Chapter Text
Hinata slid his left foot along the branch in front of him. The bark was rough and warm against his bare, calloused toes as he tested his weight, rocking a little from foot to foot. Below him, the two deer—two!—still had their heads lowered, lipping at the short, stubby grasses of the clearing.
There was a popping in his ears, like happened when he was so far underground he could feel the weight of the world pressing in on his brain, and the voice in his head said, Daichi-san would tell us to wait.
It was a deep voice—a cool voice—but Hinata could hear the little tremor of excitement in it, the same excitement that made his fingers twitch against the knives at his belt.
I know, he said. It was impossible not to sound petulant when Kageyama had access to all the same emotional signals he did, but. He tried anyway.
Daichi-san would say bring in backup, Kageyama continued, his excitement growing. Daichi-san would say that even if we get one the other will spook and we might not see it for weeks—
What backup? Hinata demanded. The wood under his foot shifted, more the breath before a creak than the creak itself, and he immediately shifted his weight backward, withdrew his foot. Noya-senpai’s almost an hour out by now, getting further as we sit on our asses, and Tsukishima’s not even on duty. He blew out a breath in impatience, making the curl of red hair that had escaped his ponytail dance against his forehead. I don’t care what he says. What do you say?
A grin—fleeting, tiny, impossible to visualize with no face to put it on, but still somehow a grin—flickered across his mind. What the hell are you standing around for?
Hinata grinned and slid his knives silently from their sheathes.
When they’d first started doing this Kageyama had to guide him—verbally, for lack of a better word, tell him where to be, how to aim, how to hold his arm, his elbow, his fingers in order to send his knives exactly where they needed to go. Now, their sync was good enough that they didn’t need the words—it was like Hinata’s vision blurred except for his target, which sharpened, like his muscles clicked into their correct places. He was still himself—Kageyama couldn’t take him over, like some campfire stories he’d heard of hunters who slipped too deep into sync with their AI—and he could still feel him, sitting at the back of his head, but it was kind of like there were hands shifting him, gentle pressures and little soft wordless encouragements, all within the space of an instant.
It was nice.
His first knife embedded itself in the deer’s throat, and before the thing’s corpse had hit the ground Hinata was running, not on the ground but skipping lightly from branch to branch, circling the little clearing. The second deer froze, hesitated, and then bolted—exactly where Kageyama had known it would, away from the place the knife had come from. Hinata reached the tree Kageyama had directed him to and dropped onto its back as it passed beneath him—the impact jarring his bones—nearly slid off immediately but got a hand around one of the thing’s antlers and sawed his second knife across its throat, quick and harsh. It collapsed underneath him with a gurgling kind of cry, and Hinata fell with it, rolling away before any of his limbs could get caught in its death throes.
He sat up, wiping blood from his eyes.
Told you, Kageyama said, smug.
“Yeah, yeah,” Hinata muttered, but he couldn’t stop grinning. “Now you contact Noya and Tsukishima to help us carry the meat.”
Don’t tell me what to do, idiot, said Kageyama, but he was already doing it—feathering his awareness out over the whole quadrant of the Wood they called home. They couldn’t do this between quadrants yet—the wireless signals were too weak, and the supplies they needed to improve them basically nonexistent within the Dome—but so long as Hinata’s fellow hunters were within Karasuno bounds Kageyama could contact them with ease.
Tsukishima’s closer, he said after a minute, but Noya is very excited to hear about our success and Asahi-san says that he’s made it into a kind of race, so it’s anybody’s guess.
Tsukishima won, whether or not he knew it was a race, and stepped into the clearing just as Hinata finished sectioning the first deer. Hinata grinned at him, raising a hand in a wave.
Tsukishima’s face was blank, and he crossed to stand weirdly close to Hinata, his eyes flickering over him.
Hinata blinked at him. “What’s up?”
Tsukishima reached out a hand and ran his thumb over Hinata’s cheekbone, then stared at the blood on his fingers for a long second. “Disgusting,” he said at last, and crossed to the other deer.
Hinata wrinkled his nose. “What the heck was that?”
“Making sure it wasn’t your blood,” Tsukishima said shortly, bending and sliding his own knife from his belt.
Hinata laughed. “You think if I was hurt Kageyama would have called you in so calmly? That I wouldn’t have said anything?”
Tsukishima didn’t look up from his butchery. “I wouldn’t trust you to notice an arrow in your back,” he said flatly, “or the King to pay any mind to your wellbeing at all.”
