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It was stupid.
Kei couldn’t sleep. He knew the correlation between looking at the phone screen and insomnia. He was still staring at the glass as if it held the cure to cancer. He’d only intended to check the time. (Lies).
He pressed the power button. Put it down. Laid back and closed his eyes.
He lasted five minutes. He picked up the phone again.
Stupid.
Hinata had sent him a meme. The timestamp read 12:32am. Nearly an hour ago, and Kei was smart enough to put his phone on silent while he was sleeping in case the volleyball idiots spammed the group chat, so it hadn’t woken him up.
The message was sent directly to him. An image of a grumpy yellow cat with black markings around its eyes that could generously be said to look like glasses.
It’s you, Hinata wrote.
Kei’s thumb hovered over the keyboard. He wrote a response and deleted it. Rewrote. Deleted.
It’s stupid. It doesn’t merit a response.
He turned the phone off again and closed his eyes. Another five minutes.
The phone didn’t buzz, but when he cracked his eyes open, he saw another message from Hinata. Another picture of the same cat, this time even grumpier and wearing a top hat. Kei had no idea how the owner got it on the animal.
Hinata: FOUND ANOTHER ONW!!!
Kei: Go to bed.
Hinata: You’re just jealous bcuz the cats handsomer than u
Kei: it’s more handsome
Hinata: so u admit it
It was not often that Hinata got one over on Kei. This meant war. Kei hadn’t been anywhere near sleep before, but he was wide awake now and googling with lightning speed. He immediately found what he was looking for: an array of orange kittens. He picked the scrawniest one he could find. An evil grin spread across his face when he realized, even better, it was a gif of the kitten letting out the whiniest meow imaginable and faceplanting into a blanket.
Kei: Look, I found you.
Hinata: MEANYSHIMA
Kei sent a devil face emoji back and locked his phone. Mission accomplished, he didn’t anticipate needing to check it again.
He looked at it again five minutes later anyway because he just really loved sleep deprivation, apparently.
Hinata: WTF?!?!? How did you mnage to find the kitten that’s ur cat’s friend?
Underneath the message was a Tik Tok video that was clearly a sequel to the gif. Sure enough, the camera zoomed out and a sandy yellow kitten with distinctive markings was shown sitting atop the couch and observing the orange kitten as it righted itself. Before Kei could form any reply, Hinata sent a slew of pictures, all with the two cats side by side. It showed them growing up, presumably through the span of a few years. Kei wasn’t an expert on cat ages, but they seemed to be full grown by the end of Hinata’s spamming.
Kei knew that it was entirely arbitrary to assign humanlike personalities to animals, but it was hard to look at the cats and not see a narrative. The two seemed to have a mostly antagonistic relationship in the beginning with all the photos from that period showing them sitting on opposite sides of the room. As they grew older, they seemed to tolerate each other more, possibly to grow more comfortable around each other. The orange cat grew into its gangly limbs and the grumpy cat’s scowl lost its edge.
Kei refused to let himself think that they liked each other because he was a cynical bastard.
(And being used to Hinata was not the same thing as liking him.)
He would admit to no one ever that he stared a good long while at the very last photo where the two cats, formerly enemies, were cuddled together on the couch with their heads resting against each other.
(He would not admit to anyone ever under penalty of death that he pictured himself and Hinata in the same position, and that it made his stomach warm and fuzzy.)
He saved the picture in a file labeled “Paleontology Lectures.” Not that Hinata would ever be going through his phone. (He did have some survival instincts.) Or that anyone would see the photo and immediately connect it to Kei and Hinata. (His teammates absolutely would. The resemblance was uncanny.) Nevertheless, Kei buried the incriminating photo amidst the stuffy dinosaur presentations and turned his phone off completely.
After that, sleep came easily, science be damned.