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Sakusa Kiyoomi did not gossip. He observed, catalogued, and, on rare occasions, delivered a verdict so accurate it ruined your whole week.
“You’re moronsexual,” he said, not looking up from the granola bar he was unwrapping.
Atsumu nearly dropped the water bottle he was holding. “I’m what?”
“Moronsexual.” Sakusa peeled the wrapper the rest of the way, folded it into a neat square and glanced over. “You are attracted to idiots. Or, more specifically, one idiot in particular.” He pointed his thumb behind him. “I’ve watched you go soft in the brain every time Bokuto opens his mouth for the past three months. It’s basically a diagnosable condition at this point.
Across the gym, said idiot was attempting to explain to Hinata why owls could theoretically beat sharks in a fight “if it came down to it,” using a volleyball as a visual aid for reasons Atsumu was sure no one had asked him to provide.
He did not go soft in the brain. Atsumu’s brain was a fortress. It had survived puberty, three years of national-level serving pressure, and living with Osamu, who did not believe in privacy, or mercy.
Atsumu’s brain took one look at Bokuto Koutarou mid-sentence, grinning and being completely wrong about owl anatomy and felt his face getting warm anyway.
“I hate that you are right,” Atsumu muttered.
Sakusa took a bite of the granola bar and said nothing else.
-
1)
It happened during a water break, which felt insulting really. Atsumu deserved to be wrecked by something dramatic. Instead it was by Bokuto toweling off his neck, catching Atsumu watching, and beaming back at him like Atsumu being there was a nice surprise, rather than the inevitable result of them having spent the whole afternoon in the same gym.
“Hey Tsumu, quick question,” Bokuto said. “Do fish get thirsty?”
Atsumu blinked. “Do…what?”
“Fish.” Bokuto gestured vaguely, as if picturing one in front of him. “They live in water. But do they, like, want water? Or is that just where they live and they don’t even think about it. Like how you don’t go around thinking about how you’re surrounded by air.”
“Bokkun. They’re in the water. There’s no…there’s no thirst mechanism required I guess?”
“But how do they know they’re not thirsty if they never get un-thirsty?”
“That doesn’t- that’s not how-” Atsumu opened his mouth to construct an actual rebuttal and found, humiliatingly, that no words would arrive. Bokuto was looking at him with such genuine curiosity, brows furrowed, entirely serious, like he had actual concern for the fish, and Atsumu’s higher brain function simply clocked out for the day.
“I don’t know,” Atsumu said weakly. “Ask a marine biologist.”
“I don’t know any marine biologists.”
“Well now ya know how I feel,” Atsumu said, and fled toward the water cooler before his face could finish turning red, while behind him Bokuto called out, wounded “Why aren’t we friends with any marine biologists? We should fix that!”
Atsumu drank an entire cup of water in one go and still felt parched. Ironically.
That night, lying in bed and absolutely not thinking about Bokuto, Atsumu found himself typing do fish get thirsty into his phone at 12:47am. After far longer than he would like to admit reading about gill anatomy he put his phone down and lay there furious at himself for several minutes.
-
2)
They were on the team bus home after an away game, the city lights sliding gold and blurred in the windows, and Bokuto was scrolling his phone, focused like he could have been watching game footage.
“Tsum-tsum, look,” He turned his screen around showing Atsumu a picture of a hedgehog in a tiny raincoat. “This is the best thing I’ve seen in my entire life.”
“It’s a hedgehog in a coat.”
“Exactly. Do you think he chose that outfit himself?”
“He’s a hedgehog, Bokuto. Someone put it on him.”
“Yeah, of course, he doesn’t have thumbs. But do you think he approved it? Like was there a moment where they held up two raincoats and he pointed at his favourite one with his little paw.”
Atsumu turned round fully to argue that this was, definitely, not possible and made the catastrophic error of actually looking at Bokuto’s face while he said it. All lit up in gold from the streetlights, absolutely delighted with his own nonsense, waiting for Atsumu’s reaction like it mattered more to him than anything else at this exact moment.
“...yeah,” Atsumu said instead, voice coming out softer than intended. “Yellow’s a good colour on him.”
Bokuto looked so pleased that Atsumu had to stare very hard out the window for the rest of the ride, silently cursing every part of his own voice for betraying him like that.
Sakusa, a few rows up, didn’t turn around, but Atsumu heard him mutter, “diagnosable” anyway.
-
3)
Practice had run long. The gym was mostly empty, evening light casting a faint orange glow through the high windows, and Bokuto still bouncing balls off his palm, unwilling to stop moving even when everyone else had gone still.
“Hey, so, important question,” he said. “If you had to fight one horse-sized duck, or a hundred duck-sized horses, which would you-”
“Bokuto, I am begging you,” Atsumu said, dragging a hand down his face, “not to ask me this.”
