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Atsumu’s job involves handling the ball. Cross-training. Getting his spikers to jump higher and giving them options to obliterate the blockers on the other team. Showing up at events. Trying not to be a PR nightmare – it’s in the fine print, but it’s an actual clause in Atsumu’s contract. He checked after the public tripping of 2018 that shall not be mentioned, just to see if he could legally dig himself a metaphorical hole to never come out of – apparently, he cannot.
Atsumu’s job does not involve smacking his teammate’s back mid coughing fit only for said teammate to spit out flowers. Atsumu’s job description definitely does not include staring at those flowers and thinking, Wow, who knew Omi’d have the feels for some sunflower dude?
Not even in the fine print.
Atsumu stares at the sunflower petals. The petals stare back at him, tauntingly unblinking.
“Omi-kun,” Atsumu says, because his mother has tried teaching him what a filter is and then Osamu swiftly erased those lessons from his long-term memory by being a scrub, “is this gonna happen during matches?”
Sakusa glares at him and slaps his hand away. “Glad to see you’re ever so careful when it comes to my health,” he grits out, but his voice is all hoarse, and there’s a petal stuck to the back of his teeth.
“What,” Atsumu tuts. “Yer the one who called Shouyou-kun out on getting sick back in fuckin’ high school on the first day of joining the team, and now I don’t get to do the same when ya went and got hanahaki? What are ya, some sorta closeted romantic?”
It’s almost an art form, how Sakusa can deliver a cutting glare despite his eyes watering with the force of his coughing fit. “Kindly fuck off,” he says, still raspy with unrequited love.
It makes Atsumu want to scream. He turns around to the rest of the team to find them staring, uncomfortable but not surprised. Inunaki’s rubbing the sole of his foot against the polished floor of the gym. Meian looks like he’s ready to intervene if anyone throws hands. Bokuto and Hinata are whispering in each other’s ears, and for once, Bokuto’s voice is actually low enough to not be a whisper-shout.
“What, am I the last one to find out?” Atsumu asks the tense air separating him from the rest of his teammates. Thomas flinches; Bokuto looks like a kicked puppy.
“Atsumu-kun–” Meian tries.
Atsumu-kun is not going to work today. So Sakusa has hanahaki for some asshole and Atsumu’s the last one to find out? Fine.
“If this happens durin’ a game, I’m benchin’ Sakusa myself,” he says as evenly as he can, and storms out of the gym and into the lockers before his voice can bend fully, contorted with something like betrayal or worry or, even worse, hurt .
He wants to wash the memories of the sunflowers off himself. Sakusa went and got hanahaki for some asshole that Atsumu probably doesn’t even know, and the team doesn’t even care enough about how that will affect their plays to let their setter know. Sakusa went ahead and got hanahaki for some sunflower dude like Atsumu hasn’t had a crush on him since forever and a day.
And it’s fine – Sakusa walks around the gym with compression sleeves every single day, like he’s testing Atsumu’s patience, then goes behind his back and pines for some bastard who doesn’t even like him back. What an idiot.
Atsumu kicks the door to his locker, unceremoniously strips out of his clothes, and hops in the shower before the water has even warmed up. The memory of Sakusa’s glare goes down the drain together with the image of sunflower petals scattered around Sakusa. Atsumu scrubs away particularly hard at the memory of the petal stuck to Sakusa’s teeth.
Thank God Atsumu didn’t go and stupidly fall in love with Sakusa, or the team would be doomed.
🌻
It takes two showers to get the memory of yellow petals off him, only for Sakusa to spit out a huge sunflower petal right in front of Atsumu’s salad the very next day – quite literally so. They’re on their lunch break when Sakusa is seized by a coughing fit and, by some twisted irony of fate, Atsumu is sitting opposite him, so a 34th of a sunflower lands in front of him – Atsumu googled it before his second shower. Apparently, sunflowers have somewhere between 34 and 89 petals. For once, he’s not going to go with the bigger number.
“At least they’re edible,” Atsumu says. From the glare Sakusa levels him with, he gathers it would’ve been better to say nothing at all, but he thinks that’s more asshole-ish than being a witty jerk.
“ You eat it, then,” Sakusa spits out, cleaning his throat.
