity and its ropes, and attachment (thought of Sakusa the asshole and Bokuto the megaphone and Inunaki the lesser-asshole and Adriah the human Retriever and too many more), and—well.

He would stay. He would be staying for the next several years, at least, despite the clamorous living-together experience and the ignored jokes and the secondhand embarrassment. 

(Why? He won’t say, but it’s easily enough answered. A lone bird offered a home will stay despite the aggravating children and the dog that sleeps by the mantel, as long as it has something to stay for.)

Twenty-three year-old Atsumu lives in a dorm with too many people; dreams of peace and quiet are quashed with such speed it’s embarrassing. There are team outings on Wednesdays and bothering Osamu over the phone on other days, and every once in a while, Atsumu will take the train to Hyogo and endure his mother’s enthusiasm for the weekend because maybe he misses her, too.

On the occasion, he can catch a whiff of high school in the presence of Sakusa Kiyoomi and his resting corpse glare, the one that intensifies around Atsumu like Sakusa would sell his soul to be anywhere else in the world than within a fifty-meter radius of him.

Other times it comes in bursts of shouting and unintentional door-slamming, and Atsumu thinks that Bokuto really isn’t half bad to be around most of the time once you adjust to the fact that his two default energy levels are zero and one hundred without a between. Roommates get used to each other, after all.

As a result, it has slowly dawned on Atsumu the amount of patience which Aran possessed in order to handle him and Osamu together for so many years. Given what crumbs of his old team’s experience Atsumu is aware of, the mere fact that they’re both still alive without their necks snapped in half and their bodies rotting six feet under the earth’s surface is a miracle in itself.

In the case of the aforementioned scenario, twenty-three-year-old Atsumu has reached the minimum level of self-awareness needed to know that he would’ve been the first murder. Death by strangulation, purple-black fingerprints bruising his jugular. Fitting, for Atsumu has never learned how to close his mouth at the right times.

Osamu would be given more mercy. In middle school, he swore to never become like Atsumu and subsequently has never been on par with Atsumu’s soulless depravity, though in Atsumu’s opinion it can’t be vouched that either of them is a sizable amount more upstanding than the other.

The real point is: if more people saw how mean Osamu could be sometimes, then maybe Atsumu wouldn’t be getting the shorter-end-of-the-stick treatment all the time.

As it goes, this also happens to lead into the question Atsumu has been asking himself rather recently: Why the fuck has the universe gone and deposited his high school self’s emotional crisis right in front of him years later, likely thinking that “why yes, this is a fantastic decision!” while Osamu gets to live his life in peace, as if the entire realm of existence is conspiring against Atsumu and Atsumu only.

Here’s the hardened truth, if you will. No matter how viciously he snarls, the universe does not give out refunds to people with shitty personalities who eat themselves whole in order to carve out their own piece of the world to put on their plate. The universe does not give out refunds to anyone but especially withholds them from people like Miya Atsumu.

It takes twenty years for him to realize this. (It will take another twenty until he learns to live with it. By the time his skeleton grows weary and he can no longer play volleyball, it will have slowly settled in his flesh, eyelashes, heart, and the universe will rock him to sleep in its stars.)

—

Then, the reckoning comes.

Atsumu is twenty, and Kageyama Tobio is nineteen and an arm’s reach away. He is taller, and broader, grown into himself as everyone has in the years from high school spanning their fingertips. Atsumu has seen many old faces—teammates and opponents alike—enter the pro-athlete scene as he did. Atsumu also fails to recall the last time a flame scrambled its way up his throat and lit a match to his organs for simply seeing someone after a handful of years. His eyes burn. His hands burn. His entire face scalds like it’s been dunked in hot water.

Atsumu is fucking stupid, so he ignores all the warning signs of what’s to come and plows ahead.

“Ready to get your ass kicked today, Tobio-kun?” He’s grinning hard. Blood thrums from the roots of his teeth to the curve of his jawbone, and the reptilian beast in his belly flexes its claws in delight when Kageyama grins back.

“We’ll ground you into dust, Miya-san. Just you wait.”

—

The Black Jackals lose.

Kageyama Tobio’s figure shimmers under the blasting stadium lights, summoning a midnight-blue landscape that he blinks into existence. He smiles as they exchange a handshake under the net, a threat and a promise. We will meet on the court again, soon.

In the moment where Atsumu forgets to breathe, forgets life itself to lock himself in this moment for eternity , something ferocious in his chest sets itself ablaze.

—

Atsumu is twenty-three and stands four feet away from the catalyst of his dreams, who grins with seafoam teeth and crinkled eyes, who waves as if they’re two old friends who’ve met to catch up with each other’s lives and argue over the tab at a boisterous, colorful restaurant. He has returned from across the Pacific after spending years setting himself in the kiln over laughing earth, and it lingers in the glow of his skin. He is alive and back.

There are several things wrong with this statement. First of all, Atsumu has no friends, nor does he make plans for one-on-one friend-dates because they always end in catastrophe (discovered through several forced cases of trial and error that he pledged were absolutely not his fault); secondly, he does not pay the tab. Ever—which might be the reason behind the former.

Third: human is a euphemism for temporary, and of these two things, Hinata Shouyou is neither.

—

Atsumu is still twenty-three, and Hinata is ten minutes from playing his first match as an official member of the Black Jackals. Only here, it’s not Hinata whose presence demands attention, despite his arrival, but the deep blue of the gaze that is just across the hall yet reflecting fifteen-thousand kilometers across the sea.

Hinata is looking at him because that’s all he ever does when Kageyama is remotely in his field of vision, and Kageyama is looking back because that’s all he ever does when Hinata is remotely in his field of vision. Gravity ceases to exist in this corner of the world. They have monopolized it all to themselves, and they are alone in this.

(Eleven-year-old Atsumu used to read endless amounts of manga and American comics on a regular basis until Osamu would yell at him for the books strewn over their bedroom floor that they were both responsible for tidying. He liked the superhero stories the most, liked the character designs and the dramatic fights and dialogue. He’d had a special liking for villains, with the reason that they were always the most capable, most calculating, and in his eleven-year-old wisdom concluded that this made them better than the heroes on all levels.

Their mother, only a smidge concerned, thought this was largely amusing and indulged him. Osamu, like any good sibling, thought him ridiculously stupid. He scoffed more than once during these spiels and remarked that this philosophy would “come back to bite Atsumu in th-” at which point their mother would cut in sternly and usher them back to their respective duties, like washing their hands before dinner.

Atsumu grew out of this phase in another year and a half; as a result, Osamu sought to deliver jabs from other topics. The books gathered dust and were eventually tucked into the closet and forgotten.) 

Reiteration: there is Kageyama, and there is Hinata, and most of the time there is also “Kageyama and Hinata” in the great yawning shape of the world.

There is also Atsumu. Atsumu stands between a bridge that has withstood the trials of high school and white-tipped oceans and square inches of strangers who speak every language but yours, and he wonders if he is the villain.

—

The Black Jackals win 3-1 against the Schweiden Adlers.