Tell him to shut the hell up, Kageyama advised, and to stop calling me that.
“That’s dumb,” Hinata said instead. “Of course Kageyama cares about my wellbeing.” Right?
Wrong, Kageyama said immediately.
Hinata gaped at nothing, wounded.
Tsukishima looked over at him and raised an eyebrow, the corner of his mouth lifted in a smirk. “He said no, didn’t he.”
“Shut up,” Hinata said, trying not to pout. He knelt to dress his kill. Jerk, he said to Kageyama, who was still too busy being smug and pissed at Tsukishima by turns to pay him any mind. What good’s an AI that doesn’t even have my back—
Noya entered the clearing like a tiny tsunami, bursting forth from the treetops and landing in a crouch directly between them. “No way!” he shouted immediately. “No way, no way, look at all this meat!”
Hinata straightened up, beaming, and Noya caught sight of him and was at his side in an instant. “Shouyo! You genius, you pair of geniuses, this is amazing!”
Hinata felt himself go red, was glad of the blood still smearing his cheeks. “Thanks, senpai. It felt so cool, the first one was so easy, it was like blam, and then I needed to get the other one, and then I did, and—“ he stopped himself, too excited to put it into words. “Yeah!”
Noya slung an arm around his shoulder and pulled him hard against his side. “You did awesome,” he muttered against his head, and then released him to gather up the rest of the meat.
When they’d gathered it all, wrapped in the clean plastic and cloth they all carried with them, they slung it into their packs and made their way home, on the ground this time. It didn’t matter if they scared anything else off; Hinata’s catch was more than their daily quota combined and all the game would have moved by the next day anyway, shifted around in their circular habitat, taken the next step in their manufactured migration patterns.
The Dome was, according to Sugawara-senpai, about 85 miles in diameter, with the Wood taking up almost 95% of that area. The rest was taken up by the walls themselves, stretching up until they faded from the wavy brown-grey of extremely thick glass to atmospheric blue, thinning as they went so that the apex of the Dome let in the sunlight unchanged without having to be open to the air outside; and by the few scattered buildings and towns that had been repurposed to bases for the hunting parties. These were divided into four quadrants, each connected to a warren of tunnels that led deep into the earth’s crust to the underground cities where the rest of earth’s survivors lived, developing new technologies to purify the poisoned air, engineering underground gardens and livestock to supplement the food provided by the hunters, and refiguring society into something that could not only subsist but thrive, a second era of human existence.
Supposedly.
The truth—revealed to Hinata and the others by Ukai and Takeda-sensei when they turned sixteen, as it had been revealed to them at the same age—was that contact had dropped off. Commands had thinned out. They still delivered the food as they were supposed it, gathering it monthly into the great elevators at the end of the tunnel under Karasuno Center, and when the doors of the elevator car opened again it was always gone, but nothing else was given, and no one ever came the other way.
Families had stopped sending their kids to the edge of the Dome to breathe the air and take their chances against the wild. The hunters who lived here now were the children of the hunters before them, an entire separate society. Hinata’s mother had been one of the last to make the journey, and she’d never really spoken about her experiences before their little happy home at the edge of the Wood. She’d never really spoken much at all. Hinata remembered her singing to him much better than he remembered her speaking, and he heard it again as they approached the outskirts of the Karasuno Center Camp—meandering, babbled, half Japanese and half the incomprehensible language that all children instinctively know and speak only with themselves.
Hinata grinned. “Natsu! Come down!”
His little sister swung herself off a branch, and Hinata moved, Kageyama guiding his hands with perfect deftness so that he matched her momentum, swinging her gently around his body once to slow her before setting her on her feet. He only realized his mistake when she gasped. “Onii-chan,” she said, “you’re all bloody! Are you hurt?”
Hinata ruffled her hair. “I’m fine, I’m fine!” He looked over her head to Tuskkishima, who was watching him. “How’s it feel to be in the same boat as my baby sister, you worrywart?”
Tsukishima raised an eyebrow at him. “She’s better company than you are,” he said and resettled his pack on his shoulder. “Come on, hurry it up.”
Hinata reached down and took Natsu’s hand, leading her through the trees. Noya stepped up other other side, laying a hand on her head. “Your brother did the work of lions today, Natsu-chan,” he said, with a grin at Hinata. “You should be very proud.”
Hinata wrinkled his nose in embarrassment as Natsu gasped, hesitated, and then asked, “what’s a lion?”
