Chapter Text
Hinata falls from the ledge.
He has nothing on him, no padding, no gear, no hooks. He simply falls, and Kageyama takes a moment to realise what just happened.
“Hinata-boke!” he shouts, darting to the window and peering out. He expects to be faced with a grisly sight on the ground, all blood and bone shattered against the unforgiving concrete. Instead, he sees Hinata’s bright orange hair against the ivy trail that sticks to the wall, glancing up with wide eyes.
“That was close,” he huffs, kicking at a small crack until it is big enough to slide his foot into it and take the weight off his arms. “Imagine if I fell, Kageyama.”
“I don’t have to, idiot,” Kageyama growls, reaching over to hold out a hand to him, his heart still thudding unevenly in his chest. “I just saw it happen.”
“Aww, did you worry for me, Kageyama-kun?” Hinata asks cheekily, grabbing onto his wrist. Kageyama considers the merits of actually dropping him again, just to make the teasing stop.
“Shut up,” he says, pressing his knees against the wall to lever him up. “You’re so heavy, what have you been eating?”
Hinata slides onto the ledge again, and lets go. Kageyama mourns the loss of his body heat for just a moment, mourns the touch of his hand against his, and then resolutely turns away from that feeling.
“It’s all muscle, Kageyama,” Hinata says, flexing an arm. Kageyama is madder at the fact that his eyes catch the rippling of solid muscle against the tight sleeve of his jacket, than he is at the fact that they nearly gave their mission away by literally tumbling out of a window.
He smacks Hinata’s hand down and pulls him back into the room in the same movement. “We have other things to be dealing with right now,” he says, lodging his crises into some dark crevice of his brain to hopefully never be pulled out into the light again. This is not the moment for them, and Kageyama is never ready for them. Never.
“How did you even fall?”
Hinata’s forehead finally crinkles, some of his cheer leaving his expression.
“There’s something in the room,” he hums, that terrifyingly focused expression coming over his face, sending a shiver down Kageyama’s back.
“Schematics show that there’s a space behind the painting.” Tadashi’s voice crackles in their earpieces, and Hinata and Kageyama exchange one glance at each other, before Hinata sighs and lifts a hand to his ear.
“Which painting?” he asks drily, and there’s a pause.
The entire wall that Hinata and Kageyama are looking at is covered in paintings. Small, medium, large – they’re all laid edge to edge, covering the wallpaper so perfectly that not a hint of the sky blue that covers the other walls is visible.
Kageyama sighs, tapping against the wood of the table that gleams in the dim light from the window. “We need something else, some hint to get us in.”
“Kageyama, look out!”
Hinata dives at him, and Kageyama has a single moment before he registers the sharp crack of something sinking into the wood, right where he had been leaning a second ago. Hinata cradles his head as they roll under the chair, the shadows embracing them like a second skin as they come out on the other side, leaning against the back.
“Are you alright?” he whispers urgently, and feels Hinata shiver slightly in his arms, a soft whimper coming from his throat as if torn from him against his will.
“’M fine, Bakayama,” he says, and unsurprisingly, Kageyama is sure that he is absolutely not fine. He looks around the room, and it’s undisturbed except for the faint flutter of the curtain at the window, a single hole letting in a chink of light. Someone had shot at them through the window. Why?
“Oi,” Hinata says, and Kageyama looks down at him. He is holding onto his shirt with a white-knuckles grip, and his eyes are slightly hazy. “G- go after them.”
“Shut up, dumbass,” he growls, and presses a hand to his ear. “Yamaguchi.”
“What happened?” Yamaguchi asks, his voice steady but still somehow managing to sound panicked. “I lost visuals inside the building!”
“It – it was – a trap,” Hinata wheezes, his hand tightly clenching Kageyama’s shirt, crumpling the fabric in his fist. His right palm is pressed to his side. “Not – not here.”
Kageyama knows the protocol that exists for cases like this. Get the goods, then get the agent out if not under life-threatening circumstances. He knows.
