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“Promise me you'll always remember: You're braver than you believe, and stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think.” – A. A. Milne
Shoyou has always been short.
It’s not that he hates his height, exactly – although he wonders, sometimes, what his life might be like if he was twenty centimeters taller -- more that he hates everything that comes with it. He hates being seen as a dwarf, some character in an old folk story who hides beneath bridges and steals from humans. He hates that pants are always too long and shelves too high. He hates it.
When he was five years old, people mistook him for two. When he was ten, they mistook him for five. And now that he’s thirteen, they think he’s still in elementary school. He’s always been talked down to instead of talked at. Adults speak with slow voices and hide behind false smiles, as though the number of centimeters next to his name on doctors’ charts makes him less of a person.
Shoyou has always felt kind-of powerless. No, not kind-of – he’s felt as though the world doesn’t expect him to have any power. It expects him to be cute and small. To ask for other people to get him things off high shelves and to always look up instead of looking ahead.
When he was eight years old, Shoyou lost track of his sister – two years old and barely toddling – during a street festival. He ran around, frantically searching for her, and found himself surrounded by questions of, “Hey, kid, are you lost?” “Are you looking for your parents?” “Do you need someone to hold your hand?” And he tried to explain that, no, his sister was the one lost, he was the brave big brother looking for her – and they laughed, and asked him to tell them more about Natsu, as though she was some kind of imaginary friend. He hated all of them, inexplicably angry at people he’d never met.
And Shoyou hated that nobody thought he was capable of anything worth doing. He couldn’t run or climb with his short limbs. He couldn’t talk to girls if he had to tilt his head up in order to meet their gazes. He couldn’t help his mom fix the garage roof, or score a winning point in the school sports games, or look after Natsu by himself. He couldn’t do anything, not because of any weaknesses in his mind or heart, but simply because he stood below other boys his age. All he wanted was to be taken seriously, but taking him seriously was the last thing anyone would do, and he hated it.
He hated it, and yet he started to believe it himself. Started to think that he was destined for some kind of office job, destined for asking his coworkers to reach the pencils on the top shelves and help him reach the copier because he doesn’t have enough strength to bang it into submission himself.
He’s almost convinced when he sees the volleyball game. There’s some kid – some high school kid who looks like he’s maybe fifteen – leaping. Not just jumping, but leaping above the volleyball net, spiking as though it was the easiest thing in the world. He isn’t looking up, or even looking ahead – he’s looking down at his opponents. And at the end of the match, when the kid’s teammates pick him up and carry him on their shoulders, cheering his name, Shoyou feels something take flight in his chest. Something warm and bubbling, like the taste of soda or maybe champagne. His heart seems to accelerate of its own accord, thumping in a rhythm that could only mean, I want that, I want that, I want that.
That night, for the first time, Shoyou dreams of flying.
Shoyou doesn’t have a team, but he practices like he’s on the best team in the precinct.
He rides his bike over the mountain and back, legs aching as he pedals as fast as he can. He runs through sunshine and rain and snow, feet slipping on the grass in the fields near his house. He buys three volleyballs takes at least one of them wherever he goes and spiking it at anything hard enough to take the hit. Shoyou’s palms are constantly red, skin blistered halfway to cracking, and his voice aches from shouting to anyone who will listen: Toss to me!
He goes to class and almost falls asleep on his desk, too exhausted from his training regimen the previous day. When the teacher shouts him awake, demanding to know what the hell he thinks he’s doing, he mumbles something about volleyball. The class laughs at him, but Shoyou grins and lets them. He’s going to become the number one spiker in Japan. He’s going to do it. And they won’t be laughing then.
His parents don’t get it. His teachers don’t get it. His friends don’t get it. But that’s okay. Because Shoyou gets it, and someday, hopefully not too long from now, he’s going to find a team who gets it.
Shoyou’s third year of middle school, he finally gets a team together, but it’s less a team and more a sympathy party – two tired basketball players and three first-years with nothing better to do. Still, they have enough people to enter in the championship. Enough for Shoyou to jump above a real net in a real game, show people what he can do.
And then, some asshole from another school ruins all that.
In all of Shoyou’s fantasies – his dreams of flying above the net and spiking balls so fast they made dents in the gym floor and teammates lifting him into the air after a winning point – he always forgot that there would be another team working just as hard as he was to block him, send him unhittable balls. He forgot that there would be some asshole twenty centimeters taller than Shoyou was, smirking as though he owned the court.