Hinata blinked and exchanged glances with Noya. “Um,” he said, “it’s like—like a big cat—?” Kageyama, help me out!
Lion, Kageyama began, panthera leo, family felidae, order carnivora—
Not that stuff! Hinata said scornfully. Dumbass, you know that’s not what I meant. Show me what it looked like!
He nearly walked into a tree when Kageyama obeyed.
His mind was filled suddenly with a huge, glorious animal in living color, a big-shouldered beast with deep, wise eyes and a great mane of red-gold hair. Speed and strength sheathed in velvet softness. An overwhelming idea of power.
“Noya,” he breathed when he’d shaken it off. “Do you really think I’m like a lion?”
Noya grinned at him. “Sure,” he said. “You’ve even got the mane.” He leaned over and shook Hinata by the head, pulling more stray strands from his ponytail so they hung around his face.
Hinata laughed and fought him off. Shifting his pack to his other shoulder, he hoisted Natsu up onto his hip. “Lions,” he said decidedly, “are the coolest animals in the world.”
When they’d delivered all the meat to storage and dropped Natsu home, Hinata slipped away to the baths. They were underground—one of the few still-usable rooms off the corridors that wound under the camp, the others being the command center, a few bedrooms for people who preferred cool darkness to birds and sunshine, and an ancient kitchen with an broken old oven that Hinata and Yachi used to play hide and seek in (or where Hinata would just hide, when the pressure of his eventual purpose became too much). These corridors used to connect to the set on the other side of camp where the elevators were, but a cave-in before Hinata was born meant that you had to go outside and back down to get to storage and the mysterious world beyond.
Not that anyone ever went beyond. Not and came back, anyway.
Once, he knew, there had been electric heating in the baths, making sure the water was comfortable all year long. These days, all the power they had needed to be diverted to the command center (“for AI maintenance reasons”, which had always struck Hinata as weird because he thought the whole point of plugging the AI directly into the hunter’s skin was so that it could be powered off the human pulse, but he was just a kid. He was happy to leave stuff like that to Daichi and Sugawara) so the water was cold, drawn up from deeper underground even than this echoing set of rooms.
He stripped off his stiff, blood-soaked clothing, tugged the rest of his hair out of its stubby little ponytail, and stared at himself in the long, rusted mirror set into the tile wall. Late summer was giving way to autumn, and the perpetual sunburn spanning his shoulders, biceps and back was turning to tan and a thick peppering of freckles. The baths were lit by dim, golden lamps which ran off stored up energy from ancient solar panels at the surface, half of which were buried or disconnected or lost. Hinata pressed his forefingers over the bruises on his ribs, his hipbones, traced the long scar in his thigh, and felt Kageyama watching him the same way he was watching himself.
The way they taught you synching with an AI worked was that the program—Kageyama, in his case—had access to all of the visual and other sensory cues that you picked up, and used those in conjunction with their superior mathematical and tactical abilities to help you best make use of the situation. The idea originally was that they’d be switched off in non-stressful situations, but when the system was put into practice two things became immediately clear:
One, the synch between hunter and AI was improved immensely the longer the AI stayed switched on and experienced the hunter’s life. Two, this was the end of the world. There were no non-stressful situations.
What they didn’t teach you was the rest of it. How AI weren’t carbon-copies, ready to be swapped and plugged in where they were needed, or even created equal. The names weren’t just for categorization purposes, they had personalities attached—personalities with strengths and weaknesses, with hunter preferences and dislikes and flaws. Whatever program had been used to create them was far from perfect, and the partnership between human and AI became that in truth rather than just in name—a partnership.
What they didn’t teach you was all the stuff you could get from your AI that wasn’t mathematical calculations or statistical data or even the scientific name of lions. The stuff you felt.
Hinata turned away from his reflection and slid into the nearest bath. “Kageyama,” he said, quietly, not wanting to break the weird stillness at the back of his mind but liking the echo of the room too much to talk only in his head. “How come I can feel the stuff you do?”
Because I’m in your head, idiot, Kageyama responded, but his voice was mild.
Hinata shook his head. “No,” he said, “I mean, like. Emotions, and—and stuff, I can feel when you get—“ sad, he almost said, lonely, knew Kageyama heard them as clearly as the words he said aloud, “—mad, and. How are you even able to get mad, I thought the point was that I get mad and you can feel that—“
Emotions are all electrical signals like the rest of thoughts, Kageyama said. Mine are transferred to you like yours are transferred to me.