—

Not only does Osamu run a steady, growing business (no, Atsumu most certainly does not keep tabs on his twin’s life), he also has the luxury of not sharing Atsumu’s agony when it comes to emotional maturity, and reaps the fruits of this benefit.

How Atsumu discovers this: Suna fucking Rintarou answers the door to Osamu’s apartment when Atsumu drops by the following week and, when questioned, replies, “I live here,” with the composure of someone who lives there and nearly gives Atsumu an aneurysm.

“Oh, yeah,” Osamu says when Atsumu ambushes him at Onigiri Miya the next day. He steps aside to wipe his hands on a towel and looks significantly undisturbed, much to Atsumu’s indignation. Most people are getting off work, and the line of customers is growing. “I told you—I’ve been living with Rintarou since January. Did you forget?”

Atsumu either forgot or just hadn’t been listening. It wouldn’t be the first time. He decides that he doesn’t really feel bad about it, like how Osamu doesn’t really care that he didn’t remember, but there’s a peculiar taste in his mouth at this realization that rubs against his teeth like lemon juice.

The sun is sinking below the horizon by the time he walks home, hands shoved in pockets while his eyes lift upward towards the view. Red dashes across the sky tauntingly as dusk approaches. It’s a shade too bright for blood and a shade too dark for fury.

There is Suna Rintarou, and there is Miya Osamu; Osamu loves Suna and is loved in return. Osamu is also considerably saner than Atsumu, which makes a fair argument, but-

But what? Atsumu pauses on the sidewalk, over a crack. The clouds don’t wait for his thoughts. They move both slowly and at a speed faster than Atsumu could ever hope to reach; perspective is on their side and plays tricks on lost wanderers.

There is an epiphany behind and around him, legs crossed, blowing bubblegum. It has waited six years to be noticed, and its patience is scabbing away with the wind.

Halfway to his apartment, Atsumu makes a second decision to hate the sky.

—

Back in Hyogo, there’s a stain on the wall adjacent to the staircase leading to their front door that is only visible when the light hits at the right angle. It’s been there since before his parents moved in, before he and Osamu were born. Maybe they fucked up the paint job on the wall when the building was first constructed. Maybe it’s been there forever, withstanding green tides and watching hands sculpt clay into life and set their creations in the kiln just to see them burn. Maybe it’s waiting for someone to finally notice.

Atsumu drags a hand through his memory in search of a pin, penciled in like the lines on the doorframe where he and Osamu measured their heights from ages three to eighteen. He finds none. There is, though, a crescendoing ring that is coming from either his consciousness or hell.

He considers first the stain on the wall, then Hinata Shouyou, then Kageyama Tobio. How these three entities fit into each other, how the world does not create space for anyone and you have to first obtain a blade, then whittle away at the mold you were forged in yourself, stretching your soul out and into your dreams. How this truth is like the blade.

Atsumu has been carving his way out since he was in elementary school and discovered how the arc of a ball travels from one’s fingertips to another’s palm, how its path ends at the gym’s linoleum floor, then repeats.

At twenty-three, he has seen and felt the path of the ball a million times over. At twenty-three, he is grazing at what it means to be free.

—

It is an uncommonly known fact that Atsumu can see the waiting epiphany out of the corner of his eye. He has seen it since he was seventeen and his soul was rough-edged, still, like when his first adult tooth grew in and he ran his tongue curiously over the jagged ridges not yet worn by time.

And with time, you grow surer of things, of yourself. This is an age-old certainty proved time and time again. This is what Atsumu knows.

It is an uncommonly known fact that Atsumu can see the waiting epiphany out of the corner of his eye. The epiphany does not know this. Atsumu does not know this—hasn’t turned to face it, yet.

The universe laughs into its glass of wine, knowing this and much more. It throws the dart. It doesn’t miss.

—

It is seven in the morning and Atsumu hits his head on the dresser, accidentally answers a spam call, brushes his teeth, and realizes he’s in love with Hinata Shouyou and Kageyama Tobio. Not necessarily in that order.

The first thing he says is, “Fuck.” The second thing he says is, “What the fuck.” The third thing he says is an indecipherable string of babbled gibberish and then he Googles: “how to fuck off the face of the earth”, sags against the bathroom door, and covers his face with his hands.

On all other levels, it’s a normal day. Hinata comes over in the afternoon after Atsumu has glued enough pieces of his sanity back together to form a believably normal picture of his pre-breakdown self, and they end up watching their recent match with the Adlers on YouTube.

The video is interrupted three times by three different ads—two being hair commercials and the other being Kageyama’s new milk sponsorship, go figure. They laugh about it until Hinata’s face is red and Atsumu complains that he’s developed a stomach cramp (Hinata laughs harder at this, which Atsumu takes as a slight form of betrayal but also half-excuses because he is pathetic and has realized that he is in love).

He sends a photo to Kageyama an hour later of his TV, which displays Kageyama’s milk commercial, except they (read: Atsumu, tears of laughter in his eyes, enabled by Hinata, also with tears of laughter in his eyes) have paused the video right when Kageyama has his eyes mid-blink, milk carton with its straw lifted halfway to his mouth. He looks possessed.

To add to the quality, there’s a visible reflection off the TV screen of Atsumu’s silhouette, phone raised, grinning like a bobcat, and the cherry garnish topping it all off is the blur in the corner that, with its color scheme, can only be deciphered to be Hinata, who at the time was wheezing until he could no longer speak and had burst into the frame while this was in procedure.

It is, by all laws of comedy in Atsumu’s head which he made up three minutes ago, a perfect photo.

Kageyama disputes this. He leaves Atsumu on read for an entire five minutes before responding with a deadpan, excessively unamused “lol” that has Hinata rolling again until Atsumu makes him sit down to catch his breath.

Come evening, they make pasta— try to, and nearly miss the aggressively boiling pot of water over Hinata’s fifth anecdote on his time in Brazil—he goes over “Oikawa-san” three of those five times (Atsumu, unnecessarily suspicious, makes a mental note to look into San Juan VBC's roster and website) and excitedly recounts a marriage proposal made to one of his beach volleyball partners. Twice, Atsumu comes close to burning himself while paying too much attention to the sparkle in Hinata’s eyes because it must be reemphasized that Atsumu is a pathetic man.

It’s a disaster, Kageyama says when Hinata relays this all to him. Hinata retaliates by cheerfully reminding him that he had set off the fire alarm in the Adlers’ dorms at midnight by microwaving leftover takeout in aluminum foil, and it took a month for everyone (read: their old Karasuno teammates) to let him live it down. Kageyama tells him to shut up.

Minutes after Hinata leaves, Atsumu grips the sink counter and stares at his reflection in the mirror for an obscenely long amount of time until he’s sure his bones have stiffened enough to become plaster and should crumble at any moment, taking his soul with them. He hopes, nominally, that his skull will be left intact so that it can be displayed in a museum later.

He contemplates fistfighting the universe. He contemplates fistfighting Sakusa Kiyoomi, just to test his half-formed hypothesis that Sakusa is secretly a computer-generated hologram. Both of these, he’d inarguably lose.