He hears the guy’s teammates call him King, and Shoyou feels his blood boil in his veins. How can one kid be King of volleyball? Shouldn’t volleyball belong to everyone? And the guy doesn’t even see Shoyou as a threat, just as some kind of jumping maniac, some kind of side show. He looks at Shoyou as though he’s a bunny rabbit bouncing up and down behind the net, amusing and weird and entirely inconsequential. Maybe if Shoyou had a better team or more experience – anything besides strong legs and quick reflexes – he’d have a chance of beating this guy, but right now, all he can do is promise himself that this won’t happen again.
He won’t lose again.
Do you hear that, King of the Court? I’m going to get stronger. I’m going to knock you off your pedestal. I’m going to spike your smug face into the dirt.
Everything changes once Shoyou gets to Karasuno.
He gets on a team. He has a captain, and senpais, and teammates willing to help him learn to be the best spiker that he can be. He wants to help his team win matches, fight enemies, take on the world.
This is what he hoped for desperately, those three years practicing alone in middle school – but he never quite bargained for how hard it would be. For how his arms would drag like lead after each practice and his head would hurt from Coach Ukai’s shout and his heart would ache for every point he could have won if he had just jumped a little bit higher, spiked a little bit faster, been a little bit better. He never bargained for all this responsibility that he feels, even though he’s only a first year. He never bargained for how his stomach would feel before every match, no matter how many they play. And, most of all, he never bargained for Kageyama Tobio.
Kageyama is like a puzzle, Shoyou thinks. And sometimes, he believes he’s got the puzzle almost put together – like he did when he first saw Kageyama on that court in junior high – but then, just when he’s about to fit in the last piece, it will all fall apart and he’ll realize that the edges were jagged and unmatched the whole time.
Kageyama thinks that he rules the court, but he doesn’t want to be a dictator. Kageyama wants to be in charge, but he doesn’t want to be a captain. Kageyama wants to be the best setter in the world, but he forgets that, for that to happen, his teammates have to be the best spikers in the world. Kageyama is harsh and abrasive, sometimes downright cruel, but he cares about his team.
Kageyama yells at Shoyou, and pushes him down on the head, and makes the scariest faces that Shoyou has ever seen in his life. But he sends Shoyou the best tosses he could ever wish for.
And sometime during that first summer, between the doors slamming shut on them at their first practice and the ball slamming down to score Aoba Johsai’s winning point, something starts to shift. Something that makes the puzzle Shoyou’s putting together in his mind harder than ever. It breaks each of the pieces he already has into a hundred new ones and paints them all black.
Kageyama stops tossing only for himself. He starts tossing for his team. More than anyone else – he starts tossing for Shoyou.
As long as I’m here, you’re invincible, Kageyama says.
He says it in their first month of practice, when they’ve barely had any matches – this guy who was supposed to be Shoyou’s sworn opponent, throwing the word invincible around like an old volleyball. Invincible is a word for storybooks, for swords built from starlight and potions that awaken the dead. Invincible is a word for manga heroes and deities of old, for people larger than life.
Invincible. Can Shoyou be invincible? Can he be larger than life, after spending fifteen years smaller than life? He leaps at Kageyama’s tosses, and thinks – maybe.
As long as I’m here, you’re invincible.
Those words stay with Shoyou, always at the back of his mind. He hears them during practice, whispers them to himself at night, writes them in the margins of his notebooks during class like a girl doodling hearts with the initials of the person she likes.
As long as I’m here, you’re invincible.
It’s a ridiculous statement. Broad and sweeping and romantic as any of those weird American movies Shoyou’s mother loves. It’s a promise that Kageyama can’t hope to keep – how can he guarantee that he’ll always be there, sending the perfect tosses at the perfect times? But the longer they practice, the longer they work as a team and as a partnership – Kageyama and Shoyou, setter and spiker – the more true it becomes.
(Shoyou takes the word Kageyama and holds it up in his head next to the word teammate, and the edges are jagged – the pieces will never fit. Until suddenly he adds the word invincible, and a picture begins to form.)
Kageyama sends tosses. Shoyou leaps up into the air to meet them. He stops, centimeters below the net, and wings grow from his back, lifting him that last distance and holding him there, perfectly still. The ball comes, and Shoyou jumps after it, and he’s not jumping any more – he’s flying.
He’s like that boy in the Greek myth they read in his literature class in eighth grade, the one who was given wings by his father and used them to reach up and touch the sun. The sun melted that boy’s wings and sent him spiraling down, down, down to the ocean far below, but Shoyou is not going to be burned. He’s going to grab that sun and hold it as tightly as he can.
