Work Text:
The Karasuno Saturday Farmers Market ran from seven in the morning until two in the afternoon, and Miya Atsumu had been setting up his stand since five-thirty.
This was, in his brother's words, "deeply unhinged behavior for someone who doesn't even like mornings." Atsumu had reminded Osamu that he loved mornings, actually, because mornings meant the produce was fresh and the customers were slow and he could arrange everything exactly the way he wanted it before the crowds arrived. He had a system. He had standards. He had, specifically, a particular way of stacking the strawberry crates so the biggest ones faced outward, red and gleaming in whatever light the morning chose to offer.
Osamu had said, "Yer just showing off," and gone back to sleep.
He wasn't wrong, exactly. But showing off wasn't the same as being wrong about the aesthetics.
The stand was his uncle's originally — Miya Farms, Est. 1987, painted in faded letters on a hand-cut wooden board that Atsumu had refused to replace because he thought it looked characterful. He ran it on weekends while training with MSBY during the week, which everyone said was too much and which Atsumu found, if he was being honest, grounding. The early mornings. The weight of crates. The routine of it. The way strangers handed him money and left with something good in their hands.
He liked people. He liked the transactional joy of a market. He liked saying "best peaches in the prefecture, and I'll fight anyone who disagrees" loudly enough that the peach stand two rows over could hear him, and he liked that they always sent someone over later to buy some just to check.
He was, in short, very good at his job.
The man with the basket first appeared on a Saturday in late May.
Atsumu noticed him because he walked differently than most people at the market. Most people drifted — eyes moving stall to stall, pulled by samples and signage and the smell of fresh bread from the bakery at the end of the row. This man walked with direction. Purposeful. A clean linen tote over one arm, a paper list in his free hand, a black mask over the lower half of his face even in the open air. Dark curls. Long legs. The expression of someone who had allocated exactly enough time for this errand and did not intend to exceed the budget.
He stopped at the stand without slowing down first, which Atsumu found interesting — most people did a small hesitation step, a scanning pause. This man simply arrived, as if he'd calculated the trajectory in advance.
"Strawberries," he said. Not a question.
"Best ones in the prefecture," Atsumu said, which was true. "And I'll fight anyone who—"
"How much per punnet."
"Six hundred yen. Two for a thousand."
The man looked at the strawberries. He looked at them the way Atsumu looked at opponents across a net — assessing, systematically, without giving anything away. Then he picked up a punnet from the front of the display, turned it over, examined the ones on the underside, and set it back down.
"Those aren't the best ones," he said.
Atsumu blinked. "Sorry?"
"The ones in the front. They're display fruit. The crate behind has better color saturation and the caps are fresher." He looked up from the crate and met Atsumu's eyes over the display. "I'll take two punnets from the back crate."
Atsumu stared at him for a moment.
Then he started laughing — not performatively, not the easy market-laugh he deployed to put customers at ease, but genuinely, caught off guard, the kind that came out slightly too loud.
"Okay," he said, reaching back. "Two from the back crate. Ya got it."
The man handed over exact change without looking at his wallet. He tucked the punnets into his basket and turned to leave.
"Same time next week," Atsumu called after him, mostly because the impulse to say it arrived before he could evaluate it.
The man didn't look back. But his pace didn't change either — not faster, not annoyed — just steady and measured and gone.
Atsumu watched the back of his head disappear into the market crowd.
Huh, he thought. Interesting.
♡•♡•♡
He came back the next Saturday. Same time — nine forty-three, which Atsumu clocked because he'd been half-watching the foot traffic with the specific attention of someone who doesn't admit they're watching for something in particular.
Same basket. Same mask. Same list, though he folded it differently this time — quarters instead of thirds. Atsumu noticed this the way he noticed everything, which was compulsively and with more detail than was probably warranted.
"Back crate again?" Atsumu said, when the man stopped at the stand.
The man looked at him. A measured pause, like he was deciding something.