In the end, Atsumu does not fistfight anyone, let alone Sakusa Kiyoomi and his terrifying aura. When all is dark and he cannot see the outline of his hands but instead feels his wet breathing as it fills the gaps in his room, he does almost cry. When all is still but the shadows waking to sentience, Atsumu sinks into his pillow and lets his vision blur.

—

“Hey, ‘Samu,” Atsumu says on the third consecutive day he and Osamu unwillingly spend together in Hyogo, a result of their mother’s urging and their general inability to get away with lying to her. “How the hell did you and Suna get together?”

Pausing, Osamu looks up from where he’s folding laundry in their old bedroom, eyes narrowing. Atsumu is “helping”, in the way that one person in the group project “helps” by crossing their arms and pretending to check in with everyone else’s work while doodling on the corners of their lined paper. “Do you actually want to know, or is this a bad excuse to talk about your life?”

Atsumu shrugs, says, “You tell me,” which is Atsumu-code for “You’re right, but I would rather chew off both my legs and my serving arm than admit that”. Language tried and weaved and built over the course of a lifetime, right from the moment they came red and crying out of the womb. Osamu doesn’t reach out; it catches anyway.

“All right. When did this happen?”

“Honestly?” Atsumu leans backwards and rolls over so that he lands face-first in the mattress. “Probably since high school.” He reconsiders. “Yeah, no—definitely since high school. What the fuck, ‘Samu, you should’a told me.”

Osamu frowns at this, mildly offended. “You’re an emotional mess, ‘Tsumu, but even I didn’t bother to know who you liked in high school, ‘cause that’d be weird. Can you not be a dumba- actually, no, sorry. That’s too much to ask for.”

“Oh, you wanna repeat that? Huh, ‘Samu? You wa-”

Osamu ignores him. “What I mean is, who is it? Seriously.” He splays out the fingers of his left hand and rattles off: “Aran-san? Everyone had a crush on him at some point. Kita-san—same rule of thumb as Aran-san. I dunno, Sakusa? You guys have that hate thing-”

“Ugh—no, no, and no, what the hell d’you mean, ‘hate’? Kita-san is a yes, but firstly!”

Osamu has opened his mouth again and, in a moment of panic and stupid decision making (which Atsumu excels at), Atsumu slaps a hand over the lower half of his twin’s face.

“Firstly-”

He’s interrupted again by Osamu prying his hand off and spluttering violently as he reaches around to grab a tissue from the nearby dresser. “That was fuckin’ disgusting, never put your dirty hand anywhere near my face ever again, I wasn’t even gonna say -”

“Firstly! Everyone on the team had feelings for him at some point. Secondly, you had a crush on him too—don’t say you didn’t, that’s a load of shit and y’know it.”

With impressive reluctance, Osamu closes his jaw. Atsumu exhales, settles his expression. He’s too young to develop wrinkles. “And that was years ago. I’m not in love with him anymore, and neither are you.”

In a beat of correlation, his mind stirs up a memory of Suna three weeks ago at Onigiri Miya, impassivity discarded for a softer emotion as he watched Osamu patiently handle a child who’d lost sight of her parents in the crowd. He’d looked like the entire world had fallen away save for the scene in front of him; it had been a sight so delicate even Atsumu couldn’t find enough ill will in himself to poke fun at it.

For a brief second, Osamu goes distant. “Yeah,” he says. “It’s different now.”

“You’re thinking about Suna,” accuses Atsumu. Partly to get a rise out of his twin, and partly because they've delved into lineless territory, and he senses danger. Osamu shoots him his default look—the 'Tsumu, are you actually stupid one.

“Yeah? Who else would I be thinking about?”

Atsumu suddenly dreads the possibility of having to third-wheel his twin and his twin’s boyfriend again, which is exactly what happens now when he drops by Osamu’s place, or Onigiri Miya on the days Suna is there, which is also exactly why he now avoids the two places altogether. There could be an earthquake and they probably wouldn’t care. Atsumu could have an emergency right in front of them and they probably wouldn’t care. Love is horrible.

“Fuck you. Could you at least act embarrassed?”

Osamu ignores him again, the bastard, and repeats, “So, who is it? Don’t make me guess again.” His tone carries the underlying threat of embarrassment.

A cloud of mortification gathers at the base of Atsumu’s throat momentarily. He considers high school. Bursts of colors, like seeing the world in its great entirety for the first time and thinking that it isn’t enough; adrenaline drives itself up the side of your head, fills your senses with nothing but the scent of burning rubber. Seventeen years old and standing on orange linoleum rectangles encased in a sea of bright blue, blood and hunger seeping out of his teeth with each grin. Their first and last match of the Spring High. His fingers slipping down the cliff edge.

“You remember our first match against Karasuno,” he says, and doesn’t listen for an affirmation because of course Osamu remembers. The memory sits under their tongues, sharp with the taste of thrill. “That’s when it happened.”

Atsumu gestures vaguely at the space in front of him. His tongue has attached itself to the roof of his mouth. “That’s when we met them."

Fortunately and unfortunately, by some ridiculous tactic of sibling telepathy, Osamu understands. He pinches his eyebrows together until his forehead forms an upside-down “V” shape. “Oh, fuckin’ hell, it was that .” He stands up. “Is it-”

“Yeah.” Their old bedroom is too small to hold a revelation of this size; Atsumu’s interruption has just saved them from being completely obliterated off the face of the earth with the impact. It’s dramatic. He knows this. He also knows he’s not ready for the stun grenade to be thrown, yet.

He manages to laugh. It’s a diluted sound, too loud, scraping against the thin shoji screens and prompting a sudden jolt of claustrophobia. He stands up as if in a dream, or the aftermath of a narrow encounter with death. Something like that.

Osamu stares at him, then stares at him some more. He stares at him for so long that Atsumu begins to wonder if he’s been possessed and whether or not the evil spirit twisting his mind is plotting ways to kill them both before Atsumu can get his head on right and do something about his stupid feelings.

Or, actually, maybe Atsumu is finally going insane after swallowing his feelings for six entire years and letting them ricochet off the walls of his skull and ruin most of his brain. Either possibility is welcome preceding the supposed end of the world.

“Oh,” says Osamu, and he blinks. He’s (unfortunately) alive and (probably) unpossessed. In his eyes, the world is still somewhat normal, with skies that are blue instead of blaring red like the ones in Atsumu’s. “Well, you’re fucked.”

“What the fuck does that mean.”

“I said,” Osamu emphasizes slowly, as if Atsumu is a kindergartener, and it’s entirely purposeful and Atsumu is going to throttle him. “You’re fucked.”

Atsumu throws a pair of socks at his face.

—

The truth of the matter is this:

Atsumu is blazing over a shivering sky. Atsumu is still, stopped, six feet under the earth and its sleeping ridges. Atsumu is in the water, and he has forgotten, in a moment of looming dread, what he is doing there. Why is he here? The answer to everything was buried deep down at the bottom of the ocean long ago, where the shipwrecks creak their rotted wood in peace. The answer is gone.

