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The first time Hinata cries in front of Kageyama, they are fourteen and both reeling with loss.
This makes no sense to Kageyama, because he won by a landslide, in fact, they had no chance—there was never a chance of them winning, and Kageyama’s team beat them like expected. (So then why does he feel like he lost something to the boy? Why does he feel just as bitter as if they’d walked away with two matches under their belt than one? Why is he so mad, then, if he was so confident that someone like Hinata could never best him?)
Hinata is upset. Hinata is angry. Hinata is crying, and none of these things make much sense to Kageyama either, because it’s ridiculous that he actually thought they had a chance, it’s ridiculous for him, so inexperienced, so far behind the others, to think his makeshift team could honest to God win.
“If you’re the King of the Court…”
Kageyama isn’t sure just how much of his time this kid is worth, but he fixes him with a glare all the same, hands stuffed in his pockets, his teammates staying behind to watch the redhead drip tears down the front of his shirt, no doubt heavy with the weight of grief, grief for his first and last junior high match.
“…I’ll have to defeat you, and I’ll be the last one standing!”
--
The second time Hinata cries in front of Kageyama, it’s an accident.
Kageyama isn’t supposed to be there, he’s supposed to be at home, but Hinata is small, so small, hunched in on himself with big, crocodile tears like a little kid, running down his chin onto his shirt, and they won’t stop coming, like his body is so full of whatever this is—anger, maybe; sadness, probably; Kageyama doesn’t know, because Hinata seems the type to cry at everything—whatever emotion this is, that the only way to make it go away is the flush it out, drip drip drip down his face, pathetic sniffling to accompany his crocodile tears. They look like something animated, something exaggerated that he would scoff at the unrealistic-ness of had he seen it in a movie, but they are real, and Hinata is small.
He reminds Kageyama of when a little kid scraps their knee and isn’t used to the sharp pain or the sight of blood and won’t stop crying until they get Neosporin and a Band-Aid, but Kageyama doesn’t think those things help much in this case.
Hinata takes a while to notice that the other is even there at all, either because Kageyama is unintentionally too quiet or because he’s too caught up in himself. Once he does, he jumps, surprised, and hastily wipes at his cheeks and rubs his eyes, like he’s plugging up a sink to stop the flow of water. His voice isn’t as normal as he probably wants it to be when he says, “What’re you doing here?”
Uncomfortably, Kageyama shifts where he stands, because he doesn’t know what he’s supposed to do in this situation. “I left my shoes in my locker,” he gives as explanation, but doesn’t move to go to his locker until Hinata prompts him to. He feels stupid and guilty as he looks for what he’d forgotten and hurriedly shoves it into his gym bag, knowing that Hinata is avoiding eye contact and almost wishing he wouldn’t.
Isn’t he supposed to comfort him? Shouldn’t he say something, at least ask why he’s sitting alone in the gym’s locker room, wailing like a baby? Shouldn’t that at least warrant a question?
But then again, he thinks, they aren’t really friends. Just because they can sort of, sometimes stand each other now doesn’t mean they have to know things like this about each other—personal things, things Kageyama doesn’t think he would be okay with sharing even on the off chance that Hinata was okay with it—and Hinata has his own friends he can talk to about stuff like this.
Kageyama is really bad with people. Hinata doesn’t say anything as he walks out, and the sound of the locker room door closing behind him echoes in his head all the way home.
--
The third time Hinata cries in front of Kageyama, they are friends now (sort of, maybe, he thinks they are, but he doesn’t really know what permits friends, not really), and they are at Hinata’s house. His dad isn’t home, just his mom and the two, while his little sister is at her friend’s house for the day. They’re outside, practicing volleyball as is normal for them whenever they hang out, when his mother calls him inside to speak with him for a moment.
She gives Kageyama a gentle smile as she slides the screen door shut, leaving him out in the backyard. He’s glad she likes him, but he always feels just a little bit uncomfortable around her, because he’s not sure what to do when it comes to other people’s mothers, especially not mothers as casual as she.
Hinata returns some fifteen minutes later, staring at his feet. Kageyama stops where he’s been tossing the ball in the air and catching it again, looking up and opening his mouth to ask what that had been about, what took you so long, when Hinata’s eyes meet his and his mouth goes dry.
This is different than the first or second, because the first, they didn’t know each other, they were rivals, he didn’t even really know Hinata’s name; and the second, that hadn’t been for his eyes. Hinata hadn’t consented to him seeing that. It was not meant for him.