“But I need to know your strategy though! It’s important for team cohesion.”
“How is it relevant to volleyball, in any way?”
“Everything’s relevant to volleyball if you think about it hard enough.” Bokuto set the ball down, sat next to him on the bench, close enough that their knees bumped, and looked at him with total, unblinking seriousness. “So, which one?”
Atsumu meant to say something dismissive. Instead he found himself actually considering it, dead serious, because apparently three months of Bokuto Koutarou had re-wired something fundamental in his brain, until he turned towards Bokuto, “The hundred duck-sized ones. Easier to pick off individually.”
Bokuto’s entire face lit up. “See, that’s what I said! Everyone else says the big one, but that thing could flatten you in a single hit. A hundred little horses, You take ‘em out one at a time. Crowd control, ya know?”
“I can’t believe you got me to have an opinion on this.” Atsumu said, mostly to himself.
“You’re welcome." Bokuto replied, entirely missing the point, and slung an arm loose and easy along the back of the bench, close enough that his fingers brushed Atsumu’s shoulder, and Atsumu’s brain went, once again, gently and completely offline.
He would lose a fight to a hundred duck-sized horses any day of the week if it meant Bokuto kept looking at him like that.
-
4)
“Okay but hear me out,” Bokuto said, mouth full of onigiri, gesturing wildly with the other half. They were tucked into a back booth at Onigiri Miya, the shop in that quiet period between the lunch and dinner time rushes, Osamu wiping down a counter within easy eavesdropping distance. Bokuto had decided this was the perfect moment for philosophy apparently. “What if the reason we forget our dreams is that dream-you doesn’t want real-you to know what happened.”
“That’s not…Bokkun, that can’t be a real theory.”
“It could be! Like, what if dream-you has a whole secret life and every morning he’s just like, nope, can’t let ‘em know.”
“So my dream self is running some kind of underground operation that I’m not cleared for?”
“Exactly.” Bokuto looked thrilled to be understood. “You get it.”
“I do not get it. I’m agreeing so you’ll stop talking.”
“You’re not, though. Your ears go red when you’re actually mad. They’re not red right now.” Bokuto leaned across the table to peer at the side of Atsumu’s head as if to double check, entirely unaware of the two inches of space suddenly missing between them. “Yeah. Not red. You like the theory.”
Atsumu very deliberately did not react to the fact that Bokuto knew him well enough to know what his ears did or did not do when he was mad, because that implied a level of attention that would end him if he thought about it for longer than half a second.
“My ears do not turn red,” he said, voice not quite steady.
“They so do. It’s cute.” Bokuto said it the way he said everything, loud, immediate, zero calculation behind it, and then went right back to his onigiri like he hadn’t just detonated a small bomb inside Atsumu’s heart.
Atsumu spent the rest of the visit staring at the counter, silently reciting serve rotations to try and reboot his brain and failing completely, while Osamu watched the whole thing with a deeply unbothered expression, as if he’d seen it coming for weeks.
-
5)
It was raining, the kind of steady grey downpour that made the gym windows fog, and they were the last two left, waiting under the awning for it to let up before making a run for the station.
“You know what’s crazy,” Bokuto said, watching the rain, “is that clouds are basically just, like, floating lakes. And they just decide to fall on us sometimes. Barely even a warning.”
“That’s- okay, that’s actually not completely far-fetched, weirdly.”
“Really?” Bokuto turned to him, smiling again, water dripping off the awning edge between them. “Because I was joking.”
“Well, don’t. You’re accidentally smart sometimes and it’s very disorienting.”
“Is that a compliment?”
“It’s a warning,” Atsumu said, though it hadn’t come out as sharp as he wanted, because Bokuto was looking at him now instead of the rain, hair damp at the edges from the walk over, sleeves pushed up, close enough that Atsumu could feel the warmth radiating off him despite the cold air.
“Tsumu,” Bokuto said, quieter than usual, like the rain had turned the volume down on everything.
“What?”
“You’re staring.”
“I am not.”
“You’re doing it right now.”
Atsumu was, in fact, doing it right now, and he had no defense, and Bokuto was smiling at him still with something that wasn’t quite his usual blinding grin, something smaller and warmer, and Atsumu shivered in a way that had nothing to do with the cold.
“The rain’s messing with your head,” Atsumu managed to get out. “That’s all this is.”
“Maybe,” Bokuto said, not sounding convinced at all, and didn’t look away and Atsumu had never in his life wanted to get home quicker.
-
+1)
Atsumu had barely spoken to Bokuto in two days and was handling it the way he handled most things he didn’t want to look at, which was badly.
He’d overcorrected in practice, chasing every ball harder than he needed to, snapping when Hinata missed a set he could’ve saved, going quiet at dinner in a way that made even Sakusa take notice and send him a you good? text from across the table.