—

Next Wednesday’s team dinner has twice as many people as usual because Meian invited Romero who asked to bring Kageyama who was followed by Hoshiumi and then Ushijima and so forth, and now Atsumu is sandwiched between Bokuto and Inunaki in the waiting hall as Meian sheepishly explains to the restaurant staff that they have reserved a room for sixteen people.

This is fine, Atsumu thinks, then repeats. This is fine. A few weeks ago, while scrolling through Twitter in his free time, he came across one of those memes of a dog sitting in a burning house, speech bubble saying, “this is fine”. He now understands it with unnerving clarity; there’s a chandelier. What kind of expensive-ass place did Meian reserve—and all this for the Adlers, too, or maybe just Romero. Atsumu is convinced that over half the volleyball players in the world have a crush on Nicolas Romero. The obvious and often reiterated fact that the man is married and has a child seems to fall on deaf ears and blind eyes. (Or ones who don’t care.)

Then—a light. (The chandelier?) Atsumu lifts a palm over his eyes. A laugh, just as blinding.

“Atsumu-san, hey, are you okay? You kind of look like a lemon right now.”

Hinata has somehow wiggled his way out of the embarrassing crowd of professional athletes in suits and is standing with Kageyama, who has also somehow slipped away from where he was stationed between Ushijima and Romero. Courtesy of Hinata’s charm, probably.

A lemon. Does he? Isn’t the phrase supposed to go something like: he looked as if he were sucking on a lemon? What prompted this comparison, his hair? He reaches up, fingertips skimming over its stiffly gelled shape in sudden self-consciousness. Hinata is grinning and Kageyama looks at him and Atsumu then decides, blind and a little hopeless, that he doesn’t care about fruit analogies or his bleached hair. “Is that so—did you need somethin’ from me?”

They’re peering at him through three layers of chatter, three layers of other people, the way one would peer at a stranded dolphin flailing about the side of a beach. “Miya-san, are you comfortable? Sitting there,” Kageyama adds, a trace awkward. He scuffs his right heel over the carpet, which is a shade of red wine, and does this repeatedly until it seems more like a habitual kicking motion.

“Uh-”

“There’s plenty of room over here,” adds Hinata, waving a palm out at the space next to them. Genuine as always.

Atsumu surveys himself and his position between Bokuto, who is deep in text messages with his fiancé, and Inunaki, who is carrying an intense conversation about squirrels with Adriah. He looks back. Hinata has an elbow propped up on Kageyama’s shoulder and rests his cheek against the elbow; Kageyama tilts into Hinata’s space until the gap between their heads is barely a centimeter wide. The sight is, at best, intimate enough that passersby would glance over, then avert their eyes and redirect the stares of their children and whisper, Be respectful, like people do in the presence of PDA, or someone crying. Atsumu wonders if they’ve been made aware of just how blatant they are.

“I’m okay! Just,” he shifts, tries to make it believable, “a little tired of waiting, that’s all.” Coward, the imaginary Osamu in his head hisses, and he bats him away.

Kageyama shifts, too. His kicking has slowed. “Ah."

Atsumu might actually be delusional because he swears up and down that he witnesses, in the span of this moment, Hinata's radiance grow dimmer. Guilt twists a dead knot in his chest that he cuts loose as quickly as it tightens. It doesn't matter whether or not it’s related to him, or if he's disappointed them—Atsumu doesn't trust his social skills to salvage this, in case the situation worsens.

Instead, he presses his mental self-destruct button.

"Really, I’m fine, so if you two’re concerned about me you don’t need to be. Go on and have your fun. I heard from Bokuto earlier that this place’s got a rabbit mascot you can pet up front, though I'm not too sure how reliable that is, comin' from him." (He's not lying about this in particular.)

Hinata’s eyes don’t return to the state Atsumu hoped for, but he does tilt his head, piqued. “Like a real rabbit?”

“Uh- you’d have to ask Bokuto. There’s also a dog outside, ‘cause Hoshiumi brought his boyfriend and apparently his boyfriend’s got a dog.”

He shrugs, left with nothing more to say. If Atsumu were to push further into distractions he would simply end up looking like a fool who is deliberately avoiding a specific conversation struck with two specific people, and Hinata and Kageyama would catch on, because they are highly observant and capable beings unless it’s regarding matters between the two of them.

“Are you su-”

“I’m sure. One hundred percent.” He drags out a magazine-worthy smile that he hopes is passable.

Their conversation stutters to an end there, because Kageyama steps away first with a nod of goodbye, saying something about the dog and Is Hoshiumi-san allowed to bring Hirugami-san; I thought this was just between our teams, and Hinata is turning to him, distracted, replying that it’s Hoshiumi-san, I don’t think anyone could stop him even if they tried— “Ah, bye, Atsumu-san!”

Atsumu waves. He grips the cuff of his neatly ironed sleeve and wrinkles it. The image of that dog meme he’d seen on Twitter slams itself front and center in his mind, as if mocking him. He gets it. He does.

“‘Tsum-Tsum, you look like a sad lemon.”

Atsumu groans and shoves his face into his palms.

—

“Am I stupid?”

The chopstick protrudes out of his mouth from where it’s wedged between the roof of his mouth and his teeth. When Atsumu and Osamu were kids, their parents warned them not to do this in case of a rather bloody accident involving the ER. Osamu listened. Atsumu did not. Atsumu has never been good at this whole self-preservation thing.

On the other end of the phone is silence. Whichever type is thrown up for debate, seeing as Atsumu can’t see Osamu’s face, so he waits. His patience unravels. “ Hello? Don’t tell me Suna stabbed you while you weren’t looking.”

A noise like a huff, then Osamu’s voice crackles through. “Real funny. Nah, I just-” He breaks off into another wheeze that sounds like printer paper being crumpled in a fist. Like the ghost of an inside joke—or the poltergeist of one, maybe. “You want a straight answer?”

“No, I want cryptic shit about my personality that I could’a called literally anyone else to tell me. Yes, I want a straight fuckin’ answer.”

Osamu unloads a heavy exhale into the speaker. It’s ear-grating, in the most obnoxious way possible. “Is this about your crush, ‘cause I don’t have th-”

“ Osamu, ” Atsumu grinds, “am. I. Stupid.”

He sounds pathetic. He is pathetic. He is cross-legged under the covers of his bed with a chopstick in his mouth and the other impaled like a bayonet in a bowl of microwaved ramen he’s trying to balance on his lap, calling his sibling in a weak attempt to grasp at a sense of achievement, to feel like he’s doing something about the frenzied, indefinite mob in his chest.

Silence returns, and Atsumu tries to regulate his breathing. He’ll die before sixty if he keeps blowing a fuse every time something remotely inconvenient happens. “Are you laughing at m-”

“I’m not.”

It’s so solemn that Atsumu forgets about the words on his tongue. He blinks. “What.”

“You said ‘am I stupid’ , not ‘do you think I’m stupid,’ ” says Osamu, as if that explains everything.

“Uh.” Atsumu sets his chopstick back in the bowl with the other one. His mouth tastes like cheap wood. “Yeah, so?”

