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Was twenty hours without sleep enough to hallucinate, Tobio wonders, because the tall blond waiting in the Arrivals Hall of Narita International couldn’t really be there.
Could he?
Tobio doesn’t remember telling anyone other than Miwa his flight number, and that’s because she’s pushy and paranoid and keeps the flight tracker open on her laptop until he’s safely back on the ground every damn time.
“Good, you’re here,” the vision says and oh hallucinations that speak can't be a good sign. “Do you remember which baggage claim your flight is going to?” But Tsukishima is already rising, long body unfolding into his consistently-impressive 195-centimeter frame and moving to stand in front of a status board. He checks his phone for something before looking back up, eyes darting quickly over the list of flights and their designated carousels.
“Umm,” Tobio manages to get out, still trying to reconcile himself with what must be a lucid dream because there’s no way that Tsukishima Kei is here for him.
“Seventeen,” Tsukishima says, nodding in confirmation before moving towards the large “17” sign hanging from the ceiling. “C’mon, King. Let’s get your shit and go home.”
Which — what? Home? Did he — did he mean Tobio’s apartment in Tokyo or Tsukishima’s in Sendai or their family homes back in the Miyagi countryside? The latter’s the closest he’s ever had to a ‘home’ with Tsukishima — memories of study parties and movie nights and sleepovers at any of the Karasuno 5’s houses flooding in — but a home with Tsukishima would be a daydream come true.
Too bad this is all only happening in the recesses of his mind.
Except —
Except when Tobio reaches out to touch him, brushes the tips of his fingers against the thick wool covering the blond’s obnoxiously elegant elbow, Tsukishima doesn’t disappear in a puff of smoke or collapse into a pile of dust.
He feels real.
He feels real and looks back at Tobio with golden eyes and a quirked eyebrow.
“Yes?” he asks.
Tobio says nothing, shaking his head and hurrying to catch up.
He’s beginning to question his sanity because Tsukishima insists on rolling Tobio’s suitcase to what he thinks he remembers is Yamaguchi’s car, putting the luggage in the trunk before folding himself into the driver’s seat. Tobio sits next to him on the passenger side and if this were a dream, wouldn’t they fit in the car a little better? As it stands, Tsukishima seems like he barely fits behind the steering wheel, hair brushing the felted lining of the car and knees sticking up over the gearbox.
Tobio adjusts the seat to go as far back as it can and it’s better than the plane — infinitely better, with the radio playing and the smell of Japan and fresh air (as fresh as it can be, in a car in the parking lot of Tokyo’s major international airport) and Tsukishima Kei to his right — but his knees still brush up against the glove compartment every time he shifts his hips.
Tsukishima starts the car and puts it in reverse. Tobio reaches out to touch the hand resting on the gear shift, long fingers and a smattering of fine, spun-gold hair, and it occurs to him to ask, “Where are we going?”
Pale features turn towards him once again, and the look on his face is soft. Not fully a smile but more than neutral and while Tobio has mounting evidence that this is real, the fondness written around those golden eyes has to be a dream.
“Your apartment,” he answers. “Unless there’s somewhere else?”
“No,” Tobio responds, settling back into the seat. The car is pleasantly warm without being stuffy and though it’s cramped, he is comfortable. Soft music plays through the speakers and he’s drifting off, awake for far too long and seven time-zones out of sorts. “I’ll go wherever you take me.”
He doesn’t realize he’s intertwined their fingers.
The man sitting next to him is beautiful, Kei thinks, even though he’s spent the better part of the past 24 hours traveling and is not his freshest. Kageyama Tobio is a vision, an absolute dream, and he’s sitting just to his left, no more than a foot or so away, and Kei isn’t sure he’s realized he laced their fingers together.
Kageyama’s hand is unsurprisingly warm, the calluses on his palm rubbing pleasantly against Kei’s skin as he changes gears, navigating out of the parking lot and on to the highway.