"Yes," he said. "And cherries, if they're good."
"They're exceptional." Atsumu was already reaching for the cherries. "Came in yesterday, which means they've had exactly enough time to — here." He held one out over the display. "Try it first."
Another pause. The man's eyes — dark, observant, and doing an extraordinary amount of communicating for someone whose face was mostly covered — moved from the cherry to Atsumu's face and back.
He took it. Bit into it without theater. A brief moment of chewing. Then he set the stem down on the edge of the display board with the careful precision of someone who did not litter, ever, under any circumstances.
"Fine," he said. Which Atsumu, with the instincts of someone who read subtext professionally, translated as: yes, those are exceptional, I will now die before admitting it.
"Two punnets?" Atsumu said.
"One. And two strawberry."
"Ya got it." He bagged everything with the practiced ease of someone who'd done it ten thousand times. "Ya come every week?"
"Apparently."
"Just for the strawberries?"
"And the cherries." A beat. "When they're fine."
Atsumu grinned. He could feel it happening on his face before he'd decided to do it — wide and involuntary and probably too much for nine forty-three in the morning. "I'm Miya Atsumu," he said, handing over the bag. "In case ya wanted to know whose strawberries yer coming back for."
The man took the bag. His fingers were long and gloved — thin cotton gloves, which Atsumu filed away alongside exact change and back crate and cherry stem placed not dropped.
"Sakusa Kiyoomi," he said. And then, with the air of someone issuing a clarification rather than a pleasantry: "I know who you are. You play setter for MSBY."
Atsumu opened his mouth. Closed it. Opened it again. "Did ya look me up?"
Sakusa Kiyoomi looked at him steadily. "I follow volleyball," he said, and left.
Atsumu watched him go again. The market was busy around him — a child was crying somewhere about not getting a sample, someone's dog was losing its mind over the cheese stand — and he stood behind his strawberry display grinning like an idiot for approximately forty-five seconds before the next customer arrived.
♡•♡•♡
By the fourth Saturday, Atsumu had started setting things aside.
It was not a conscious decision. Or rather, it was — he made it consciously on the Thursday before, when he was sorting the new strawberry delivery and his hands found the best punnet almost automatically, the one where every berry was uniform and deep and the green caps were bright and uncurled, and he thought: I'll save these, and then thought: for who, and then didn't examine the answer.
He put a small square of brown paper over the punnet with his initials on it. MA. Which was deeply unnecessary since no one else worked the stand on Saturdays and no one was going to steal a reserved strawberry punnet. But it felt like it meant something, the marking of it. The small claiming of intent.
When Sakusa arrived at nine forty-three — Atsumu had stopped timing it, because timing it would mean admitting he was waiting — he reached under the display board without ceremony.
"I set some aside," he said, setting the marked punnet on the display. "Best of this week's batch."
Sakusa looked at the punnet. Then at Atsumu. Something crossed his face that the mask made impossible to read but that his eyes did not, entirely, conceal.
"You set them aside," he repeated.
"The good ones go fast." Atsumu shrugged. The shrug was casual. It was a very casual shrug. "Figured ya'd want 'em."
A long pause. The market moved around them — someone's laughter, a vendor calling out a price, the warm particular smell of June produce and cut grass.
"How much," Sakusa said.
"Same price." Atsumu said. "Six hundred."
Sakusa paid. He added a punnet of blueberries to his basket — new, Atsumu noted, he hadn't bought blueberries before — and tucked everything in with that particular careful efficiency.
"Thank you," he said. It sounded slightly stiff, like he'd remembered to say it rather than felt like saying it, but Atsumu had learned in four Saturdays that Sakusa Kiyoomi meant what he said even when he said it like a form being filed in triplicate.
"Same time next week," Atsumu said.
"Obviously," Sakusa said, and left.