“You’re not stupid all the time,” Osamu says, and Atsumu‘s jaw drops.

“Wait, stop talkin’ for a sec, I need to record thi-”

“Let me speak, asshole. You’re still stupid most of the time, but.” There’s a pause, then Osamu clicks his tongue. “But if you’re askin’ me if you’ve got decent judgment on this thing you’ve been so worked up about, then, yeah. And if it really goes to shit, it just goes to shit.”

“That doesn’t he-”

“You’ll be fine,” Osamu says, quieter, pretending not to hear Atsumu mutter stop interrupting me. “Even if it goes to shit, you’ll be fine.”

“Even if-” Atsumu runs a hand through his hair, then runs it back the opposite way so that his bangs prick his eyes. He huffs, trying to sound indifferent in the face of rarity, even though the inside of his cheek is starting to ache from being chewed on. What seeps through the crackled quality of Osamu’s voice is. Well. It’s something he doesn’t quite know what to do with. He scoops it in his palms cautiously, like holding water that won’t run through your fingers.

“You’re serious,” he says.

“I’m literally risking my dignity by sayin’ sappy shit when you could be recording this.”

“Okay,” Atsumu says, “uh. Just makin’ it clear, but I’m not recording.” His stomach is folding in on itself, not unpleasantly, but with awkwardness. Some feeling buried halfway between that and reassurance. “Thanks, or whatever.”

“Or whatever,” Osamu parrots back at him, and despite himself, Atsumu laughs and chokes on his laugh, then brings the receiver in close to let out a yell, and cackles as Osamu clearly recoils from the loudness, cursing.

“Fuck you, I’m never bein’ nice to you ever again.”

“Your loss.”

“How is that my loss-”

Outside Atsumu’s room, there sounds a thump followed by a loud groan of oh my god, you scared me, and then a snort and collective laughter from both. Someone’s workout playlist is blaring from down the hall. Given the upbeat, bubblegum pop music, it’s probably Hinata’s, or Inunaki’s. They never know when to turn down the volume of their phones and keep their doors shut. The rest of them collectively decided long ago that it’s more a nuisance than a real issue. They let them be.

You’ll be fine.

“...Hey. ‘Samu.”

“What.”

The panicked knot in his chest has vanished. Atsumu twists his mouth into a sideways grin, because anything more would be giving Osamu too much credit. But still. “Thanks. For saying all that stuff.”

“Yeah. You owe me now.”

“I-” Atsumu begins, protesting, and gives up for once. He’s strangely tired. “Fine, whatever. Fuck you.”

“You’re welcome. ”

—

“So. You’re in love with Tobio-kun.”

Hinata swings his legs where he’s perched on top of the kitchen counter and pops another shrimp chip in his mouth. He invited himself over as soon as Bokuto announced that he was going to be spending the day at Akaashi’s, and Atsumu, like the pathetic man he is, could not find the words to refuse.

Atsumu is also a stupid man, seeing as they’ve ended up here, in their dorm’s shared kitchen, in this line of conversation. Slip of the mouth—a terrible mistake and likely soon-to-be regret. He notes down mental instructions to scrub his tongue with sandpaper if by some miracle he escapes from this unscathed.

“Yep. You are, too.”

Atsumu jerks. “What,” he says. Was that accusatory? Does Hinata Shouyou retain enough malice in his mortal form to be accusatory?

He tries for a scoff. “You sure you’re not mistaking me for someone else, Shouyou-kun? This is Kageyama Tobio we’re talking about, remember? Like—the dumb, gullible, angry guy, Kageyama Tobio.”

The dodge is pointless. His words slide down the back of his tongue like sandpaper, scrape against his throat when he swallows.

It should be unfair that Hinata can admit this so easily, acting like it’s a feat barely worth anything when to Atsumu it is everything. It should be unfair that Hinata is in tune with his soul and where it has directed him while Atsumu is still trapped in a duel with himself to pry out the truth. Atsumu has spent years not knowing that he is in love. And now that he does, he’s playing the coward.

Silence closes in around them. Hinata knows him better than that. Atsumu knows that Hinata knows him better than that.

For an agonizing stretch of time, there is nothing but the sound of the faint buzz of the kitchen’s shitty lighting fixture and his own quickened breathing. Hinata’s hand has withdrawn from the chip bag and is laid on his lap, fiddling with the creases in his sweatshirt. He must’ve forgotten to iron it.

“Atsumu-san,” he says slowly. “You know it’s pretty obvious, right?”

That is the last thing Atsumu wants to hear, and he almost snaps this out loud. It prompts a brand new chain of panic, like: how many people caught on before Atsumu’s feelings rammed into his gut? How many were unfortunate witnesses to his embarrassing behavior? How many laughed, and how many were kind enough not to?

It’s not even a daggered statement. Atsumu knows how to deflect those all too well; he’s spent his whole life doing so. Here, he is barely allowed to lash back, however much he might want to, because there’s no justification.

Surely, one can say, pettiness has never stopped him before. They’re not wrong, but in saying that, they have forgotten to consider Hinata.

Hinata hasn’t a semblance of cruelty in his body. He is the force that tugs Atsumu down by his bones, tethered to the ground by gravity to writhe in the wake of this truth and its overwhelming simplicity.

“I… had no idea,” he says, in honesty. The skeleton of his annoyance picks at his words. “How long have you known? How did you find out, even? I didn’t even know until, like, last month , and you’re telling me it’s ‘pretty obvious’ and I dunno what that means! D’you mean to tell me that the entire fuckin' world knows about my stupid-” and he’s bulldozing headfirst into a ramble, now, when Hinata cuts through the fog.

“Since that first match we had against the Adlers after I joined the Black Jackals. I knew. I think everyone else on our team knew, too.”

And then, with kindness that twists like a knife, Hinata says, “Your feelings aren’t stupid, Atsumu-san.”

It's infuriating. This is, somehow, the only reason Atsumu gathers enough sense to shut the fuck up for a moment, and upon seeing Hinata’s face, is violently struck with another bout of awareness.

See—there are several things that one must know to understand this situation.

Firstly: Hinata Shouyou is clearly and indisputably in love with Kageyama Tobio. This is a truth as prevalent as the one about grass sprouting green in the warm seasons, or the one about Miya Atsumu being clearly and indisputably in unrequited love with Hinata Shouyou and Kageyama Tobio.

Secondly: Hinata knows only half of the Miya Atsumu truth. A half-truth works wrongly, like a poem written entirely backwards with the letters rearranged, which is why, Atsumu supposes, they are called white lies.

“Shouyou-kun, I’m-”

He’s what? Sorry? For what—Hinata doesn’t need an apology—the mere thought is laughable.

So Atsumu tries for salvation. Or destruction, depending on how one perceives it. He settles for: “He loves you, too.”

At that, Hinata turns towards him, and surely, he knows how heartbreaking it is—that look. The one catching mortals in his fishing net, in the dark of his silhouette as he dances through the universe, bright, so bright it rings.

“Who?” he says, as if it isn’t the simplest thing in the world. As if he doesn’t already know the answer.

