Work Text:
When Yuuta Okkotsu is nine years old, Rika Orimoto changes his life.
They’re both sick when they meet, but that doesn’t stop Rika’s face from lighting up with a smile the entire time they talk. Yuuta is enamored by that smile from the beginning. It’s what holds him in place the entire time she introduces herself and starts rambling about her interests. In fact, Yuuta doesn’t even get to properly introduce himself for ten minutes. But it’s during those ten minutes that Yuuta learns two very important facts about Rika. The first? He wants to see that smile every day. The second? Rika loves volleyball. Yuuta doesn’t really know anything about it, and he doesn’t really care for it. But as the sun pours in from the window and frames Rika in an almost ethereal light, she almost looks like she’s actually glowing as she tells him all about it, and he decides that he’d listen to her talk about it for forever, if he could.
Having conversations about volleyball swiftly turns into watching her play it. She likes to play alone, which is odd for a team sport, but Yuuta never comments on it. He’s content to just sit on the sidelines and watch as she tosses the ball into the air, only to smack it down onto an empty court.
“It’s called a spike, Yuuta!” She admonishes with a laugh.
“Ehh?” Yuuta tilts his head to the side. “That doesn’t make sense. Why isn’t it just called a smack or a slam or something?”
Rika sighs and tosses the ball high into the air. “You just don’t get it, Yuuta.” The ball comes down, and Rika spikes it into the ground hard enough to make it ricochet several feet away, and Yuuta is on his feet to chase after it in a second.
She’s right. He doesn’t get it. Volleyball is fine, but it’s kind of boring. Rika is the only thing that makes it interesting, and Yuuta can’t help but think it would be better if she actually played it the proper way, with a team and everything. But he doesn’t know how to even find her a team, so he never says anything. He resigns himself to watching her spike to no one for the rest of his life. In the end, it doesn’t matter if Rika is playing it the right way. All that matters is that she keeps smiling at him like that.
When Yuuta Okkotsu is eleven years old, Rika Orimoto changes his life again.
This time, she does so in the exact opposite way; instead of entering it, she leaves it.
Yuuta doesn’t know how he got home that night. He remembers playing at the park, he remembers the sound of screeching tires, he remembers the blood— so much blood— but he doesn’t remember being pulled into the cop car. He doesn’t remember sitting in the waiting room of the hospital. He doesn’t remember Rika’s grandmother and his parents arriving at the hospital together, crowding around him and crying. He doesn’t remember going home, he doesn’t remember the funeral, he doesn’t remember the next few weeks in general. He stays inside his bedroom, only coming out when prompted. Even then, when he’s forced to return to school, he takes a much longer route to avoid the street where it happened. He doesn’t talk to any of his classmates. He doesn’t have anything to say, and even if he did, they all stare at him with worried looks now, like they’re expecting him to start crying at any second. Sometimes, he thinks he just might. He’s always been pretty emotional, but it feels worse now, like Rika was the one who was holding him together, and without her, he’s falling apart.
When Yuuta Okkotsu is eleven, he moves to a new town.
It’s not surprising. He could hear his parents whispering about him, late at night when he was meant to be sleeping. They worry about him. The way he avoids an entire section of the town, the way he won’t talk to anyone at school. They keep saying that it’ll be good for him, that it’ll help, but he can’t tell if they believe it or if they’re trying to convince themselves.
What is surprising is the volleyball that comes flying out of nowhere. It nearly slams into the side of Yuuta’s head, missing him by just a few inches. He stares at it with his mouth wide open for a few seconds before looking up at the sky, as if it could somehow have been sent by Rika. When he doesn’t see anything there, he looks across the street.
A boy with white hair and a face mask is staring at him expectantly.
Yuuta jolts, suddenly hyper aware of how badly he’s fumbling this social interaction. Almost mechanically, he grabs the ball and walks until he’s standing on the side of the street. The boy keeps staring at him. It suddenly hits Yuuta that he hasn’t touched a volleyball since before Rika died. Even then, he only ever grabbed it and tossed it back to her. He’s never actually played.