But this—this is Hinata, explicitly giving consent to Kageyama seeing him like this, because he doesn’t look away, and his bottom lip trembles where he’s biting it, and Kageyama doesn’t see the first tear fall but he knows when it does anyway. Hinata’s shoulders shake. He’s looking at the ground, hair covering his eyes, but his shoulders shake, and before long he’s hiccupping, gasping for breath between stifled sobs, biting his knuckle, and Kageyama stands there dumbly, still clutching the volleyball, unsure of what to do.
He doesn’t have younger siblings, and he’s never really had friends, not friends that were willing to show him this at least, and his nails dig into the skin of the ball because he doesn’t know what to do.
“W-what…” He starts to say, but his mouth is dry, so he licks his lips and tries again, “what happened? With your mom?”
Hinata doesn’t answer. He sits down on the patio swing and brings his knees up to his chest, wrapping his arms around them and buries his head there. His shoulders shake, shake, shake as he curls into himself. Kageyama finds himself sitting down next to him.
There’s a good five or ten minutes of silence, where he just lets him cry, neither saying anything and neither moving, until Kageyama sets a hand on his shoulder, a little awkward and a little stiff, but that’s what he’s seen people do before and that’s the best he can come up with. Hinata lifts his head from his knees at the contact, sees the hand on his shoulder, and laughs, a little dry and a little humorless but a laugh nonetheless.
“You really suck at this, Kageyama,” he says, and he’s still laughing a little, rubbing his eyes of the tears, and Kageyama feels himself heat up in embarrassment.
“I’m trying,” he mumbles, and Hinata must hear it, because he nods.
“Yeah, I know.” He sighs and leans his head back on the swing, closing his eyes, but looking just a little more peaceful than earlier. He isn’t crying anymore. “…Doesn’t mean you don’t suck though.”
“Hey!”
Hinata snickers and sticks his tongue out, and that’s the end of it.
--
The fourth time Hinata cries in front of Kageyama, they’re in the school’s bathrooms, yelling at each other through the wood of a locked stall.
“Hinata, what the fuck?” he demands, because it isn’t normal for the decoy to just run out of practice like that, for him to get so pissed off so easily. He’s been acting weird a lot lately. Kageyama isn’t having it anymore; before, he could sort of deal with it, but now it’s messing with their playing, and that’s where he draws a line.
“Go away.”
“Like hell I am!” He glares at the door separating them. “Hinata,” he says, in what he hopes is a good impression of Daichi’s no-nonsense voice, “open the door.”
“No!”
He has to take a deep breath at that to calm himself down. “You’re—you’re so—“ he struggles for the right word, gripping the ends of his hair in frustration. “Infuriating.”
“I haven’t done anything!” Hinata snaps.
“I’ll believe that when you open the damn door!”
“Go away. I’m fine, so stop bothering me! You don’t have to come babysit me just because Suga-san told you to!”
“Suga-san—?” He shakes his head, even though the other can’t see it. “What the hell does Suga-san have to do with anything?”
“You’re only here ‘cause him and Daichi told you to go check on me.”
Kageyama glares at the door. “Are you really this stupid?”
“Hey! I’m not the stupid one, stupid!”
“Neither of them told me to go check on you, dumbass, I just did. Now come out.”
There’s a pause from the other side of the door, and for a moment, he thinks that Hinata has finally given up and will relent. “…They didn’t?”
“Of course not. Why would you think they had?”
Another pause, and his voice is quiet this time, like suddenly he’s unsure. “I…don’t know…”
“Great, now hurry up and come back to practice. You’re holding every body up.”
Kageyama thinks that that’s the end of that, that Hinata has finally relented, so he turns to walk out of the bathroom and back to where everyone is no doubt waiting for this whole ordeal to be over. This isn’t the first time Hinata’s done weird stuff in the middle of practice, but this is the first time it’s affected practice.
But when there comes no following footsteps like he thought there would be, he stops.
“Hinata, what are you doing? Come on, dumbass, we have to go—“
“Kageyama…”
It’s probably the sound of the other’s voice that makes him pause what he’s saying, hand hovering over the bathroom doorknob where he was going to exit. He doesn’t say anything, waiting for Hinata to make the next move.
