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He’s dragging his bike up a hill, twenty minutes south of Rio, when it occurs to him. This is the same as Miyagi.
There had been a morning, in the winter of his second year at Karasuno, when his bike’s back tire popped halfway up the mountain on his way to school. It must have ripped itself open on a rock--he’d skidded sideways and jumped off in time to watch his bike slide horizontally across the layer of snow that blanketed the street, dragging tracks of exposed asphalt through its surface. He’d yanked it back upright and tugged the chain back into place, and set on further up the hill by foot. His bike clattered on beside him as cars whipped by. Their headlights cut hard beams of white through the predawn darkness, letting Hinata take count of the tears in the leather of his bike’s saddle and the slush gathering on his shoes. He’d gotten to practice late that day, in soaked-through sneakers and a rare cloudy mood.
This, he thinks, is no different. Only the Brazillian sun, maybe, or the burn on his neck, or the errant scraping of the left pedal against his calf. The back tire of his bike had ripped itself open on a rock a half-mile back, as he’d tilted and swayed his way up a byway on the southern fringes of the city. It had sent him and his pizza boxes and his backpack skidding across the asphalt. The words Bon Appetit , spelled out in cheery yellow letters on the side of his delivery bag, had gotten plastered over with dirt to the point of illegibility. There had been three orders in there, now down to one, with one pizza martyring itself on the concrete as a car rolled by and another split into pieces on the sidewalk.
Bon Appetit , Hinata had mused, stuffing the torn slices into his mouth. It was basil and olive oil, and stuck to the back of his teeth. He’d shoved the surviving pizza back into his bag and set his bike upright. It sank into its deflated back tire as he stared at it, teetering on the side of the road. He’d be going on foot.
There isn’t enough time left to get the final delivery there on time, he knows, even with the other two now off the table. It’s another mile north. The address flickering on his phone leads to a cluster of apartments pinched tight between two steeply-canting slopes, tucked away from the southern shore he’s departing from.
That’s something he likes about Rio. The mountains are abrupt in the way they cut through the city, sticking their fingers up into the gaps between the buildings and threatening to pry them apart. Their stubborn and insurmountable presence is comforting; they suggest, somehow, forces more powerful than the city, or the people living there, or Hinata himself. He’ll take the final delivery to the apartment’s door however late it may be, he decides, and if he gets told off he’ll eat it on the way back to Bon Appetit and let his bike’s slashed tire explain itself.
Earlier today, before the tire punctured itself on the asphalt, and while the three pizzas had still sat heavy and warm in his backpack, Hinata had rolled past the window of a sports bar. A TV hung high in its window, half-shrouded by the sun’s glare.
É ACE! FANTÁSTICO! read the subtitles. They were small and bunched at the bottom of the screen, written in cheery yellow text. Hinata had stopped in his tracks and stared through the window. His shadow halted with him in the half-mirror of its surface.
ELE SÓ TEM 19 ANOS! TOBIO KAGEYAMA!
Hinata’s bike had tilted to one side until he stilled it with a foot to the ground. His Portuguese was good enough to understand exactly what it said, now; the rest of him was far behind. He’d spent the first four months of his time here struggling against this imagined picture: Kageayama’s shock of hair, his shoulders, the arc of the ball as it shot from his fingertips. Here it stood before him, pixellated and fleeting, glimpsed on a TV through the fingertip-smeared window of a daytime bar. No more than three inches tall. Clad in a uniform Hinata didn’t recognize. Ignored by the patrons that hovered beneath it. Gone as quickly as it had appeared, as the TV cut from a shot of the court to a car commercial.
Hinata looked down, and met the gaze of his own milky reflection. He realized he felt a loss. He’d always imagined that his reunion with Kageyama, even the image of him, would be more ceremonial. Behind his reflection, a group of young men were tilting back cans of beer in unison. His eyes adjusted to their depth, and then back to his.
Kageyama is playing in the V-League. He knew this already, had imagined it it, heard it in the back of his mind with prophetic clarity from his first moments on the beach. The thought had looped over on itself into meaninglessness, those first few days, a punishing drum rhythm that hailed his every sunken step into the sand.