“Ew,” Atsumu says, with feeling . He watches Sakusa dig into the inner pocket of his jacket for a ziplock bag that he gingerly opens to extract a pair of tweezers. With a look stuck between unbreakable focus and disgust, he picks up the petal he choked out in front of Atsumu’s salad and drops it in the bag, next to at least ten others. That’s a whole third of a sunflower he produced – since when, even? “Are ya collectin’ them?!”
“For my doctor,” Sakusa says, like coughing up flowers and then handing them to some gloved doctor who will put them under the microscope is normal.
“ All of those?”
“What do you suggest?” Sakusa asks, raising one of his damned perfect eyebrows. Seriously, who’s the asshole who doesn’t love him back? Atsumu wants to have words . “Making a herbarium?”
“Throwin’ them away?”
Sakusa scrunches his nose – who is it?! – and it’s so unfairly cute that it finally hits Atsumu. Sakusa is actually in love with someone , enough to not want to throw away even one petal stuck in his airway. Sakusa is in love with someone, enough to even cough up sunflowers in the first place. Sakusa.
Atsumu has barely gotten three bites out of his salad before Sakusa quite rudely spat out his unrequited love right in front of Atsumu’s bowl with his perfect aim and everything. It can’t be the food’s fault, then, that Atsumu’s heart does the opposite of cartwheels – he doesn’t know if there’s a word for that, but it’s definitely what his heart is doing right now.
Fuck the sunflower dude, really, for dragging Atsumu into this petal-y mess.
🌻
It’s gotta be Ushiwaka, who’s seeing that chocolate guy in Paris. There’s no other explanation.
Like most revelations, this one comes to Atsumu in the middle of doing something so mind-numbingly mundane that his thoughts drift back to Sakusa and his ziplock bag of sunflower petals. Now that he’s come to this undeniable conclusion in the middle of the improvised laundromat in the basement of their dorms, Atsumu needs to confirm it. He glances at Sakusa, who’s scrolling on his phone two chairs away, and wonders if he’s reading up on news about Ushiwaka – a documentary of him and the Paris-residing chocolate guy came out last week. Maybe that was what triggered Sakusa’s entire garden-in-my-lungs situation.
“Why don’t ya just get the surgery done?”
Sakusa looks up from his phone and tilts his head. A single curl falls into his eyes. Atsumu thinks he’s wasted on Ushiwaka, really. “I mean,” he says, then stops, because there’s really no subtle way to reveal his epiphany. Then again, he’s never been subtle with Sakusa – not on the court and not when he playfully hits on him – so he’s not about to start now. “Ushiwaka’s basically married to that French guy, right?”
“Tendou-san is not French,” Sakusa says, unflinching. “And where did you get the idea that I’m sick because of Wakatoshi-kun?”
Sakusa’s always been good at deflecting, but Atsumu doesn’t get why he would deny the truth. “Yer only friends are Ushiwaka and Motoya, and it can’t be yer cousin–” Atsumu pauses, then gasps. “Omi-kun! Incest?!”
One freakishly long leg kicks Atsumu’s chair. Sakusa is groaning at the ceiling like he regrets all of his life choices. “You’re an idiot, Miya.”
“It doesn’t make any sense,” Atsumu defends himself. “Who else would be enough of an idiot to not like ya back, Omi-kun?”
Sakusa looks at him like Atsumu’s being an insensitive jerk – and well, if he replays what he’s just said and squints just so , he can kind of tell where Sakusa’s coming from. “Listen, I’m not tryin’ to trash talk yer crush or anythin’–” Sakusa cringes “–but yer a catch, y’know?”
“Thanks,” Sakusa deadpans. The lighting in the basement is kinda shitty, but Sakusa’s only sitting two chairs away, so Atsumu can see the small tick in his jaw that means he’s biting down on a smile which doesn’t reach his eyes. It feels like one of those oh, the irony smiles, and it makes the silence that settles between them feel wrong in all the folds of Atsumu’s shirt.
Being silent with Sakusa has never been uncomfortable before, so Atsumu does what he always does when faced with a dilemma – he thinks about what Osamu would do. “Wanna go egg their house?” Atsumu says, which is something Osamu would most definitely not say, because he never wastes eggs – or any other food, really.
It ends up being the right thing to say anyway, because Sakusa snorts. Atsumu’s never heard that before – a choked up little laugh, bouncing off the whirling washing machines. His heart does the newly invented gymnastics element again.
