Work Text:
Kei is being bullied, he supposes.
He’s certainly being cornered, a sneering pack of boys from some team he doesn’t remember crowding him back into a secluded hallway of the tournament building. It’s a novel experience for Kei—he’s certainly familiar with dealing with bullies, having spent a portion of his childhood gleefully terrorizing Yamaguchi’s harassers until they finally took the hint, but he’s never had this sort of deliberate, menacing aggression directed at him personally. He doesn’t quite know what to do with it, honestly.
“Eh? What’s the matter, pretty boy? Don’t have anything clever to say anymore?” The leader—or at least the most obnoxious member of the group—swaggers forward into Kei’s personal space again. Kei takes another step back, glancing behind him when his back thumps gently against a wall, drywall and paint cool through the thin fabric of his t-shirt.
“Huh? Come on, speak up,” the sneering boy urges again.
Kei holds his tongue, as he has been since the group approached him, because, frankly, he can’t think of anything less provocative to do. He could try to physically fight his way out, but these days he doesn’t have that much of a height advantage anymore, and most volleyball players are just as strong as he is, often stronger. They’ve got him in sheer numbers, too—he might be able to take one or two of them, but there are four troublemakers pinning him to the wall, and he doesn’t like those odds.
Alternatively, he could give them what they want, open his mouth to make some snide remark, but he doesn’t think letting someone who’s looking for a reason to punch him in the face have their way is a very good idea. He knows that keeping quiet is probably going to frustrate them enough that they might end up hurting him anyway, but there’s a chance they might get bored and walk away if he just stays silent, eyes averted and hands clasped loosely in front of him. If he did decide to say anything to them, he’s pretty sure whatever came out of his mouth would pretty well evaporate his chances of a peaceful resolution.
The leader takes another step closer and Kei has nowhere to go, is forced to turn his face awkwardly up and away to avoid getting a nose full of the boy’s breath.
“What, turning your nose up at me? You think you’re such hot shit, don’t you? Won’t even look at plebeians like us.” He laughs, ugly, but Kei just keeps staring at the far wall, doing his level best to swallow the irritation and the jittery rush of adrenaline pounding through his body. It won’t help, he repeats to himself, over and over in time with his pulse. It won’t help, if you do anything it’s just going to make them madder, it won’t help, just ignore them.
It works until it doesn’t, until one of the other boys pushes forward and snatches his glasses off his face, dropping them to the floor and stepping on them. Kei finally looks down, staring at the cracked, twisted frames of his glasses under the boy’s sneaker, and he feels his cheeks start to heat. It’s like blood in the water. They snicker at him, at his stupid, humiliated flush, and the leader reaches out and shoves him. His head hits the wall and he’s pushed again before he can recover, this time sideways so he lands hard on the floor. Pain jolts up his arms and through his leg and hips as he makes contact, and he curls up instinctively, raising an arm to protect his head in case they try to take it further.
And they do. Try, that is. One manages to kick him in the ribs and he grunts as pain seems to replace the air in his lungs, but then there’s a shout and a blur and a thump. More shouting, and when Kei manages to pull himself together enough to uncurl from his defensive huddle he can see a fuzzy, flailing heap a few feet away, writhing and shifting with the motion of a full-on brawl. He can’t make out any of the details with his glasses in pieces on the floor, but in the midst of all the yelling he thinks he recognizes Yamaguchi’s voice.
Kei finds himself suddenly frantic, scrambling for his bag and pawing desperately through it to find his sports glasses, and then he’s got them on and looks up and—it’s definitely Yamaguchi. Yamaguchi, a boy he had spent months, maybe years, scaring bullies away from, is on the floor in the middle of the tangle of bodies, looking absolutely furious in a way that Kei has never seen before, throwing fists and elbows that look like he means for them to hurt. Kei sits frozen, gaping at the sight, until one of the boys gets in a punch that snaps Yamaguchi’s head back and bloodies his nose, and Kei lurches to his feet, stumbling towards the fight. Yamaguchi might be single-handedly fending off four attackers through the combined powers of the element of surprise and sheer damnedness right now, but Kei knows it won’t last and he’s not about to let Yamaguchi get beaten to a bloody pulp on his behalf.
He wades in with determination and takes a few glancing body blows in the process, but he ignores the other boys completely in favor of wrapping his arms around Yamaguchi’s chest and starting to haul him bodily out of the fray. Yamaguchi fights him every inch of the way, straining and wiggling and, when it becomes clear that he’s getting pulled out whether he likes it or not, using the leverage of his back against Kei’s chest to get a few last kicks in. They’re mostly disentangled, although the other boys have collected themselves enough to start lunging at them again, when a bellow that raises the hairs on the back of Kei’s neck echoes down the hallway.
“HEY!” The voice is familiar, and Yamaguchi goes instantly still and limp in Kei’s arms. Kei and Yamaguchi barely have time to look up before the boys, who have also stopped in their tracks, are being pulled roughly away by the backs of their shirts. A fuming Sawamura has two of them by the backs of their shirts, and Azumane and Tanaka each have a grip on one of the others. The rest of the team is standing behind them, surveying the scene with varying levels of shock (Hinata and Kageyama), disappointment (Sugawara and Ennoshita), and pride (Nishinoya).