Shoyou dreams of flying. He has since he first decided to play volleyball. He reaches up and grabs the sun – and sometimes the sun and the volleyball are the same, and sometimes the sun and victory for his team are the same, and sometimes the sun and Kageyama are the same.
Shoyou doesn’t know how to deal with this – this electricity that runs through him when he hits one of Kageyama’s tosses, this feeling of easy familiarity he gets when he and Kageyama walk home from school together, this certainty that he and Kageyama have a connection buried deep in their very souls. Sometimes, Shoyou thinks that he and Hinata are like two gears clicking together, a machine that runs more smoothly every time they interact. Sometimes, Kageyama looks at Shoyou and all thoughts flee his mind. He knows, in the back of his mind, that what he feels is a new emotion -- an emotion that Shoyou’s almost terrified to name, terrified as he’s never been of anything.
Kageyama never leaves Shoyou, even though they see each other only for a couple hours at practice each day – his face, his voice, his hands haunt Shoyou like some kind of ghost. Well, a ghost that makes Shoyou’s heart race, makes him feel a thousand times more alive, makes him want.
Shoyou wants. He wants to look and wants to touch, wants a hundred things he doesn’t have words for, wants and wants and – his biggest goal outside of practice becomes not getting good grades on exams or getting popular in his class but getting Kageyama to laugh.
(Shoyou thinks Kageyama looks at him and sees – not a short boy jumping to make himself taller, but a boy determined to play volleyball as well as he can, a boy who makes a formidable opponent, a boy who demands to be taken seriously. Or, well, he doesn’t think. He hopes.)
(As long as I’m here, you’re invincible.)
The volleyball hits the gym floor barely a centimeter from Nichinoya’s fingers. The entire team lets out a joint curse. The whistle blows –
Second set – 25 – 22 – Aoba Johsai.
The first set had gone so well. All of their new tactics had worked out, and they won before Aoba Johsai could even get to twenty points. But in the second set, the other team seemed to pinpoint their weaknesses, almost figuring out how they would attack before they knew it themselves. Oikawa in the summer had been intimidating; Oikawa in the spring is terrifying. He smiles and he waves, and he beats them into the ground.
They have ten minutes in between sets. Shoyou follows his team to the volleyballs, his aching limbs dragging him down like sacks of flour. Sugawara hurries over from the sidelines, Shimizu following not far behind, and the two of them talk with Daichi in quiet, anxious tones. There’s this air of nervousness they just can’t shake – they came so close the last time, so determined to beat this team, but they don’t know if they can push forward far enough to do it now.
Shoyou seeks out Kageyama, almost without thinking about it. The setter is sitting by himself on one end of a bench, his head bent over his knees. When he sits up, his face is the color of week-old cheese. He stands shakily, mutters something about going to be bathroom, and practically sprints out of the gym.
Shoyou stares at him for a moment, considers his options, and then nods to himself.
“I’ve gotta go, too!” he hollers to anyone listening.
“Hurry back,” Sugawara tells him. “We’re meeting in five minutes.”
Shoyou nods, and runs towards the bathrooms – the exhaustion in his limbs fading more with every step.
When they first got here, they’d all been so excited about the gym. There’s clearly been some remodeling between their last tournament and now, and the floors are cleaner, the lights brighter, and the bathrooms nicer. Shoyou, along with Nichonoya, Tanaka, and even Asahi had spent quite a few minutes earlier in the day admiring the new, fancy technology, but now Shoyou’s eyes are drawn not to the shiny sinks or the cool European hand dryers or even the wood stall doors, but to the figure slumped in a corner next to the urinals.
Shoyou walks slowly over to his teammate.
Kageyama looks up – and Shoyou can see, as he hadn’t been able to from farther away, that the guy is shaking. His hands clench his arms as though they’re all that’s holding him to the ground. He’s falling apart, like a building in an earthquake – very foundation unraveling by the suddenly unsteady earth. He’s falling apart, and yet the puzzle in Shoyou’s mind is more solid than ever.
Shoyou jabs him in the shoulder – hard and unsympathetic, like hitting a punching bag.
“Hey,” he says.
Kageyama’s expression is one that, a few months ago, Shoyou would have found terrifying – but now, all that crosses his mind is worry for his friend.
“What are you doing here?” Kageyama asks.
“Um, I – I needed to pee,” Shoyou replies, looking at the floor. It’s a nice floor, he supposes. Shiny. Much cleaner than the floor of their locker room at Karasuno.
“Then why are you talking to me?” Kageyama demands.
Shoyou sighs. “Alright, fine. I went in here to talk to you.”