“That’d be so disgusting,” Sakusa snorts again, and the tick in his jaw is gone.
Atsumu thinks he needs to watch Simone Biles’ routines again and figure out how to unteach his heart the anti-cartwheel move it’s pulling.
🌻
To his credit, Sakusa keeps the coughing to a minimum – half the time, Atsumu forgets that sculpted-by-the-greek-gods Sakusa Kiyoomi is pining for someone.
Then, because he was getting too comfortable again, Atsumu walks into the lockers’ bathroom one fateful Thursday morning, only to find Sakusa crouched over the toilet seat, coughing up an entire ziplock bag’s worth of sunflower petals all at once.
Back in middle school, their biology teacher taught them first-aid, but he didn’t teach them how to get over the shock that pins him to his spot. Sakusa is shivering with each visceral cough, his entire spine jolting with it, and for the first time since that very first shameless yellow petal escaped his mouth, Atsumu doesn’t even care about the sunflowers. He just cares about Sakusa not coughing his lungs up along with those damned flowers, and being able to still play volleyball, because despite having thrown a fit over it, Atsumu doesn’t know if he actually has it in him to bench Sakusa, and–
“Bag,” Sakusa croaks, and Atsumu’s feet finally unglue themselves.
He fumbles through Sakusa’s bag and finally finds a small yellow pouch – if he wasn’t panicking, the irony of it all might make him laugh – and fishes an inhaler out of it. Sakusa tries taking a shivering breath, but his arm is shaking – and his shoulders, and his face, and the single tear that rolls down his cheek as he unleashes another earth-shattering cough. Atsumu does the only thing he can think of and presses the inhaler against his face, holding his head steady by the back of his neck.
He’s not sure how long they’re on the floor for – as long as it takes for Sakusa’s breaths to even out again. Even then, his shoulders are still shaking with the aftermath of his episode, and his trembling fingers reach for the yellow pouch. Atsumu shoves it in his lap, and watches as Sakusa takes out a tiny white bottle, shakes two pills out of it, and swallows them dry.
The floor around them is covered in sunflower petals. Atsumu is starting to see red from all the yellow. “There’s pills for this shit?” he spits out.
Sakusa must not be back to his normal self just yet, because his smirk is weak. “Of course there is,” he croaks out, raspy with fucking pining. “We live in the twenty-first century, you dolt.”
“Wow, Omi-kun called me a dolt. I’m swooning,” Atsumu says, because he’s trying to ignore that his hand is still wrapped around the back of Sakusa’s neck – he doesn’t trust that Sakusa’s head won’t roll over if he lets go. Because he wants to bring back a sense of normalcy in a sea of unrequited sunflowers. Because he’s trying to ignore thinking about how mad he is, or why he even is mad in the first place.
He’s never thought of Sakusa as fragile. In his mind, Sakusa has always been hot, and kinda untouchable. This Sakusa, however, is pining for someone, and it’s so bad that he’s not even being rational enough about it to get surgery. This Sakusa is the real Sakusa – Atsumu can feel his skin, warm against his fingertips, not porcelain cold like in every wet dream Atsumu has had of him. It makes Atsumu wonder which version of Sakusa has existed in his mind until now, and if the real Sakusa would even recognize that version as himself.
“Uhm, Samu makes real good umeboshi onigiri.”
Sakusa looks at him like Atsumu hit his head – and yeah, okay, Atsumu can see where he’s coming from this time. “Yer sick, Omi-kun,” he tries to explain. “Food always helps when yer sick.”
“I’m not that kind of sick, Miya,” Sakusa says, not unkindly, which is weird – this is the real Sakusa.
Atsumu bristles. “I’m tryin’ to be nice and offer ya free food, so shut up and take it.”
“What am I, a charity case?”
This, Atsumu is familiar with – banter territory. A safe space where he’d reply with nah, ‘course not, yer my spiker and a grin. A map he always discovers new streets on with Kiyoomi, something always exciting and always expertly dodging the truth. This time, however, Atsumu walks the unwalked path.
“Yer my friend, Omi-kun.”
