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It started innocently enough. During the third set of the second Jackals-Adlers match of Hinata’s first pro season, he slipped on sweat in between points and fell, rather serendipitously, he thought at the time, into Miya Atsumu’s arms.
“Gwah! Sorry!” Hinata said intelligently.
“No worries, sweetheart,” Atsumu said, snickering. He pushed Hinata gently upright.
All that volleyball practice on sand, and Hinata was defeated by a puddle of sweat. During a pro match on live television. He was sure his face was now approximately the color of his hair. This would inevitably be making the rounds later on Japanese Volleyball Twitter.
He sighed and readied himself for Kageyama’s serve. It was one of the most terrifying serves in the V-League, after all. Across the court, Kageyama seemed to be glaring intensely at the volleyball currently clutched in his hand.
Oh dear. Hinata remembered from his high school days that Kageyama’s service aces were directly correlated with the intensity of his glares. And he was absolutely tearing this volleyball apart with his eyes, as if it had personally murdered his entire family.
At the whistle, Kageyama tossed the ball into the air and hit it with a force so hard that Hinata instinctively ducked as it rocketed over his head like a missile.
“OUT!” Meian shouted behind him. Hinata turned just in time to catch the ball careening into the opposite wall with a bang that he didn’t even know was possible. Not even close.
“What the heck,” Hinata muttered to himself. Kageyama’s serves were usually so consistent. Then, with a wince, Hinata looked up and realized that his former teammate was now sending the death glare at Atsumu.
Wow, he thought. Was this flubbed serve because of his incident with Atsumu earlier? What, was Kageyama jealous that his high school teammate now had another setter?
Well. If this information could neutralize the problem that was Kageyama’s serve, Hinata was not above using it to his advantage.
After a full rotation, as the scoreboard continued to grow with the match agonizingly close, Hinata got his chance. Right before Kageyama got the ball, and against his rational judgment, Hinata bounded up to Atsumu and gave him a hug. He knew in the back of his head that he was on live television, but decided that was a problem for later. Right now, they needed to win this match.
“Aww, what’s this for?” Atsumu said in a mock-singsong voice.
“For being the best setter ever!” Hinata said cheerfully, just loud enough for everyone on the court to hear. He looked up at Kageyama; sure enough, his eyes were full of murderous rage.
The ref blew his whistle, and Hinata bounded back to his spot, slightly nervous. This public humiliation better have been worth it. He couldn’t even imagine the social media commentary for this blunder. He was not above ruining his professional reputation for a competitive edge against his former setter, but ruining his professional reputation for no reason definitely crossed the line.
Kageyama somehow looked even more furious now than the first time. Right as the whistle blew, he jumped up and delivered another cannon of a serve—
directly into the net, nearly blasting a hole right through it.
“Woo!” Hinata cheered with his teammates. Two missed serves from Kageyama in a row! He locked eyes with Atsumu, who gave him a little knowing smirk.
Hinata jumped excitedly. The Schweiden Adlers would not know what hit them.
When the third Jackals-Adlers game came along, Hinata was determined to win again. This meant that his new tried and tested anti-Kageyama game strategy would have to be flawless.
Of course, he had prepared beforehand. He pored over game tapes from the current season—where Kageyama had played (and won) viciously against other teams, and where, coincidentally, he was not playing against any ex-teammates. He watched post-game interviews, where Kageyama more or less referred to the last Jackals game as a fluke, giving no real useful information. Most importantly, he studied all of Kageyama’s missed serves last game, trying to map a correlation between the type of action and the setter’s corresponding reaction.
The conclusion of all this research (which he conducted concurrently with his volleyball practices) was, as he told Atsumu in a private meeting that morning, that more outrageous displays of affection seemed correlated with worse (and more violent) performance. Thus, the only way to proceed was to escalate.
This time, Hinata and Atsumu decided to start acting friendly before the first serve—for an even greater effect, because Hinata remembered vaguely from physics class that every action has a stronger reaction, or something like that. They came onto the court together hand in hand.
Their teammates shot them some confused looks. “What—?” Barnes asked, gesturing vaguely in the direction of Hinata and Atsumu’s clasped hands.
“Don’t worry, it’s a game strategy!” Hinata chirped.
“What kind of game strategy—?”
“Oh, I know!” Bokuto broke in. “We’re trying to show the other team how close friends we are! We should all hold hands with each other!”
“Exactly,” Atsumu said. “Can you imagine Kageyama holding hands with Ushiwaka?”
An image of this flashed in Hinata’s mind, and it was so disturbing that he suddenly felt like throwing up.
