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“Right, everyone,” Daichi announces as soon as they’re all off the bus, rummaging into his bag and bringing out a slightly crumpled map of the Australian Walkabout Wildlife Park. “I know we’re all excited, but I’ll go over the rules one last time.”
“Daichi,” Suga sighs.
Daichi waves a hand at him without looking up from his leaflet. “We don’t have much time, so we’re definitely not sprinting to the Mt White lookout and back, but—”
“Daichi—”
“—Suga, we’re representing Japan,” Daichi sighs right back.
(It’s technically not true—for all that this graduation trip had gone to hell in a handbasket once their ex-juniors and most of the country seemingly caught wind of their plans, it’s mostly gone according to plan and Daichi is going to make sure it stays that way—but few of them speak any English and Daichi will be damned if any of them get into trouble. They’ve only been on Australian soil for less than twenty hours, for goodness’ sake.)
“Look,” Daichi adds as he turns to the back of the leaflet, “just make sure you’re with at least one other person when you wander about, okay? And—”
“Excuse me, Sawamura-san.”
That makes Daichi look up—because Suga’s interruptions are one thing, but Akaashi’s are another thing entirely. He doesn’t look too different, but there’s an unusual tightness to his eyes that makes Daichi ask, “Is everything alright?”
“There’s nothing wrong with me, Sawamura-san,” Akaashi replies, “but… did you mean to address everyone?”
“Isn’t that what I’m—”
Suga’s the only person standing beside Akaashi, though—and even as Daichi blinks at them, he hears a suspiciously familiar whoop and a distant Oi, annoying owl, the hell’re you doing with all those holes in the ground?!
“Oh my god,” Daichi groans over Bokuto’s horribly carefree laughter. Akaashi, bless his soul, pats his shoulder with something approximating a grimace before he walks off towards the entrance.
“Murder isn’t legal in Australia, ex-captain-san,” Suga laughs as he pats Daichi’s other shoulder, “but I’ll help you keep an eye out for everyone else, okay?”
He doesn’t tease Daichi for ignoring his warning—doesn’t do more than grin at him with sparkling eyes that no person should have after less than six hours of sleep—and after a quick glance around, Daichi only rolls his eyes before ruffling Suga’s hair.
“Let’s go see what everyone’s up to, then,” Daichi directs at Suga, and slings his bag onto his back before falling into step with him.
Despite all the yelling earlier, there aren’t any familiar faces near the wombat burrow. A few kids are clustered around a sleepy, snuffling lump Daichi thinks is a wombat, but they’re far too young to be his former underclassmen.
It’s not until they get near a cluster of eucalypt trees that Daichi spots two familiar faces.
Or, perhaps, it’d be more accurate to say that he hears them before he sees them.
“That koala can’t fool me, Noya!” Tanaka yells from partway up a tree. “You think furry grey lumps are meant to grow on these trees?!”
“I don’t know, Ryuu, I’ve never stayed awake in class long enough to remember!” Nishinoya cheerfully yells back.
Daichi thinks he sees the koala curl into itself a little more at their voices, but it’s hard to tell when he’s also aware of the pointing and tittering from other visitors. Ennoshita, he thinks, would’ve been perfect for talking them out of their current madness—but he’s back in Japan, and Daichi’s saddled with the fearless duo.
The fearless, idiotic and insane duo, because Tanaka’s crawling further up the tree and Nishinoya’s pumping his fists in the air with loud, echoing cheers. Daichi glances to his right, mouth opening slightly, only to see Suga poking his tongue out as he fiddles with filters on his phone.
(Which is distressingly cute and would warrant a bit of staring, under normal circumstances, but with Tanaka and Nishinoya as they are now…)
“Tanaka,” Daichi roars as he storms over, “you get down from that tree this instant!”
“Noya, why’s your voice—o-oh, Daichi-san!”
“Just what do you think you’re doing?” Daichi knows he strikes an imposing sight with his feet planted shoulder-width apart and his arms crossed tightly over his chest, but Tanaka only smiles down with an increasingly pale face as he roars, “Didn’t you read the instructions I passed out yesterday? What was the first thing written on there?!”
“I, uh… haha, I’ll be down in a moment, Sir!”
“You’d better be, Tanaka Ryuunosuke!”