He doesn’t know what comes over him.
He tosses the ball into the air, leaps, and smacks it down.
It sails across the street. Yuuta thinks it’s going to land on the boy’s driveway, but the boy is in motion before it has a chance to meet its mark. He slides on his knees, his arm stretched out, and the ball bounces off of his forearm and lands softly in the grass.
“Wow,” Yuuta whispers.
Then the boy stands.
“Wow,” Yuuta winces. Blood is streaming down both of the boy’s legs, but he doesn’t seem to care. He looks up at Yuuta and something about the way his eyes crinkle makes Yuuta think that he’s smiling.
The boy’s front door opens.
“Toge, it’s time for dinner!” Calls a woman with long, white hair tied into a bun. When Toge turns around, her face falls into a flat, unimpressed expression. “I thought we talked about practicing on the cement. At least wear your knee pads.”
Toge shrugs as he walks into his house. The woman sighs and shakes her head. Before she shuts the door, Yuuta sees a small hand reach out and wave at him.
The door shuts.
The volleyball sits on the front lawn.
Yuuta waves back.
When Yuuta Okkotsu is eleven years old, Toge Inumaki changes his life.
He knocks on Yuuta’s door with a volleyball in his arms three days after their first meeting. He’s noticeably not wearing any kneepads or facemask, but he is wearing a hopeful smile. It’s different from Rika’s. She always wore giant grins that showed all of her teeth but never quite reached her eyes. Toge’s smile is small and soft, barely there, but his eyes crinkle with it.
Yuuta is enamored.
Toge is different from Rika in a lot of other ways, too. He’s really quiet. He rarely speaks, and when he does, it’s usually in hushed whispers. Talking too much hurts his throat, he explains one day, so he talks with his hands when he can. Yuuta doesn’t mind. He’s been told he talks too much anyway, so he’s happy for it to finally be useful for once. He fills the silences with his rambling, and when he can’t sleep at night, he reads books on JSL.
The one thing Toge and Rika have in common is their love of volleyball. Whereas Rika focused on getting the ball to the ground as quickly as possible, Toge’s goal is to prevent that entirely. He never spikes. Yuuta would have been content to throw the ball for him, just like he had for Rika, but that was another thing that differed between Toge and Rika: Toge isn’t content to just let Yuuta sit on the sidelines. He doesn’t just want to play in front of Yuuta; He wants to play with Yuuta. As soon as he realizes how abysmal Yuuta’s knowledge of volleyball is, they spend night after night watching volleyball matches together so that Toge can explain what’s happening. Once Yuuta has a decent enough grasp on the rules, he starts to go over the different positions.
Toge is a libero. He’s very proud of it. Yuuta learns that Toge doesn’t just avoid spiking because he doesn’t like it; he’s actually not allowed to. His entire job is to keep the ball in play. He gives his teammates another chance to score a point, but what’s more important to him is that he gives them the confidence to keep looking forward. His teammates can focus solely on hitting the ball if they know that Toge is there to save it. Yuuta suspects that Toge secretly likes the dramatics of it as well. It’s cool to see a spike land a point, but it’s much more impressive to see a libero narrowly prevent a point from being scored.
Yuuta decides that he wants to be a spiker almost immediately. He can’t see himself in a different position. He doesn’t think he’s dextrous enough to be a libero like Toge. And, in a way, it sort of feels like he’s carrying on Rika’s will by being a spiker. Toge loves the idea of Yuuta being a spiker. They spend their afternoons together with Toge setting the ball to Yuuta, who spikes it down for Toge to try and receive it. Their system works great. Yuuta loves it. If he could, he would spend every afternoon playing with Toge.
When Yuuta Okkotsu is sixteen years old, he joins his highschool’s volleyball team.
Predictably, so does Toge. Not only do they make an entire team’s worth of friends, but their coach Gojo manages to shape them into actually decent players. They don’t make it to nationals, but they almost do. Yuuta can hear people whispering about him— that’s the prodigy, he’s the new Gojo— and it always makes him uneasy. Luckily, he has a team. Yuuta doesn’t understand Rika’s distaste for teams. He loves his. Sure, it’s full of weirdos, but they’re his weirdos, and he isn’t particularly normal either. Yuuta has friends again.