But there’s a gentle trickle of blood that looks almost black in the light from the moon pulsing through Hinata’s fingers in a steady stream, and his eyes are half-lidded, his head bowed so his chin almost touches his sternum. His pulse under Kageyama’s hold on his arm is jumping so fast, so unsteadily.
“Kageyama, your orders,” Yamaguchi says, and it snaps him out of whatever shock he had fallen into. “Tsukki’s on his way.”
“Get him out of here as soon as possible,” Kageyama says, checking for the knives that he tucked into his hidden sheaths when he left their base. “I’m going after the attacker.”
“No need,” Tsukishima says, cutting over Yamaguchi. “He’s gone.”
White hot rage courses through Kageyama at the casual steadiness of his voice.
“You let him go?” he spits, hands still cradling Hinata, who seems to have no energy left in him. His stillness is all wrong, he shouldn’t be so quiet, he should be laughing and poking fun at Kageyama or jumping around to find the hidden cache – but he is silent and still.
“Not all of us are as empty as you, King,” Tsukishima replies, and the coldness stings, just as the name does. “Get the goods, I’ve got Sho.”
Tsukishima’s slight form appears in the window, and he slides in, the clunky box in which his disassembled sniper’s rifle is packed landing with a thud on the floor. “The rest of the building is clear,” he says, and then he’s on his knees, shifting Hinata’s hand away to look at the wound with a gentleness that seems most unlikely on him. But Kageyama sees one thing before he turns away to look at the wall of paintings – Tsukishima’s face is as pale as a ghost, and his hands are shaking.
“Yamaguchi, give me more info about this,” he says curtly, forcing himself to push Hinata out of his mind. Focus on the mission, that’s what matters now.
“Fourth from the left, third from the bottom,” Yamaguchi says, and Kageyama pushes the portrait of a fat old man out of the way to expose the steel safe. Hinata was supposed to break into it. He was the one with the skills for that, Kageyama was just supposed to be there to protect him, how did it go so wrong?
“Oi, King,” Tsukishima calls, and Kageyama takes a moment to suck in a sharp breath before he turns to glare at the tall man who has Hinata up on his feet, his arm slung over his shoulders as he droops over. “Try 0927.”
Kageyama punches in the code, his heart thudding in his chest with adrenaline, anxiety, anger, maybe so much more that he couldn’t identify. “If this is wrong…” he growls under his breath, wrenching the handle with more force than necessary.
The safe clicks open, and he nearly stumbles from the force. The documents they were looking for lie there, innocently staring up at him from the top of a pile of folders. Kageyama turns to Tsukishima with wide eyes, because how did you know?
Tsukishima simply looks like a bad guess had been proven right, like something he had been praying for had not come true, like the world was collapsing around his shoulders. It wasn’t a look that belonged on his face.
Kageyama would be the first to say that he didn’t like Tsukishima. He thought the other man was too smug, with his slender fingers always tucked into his pockets, headphones around his neck, that derisive smirk on his face whenever he brought up Kageyama’s past to throw at him. But no one deserved to look so broken.
No one.
The earpiece crackles. “Guys, there are lights along the path, I think people are coming back,” Yamaguchi says, an undercurrent of anxiety running through his voice. “Kageyama, do you have the goods?”
Kageyama looks down at the envelope in his hands, notes the purple and white pattern on it, and then tucks it into his backpack.
“Affirmative,” he says. “Tsukishima has Hinata. We’re moving out.”
“Have Asahi-san meet us on base,” Tsukishima says sharply. “We’re gonna need him.”
Kageyama wants to wipe the memory of Hinata’s bloodstained hands from his memory. He wants to wipe that limp droop of his arms from his mind. He wants to understand why Tsukishima looks so broken.
But he says nothing. He simply follows him back out of the window, helps him gently lower Hinata – who stays unconscious except for the small, pained whimpers that leave his bitten lips – and get back into their car, parked a discreet distance from the imposing building they had just been in.
He holds Hinata’s head steady in the backseat as Tsukishima drives, Yamaguchi’s voice coming through the radio in a steady tone. The lights go on behind them.