“Kageyama…can you just…” There’s the sound of hiccups from the still-closed stall, and his eyes widen when he recognizes the sound. “Can you just let me be alone for a while? T-tell them…I’m not feeling well…let me be alone…”
There is no first instinct at this situation, because half of him wants to say sure, fine and flee from the tiled room as quickly as possible, while the other half wants to say hell no I’m not leaving you in here alone, before asking what’s wrong and why he’s so upset nowadays. In the end, he does neither, and instead stands still at the door, neither exiting nor staying.
Hinata catches on to his lack of answer. “Kageyama—“
“Tell me what’s wrong.”
He hadn’t meant to say that, but the words slipped out, and he figures now he can’t take it back anyway. It makes Hinata pause.
“Tell you…”
“Tell me what’s wrong,” he repeats. “You’ve been acting pissed off all week, and your receives are worse than usual, so—so just…” He’s glad Hinata can’t see him right now. His face feels warm. “So just tell me what’s wrong, so we can get over it and go back to you being annoying and hitting my tosses again.”
“I…” Hinata hesitates, his voice just a little bit shaky like the prospect of talking about it is worse than sitting in there and crying, but Kageyama can’t say he blames him. He doesn’t know why he’s asking this of the other boy when he knows he could never answer that in return.
At the reluctance, he tries to coax out an answer, caught between genuinely worrying about the other and wanting to get back to before. “Is it…does it have to do with you…you know…?”
He can hear the frown in Hinata’s voice when he asks, “What?”
“You know…” He shifts where he stands, pressing palms into his athletic shorts, although wiping sweaty hands on sweaty fabric doesn’t do much of anything. “You being…”
“What?” Hinata thinks about it. “Oh.” He thinks about it some more. “OH. Oh. Yeah. Um. Sort of. Yeah.”
He nods and realizes that it’s lost when neither can see the other’s face. “It’s got to do with that?”
“Yeah, it’s just…” Kageyama can imagine the way he probably bites his lip at this, thinking about how to word it, chewing on the already chapped skin until it bleeds like he does sometimes in class. “…’s just something someone said today.”
He frowns. “Well, what’d they say?”
“It—it’s not that big of a deal, it just…”
“Hinata.” He really doesn’t know if his Daichi impression works at all.
“Just—some comment about me, you know, saying that I was—a girl, dressing up so I could—“ He cuts himself off abruptly. Kageyama hears the way he tears up at that, in the thickness in the air, and there’s an unprecedented anger that boils up under his skin.
“Who was it?”
“I don’t know,” Hinata says, but he still sounds choked up. “He’s in my class. It’s not a big deal.”
“Hinata—“ People can’t just say stuff like that to you, he thinks, pissed off inexplicably, people can’t just say stuff like that to you, mess you up during volleyball, and then not have to deal with the consequences.
The creak of the stall door being unlocked and opened stops him in the middle of what he was saying, and Hinata’s eyes are still a little puffy, but he puts his hands on his hips and smiles, saying, “Okay, that’s over, so make sure to send me lots of tosses!”
Kageyama is not convinced with this, because the request feels just a little bit hollow, but he scoffs (insincere, more for show) and swings the door open. “You better hit all of them then.”
--
The fifth time Hinata cries in front of Kageyama, they are on Kageyama’s floor, Hinata still waking up from an impromptu nap, blinking sleepily before he realizes that his face is wet.
Kageyama doesn’t say anything, just shifts so that he’s sitting cross-legged instead, and watches as Hinata pulls his hand back from his cheek and stares at the water left over, like he’s never seen tears before.
“Why am I…?” he asks, and Kageyama gives him a look, like, how am I supposed to know?
“You were asleep,” he says, as if Hinata didn’t already know that.
“Was I…?” He frowns, eyebrows furrowing in confusion. “Was I crying in my sleep? That whole time?”
“Not the whole time.” He hasn’t finished his History project yet. It sits on the floor in front of him, textbook open with the pages sprawled out in a vain attempt at an illusion of productivity.
“But I was crying while I was asleep.”
“That’s what I just said, yeah.”
“And you didn’t wake me up?!”
Kageyama huffs. “You’re not supposed to wake someone up when they’re having a bad dream, dumbass.”
“That’s only for, like—night terrors and stuff, Bakageyama, not just normal dreams.”
He hates that nickname, but says nothing of it, and instead glares, huffing, and looks away embarrassedly. “Sorry, I was trying not to make things worse…”
Hinata blinks at him, before he starts laughing, and, after the other demands to know what is so damn funny, he shakes his head and says, “You’re so bad at this stuff, Kageyama, even when you try to be, like, considerate and whatever.”