But as Tanaka shimmies down the tree and the curious onlookers begin dispersing, Daichi glances around and spots Suga tucking his phone away with a wide, innocent smile.
Except… he only spots Suga. As in, there’s no Nishinoya.
“So,” Daichi asks in a level voice that absolutely isn’t .5 seconds away from turning into a scream, “did anyone see where Nishinoya ran off to?”
“The little kid with a bit of yellow in his hair, right?” Atsumu hums, blinking down at Daichi’s pinched expression. It’d taken three tries to get his attention, no thanks to whatever he’d been snickering at with his twin, but Daichi doesn’t particularly want to know—especially if it has anything to do with the way Bokuto’s half-curled on the ground, white-knuckled hands gripping a very sensitive area and bruises liberally decorating his arms.
“Can’t say I have,” Atsumu adds with a little shrug, “but… how ‘bout you, ‘Samu?”
Osamu shrugs back, eyes glued to whatever’s on his phone, but Terushima pops up and slings a friendly arm around Daichi. “You asking after that other little guy of yours, Captain?” he laughs, thumping Daichi enthusiastically on the back. “I think I spotted him having a good time with—oi, you guys seen where the emus went?”
Kuroo’s too busy rolling on the ground near Bokuto to respond and the Miya twins have gone back to whatever’s on their phones, but Akaashi gets up from where he’s kneeling beside Bokuto and points right at them.
“I asked about the emus, not the ‘mus!” Terushima yells far too loudly—
But then there’s a shriek, several grunts and the ground begins shaking beneath Daichi’s feet. “Yaku-san, they won’t leave me alone!” someone wails above all the noise, and Daichi spins around to see…
Is it chaos? Is it a small-scale apocalypse? Osamu and Suga don’t seem to care, if the way their phones are trained on the spectacle is anything to go by, but Yaku’s howling as he doubles over with exaggerated slaps to one knee and Lev…
Lev has two emus preening his hair and one poking curiously at his hands.
“Oh man, this is even better than that owl guy feeling up that kangaroo’s pouch!” Atsumu snickers.
Oh, Daichi thinks a little distantly through his gaping, even as there’s a sharp thwack and a deeply unimpressed, “The only reason it wasn’t you was because you lost that game of scissors-paper-rock, ‘Tsumu.”
It’s tempting to turn around and ask just what the Miya twins mean—because, really, why—but there’s a boom and an all-too-familiar, “Hey, you guys really are fast!”
And when Nishinoya races by on an emu’s back, laughing wildly while the poor emu booms and hisses its distress…
“Nishinoya—Nishinoya, no—Nishinoya Yuu, stop riding that emu this instant!”
“So, that happened,” Kuroo sighs when they’re back on the bus. “Good thing you talked them out of fining or arresting us, Karasuno-san.”
Daichi groans and sinks further into his seat, ears burning from the memory of haggling with the Park’s management, but Kuroo only laughs and slaps him on the back. “Look, it’s no big deal,” he adds with a little smirk. “We all enjoyed ourselves—isn’t that right, Chibi-chan?”
But Hinata doesn’t respond. Hinata is, in fact, nowhere to be found on the bus.
“Huh,” Kuroo says as Daichi scrambles to his feet with a desperate shout, “where’d Chibi-chan go?”
“You would not believe how bad my luck is!” Hinata moans, rubbing his arms as he stumbles out the entrance. “I had to wait in line for fifteen minutes and then they switched out the cute koala I wanted to take a picture with for this—this horrible one that was so heavy, and its claws were so sharp!
“And I’m not even smiling properly in the photograph!” he wails, brandishing it in the air. It’s hard to tell who looks less impressed out of Hinata’s grimace and the koala’s heavy-lidded glare, but he sniffles before tucking the photograph away and mumbling, “That stupid Kageyama’s gonna laugh when he sees it, I just know it…”
But when nobody laughs or comforts or responds to him, Hinata looks up to find no sign of his ex-teammates, his friends or the bus.
He glances to the left. To the right. Rubs his eyes and scans the parking lot and runs a lap to double-check the area just in case and finally, when not even rummaging through the pebbles by the side of the road helps, turns his face up to the sky and screeches—
“Did they leave without me?”