Chapter Text
If Tsukishima Kei had a dollar for every time his life felt like a stupid, cheesy action movie, he’d be filthy rich by now.
He shivered, stuffing his hands into the pockets of his hoodie as he walked through the crowded street. It hadn’t been that crowded before; he assumed that more people had shown up just because he did. And not just people, either. There were cameras everywhere. He’d never been camera-shy, he just couldn’t care less. If there was a camera on him, he wouldn’t act any different than if there wasn’t. It could be referred to as confidence, but he personally preferred the term “nonchalance”.
When you thought of typical superhero outfits, you probably thought of brightly colored spandex bodysuits with some sort of weird symbol on the front, not a black hoodie and sweatpants with a simple red party-supply-store mask, but that was what he had decided to wear. It wasn’t much, but it was comfortable and it didn’t look stupid, which were pretty much all the things he cared about in an outfit.
As fate would have it, the night before the first real day of summer vacation wasn't spent playing Super Smash Brothers until midnight, like last summer, or driving for half an hour to the next town over just for ridiculously good ice cream, like the summer before that. Rather, it was spent on the job, colloquially known as the "part-time job from hell". Missions like this didn't come up often, but when they did, they were the most physically taxing thing that Tsukishima could spend his time doing. He constantly had to remind himself to be thankful that one, missions almost always happened when there wasn't school the next day, and two, he didn't have to do this alone.
Next to him, Yamaguchi sucked in a breath, staring straight ahead at whatever monster-of-the-week the two of them were going up against this time around. Well, it wasn’t a monster of the week, per se. It was a monster of the every other week, literally speaking.
The person standing down the street from them was a woman, who didn’t look older than twenty-five. Thankfully, she was the person here with the stupid outfit, which looked to be just a cowgirl costume, nothing more, like something out of a dumb kids’ cartoon. There was a white cowboy hat on her head, brown cowboy boots on her feet, and she was wearing her hair in two braids. Her skirt twirled as she turned around to face them.
“Well, well, well!” She put her hands on her hips and grinned. “Look who showed up to this hoedown!”
“If you think that we’re the type to go along with your stupid Wild West motifs, you’re just plain wrong,” Tsukishima grumbled to himself.
Yamaguchi laughed. “Come on, Tsukki, just go with it!”
“You can do that.” Tsukishima rolled his eyes. “Just don’t bring me into it.”
They stopped the momentary conversation when the cowgirl pulled a unfittingly modern-looking ray gun out of each holster situated on her hips, pointing the pair of guns at them. They were both jet black, with hot pink streaks running down the sides. She narrowed her eyes and pointed the barrels right at their eyes.
“These babies run on energy.” She stretched out the last syllable of “energy” to a particularly annoying length. “Energy in...” She put her fingers on the triggers. “Energy out.”
Tsukishima stood there for a second, frozen as he tried to think of what exactly she was talking about, before he was shoved to the ground just as two rays of hot pink light shot out past him. When he looked up again, he was on his stomach, directly across the street from Yamaguchi, whose eyes were wide as he looked down at the streaks of light that were disintegrating behind him.
“What the hell are those things?” Tsukishima hissed.
“I don’t know!” Yamaguchi whispered back.
Tsukishima narrowed his eyes as the cowgirl laughed from in front of him, trying to get something out of the weird ray guns that she was still holding up. “And what does she mean by energy?”
“I’m not sure,” Yamaguchi said, “And there isn’t really a good way to find out.”
Tsukishima nodded slowly, looking around at all the people who were standing at the scene. There were probably at least a thousand more watching this on TV. “I have an idea. It’s not necessarily a good one, but it’s something.”
“Okay.”
“I act as a distraction and try to see what those gun things are while you go around from behind and try to find some way to stop this,” Tsukishima said.
“All right.” Yamaguchi nodded.
After that, the two of them split up, with Yamaguchi leaving the fight itself and taking a detour back behind the crowd while Tsukishima stood up and made his way to the middle of the street, putting his hands back in his pockets. For the middle of July, the evenings were surprisingly cold, and taking advantage of the hoodie was mostly practicality.
“Oh?” The cowgirl looked up from her pair of guns. “Where’s your partner?”
“Nowhere you need to concern yourself with.” Tsukishima smirked.
“Well, then I guess it’s just you and me, buckaroo.” The cowgirl grinned, eagerly shooting the guns again right in Tsukishima’s direction. With barely a moment to spare, he hit the ground, ducking only a hair under the two rays of light that shot through the air.
Did ray guns have an equivalent to running out of bullets?
