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The cat is napping outside one day in late summer, on the stoop outside the shop. She doesn’t come outside much anymore, not since the winter cold became too much for her old bones, and the shop owner gave her a cat bed under his desk in his office and regularly-filled food and water bowls by the window. But right now the early afternoon sun is warming her fur and her aching joints, and she knows she won’t have many more of these days before autumn comes in earnest.
(The shop owner is kind, even though his voice is always hoarse and he always smells like smoke and he will complain at every mealtime that he’s not her owner, thank you very much, and she should go back to hunting her own food like a self-respecting alley cat and stop scrounging off of his good grace.)
He’s in the shop today; the cat can hear him crooning softly to himself as he takes advantage of the lull between customers to shift inventory between shelves. The cat’s ears prick as another voice carries over on the wind, from further away.
“Yeah, nee san. It’s okay.” It’s Kageyama, the cat notes, slipping leisurely back to awareness. And he’s quiet, unusually so, which means Hinata can’t be with him.
“You really can’t help it if you can't make it,” Kageyama says, nearer now, and the cat blinks her eyes open. His voice is carefully blank, a still, placid void. She has never, not in the year and a half she’s known Kageyama and the half a year she’s liked him, heard his voice sound like that. “Don’t worry about it. Mom and Dad are both in Tokyo this week anyways, so it’s not like we’d have had anyone to drive us there even if you could have come home.”
He rounds the corner, head down and shoulders hitched up tight around his head, one hand holding a phone to his ear.
“I’m not upset,” says Kageyama. The cat thinks someone would have to be a real idiot to accept that, but whoever he’s talking to does, because he says goodbye and lowers the phone and stuffs it into his pocket, all within thirty seconds.
He spots the cat then and makes to walk past her, but she mraows insistently, tail flicking. Last winter the sound would have made him flinch and walk faster, but now he only sighs and pauses, frowning at her. “I do have to get home,” he grumbles. “We can’t all just sit around petting you all day.”
The cat doubts the veracity of that statement, considering the number of times Hinata and Kageyama get delayed on their way home in the evenings, petting her on the stoop of the shop and sharing bits and pieces of their meat buns before they get a worried call from Hinata’s mother. But she doesn’t have to argue her point, since he squats down beside her anyways, running his fingers tentatively through the rough orange fur at the top of her head.
Kageyama has improved leaps and bounds since the first time she allowed him to pet her, but he’s still not very good – his hands are big and kind of clumsy, and sometimes his palms land too hard between her ears, or his fingers are too sharp against her back. He’s bad at being gentle with smaller creatures, at getting them to stay close, which is why the cat spent the majority of the first year she knew him staying safely away in the sanctuary of Sugawara’s lap.
Sugawara’s moved on though, and she can’t be picky about alternatives. She would rather pick Kageyama than the short boy with the yellow bangs, whom she has observed to be rather bitey.
Kageyama’s fingers are so light they could be tendrils of wind shifting through her fur, like he’s afraid (as he always seems to be) that this will be the time she snaps and bats his hand away. The cat observes him through slitted eyes and resolves to endure the mussed fur that will result from when he gains confidence.
If he ever does gain confidence, thinks the cat. Kageyama’s face is set in its trademark severe scowl, but there’s something different about it this time.
She waits until he’s shifted to sitting next to her on the stoop, all ungainly elbows and knees poking every which way, before she labors to her feet. He stiffens at her movement, and then emits a relieved grunt when she clambers carefully into his lap and settles down across his thighs.
It is not all relief, perhaps. “Coach needs to stop feeding you so much,” he groans. “Maybe hunting a mouse or two again would be good for you.” In the spirit of magnanimity towards his bad mood, the cat does not nip him in retaliation.
He resumes petting her, slow and pensive. It almost lulls her back to sleep before a curious hitch in Kageyama’s chest catches her attention. She blinks one eye open, but there’s no Hinata around to make Kageyama start yelling. When she peeks up at Kageyama’s face, he is not scowling. He’s just staring out into the road, blank-faced and tired looking.