He’s not sure why he does it – maybe because he’s just seen the vulnerable side to Sakusa, and that calls for Atsumu to be real, too, instead of just the too-blunt-jerk version of himself he so unapologetically shows to the public. Once the words are out and floating between them, though, he realizes that they’re true, so there’s no point in taking them back.
Sakusa seems to consider this. Eventually, he offers, “Your brother seems like he’d respect restaurant hygiene standards.”
Atsumu knows that’s as close to an agreement as he’s going to get.
🌻
The ten-odd something petals in Sakusa’s little ziplock bag turn into a decomposed small sunflower in a slightly bigger ziplock. Free food turns into fighting over how Sakusa’s never seen High School Musical and then into watching the first movie together with takeout from Onigiri Miya on the table. “That was awful,” Sakusa says as the credits roll, and then, “When are we watching the second one?”
They go through the entire series, then switch to Sakusa’s musicals, “because you need to get cultured, Miya.” Atsumu agrees, even though none of this is in his contract – not even in the fine print. They watch three musicals, too, because Sakusa’s fair and hates being indebted.
He only coughs up a total of five petals while in Atsumu’s apartment, but when he takes out his ziplock bag, it’s gotten bigger yet again. Atsumu has lost count of how many petals are in there – he’s lost count of how many movies they’ve watched together for fairness’s sake, too.
“I don’t get it,” he says one Friday evening, as he’s washing the dishes.
Sakusa’s been glancing over his shoulder every ten seconds, like a timed jack in the box. “I knew you couldn’t wash the dishes properly,” he sighs, waving his hand like he’s trying to shoo Atsumu away from the sanctity of his sink. “Pass it over–”
“I’m not talkin’ about the damn dishes, Omi!”
“Really? Because you’re using cold water–”
“I don’t get why yer not gettin’ this surgery done,” Atsumu cuts him off. “Like, it’ll make ya no longer love this jerkface, but it’s not like ya’ll never love anyone else again.”
Sakusa snorts, but it’s not the amused, strangled little sound that Atsumu chases with each of his bad jokes. “That seems pretty sad to me.”
Nowhere in his contract is Atsumu obligated to look after his stupid teammate and his stupid unrequited crush, but the two showers a day he takes haven’t been enough to erase the memory of sunflowers lately. Atsumu doesn’t even need to see yellow to feel the pit in his stomach be engulfed in something so close to anxiety that it feels like anger. “Since when have ya been a romantic, Omi-kun?” he bites out.
When sunflowers stare at him unblinkingly, it feels taunting. When Sakusa does it, it makes Atsumu feel like their five centimeters height difference is, in fact, much larger. “Probably since around the time you joined the Jackals,” Sakusa says, unblinking.
Atsumu’s heart cartwheels like Sakusa is actually trying to say something else. His mouth, however, can only come up with, “Four years? Damn, that’s a long time to be pining.”
Sakusa snorts again – this time, it lands marginally closer to the sound Atsumu’s been chasing.
“And ya never considered confessin’ to this person?”
“I did. Then I realized he’s an idiot who wouldn’t recognize a confession if it hit him in the face.”
“Are ya sure ya like this guy, Omi?”
Sakusa snorts again, and it’s exactly the sound Atsumu’s been chasing – strangled, undignified, a little grating in the way it feels like he’s laughing at Atsumu. “What, want me to cough up another flower to prove it?”
“Nah, I’m good. Any more petals in my apartment and I could start a herbarium.”
“You said they were edible. I’m sure your brother could come up with something.”
“That’s so unsanitary, Omi-kun. Though I’m pretty sure some diehard fans would gobble it all up.”
Sakusa’s snort is a sound that the Sakusa in Atsumu’s mind – the one he thinks was sculpted in cold marble and then brought to life by some sort of witch who forgot to give him proper bones in favour of nasty wrist spins – would wrinkle his nose at. Finding out that Sakusa is spitting out sunflowers for some random guy was a metaphorical hammer to this imaginary, magic marble-made Sakusa, but when he looks back on it, Atsumu wonders where the marble Sakusa came from in the first place.
After the public tripping of 2018 which shall never again be mentioned, Sakusa bickered with Atsumu all throughout the tryouts, dragging him out of the embarrassment hole he’d dug for himself one insult at a time. Sakusa listened to Atsumu mope about his serve almost as much as Osamu did, and received all of his failed attempts at the hybrid with a challenging grin. Sakusa has milk at his place even though he’s lactose intolerant because he knows there’s one brand that reminds Atsumu of home when he misses Osamu but doesn’t want to admit it. Sakusa touches up Atsumu’s roots before the season starts because one article poked fun at his dye job once.