The man asleep in the passenger seat next to him is beautiful, even as his head lolls to the side, lips slightly parted, snoring lightly from the awkward hyperextension of his neck. He is beautiful and Kei is fairly certain he is in love. He had his suspicions when he asked Miwa for his flight information in the course of casual conversation as she cut his hair. He had his suspicions when he asked Yamaguchi if he could borrow his car, a half-baked plan forming in the back of his mind. Those suspicions were confirmed when he looked up from his phone to check the arrivals status board for the umpteenth time, eager to get on with whatever this was, only to lock eyes with a hauntingly familiar blue gaze.
Tobio didn’t talk much — he never has, really, always expressing so much more through his actions than with anything that came out of his mouth — so Kei’s heart leapt when Tobio reached out to touch him.
The man who slotted their fingers together before dozing off is beautiful and Kei is fairly certain he loves him. He has an inkling that Tobio maybe loves him too.
It should feel sudden, it should feel abrupt and like an earthquake or a tsunami or volcanic eruption. The realization should irrevocably change him, like there is a Kei-Before-Tobio and a Kei-After-Tobio but Kei realizes that the realization hardly changes anything at all, that the Before and After versions of himself happened a long time ago.
The man sitting next to him is beautiful and Kei thinks that he’s probably been in love with him for a while now. Kei thinks that maybe, just maybe, Tobio has been waiting for Kei to realize it too, given the sweetly sleepy way he told him he’d follow Kei anywhere in just about as many words.
He doesn’t fully know what he’s doing — the plan was still only half-formed when he left for Tokyo earlier that morning, wanting to first see Kageyama and play it by ear — and he’s glad that Kageyama’s not awake to watch him internally panic over his next steps. Those blue eyes always saw more of Kei than he intended to share.
The hand on top of his twitches and he takes a deep breath, inhaling until his rib cage protests and letting it all out in a concerted exhalation. The stretch of his diaphragm provides a nice counter to the strangle-hold his emotions have around his heart.
Kei isn’t good with rolling with the punches, too accustomed to analyzing details and playing the long game, but Kageyama has always made him act rashly. And all of his meticulous planning hasn’t gotten him anywhere.
So for now, there’s only one course of action: drive to Kageyama’s apartment. Time would dictate what he — what they — did next.
It’s both too far and not long enough before he’s pulling in to the parking lot and shaking Kageyama awake.
Tobio is confused about the dream-ness of this all because he thinks he fell asleep in a car with Tsukishima outside the airport but now he’s waking up with Tsukishima in a car outside his apartment. Waking up from a dream within a dream is not something he’s ever done before — he wonders if Yachi would know if it’s possible, since the only other person he can think to ask is sitting next to him, and he doesn’t want to clue Tsukishima in to the fact he has no idea what’s happening.
Because whatever is going on? He likes it. He likes that Tsukishima showed up unannounced at the airport, he likes that Tsukishima borrowed a car to drive him around, he likes waking up to a gentle nudge coupled with a, “we’re home.”
He likes it a lot and would prefer that it not end. Tsukishima was like a wild animal in that regard, though — easily startled and highly likely to revert back to better-established behaviors.
He’s being herded into an elevator and down a hallway and through his front door and then he’s home, as much as this can be home, considering he’s only here for roughly five months of the year.
He’s hungry, tired and smelly — equally tempted by the shower, bed and prospect of dinner. Tsukishima pushes him towards the bathroom.
“Clean up. I’ll cook us something.”
And Tobio rolls with it. Pointing out how out of character this all is would be akin to asking ‘why’ and he didn’t want to venture into that territory.
He pulls out a clean set of lounge clothes from his bag and heads to bathe.
As an athlete, Tobio has learned to relish the burn in his lungs and ache in his muscles associated with rigorous activity — they’re signs of progress, of steps forward towards his goals — but nothing ever quite compares to a hot shower, whether after a game, a run or a full day of travel.
Near-scalding water beats down on his head, neck and back and while he feels more relaxed than he has since he last went to sleep in Rome nearly 30 hours earlier, the exhaustion and aches associated with sitting in the same small seat for prolonged periods of time are making themselves known.