“It’s his birthday today,” he confides to the cat out of nowhere; his voice is quiet and a little shaky, nothing like how he sounded on the phone. The cat doesn’t understand, but it sounds like a problem. She can only settle more deeply into his lap and begin to purr, and hope it helps.
“It’s his birthday,” he repeats after a moment. His chest shakes again. “I wanted to go visit, but it’s too far and I can’t get a ride, and Miwa nee can’t come, so – so I can’t go. And I’ll be on my own when I get home.”
His voice quivers over on my own, and it reminds the cat how young Kageyama is: this gangly, grumpy boy, who yells a lot and doesn’t know how to be gentle. The cat thinks that Kageyama often looks like a very solitary kind of person, so tall and straight-backed and impassive, but he really isn’t much more than a kitten. He shouldn’t be on his own, at least not now. The cat knows she doesn’t understand much of what he is saying, but she understands that much.
Just as she thinks this, the cat picks up another sound: from far away comes a distinct caterwauling. It takes ten seconds before it registers with Kageyama, who twitches and looks back up the path, and another fifteen seconds before it resolves itself into anything meaningful.
“Kageyamaaaaaaaa!!”
Hurtling down the path comes a familiar noisy red blur, moving at top speed. Hinata is peddling madly on his bicycle, eyes focused on the path. Now that Hinata has arrived, the cat braces herself.
“OI!” roars Kageyama when it appears that Hinata has not seen him (the cat congratulates herself on not twitching) and Hinata brakes hard and nearly falls off his bicycle before catching himself with a foot.
“Oh, there you are,” says Hinata brightly, completely at odds with the way he was shouting Kageyama’s name to the high heavens not five seconds ago. He doesn’t even seem out of breath. “I thought you’d be much further away by now.”
“If you thought that, then why were you shouting from all the way back there?” Kageyama is trying to dredge up his usual level of derision, but doesn’t quite get there.
“Oh.” Hinata pauses and stares up at the sky, and then shrugs. “Amping myself up, I guess?”
Kageyama shrugs too, like this makes sense to him, and if the cat could roll her eyes she would.
“Why’d you start back without me, though?” asks Hinata. “The thing with Takeda sensei only took a few minutes, he just had to give me a few forms and explain what they were. I was still planning on walking – er, racing you home!”
“Oh,” says Kageyama. “I didn’t know that.”
Hinata’s eyes finally alight on the cat, and he lets out an indignant screech. (The cat does not twitch at this either.) “You’re cheating! You bailed on me so you could get extra time with Goldie san so she’ll like you better.”
(Goldie is the atrocious name Hinata insists on calling the cat. It is not her name, and she does not respond to it, and she only refrains from scratching Hinata every time he calls her that out of consideration for her friendship with Sugawara, who introduced Hinata to the cat and is perhaps the only human on this earth that she respects.)
“I – I did not, dumbass!” protests Kageyama, and although the cat thinks her eardrums will never recover, she is glad to hear that he sounds almost like himself.
“You did,” says Hinata, dismounting from his bike and marching it to lean up against the side of the shop. “We have to take this into account when we calculate who she likes better at the end of the year. I’m not buying you a month’s worth of meat buns because you’re a cheating cheater!” Kageyama splutters indistinctly, but Hinata forges on, demanding, “How much extra time did you have?”
Kageyama pauses, before admitting begrudgingly, “Maybe fifteen minutes?”
“Fifteen minutes,” Hinata mutters darkly, glaring at Kageyama. “We’ll find a way to calculate that out of the final results.” He marches inside the shop without another word.
When he comes out, he flops down next to Kageyama with a great air of irritation and thrusts a neatly wrapped meat bun unceremoniously into his face. Kageyama lifts one hand off the cat to take it.
“Coach says to tell you if this ruins your dinner he’ll know and’ll make you help the first years practice their receives all day tomorrow,” Hinata says, his mouth already full.