None of this feels like something marble or fairy dust could achieve, and all of it feels so real that it gives Atsumu whiplash. Seeing Sakusa drying dishes in his kitchen makes Atsumu wonder who he even had a crush on.
More than anything, seeing Sakusa clear his throat like he always does when he’s trying to keep petals at bay makes Atsumu see red. Sakusa should be the one having someone collect flower petals for him – blood red, carnation petals.
🌻
According to an article that Suna sends to Atsumu, followed by an entire row of laughing cat emojis, sunflowers were given to people in the Victorian era to passive aggressively call them haughty. He’s not sure how that is relevant to someone on the Japanese national team, or how it relates to the fact that Sakusa coughed up a third of a small sunflower in the break between the fourth and fifth set against the Raijins and then still scored the winning point of the match. Suna, Atsumu concludes, is just a sore loser.
In the aftermath of the match, Sakusa coughs up to another half of the flower, then diligently takes out his tweezers and collects every last petal with some sort of masochistic reverence. Atsumu stamps down on the impulse to rip the bursting ziplock out of his hands, empty it in the toilet and flush all of Sakusa’s unrequited love down the drain. Instead, he showers in record time and leaves for the izakaya first, to “grab the best table.”
The reservation was made a week ago, for the only table that fits the entirety of MSBY in a cramped cubicle at the izakaya two streets away from the arena.
“Atsumu-san!”
Shouyou catches up to him in exactly three steps. Atsumu turns around a little too quickly – looking a little too guilty – and lets his shoulder sag under the weight of his bag when he sees no one else following.
“The team is taking its time,” Shouyou says, always too perceptive for his own good. “Bokuto-san tried helping Omi-san with the petals, but Omi-san pushed him away, so now they’re all waiting for him to finish sorting out the petals by size.”
Atsumu tries not to visibly stiffen, and fails miserably. This is why he left the gym in the first place.
“Does it make you uncomfortable, Atsumu-san?”
Shoyou is too perceptive to not know the answer to that question already. “It’d make anyone uncomfortable.”
“Why?”
Atsumu doesn’t dare look at Shouyou. He’s sure he’s unblinking, with those huge, loud eyes that make you face yourself honestly. Honestly, Atsumu has been avoiding his feelings expertly for about three months now. “Love is embarrassing,” Atsumu offers instead.
“You know, Kageyama used to have hanahaki.”
If Shouyou was trying to get Atsumu to make eye-contact – well, he succeeded. “Tobio-kun?! As in, yer fiancé Tobio-kun?! As in, wears his engagement ring on a necklace during the games Tobio-kun?!”
“Yeah.”
“Huh,” Atsumu manages, feeling like the earth suddenly started spinning the other way around. “Must’ve done a good job doin’ the surgery quickly then, ‘cause I’ve never seen him spit flowers.”
“He confessed to me after the second time he coughed up forget-me-nots. He said he couldn’t have hanahaki interfere with volleyball–”
“Tobio-kun had hanahaki for ya ?!” The earth probably stopped spinning altogether. Atsumu stops right as they’re about to take a corner into the next street, and stares at Shouyou like he’s wearing a clown costume.
Shouyou is acting like he’s wearing a suit and trying to prove the theory of relativity. Atsumu doesn’t think he’s ever seen him this serious off the court, so he swallows back all of the other words crowding in his mouth and falls back into step next to him.
“It took me a while to realize I loved him back,” Shouyou says around a small smile, something that looks ripped from the softest folds of his heart. “Kageyama has never really been just a friend or a rival, but he’s always been a partner, regardless which side of the net he stood on. You know how you grow up on all these love stories with butterflies in your stomach and romantic moonlight scenes? Kageyama and I were on different sides of the world, and the only thing I’ve ever felt around him was calm or frustrated.”
Atsumu thinks about his outrageous crush on fake marble-Sakusa and thinks he understands: the Sakusa in his imagination always made him sweat with anticipation. The real Sakusa makes him reread his contract and still do things that aren’t even in the fine print. There are no butterflies in his stomach, but he could sign his heart up for the gymnastics Olympic trials.