The Jackals won the coin toss, which meant that Hinata and Atsumu had to wait a few points before making their next move. But soon, the score exactly even as it always was, Kageyama was up to serve, and it was their time to strike. Hinata immediately scooted over to Atsumu and slung his arm over his shoulder, leaving the left wide open.
“Hello there, Shouyou-kun!” Atsumu sang as he tousled his hair.
“What are you doing?” Sakusa hissed from behind them.
“Relax, Omi-Omi!” Atsumu grinned. “We won’t need any defense on this serve.”
Sakusa looked unimpressed, but he just sighed and turned away to face the net. Sure enough, behind it, Kageyama was practically boiling with anger.
As soon as the ref blew the whistle, Kageyama jumped, attacking the ground as if he had a grudge against it, and whacked the volleyball with a force so strong that it should have torn his own arm off. He was clearly aiming for the left, where Hinata had just vacated, but instead of going over the net it went wide and nearly took off the ref’s head.
There was a collective gasp from the crowd. Kageyama, missing a serve against the Jackals again???
The ref blew his whistle angrily. The crowd gasped again—he was holding a yellow card.
The Adlers head coach quickly stood and called a timeout. Hinata watched as Kageyama, head down, shuffled forlornly to the bench. He almost felt a little bad.
“I figured out why Kageyama keeps missing his serves!” Bokuto said excitedly between gulps of water.
Hinata froze. He felt heat rising to his cheeks, but didn’t quite know why. It wasn’t like he was doing anything wrong, so why did he feel like he was about to get caught? (And why was he blushing?)
“Tell us, Bokuto-san!” Atsumu said cheerily.
“Well, I’ve started flexing my biceps every time he’s about to serve, and my biceps are so big that he gets scared!” Bokuto said.
“Correlation does not equal causation,” Sakusa muttered, just within earshot.
“THAT’S WHAT AKAASHI SAID!!!” Bokuto wailed. “But I don’t know what those words mean!!! And my biceps are big!”
When they got back on the court, Kageyama had been replaced by Schweiden’s backup setter. The Jackals won again, by a larger margin this time, but Hinata couldn’t help feeling a little sad that he didn’t get to actually beat his rival.
“Okay, I have a plan,” Hoshiumi said. The rest of the Adlers were moping around in their locker room, trying to gain a semblance of composure before the post-game press conference.
Kageyama finished toweling off and zipping up his team jacket. Honestly, between the recent development of a too-close-for-comfort friendship between two certain MSBY Black Jackals players and the subsequent getting benched against and losing to said MSBY Black Jackals players, he was kind of too emotionally exhausted to hear about any plans Hoshiumi might have.
Hoshiumi barreled on, oblivious to Kageyama’s woes. “Next time we face the Jackals, we throw their strategy back at them.”
This got Kageyama interested. “What do you mean?”
“Haven’t you noticed? Hinata and Atsumu are acting that way on purpose. They only do it before you serve to throw you off.”
Kageyama frowned. “Oh.” He thought about it. “But how do we throw that strategy back at them? I don’t have easy access to Hinata across the net.”
“No, no,” Hoshiumi said, as if Kageyama were an idiot. “You and me. We show Hinata that you have a new wing spiker too, and that we’re great friends, and that you can do the quick with me or whatever. We make him miss his spikes, hopefully get him benched, and then seize victory because he’ll no longer be on the court to interfere with your game.”
“Oh.” That made a lot of sense.
“Why don’t you just talk to him?” Ushijima broke in.
“Talk to who?” Kageyama said.
“Hinata. Just tell him that you like him instead of playing around.”
Hoshiumi sighed theatrically. “In situations like this, straightforward is the last thing we need to be. We need to fight fire with fire. We need to triumph as the team that’s better at psychological warfare.”
Kageyama nodded along. After all, he was never one to back away from a challenge posed by his greatest rival.
Ushijima just shook his head. He looked slightly distressed, but didn’t push the matter further, because the press conference was about to start and they needed to vacate the locker room.
Riding high on their recent victories, Hinata entered his fourth Adlers game with an air of unbridled optimism. And, of course, holding hands with Atsumu, because that worked like magic last time.
Kageyama glared at him from the sidelines. Hinata bounded over to his former setter. “Are you playing today?” he chirped. For all his insistence on neutralizing his rival, he really did miss playing against him last time.
Kageyama didn’t respond, instead unleashing a terrifying smile, the serial killer one that appeared during the rare times he had something truly devious planned.