Hinata slumped down in the water until it covered him up to his eyes, liked the way it made his vision go crazy with reflected gold, liked the goosebumps on his skin. But, he said, those electric signals have to come from something, right? A, like. Brain, a meat brain and a heart and a stomach to feel squirmy and stuff. Otherwise they’d feel different. Right?
He expected Kageyama to make fun of him—he could almost hear him snap, ‘you’re a meat brain’, but the Stop being stupid, when it came, was weirdly short, the whispers of thought behind it weirdly hushed.
I’m not being stupid, I’m being smart. Hinata sat up a little. “Kageyama,” he said, blowing water droplets off his lips, “what aren’t you telling me?”
There was another pause, and Kageyama said, Asahi-san says there’s food. The thought was accompanied by a whiff of roasted deer and sweet, herb-filled air, transferred from Noya’s head to his.
Hinata’s stomach hollowed out so fast it was painful. “Food!”
He ducked under the water, scrubbing his hands over his scalp and shoulders and chest as quickly as he could. He surfaced, slicked back his hair, and hauled himself out of the bath, one of his shoulders aching a little.
Took that forward roll too fast, Kageyama muttered, and Hinata would have bristled but he knew Kageyama meant it as a criticism of himself as much as Hinata, if not more.
“Gotta get Tanaka to teach me that cool handspring,” he replied, and rubbed himself dry with his little scrap of rough towel. He stared at his disgusting, sweat-and-blood spattered clothes. “Kageyama.”
You’re not putting those back on. His AI sounded disgusted.
“No-oo,” Hinata said slowly. “But.” He looked around the empty room. “You, um, see anything else I can wear?”
Kageyama went dangerously silent. Hinata, he said finally, hit yourself in the face.
He accompanied the suggestion with the proper silent signals to make Hinata’s arm move and Hinata was so used to trusting those signals implicitly that he did it, smacking himself across the cheek with an open palm. He blinked, startled, and then grinned wide. “Okay, asshole,” he said, “you ready to do this?”
He left the baths with purpose, striding along with corridor outside with all the confidence he could muster. Kageyama hissed in his head, like he had to stay quiet for some reason. What the hell are you doing—
It’ll be just like stealth training, Hinata said, hunger and adrenaline from the hunt making him jittery and fearless. It’s not far to our tree—
No way, Kageyama protested, just—get someone to bring you some clothes or something, idiot—
Everybody’s eating, Hinata sent, scornful. He pressed himself against the wall at the bottom of the stairs to the surface, peering upward into the evening air. Nervousness sat low in his stomach, but he ignored it. Unless you think you’re not good enough to warn me if anyone can see me.
I can only sense the other hunters, dumbass! Kageyama protested. Tanaka could see you, or Sugawara-san, or—Hinata, Shimizu could see you.
He seemed to think that would scare Hinata, and on one level it kind of did—it would be embarrassing as hell for a girl to see him naked, especially a girl as beautiful as Shimizu. But—for whatever reason, it was far more nerve-wracking to have Kageyama himself see, and he couldn’t look in a mirror without that happening. After that, nothing was scary. He took a steadying breath.
Chicken? he challenged. You think we can’t do it?
Without waiting for Kageyama to answer, he darted up the steps.
It was quick—and only slightly painful—work to scale the first tree he came to, and then he just stayed high, swinging himself from branch to branch. The wind felt awesome against his clean skin, and from the east, toward the clearing unofficially designated as their dining area when the weather was clear, he could see thin plumes of smoke and smell the incredible sweetness of roasting meat.
He leapt from the thinning end of one long pine branch onto another, let it springboard him upward. In this, his height (and Noya’s) was an advantage. Tsukishima had to be much more careful, staying close to the trunks of trees when his hunts called for aerial work, which wasn’t often. His AI Yamaguchi was quiet (although Hinata wondered how quiet; sometimes he heard Tsukishima mutter “shut up, Yamaguchi” under his breath) and focused and determined, and Tsukishima was almost never hurt compared to his smaller teammates.
Tsukishima, Kageyama snapped, an echo of Hinata’s thoughts. Left, ground, looking this way.
The spot where the other hunter stood blazed momentarily in Hinata’s vision, like he could see through the trees between them, and Hinata slipped in close to the trunk and edged around it, keeping as much wood as possible between himself and the other boy. The day was sliding into night, the world above him going gold-grey-blue with the sunset. Noya swore there was a moment at twilight where you could see the joints between the panels of the sky, but Hinata had never seen it.
