Archive of Our Own ^beta

Only do not forget, if I wake up crying
its only because in my dream I'm a lost child

hunting through the leaves of the night for your hands

~Pablo Neruda, Love Sonnet XXI

a day is long
and I will be waiting for you, as in an empty station
when the trains are parked off somewhere else, asleep.

~Pablo Neruda, Don’t Go Far Off

If Atsumu could, he’d ask Shouyou to smuggle the ocean through airport security for him—just a mouthful because it tastes different here, Shouyou wrote on the back of a postcard, the ink smudged. Atsumu-san, so different, here, Atsumu’s clumsy thumb covering the ‘san’ of it as he held the card up to the light.

On restless nights, when sweat pools in all the crevices of his body and his sheets are out to get him, smothering him, as heavy as sails, Atsumu has the gall to dream about it: Shouyou with a wheeled suitcase, Shouyou with a sleep mask holding back his hair, smiling at Atsumu as he reaches up to fiddle with the undone button of Atsumu’s quasi-Hawaiian atrocity of a shirt—Shouyou’s favorite—goes on tiptoe, and feeds the Atlantic to Atsumu through the strait of their mouths, one parched by the sun, one by something else entirely.

Atsumu dreams in distances now: dreams in weathervanes and in waves, in currents and tides, in away and back, in here and over there, in go and come back, in went and not back yet, why did the grain of sand cross the Pacific?

On mornings so early birds might stare you down if you dare step foot outside, Atsumu curls up on his windowsill bundled up in a blanket, local make, with a cup of coffee in hand, Brazilian brew. Twelve hours ahead and there’s only one thing Shouyou would travel back in time for. Outside Atsumu’s window, the yolk of the sun is scrambled, the eastern sky not faring much better. The mug is Atsumu’s favorite: custom-made, best miya atsumu it proclaims boldly in Comic Sans MS, lower case, like Atsumu is a category of his own, and the sun slowly getting its bearings now, poking him with its rays, you, too, you, too. His socks don’t match, his roots are showing, and the coffee has been yellowing his teeth. Keep it up and they’ll match what’s left of your piss-poor dye job, Sakusa told him the other day, which, in Sakusa-speak, translated to something like are you okay. Atsumu is a-okay, but how funny that the sun should set in the evening when it really sets in the morning, obstinate like the sort of stain you’ve no hope of banishing with bleach, Atsumu’s heart always peeking through the Venetian blinds of his ribcage to see it settle down on its throne of skies.

Longing, as in long. Longing, as in, long time no see, as in, so long, it’s been, as in, so long, the distance. Longing, as in, so long.

Atsumu treated himself to a globe before Shouyou left—volleyball shaped, he remarked to the people waiting in the line behind him like a tool as he fumbled for his wallet. These days, he likes to spin the globe until he finds Brazil: as far-flung as it is robust, all but shouldering other countries right off the continent.

A Shouyou in a haystack, the compass that is Atsumu all out of whack, but he always knows where he is in relation to Brazil, or rather where Brazil is in relation to him: at his left, at his right, behind him. Ahead of him.

How do you like your eggs in the morning? Atsumu asked Shouyou once and warm, is what Shouyou said after a pause. Warm.

*

Atsumu is sixteen and he wants things, he’s sixteen and he gets them, he’s sixteen and Shouyou, the most sky of his earthquakes, he’s sixteen and Shouyou, Shouyou, the aftershocks of him. Jump, Atsumu tells him in dreams, and a smile, going on laugh, how high? This high? Oh, but I can go higher than that. A study in will, in flight, in (e)motion, writing the future in calligraphy so confident that Atsumu can’t imagine anyone not stopping to have a read.

Funny, Atsumu smells the sand on him even then, even at sixteen, even all the way across the net, which, he will come to understand, is not actually very far. We are what we eat, we are what we do, we are where we go, we are where we will. Sweat, salt, skin, sand, the aftershocks of him. Third year, captaincy, a weight, Atsumu’s shoulders, jump, how high?, this high?, higher?, higher still?, here.

Atsumu is seventeen and he waits, he’s seventeen and he bides his time, he’s seventeen and he pays attention to the sky now.

He wants things. He wants things, and this hasn’t happened yet but how do you like your eggs in the morning?

He wants things. He wants.

*

Natsu made a valiant effort to hate Atsumu at first sight, but it took her all of three seconds to connect the dots and take him under her wing instead, so to speak.

You’re totally in love with my brother, she accused without preamble, cornering Atsumu outside the bathroom after a game (their win), even though he was still in the middle of sorting out his sweatpants, jeez.

Like, totally, she repeated, as though she’d decided that Atsumu’s coffin was in dire need of even more nails. It’s painful to watch.

After that, it was all piggyback rides she was too old for and long-distance sleepovers he’d never had before her. Atsumu still remembers how, when Shouyou went home for a few weeks during the off-season and was busy catching up with his old teammates, Natsu convinced him that if, instead of cucumber, he put sliced onion on his eyes, it’d do away with the bags he was sporting there in no time at all, no, it won’t sting, I promise! Look at me, Atsumu-san. Have I ever lied to you?

By the way, she hummed fifteen minutes later, watching him bawl his eyes out because he couldn’t see the disconnect button for the tears. When are you going to tell him?

These days, they exchange daily texts and are involved in an eternal one-upmanship on Duolingo. She asks him for volleyball tips, and he doesn’t ask her for news of Shouyou. It’s an odd relationship that the two of them have: a teenage girl and the guy who is not dating her older brother.

It might be painful to watch, but, even after all these years, Atsumu is yet to figure out if it’s painful to feel.

*

The come, the go, the wax, the wane of him. High tide. Riptide. High tide. Never low.

A hard-earned win when Atsumu is seventeen. A hybrid serve when he’s twenty-three. Let’s talk rankings now. Are you seeing, or are you only looking?

Time after time, a grin. Time after time, all ten of Atsumu’s fingers. His best, his better-than-best, time cresting, cresting, the ink on Shouyou’s contract drying, drying, the surge, the swell of it.

There are those who loved first, but Atsumu has already loved the longest, the feeling stretching both forward and back in time, grazing shores he’s left and those he hasn’t reached yet until it comes full circle.

How high?

Do your worst. Do your best. Do your most. Shouyou. Shouyou.

*

Here’s one memory Atsumu comes back to, time after time:

Shouyou is leaving in three days. It’s his goodbye party—his fare thee well, fare thee far party—and they’re all just the right side of tipsy for Atsumu to blame it on sake when Shouyou says, drive me to the airport on Thursday.

Atsumu’s hands feel cold. His toes are curling, his heart is smarting. He trips over somebody’s shoe in the genkan, trips over another, almost cracks his skull open on Meian’s door. Him? Shouyou? Airport? Shouyou can’t possibly mean that.

“Atsumu-san,” Shouyou says as Atsumu slides to the floor, back to the door, his head pulsing with an ache almost dull enough to distract him from that other persistent aching he’s been enduring for a while now.

“I can’t drive you to the airport, Shouyou-kun,” Atsumu most certainly does not sniffle. “I don’t have a car, remember?”

He bites his tongue, but it’s too late. Stupid, stupid, stupid and it’s too late now. He should buy a car. Fucking—steal one. Anything.

For Shouyou? Anything.

“Atsumu-san,” Shouyou says, crawling to him through trenches of scattered footwear. “Have you hurt yourself?”

Has Atsumu? Does it hurt?

“I lied,” Atsumu blurts as Shouyou cocks his head with a frown. “I have a car.”

“No, you don’t,” Shouyou says—a laugh, going on smile. “Where does it hurt? Here?”

Before Atsumu can stop him—would he have stopped him?—Shouyou’s fingers are feeling the back of his scalp, every touch a question asked in a whisper, on tiptoe.