“I don’t think love needs to be textbook romanticism – being competitive and loud doesn’t make it any less real.”
“What are ya tryin’ to say here, Shouyou-kun?”
“Omi-san’s brand of love might look different,” Shouyou says, stopping in front of the izakaya and hauling the door open, “but it’s not difficult to recognize.”
Atsumu forgot that the walls here are painted in pastel yellow, and almost sees red. “Ya know who he has hanahaki for?”
Shouyou gives him the same look he does when he’s waiting for the toss to come to him – taunting; unblinking. “You mean you really don’t know, Atsumu-san?”
Atsumu walks in first and heads straight for the waitress. If he thinks about the implications of Shouyou’s question for too long, something ugly will rear its head from the place where the memories of sunflowers, the ones he can’t rub away in the shower, have been stashed.
🌻
“Where’s Omi?” Atsumu asks two days later, stepping into a gym filled up with everyone but one Sakusa Kiyoomi. He’s always in first; Atsumu is always in second, walking onto the court with banter on the tip of his tongue, except last night he had sunflower nightmares which kept him up until the crack of dawn. The fact that the sky turns yellow first thing in the morning feels like a personal affront at this point.
“He’s home today,” coach Foster says. “He said he wasn’t feeling well.”
No one explicitly mentions hanahaki or flowers, because they don’t have to. Atsumu feels the rage simmer inside him, that ugly thing he was trying to keep at bay poking its head through his ribs and trying to claw at Atsumu’s heart, and pours it all into his serves. He hits service ace after service ace, and thinks if Omi was here, he would’ve received half of them , and then hits the ball even harder, until his hands go numb.
Is it fucking sunflowers again? he texts Sakusa during lunch.
Sakusa, because he gets some kind of weird kick out of fucking with Atsumu, replies with only a picture of what has to be a herbarium page. There is a date and place written under every single petal taped to the paper. It feels almost morbid, like proof of how undeniably gone Sakusa is for someone who lets him cough sunflowers.
But above all, it’s ridiculous. Sakusa should be angry. He should be falling out of love with this asshole and falling in love with someone who can appreciate his dark humor and the way he always leans in a little when Atsumu says something the rest of the team ignores.
Past Atsumu was wrong and deserves to be shamed for how shallow he was being – Sakusa is not just some hot athlete. Sakusa is beautiful , with his horrid snorts and focused frowns and frustrated pouts. Even in the morning, when he rolls out of hotel sheets with terrible bedhead, he’s pretty. Atsumu can’t believe there’s some jerkface out there who can’t see all of this.
Sakusa should be getting flowers, not coughing them up.
“Atsumu,” Meian says not even an hour into their afternoon practice, “go home.”
“But I’m nailin’ these serves, captain.”
“It’s not productive practice if you’re just using the court as an outlet for your feelings.”
“It feels like you wanna hit me,” Inunaki chimes in from the other side of the net. “Do we all need to pitch in and buy you a boxing bag?”
Atsumu sticks his tongue out at Inunaki.
“Go home,” Meian repeats, and this time it feels more like an order.
“Get your head out of your ass,” Inunaki helpfully translates.
Going home isn’t going to solve shit. Atsumu knows it even as he’s packing his bag and hauling it over his shoulder – if he gets too much time with his own thoughts, his mind will go places. Having one hanahaki-plagued player on a team is enough – Atsumu doesn’t think they can defeat the Adlers if he looks in the mirror and opens Pandora’s box, only to find red carnation petals at the bottom.
🌻
“So yer team sent ya home ‘cause ya can’t compartmentalize?”
Atsumu opens his fridge, sees the blueberry-flavored soy yoghurt he bought because it’s Sakusa’s favourite healthy snack during movies, and realizes he has no good comeback for Osamu. “This fucking sucks.”
“Would it really kill ya to just admit yer feelings?”
“We don’t need two players with hanahaki on one team.”
“Hanahaki a rare disease, I doubt ya’d get it.”
“Why, cause ya managed to pine three years over Suna with no repercussions?” Atsumu snaps, slamming his fridge door shut.
Osamu sighs his long-suffering, Atsumu-patented sigh. “Yer makin’ yerself miserable, Tsumu. Since when do ya hold back?”