Atsumu was good. He was fine. He was a twenty-five-year-old professional athlete who had a very normal, very manageable crush on his teammate, and it was absolutely not spiraling into anything larger, and he was absolutely not lying face-down on his living room floor at nine p.m. because his brain wouldn’t stop running the numbers.
The numbers being, Bokuto was easy. Bokuto liked everyone, he loved loudly and without any sort of filter. The thing on the bus, and in the rain, that was just Bokuto. That was his whole deal. He made everyone feel like they were the only person in the room, and Atsumu had made the terrible mistake of believing it meant something specific to him, when really he was just one more person catching the edge of a light that shone on everybody.
He was mid argument with himself when someone knocked on his door.
He knew it was Bokuto from the rhythm of the knock, which was deeply embarrassing to admit to himself honestly.
“Hey.” Bokuto stood in the hallway in a hoodie, hair flat from the walk over, none of his usual bounce. “You’ve been weird. Since the other day.”
“I haven’t been weird.”
“Tsum-tsum.” His name came out in such an uncharacteristically quiet tone from Bokuto that any argument Atsumu had, died right there in his throat.
“Can I come in?” Bokuto asked. “I’ll leave if you want, I just, I don’t wanna leave if you’re not actually okay.”
Atsumu stepped back and let him in, mostly because he didn’t trust his own voice yet.
They ended up sitting on the floor, backs against the couch, knees loosely touching, the overhead light off and just the kitchen lamp on a low setting. Bokuto didn’t say anything for a while, which was its own kind of unusual, and Atsumu found the silence worse than any dumb question about ducks or hedgehogs.
“I keep doing this thing,” Atsumu finally said, staring at his own hands, “where I decide something’s real and then remember it’s probably not, and I hate it. I hate how fast I go from zero to…to stupid about it.”
“About what?”
Atsumu almost lied. He’d built his career out of confident and controlled things. Serves, tosses, a face that gave nothing away when it mattered. But Bokuto was sitting there in the low light, not pushing, just waiting, in a way that made lying about it feel like it would cost more than it would save.
“You,” Atsumu admitted, quietly. “About you. Because I know how you are with everybody. I know that when you do that thing, where you look at me like…like I’m not just one of the guys, I get stupid and I let myself believe it means somethin’ it probably doesn’t, and then I spend two days convincin’ myself I’m an idiot for readin’ into it. Which I am. So.”
He expected Bokuto to laugh it off or get flustered and change the subject, or say something well-meaning and slightly wrong, the way he sometimes did.
Instead Bokuto went still, considering, in a way that felt entirely unfamiliar.
“I think,” he said slowly, like he was choosing each word on purpose, “you’re so used to staying one step ahead of everyone that when something’s just plain and simple, you go looking for the catch instead of just believing it.”
Atsumu looked up at him.
“I’m not good with everybody the way I am with you,” Bokuto went on. “I know it looks like I am, ‘cause I’m loud about everything, but I don’t text everybody about hedgehogs at midnight or ask them about the inner musings of fish. I’ve been trying to get your attention for weeks with the dumbest stuff I could think of because it works, ‘cause you laugh a real laugh, not just a polite one, and I like bein’ the reason for it.” He paused. “I wasn’t lookin’ at you weird under the awning before because it’s just what I do. I was looking at you like that ‘cause I’ve wanted to for a while and finally let myself.”
Atsumu’s heart felt like it was doing backflips inside his chest.
“You could've just said that,” he managed, voice thinner than he would have liked. “Instesd of askin’ me about duck-sized horses for three weeks.”
“Would you have believed me if I just said it?”
Atsumu opened his mouth to argue and then, honestly, closed it again because, no. Probably not. Probably he would have found six reasons to talk himself out of it, the way he’d been doing for months already.
“You’re not as dumb as you look,” Atsumu said instead, which was as close to I believe you as he could manage without his voice cracking outright.
“I get that a lot,” Bokuto said, grinning again, easy and warm.
Atsumu said nothing, but he held Bokuto’s gaze, and whatever Bokuto found in his expression seemed to give him the answer.
“So can I…is it ok if I…”
“Bokuto, if you don’t kiss me right now I think I might combust,” Atsumu said, “and then you’ll have to explain to Meian why I’m not at practice tomorrow.”
Bokuto laughed, startled and delighted, before closing the distance between them and Atsumu got his answer against his lips instead, warm and certain, nothing like a joke about ducks or hedgehogs or thirsty fish. Just Bokuto, plain and honest.
When they broke apart, Bokuto was still grinning, forehead resting against his. “For the record,” he said, “I do think dream-you is up to something.”
“Shut up,” Atsumu said, and kissed him again so he would.