“There,” Atsumu lies—lies because uh-oh, that’s not where it hurts at all. His hands cold, his toes curling, his heart—His heart all out of whack.

“Okay, let’s see,” Shouyou says—coos, really—steering Atsumu closer, applying gentle pressure until Atsumu has no choice but to yield or resist. He goes with the former—when hasn’t he, with Shouyou?—and rests his forehead on Shouyou’s shoulder. The muscle there, the bone, and that first time, Shouyou came back grown, came back strong, came back with a tan, came back. “Here, right?” Shouyou makes sure, rubbing his fingers in concentric circles over Atsumu’s undercut, his knees twin islets in the Bermuda Triangle of Atsumu’s open legs. “Does this hurt? No? How about this? We wouldn’t want it to bruise, would we? No sir, can’t have that, but do tell me if it hurts, Atsumu-san,” and circles, circles, latitude, longitude, Atsumu, who treated himself to a globe, the kind that comes with Brazil on it—he wouldn’t waste a penny on one without it, not him. “You’d be a bit of a baby about it if it bruised, wouldn’t you? Not to mention, Osamu-san would make fun of you for sure. By the way, what I meant was, will you come with me to the airport? We can take a cab, your treat. It’s only fair, don’t you think?” Atsumu nodding sleepily, one of their teammates stepping into the hall and immediately retreating like they know because doesn’t everyone? It’s painful to watch, but that hasn’t stopped them all from watching, has it? Por favor, por favor, por favor, dying on Atsumu’s parched tongue. Só mais um pouco. “Or we can always go by train, save money. You’ll help me with my luggage, won’t you, Atsumu-san? I have so many things now, as you well know.” Atsumu does know because Shouyou’s so-many-things-now are currently residing in Atsumu’s apartment, stuffed inside two bulging suitcases. What he doesn’t know is what they’re doing there—what Shouyou is still doing there, here, in Osaka. “By the way, did your mom use to blow on injuries to make you feel better, too?” Sake on the roof of Atsumu’s mouth, far worse things on the tip of his tongue, and then Shouyou bowing his head to blow the gentlest of fault lines over the back of Atsumu’s head.

A whine catches in Atsumu’s throat, then leaves it.

“Or maybe she would kiss them better?”

Atsumu, the wrong side of tipsy, buries his face in Shouyou’s shoulder, the muscle there, the bone.

“Let’s get you home, Atsumu-san,” Shouyou whispers, brushing his fingers through Atsumu’s hair, no kiss.

Atsumu treated himself to a globe, the kind that comes with Brazil on it.

*

Roughly half a year (or, if you like, one hundred seventy-nine days) after Shouyou leaves for Brazil again, during an afternoon lull, Osamu grabs Atsumu’s phone off the Onigiri Miya counter, his own long dead. Atsumu, who realizes what Osamu will see when he unlocks the phone a beat too late, fights him for it tooth and nail, scrambling over the countertop and pulling all the dirty tricks in the book: fingers up Osamu’s nose, a knee aimed at Osamu’s balls—if it doesn’t have the intended effect, that’s only because the asshole clearly doesn’t have those, ha—but it’s all in vain. Osamu has an unfair advantage here: this is his turf, and he doesn’t have to file his nails.

“Keep telling yourself that,” Osamu snorts, shoving him away as he enters the passcode—predictable, easily hackable, unchanged since Atsumu’s first cellphone, the very same one he had to share with Osamu: their mother’s birthday. “What depraved shit have you been looking up now, then? Don’t tell me you’ve been at it again, googling how to—”

Atsumu groans as Osamu breaks off abruptly, watching his brother’s eyes widen and then widen even more when he pulls up Atsumu’s search history.

“Oh, Tsumu,” Osamu sighs, and not pity.

Everything but that.

*

A few months into their teammateship, Shouyou props his shoe on Atsumu’s thigh to tie it before practice and tells him that the sky is different, over yonder in Brazil.

“Different how?” Atsumu asks, expecting something like more saturated, more postcard, more blue.

“It’s farther away,” Shouyou tells him instead with a shrug. “Or at least it seemed farther away when I first got there.”

As high as you can, then higher than that.

“Maybe you only remember it that way because you did all that growing during your time there, so when you came back to Japan, the sky here seemed closer.”

“Yes,” Shouyou says, blinking at Atsumu in surprise. “The sky here—It’s been almost within reach.”

Atsumu smiles. He’s been doing a lot of that around Shouyou. Atsumu is not always great at keeping up with him. Shouyou says sky and it could mean anything from Kageyama Tobio to volleyball itself. What Atsumu knows is that there is only one thing Shouyou would travel back in time for—what he knows is that he will, someday, leaving the present and the Atsumu that comes with it to their own devices. Atsumu’s days with Shouyou are numbered, the hourglass of their time together thick-necked. Together, as in, to gather. Together, as in, two, together. It doesn’t matter how much overripe fruit they’ve shared between them or that Shouyou is the first person that made Atsumu want to give up his half of an orange. His come, his go, and what they don’t tell you is that, even worse than the wait, is the wait for the wait, until it’s no longer waiting but a waitage.

Outside the window, the sun peeks out of its shell like a sleepy crustacean. Years later, Atsumu will watch it from his windowsill and think, how funny, that they should have seen more sunsets together than they have sunrises but have shared more sunrises than they have sunsets.

How do you like your eggs in the morning?

Scrambled, sunny-side up, omelet. Nutritious, fresh off the stove, warm.

Shouyou is, in no particular order, Atsumu’s favorite: color, teammate, feeling, event, jet plane, person, place, day of the week, and time of the day.

*

If Shouyou were to fly back to Japan, he’d go straight to Miyagi, or maybe to Tokyo, not down south.

Atsumu knows few things for a fact, but he knows this.

He knows this because, once, Shouyou came down here on a bullet train so Atsumu would set for him, and it was almost as inevitable as this.

Its lasting, almost as inevitable as its ending.

A few months after signing his contract with MSBY, Shouyou gave Atsumu a seashell from his carefully curated collection of beach miscellanea—the one he’d stored in a plastic bag and then smuggled inside a woolen sock (never worn) inside a sweater (ditto) inside a hoodie (contraband of sand in both pockets), convinced they wouldn’t let him out of Rio if they discovered it in his carry-on.

Press it to your ear, press it to your ear, Shouyou insisted, so Atsumu did, the oceans of Shoyou’s past-turned-present-turning-future roaring in his ear, flooding his cochlea. It was all there if you cared to hear: the growth spurts,  the love pangs, the crash course in sand.

You can keep it, Shouyou told him, but Atsumu would have found a way to keep the seashell anyway.

He’s an asshole like that.

*

That day at the airport, it’s just the two of them.  

No Bokuto. No Sakusa. No Kageyama.

No Natsu, even though Atsumu offered to pay for her train ticket and everything.

Why Shouyou is flying to São Paulo from Kansai, Atsumu doesn’t know. He’d gone back home to say goodbye to everyone and then came back to Osaka to laze about on Atsumu’s couch, shamelessly flaunting his colorful socks and all-teeth grins until Atsumu’s apartment felt not just lived in but lived through and through—broken in. Shouyou would putter about with little concern for pesky things like privacy, opening cupboards, peeking inside pots, foraging for God-knows-what, one suitcase eviscerated of underwear and gaping open in the corner, the other pulled to the middle of Atsumu’s living room, where it formed a makeshift coffee table, a Go board balanced on top, their pieces caught in a perpetual back-and-forth that neither of them was ready to call a tie. When, after days of this idle, indulgent cohabitation, they found that it was time to zip the suitcases up, Atsumu suggested he’d sit on them and Shouyou laughed so wonderfully that he had to throw his head back to accommodate it, better me! If you sit on them, the plastic might not survive it, Atsumu-san. Atsumu feigned offense—it was always feigned, with Shouyou—and got busy shoving stray sleeves back inside the larger suitcase as Shouyou settled on top of it like a buddha, crossed-legged and pretending to meditate. Under the guise of wrestling with the zipper, Atsumu stared, taking in the sore in the corner of Shouyou’s mouth—the sting that Atsumu had dreamed of easing—memorizing the network of capillaries on Shouyou’s eyelids, the cartography there all rivers.