“Well, you’re a feisty one, eh?” The cowgirl cocked one of the guns again with a scowl. “I can’t seem to flippin’ hit you!”
She shot the gun, and Tsukishima saw the ray coming, easily turning around to avoid it as it brushed past his ear. He could practically feel the heat emanating from it, and while it was a close one, he didn’t get hit.
He only realized his error when he was already facing away from her. For these few seconds, he was vulnerable, but she had already fired a shot, so it probably wouldn’t happen.
And that was when he remembered that she had another gun.
In the span of maybe three seconds, he heard her cock the second gun, and the sound of the ray of light shooting out from it when she pulled the trigger happened right as he turned around. The ray came faster than he anticipated and he was hit right in the middle of his chest.
He felt like he’d been stabbed. Not like he knew what being stabbed felt like, since that stood as one of the only things that hadn’t happened to him at this point in his life, but if he did, he figured it would feel pretty much exactly like this.
Thankfully, he hadn’t actually been stabbed. He’d just been hit in the chest with a ray of energy or something that had completely knocked the wind out of him. His shoulders slumped forward as he fell to his knees, the feeling eerily similar to when he’d temporarily lost his powers last month. This kind of thing happened a lot: he’d forget a small but crucial detail, only for it to bite him right in the ass a short time later.
Such was the life of a teenage superhero, he supposed.
There was a cackle behind him that belonged to the cowgirl villain, who stuffed her ray gun into the holster on her hip with a dramatic spin. The bell-shaped earrings dangling from her ears jingled as she laughed and the corners of her mouth upturned into a sinister grin.
“Aw, would you look at that?” She frowned, even though by the narrowing of her eyes, it was obvious it was fake. “Looks like all that energy’s been zapped away!”
So that was what she meant by “energy”.
Despite being down on his knees and trying as hard as he could not to pass out, Tsukishima still found the strength somewhere inside himself to scowl. That wasn’t even how energy worked. He hadn’t spent an hour in science class last week almost falling asleep at his teacher’s lecture that energy couldn’t be created or destroyed just for someone to get it wrong now. It was stupid. And annoying.
Just as he was about to lay back and let his eyes close, he felt himself being lifted up the ground and being practically shot through the air, momentarily shocked at the lack of solid ground beneath his feet. After he had been floating for a few seconds, he dropped abruptly on the other side of the street where the fight was taking place, landing in a tangle of limbs that he thought was the opposite of typical for him. After the impact, he possibly felt even more shitty than he did before, and he wanted nothing more than to sleep for at least two days.
“Hey, Tsukki, are you okay?” Barely a second went by before Yamaguchi’s wide eyes filled almost the entirety of Tsukishima’s field of vision. “I didn’t mean to drop you, I just needed to get you out of there and I wasn’t paying attention to anything really and I’m really sorry and -”
“It’s fine,” Tsukishima said, laying out on his back like he wanted to melt into the ground, which, for all intents and purposes, he probably did. “Stop talking so fast, it’s giving me a headache.”
“Sorry, Tsukki!” Yamaguchi laughed to himself before he turned around for a quick second and his voice got infinitely quieter. “I don’t know what to do.”
“What do you mean, you don’t know what to do?” Tsukishima asked, “We’ve been doing this for four months now, you definitely know what to do.”
“That’s not what I meant!” Yamaguchi sighed. “I don’t know how I’m going to end this.”
“It’s not that hard,” Tsukishima said, “By now, you know her trump card, and there’s not that much left to do.” He smirked. “Besides, it's not like you have much of a choice."
Yamaguchi sucked in a breath. "Okay, fine. I'll try."
There was a thump, presumably from Yamaguchi hopping back up to his feet, before he started running back into the fight itself.
A few moments later, amid the sounds of yelling, laughing, gunshots, and the anxious buzz of conversation from bystanders on the scene, Tsukishima closed his eyes, letting the exhaustion take him over.
The next morning - or maybe afternoon, you couldn't really tell in the summer - Tsukishima woke up to the sound of typing and muffled classical music probably playing from a radio somewhere. But when he opened his eyes, he didn't quite know where he was for the first few seconds. He was lying on what felt like the floor, although it was covered in an off-white carpet, and he was under a thin, dark blue blanket with his head resting on a white pillow.
He felt much better now than he did last night, but he still felt horrible. His entire body was sore, and he felt particularly lightheaded. He guessed that those were just the side effects of being shot, which was essentially what happened, even though it wasn't a real gun with actual bullets that he'd been shot with. Even though the whole energy concept from last night made no logical sense, it still packed quite a punch.