Atsumu watched him navigate through the crowd — he moved through it the way he did everything, with a precise, unhurried efficiency that never bumped into anyone, never paused unnecessarily, a man who had correctly calculated the gap between every obstacle before he reached it.
"Obviously," Atsumu repeated to himself, very quietly, facing forward. He was smiling again. He pressed his lips together. It didn't help.
♡•♡•♡
Here is something Kiyoomi would not say to anyone: he didn't need this many strawberries.
He lived alone. He ate well and carefully and with the considered attention of someone who respected his body as an instrument of his work — he was a physical therapist, which meant he spent his days very aware of what bodies could and couldn't do, and he applied the same framework to his own. He had a weekly market list. It was a reasonable list. It had never, before late May, contained three punnets of strawberries.
He told himself it was because the quality was demonstrably superior to what the grocery store carried. This was true. He told himself he was making jam, which he did once, to validate the reasoning, and the jam was excellent. He told himself the walk to the market was good for him, which it was.
He did not tell himself that nine forty-three on a Saturday had become the point around which the rest of the week quietly organized itself. That he found himself noticing strawberries in recipes he read and feeling something that wasn't really anticipation about Saturday and wasn't really looking-forward-to but was, undeniably, adjacent to both.
Miya Atsumu was loud. He was bright and indiscriminate with his attention in the way of someone who genuinely liked everyone, which Kiyoomi found baffling and, more reluctantly, appealing. He flirted with elderly women buying peaches. He did voices when explaining why his nectarines were superior. He had opinions about fruit that he delivered with the conviction of someone testifying in court. He was, Kiyoomi observed clinically and unhelpfully, very handsome in the particular way of people who have no idea they're doing it — easy with their body, easy with their face, all that open charm sitting on them like they'd been born wearing it.
Kiyoomi had told himself, in May, that the man would be insufferable.
He was insufferable. He was also — and this was the problem — the most straightforwardly delightful part of Kiyoomi's Saturday.
He bought blueberries he didn't need. He bought a small jar of honey because Atsumu mentioned, while not exactly addressing Kiyoomi, that locally sourced honey had different flavor profiles than commercial, and Kiyoomi found himself listening without meaning to. He spent eleven minutes at the stand one Saturday, ostensibly examining the peach selection for the first time, and was dimly aware that he'd been there seven minutes longer than the transaction required.
When he got home that Saturday and unpacked three punnets of strawberries onto his kitchen counter, he stood looking at them for a moment.
You're buying more than you need, he thought.
The thought was not a warning. It came out as simply an observation, the way he might note that he'd run further than he planned on a morning run without minding it.
He made a smoothie with one punnet and ate the second with a spoon over the sink, which was not his most dignified moment but which tasted like June and something he declined to name more precisely than that.
♡•♡•♡
The seventh Saturday, Atsumu had a sign.
It was propped against the front of the display board: hand-lettered in marker on a square of cardboard, slightly crooked.
SMILE TAX IN EFFECT
bad mood? cost of strawberries goes up
good mood? ya might get a deal
— the management (me)
Kiyoomi read it. He read it the way he read everything — fully, once, with retention.
"That's not a legal pricing structure," he said.
"It's a vibe-based pricing structure," Atsumu said. He was already reaching for the reserved punnet. "Very different."
"Vibes aren't legally binding."
"The market doesn't have a vibe regulatory board, so."
Kiyoomi looked at the sign again. He looked at Atsumu, who was watching him with an expression that was most of a grin held back to about seventy percent, which Kiyoomi had observed was Atsumu's expression when he was pleased with himself but was performing restraint for comedic effect.
"I'd like two punnets," Kiyoomi said.
"Ya gonna smile for the deal?"
"No."
"Twelve hundred, then. Full price."
"I know. I have exact change."
He set the coins on the display board with care. Atsumu watched his hands — gloved, as always, pale cotton — count them out with the same precision he applied to everything.
"Ya could just smile," Atsumu said. "It doesn't have to be a big smile. I'm not asking for teeth."