What the heck did that mean? Hinata ran back to his side of the net, but now he was kind of scared. Had Kageyama found a way to become immune to the strategy? (This inexplicably made Hinata sad to consider, as if it meant Kageyama no longer cared about him, even though he could not understand how those two things were related.) But the game was about to start, and he had many other things to focus on, so he didn’t think much of this exchange until Kageyama and Hoshiumi pulled off an insane quick during the first volley.
It wasn’t like Hinata didn’t know that there were other hitters capable of doing the freak quick with Kageyama, even though seeing it had still always made him uncomfortable. But then, after scoring the first point, Kageyama picked up Hoshiumi and spun him around in the air, and Hinata’s stomach dropped to his knees as he realized oh, Kageyama really does have other hitters, and Kageyama never did that with me?!
He did not recognize this feeling; all he knew that he did not like it at all. He bent over, feeling as if he was either going to puke or cry or maybe do both at the same time.
“Shouyou-kun!” someone said. “The next point is about to start!”
Hinata finally shook himself out of his stupor. Atsumu was watching him, slightly concerned.
“Okay,” he said. He bent down to his receive position, but he still felt slightly wobbly and lightheaded. When the ball arrived—an absolute missile of a serve from Ushijima targeted right at him—it bounced off of his shoulder and into the stands.
“Sorry!” He winced. Ushijima’s serves were difficult to receive, but this wasn’t that. He had been unable to hold his arms in place.
By some miracle, he was able to receive the next ball, if messily, which Atsumu hammered straight into the opposite court. A few more unremarkable points occurred, allowing him to get back into the game, until a particularly high receive by Inunaki had him noticing something odd on the other side of the court. Kageyama and Hoshiumi were sending each other…air kisses?
Hinata’s stomach dropped again, and this time he actually stopped in the middle of his jump approach. “Shouyou-kun!” Atsumu called, setting a quick to him, but he was not there to spike it
The telltale whistle of a timeout being called. Shoot, Hinata thought to himself, squeezing his eyes shut. The Jackals were a deep team with a strong roster. This surely meant that he was being benched.
He walked over to the sidelines, avoiding eye contact with his concerned teammates.
“Are you doing alright, Hinata?” Coach Foster asked.
Hinata shrugged. “I guess not.”
“No worries. Get some rest. Barnes, you’re going in.”
Hinata plopped down on the bench. He hugged his knees close to his chest as he watched the rest of the game, and his eyes kept wandering over to the other team.
Somewhere above them in the stands, a trio of young men decked out in both Adlers and Jackals merch were watching the game very intently, cheering at every point no matter who scored it to the irritation of all the fans around them.
“They’re playing a…very interesting version of volleyball,” Asahi observed.
Daichi nodded in agreement. “Making your boyfriend jealous on court is not a match strategy I’ve ever seen.”
“But hey, Hinata and Kageyama have always been intense,” Suga said. “Maybe that’s why they went pro and we didn’t.”
The Jackals lost. Sakusa pulled him aside in the locker room, saying there was an important conversation that needed to be had.
“So we were just going to let this slide, since it was winning us games, but you need to stop whatever you’re doing with Atsumu and tell Kageyama how you feel,” Sakusa said bluntly.
“T-tell Kageyama how I feel? What do you mean?” Hinata stammered. His face suddenly felt hot, but he couldn’t figure out why.
Sakusa pinched the bridge of his nose, as if he were dealing with a massive incoming headache. “I told Meian I didn’t want to deal with this,” he muttered to himself before continuing to speak to Hinata like he was an idiot. “Kageyama clearly has feelings for you. You are riling him up and making him jealous by flirting with Atsumu on the court. Now that he’s doing the same to you with Hoshiumi, it would be prudent for both of you to talk out your feelings, because this advantages no one and makes all of us look stupid on TV.”
Kageyama…has feelings? For him?
Hinata blushed. Kageyama having feelings in general was already a foreign concept. The thought of his old teammate having feelings of the romantic kind, for him, made him feel achy and bubbly and wonderful inside, like he wanted to fly out of his own body. All of a sudden, a lot of things started to make sense. As long as I’m here, you’re invincible. Long days and weekends in their third year spent entirely at Hinata’s house. The first hug he’d ever seen Kageyama accept from anybody being at the Haneda Airport, Hinata standing atop dreams that would fly him to Brazil and back, Kageyama about to achieve greatness in Japan.
And what about him? Even now, years after high school, after playing beach on the other side of the world and going pro, the first setter he could think of was still Kageyama. And whenever interviewers asked him about his plans for the future—5, 10, 20 years—the only thing he knew for sure was volleyball, and the black hair, blue eyes, and permanent scowl that came with it.
