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monday
“Shibayama! Do you have any hair gel?”
Yūki looks around the clubroom, then back at Lev. “Me? Inuoka probably does.”
“He says his hair’s just like that. Kenma laughed at me. Tora doesn’t have hair.”
“Tora uses wax,” Tora hollers from behind them.
Yūki decides to ignore him. “Why do you need gel, anyway?”
Lev beams. “I want to do a cosplay!”
“Okay,” Yūki says slowly. “But right now?”
“No, not right now! But I wanted to test it out. Here, look.” He brandishes his DS. Tinny music leaks from its tiny speakers. Yūki leans in. There’s a very fancy looking man in a suit on the screen. His bangs look like cat ears. His hair is a little darker than Lev’s. He looks infinitely more composed than Lev does, ever.
“I don’t think your hair is long enough for that. Who’s this?” He doesn’t really look like the kind of video game protagonist Kenma and Tora like, with the pointy armor made from giant monsters or whatever.
“That’s Mitsurugi Reiji! He’s a prosecutor! Isn’t he cool? He has the—” Lev wiggles his fingers under his chin. “I don’t know what that’s called, but it’s so fancy! Alisa said she could make me one if I wanted. So I’m going to cosplay him!”
Yūki stares. He takes a moment to get his thoughts in order. Kenma makes (terrifying) eye contact with him on the way out the door, and shakes his head slightly. Save yourself, he seems to say. But Yūki’s the kind of person who puts his hand up in class when he has questions, so he asks them.
“Why is there a prosecutor in a video game? What are you even going to cosplay him at? Why not just buy some hair gel on your way home?”
Lev wilts. It’s a bit tragic, watching him sag. It’s also unfair how tall he is even when he’s slouching as much as a boy his height can possibly slouch. “I don’t know. I just— wanted to try it, you know? Like, dressing up all fancy sounds cool, and my hair already matches, and haven’t you seen how cool the cosplay club seems? Like they’re all having fun.”
Most of the school wouldn’t think of the cosplay club as cool, probably. Lev has a point — they don’t seem to care, and they put everything into what they do. Yūki can respect that. Yūki can respect that Lev respects that, actually — he’s tall and green-eyed and half the girls only talk to Yūki so they can ask about him. He doesn’t need to care about the cosplay club, and Yūki didn’t think he noticed that sort of thing.
“They do seem to have fun,” he concedes. He eyes Mitsurugi on the screen warily. That hairstyle isn’t as complicated as the ones the cosplay club tends to do, but it’s still… difficult. “Do you even know how to get gel to do that?”
“Nope! But that’s why I asked you, Shibayama! You always seem to know things.”
“I’ve never used gel in my life.”
“You’ll work it out! I mean, we will, together. Like in that match last year, you know? We hadn’t played together properly before! In a real match! And we worked out how to work together, and it was awesome, and Yaku-san wasn’t even a little bit mad at me for messing up, and now we’ve played lots together and we’re even better.” He stops for breath. “I just think that if we teamed up we could do anything.”
“Even put gel in your hair,” Yūki says, dryly. His voice is flat, but really, he’s a bit charmed. Lev has that effect on people. Maybe especially on him.
“Yep!”
“Okay,” Yūki says. “Let me see what I can find.”
tuesday
Lev texts like he talks, which is to say that Yūki gets in trouble for his phone going off twelve times in a row at the dinner table. He feels that little curl of delight, though, even when his mother frowns at him, and wonders loudly if he’s suddenly got a girlfriend. He doesn’t usually get this much attention.
Over the course of the evening, he learns what game Mitsurugi’s from (Gyakuten Saiban, apparently), what the neck-hand-wiggle thing is called (”Alisa says it’s a jabot even though lots of people call it a cravat!”), and a lot about the game (”It’s not just one! There’s four and a spinoff and a crossover and another one coming out soon, but it’s for the 3DS, and I don’t have one of those…”). It’s a little overwhelming, but the novelty of learning that Lev of all people is currently fixated on a game about lawyers hasn’t worn off yet.
It turns out that Yūki’s little brother has hair gel he doesn't want. It’s marked with Xtra Xtra Strong Hold, so it seems promising. “It didn’t work for me,” Kaito says. He narrows his eyes. “So it probably won’t work for you either. We have the same hair. It looks fine to me. Since when did you need gel?”
“It’s not for me,” Yūki says.
“It better not be. If you come home and half your hair is stuck together Okaasan’s gonna kill you.”
wednesday
“Tell me about Mitsurugi,” Yūki says, when they’re packing down after practice.
Lev immediately drops his side of the net. “He’s really cool! He has a kinda sad backstory, actually.”
“Really? Aren’t you still playing the first game?”
“Yeah. I just finished the fourth case last night, though, and that’s the original final case. He’s accused of murder.”