Kageyama glares at him – but the glare holds no real threat. (Kageyama has many levels of glares; if Shoyou couldn’t tell them apart by now, he’d be a poor rival.)
“You’re worried,” Shoyou says. “You’re nervous.”
“Yeah? And so what if I am?” Kageyama makes the question a challenge, like bet you can’t hit that serve or bet you can’t beat me to practice.
“So, you shouldn’t be,” Shoyou answers simply – taking the challenge and turning it on its head.
“How can you say that?” Kageyama tries to sound angry, but his voice is shaking too much. Shoyou isn’t fooled.
“Because. Because I know we can beat them. Between your setting and my spiking, and Asahi’s spiking, and Nichinoya’s defense, and Daichi’s captaining, and Tsukki’s anger, and everyone’s everything, there’s no way we couldn’t beat them. We’ll be like gwah and pow and we’ll take them down!” Shoyou waves his arms about in the air, imitating the passage of a volleyball across the court.
“They beat us last time.” Kageyama hides his face in his arms, muffling his voice. “Oikawa saw right through me. He’s a better player than I am – he’s a good captain, and a good setter, and a good spiker, and a good strategist. He’s everything.”
“So what?” Shoyou retorts.
Kageyama struggles for words, then finally lets out, “So how can I beat him?”
“Okay, first of all,” Shoyou says, his loud voice echoing in the empty bathroom, “you don’t have to beat him. We all have to beat him. I thought you learned this?”
Kageyama sighs. “Yeah, I – I don’t know. I’m just ... worried.”
“Well, don’t worry. It’s like Sawamura-san told us – if we believe we can beat them, we can beat them! Everyone’s believing in you, Tobio.” Shoyou doesn’t mean to use Kageyama’s first name, it’s just that – Oikawa always uses it against him, calls him “Tobio-chan” like Kageyama is a little kid trying to walk around in shoes too big for him – and Shoyou knows that Kageyama is taller than he realizes, stronger than he believes. And the name slips out, almost of its own accord.
“Everyone’s believing in you, Tobio,” Shoyou repeats, more loudly. “All of your teammates are. They’re believing in you, and they’re believing in each other – that’s why we have to win. Okay?”
Kageyama looks at Shoyou for a long moment, searching his face or his eyes or his heart – and nods.
Shoyou holds out his hand. Kageyama takes it. He stands – and Shoyou has always been so intimidated by Kageyama’s height, but now, he barely notices the difference between them. Shoyou isn’t looking up at his teammate – he’s looking ahead.
Kageyama turns to go, but before he can take a step, Shoyou tugs on their joint hands. Both of them stay, frozen in place as cleanly as if their bodies had turned to ice.
“Tobio,” Shoyou says again. (He wonders at this new feeling carved into his chest – helpless and powerful at the same time.) “As long as I’m here, you’re invincible.”
And he leans up – Tobio’s shirt is slick with sweat – he pulls – Tobio folds into him, easily as a piece of paper into a crane – he breathes – Tobio doesn’t fight, doesn’t pull away, only holds steady steady steady –
The kiss is over in an instant. The time it takes for a perfectly spiked ball to hit the floor.
Shoyou takes a shaky breath, turns, and sprints out of the bathroom, his face bright red. He knows he’s made a huge mistake – should’ve done that after the match, now he’s going to be distracted for the whole third set – should’ve done that back in their locker room, or on the road between their houses, or somewhere nobody else could see – should’ve done that not at all.
Still, he can’t help smiling at the memory of Kageyama so close, so close and not fighting.
“Is he okay in there?” Suga asks, coming up to Shoyou’s side and handing him a water bottle.
“Um – I – I think –” Shoyou stammers.
Luckily, before he has to finish his sentence, he’s interrupted by someone running up to join them.
“Let’s win this,” Kageyama says. And he’s not angry or confused – he’s only determined. Invincible.
Shoyou grins, his fears forgotten. “Win this!” he shouts.
The rest of the team echoes their cry, and soon Nichinoya is jumping up and down and Tanaka is chanting and Suga is giving everyone high fives and – there’s no way they can’t win. They have to win. They have to fly.
(The third set goes to Karasuno. Of course.)
Shoyou can’t sleep.
Today was – it was incredible. There aren’t enough words in any poems or novels or songs to describe how it felt to beat Aoba Johsai. (And even if there were, Shoyou would probably still resort to using sweeping gestures and loud “gwaaah”s.) His hand hurts from hitting so many balls, and face hurts from grinning.