Something about all of this felt off, even though it shouldn't have. It was a Monday morning, sure, but as of now, it was also summer vacation. As far as he was concerned, he didn't have any obligations other than sleeping all of this off. But he felt like he should have been doing something right now that he clearly wasn't.
As he slowly sat up, he found that the typing sound was coming from Yamaguchi, who was typing on a laptop across the room, which probably meant that he was somewhere on the floor of Yamaguchi's bedroom. He was staring at the screen, with his eyes slightly narrowed and a tiny smile on his face. When he lifted his eyes from the screen, he jumped once he saw that Tsukishima was looking at him, before he started laughing.
"Oh, you're up!" Yamaguchi looked back down at the screen and frowned. " "Are you okay? That was really freaky last night."
"I'm fine," Tsukishima said, "I still feel like crap, but I'm fine."
"That's good."
Tsukishima stretched his arms up above his head, before he realized what exactly felt so wrong about this. "Wait, shouldn't we be at practice right now?"
"Daichi-san texted me last night and he said we didn't have to go today if we didn't want to."
"It doesn't seem like him to let us off the hook the day before training camp."
"He said he saw everything from last night on TV, and it was Suga-san who was really freaking out." Yamaguchi chuckled. "It seems like everyone was worried about what happened to you except you, Tsukki!"
"Oh." Tsukishima frowned, looking out the window at the light blue, cloudless sky. "What time is it?"
"It's about 12:30," Yamaguchi said.
"Okay," Tsukishima said, "What happened last night anyway? I assume you finished everything."
"Yeah." Yamaguchi gave a sheepish grin as he scratched the back of his head. "I think it went pretty well. You were right, there wasn't a lot left to do." He laughed. "The hardest part was probably carrying you home after that! You're really heavy when you're unconscious!”
“Well, I didn't feel a thing, so you did fine.”
“Oh, good.” Yamaguchi looked back down at the screen of the laptop. “Okay, I have to show you this.”
“Show me what?” Tsukishima asked, leaning over so he could see behind the laptop. The screen was opened to a web page, focusing on some news article. He sighed when he realized exactly what it was. “Yamaguchi, why do you keep reading these? You never get anything good out of them. It’s probably just the same as always, just a lack of information and unreasonably high levels of criticism.”
“Okay, I know you hate reviews with a passion, but this one’s different.” Yamaguchi smiled. “It’s really good.”
“Define ‘good’.”
Yamaguchi paused for a second before he started reading the article. "'Until last night, the people of Miyagi Prefecture knew Midori not as the color green, but as one of the members of the prefecture's local superhero team, and, unfortunately, the rather underwhelming one.'"
"I don't know, this seems pretty same-y to me." It was a few seconds before Tsukishima realized what exactly the point was that Yamaguchi was trying to make, at which he looked up at him with wide eyes. "What do they mean, 'until last night'?"
Yamaguchi only grinned before he started reading again. "'After four months of almost-there's and not-really-there-at-all's, the Miyagi Duo's Midori seems to have finally hit his stride with an incredible performance last night, completely outshining that of his more traditionally noticeable teammate, Aka. After a particularly hard-hitting villain of some sort that rendered Aka unable to fight, Midori stepped in without hesitation and expertly finished the job himself, while simultaneously showing that his potential is nothing to scoff at. This is especially impactful considering the numerous articles published after each of the Duo's missions that usually happen every two weeks, most of them harshly criticizing Midori's relative lack of firepower and exposure, and last night proved that he is definitely more than meets the eye.'"
Once he finished reading, Yamaguchi leaned back onto the floor and sighed. "I wasn't expecting this to happen."
Tsukishima smirked. "I was."
Yamaguchi giggled. "Of course you were!"
They both fell silent for a few seconds after that, as Yamaguchi read the article to himself again, mouthing the words as he read them. The smile on his face only grew wider, until it started to fade as he closed his eyes, taking a deep breath. When he breathed out, there was a solitary tear running down his cheek as he started to smile again.
"Hey, are you -?" Tsukishima was interrupted when Yamaguchi leaned over and hugged him tightly. It was initially suffocating, but after a few seconds, Tsukishima didn't really mind all that much. "Are you okay?"
"Yeah, I'm okay." Yamaguchi laughed. "I'm better than okay, I can't believe this is happening! I've only wanted this to happen since we started all this, and I thought it would take years before reviews were even mediocre, but -"
"I know," Tsukishima said, "Congratulations."
"Thanks." Yamaguchi beamed. "Didn't you say at some point that you knew reviews would get better?"