And that—even if meant jokingly and without malice—sort of hurts his feelings, not that he’ll ever admit it. He bristles immediately. His social skills are still a sore subject. “Excuse me for trying to be nice. I guess I’ll just stop then.”
“Aww, no, c’mon,” Hinata whines, his tears gone. “Don’t be so pouty, I was only messing with you.”
Kageyama pretends to ignore him in favor of reading a passage from the textbook that was assigned for the night. He sees the redhead pouting out of the corner of his eye.
“Kageyammaaaaaaa.” He pulls himself over so that he’s in the other’s space. “C’mooooon, I was just teasing.”
(He’s not even upset about it anymore, but at this point it’s about getting back at him.) “Whatever.”
The pouting doesn’t end. “C’mon, I didn’t mean it.”
Silence in answer.
“You’re just gonna ignore me then?”
“…”
He groans and flops back down on the floor. “You’re the woooorst.”
“…”
“Kageyama.”
“…”
Frowning. “Okay, okay. I give in. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it.”
“…”
“Kageyama!”
Said boy doesn’t even look up from what he’s reading, eyes skimming the page without registering its meaning at all. He hears the other sit up and shift closer to him, until he’s got a hand on his jaw coaxing his face up to look at the other, still pouting and still frowning.
“C’mon, I said I was sorry!”
(It would be easier to stop “ignoring” him if they weren’t so damn close, if he couldn’t feel Hinata’s breath on his cheeks and the soft hand still on his jaw—)
Hinata blinks, notices the position they’re in, and turns twelve shades of red before backing up to his original spot. He mumbles an apology, this time the one to not look up.
Twenty minutes of finishing homework in awkward silence before Kageyama remembers to say, “I forgive you.”
(To which Hinata glares, because, took you long enough, jerk.)
--
The first time Kageyama cries in front of Hinata, they’re tired and delirious, the only kind of delirious that you get from staying up until four A.M. on the phone when you’re supposed to be sleeping because you have a test in math the next thing in the morning.
He’s not sure what they’re talking about, but they’re talking, and they’ve been like this for a while now—that is to say, they’ve been friends for a while now, Kageyama staying up just to hear the other’s voice or watch the flurry of emojis Hinata is so fond of sending in texts, Hinata staying up to talk his ear off and send him the millionth link to the millionth stupid video that night.
They don’t usually talk about serious, personal topics when they’re half asleep, because they both seem well aware of the dangerous of doing such things, but somehow the conversation had steered into Hinata ranting which had steered into Hinata venting which had steered into Personal Story Time with Hinata and Kageyama.
Kageyama feels just a little bit obligated to say something about himself, because Hinata has shared so much about himself, because he’s been so open and trusting with the other, even though Kageyama knows he probably isn’t anyone’s first choice to go to for emotional support. And that’s what friends do, right? They share things with each other, don’t hide stuff or keep things bottled up, right? Isn’t this what he is suppose to do—talk about himself?
So Hinata asks, just a question, hesitant and small because he knows that the other doesn’t really like talking about things like emotions and stuff if they are involved with himself, so there is no doubt in his mind that it surprises the other boy when he actually starts talking, just whatever comes to mind.
(Kageyama had not realized how lonely he was until he had a friend; had not realized just how isolating and horrible it was when he was King, separating him from other people and keeping him stunted in his social growth; he was thirteen, he was a kid, he hadn’t realized what he did would bother people so much—)
And Hinata starts talking in response too, once he realizes that Kageyama can’t quite get anymore words out of his throat, and it wells up something that he hasn’t realized was there, until he’s overflowing like Hinata does when he cries, and it feels weird with wet cheeks (he doesn’t cry often, he doesn’t always remember what it feels like).
Hinata must hear him over the phone, must hear the attempt to stifle inhales so they aren’t too deep, must hear the uneven breathing and the shaking words. He must hear them, Kageyama knows; Kageyama knows that Hinata knows that he is crying.
But Hinata doesn’t say anything about it. Instead, he keeps talking, voice soft and comforting, until Kageyama falls asleep feeling exhausted.
(And at school the next day, neither mentions it outside of a quick, “Thank you,” that Kageyama offers on the way back from practice.
Hinata smiles, bright, blinding, and says, “What’re friends for?”)