The wind shifted in the leaves, and if he weren’t so hungry he would be tempted to just—stay here, naked as the day he was born, secure because today, today they had enough to eat—fresh things to eat; today, no one was hurt; today, there was no threat of drought or storm or other malfunction; today, he and his little band of family were safe.
Hinata, Kageyama said quietly, waking him from his daze. He expected his AI to make fun of him for sitting still so long and risking being seen, but Kageyama said nothing else. There was a pressure at the back of Hinata’s head, not entirely familiar but not entirely new—akin to but not the same as hunger; akin to but not the same as restlessness. Yachi would probably call it longing, but Yachi was always romanticizing everything.
Suddenly all the questions he’d been distracted from by Kageyama’s mention of food came rushing back. He straightened up, checked the blaze that was Tsukishima, and slid lightly down a few branches. Don't think you’re gonna get away with not answering me, you sneaky—
Below him, Tanaka looked up, did a double-take, and then burst into raucous laughter.
Hinata felt himself blush from head to toe, covering himself up as best he could. Kageyama!! He screeched inside his own head.
You deserved it, Kageyama said smugly.
“H-Hinata what the fuck,” Tanaka choked when he could breathe, his eyes filled with tears.
“Shut up!” snapped Hinata. “I was taking a bath and my clothes were all bloody—“
“Oh!!” Tanaka interrupted, his eyes lighting, “I heard you guys took down two whole deer today. That’s amazing, man. Knew you had it in you!”
Hinata scratched a hand through his drying hair. “Uh, haha. Yeah—“
Tanaka hooked a thumb over his shoulder. “C’mon,” he said, “I’ll help you sneak to get clothes and then we’ll head to dinner, yeah?”
Hinata grinned at him, embarrassed. “Thanks, senpai. You’re the best.”
Tanaka swelled up his chest at the honorific. “I am, aren’t I?” His face cleared suddenly like he’d had an idea, and suddenly he was stripping out of his shirt. “Solidarity!” he announced.
Hinata gaped at him. “You’re so cool!!”
They made it to his tree outpost without further incident, unless Hinata hitting his head against the wall when Tanaka launched him head-first through the door counted. All of the hunters had two homes: their childhood home, usually in the remains of a house or under the ground in the tunnels, where they spent their lives until they were old enough to properly climb and run through the treetops and where they kept what little precious stuff they had; and their outposts, carved into or built outward from the largest of the trees around the ancient town. Hinata spent a lot of time in his childhood home still because he had to take care of Natsu, but he didn’t want to risk Shimizu or Yachi being there, or Natsu blabbing to everyone that her big brother had run in buck naked at dinnertime with Tanaka at his heels.
His senpai ran back to the clearing to grab the wood he’d been gathering, and by the time he returned—sweating and set-jawed, his shoulder muscles straining but his face all cheerful determination—Hinata had shrugged himself into loose pants and a half-vest that he was pretty sure had once been his mother’s. Certainly she’d made it; she’d made a lot of their clothing, his and Natsu’s and everyone’s, making use of the hides and furs that the hunters brought back as all their pre-Dome fabrics slowly rotted away to nothing. It was orange—died with lichen she’d gathered on the closed-off steps of the deeper tunnels—and fastened at the front with little ties that were delicate in his weary fingers, finicky to tie correctly.
He frowned down at them, and remembered the other reason he was mad. “Kageyama!” he shouted aloud, and Tanaka, waiting at the base of the tree, yelped.
Hinata made a face and turned his voice inward. I can’t believe you did that to me, he complained. You’re such a jerk, who programmed you to be such a jerk—
It was your idea, stupid, Kageyama pointed out testily. I just made sure you got what you had coming.
I did it because I thought you had my back! Hinata complained, finally managing to tie his shirt, and then leapt down from his perch to join Tanaka.
The older boy greeted him with a grin. “Sort out your headmate issues?” he teased.
Hinata made a sour face at him, and Tanaka laughed. “So, as usual, no.”
We’re fine, Kageyama muttered. Hinata, tell him we’re fine.
Hinata put a hand to his head, still making a face. Jerk, he insisted. Jerk, jerk, jerk.