“Can’t be worse than helping you with your receives,” retorts Kageyama, but his voice is subdued. He’s not looking at Hinata, but the cat is, so she sees the red-haired boy’s sharp eyes.
Even though by the cat’s estimation Hinata and Kageyama are around the same age – despite being nowhere near the same size – it sometimes seems like Hinata is much wiser, and certainly much more canny than anyone expects him to be.
“Also there’s a way to overlook your egregious cheating,” Hinata decides imperiously.
“What’s egregious mean,” asks Kageyama, trying to open the wrapping of his meat bun with one hand and his teeth. At his side, Hinata makes a show of not helping him.
“I don’t know, Yachi san says it all the time.” Hinata waves a dismissive hand. “Anyways, I’ll get to share my meat bun with Goldie san, but you have to eat that one all by yourself. The entire thing.”
Kageyama pauses again. He never does that in Hinata’s presence, as far as the cat is aware. Hinata has always been the one thing to spur Kageyama on – to wake him up on sleepy mornings, to galvanize him after long, tiring days. To make him go. The cat is used to them being around, petting her and feeding her and making various high-pitched noises at each other, but Kageyama has never been so quiet around Hinata. It’s almost unsettling.
“Oi, if you’re trying to be nice to me –” starts Kageyama at last.
“I don’t know what you mean, because I’m not nice to my greatest enemy,” sniffs Hinata, “but when Goldie san realizes you’re not giving her any food, and I am, she’ll definitely claw your head off. At least a little.”
“You wish,” says Kageyama. He's finally managed to unwrap his meat bun, narrowly avoiding dropping it in his lap (and on the cat).
“Might even improve your ugly face,” says Hinata primly, and Kageyama grumbles under his breath, but he doesn’t lift his other hand from the cat to punch Hinata the way he would have six months earlier.
“You could tell me why you’ve been Grumpyama all day, if you wanted,” says Hinata after a few minutes of more or less agreeable silence. He’s been feeding the cat bits of meat from his bun, propping them on Kageyama’s knee so she can snap them up. He tries to prompt her to get into his lap by putting the food on his knee instead and nudging his and Kageyama’s legs together. She gives him a look and turns her head away. Her loyalty will not be bought.
Kageyama twitches, but doesn’t pull away. He’s been obediently working his way through his own meat bun. “I’m not grumpy. You know that’s just how my face looks.”
“Liar,” says Hinata easily, in between the high-pitched noises he’s making at the cat that she’s doing her level best to ignore. “You’ve been off all day.”
“I have not.”
Hinata grimaces. “I can always guess until I get it right.”
“We’ll be here until winter,” says Kageyama, and instantly looks regretful when Hinata crows.
“At least you admit that something’s wrong,” says Hinata. “Hm. Okay. Did you do badly on the math quiz?”
“No,” says Kageyama, balling up his meat bun wrapper. “Well, sort of, but I don’t mind that.”
“Are you upset that we take rest days from practice on Fridays?”
“Not right now, no.”
“Are you upset because we lost the practice match with Date Tech?”
“What – no. Hinata, that happened on Monday.”
Hinata shrugs, munching contemplatively. “You’re slow enough, it might have just registered today.”
“You better watch the back of your head the next time I’m up to serve,” Kageyama threatens.
“So now you’re intentionally planning on flubbing serves,” marvels Hinata, “Wah, wait ‘til I tell Ennoshita senpai about this.”
There’s a brief interlude where Kageyama tries to pluck Hinata’s head from his shoulders one-handed, all while keeping a secure hand on the cat’s flank.
“Okay, so not any of that,” Hinata concludes, running both hands through his hair to set it mostly to rights. The cat is, to put it mildly, not happy. “What about – were you sad because Takeda sensei told me to stay after to get forms for Brazil, and you thought I was ditching you?”
Kageyama tenses minutely, only enough for the cat to feel. He still shakes his head. “That’s the worst guess yet,” he says, voice gruff. “We really will be here till winter.”