Atsumu, who never asked will you miss me because he didn’t want to know, and now that it’s just the two of them, Atsumu is already missing all over—miss: -age, -dom, -ery. He doesn’t know this yet—there’s denial to be waded through first—but he’ll be keeping a wealth of memories. There are so many hacks for mitigating heartache—think of the distances that birds cross every year on their pilgrimage to warmer parts, think of all the Shouyouless people and places that have never known him and never will, think of water suckling on different, lonelier shores—and yet, it always comes back to this: why did the grain of sand cross the Pacific?

“So this is it,” Atsumu sighs. Earlier, he tripped over one of Shouyou’s suitcases, but only twice.

“Atsumu-san,” Shouyou says, maneuvering Atsumu’s stiff arms out of the way to wrap himself around him, arms linked but not padlocked behind Atsumu’s neck, legs holding his hips hostage. “Miss me, okay?” Shouyou whispers in his ear, Atsumu’s heart beating pell-mell as people hotfoot it to the security checkpoint all around them. “Miss me a lot.”

“That’s—That’s mighty selfish of you, Shouyou-kun,” Atsumu says, voice cracking with it because what kind of a request is that?

“I learned that from you, Atsumu-san,” Shouyou laughs and he’s heavy. Atsumu’s arms will feel so light, so empty of him any moment now.

“Oi,” Atsumu protests half-heartedly. He’s trying so hard to be brave about this, but his chin is already starting to wobble even though he promised himself he’d postpone the crying until his commute back to Higashiosaka, where he belongs.

“Selflessness, too,” Shouyou amends sweetly, the syrup of his voice like something Atsumu will hoard for later, when his throat is sore with lacking. “You’ve always had that in spades.”

Later, after they extricate themselves and Shouyou lets the crowd gobble him up without a backward glance, Atsumu’s phone vibrates with an incoming message.

you know that time you asked me how i like my eggs in the morning?

i lied

Everyone says, Shouyou is like the sun.

All right, fine, no one says it, but everyone thinks it.

Atsumu, though. Atsumu has only ever thought that Shouyou is like when you try to take a true-to-life picture of the sun, so he closes his eyes and remembers instead.

Remembrance. That’s a good one.

*

If you pull up Atsumu’s search history, you will see:

brazil time

brazil weather

brazil hinata shouyou

brazil sunrise

brazil sunset

brazil

plane tickets japan brazil

plane tickets japan brazil

plane tickets japan brazil

plane tickets japan brazil

plane tickets japan brazil

plane tickets japan brazil

plane tickets kansai airport são paulo

And finally, that most recent one:

do the atlantic and pacific oceans mix?

*

Two weeks after Shouyou leaves for greener pastures and farther skies, Osamu shoulders his way into Atsumu’s shoebox apartment, takes one look at the heaps of sauce-stained clothing and towers of emptied takeout containers, and calls the place a pigsty to Atsumu’s face, sweet Jesus, no offense to pigs.

Even if he had the energy to try, Atsumu knows better than to argue. Instead, he musters up a threadbare scowl and cocoons himself in a smelly blanket even though it’s the height of summer. Trust Shouyou to leave at the tail end of tsuyu, the sky itself weeping for the loss.

Atsumu trails after Osamu into the kitchen and watches him inspect Atsumu’s best miya atsumu mug, the only clean crockery item in the apartment.

“A category of your own, are you?” Osamu snorts. “If there were more Miya Atsumus—”

“Put that back before you break it,” Atsumu sniffles and then, tired of bestowing the honor of his presence on Osamu’s ungrateful ass, sequesters himself in his junkheap of a room. When he emerges some hours later to search the empty containers for leftovers and appease his growling stomach, Osamu, the bastard, takes the opportunity to sneak into the bedroom with a laundry basket.

“Don’t mix colors with whites!” Atsumu calls after him, flipping him off over his shoulder, and then settles on the windowsill with old (ish) noodles and tries to remember what it felt like to wade through sunlight knowing that there was something warmer, sweeter than that just a few buildings away.  

“You’ll poison yourself, asshole,” Osamu says once he’s done taming Atsumu’s war tank of a washing machine into obedience, storming inside the kitchen to rip the takeout container out of his hands. “By the way, what’s the deal with that snot-covered ‘MY TUMMY HURTS AND I’M MAD AT THE GOVERNMENT’ shirt you stashed under your pillow? Don’t tell me you’re constipated again? What did we say about eating your greens? Not to mention, it was a good two sizes too small for your fat ass—”

Atsumu blinks at him and then throws himself off the windowsill, mumbling no, no, no, as his socks skid on the floor. In the bathroom, he falls to his knees and stares at the washing machine, colors whirling away inside without a care in the world—the cruelest of kaleidoscopes.  

“What the fuck’s wrong with you?” Osamu sighs, following him inside.

Atsumu sniffles. “I hate you.”

“Huh?”

“I HATE YOU,” Atsumu yells, curling into a ball right there on the floor. “I HATE YOU, I HATE YOU, I HATE YOU, that was SHOUYOU’S, and I HATE YOU!”

Osamu stares at him, pinches the bridge of his nose, and finally starts pacing. Atsumu’s bathroom was not designed with pacing in mind, but Osamu makes the best of it, shuffling in anxiety-inducing circles, surface area be damned. “Are you seriously telling me you’ve been sleeping with your teammate’s dirty shirt under your pillow like a pervert?”

Atsumu tries to glare at him, but his chin wobbles and his eyes burn with fresh tears. “He said I could have it,” he sniffles, burying his face in his knees. “I can’t sleep without it, and now you’ve gone and ruined everything.”

All this, and after Osamu stole Atsumu’s favorite hoodie, too. The scrub won’t admit it, but Atsumu’s on to him. First, Osamu lured him into a false sense of security by making fun of him for wearing pastel pink for months on end, and then, once Atsumu lowered his guard, the bastard stole it. To add insult to injury, knowing him, he wore it twice and then started using it as a mop in OniMiya, too.

“You know what,” Osamu says after a pause, rounding on him. “I’m washing my hands of you.”

“Good riddance,” Atsumu mumbles as Osamu storms out of the bathroom.

Eventually, after he grows weary of stealing mournful glances at the washing machine, Atsumu crawls back to his room and buries himself in what hasn’t been stripped away of his sheets. When he drags himself to the kitchen two hours later, there’s a molehill of freshly made onigiri on the now sparkling countertop.

Atsumu doesn’t make a mountain out of it. If he has a cry about it, then, well. That’s between him and his kitchen.

*

If Shouyou were to fly back to Japan, he’d go straight to Miyagi, or maybe to Tokyo, not down south.

Atsumu knows few things for a fact, but he knows this.

And then.

im at the airport

can you come get me?

(i know that you don’t have a car.)

Atsumu drops his phone. He doesn’t have a car, but he’ll borrow one. He’ll buy one. He’ll steal one.

*

Months before Shouyou leaves:

A song so happy it’s sad is pouring out of Shouyou’s geriatric, ducttape-and-a-prayer cellphone one crackle at a time, something in Portuguese. O que vai ser de mim, but this is long before Atsumu’s Duolingo era: they’re both lying on their backs, him and Shouyou, their legs raised at a ninety-degree angle and propped against the wall because ‘it’s healthy to do that for twenty minutes every day, Atsumu-san, haven’t you heard?’, matching mugs of cocoa—half empty or half full, depending on how you look at it—cooling at their sides. Shouyou is telling him about the abandoned Esqueleto Hotel keeping vigil over São Conrado, its comb empty of all honey (“Are you creeped out?”—Atsumu is), about the Escadaria Selarón and the stairs’ tile-after-tile, color-after-color territorial expansion (“Are you amazed?”—Atsumu is), about the sound the deep-fried dough makes when you sink your teeth into a hot coxinha, every bite bringing you that little closer to a death by heart attack but so very worth it (“Are you hungry?” and yes, Atsumu is hungry. He has been, hungry).