Me.

Atsumu swallows his own demise. There is a two-way path laid out before him; he loses in both, keeps his secret in one.

“He loves you. Tobio-kun loves you; do you- do you see that?” His organs are turning to gold, slowly, to be broken open and displayed along with his skull in that museum of fools.

Hinata is so still he might as well be a god’s sculpture. His silence kindles a sort of ugly frustration in Atsumu that isn’t fair at all to begin with, but in a millisecond-frame’s worth of decisions is fair enough to be spoken aloud.

“Do you know? Shouyou-kun, don't tell me you've had no idea this whole time because you've gotta be smarter than that and it couldn't be more obvious- have you even seen him—like, looked at his face? The way he looks at you? Tobio's been in love with you for years and you-”

“Atsumu-san,” Hinata interrupts. “I know.”

What.

“What,” Atsumu says, stupidly.

Hinata is looking at him again. The light splayed against the counter is soft and amber and flicks up against his face like a sheen of gold, stretching up and around the line of his jaw.

Does he know?

No, does he know that what he levels on every single person in his vicinity renders them completely and utterly helpless to his power, like he is the sun and they are all Icarus, held together only by wings constructed of wax and feather, soaring relentlessly towards a blaze they will never touch and will die trying to; does he know this?

Mortals are reckless; the ocean feeds from this desperation. Atsumu fell headfirst into her glorious jaws long ago and realized this only when he realized that he is in love, painfully so as he struggles to keep his head above the surface, and yet.

And yet, Hinata hovers at the edge of the water with his crow-feathered wings, and he is asking Atsumu if he really wants to drown because Atsumu can swim perfectly well and the sea is merciful today—so why is he still here, when he could be free?

Atsumu has not answered him yet. He thinks he might be waiting for something.

“I know, Atsumu-san. But do you? ”

—

Turns out, Atsumu doesn’t know. Know what, he asks, feeling stupid about the entire situation all over again. None of this has gone the way he expected, but then again, he hadn’t expected to be greeted on a Sunday morning by the staggering realization that he’s been in love—and with not just one, but two people. For years.

Hinata smiles and hops off the counter and tells him to go figure it out. Atsumu asks why, and if Hinata knows why not just tell him; what if Atsumu doesn’t want to figure it out; what if he never knows, and Hinata laughs while unlacing his sneakers at the entrance of his room, and closes the door behind him softly. He takes the bag of shrimp chips.

—

“Can I ask you something’?”

“You just did, Miya-san.”

“Don’t get cheeky with me.” Still. Atsumu is smiling, though the backs of his eyes are burning and his hands are also burning, and the deja-vu of it all is filling his senses like smoke.

He says, “I’m gonna ask you a question.”

The streets are loud, the cars louder, headlights incising deep shadows into the angles of Kageyama Tobio’s face. They’d passed a digital screen earlier flashing an enormous, scaldingly bright image of the Schweiden Adlers in between other various advertisements, and Kageyama had frowned, nonchalantly produced a mask from his pocket, and hooked it behind his ears. It leaves only his eyes for recognition, shards reflecting a city’s prismatic nighttime view.

His figure is outlined by the neon-red storefront sign behind them. Atsumu looks at him, edged blurrily in red and blue, purple where light and shadow converge. He looks at him the way you look at something unattainable to allow yourself to feel devastation in its presence for a fleeting moment before being forced to move away, because other people search to feel the same devastation, and other people are in line behind you.

He asks the first question, and starts counting.

Ten seconds. Twenty. Atsumu isn't actually counting; he’s holding his breath and reviewing every single mildly significant life choice he’s made since birth. It’s felt like too long, and there are too many choices to flick through.

“That’s not a question, Miya-san.” Kageyama’s voice is carefully level. His eyes trace a stray plastic wrapper discarded on the concrete. He doesn't bend down to pick it up this time—Atsumu has hit the nail on the head.

“Fine. Are you in love with Shouyou-kun?”

Something is banging at Atsumu’s door and shrieking to be let in, probably his conscience. He does not let it in; instead, he shoves his hands deeper in his pants pockets and digs his thumbs into the fabric. A minute passes.

“It’s-” Kageyama fumbles. “It’s more complicated than that.”

“Is it, 'cause it sounds like you’re just overcomplicating something simple.” Atsumu sighs. It’s a dramatic, painfully forced sort of noise. “I mean, it’s obvious that you two are just dancing around each other for nothing. Get it over with and date already, will you. I'm kinda sick of watching you guys do your pining thing back and forth.”

Kageyama flinches.

Were Atsumu a kinder man, he would have kept his mouth shut. Were Atsumu also a smarter man who does deductive reasoning before making any decisions that are potentially life-ruining, he would have kept his mouth shut.

Unfortunately, Atsumu is a mortal, and a fool. More fool than mortal if he’s being precise. Semantics.

He tilts his head sideways and regards the same palette of midnight blue he’s been observing for years, memorized. At this point, he expects Kageyama to lash back, which would be perfectly understandable. Spit venom at anyone on the street and they will normally shoot it right back into your face.

To his surprise and disappointment, despite having been snapped at, Kageyama collects the poison in a vial to study it instead. Which is perplexing because Atsumu has seen him riled before, feathers ruffled, glittering crown askew, because Kageyama is easy to prod and even easier to enrage.

A car horn sounds off in the distance. Someone yells indistinctly a block down, followed by a metallic crash. He waits for the telltale glint of a shield, defense mechanism activated, and still, it never forms.

Oh, hell. Is Atsumu the worst of them after all?

“Miya-san,” Kageyama says quietly, lifting his face, and the first crack splinters in Atsumu's sanity.

“Could you not call me that, Tobio-kun? You sound like you’re talkin’ to me and ‘Samu both and I'd rather not picture his jerk ass right now."

It's useless and stupid and dumps the atmosphere with questions like, "if you hadn't liked it then why didn't you say anything for seven fuckin' years," and Atsumu clenches his teeth because he hates it but hates it more, right now, that “Miya-san” is the way he sounds in Kageyama’s thoughts.

Except Kageyama nods instead of saying sorry, or I didn’t know you disliked that, or if you hate being called ‘Miya-san’ then why didn’t you tell me earlier?

"Atsumu-san," he amends, "can I ask you something?"

Atsumu tries, halfheartedly, not to linger on how his name falls from Kageyama’s mouth. This, he fails. Somewhere in the haziness of his mind, Osamu is laughing at him and his self-induced torment, because Osamu is the only shred of his conscience left intact. The rest of it abandoned him long before the word “conscience ” could even form on his lips, and Atsumu is beginning to understand why.

Atsumu-san, can I ask you something?

Soft, open face. So plainly simple; will he get to keep this feeling, once all is said and done? Atsumu doesn’t know the answer.

He wets his lips. "Go ahead."

Kageyama does. He opens his mouth and lets the words flutter out, feather-soft against a chaotic landscape. He opens his mouth and promptly tosses Atsumu's volleyball-shaped world off its axis. Barely audible, delivering a tremble through the earth, he opens his mouth and says, tentative: “If Hinata isn’t the only one I’m in love with, and I’m not the only one he’s in love with, what would you say?”