He’d never thought about it this way before, but he supposed that he’d always known. It made sense, like that moment of clarity he got sometimes at the peak of his spike, when time slowed to a halt and he knew exactly where and how to hit the ball.
“Oh my god, I have feelings for Kageyama,” Hinata realized aloud.
“Okay, I’m glad you figured that out,” Sakusa said tiredly. “Please go deal with that and stop making the rest of us have to witness your weird mating ritual.”
Hinata’s cluttered Osaka apartment was just a little too small for both of them. But he was really too nervous to notice. Every cell in his body seemed to jitter like a swarm of bees. He was sure he was going to start actually making buzzing noises any minute.
“T-tea?” he managed as he led Kageyama to the table in the kitchen area.
Kageyama just nodded, combing over the room with his eyes. Hinata pretended not to notice the disapproving tilt of his eyebrows as he surveyed the piles of unfolded laundry, stacks of paperwork, and miscellaneous other items strewn across the floor. Hm, maybe I should clean my apartment, he thought. And then: This would’ve been a nice thought to have before inviting my crush over.
Hinata walked over to the kitchen and poured some matcha into two of his more presentable mugs, a Karasuno one with his name on it and one with pictures of dogs. It was all he could do to not spill hot tea all over his hands.
This was something they’d done so many times before, in those many weekends that Kageyama would spend over at his house. They would toss sets to each other in the backyard, then head inside for tea and dinner and sometimes late night homework, if they were both on the verge of failing again, and sleep, if Kageyama was too tired to make it back to his own house. But this felt different. This felt like moving to Rio—exhilarating, terrifying change.
Hinata set the mugs on the table and perched himself on the chair that wasn’t taken. His knee bounced up and down rapidly, creating ripples in his tea as he drank.
“What’s gotten into you?” Kageyama said.
Wow. Hinata had forgotten what it felt like to be the object of attention for those deep blue eyes. His chest fluttered, even though said attention was quite judgmental at the moment.
“Uh-um…” he started, very aware of how his grasp on the Japanese language was dangerously slipping away from him. “I’m sorry I flirted with Atsumu on the court. I just noticed it made your serves worse. I don’t actually like him like that, but I didn’t know you felt this way for me—”
“Felt what?” Kageyama had visibly recoiled. His tone was icy.
“Uhh….” What if Sakusa was wrong? he now thought in a panic. Sakusa was always right, but this could be the exception. Kageyama certainly didn’t look in love with him right now.
He blamed the next words that came out of his mouth on this confused jumble of thoughts. “W-well, Sakusa told me…you see, apparently everyone thinks—he said you like me, and then I realized I don’t like seeing you and Hoshiumi—but I told him I realized I like you too, because I always want to play with you, because whenever we play it’s always like BAM and it feels perfect, and when I’m around you my stomach is always like WOOSH, and when you’re here I’m invincible—”
What happened next was a blur. Hinata, stuck inside the word soup he was currently ejecting from his mouth, only noticed his vision going black before something soft brushed against his lips. He startled and jumped up, knocking his forehead against something hard.
“Ow!!!” he yelled, at the same time Kageyama shouted, “What was that for, boke?”
Hinata rubbed his forehead and looked up. Kageyama was glaring down at him like usual, but he was blushing, and Hinata wondered how he had never noticed just how much fondness was hidden behind that scowl.
“You kissed me,” Hinata said, awestruck, the way he felt whenever he successfully hit a new kind of spike for the first time.
“I win,” Kageyama said.
“What kind of a love confession is that???” Hinata demanded. Then he thought about it and realized that no relationship between the two of them could possibly be normal. It would always be messy and too much, fistfights during their first year of high school and injuring themselves racing to the gym.
“You have a bruise on your forehead,” Kageyama said.
“And whose fault is that, Stupidyama?”
“You headbutted me,” Kageyama pointed out.
“Yeah, but you took me by surprise!”
Kageyama suddenly withdrew awkwardly. “Wait, you…wanted to, right?”
“Duh,” Hinata said incredulously.
“You haven’t done this with Atsumu, have you?”
“Of course not!” Hinata nearly shouted. What kind of a stupid question was that? But then an image of Kageyama and Hoshiumi popped into his head, and he couldn’t help but ask, “And Hoshiumi…?”
Kageyama shuddered. “No,” he said quickly, as if this image was equally as unpleasant to him.
“I actually don’t want to think about Atsumu or Hoshiumi right now,” Hinata said.
Kageyama nodded in agreement. “I just want to think about you,” he said shyly.
Somehow, that was the most romantic thing Hinata had ever heard in his life. He leaned up to kiss him again.