"I don't discount my expressions," Kiyoomi said, "for market pricing."
"That's either very principled or very stubborn."
"Both," Kiyoomi said. He picked up his bag. Then, with the air of someone offering a measured concession: "Your nectarines today. Are they good?"
"Best in the—"
"Prefecture, I know. I'll take two."
Atsumu laughed — the real one, the too-loud one — and Kiyoomi turned away before whatever was happening in his chest could work itself into something identifiable.
♡•♡•♡
It happened on a Saturday in late July.
Kiyoomi arrived at nine forty-three, the market warm and thick with summer, and found the reserved punnet waiting in its usual spot — except today there was something else beside it. A small folded square of paper, the same brown paper Atsumu used for wrapping, tucked beneath the edge of the crate with the corner sticking out in a way that was either accidental or very deliberately visible.
Atsumu was busy with another customer when Kiyoomi arrived — a woman asking something about melons that was requiring Atsumu's complete theatrical expertise — and so Kiyoomi stood, as he sometimes did now, waiting without impatience. He looked at the note. He looked at Atsumu, who was gesticulating about melon provenance. He looked at the note again.
He picked it up. Unfolded it with the same care he gave to everything.
yer discount gets bigger if ya smile at me
(i know ya won't but i wanted to say it anyway)
(i set aside the good peaches too. in case ya want some.)
(ya don't have to.)
(no pressure.)
(i'm not good at this)
— atsumu
Kiyoomi read the note.
He read it again.
He folded it back along its original creases — quarters, neat — and put it in the front pocket of his tote bag, which was not the pocket he put receipts in. He was aware that he had made this distinction deliberately and that this meant something and he was choosing, at this precise moment, not to examine it.
Atsumu finished with the melon customer and turned to find Kiyoomi already waiting.
"Hey," he said. A fraction less of the usual performance in it. Just hey.
"Hey," Kiyoomi said.
He did not smile. He had thought about it, briefly, the three seconds between reading the note and Atsumu turning around, thought: I could, it would cost me nothing, he's clearly— and then thought: no. Not like this. Not as a market transaction.
"Usual?" Atsumu said.
"Yes. And the peaches."
Something shifted in Atsumu's face — not quite surprise, but close. Like he'd prepared for a different answer. He reached under the display board for the second reserved portion without being asked.
"Best of the week," he said, setting them down. His voice was a degree quieter than usual, which on Atsumu — who operated at a consistent social volume of about eight out of ten — registered as notable.
"I know," Kiyoomi said. He counted out his payment. Picked up his bag.
Then he did something he hadn't planned, which happened to him rarely enough that it registered as an event:
"I'll see you next Saturday," he said. Which was not new, as a fact — he came every Saturday, this was established. But he said it directly, to Atsumu, with eye contact, in a tone that he was aware was not the tone of someone completing a purchase.
Atsumu looked at him. And for once — for the first time in ten Saturdays — Miya Atsumu had nothing to say.
He nodded. His ears were slightly pink. Kiyoomi filed this away.
"Yeah," Atsumu managed. "Yeah, see ya."
Kiyoomi left. He walked through the summer market with the note folded in the front pocket of his tote bag and the peaches — the best of the week — wrapped in paper and warm from the morning sun.
He did not smile. His mask made it impossible to check.
But the corners of his eyes did something, alone on the market path between the bread stall and the flower vendor, that he did not try to stop.
♡•♡•♡
The following Saturday, Kiyoomi arrived at eight fifty-one.
This was fifty-two minutes earlier than usual. He was aware of this. He had noted the time when he left his apartment, noted it again when he entered the market, and spent the eight-minute walk from the gate to the fruit row telling himself that he had simply woken up early, that the morning was pleasant, that arriving early to a farmer's market was not a statement of anything.
He arrived to find Atsumu mid-setup.