As comforting as it is to know that he has an entire team of people standing behind him, it all pales in comparison to the warm feelings that Yuuta gets from knowing that Toge is among them. When he’s not holding Yuuta’s hand and smiling at him, he’s catching all the balls that Yuuta misses, giving him opportunity after opportunity to spike the ball and make Rika proud. By their second year, Yuuta and Toge have really come into their own as volleyball players. Yuuta manages to make the setters not want to strangle him, and Toge falls into an easy rhythm with the entire team. They make it to nationals. Everything is good. Everything is perfect.
When Yuuta Okkotsu is seventeen years old, Toge Inumaki gets hurt.
It isn’t anything major. Just a minor wrist injury. But it’s bad enough that he gets barred from playing the next game.
The nationals game.
Yuuta has to play at nationals without Toge.
“It’s not a big deal,” Toge signs one day. Everyone else had left the gym hours ago, but Yuuta had been in a mood, so no one tried to kick him out. Gojo just tossed a pair of keys to Toge so they could lock up when Yuuta finished throwing his tantrum. “This is only our second year. There’s always next year.”
“That’s not the point,” Yuuta snaps. He tosses a ball up and slams it down with so much force that the palm of his hand stings. The sound of the ball landing reverberates throughout the entire gym. Without the rest of their teammates to fill the air with chatter, it’s almost deafening. Yuuta looks at Toge helplessly. “I just don’t want to do it without you,” he admits quietly. He doesn’t know how to explain that it’s all just pointless without Toge. Yuuta’s only motivation for doing well has been to get Toge to the nationals game. It’s always been about getting Toge where he wants to be. It’s always been about Toge.
Toge raises an eyebrow and tosses another ball Yuuta’s way. “You can’t just not play.”
Yuuta is hit with a rush of anger. He grips the ball so tightly that he wonders if he could pop it. Instead, he goes to throw it over to the other side of the court, but it ends up getting caught in the net. “I don’t even care about volleyball!” He yells, falling to his knees. His shoulders are shaking, and he suddenly realizes he’s crying. He doesn’t know when he started. “I don’t even care about volleyball,” he whispers. “I just—I care about you, so I agreed to play because I wanted you to keep smiling at me. And now I have an entire team relying on me, and I have to do well so they aren’t disappointed in me, but I don’t know if I can without you.”
“Yuuta,” Toge whispers as he kneels down. Yuuta doesn’t look at him. Instead, he just lets himself tilt sideways until he falls into Toge’s arms. Toge laughs at him. “You’re being dramatic,” he whispers.
“Then why are you crying too?”
“Shut up about it, that’s why.” But Toge is still laughing, and then so is Yuuta.
A week later, Yuuta finds himself standing on the court with a ball in his hands. Toge isn’t there. He chose not to ride with everyone else, and Yuuta isn’t positive, but he’s pretty sure it’s because he’s still trying to hide how upset he is about not being able to play from everyone. Yuuta hadn’t realized before now how much he truly relies on Toge’s calming presence during games. His anxiety is sky-high. All he can see is the spot where he needs his serve to land. All he can hear is the chatter of the people in the stands. It feels like they’re all staring at him. He can feel his heart pounding in his chest. His hands are shaking. He hasn’t even started moving yet, but he feels like he’s covered in sweat.
“Hey, is that Inumaki-Senpai?” Yuuji asks suddenly.
“What the fuck is he doing in my skirt?!” Maki yells.
Yuuta whips around to see Toge running to the sidelines, Shoko casually following behind him. He’s wearing his jersey and one of Maki’s skirts, and he’s holding a pom-pom in his uninjured hand. When he reaches the sidelines, he skids to a stop.
“YUUTA!” Toge shouts. It’s the loudest anyone has ever heard him, and even Yuuta reels from the shock. He can hear surprised murmurs from their classmates in the stands above them. Toge takes such a deep breath that Yuuta can see his chest raise with it. “YUUTA!” He shouts again. “WIN!”