"...Yeah." That had been back in June, up on that hotel rooftop after that press conference when everything seemed to be going wrong. It had been sappy and way too sudden, sure, but considering that within three minutes they were making out while simultaneously hovering in the air just above the rooftop, it wasn't even close to the mushiest thing that had happened that night.
Just remembering anything about that night made Tsukishima blush uncontrollably.
"Well, you called it!" Yamaguchi smiled again. "How did you know?"
"I'm not sure." Tsukishima shrugged. "I just did."
"Oh." Yamaguchi took a breath before he started again. "Do you think this should have happened? Like, reviews are never this good, maybe it was just a fluke."
"What?" Tsukishima's eyes widened. "Of course it should have happened."
The only response that Yamaguchi gave was hugging him even tighter, resting his head on Tsukishima's shoulder. It was impossible to tell if the tears currently falling onto it were from happiness, sadness, or something else entirely, but either way, it was a complete waterworks at this point.
And for a minute or so, neither of them said a word, or even really moved at all. They didn't need to. It was like they had developed some weird kind of telepathic communication and they didn't need words to say what they were thinking, even though that wasn't really the case.
All in all, it felt pretty nice.
The next morning, after a day of rest and not much else, Tsukishima and Yamaguchi rejoined the rest of the Karasuno volleyball team as they got on the bus to the Tokyo training camp.
Needless to say, the two of them got quite a bit of attention on the way.
“Yamaguchi-kun!”
Yachi could barely hold onto all of her bags as she raced down the street, catching the two of them just before they got on the bus. Once she was standing in front of them, she stopped for a second and grinned before she dropped her bags and hugged Yamaguchi's stomach, since she was too short to reach much higher.
"That was really cool Sunday night." She smiled up at him. "I saw it on TV! You're really good at this."
"Oh!" Yamaguchi chuckled nervously. "Thanks, Yachi-san!"
"You're welcome!" Yachi let go and leaned down to pick up her bags again, eyes widening as they landed on Tsukishima. "I'm not saying you weren't cool, too, I just -"
"I didn't exactly do much." Tsukishima shrugged. "I made a stupid decision early on."
Yachi frowned before she hugged him as well, presumably as tight as she was hugging Yamaguchi earlier. "You have to be more careful! I was really worried about you, you know!"
"Well, I'm fine now. There's nothing to worry about."
"Yes, there is!" Yachi pouted as she got onto the bus, taking a seat in the front row. "You could have died!" She sighed, taking her phone out of her pocket. "You two! Always throwing caution to the wind like that!"
"S-sorry, Yachi-san!" Yamaguchi gave a sheepish grin.
Yachi's phone played a quiet ding, at the same time her eyes lit up. "Oh, I got an email!" She tapped the screen a few times. "I'll forward this to you, I think you guys are going to like it!"
Since Yachi had joined the team after that whole fiasco in June, she’d found out her teammates’ secret identities in a slightly different way from everyone else. around the beginning of July, some monster was attacking a train station where she happened to be at the time, and she'd been the damsel in distress, as it were. When Yamaguchi had swooped in and gotten her out, she’d easily recognized him under the mask, screamed so suddenly that Yamaguchi had almost dropped her, and had probably been internally screaming ever since. She, like practically every other teenage girl in the prefecture, was a huge fan, and she was absolutely ecstatic when she found out that the two people that she looked up to the most at the moment were in a class directly next door to hers at school.
Since then, she’d volunteered to help the two of them out in any way that she could, something that they were both immensely grateful for. While the job was interesting and even fun at times, it was incredibly stressful for the two of them to manage on their own. And so, at this point, she’d taken over as their agent-slash-manager, answering emails, taking phone calls, scheduling interviews, and being the person to brief them on jobs whenever they came up, eventually replacing the person who did it before. For some reason, even though she was always freaking out whenever she called them, she somehow made everything less stressful.
“Thanks, Yachi-san!” Yamaguchi grinned before he took a seat in the fourth row, taking out his phone as soon as he sat down. A familiar ding came from the phone's speaker just as his eyes widened.
"What is it?" Tsukishima asked, sitting down in the seat next to him.
"It's just the schedule for the week." Yamaguchi scrolled through the email. "It looks pretty fun."
While they were in Tokyo, they were scheduled to have a check-in at the headquarters of this whole superhero program thing. It didn't seem like much, but within the check-in was a tech upgrade, a possible uniform change, and the meeting itself, among other things. Not to mention various publicity stunts, like magazine photoshoots and morning talk show appearances, and, if they were lucky, getting to meet Team Tokyo themselves.
While they were definitely busy over the course of the week, it came with one particularly nice benefit: an actual break. Somehow, they'd negotiated with another duo from somewhere nearby to take over for this week, which probably wasn't hard, considering that not a lot was expected to happen. But that was probably the best thing about this trip: a week when there weren't any jobs to worry about, and when they could finally relax for once.