“What,” Yūki says.
It all comes out after that, in fits and bursts, Lev’s storytelling crossing over itself every time he remembers a new detail and backtracks to fit it in. Yūki thinks he keeps up with it — it’s certainly tragic, and it’s the most animated he’s ever seen Lev. The most emotional, too: “Naruhodō saves him in the end,” Lev says, misting up. “He believed in him. He always believed in him. He even went into law because of him, you know? And in the last two cases I got to see how cool they were in court together, and then it turns out that they were childhood friends before everything happened, and—”
He cuts himself off there, blinking furiously. Yūki steps closer. “Lev?”
“I just think it’s cool,” Lev says. It’s quieter than he usually is. “I know, it’s a game about law, and law’s boring, and Mitsurugi wears a suit, and he’s not a cool fighter. But things get so intense, even though they’re just normal people like us. And they trust each other. I wish someone trusted me like that.”
“I trust you,” Yūki says. He fumbles for the right words. Damn Kuroo for graduating and not being around to help with this kind of thing. He admires his remaining senpai, but no offense, Kenma and Fukunaga and Taketora aren't as good at Lev Advice. “Maybe not with, uh, adoptive father murder trial things. But volleyball’s about trust, right? You trust me to be there. I trust you to open up the way.”
It’s that easy, apparently. Lev swings around, eyes still wet, and beams at him. Really beams, the force of it scrunching up his face. It’s a little terrifying but mostly it’s sweet, actually, that what Yūki thinks matters so much to him. “Really?”
“Of course,” Yūki says, just to watch that smile grow even more.
thursday
“I think I might be Naruhodō, actually,” Lev says, stepping out of morning practice. “You’re the one who’s all put together and efficient and stuff. You’re not, like, tragic-fancy like Mitsurugi is. But you’re smart and calm and Naruhodō’s also smart but he’s kind of silly? And he’s clumsy and he’s still working things out. It’s why it’s cool that Mitsurugi trusts him.”
He nods firmly, then heads off for class. Yūki stares after him.
Fukunaga comes up beside him, after a few minutes. “Fun is what you make of it,” he says, patting Yūki on the back, then he’s also gone.
friday
“I changed my mind,” Lev says. Yūki freezes with his handful of gel. “No, keep going! We waited all week to try this out, I told you I was sure! I mean maybe you’re Naruhodō after all.”
So it’s this again. “Why?”
“Cause he’s the Turnabout Terror. When everyone’s given up, he’s there to save the day. Isn’t that kind of what a libero does?”
“I guess,” Yūki says. He smooths the gel carefully into Lev’s hair, parting it with a Hello Kitty comb Lev had presented to him that morning. He’s looked at enough of Mitsurugi’s sprites to know how this should go: back of the head smoothed back, first, then the bangs last. He’s got each section flat, but he’s not sure how he’s meant to make the dramatic swoop. Lev’s hair really is just a little too short.
“Actually. You’ve got the same hair color as him.” Lev bolts upright, jolting out of Yūki’s reach. “Shibayama! Let me do his spikes on you. I bet I could make it work.”
No. No no no no. Never mind that everyone has the same hair color as the spiky lawyer, Yūki’s a good libero because he has good instincts, and they say he has to run.
Yūki dodges, but Lev’s gotten better at footwork lately, and he’s blocking the clubroom door. They circle each other cautiously. Eventually Lev’s stupid long arms get him, and before long he’s got a whole fistful of gel in his hair. It feels gross. But Lev’s also so, so close, smoothing out the cold clumps with a look of such eerie focus that Yūki can’t help but hold still and watch him work.
“There,” Lev says. He steps back, but his hand lingers, cleaning an errant smear off Yūki’s cheek.
Yūki looks at him. Lev’s bangs have gotten a little messy from the chase, flopping over the sides of his face in ragged, heavy sheets. His uniform shirt is translucent at the shoulders with excess product. It’s… actually closer to Mitsurugi’s hairstyle now than it was before. “You look like him,” Yūki says.
“You too. We don’t have any proper costumes, or anything, but—” Lev rummages through his things, dropping his navy uniform blazer on Yūki’s shoulders. He slips his own red tracksuit jacket on, then herds Yūki toward the mirror on the back of the door. “Look! It’s us.”
It is them. They hardly fit in frame together — Lev has to bob down a little so all of his head is in view, and Yūki’s pressed to him side by side. Still, though. Lev blinks at them both in the mirror, serious and pleased. Like this, he looks even more catlike than usual. Smug, perhaps, in the way Mitsurugi is.
Yūki tries to bite back his grin and fails miserably. He looks ridiculous, hair in messy, tragic clumps on the sides of his head. Lev’s blazer hangs off him. Through the blur of his laughter, they do look right: red and blue, silver and black.
“It’s us,” he agrees. “It really is.”