Yamaguchi swallows so hard that Kei can feel it against his chest, but then he’s tugging at Kei’s arms where they’re still locked together around him in a death grip, gathering his feet under him and pushing up and away from Kei. This close, Kei can see that he’s trembling, but Yamaguchi straightens his shoulders and puts his chin up, and Kei can’t help but marvel again at how incredibly cool Yamaguchi has gotten while he wasn’t looking. The sight of him, swollen and bloody and shaking, looking as fierce as Kei has ever seen him, makes something unfamiliar clench in Kei’s stomach.
They get yelled at, of course. They also get suspended from the team for two weeks, both of them, for all that Yamaguchi insists to Sawamura and Coach Ukai that Kei had nothing to do with it, that he had instigated the fight and Kei was only trying to help him. It’s not a lie, exactly, and Kei appreciates the effort, but he’s secretly glad that they’re punished equally. If Yamaguchi had rescued him, earned himself bruised ribs and a split lip, a swollen nose and two black eyes on Kei’s behalf, and then been the only one punished for it? Kei’s not sure he would have been able to live that down.
Kei glances at Yamaguchi, sitting in the nurse’s office beside him while Shimizu prods at Kei’s ribs and makes him wince. Yamaguchi looks more like his usual self now, holding a bag of ice to his nose and staring down at his gently swinging feet, anxious and sorry expression made all the worse by the bruising around his eyes.
“Thanks.” Yamaguchi’s head jerks up, his cheeks flushing just a little, and the corners of Kei’s mouth twitch upward without his consent.
“Ah, no, I—!” Yamaguchi bites his lip, casting his eyes aside. “…Sorry, Tsukki.” Now Kei has to raise an eyebrow at him, although the effect is probably dampened somewhat by his flinch when Shimizu presses an ice pack to his ribs without warning.
“Did you not just hear me thank you? What are you apologizing for?” Yamaguchi ducks his head, and Shimizu, apparently satisfied with her patch job, ducks silently out of the office—Kei has never been more grateful for her social grace.
“Well, I—I got you in trouble, I got so angry when I saw—and I just ended up making everything worse…” Kei stares at him, his expression twisted into utter disbelief.
“…You can’t be serious,” he manages after a minute, and Yamaguchi flinches at the scorn that creeps into his voice. “If you hadn’t done what you did, they would have beat the shit out of me, which would have been a lot worse than a scolding and two weeks off practice. It’s not your fault they decided they had a problem with me.” Yamaguchi shrugs, still not meeting Kei’s eyes.
“I could have probably solved it in a better way, though. You always managed to when we were little, but I—I’m not as big as you so I’m not that scary, and I’m not smart enough to be good at talking people down. And anyway, I really wasn’t—I wasn’t thinking, even though I should have been. I saw him kick you and I just… I don’t even know what happened, all of the sudden I was just on them and—well. You know how it went from there.” He says it all in a rush and then clamps his mouth shut, like he hadn’t meant to admit any of it. Kei lurches forward and kisses him.
Tries to, anyway. He kind of smacks into the bag of ice Yamaguchi is still holding against his nose, and Yamaguchi yelps in pain when Kei hits his nose and his split lip, but their mouths make contact for a second before they jerk apart.
Kei’s stomach is doing the clenching thing again and his heart is beating harder than when he was being cornered and threatened. He hopes he’s not blushing as badly as Yamaguchi, who’s staring at him with wide eyes, but he has a feeling it’s a hope in vain.
“Sorry,” he croaks around the lump that’s suddenly formed in his throat. He’s not sure why he did it, except he is, and he has no idea what to do with it. The pieces have suddenly fallen into place in his mind, and he can see, painfully clearly, that somewhere along the line, he had started to care for Yamaguchi as more than a friend. That his pride in Yamaguchi’s progress, the fact that Yamaguchi had managed to spark him back into motion after so many years of willful stagnation, and the strange feeling in his stomach at the idea of Yamaguchi being angry and brave on his behalf, being protective of him, are signs that something deeper has been shifting in their relationship, on Kei’s end at least. He’s not sure how he missed it.
Yamaguchi is still looking at him, but his expression is shifting slowly, and he’s lowering the ice from his nose.
“Did you, um—did you mean that, Tsukki?” Yamaguchi asks, and Kei has to clear his throat.
“I—yes,” is all he can manage, but it must be enough for Yamaguchi, because he’s leaning forward, his free hand coming up to hold Kei’s face, and then their lips are meeting again. Kei holds perfectly still this time, barely dares to breathe, and Yamaguchi kisses him very carefully and gently—probably more out of consideration for his injured face than anything, but Kei likes to think it might have something to do with the fact that it’s their first kiss and Yamaguchi is just as excited and terrified as he is. It’s short, and his lip tastes like Yamaguchi’s blood when he licks it, but Yamaguchi is smiling at him, brown eyes soft and brilliant, and Kei thinks it’s probably okay. He thinks about getting to go home from school early for the next two weeks, and all the things they could do with the extra time, and decides it’s definitely okay.
Maybe he should get bullied more often.