“Okay,” Yuuta says dumbly.
“Hey now, don’t count the rest of us out!” Maki calls out.
Itadori jumps up and down a few times, looking like an excited puppy. “Yeah!” He yells. “We’ll win for sure! Right, Fushiguro?”
“Don’t drag me into your dramatics,” Fushiguro says flatly, but he caves when Itadori whines at him. “Of course we’ll win.”
“Okay,” Yuuta says again, a little louder this time. “Okay, yeah. Yeah!” He’s too caught up in the feeling of relief to shout good and proper like Toge had been, but Toge must hear him anyway, because his face lights up in a grin. He throws his pom-pom into the air and does a backflip, catching it as he lands. The crowd goes wild. Yuuta does shout this time. “Be careful! Your wrist!”
Toge turns towards him and sticks his tongue out, but he also gives him a thumbs up, and Yuuta feels his heart rate go down a little. “Okay,” he says again. He turns and faces the net, tossing the ball up and catching it just to feel the weight of it in his palms. Behind him, the crowd is yelling and cajoling at whatever Toge is doing, which makes Yuuta feel a little better. He knows that as soon as he hits the ball, all of their attention is going to be on him again. But he also knows that as soon as the first serve lands, he’s going to be fully enthralled by the game. Toge is giving him what he needs—a reprieve for just the first serve. Even when he’s not on the court, Toge is still supporting him.
Yuuta takes a deep breath.
If he concentrates hard enough, he thinks he can hear Rika’s voice in the back of his mind, wishing him luck.
He throws the ball into the air.
It connects with his palm.
When Yuuta Okkotsu is seventeen years old, he wins his first game at nationals.
It’s the hardest match of Yuuta’s life. It feels like it’s dragging on forever, but then it’s suddenly over, and it feels like it’s only just begun. Yuuta is breathing hard, he’s covered in sweat, and the palm of his right hand stings. But they won.
They fucking won.
His entire team is screaming, and so is everyone in the stands. Yuuta stays stock-still where he is on the court, just staring at where the ball landed, like he can’t believe what just happened. He sort of can’t.
And then there’s a weight on his back. Familiar arms wrap around his neck, and he can hear Toge laughing in his ear. Yuuta moves on autopilot. He grabs Toge’s arms, careful of his injured wrist, and flips him so that they’re chest-to-chest. Toge’s legs wrap around Yuuta’s waist, and all Yuuta can do is kiss him. He doesn’t plan on it. It just happens. The crowd is still cheering, and for a second, it’s so easy to believe that they’re cheering for this. For them. It’s not too long before their entire team is all over them, throwing themselves on top of Yuuta. Maki is berating Toge for taking her skirt, Nobara is making fake gagging noises, Yuuji is shouting something at Megumi, who’s currently trying to look anywhere but at Yuuta.
The only person Yuuta really wants to look at though is Toge. He’s staring at him with wide eyes and a grin that shows his teeth. He’s also crying.
“You’re being dramatic,” Yuuta tells him.
“Then why are you crying too?” Toge asks through a laugh.
Yuuta laughs too. “Shut up about it, that’s why.”
Eventually, the hype dies down. Everyone shakes hands with the other team, they take their photos, and they pile onto the bus to head back home. Toge and Yuuta tuck themselves into the very back of the bus together.
“You know, I don’t think my mom knows I’m gay,” Toge signs.
“Well, she does now,” Yuuta signs back, just in case everyone else is asleep. “Sorry.”
Toge shakes his head with a smile. “She won’t care.”
“If it’s any consolation, I think my parents have known about me being in love with you for years.”
“Years, you say?” Toge asks, wiggling his eyebrows.
Yuuta smiles. “Ever since you showed up at my door with a volleyball, I think,” he whispers, setting his head on top of Toge’s. His eyes slip shut as Toge snuggles against his chest. Whatever Toge says in response, Yuuta misses it.
When Yuuta Okkotsu is seventeen years old, he falls asleep in the back of a bus with Toge Inumaki in his arms, like he was always meant to be there.