“Since it’d get in the way of volleyball.”
“Stop kiddin’ yerself and just admit that yer scared.”
Atsumu hangs up. Talking to Osamu can be even scarier than looking into the mirror, when he decides to pull the rug from under Atsumu and expose all of the stuff he’s been sweeping under it.
Because Atsumu is scared. He somehow sneaked one of those blueberry soy yoghurts out of the fridge before closing the door on the evidence of his cowardice, and he rips off the plastic cap with vengeance. Having a crush on imaginary marble-Sakusa is distant and comfortable; falling in love with real, flower-coughing Sakusa is scary and way too raw. Atsumu doesn’t even like blueberry flavoured soy yoghurt, and yet he uses the spoon to scrape the walls clean before throwing the cup away and beelining for the bathroom.
He squeezes out a generous amount of toothpaste and scrubs his teeth just as angrily as he served in practice before. Atsumu could sign up his heart for the gymnastics Olympic trials right now and he’d get gold with little competition. He stares at his reflection in the mirror, toothpaste lining his mouth, and rolls around the idea of Sakusa and love on his tongue. He doesn’t spit either of them out when he rinses his mouth.
Atsumu fingers curl around the sides of the sink. It’s just him here – he could flush all his thoughts down the shower drain and pretend they’ve never existed, except he knows they’d come back to taunt him unblinkingly, and he has no rug in his bathroom to sweep them under.
So maybe Atsumu is in love with Sakusa, and his horrid snort, and his stupid sharp tongue, and the fact that he’s so fucked up that he made a herbarium out of his feelings. He tries whispering it, just to see if the words would come back as haunting echoes, and promptly chokes on his feelings and leftover toothpaste.
He’s still coughing, wondering if this is what Sakusa feels like, taken apart from his very lungs, when a quick rasp against his door pushes him to gasp for air. It might be Bokuto or Shouyou, checking in on him after practice – they brought him food every night when Atsumu was out with a cold, and a free meal sounds like a good band aid for his misery right now, so Atsumu wipes his face and rushes to open the door.
On the other side of the door, he is welcomed by neither free food nor megawatt smiles. No, what awaits him instead is a very real, very disheveled Sakusa.
Atsumu’s first instinct is to pinch his cheek to make sure he’s awake. His very next instinct is to pinch Sakusa’s cheek, to make sure that this is not a ghost of marble haunting him. He gets to do neither, because, with absolutely no preamble, standing in the hallway for everyone to hear, Sakusa asks, “Are you in love with me?”
Atsumu can still feel the toothpaste in his mouth. He still hasn’t spat out any of the words he’s been tentatively rolling around on his tongue. “I’m kinda in the middle of figurin’ that one out, Omi-kun.”
“I was in the middle of a coughing fit which miraculously stopped,” Sakusa says, like that explains everything, “so you must be the biggest idiot of all time.”
“I–” Atsumu starts, then abruptly cuts himself off. Sakusa’s cheeks are flushed, some weird combination of coughing his lungs out, then running across the hall to Atsumu’s apartment, only to deliver the most roundabout and unromantic confession of all time. Then again, Atsumu must match him by being the biggest idiot of all time, because it takes him a minute to actually connect the dots. When he does, his face splits into a silly grin, and the fear melts away, together with the memories of yellow petals.
“I just brushed my teeth,” he says, living up to the title Sakusa has just bestowed upon him.
Sakusa arches a perfect eyebrow. When Atsumu cups his cheeks, though, he looks like a pufferfish, and the contrast is so imperfect that it makes Atsumu’s heart do a roundoff. He should buy Sakusa flowers every week, to make up for all the ones Skausa has coughed up for him. He should stock up on even more blueberry soy yoghurt. He should watch an unfair amount of Sakusa’s musicals.
Sakusa deserves to be loved properly, Atsumu thinks, and pulls him into his apartment to kiss him tenderly, purposefully, unblinkingly, because he’s already missed so much of the subtext that he cannot afford to close his eyes for even a second. Sakusa melts into it without protesting, gripping at Atsumu’s shirt for support, or maybe just to make sure that he’s real, too, and Atsumu keeps him there until they’re both breathless and a little dizzy.