“You might wanna come to some kinda peace during dinner,” Tanaka suggested, resettling the bundle of wood across his shoulders and retying his shirt around his waist. “Never part angry, that’s what I always say.” He grinned.
Hinata stopped walking, startled.
“Good advice, Ryuu,” Tanaka said conversationally to himself. “Oh, thanks, Ryuu.” He turned when he noticed Hinata wasn’t following him anymore. “What’s up?”
“There’s an update tonight?” Hinata asked, dismayed. He hated it when they had to update the AIs, because it meant he had to take the plug from behind his ear and give it to Suga and his head was all empty of anything but his own dumb self, and nobody could ever tell him how long it would take, because the computers they had in the command center were so old and constantly breaking, and he was always paranoid that. Something would happen.
Tanaka raised his eyebrows at him. “Yeah,” he said. “Suga told you like two days ago at breakfast, weren’t you listening?”
Hinata tried to remember anything that had happened two days ago, but came up empty. He shrugged and started walking again. “Guess not.”
I remembered, Kageyama said snottily.
Wish you had a head so I could hit it, Hinata muttered at him. Why didn’t you remind me?
Why do you think I wanted to take down those deer? Kageyama demanded. You think updates are weird and uncomfortable for you? I wanted to stretch my legs before I’m all cramped up for a thousand years.
I just thought you were a dumbass who got excited about stupid stuff, Hinata said stubbornly.
Kageyama flared with anger in the back of his head. YOU WERE JUST AS EXCITED, YOU STUPID—
Hinata started laughing, and Tanaka looked sideways at him, his expression a little odd. Hinata bumped him with a shoulder. “What’s up?”
Tanaka shrugged. “Nothin’,” he said. “It’s just, sometimes it gets kinda lonely out here.”
Hinata bit his lip. “Ah, I’m sorry—“
Tanaka hit him the shoulder with a gentle fist. “Don’t, don’t,” he said. “You’re better than Noya, anyway. The way that guy gets…” He shook his head, staring at his feet as he walked. “We’ll be like. Chilling, or working, even, making new nets for Takeda’s fishing or whatever, and he’ll just go all scary-silent and stare at nothing and he’ll stay like that for hours and like.” He twitched his mouth, a little bitter. “What are he and Asahi even talking about in there? There can’t be that many strategies or whatever to discuss.”
Hinata blinked at him. “They’re friends.”
Tanaka frowned. “Yeah, but,” he said. “So’re him and me, and I’m like, a person.”
He doesn’t mean that, Hinata said to Kageyama immediately. He’s just hurt.
Obviously, Kageyama shot back immediately, but there was something soft to it, almost grateful.
“Tanaka,” Hinata said slowly. “Why aren’t you a hunter?”
Tanaka looked at him, surprised. “What?”
“How come you never took the test, got the surgery?” Hinata asked.
Tanaka shrugged. “I don’t really like the idea of having somebody else rootin’ around in my head,” he said. “Plus, we need some people to stay behind and keep everything ship-shape around here, right? Besides.” He shuddered. “I’m really not a fan of needles.”
Hinata watched him for a minute, and then nodded.
“Why?” Tanaka asked. “You think I’m not a hunter, so I just don’t get it, huh?” His voice was mocking.
“No!” Hinata protested, and then felt bad, because it was a lie. “I mean, kind of. It’s just—it’s complicated, I don’t.” He sighed. “I’m sorry he’s been ignoring you and I know it must be hard when we clam up like that but Asahi’s—whatever he is to Noya, he’s not replacing you, okay? It’s different, it’s—“ He threw his hands up. “It’s just like, click! And then there it is.”
Tanaka stared at him for a long moment and then shifted the wood off his shoulders, setting it down to stack against the trees at the edge of the clearing. “Naaahh," he said, more just noise than negation. Go on." He flicked a thumb over his shoulder. “Eat.”
Hinata wanted to linger, not liking how unresolved things felt, but his stomach was so empty it was collapsing in on itself, and so he threw Tanaka a salute and a reassuring grin and trotted off to join the others.
Most people had already eaten and moved on, but Shimizu was sitting with Natsu on the edge of one of the firepits, watching her carefully as she wielded a tiny knife, sharpening a stick to a perfect roasting point.
Natsu looked up and grinned at him when she saw him. “Onii-chan!” she exclaimed, waving the knife and the sharp stick both.
He leapt theatrically back from her, widening his eyes. “Woah, woah!” he said, and leaned in to steal the knife out of her hand. “Careful, or you’ll make me prey like dinner was!”