Not the polished, display-perfect setup Kiyoomi had always seen — this was earlier, behind the performance, the actual labor of it. Atsumu had his sleeves rolled to the elbow and was lifting a crate of peaches with the focused economy of someone whose body was accustomed to carrying heavy things. He'd pulled his hair back, imperfectly, a few pieces falling forward. There was a streak of something — dirt, or juice — on his forearm. He was talking to the vendor two stalls over, something about a missing shipment, still managing to be expressive about it even while carrying forty pounds of stone fruit.
He turned when Kiyoomi's shadow fell across the display board.
He looked at Kiyoomi. He looked at the market around them, still sparse in the early hour. He looked at Kiyoomi again.
"You're early," he said.
"I woke up early," Kiyoomi said.
"The market's not fully set up."
"I can see that."
Atsumu set down the peach crate. He straightened. He was looking at Kiyoomi with an expression that was doing considerably more than his usual expressions, which were already doing a lot — something careful in it, attentive, like he was reading a text for the second time looking for what he missed the first.
"Strawberries are set," he said. "Obviously."
"Obviously," Kiyoomi said.
A pause. The market morning moved around them: birdsong, the creak of a stall tent, somewhere a radio playing something old and slow.
"Can I ask ya something?" Atsumu said.
"You ask me things every Saturday."
"Not like— yeah, okay. Fair." He rubbed the back of his neck. The streak of something on his forearm caught the morning light. "The note. Was it—" He stopped. Started differently. "Did ya think it was weird? The note."
Kiyoomi considered. He considered the way he did everything — fully, without rushing, giving the thing its due.
"No," he said.
"No, like — no it wasn't weird? Or no ya don't want to answer?"
"No, it wasn't weird." Kiyoomi looked at the display board. At the strawberries, arranged the way they always were — the good ones visible, the reserved section already waiting. "It was—" He paused, because he was not a person who reached for words carelessly. "It was you. It sounded like you."
Atsumu blinked. "I'm not sure if that's a compliment."
"It is."
The word sat in the morning air between them, cleaner than Kiyoomi had expected it to be.
Atsumu was quiet for a moment. This was, Kiyoomi reflected, approximately the fourth time in their eleven-Saturday acquaintance that Atsumu had been genuinely quiet, and every previous instance had been significant.
"I've been thinkin'," Atsumu said, "about asking ya something."
"Ask it."
"There's a place near here." He gestured vaguely east. "Good coffee. They do this seasonal thing with — it doesn't matter. The point is." He stopped. Made a face at himself that Kiyoomi would have found endearing if he were the type of person to use that word out loud. "Would ya want to get coffee sometime. With me. Not as a market thing. Like a—"
"Yes," Kiyoomi said.
Atsumu's mouth, which had been preparing to fill silence with additional explanation, closed.
"Yeah?" he said.
"I said yes." Kiyoomi picked up the reserved punnet. Turned it in his hands with the same deliberateness he brought to all assessments. "Good caps," he said. "Thank you."
"The caps are—" Atsumu stopped. Visibly reoriented. "Yer really gonna make me just — we're moving on?"
"I said yes. We've established the plan. Further elaboration seems unnecessary." Kiyoomi set the punnet in his basket. "How much."
Atsumu stared at him for a long moment. Then the grin arrived — the real one, not the market one, wider and less managed and bright in a way that Kiyoomi had no business noticing as specifically as he did.
"Free," Atsumu said.
"That's not—"
"Smile tax works both ways, Sakusa-san. Yer making me smile so much right now that yer getting the strawberries free."
Kiyoomi looked at him. He looked at the strawberries. He reached into his tote bag and counted out six hundred yen and set it on the display board.
"I'm paying," he said. "I want to pay. I want our transaction to be professional."
"We just agreed to go on a date."
"Our market transaction should remain professional. The date is separate."
Atsumu picked up the coins. He was laughing — quietly, this time, not the market laugh, something smaller and more private — and he dropped the coins in the lockbox with a particular gentleness, like he was handling something worth handling carefully.