Kageyama is facing him and Atsumu is frozen to the ground. Atsumu has retreated inside his glass mold, the only gift left to him by the universe when he was first forged through fire and iron, and Kageyama Tobio has just appeared before him, wielding a sword pulled from the marble of his own verdict, and delivered a perfect blow to its safety.

Belatedly, Atsumu notices that Kageyama has pulled his mask down and tucked it under his chin and is now looking at him in all his unobscured beauty. Backlighted against the millisecond red-yellow-white lights that glide over and past his form, shadows deep, dark blue, enough to render a gleam to the jewel-bright of his eyes.

When he clenches his fists, Atsumu feels the skin of his hands stretch over his knuckles. They burn.

Because—look, here's the thing.

Atsumu might be a fool, certainly stupid enough to validate the title, but he's not dense. There's the minutest quiver in Kageyama's voice, hairline cracks spiraling into a vague something Atsumu hasn't gathered quite enough courage to name just yet. He stands at the edge of this universe and reaches, carves mountain ridges into the galaxies with fingertips outstretched, thinks to fall back to earth if the oceans will cradle him again. Either that or jump the ledge between this world and the next.

What do you hesitate for?

Everything, mostly. The vague possibility that he’s gone and plunged too deep inside his own head.

"Tobio-kun," Atsumu says, croaks the name, because his throat has gone dry and there is nothing he can imagine that could’ve prepared him for how to respond in the case of— this , "please elaborate."

Kageyama inhales sharply. "You’re right, I'm in love with Hinata. And he's in love with me, too, but-"

He's fiddling with his hands, a years-old nervous habit, Atsumu knows, gathered from a hundred instances of watching him across the net for too-long fractions of moments. And here’s the other thing.

In these six years, Atsumu has changed. He’s long abandoned his toddler mentality and should know better than to crawl into dying holes and rot away like a wounded animal. Should know better than to overstay his welcome. The sea is only kind for so long, and she spares little of it for his microscopic existence.

Then perhaps most importantly, he knows this: It’s slow, but when he concentrates, he sees the framework of a conclusion ripening its colors. Transitioning through the color spectrum and into corporality. He glimpses it.

"Hinata's in love with you," says Kageyama.

Ah.

(Somehow, he sees it before it hits. It’s been hurtling toward him for a long, long time.)

The world doesn’t still, doesn’t hold its breath; it hums, carries itself like it always has, stable on its axis, because the earth is older than any of their ashes could ever aspire to be and it has more important business to tend to than the small happenings between two of the seven billion people on its surface.

Atsumu breathes. Breathes like he's broken the surface of the waves, raised his head heavenward to see a cerulean sky for the first time in this eternity, and, again, there it is: a beacon cutting through the storm clouds, white-gold and blinding. The first scintilla of a revelation.

"And you?” His voice is no more than a faint rustle in the air. The burning has enveloped his soul and made a simmering path into his heart. He thinks he might be dying. He thinks he might be getting out of the water, cold seizing the droplets on his skin, and it feels like dying. “Are you in love with me, too?”

"Do you need to hear it?” Is it not clear enough?

Evidently, it is not. Evidently, Atsumu still needs to hear it, for the slightest of chances that he is mistaken.

“I won’t believe it till you say it, Tobio-kun.”

He’s trembling, exhales a laugh because even in the city-depth dark Kageyama’s face is visibly flushed. He’s gorgeous. Atsumu is going to eat his own hands from the wrist up. Atsumu is going to march up to the sky tomorrow morning and, depending on the events proceeding after this thought, either laugh or throw stones at its faceless, eternal presence.

“I am,” Kageyama says with steadiness that grows roots. “In love with you, I mean.”

“Oh.”

It hangs for a beat, lingering in the slow aftermath of shock the way only a truth delivered in ringing simplicity is capable of. It lingers, and then the wind carries it away. It lifts Atsumu out of the water and thrusts him into the hands of the awaiting world.

He raises his head, now, to seek out the stars and the purple-blue-yellow tones of the light-polluted night view above. Two weeks ago, in the cramped kitchen of the Jackals’ dorms, Hinata had looked at Atsumu and right into the ugly, restrained part of his soul blanketed in apathy, tugging it into the open, watching it flutter, unprotected, into the outside world. Hinata had looked at him and asked, Do you know? While Atsumu was stranded and struggling to keep his head above the water, Hinata had flown to him and spread his arms and his corvid wings, dangled the truth over Atsumu’s head and retrieved the question from at the bottom of the ocean, asking him where the answer laid.

Why are you here, when you could be free?

He hadn’t answered the winged Hinata nor the real one. He didn’t know how to. He was waiting for a sign, for lightning to strike either the ocean or the place where he stood. He was waiting to discover what being free entailed, as if it were something scrawled into the seafloor, a large yellow CAUTION sign to consider beforehand. Atsumu is a fucking idiot.

“Good. It’s good that you’re in love with me, you and Shouyou-kun.” His heart has climbed into his mouth. What lies between them right now—what lies in front of Atsumu, having finally made its timid exit from his mouth—is inexplicably fragile. “Because I’m in love with you both, too.”

“Oh. That’s-” Kageyama cuts off and leaves his sentence tumbling without direction. He seems to be struggling for words, but the brightness laid over his face is like nothing Atsumu has seen before, and it points to hope. He takes a step forward, and Atsumu revels in the sight of joy on Kageyama Tobio’s stoic features, and Kageyama says, a touch sheepish, “Looks like I’m buying curry today.”

“Uh. Did you lose a bet, or—?”

“Sort of. Hinata and I…” He wrings his hands. “We had an argument about you.”

Atsumu’s spine rears backwards. “About me? ”

“Put simply, I said you were in love with Hinata, and Hinata said you were likely in love with both of us, and it was a big stresser for both of us, so.” Kageyama shrugs, pulls out his phone with an edge of sourness, “I’m gonna buy him that brand of curry he likes before he can shove his win in my face.”

“D’you think it’ll stop him from doin’ that?”

“No.”

Atsumu laughs. It’s a noise bitten off of the years adding up to months adding up to days adding up to the minute it took for Kageyama to say everything, and it comes to him easier than expected. A fully formed truth has peeked its head out of their hearts and slid down and out into the open to be seen, and in doing so, they—all three of them—have reached down and torn the band-aid off their skin in one clean move. What lies under is soft and new and vulnerable.

“Tobio-kun.”

“Hm?”

“After we get this whole,” he gestures sporadically, “thing sorted out, I’m gonna- I’m gonna kiss you. Shouyou-kun, too, if he lets me.”

Kageyama ducks his head to the side, attempting, in vain, to conceal his smile by smothering it into the collar of his winter coat. It does nothing to hide the cherry color of his ears. “Sure.”

What lies under the band-aid is a path cleared of dead leaves and twigs and pebbles, and it races towards the vanishing point on the horizon in a blinding, white strip of light. What lies under is what Atsumu looks at now: the sky. He’s climbing out of his shell and staring it in the eye.