It’s been a mild winter but they’re huddling for warmth anyway, their hips pressed together: plausible deniability. Inside Atsumu’s chest, his heart feels well-rounded and full sail, bilingual. Outside, the wind keens like it, too, hungers for something, but, for the moment, the hourglass counting down their days together has been laid on its side, its sands still as the procession of minutes slows, dillydallying. They say happiness goes at a gallop as misery hobbles along, but this joy has the languid quality of a siesta, and winter? They are huddling for warmth, which is to say, they are warm.

They’re both in shorts, the sleeves of their sweaters rolled up all the way to the elbow, but this, here, might just be the warmest Atsumu’s ever been.

Sometimes, a muscle will jump and a leg will shift, a meet-and-greet of skins, everything goosebumps. For a while now, Atsumu has been cooking (attempting to cook, Osamu would say) for two, and his plates—plural—are chipped in unexpected places. Shouyou laughed the first time he saw him pull on a pair of rubber gloves before doing the washing, but do you like your sets customized, or not? and are they mine, then? Shouyou asked, delighted, kicking his legs where he was perched on the countertop. Really?

Shouyou is telling him about Brazil—the good, the better—when his socked foot bumps into Atsumu’s and he wants to go back, someday.

“What’s that?”

“I want to go back, someday,” Shouyou repeats patiently.

“To Rio?” Atsumu hums with an easy grin. “Like on a holiday?”

“To Brazil,” Shouyou corrects. “Like to play.”

His coming, his going. Shouyou, forever in the remaking, forever in the unmapping, and they should have printed ‘citizen of more’ on his passport, to warn the likes of Atsumu.

If Atsumu is to be a stop, then the least he can do is seem a scenic one, so he manufactures a smile for the occasion, slow and sweet. “They’ll be lucky to have you,” he scrounges up, and never let it be said that he can’t be good.

Deep down inside, he’s even already happy for Shouyou. Who wouldn’t be, for Shouyou?

“Would,” Shouyou corrects absently, feet tapdancing their way across Atsumu’s wall. “Would be lucky to have me.”

Atsumu shakes his head, lets the smile set. “Will.”

Like trying to take a picture of the sun and this is when Atsumu starts stocking up, looking his fill.

*

Seventeen, when he wins. Eighteen, when he learns he’s losing. Nineteen, and when he wants things, he waits for them.

*

In his dreams, Atsumu searches Shouyou’s scalp for salt, searches his smile for sand. Awake, he searches himself for Shouyou, but there’s not much of him to be found.

Keep it, Shouyou said when they couldn’t stuff that one shirt inside either of the suitcases. Convenient, isn’t it? Your tummy hurts all the time, too.

Har, har, Atsumu sighed, elbowing him. It’s not exactly my size, even though he was dying to accept.

Shouyou flopped on top of the bigger suitcase, kicking his legs, smile quiet like a door shutting, ever so softly, on all too many yesterdays. It’s funny because, sometimes, Atsumu still remembers them as tomorrows, even now. Shouyou, the plastic aglets of his hoodie chewed out of shape, Shouyou, his socks more hole than cotton, Atsumu-san, I haven’t been homesick for a while now. What if I’ve forgotten how? Do you think homesickness is like riding a bike?

And keep it, Shouyou said, tossing the shirt at Atsumu, sweat-stained, sauce-stained, lived in. Atsumu thought that homesickness was falling off the bike over and over again, or having your bike stolen, or leaving it behind because you’d rather run now. You’d rather fly now. He knew better than to say so.

Keep it, but Atsumu is an asshole, so maybe he would have found a way to keep it anyway.

*

Atsumu is sixteen. Shouyou is his future, which is to say, one day, he’ll be his past.

Atsumu is twenty-seven. Shouyou is his past, which is to say: on mornings so early birds might stare you down if you dare step foot outside, Atsumu curls up on his windowsill bundled up in a blanket and presses a seashell to his ear, lets it foretell his present.

When he says that they’ve shared more sunrises than they have sunsets, he and Shouyou, he doesn’t mean it like that. Shouyou’s shoe braced on his thigh, jumping muscles, meet-and-greet of skins, yes, but it was never like that.

What Atsumu means is that he’s been awake for all of Shouyou’s sunsets and sunrises, but he suspects—no, knows for a fact—that Shouyou’s only been awake for all of his sunrises.

Twelve hours ahead and Atsumu has been busy living but, in the past of their future, he still finds wait all over himself come morning.

*

They don’t text often but when they do, it’s not exactly what Atsumu would call small talk.

Sometimes, Shouyou will send him a picture of the sky.

(very nice. very blue., Atsumu texted back the first time it happened. very 18,748 kilometers away, he refrained from adding.)

Sometimes, Atsumu will send Shouyou a picture in return. The sky, the river, a tree, a bird.

Not the sun. Never that.

Once in a blue moon, Shouyou will text him late into the Brazilian night, words derailed by typos, and Atsumu will write, go to sleep, to which Shouyou might reply, bt when iwa ke p youl bee aspleen.

He has a way with words, that one.

When Atsumu is feeling generous, he interprets Shouyou’s refusal to recognize that Atsumu would gladly stay up for him night after night as kindness.

Atsumu has never asked anyone if they get those late-night, early-afternoon texts from Shouyou, too. Frankly, he’d rather not know the answer.  

*

Playing with Shouyou was a homecoming of a sort. A wish granted, a promise fulfilled, a heart turned house and a when turned now. Communication without words, a choreography they’d manage to pull off time and time again without having practiced it, so much of it hard work, so much of it soul work.

The give and take, the serve and receive of it.

They say happiness goes at a gallop, but whenever Atsumu rummages in the drawers of memory, he kneads time like dough and gives it the rolling pin treatment.

Remembrance. Sounds about right.

Two years’ worth of memories, and, somehow, this one still hurts the sweetest:

Shouyou has been in Osaka for close to a week when he calls Atsumu and asks, all polite, if Atsumu would help him carry a couch up the stairs, all the way to his fifth-floor, unfurnished mousehole of a new apartment.

When Atsumu gets there—a little winded because who wouldn’t run, for Shouyou?—maneuvering the couch through the narrow doorway proves to be quite the logistic conundrum, but they manage after five minutes of a strategic, see-saw motion push and pull. Up in Shouyou’s apartment, sweaty and limp in the genkan like a beached jellyfish, Atsumu squints at a row of worn trainers and pushes them aside to inspect a depository of sand marking an ant-scale shoreline running parallel to the wall.

Incredible, he marvels as he breaks the line with his index finger. Shouyou, who flew back to Miyagi, got through multiple loads of laundry up there, came down here for the tryouts, headed back north to await the verdict, and somehow still had enough sand left in his shoes to track it all the way to his new apartment.

When a grain of sand gets stuck to the tip of Atsumu’s finger, he squints at it, painfully aware that it’s traveled farther than he ever has.  

“You’ve gone cross-eyed,” Shouyou remarks when he steps into the hall, all bare feet and tan lines. “Atsumu-san?”

Atsumu might hunger for greatness but he’s Kansai born and bred, and home has always been a place. He’s not fussy—he likes his eggs scrambled, sunny-side up, omelet.

Local.

*

Atsumu sleeps with his curtains open. He always has, to wake to light, to wake to day.