"Coffee next Saturday?" he said. "After here?"
"After here," Kiyoomi agreed.
He straightened his basket. He was already turning to continue his market circuit — the honey vendor, then the bread stall, the routine of it steady and known — but he paused at the edge of the display, half-turned.
"The note," he said. "The part where you said you weren't good at this."
Atsumu looked at him. "Yeah?"
"You were fine," Kiyoomi said. And then, because the morning was early and the market was quiet and there was no one close enough to see: he let the corners of his eyes do the thing they had been doing for eleven Saturdays and never been allowed to do in view of anyone.
It wasn't a smile, technically. It wasn't teeth. It was a small, deliberate, particular arrangement of expression that Miya Atsumu — who read people for a living, who had spent eleven Saturdays cataloguing every microexpression Sakusa Kiyoomi allowed to pass through his face — understood completely.
Atsumu's hand found the edge of the display board. He held onto it.
"Ya just—" he started.
"I'll see you next Saturday," Kiyoomi said. "Before and after."
And he walked away into the summer market, basket over one arm, strawberries — the best of the week, always the best of the week — tucked safely inside.
♡ what becomes of the strawberries ♡
The coffee place was called Midori and it had a seasonal strawberry latte that Atsumu described, accurately, as life-changing. He ordered two without asking, which should have been presumptuous and which Kiyoomi found he did not mind. They sat at a table outside in the late-morning sun with the market bags between their chairs and Atsumu talked — because Atsumu always talked — and Kiyoomi listened, and somewhere in the forty-seven minutes they spent there Kiyoomi found himself answering questions, offering things unprompted, doing more of the talking than he'd done in a single sitting in recent memory.
It was, he thought later, the way it always was with Atsumu. The man made space and then stayed in it with you, which turned out to be exactly the right combination.
On the fourth Saturday after that — after coffee became routine, after their walk between stalls became less a transaction and more a circuit they did together, after Kiyoomi had started arriving at eight fifty and Atsumu had started saving a second cup of the coffee he brought from home for someone he didn't name to his neighbor Komori, who nodded knowingly — on that Saturday, Atsumu looked up from arranging the display to find Kiyoomi standing there without his mask.
He'd started wearing it less, lately. He still carried it. But the morning was warm and the market was open and Atsumu was clean and careful with the surfaces he touched and Kiyoomi had done his own quiet reasoning, the way he did everything.
Atsumu looked at his face. At the full geography of it, finally. The line of his mouth, the architecture of him, all the expression that had been translated through eyes alone for eleven weeks and was now, simply, there.
"Hi," Atsumu said. Very quietly, for him.
"Hi," Kiyoomi said.
Atsumu picked up the reserved punnet from its spot under the display board. He held it out over the display.
"Best of the week," he said.
"I know," Kiyoomi said. He took it. Their fingers touched over the crate — briefly, warmly, with the specific quality of a touch that is not accidental and both parties know it — and Kiyoomi did not move his hand immediately, and neither did Atsumu.
"Ya gonna smile at me now?" Atsumu said. He was grinning, which undermined his attempt at a neutral tone considerably.
Kiyoomi looked at him. He thought about eleven Saturdays and a folded note in a front pocket and coffee and the particular pleasure of a morning that has something good in it that you can count on. He thought about strawberries, the best ones, set aside week after week with the quiet intention of someone who does not say things plainly but means them completely.
He smiled.
It was small, and it was his — not performed, not for the market, not a tax or a discount or a transaction. Just a smile, offered freely, in the early Saturday sun.
Atsumu's expression did something complicated and then settled into something very simple.
"Yeah," he said, softly. "Okay. That one's free."
Kiyoomi paid anyway. He always paid. But he came back the next Saturday, and the one after that, always earlier than he needed to, always with a basket that had room for more than was strictly necessary.
And Atsumu always, always set aside the best ones.
♡ End♡