"Hey, Yamaguchi!"
Tsukishima was slightly startled as a balled-up fist reached across his field of vision, barely an inch or two in front of his face, and fist-bumped Yamaguchi in the seat next to him.
"Congrats!" Noya gave a thumbs-up with his other hand and grinned. Of course it had to be him.
"Oh!" Yamaguchi laughed. "Thanks!"
"No problem!" Noya chuckled. "That should have happened a long time ago, if you ask me."
He waved, walking to the back row to sit down next to Tanaka.
"Hey, guys!" Suga was next to get on, taking a seat next to Daichi in the row in front of Tsukishima and Yamaguchi. "I saw what happened Sunday night on TV. That was really cool."
"Thanks, Suga-san!" Yamaguchi smiled.
"You're welcome!" He smiled back before he looked at Tsukishima and frowned. "But you really have to be careful! I was really worried when you got hit. I thought it was going to be last month all over again."
Back last month, when the whole de-powering incident took place, Suga was the first to find out about it, as well as the first to find out about their secret identities in the first place, and he'd come at just the right time to see Tsukishima out cold on the ground. Needless to say, he'd freaked out then, and he had clearly freaked out on Sunday, too.
"Sorry, Suga-san." Yamaguchi chuckled nervously.
"It's okay, just -" Suga sighed. "Try not to scare everyone next time, okay?"
Both Tsukishima and Yamaguchi nodded as Suga turned around to face the front before he whipped his head around again. "Oh! One more thing!"
He stopped for a second before he looked at Yamaguchi and grinned. "I saw the reviews yesterday, too. They were better than I've ever seen them. Congratulations!"
"Thanks!" Yamaguchi was smiling again.
Suga gave a quick thumbs-up before he turned around again and started talking to Daichi about something.
As the next few minutes, everyone else who got on congratulated Yamaguchi in some way. There were a lot of high fives, a few fist bumps, and everyone was in a particularly good mood.
Tsukishima didn't think he'd seen Yamaguchi this happy after reviews came out in the entire time they'd been doing this.
"Hey, Tsukki?" Yamaguchi asked.
"Yeah?"
"I never really got to say it yesterday, so…" Yamaguchi smiled. "Thanks."
"For what?" Tsukishima's eyes narrowed.
"You've just always been there, I guess." Yamaguchi shrugged with a giggle. "This is going to sound really cheesy, but you probably started believing in me before I did."
"Oh." There was probably a slightly-more-than-light dusting of red on Tsukishima's cheeks at the moment. "No problem." He paused for a second before he smirked. "And yes, that was really cheesy."
If it wasn't obvious before, over the past month or so, practically everything had gotten easier. Not only had the job process become more routine, it had even become a bit more fun. Not to mention that over the past four months, the two of them had gotten to know each other better than they already had over the past four years or so.
Neither of them were complaining.
"So apparently, everything starts tomorrow and goes off and on until the day before we leave." Yamaguchi started looking through the email again. "It doesn't look like much more than an hour or two every day, so we can spend most of the time practicing with everyone else."
"What's happening tomorrow?" Tsukishima asked.
"Nothing too big." A smile started to appear on Yamaguchi's face. "Just getting new uniforms and..." He paused, eyes wide. "Ooh, we're meeting Team Tokyo's agents tomorrow, too! They're the people doing the check-in."
"Agents?" Tsukishima asked as he took out his phone. "As in plural?"
"Yeah," Yamaguchi said, "According to the email, they have two. Although it says here that one of them is mostly just there for moral support and doesn't really do much."
"Who says that in an email?"
"This guy, apparently. Yachi-san's talked to him a few times, she said he's pretty cool." Yamaguchi shrugged, looking back down at the screen. "The day after tomorrow is technology upgrades and if it works out, breakfast with Team Tokyo!"
"They'll probably be on a job or something," Tsukishima said, "I've heard they're always busy."
"Yeah, but maybe not," Yamaguchi said, "Who knows, they might be really nice people."
"So what's the rest of the week going to be like?"
"All the talk show appearances and helping Team Tokyo with jobs and stuff if our schedules line up." Yamaguchi turned off the phone and put it down on his lap. "I don't know, I think I'm going to like this."
"Yeah, maybe." Tsukishima took his headphones out of his bag and plugged them into his phone as the bus pulled out.
In hindsight, they both would have been saved a lot of surprise later if they'd just skimmed it slightly slower and took a second to look at the name at the bottom of the email.