*

On his bad days, Atsumu wishes he could miss Shouyou the way Kageyama Tobio seems to miss him: not at all. He thinks about it sometimes, mostly during his morning runs, when he can take out his frustration on sidewalks and footpaths: this epic, never-ending rivalry of theirs, how each goes about his life and looks forward to meeting the other without all that mundane keeping-dirty-shirts-under-pillows business.

Everlasting, unwavering, two-sided.

Not temporary, not rickety, not—

Shouyou at fifteen, spring limbs and more resolve than muscle, Shouyou at sixteen, worn shoes and jumping even higher, Shouyou at seventeen and the wait for him, Shouyou at eighteen—happy birthday, Shouyou—and the wait for him, Shouyou at nineteen and the wait for him, Shouyou at twenty and the wait for him, Shouyou at twenty-one and there you are.

Atsumu, so many skies old now.

It’s not everlasting, unwavering, or two-sided, whatever they’ve got going on, but if Atsumu could, he’d ask Shouyou to smuggle him through airport security all the same.

*

When Shouyou learns that his new apartment is but a few blocks away from Atsumu’s own, he wastes no time arranging a sleepover.

“It’s been uncharacteristically cold this week,” he says, pensive. “I know because I looked up the average temperatures in Osaka across all the months of the year before I came here,” he boasts, all teeth. “Mom insisted.” A shrug. “Anyway, we should build a blanket fort.”

“A blanket fort,” Atsumu repeats, trying and failing to keep up with him.

“Yes,” Shouyou nods eagerly. “Your place at seven?”

Atsumu spends the rest of the afternoon frantically cleaning his apartment, contemplating fleeing back to Amagasaki and using his childhood home as a bunker to wait Shouyou out in. He knows all about blanket forts—his and Osamu’s used to have turrets—and his one measly blanket simply won’t do. He’s not exactly rich in pillows, either, what with the single, in-his-twenties, and living-alone thing.

This is Shouyou’s first week in Osaka and all Atsumu has to offer aside from one lumpy pillow is a blanket that’s due for a wash and likely remembers the Meiji Period. Sure, coats could do in a pinch but there’s something pathetic about Atsumu’s collection of building material all the same, and Shouyou—the wait for him finally over—deserves the warmest of welcomes.

Why are the two of them having a sleepover just by themselves anyway? Shouyou and Bokuto are all buddy-buddy, let him be tasked with constructing blanket Taj Mahals.

It feels odd, to be singled out like this. Painful even, the matchhead that is Atsumu’s heart trying to strike from the friction of his ribcage.

In the end, instead of fleeing home, Atsumu steals (“I borrowed it, Samu! Borrowed!”) a shopping cart and embarks on a tour of Higashiosaka, making stops at his teammates’ apartments one by one to beg them for pillows. Bokuto gives him an armful and invites him over for a cup of hot chocolate, too (never mind that he burns it—nobody’s perfect and Atsumu’s not one to look a gift owl in the mouth) but Inunaki, the bastard, makes him sing nursery-rhymes ‘for his troubles’ until Atsumu’s voice just about gives out. By the time Atsumu’s done making rounds, he has less than an hour to construct the pillowest blanket fort to ever pillow, so he gives it his all for the final stretch, muscles straining as he pushes the cart uphill, a bag full of Onigiri Miya takeout hooked on his arm swinging back and forth.

“Jesus,” Atsumu wheezes once he makes it to his building, doubling over and trying to blink sweat out of his eyes.

“Is this for our fort?” Shouyou asks from his vantage point on the top of the front steps, ogling Mount Blanketest.

“Sh-Shouyou-kun!” Atsumu squeaks. “Didn’t we say seven?”

“Yes,” Shouyou says as he gets to his feet with a small smile. “And it is seven now.”

“Well,” Atsumu sighs. “Kill me now.”

“Why would I do that when you went to all this trouble?” Shouyou tut-tuts. “I should at least wait until we’re done with the fort.”

“Exploit them before finishing them off?” Atsumu snorts. “That’s mean, Shouyou.”

“You’re such a try-hard,” Shouyou smiles, poking an embroidered cushion. “I’m glad,” he adds, before Atsumu’s pout can deepen into a scowl.

“Glad that I’m a try-hard?” Atsumu says, puzzled. “Which I’m totally not.”

“Glad that I came here,” Shouyou clarifies, amused. “And you totally are.”

He smiles and Atsumu is helpless to do anything but return it. Shouyou poking fun at him is different to when others do it—if it’s Shouyou, the pleasure is all Atsumu’s. If it’s Shouyou, Atsumu is already putting on his clown shoes and baking the pie he’ll smash against his face, too.

“Come on,” he says softly, grabbing an armful of blankets. “Let’s build you a castle.”

Shouyou perks up, bouncing on his heels. “Can it have turrets?”

Atsumu spent years waiting for him, and now here he is.

*

Atsumu thinks about it a lot—smudged ink, letters limping along in handwriting that, while familiar, is significantly shakier than Atsumu remembers. The traffic of words overwhelming the back of the postcard as Shouyou ran out of space but not of things to say, culminating in a veritable syllable pile-up, a next time i’ll send a letter, haha shoehorned in the nonexistent margin.

Atsumu’s matchhead heart more mailbox now, and he, who has so many message drafts on his conscience.

*

It takes almost an hour to build a Taj Mahal out of blankets but only one wrong move to fell it. Inside its ruins: only foundations, only beginnings, the aftermath all laughter.

*

On his way there, Atsumu thinks of the Kansai International Airport seen from up high, a bird’s-eye view. A banner sticking out of the mainland, signaling you’re here. He imagines what it must have looked like to Shouyou as his plane got farther and farther away—Shouyou, who had the window seat and would have been taking the world in with his nose glued to the porthole. The horseshoe of Osaka Bay, open in welcome, yours for the landing, yours for the leaving. Was Shouyou allowed a last glimpse of the castle, the port, the islands, to bid them farewell? Blue sky, bluer water, the castle, the port, the islands, and the Atsumu that Shouyou wouldn’t have been able to make out even if he’d chosen to look.

Shouyou, homesickness veteran and self-made Olympian that he is, needs no looking after, but Atsumu likes to think that that day he saw him off, he entrusted him to the sky all the same.

Shouyou, who is here now, come, as always, without warning—Shouyou, the beforeshocks of him, here now, in one of his many homes. Shouyou, who is homeful, at home everywhere and never homeless, hopeless, or helpless, but always homesick, homeache, homelust.

Atsumu pinches himself to stop drowsing against the train window. This time, Shouyou won’t be bringing as much beach with him—Atsumu knows all about it, he’s got a globe, he’s used Google Maps, he’s been on Wikipedia, he’s as familiar with São Paulo as someone who’s yet to step foot on Brazilian soil can feasibly be. Still, inwardly, Atsumu is already going through Shouyou’s pockets, counting each and every grain of sand.

*

Sunlight is kindest to him when sieved through his mother’s fingers.

“You come see me so often these days,” she says as she plays with his hair. They’re sitting on the worn-in doorstep, seeing the sun off together, and she didn’t question it when Atsumu laid his head in her lap, curled up at her side like a cat. “What’s been bothering you, baby?”

She did use to blow on their ‘ows and ouches’ when they were kids. Atsumu remembers his teenagehood as a constant negotiation between finding affection embarrassing and pretending to: back then, he’d go so far as to fabricate stories about invisible bumps for that kiss.

“I don’t like thinking about it,” he mumbles now, burying his face in her skirt. “You, alone out here.”

“It’s okay,” she laughs, smoothing his hair off his forehead. “Believe it or not, but your brother gets homesick, too.”