“You didn’t floss properly,” is the first thing Sakusa says when they pull apart. He’s flushed to the tips of his ears, and his tongue is all the sharper for it. Atsumu feels like he’s being ping-ponged between unbearably fond and stiflingly guilty. “I can’t believe I made a herbarium because of you. I don’t even like flowers, you asshole.”
And well, Atsumu doesn’t need to tilt his head or squint to see where that one came from. He’s the self-proclaimed asshole, jerkface, idiot who made Sakusa hate yellow, probably. “Sorry it took me this long to figure it out, Kiyoomi.”
“You better be,” Sakusa snorts – it’s the horrid sound Atsumu has been constantly chasing, and it makes his heart cartwheel backwards. “I have so much blackmail material. You’re going to lose every fight in this relationship, Miya.”
Atsumu laughs, and feels so many feelings seep out of him within that breath that he almost loses his footing. “Let me floss again,” he says, trying to pull away.
Except Sakusa’s fingers curl around the collar of his shirt, and the next thing he knows, Atsumu is being kissed like Sakusa is trying to pin him in place and make him read over the fine print again. Atsumu still tastes like toothpaste. If Sakusa keeps kissing him like this, toothpaste be damned, Atsumu would agree to whatever relationship contract he’s signing up for, and deal with the fine print later. There’s not much Sakusa can ask of him that Atsumu wouldn’t willingly do, anyway.
Sakusa presses him against the wall, both of his hands now on Atsumu’s hips, fingers dangerously close to the waistband of Atsumu’s shorts. Atsumu could definitely get his heart to break some world record in gymnastics, but he thinks he’d rather hand it over to Kiyoomi – he’s all bendy. He’ll know what to do with it.
🌻bonus🌻
The bouquet in Atsumu’s hands is so large that he needs to knock on the door with a knee. He peeks between the sunflowers, catches Sakusa’s frown upon opening the door, and sees the exact moment when he decides to close it in Atsumu’s face.
“We need to celebrate the end of yer herbarium, Omi-kun!” Atsumu says, wedging his leg in the small opening Sakusa has created and sneaking his way inside.
“You find this funny, don’t you?”
“Kinda,” Atsumu grins, lowering the bouquet to see Sakusa’s entire face.
“We’ve been dating for three days and I already want to break up with you.”
“But then ya’ll get hanahaki all over again, Omi.” Atsumu slips out of his shoes, pushes the bouquet in Sakusa’s hands, and grabs the vase he displays purely for aesthetics in the hallway.
“No, I think your stupidity cured me for good.”
Atsumu laughs as he makes his way through the kitchen to fill the vase with water. “Do ya hate them now?” he asks, tipping his head towards the plants.
Sakusa drops them in the vase, splaying them out so they hover over the entire table, tauntingly unblinking – both a reminder and a promise. “It’s a love-hate relationship, I think.”
“Whatcha gonna do with the herbarium, then?”
“Keep it, of course.” Sakusa grins, “I told you, didn’t I? I’ll win every single argument from now on.”
“That’s blackmail, Omi-kun,” Atsumu says, like he’s not winding his hands around Sakusa’s waist and resting his chin on his shoulder. “I’m repenting.”
“By getting me sunflowers?” Sakusa asks, with one of those perfect eyebrows arched in amusement.
“I’ve looked in yer herbarium,” Atsumu says, feeling Sakusa tense in his arms. “Ya coughed out 436 petals.”
“You counted them?”
“That’s about thirteen small sunflowers,” Atsumu says, waving at the vase with a flourish.
“What an unlucky number,” Sakusa snorts, relaxing against Atsumu’s chest. “So what, we’re even now?”
“Ya wrote a little somethin’ under every petal,” Atsumu purrs, watching with delight as Sakusa’s ears turn red. “Somethin’ I said or did on the day ya coughed them out? Omi-kun, ya really are a romantic.”
Sakusa shoves him, but it’s weak. It’s a good thing, too, because Atsumu’s heart is in his hands now – he wouldn’t want Sakusa accidentally dropping it. “I never actually properly said it, but I do love ya, Omi-kun.”
Sakusa has abandoned his half-hearted attempt at freeing himself from Atsumu’s hug, and instead squirms in his arms to cup his cheeks and press a kiss to the corner of his mouth. “Me too. 436 petals’ worth.”