He presses his forehead against the cool tile lining the shower stall, trying to get his bearings in between washing his hair and body. The facts, as they currently stood, are as follows:
- Tsukishima Kei met him at the airport, which required him to have found out from Miwa when his flight was.
- Tsukishima Kei met him at the airport with Yamaguchi’s car, which meant he had driven more than five hours from Sendai instead of just taking the train.
- Tsukishima Kei met him at the airport and drove him ‘home’, to Tobio’s Tokyo apartment, where he is now making them dinner while Tobio leans his head against the wall, trying to determine if this whole thing is a dream.
Tact and deductive reasoning — key for navigating this situation — have unfortunately never been his strongest suits. His setter hands, normally so dexterous, are more likely to fumble this blown-glass-delicate thing they’ve built over the past two hours than steer him through it.
Regardless, he finishes up and heads back to the kitchen.
Kageyama steps out from the hallway with sweatpants slung low about his hips and a towel draped around his neck — he’d be the manifestation of Kei’s wet dreams if not for the exhaustion written into every plane of his stupidly-pretty face.
He ambles over to the island, leaning against the counter near to where Kei is stirring a pot of miso soup.
“You’re still here,” he says. He sounds like he doesn’t believe it, even as his eyes rake over Kei’s face.
Kei checks on the rice cooker before meeting Kageyama’s gaze. “I said I’d make dinner, didn’t I?”
“I thought…” he trails off, looking off to the side.
“Thought what, King?” Kei prods.
“Thought I’d imagined it. This. You, here.”
“You thought you imagined me driving you home?” he teases but, truth be told, Kei’s heart has been racing since he heard the water shut off. The only task left on their to-do list for the day was ‘talk’.
Kageyama shoots him a deadpan sapphire stare, then lets his head drop forward, grunting at the stretch. Kei wants to reach over, dig his fingers into the muscles presented to him, massage along the tendons and feel Kageyama melt under his ministrations.
“I’m — leave me alone, I’m tired.”
“You can go to sleep,” Kei says. “I’ll stick this in the fridge.”
“No!” Kageyama reaches out a hand, wrapping long fingers around Kei’s wrist. “No. I…is it almost ready? I’m hungry.”
The rice cooker chimes that it’s done and Kei shoots him a soft smile. He pulls away, plates the food and brings it over to the table, along with a pitcher of water. Kageyama doesn’t immediately sit, so Kei turns to look for him.
He’s closer than Kei anticipates — within arms reach — and Kei sees his hand, outstretched but low, aiming for the hem of Kei’s own sweater.
“You’re really here?”
Kei’s breath catches in his throat. There’s a naked vulnerability in Kageyama’s eyes that makes him swallow, pause and relent even though most of his instincts are clamoring to take either flight or defensive tactics. For all that he’s supposedly good with words, any that would suit this particular moment don’t come easily to him.
He wants many things: to eat, because he is hungry; to run, because he has never traversed difficult conversations with grace; to kiss the man in front of him and welcome him ‘okaeri’, because his heart finally, finally understands where – who its home is, after years of denial.
If only they could step into the relationship without the requisite preamble. If only they could regain the time they’d lost to foolishness.
“Yeah,” he says, voice more of a whisper than anything substantial. “Yeah, I’m really here.”
“How long are you staying?”
As long as I can, Kei thinks. As long as you’ll let me.
“The night?” Kageyama continues. “It’s pretty late for you to drive back.”
Kei can’t suppress the small smile that overtakes his face. He huffs a laugh. “I’m not sure I’ll fit on your couch, King.”
They both look at the sofa: comfortable and broken-in, but more decorative than anything and definitely too small for Kei’s lanky frame.
“Then you’ll have to sleep in the bed,” Kageyama says, taking a tentative step closer. “We can share.”
Kei bites the inside of his cheek to tamp down his smile, wrapping an arm around Kageyama’s waist and pulling him in closer.
“I guess we’ll have to,” he says, like it’s not a dream come true.
You're in a car with a beautiful boy,
and he won't tell you that he loves you,
but he loves you.
Richard Siken