“Or you could just tell me,” Hinata needles. They’re no longer feeding the cat anything (which she wholeheartedly resents) but Hinata keeps his knee pressed solidly against Kageyama’s. “You don’t have to tell me all of it, but enough so that I don’t accidentally make you more of a grouch.”
Kageyama pauses – again. “What’s it matter,” he says at last. “I’ll play fine tomorrow morning at practice and you’ll get your tosses, so there’s no need for you to bother yourself –” Hinata’s mouth clamps shut, and he reaches over and flicks Kageyama on the forehead, hard. Kageyama yelps and nearly ousts the cat from his lap. “What the hell was that for, stupid?”
“You’re the one being stupid now,” Hinata says calmly, over the cat’s infuriated hissing. “C’mon. Out with it.”
Kageyama pets the cat with both hands now, hands careful and apologetic. She calms, but decides that one more episode like that and she’s leaving and going to gossip about unruly teenage humans with the calico behind the grocer.
She senses how all the tension floods out of Kageyama at once, the way his shoulders slump, and promptly scuppers that plan.
Hinata waits, uncharacteristically quiet.
“There was a family – thing,” says Kageyama at last. His voice is tight and shaky again, and his face is tilted so he’s speaking directly at the cat’s back. His breath stirs the fur above her neck. “Or – not exactly a family thing. It was just supposed to be me and my older sister. We – we were supposed to – visit someone. But she can’t make it, so I’d have to go alone, and I can’t go alone because you need a car to get there.”
This is the most the cat has ever heard Kageyama say to Hinata in one go at this decibel level. It’s almost miraculous.
There’s a long, quiet moment where all the cat can hear are the birds chirping in the brush and the two boys breathing, one more raggedly than the other. Hinata’s face has always been easy to read, even for a cat: there’s no mistaking the dawning comprehension and surprise in his eyes as he looks at Kageyama. It’s a great source of relief that he seems to understand the situation more than she does.
“How far’s the place by car?” asks Hinata, breaking the silence, and the cat is grateful that Kageyama hasn’t looked up to see the gentle expression on Hinata’s face. She has a feeling she’d be upended from his lap completely when he tries to make his escape.
“Not far, just fifteen minutes or so,” says Kageyama. “I’d take the train, but there’s no line in that direction, and I don’t know the way well enough to bike.” He frowns at the cat. “And you don’t have a car, so why’re you asking?”
“I don’t have a car, true,” says Hinata, for once forgetting to object to Kageyama’s belligerence. “But coach Ukai does, and he’s getting off in ten minutes.”
Kageyama blanches. “I can’t ask him to drive me there!”
“Why not?” says Hinata reasonably. “He drove us thirty minutes out into the boonies and back multiple times a week to work on our quick with old man Ukai last year, and that was always after regular practice so it was so much later. It’s not even three pm yet.”
“But that was basically part of his job, stupid,” hisses Kageyama. “This doesn’t have anything to do with volleyball.”
“This is kind of more important than volleyball, isn’t it?” Kageyama jerks his head up to stare at Hinata, as if he doesn’t believe his ears, and Hinata rolls his eyes and wisely changes tack. “All I’m saying is, how would you feel over the next few days or weeks if you missed this? Bad, right? That feeling would transfer to how you play volleyball, and then that would make it coach Ukai’s business, wouldn’t it?”
This doesn’t make much sense to the cat, but Kageyama nods slowly to himself like it’s a solid argument. He looks away and down again. “We’ve gone every year,” he admits, and his voice has never been smaller.
Hinata reaches over to scratch the cat’s back; his hand is smaller and gentler in her fur, inches away from Kageyama’s. “Here’s what I’m thinking,” he says, and his voice is bright but his eyes are soft and discerning as he watches his friend’s down-turned face. “I’ll ask coach, and he can take you there and then drop you off at my house and you can sleep over. If he’s too busy, then you can come to sleep over anyways, and maybe we can get Dad to take you when he gets home from work.”