But the fight isn’t over yet. Aoba Johsai was only the semifinals. Tomorrow, Karasuno goes up against Shiratorizawa, and if they can’t win that match, everything they’ve done up until then will have been for nothing. Shoyou tries to sleep, knowing that he needs rest to play well the next day, but his mind is too full of worries about the next day – what if he fumbles? What if he misses? What if he looks at Kageyama and forgets the play he was supposed to make? What if he lets his team down? What if he does his best and his team still loses? The questions circle round and round his head like vultures, cawing and beating their wings and scaring away any chance of relaxing he might have.
Eventually, Shoyou gives up tossing and turning on his mat. He stands up and heads for the door, careful to tiptoe around his sleeping teammates. The room Takeda booked for them is on the third floor of the building, and there’s a balcony at the end of the hallway – Shoyou remembers it from when he came in.
The night sky is dark above him, dark as the uniform Shoyou will wear tomorrow – but the city lights are bright below. He can’t make out individual buildings, just a complicated pattern of yellows and oranges, blues and purples, all neon and larger than life. Most of those lights are advertisements, manufactured to grab attention and deliver profits, but some of them aren’t. Some of them are windows in office buildings, lit by people working late, or streetlights standing guard over the sidewalks, or lamps illuminating balconies just like the one Shoyou’s standing on.
Shoyou wonders if anyone else is leaning against the rail of a balcony right now, looking out at the city. He wonders if anyone else is thinking about volleyball.
“Why are you still awake, dumbass?”
Shoyou turns around, and is somehow not particularly surprised to see Kageyama padding towards him, running a hand through his hair.
Shoyou shrugs. “Couldn’t sleep.”
“Me neither,” Kageyama says. He takes a few steps forward until he’s standing shoulder to shoulder with Shoyou, staring out at the same lights. A minute passes, neither of them speaking. Shoyou feels as though both of them are waiting
And then, Kageyama asks, “Hey, what did that mean, earlier?”
“What?”
“You know, when you – what you –”
“What I said?” Shoyou interrupts. Kageyama nods, so he goes on, “I just repeated what you said to me, back at the beginning of the season.”
“No, I mean – what you did.”
Oh. Shoyou knows what he did. He’s spent many minutes since wishing this confrontation would never happen – but now that it is, he’s oddly relieved. As though he’s been pedaling uphill on his bike for miles and finally reached the top.
Shoyou gathers all his courage, closes his eyes – like spiking one of Kageyama’s tosses – and says, “I thought I made it pretty obvious, what that meant.”
He opens one eye to peek at Kageyama’s expression. Kageyama isn’t angry, isn’t scared – more surprised than anything. And it’s hard to tell in the dim light, but Shoyou is pretty sure that’s a faint blush coloring Kageyama’s cheeks.
“Oh,” Kageyama says.
And then he’s turning, and grabbing Shoyou’s arm – and turning Shoyou towards him, and pulling him in – and it’s clumsy, this mess of lips and teeth, mouths opening hot and wet and tongues sliding from one place to another, unsure of where exactly they fit. It’s clumsy, but it still sends sparks racing down Shoyou’s spine, it still fills a pool of warmth somewhere beneath his stomach. And besides, they’ll get the hang of it soon enough – just like they did with their quick, and their challenges, and their tentative friendship.
“We really should go back to bed,” Shoyou says, minutes (or possibly hours) later. His voice comes out breathless and insincere.
Kageyama bends, pushes his face into Shoyou’s shoulder, and makes a sound that – if Shoyou didn’t know any better, he’d call it a whine.
“I know.” Shoyou – feeling unbelievably brave – presses a kiss to the top of Kageyama’s head. “I know.”
Kageyama stays there for a moment, his hair tickling the base of Shoyou’s neck. The two of them breathe together, a slow in out, in out that feels comforting, familiar, like home. And then one of them moves – or both of them do – and they’re kissing again, still clumsy but they’re practicing, they’re practicing. (Practicing is something they’re good at.)
They do go back to bed eventually, holding hands as they try to step over their teammates. Shoyou nearly trips over Daichi at one point, and giggles loudly enough that Kageyama has to put a hand over his mouth to quiet him. When they lie down, Shoyou is shaking -- with laughter, or relief, or just happiness. He stretches out his arms and legs as far as they’ll go, taking up the whole mat. And his mind eventually quiets, but the feeling -- the happiness -- remains.
As Shoyou’s eyes finally drift closed, he hears Kageyama whisper, so quiet it’s barely audible:
“Together, we’re invincible.”
Shoyou grins, and echoes Kageyama’s words.
“We’re invincible.”
(He isn’t scared of the match tomorrow. Or the match after that. Or any match at all.)