“Ma,” Atsumu sighs, rolling over onto his back to look at her, her bowed head framed by a school of lightladen clouds. His eyes are watering from the sun, and he considers its generosity: how, as it takes its leave, it gives color instead of taking, the sky ripe with the warmest of shades like an orchard at the height of summer. It’s already September but the cicadas are still at it, breaking hearts evening after evening, and sunsets are as uncompromising in their beauty as ever: sky fatale, his mother’s face a canvas for the day to cover with its paint.

Atsumu’s favorite thing about the sun must be what it does to people.

“Ma, he says again, and she hums, tweaking the shell of his ear. “Ma, it might be ages before I bring someone home,” he admits, forcing himself to hold her gaze through the shame. “Sorry,” he adds as her fingers stutter at his temple.

“Oh, baby—“

“But,” Atsumu interrupts, releasing a shuddery breath. “I’ll keep coming by myself, okay? I’ll keep coming until you’re, like, totally sick of me.”

“You could move back home, and I still wouldn’t—” she breaks off, blinking back tears. “My, just look at the time.”

Yes. It’ll be quarter to six a. m., Brazil Time, now.

There’s no kissing a heart better but Atsumu inhales for her, opening his ribcage as wide as he knows how.

*

Homecoming, like come home already.  

Atsumu’s roots are showing but he’ll never be caught completely unprepared: these days, there is a trove of crisp sheets and soft pillows inside his closet. Osamu makes the mistake of opening it once and Atsumu’s heart dislodges inside his chest like something he swallowed wrong finally going down the right pipe as he watches his brother get taken down by an avalanche of cotton and feathers.

In the grand scheme of things, Atsumu’s life has been more wait for Shouyou than Shouyou, but he’d rather wait for him than have something—anything—else.

*

Atsumu forgot all about the quasi-Hawaiian shirt. In fact, he’s still in his pajamas when he gets there, instinctively heading for Departures and doubling back when he realizes he’s supposed to look for Arrivals.

At least he remembered to wear shoes.  

As he scans the milling crowd of jetlagged homecomers, Atsumu is painfully aware that he’ll make for a poor BnB. He hasn’t cleaned his apartment in ages, and he can’t remember if there’s anything in the fridge. There’s sleep in the corner of his eye—he rubs it away, blushing to the roots of his hair, and speaking of his roots, has he mentioned that they’re showing?

Then again, he has a spare toothbrush. A spare mug. A spare pair of chopsticks. A spare pair of slippers. A spare side of the bed.

In those last pre-Brazil days, Shouyou weathered through three nights on Atsumu’s dwarfish couch, curled shrimplike against its arm and stretching the accordion of his spine come morning (for the record, Atsumu offered to take the couch himself) before Atsumu woke up to a tuft of familiar hair tickling his nose. In his sleep, Shouyou had flung his limbs every which way and kicked off the sheets he must have stolen. Atsumu’s bedroom faced East, the morning sun blanketing the ridge of Shouyou’s spine—like attracts like—and Atsumu’s breath caught, something boiling over the brim of him. Shouyou’s many appendages were encroaching on Atsumu’s personal space, an arm venturing as far as Atsumu’s chest, a knee sliding against Atsumu’s own. Slowly, so as not to disturb him, Atsumu retreated, but Shouyou mumbled sleepily and followed until there was nowhere to retreat to, Atsumu’s behind all but hanging off the bed.

Atsumu wouldn’t have dreamed of denying Shouyou so he allowed it, Shouyou’s limbs landlocking the expanse of the bed as he closed the distance between them, a sunlight estuary flooding what little space remained unclaimed. He was a sight like that and Atsumu, who’d built him a shrine in the corner of his thoughts, prayed the sunrise away one glance at a time: a freckle, a scar, a blemish, an insect bite. The muscles that had grown in spurts to make up for lost time, measured one stretch mark at a time, and the skin that had borne it, straining at the seams but holding on. The tan that had receded, but, reinvigorated by the Osaka sun, never faded completely. The feet that must have hurt so, scalded by noon-baked sand and unprotected by athletic wear, no one there to offer foot rubs. The hands that must have worked the hardest of all, sometimes still twitching in sleep, preparing for emergency sets through dreams of games lost and won, as precious as they were callused as they were small.

An eye opened. A sun rose. A heart broke. A tale as old as time.

From that morning on, it was all make-do, interim blanket forts—blanket tents, really—Shouyou pulling the sheets over their heads as they whispered the wee hours away. Sleeping seemed wasteful, on the eve of the end, but sleep they did. A week of waking to Shouyou drooling on his pillow was enough to spoil Atsumu rotten: after this, nothing would do, and his poor mother.

It wasn’t two-sided and now there might be nothing but eggs in Atsumu’s fridge, but he remembers this best: Shouyou first thing in the morning, his toes curling as he stretched his arms over his head after a night of slurring in his sleep and breaking in the neglected side of Atsumu’s mattress. Atsumu-san, do you know, I don’t think I’ve ever slept better.  

Arrivals. People with wheeled suitcases, people with sleep masks on their heads, people with loved ones to take them home and Shouyou, here to jumpstart Atsumu’s present.

*

“I suppose I thought you’d be more… proactive about it,” Akaashi says as Atsumu helps him haul the last of boxes full of books to Osamu’s second-floor apartment half a year after Shouyou leaves for Brazil. Osamu’s long-distance courtship-turned-relationship culminating in this: Akaashi rearranging Osamu’s toiletries to make space for his own and Atsumu is happy for them, he really, is, but more proactive? Is this guy for real?

If Atsumu was meaner, he’d grumble something about a literature degree and Osamu’s inadequate shelf space. As it is, he narrowly avoids dropping one of the boxes—the one containing Akaashi’s set of Encyclopedia Britannica, too—on his foot and raids Osamu’s kitchen cabinets to recover from his near-death experience, pouring himself a glass of wine and offering some to Akaashi like the good stand-in host that he is.

“Suit yourself,” he shrugs when Akaashi declines politely. “Anyway, what’s there to be proactive about?”

Akaashi gives him an are you even serious now look.

“Fine, I could have said something, I’ll give you that,” Atsumu sighs. “But what good would that have done?”

Truth be told, Atsumu thinks that people don’t give Shouyou enough credit. He can be shrewd and observant—if he misses something, it’s because he looked and chose not to see. Atsumu has so many drafted messages on his conscience, but he believes this entirely: he spent all that time setting to Shouyou, talking to him, looking at him. What else was he supposed to do? Spell it out? He already had.

“Osamu-san worries about you,” Akaashi says after a pause.

“Good,” Atsumu snorts. “Hope it gives him ulcers.”

Akaashi smiles and pries the wineglass out of Atsumu’s hand. “How do you feel about K-dramas?”

And so, day after day, one foot in front of the other, life marches on.

*

The skies that Shouyou sends him are: cobalt blue, navy blue, yale blue, blue, blue, blue. They are white and off-white, crimson and clover—it’s true, turns out the sky can be green, too—baby blue and eye blue, alone blue and love blue. Smooth like linen before Shouyou and rumpled like linen after Shouyou, blank and chock-full of clouds. Skies eclipsed by a blurry thumb and awash with the parentheses of flocking birds. Cornflower blue, admiral blue, boastful and bashful, always distant, just beyond reach. Shouyou does not shy away from the sun, so: sunsets, sunrises, and everything in between, not true to life but true to heart, Atsumu eating it all up—crimson and honey, amber and rust. Skies newborn, skies stillborn, skies worse for wear and soldiering on, flying like released kites.

Shouyou’s Instagram is Atsumu’s morning paper, and is the sky the canvas or the painting? Is the sky the canvas or the easel?

Atsumu has all these inches on Shouyou but he remembers looking up at him better than he remembers looking down. It’s not two-sided, no, but the skies he sends back are always gentle, almost shy, and why spell it out when he already has?

In Atsumu’s dreams, the sky pulls him into its lap and braids sunlight into his thoughts. Shouyou is there, waiting for him. He has always been there. Sunset is a lock and he’s asking for a spare key.