Natsu giggled. “You’re not prey, you’re a lion,” she said.
Hinata puffed up his chest in pride. Kageyama, not to be left out, sent him three or four rapid-fire pictures of lions making stupid-looking faces.
Replying to Kageyama with his best wordless, unimpressed grunt, Hinata hooked his hands into claws and advanced on his little sister, growling, until she shrieked with laugher and tried to hide behind Shimizu’s knees. Hinata relented, running a hand through her hair and looking up at his friend.
Shimizu was looking elsewhere, her head turned to stare across the clearing, her long, black hair swept off her neck, and Hinata’s gaze caught on the AI-port tucked behind her ear, snapped closed but empty, a little hollow space inside her skull where someone else had lived, once.
She’d never told him who, and he’d never asked. It seemed rude, despite his terrible curiosity. He told himself—again—that it wasn’t his to know.
He followed her gaze; she was staring across the clearing at Yachi, who was helping Takeda-sensei break down the roasting frame. He took a breath; there was a weird sort of sorrow in her eyes, a dullness. “Shimuzi-san,” he asked, “are you okay?”
Shimizu blinked and looked at him, and then blushed, dropping her eyes. “Sorry,” she murmured. “I’m okay.” She hesitated, and then admitted, “autumn is hard.”
Before he could think better of it, Hinata asked, “Is that when you lost—“
He cut himself off at Kageyama’s warning Hinata, but it was kind of too late. Shimizu raised her eyes to his again, and for a moment she looked puzzled. “Lost—?” she asked, and then realization dawned, and she raised a hand to her ear, tucking her hair behind it and brushing her fingertips over the cap of her port in one habitual motion. “Oh,” she said. “I—something like that.” She smiled. “I’m surprised you haven’t eaten yet, Hinata-kun.”
Hinata shrugged, a little uncomfortable. He didn’t really want to admit that he hadn’t eaten because once he’d eaten dinner would be over, and after dinner he had to go see Sugawara-san and give up Kageyama for some indistinct amount of time that would definitely be too long.
He covered that thought up with a hasty breath of still-delicious-smelling air, turned his thoughts firmly to food, and hoped Kageyama hadn’t noticed.
Maybe he didn’t, because all he said was a relatively mild, Nosy, Hinata, and Hinata made a face to himself as he jogged over to get food.
I just wanna know, he complained. Maybe if I knew, I could help.
Couldn't, Kageyama said shortly.
How would you know? Hinata demanded, grabbing a plate and piling it high with deer meat and greens and little sour apples. You don’t know anything more than I do.
Kageyama hesitated a second too long, and Hinata paused, too, his mouth stuffed full. Do you??
No, said Kageyama.
Hinata’s mother had been especially good at embroidery, picking out beautiful floral patterns in the clothes she made for special days. Hinata used to sit in her lap and turn them over in his hands, amazed that something could be so neat and precise on the top and such a mess of colorful thread on the bottom.
That was exactly how it felt when Kageyama lied to him. His no was short and precise and brooked no argument, but it was sewn all under with guilt and frustration and a lot of other weird emotion that Hinata couldn’t untangle, and Hinata frowned, chewing slower. Stop not telling me stuff, he demanded.
No, said Kageyama, outright denial this time. Stop asking.
Hinata took his food and, balancing it on the fingers of one hand, used his other hand and his legs to scramble up into the low branches of one of the trees surrounding the clearing. “Kageyamaaaa,” he complained. “Tanaka-senpai said never part angry!”
I’m not angry, Kageyama said coolly. If you’re angry, it’s your own fault.
Hinata swung his legs in frustration. “Why are you so stubborn?”
Because you’re so annoying, Kageyama said testily. Leave me alone.
He slunk off into whatever inaccessible bit of Hinata’s brain he occupied when he was sulking, and Hinata ate his food in frustrated silence. When he’d finished he washed his dishes and placed them back in the carts to be taken back underground with the rest of the dinner stuff, and then he sighed and went to go find Sugawara.
He was already in the command center. It was a weird, dark room, totally at odds with the world that Hinata experienced on a daily basis. He came down here as little as possible, not least because he associated it so much with having Kageyama taken away, and with the whole. Surgery in the first place. He shivered, a little, in the cool air.