—

Lesson number one, Atsumu learns, after Hinata drags him and Kageyama into his room and they take his hands in theirs for the first time: The universe certainly doesn’t make space for anyone, and it doesn’t plan to change this after so many eons. But people do. Every day, people carve out shapes in their hearts and hope that these rooms will be filled, taken. They wait for this. They wait for others to come along and realize that they have a place to stay, if they wish. They wait.

Lesson number two rises like dawn the following day, when he meets them outside and they rush towards him like the tide: Shouyou and Tobio have opened up these spaces, and they did what all do. Two birds resting on a wire, alone in their longing, because two’s company and three’s a crowd isn’t quite right, has never been. Shouyou leaps for him and Tobio unravels his rare smile; how his eyes curve like the sunrise. Atsumu thinks that maybe he has a right to all of this—in this little space with the two of them.

Lesson number three, in finality: He’s peeled away the foil in which he was molded, and he has climbed out, and he has met the sky where it arcs, and he is free. But this isn’t where it ends.

What now, what of this new vulnerability, a butterfly emerging from its cocoon?

Here’s what. At least, here’s what Atsumu knows: Shouyou laughs with them like he’s ringing the bells on top of a tower, spinning, dancing over the edge, his anchor but a single rope. Shouyou smiles at everything like the world is his oyster and he has dug out its pearls and built them into a home. Like he hides power in his teeth and unleashes it on the universe every so often for a good kick.

By some miracle, there’s Tobio, too, gliding the delicate bones of his hands over what he loves like they are the most precious treasures the world has to offer, like they are the pieces of his soul. Tobio grows quieter on the court, the kind of deadly silence that promises trust, a threat laid in its core. Tobio looks at them—Shouyou, Atsumu—like the rest of the world doesn’t exist at all. Like they are the fireflies, and he is the traveler. Trust.

Atsumu loves them. This, he knows with more certainty than he has ever known anything. He loves them so much it rests like an old, wise thing in his chest, aching, aching.

So by the time he’s crawled out of broken glass, by the time he’s found room to reach himself into, he knows, too, that they have made space for him, and that it is all right for him to take it. After all, it was shaped exactly for him.

“The weather’s great today, isn’t it?” Shouyou remarks, eyes thrown up to the sight. Everything he says is exciting, even that, in a way only he is capable of. Tobio’s gaze is fixed upwards, and Atsumu follows it.

The sun is a blinding sphere of white pooled in blue, the kind of sight only in dreams. Vibrantly surreal. Atsumu smiles so widely his jaw twinges.

“It is.”

—

The boy who ate the sun and the boy with the ancient crown stand where the end and beginning spill into each other. They want to know, almost desperately: Are you coming with us? They have been waiting for what feels like eons. Atsumu, too, has been here for so long, but only now does the blindfold come off. He spares a moment to adjust to the light.

Does he go with them, you ask? Well—you’ve stuck around for this long. You know that he is in love, and that he can single-handedly defeat the apocalypse with it; he wields this knowledge in his mouth and in threads between his fingers. You know that the sun-boy and the crown-boy love him too. You know that they would overturn the earth for him, fish the moon out of the sky.

Does he go, then?

It’s easy. You already know the answer.

—

Evening floats down the corner, soft and smooth as pigeon down. It pushes through three figures caught in the center of the sidewalk.

“Atsumu-”

“I don’t look like a lemon.”

Shouyou laughs. “I was going to say you look good today. You always do, but—even more so, today.”

“Oh.”

Atsumu is not flushed, he is not. It’s the damned suit; it’s too much for this weather. That, and his boyfriends who’ve taken to an unfortunate habit of embarrassing him as much as possible in public, and the warm lighting of the streetlamp they’re under.

Someone from the Jackals is taking pictures of them. Given the shameless camera flashes from only a few meters away, there are probably multiple phones out. Shouyou’s face is contorted into a poorly-made grimace that does nothing to hide the amusement lodged in his throat. Atsumu resigns himself to a life of blackmail.

“Atsumu, you’re red.”

Atsumu kneels down on the concrete and pulls his collar as far as it can go over his face. “Tobio, please.”

They’re going to kill him. Shouyou was the first to strike him to the ground and is now handing the sword over to Tobio so that he can deliver the final, fatal blow, and then Atsumu will be nothing more than a memory.

He’s being dramatic. It’s the heat. It’s the way Shouyou is grinning, scaldingly sun-bright in contrast with the quiet curve of Tobio’s mouth and how his eyes outshine his smile. It’s the love—there’s so much of it. There’s so much of it here.

“All right, you guys,” someone laughs, likely taking pity on Atsumu’s state of humiliation. “Come on, we all have to be present for our reservation. If you don’t want to sweat through your suits then hurry up.”

“Come on, come on,” Shouyou echoes, and then he’s hooking his arm through Atsumu’s and tugging him up, and Atsumu goes willingly, helplessly, because Shouyou is nothing if not an unstoppable force of nature. Tobio’s hand finds his not a moment later, as easily as breathing. When Atsumu glances back, Tobio is smiling at him, a faint blush high up on his cheeks, and Atsumu’s heart very nearly slams itself dead on his ribcage.

“Guys,” says Shouyou, gaze softening like summer warmth when they both turn away from each other to look at him. “Let’s go. I wanna try the new eel dish they have on the menu; Hoshiumi-san said it was great.”

“Since when do you talk to Hoshiumi-san about these things,” Tobio demands as Shouyou pulls them through the doors with the rest of their teams, and Shouyou is retorting something like, since forever ago, Tobio, and Atsumu is laughing like he’s got nothing to lose, and it’s loud and gorgeous and bursting and—

Oh. This is what it is, he thinks. Like staring up at the sun for the briefest of moments, looking right into the blinding white expanse and realizing in that split-second of seeing everything and nothing at once. A truth inconsolably simple.

Shouyou falls asleep first on the taxi back to their place. He got to try the eel dish after all—made Atsumu try it too, and Tobio, who grumbled and fussed until Shouyou drew back with a sly grin and: Atsumu, you feed it to him. Tobio gave in after that. He falls asleep second. Shouyou’s leg is hooked over Tobio’s knee and his mouth is open in sleep, and Tobio’s head is on Atsumu’s shoulder and his soft hair is tickling Atsumu’s neck, and Atsumu, well. Atsumu tries not to sweat to death in his suit. Tries not to break the dream: Shouyou and Tobio’s sleeping forms and the motion-blurred lights outside gliding over them, illuminating their faces for fleeting milliseconds. Atsumu sits in the taxi, awake, and tries to catch each instance.

Come morning, they will rise before the sun, as Shouyou and Tobio are prone to do, even on days when it is unnecessary. Tomorrow is one of those days. They will wake him, and Atsumu will voice his single, daily complaint about getting up before his alarm, and then he will go running with them because he can live with six a.m. runs forever if he gets to do it with them. That, and this—all of it—is that inconsolable truth, he knows. He is home in a space hollowed out for him. He has filled it. He is home, now.