*

Shouyou is sitting astride the bigger of his suitcases. There is no sleep mask; his hair is growing long. It clashes with his hoodie, which is: oversized, pastel pink, not his. Atsumu’s.

Atsumu owes Osamu an apology but that doesn’t mean Osamu will get one.  

“Atsumu-san!” Shouyou cries, flying off the suitcase and into Atsumu’s arms, immediate and spitfire.  He’s different but he’s the same. For every self he shed like old skin, he seems to have kept one. He’s a time traveler, already at home in the near future even if his breath, released in a huff over Atsumu’s cheek, has gone a little stale. If Atsumu were to nitpick, he’d remind Shouyou that he owes Atsumu a kiss but it’s water under the bridge—Atsumu has forgotten all about it, or, at the very least, he’ll never bring it up.

Shouyou is summer-brief and sky-borne. He is holding on for dear life, and he’s here. “Missed you,” he mumbles, burying a smile in Atsumu’s shoulder. “Sleepy.” Legs that are all muscle circling Atsumu’s hips. “Train?”

“I rented a car,” Atsumu laughs wetly. “Okaerinasai.”

A sleepy sigh. A barely intelligible mumble. Tadaima.  Carry me?

Atsumu cradles the back of Shouyou’s head. The only way to keep him is to let him go—the only way not to lose him is to enjoy him while he lasts.

Shouyou’s arms padlocked behind his neck, and it takes everything in Atsumu not to swallow the key.

Later, once he’s done playing Tetris with Shouyou’s luggage and the rental’s trunk, Atsumu buckles Shouyou up as the other watches him sleepily. At Atsumu’s questioning look, Shouyou reaches inside his pocket, pulls out a tissue, and unfolds it to reveal a small seashell.

“I smuggled it through airport security in my mouth, like a toothache,” Shouyou mumbles on a yawn as he extends his hand. “I know it’s okay to put seashells in your carry-on but this one is so beautiful, I worried they’d take it away.”

Atsumu opens his hand. His breath hitches when Shouyou drops the shell in his palm.

“I couldn’t bear it if they took it away, so I smuggled it, just for you,” Shouyou whispers, fighting sleep one slow blink at a time. “It’s all there, if you care to listen, and isn’t it beautiful?”

“Yeah,” Atsumu croaks, watching Shouyou drift off, his eyes stinging with tears. “Sure is.”

*

Shouyou comes and Atsumu, twenty-two, going on twenty-three, and more ready than ever, expects him.

He expects a phenomenon but what he gets is that, and then some. What he gets is that, and a boy. Shouyou can jump higher than Atsumu imagined, and Atsumu imagined plenty, but, on nights out, the tips of his ears still flush red. He defies laws of physics on the court but, off it, he’s just like anyone else, tripping over things and at the mercy of indigestion.

When he shouts, he’s everybody’s, but when he speaks low, in a whisper, he’s private.

“You’ve only realized now?” is Osamu’s input when Atsumu comes clean, head pillowed on the Onigiri Miya countertop. Soon, you’ll wear in a groove there, Osamu has taken to complaining. “You’ve been talking my ear off about the guy for years, Tsumu.”

Years, yes, but there’s a difference between waiting for someone like you await a change in the weather and waiting for someone like you wouldn’t mind adopting a cat with them.

“Do you think Shouyou-kun is a cat person?” Atsumu sighs, tiptoeing his fingers across the countertop until they encounter a stray grain of rice.

Harvest time, things coming full circle, reap what you sow. Atsumu licks the grain off his finger, knows better than to let it go to waste.

“I think he’s an everything person,” Osamu says with a shrug. “The question is, is he a Miya Atsumu person?”

“Oh, shut up.”

Shouyou has a sun for a heart—this is true, this is fact. The rest of him orbits that warm core and Atsumu’s new favorite thing is when Shouyou shoves his cold hands—the outer reaches of the galaxy of him—in Atsumu’s pockets whenever they leave that izakaya or other late at night, for warmth. In fact, Osamu would doubtless beg to differ but, at this point, Atsumu is pretty sure Shouyou is what Atsumu has pockets for.

*

You’re twenty-eight and a boy gives you a seashell. It’s a shell of many colors but you can’t quite pin any of them down. Blue, white, crimson, clover.  Blue, beautiful, freckled, yours: once a home, now it’s an archive of oceans. A bird might have tried to pick it up with its beak, a child might have dropped it. Sunlight filled it to the brim until it overflowed, sand came and went, salt has stuck around. You can even taste it, if you press the very tip of your tongue to the coarse surface.

You turn the seashell this way and that, holding it up to the light. He is sleeping, and cobalt blue, navy blue, yale blue—the blue of the sky returning him safe and sound. He is sleeping and your favorite thing about the sun must be what it does to people.

So far, you’ve lived through more sunrises than you have sunsets and when you press the shell to your ear, it’s all there, and it’s everything. Everything.

*

On the day of Shouyou’s flight, Atsumu makes up his mind to be brave. He feels a cold, compact pressure settle on his chest when he wakes, like he’s six sands under, but he can bear it: there is breakfast to be made and he can stomach it.

In sleep, the soles of Shouyou’s feet seek Atsumu’s calves.

For warmth, Atsumu tells himself, but isn’t it summer? Hasn’t Shouyou kicked the covers off yet again?

Shouyou is leaving so soon and Atsumu loves him so much. It’s the kind of love that sticks, too—the kind of love that can keep you from bursting into tears when you stub your toe and lets you hold it together when your favorite everything is about to cross the Pacific.

His poor mother and Osamu better make an honest man out of Akaashi soon because Atsumu might just be a lost cause.

An eye opens. A sun rises. A heart breaks. You’ve heard this one so many times.

An eye opens as another closes. In the darkroom of his eyelids, Atsumu develops the photograph he’s never taken: Shouyou, a murmuration of blues with a sunbeat tucked under his ribs, aerial view.

Atsumu has been allowed to keep so many things. This, he knows to let go of.

*

Shouyou is sleeping in Atsumu’s bed in that hoodie he refused to take off after Atsumu piggybacked him up the stairs, and there is nothing Atsumu knows for a fact. Earlier, when Shouyou rolled over to curl up on Atsumu’s side of the bed, Atsumu stared but only for a second: Shouyou sheathed in morning light, the blade of him dulled by sleep. Atsumu took note of new freckles and scars, stretch marks and tan lines, and then he forced himself to stop looking even as Shouyou’s hands sleepwalked across the bed, as though in search of something.

Atsumu should be getting groceries, but he can’t bear the thought of leaving Shouyou alone in the apartment even if he’d sleep right through it, so he wanders from room to room—and there are only so many rooms to wander through, here—holding on to Shouyou’s seashell for dear life.

Oddly, it was Aran and not Osamu that Atsumu decided to confide in some months after Shouyou left.

Nobody gets it, Atsumu complained, burying his face in Aran’s shoulder. I don’t get why nobody gets it.

Nobody gets what, now?

Atsumu’s hands taking off, gesticulation for a crutch. It’s how when you say ‘I can’t wait’ you don’t mean that you’re incapable of waiting and so won’t. What you actually mean is ‘I’m looking forward to it’.

So, just to confirm, you’re not miserable? Aran asked after a pause. Osamu keeps nagging me to check in on you, you know.

Asshole, but Atsumu didn’t mean it.

He probably was a little miserable. Bags under his eyes, teeth yellowed by coffee, and Jesus, don’t even get him started on his roots. His bed, Shouyouless, his kitchen, Shouyouless, his team, Shouyouless.

Atsumu couldn’t wait but he was still doing all that waiting, wasn’t he?