Sugawara looked up from his desk. Once, this place had been equipped for upwards of twenty people, meant to have visual and auditory contact with the hunters at all times and be able to perfectly guide them in their hunts. Now almost everything was rendered useless by the lack of power; there was one functional generator in all of Karasuno. Daichi and Sugawara—or maybe Ukai and Takeda, who from Hinata’s limited understanding had been doing their job before they were—had consolidated it all into one room and mostly two desks.
“Hinata,” Sugawara said, smiling his little dimpled smile. “Hey. You ready?”
Hinata swallowed. Kag—
I wish I could tell you but I can’t and I’m sorry, okay? Kageyama said, all in a rush.
Okay, said Hinata, startled.
So just stop asking, Kageyama said. Okay?
Hinata reached up to the port behind his ear. Okay, he said, and swallowed. See you soon, yeah?
Kageyama sent him—feeling, without words, a little flash of something relieved and thankful and worried. Yeah, he said at last, and Hinata flipped open the cap to his port and tugged out his plug.
It was a weird feeling, like popping a knuckle if popping a knuckle meant your finger went dead afterward: a little painful, a little jarring, a lot hollow. Hinata handed Kageyama to Sugawara, flipped his port closed, and cracked his neck. He watched Sugawara plug his AI into the ports on the computer in front of him, watched him type for a moment on the clattery keyboard, and then he made a decision.
“Sugawara-senpai,” he said. “Can I ask you like. A whole bunch of questions?”
Sugawara raised his eyebrows. “Yes?” he said uncertainly.
Hinata hopped up on a filing cabinet. “Okay,” he said, “so like—how come I can feel what Kageyama’s feeling? Not like what he knows, or what he’s saying, but like, emotions and stuff, and like—sometimes the feelings of those things the way, like, a body would feel them? Like he doesn’t have a body, how does his digital brain or whatever know how to do that? Did he learn the body-feelings from other hunters before me? How would that work? And, like.” He paused to breathe.
Sugawara was staring at him, caught halfway between laughter and worry. “Hinata—“
Hinata shook his head and kept going, because he had to get it out while he knew how to say it, at least kind of. “Sometimes there’s this thing that happens where he thinks about stuff that makes no sense, like it’s too much him to be his, like—one time he remembered what sunshine felt like only it wasn’t on someone else’s face because I know what him remembering that feels like, it was too, like, close, and—“
Sugawara held up a hand. “Hinata, I—“
“—and what happened to Shimizu’s AI because I know it’s not my business but Kageyama knows and he won’t tell me!” Hinata finished in an almost-shout.
Sugawara put a finger to his lips. “Shush, shush, okay? Calm down.” He frowned at his feet for a long time, and then, like Hinata, seemed to make a decision. He walked over to a panel in the wall and pressed a button. “Daichi, can you come in here a sec?”
There was a pause, and then a door at the back of the room opened. Daichi came through and closed it behind him, frowning. “What’s up, Suga?”
Suga made a stay-here kind of motion to Hinata and crossed the room to him, saying something in a voice too low for Hinata to hear. He reached for Kageyama to ask him to sharpen his hearing, and then remembered. Worrying his lips between his teeth he watched Daichi and Sugawara have some kind of heated, whispered fight, and then Daichi sighed and said, a little louder, “fine, but on your own head be it.”
Sugawara crossed his arms, the expression on his face one that Hinata had never seen on him before—resigned, a little bitter. “Isn’t it always?”
Daichi looked at Hinata. “Come on, then.”
Hinata jumped to his feet, his heart hammering in his chest, and skipped over to him. Daichi led him to the opposite end of the room. He walked over to one of the walls and did something with one of his hands.
With a click and a grinding sort of groan, the wall split in two, revealing a long, dark hallway. Hinata gaped, but Daichi didn’t give him time to really react, because he did something else by the wall and a light flickered on, and then he was continuing through the false wall and into the hall.
It was lined by tall, glass cylinders hooked into the floor and ceiling. Most of them were empty, hanging with wires that connected to nothing at all, but as they continued Hinata saw—figures, in a few of them, wanted to stop and stare but something kept him matching Daichi’s steps.
“Here,” Daichi said at last, stopping in front of one of the cylinders, and Hinata looked.
There was a boy in the cylinder, suspended in some kind of clear liquid. There were wires hooked into his shoulders, his wrists, his temples; tubes lead from his nose away into the ceiling. He was naked, his skin moon-pale, and his black hair lay in a jagged peak against his forehead, drifting slightly away from his skin.
The label on the cylinder said Subject 26: T., Kageyama.