Kageyama’s hands pause in the cat’s fur. He looks up at Hinata. “Sleep over?”
“Yeah, dumbass,” says Hinata. “Don’t do it for my sake. Ma and Natsu have been asking after you since the last time. And it works – I think Ma’s making pork curry tonight.”
“She is?” Kageyama asks faintly. His eyes are wide and dark and are shining oddly.
Hinata nods. “It’s your favorite,” he informs Kageyama.
“How did you know that?” The shakiness is back in Kageyama’s voice.
Hinata levels Kageyama with an unimpressed look. “I may be stupid, but I’m not that stupid. I notice things.” He gets to his feet and stretches. “You wait here, Grumpyama, okay? Don’t run away again.”
“I didn’t run away, dumbass,” snaps Kageyama reflexively, but he doesn’t protest when Hinata uses the unusual height advantage to violently ruffle his hair for once before heading back inside the store.
The seismic tremors in Kageyama’s chest are back, and they’ve increased in frequency and strength. The cat chances a glance up, and realizes Kageyama’s face has gone all twisted and pink and wet, his eyes squinched shut. It’s not quite something she understands – she tries purring to get him to stop, but it only makes him hiccup, once, quietly. A small sound that escaped without his permission.
Just a kitten, she finds herself thinking again, looking at his rounded shoulders, the forlorn dip of his head.
Hinata and the shop owner come out five minutes later, after Kageyama’s dried his face with the inside of his t-shirt. The cat scrambles out of Kageyama’s lap so he can stand.
“Coach, you don’t have to –” begins Kageyama, but the shop owner just twirls his set of keys at him.
“It’s no trouble, Kageyama,” says the shop owner, gruff and firm. His earring glints in the sun. “I’m off shift, and there’s a sports store I was planning on visiting in the area anyways.”
Kageyama clears his throat. “You – you don’t know what the area is, coach.”
The shop owner coughs. “Well. There’s probably a sports store there and we need to stock up on some – some things anyways.” He steps off the stoop. “I’ll start up the van. Goldie san, you should head inside, Ma’ll get out your dinner soon.” The cat hisses at him in response to the name, and he grins before leaving Kageyama and Hinata and the cat alone.
Hinata looks down at the cat, who’s busied herself twisting around and between Kageyama’s legs. “You had five extra minutes with Goldie san,” he realizes sadly. “I guess I’ll have to figure out how to calculate that out of the final tally after all.”
“Good luck with that,” scoffs Kageyama. “Hey. If you want – you could come.” He's staring at his shoes, and his voice has gone very quiet. Hinata gapes up at him, eyes sparkling.
“You want me to come?” he breathes.
“I just said that, did you lose your hearing?” barks Kageyama, but Hinata’s eyes have gone soft again, and he doesn’t seem to register his friend’s tone.
“Okay, Yamayama, I’ll come,” he says easily.
“Don’t call me that,” Kageyama grouses, flushing gently. Behind the shop, the shop owner’s van loudly rumbles to life.
“I can go to the store with coach,” offers Hinata, tucking his hands into his pockets. “Or – whatever you want, really.”
“I – I don’t know. I’ll decide when we get there, I guess,” Kageyama says, but Hinata doesn’t seem to mind, humming quietly to himself.
Hinata squats to pet the cat, who decides to oblige him once this afternoon. Hinata scratches between her ears and down the arch of her back, and says, quieter than she believed him capable of being, “Thanks for looking out, Goldie san.”
She doesn’t know what she’s being thanked for, exactly, but Hinata flashes her a bright, conspiratorial smile anyways. She watches as the shop owner turns the van around to the front of the store, and Kageyama opens the passenger door and swings in with Hinata climbing in behind, and thinks about how Kageyama may not be so bad at being gentle with smaller creatures, at getting them to stay close.
She watches the van drive away until it’s a yellow smear, dissolving in the heat-muddled distance, and then curls back up on the stoop and goes back to sleep.