After Shouyou’s flight, Atsumu spent weeks blowing his nose in Shouyou’s MY TUMMY HURTS t-shirt and chasing the last of his smell, but he’d never dreamed of begrudging Shouyou the world. Never that.

For the record, I keep telling people you’re a good kid, Aran said, wrapping a heavy arm around Atsumu’s shoulders to pull him closer. They never believe me, but it’s true.

For years now, Atsumu, who’s not a kid anymore, has been shuffling memories like a deck of cards, hanging them up on the clothesline of his days. If he were careless, he’d cut his finger running it over the peaks and valleys of Shouyou’s shell, but today, he’s only careful. It’s almost noon, indisputable sunlight, and there are eggs in Atsumu’s fridge.

A bed spring. A mumble. A yawn.

Shouyou stirs and Atsumu might be greedy, but with Shouyou, taking has always meant giving.

*

“What are you making?” Shouyou asks, rising on tiptoe to hook his chin on Atsumu’s shoulder and Atsumu knows nothing at all.

“I’m cooking you breakfast,” Atsumu says once his breath is under control. “I only have eggs.”

Shouyou hides a whole cache of smiles there, in the cradle formed by Atsumu’s right clavicle and scapula. Atsumu can feel them even through his shirt, setting.

“Atsumu-san,” Shouyou hums, curling his fingers over Atsumu’s other, neglected shoulder. “Did you miss me?”

“Yeah,” Atsumu croaks, almost drops the spatula.

“A lot?”

“Yeah.”

“How much?”

“Yeah.”

“Atsumu-san,” Shouyou laughs. “Won’t you look at me?”

Atsumu hasn’t hurt his shoulder, but Shouyou’s breath finds it anyway. Sunlight has had ample time to reacquaint itself with Shouyou but here it comes all the same, creeping closer slowly but surely, committing warmth all over where the two of them touch.

“Ready,” Atsumu tries.

“Hm?”

“Breakfast,” Atsumu tries again, slurring the words. “It’s ready.”

Shouyou, who reaches out to slowly, finger by finger, loosen Atsumu’s grip on the spatula. Atsumu has been so homesick for him but something in him is already aching for recovery, the sky outside bluer than blue, convalescent, so long a-coming, here now, stooping low enough for the first of its rungs to be just within reach.

There is a seashell in Atsumu’s mouth because, so far, he hasn’t come up with a safer place to put it.

*

Dead Reckoning, Kita told Atsumu once, is a method of navigation that relies on estimating one’s current track, groundspeed, and position based on earlier known positions.

In other words, it is a method of establishing one's position using the distance an d direction traveled rather than astronomical observations. This form of spatial navigation helps animals—birds, for instance—return to a starting location by identifying the present one, even after circuitous trips.

As in, Atsumu asked, you have to keep your starting location in the back of your mind at all times to make your way back?

Kita smiled. Something like that, yes.

*

“Atsumu-san.”

“Shit.”

“Atsumu-san.”

Shouyou’s hand stilling Atsumu’s wrist to stop him from trying to scrape burnt egg off the pan.

“Can’t even do breakfast right,” Atsumu says, trying to laugh it off, the shell tucked under his tongue now and it’s so small, he can barely feel it. “You start eating, okay?”

Shouyou frowns at him, tugging on the pan like he wants Atsumu to hand it over. He’s still wearing Atsumu’s hoodie, but Atsumu doesn’t mind. Shouyou can keep it, it’s only that Atsumu doesn’t know anything anymore.

“Didn’t you say you liked your eggs warm?” he reminds Shouyou helplessly, trying to will his hands to stop shaking. “Fresh off the stove?”

“Didn’t I also say I lied?” Shouyou counters as Atsumu finally lets him have the pan. “Sit down, Atsumu-san. I’ll just plop this in the sink and be right with you.”

When Shouyou turns his back on him, Atsumu takes the opportunity to retrieve the seashell and slip it inside the pocket of his sweats. It’s not safe there, but it’ll have to do for now.

Atsumu doesn’t need to be Shouyou’s home, but he’d love to be one of his many homes. A stop on his way to somewhere else. A bed to sleep in. A cup of coffee to share.  A plateful of breakfast.

He’s always been greedy, but Shouyou is an exception that proves all his rules.

They eat in silence and Atsumu makes sure to chew every mouthful thirty times, for the sake of his health—mental, rather than physical. Under the table, Shouyou’s foot bumps his and it’s an accident, but then it rests against his, and it can’t be.

“Won’t you even ask?” Shouyou snorts, pretending to pout, backlit by all that sun that followed him here to overtop the banks of Atsumu’s kitchen.

“Fine,” Atsumu sighs. “How do you like your eggs in the morning?”

“Well, to tell you the truth, it doesn’t even have to be morning,” Shouyou shrugs with a small smile. “I like them poached, and fried, and soft-boiled, and hard-boiled… I’m really not very fussy.” A toe poking through the hole in his sock, drawing figure eights around Atsumu’s ankle. “What I’m trying to say is that I like them best here.”

Atsumu gulps. “Here in Japan?”

Shouyou shakes his head, the corner of his lips quirking up.

“Here in Kansai?” Atsumu tries.

Shouyou shakes his head again, cocks it at Atsumu.  

“Osaka?”

Shouyou pouts, poking Atsumu’s leg with his toes. “Now you’re just being obtuse.”

Atsumu props his elbows on the table and buries his face in his hands. This is too much. This is too much and earlier, by the stove, Atsumu burned the eggs because after Shouyou blew on his shoulder, he kissed it.

He kissed it.

“Hey now,” Shouyou laughs. “Don’t hide.”

Chair legs screeching on floorboards. Soft footsteps. Fingers slotting through Atsumu’s own—small, callused, precious.

“Come on,” Shouyou whispers, tugging on his hand. “Let’s have a look.”

And Atsumu, who’d never deny Shouyou anything, trails after him all the way to the kitchen windowsill, where there’s just enough space for the both of them if they huddle close.

Probably. They might have to check, just to make sure.

“I don’t even want to know what time it is in Brazil,” Shouyou laughs, staring at the sun that’s long reached its zenith.

“One a.m.,” Atsumu blurts, and the mortification is worth it, for the smile Shouyou gives him: whispered, spoken low, private.

“You know, when I was in São Paulo, I always knew which way Japan was, in relation to me,” Shouyou says as he perches on the windowsill, dragging Atsumu with him until Atsumu has no choice but to step between the welcome of his open knees. “It was this whole arrangement: I’d be aware of Japan at my left, at my right, behind me. Ahead of me. I’d start at the front door of my apartment and then, wherever I’d go, every turn would be an added… what’s it called…” Shouyou’s eyebrows furrow and Atsumu is so in love. “Victor? No, not Victor… Victor, Hector… Vector! Yes, that’s it!” Another smile and so in love. “I’d eat my breakfast facing you, the way I would if we were sitting at the same table,” Shouyou adds, somewhat sheepishly, ducking his head. “At your table,” and he looks up to meet Atsumu's eyes now. “I kept thinking, Gee, I hope Atsumu-san hasn’t been trying out different seats.” Another smile, a little softer now. “I’m sorry you had to wait so long.”

Atsumu doesn’t ask Shouyou when he’s going back to Brazil—if, after two years there, he’s going back at all. “It’s okay,” he says instead once he finds his voice, some door he’s locked deep inside of himself creaking open. “I was looking forward to you.”

Shouyou exhales, pulling him closer, closer. Sunset might be imminent but, time and time again, the day breaks out of its chrysalis without grief. Now that the wait for him is over, Atsumu’s life is Shouyou once more—Shouyou, the best thing that the sun has ever done to him, everything Atsumu let go of returned at last.

And someone you love enters the room
and says wouldn't
                  you like the eggs a little

different today?
                And when they arrive they are
just plain scrambled eggs and the warm weather
is holding.

~Frank O’Hara, For Grace, After a Party