Hinata watched his reflection’s expression shutter in the sports bar’s window. His phone was blinking in its holster on his bike’s handlebars, dutifully directing him south. He had three deliveries in the next hour. What else was there to do? He watched the mirrored version of himself for a few moments, as if asking it to move on from the window, for him, instead of him, so he wouldn’t have to. The pedals of his bike were impossibly heavy as he kicked away.
This is the same as Miyagi. The thought repeats in his head, on the sun-bleached hill south of the city, as soon as he catches himself lingering on the memory of the TV. He grits his teeth together. This is unlike himself. He’s beginning to crest the hill, busted bike in tow beside him, and can see the geometric forms of the apartment complex that serves as his destination. One more pizza. Each fall of his foot seems to stick to the ground. It’s the same feeling as walking through sand on a rained-out court.
He stops when he reaches the hill’s peak, at the place in the road that begins to slope down. The back of his bike is still sinking defeatedly into its flat tire, but Hinata pauses to consider it, now. He mounts the bike with an irreverent swing of his leg and feels his weight settle it further into the road. When he lifts his feet, the bike begins to roll forward down the street’s slope. The back tire’s deflated shell provides no protection against the asphalt; he feels every bump in the road on the way down.
\/\/\/
He’d made the final pizza delivery on time, skidding to a halt in front of the apartment building and flinging the bike to the ground for a second time that afternoon when he’d realized his brakes were shot. His manager had been understanding about the popped tire when he returned to Bon Appetit . He’d had a bruised leg and a dirt-smeared bike to show for it.
Pedro isn’t home when Hinata gets back to their apartment. He must be at class, Hinata thinks, or getting himself lost somewhere in the city. There’s sand kicked in from the foyer, and Hinata regrets the feeling of it against the soles of his feet. He throws his sandals and his backpack into the corner by habit.
Their kitchen’s lights have been left on, and Hinata enters to the sight of the dishwasher shuddering in its frame beneath the counter. It does this, sometimes, gets jammed while it runs and vibrates erratically until someone cancels the cycle and restarts it. Pedro had shown him how to reset it three weeks ago, gesturing wordlessly and nodding at Hinata when he found the right button. Hinata leans over the sink to clap their windows shut before turning his attention to it. The sun has already begun its sideward descent towards the mountains, and only a single band of light sits across the dishwasher’s beaten surface. Hinata reaches beneath the lip of its handle to press the power button, but it chugs along. Hinata presses it twice more.
Kageyama’s image plays in his head for the umpteenth time. It had trailed him ghost-like since the moment he’d seen it, down the hill, coming back from work, and returns to him again now like a loyal animal. It was an overhead shot of him that had played on the TV, taken from the high-flung balcony of some gymnasium Hinata had most certainly never seen. Hinata imagines the crowd cheering, the cry of the announcer’s voice: É ACE! FANTÁSTICO!
Hinata sees the slowed-down replay of the service ace. Kageyama launches the ball skyward, takes a step with his left foot, his right, his left, leaps. The lines of the court sweep beneath him. His pixels shimmer on the screen. Hand meets ball, ball meets court. The subtitles roll across the bottom of the TV. ELE SÓ TEM 19 ANOS! TOBIO KAGEYAMA! The bar’s patrons throw back their beers in perfect ignorance.
This imagined Kageyama is pumping a fist at his side as Hinata presses the dishwasher’s power button for the fourth time. It’s not turning off. He yanks at its handle, then, as the TV camera in Hinata’s head cuts to a shot of Kageyama striding across the court.
The dishwasher lets its door tip open, and begins to spill its guts out.
Hinata takes a step back. The dishwasher normally shuts off its spray cycle automatically when it gets yanked open; now, as Hinata stares on in shock, it’s flinging hot water out of the gaping space left by its fallen door. He rushes forward to try and shut it onto itself again, one hand extended in front of his face and the other grabbing low for the door’s handle. He gets it halfway up, and then three-quarters, until the door jams against something. The water’s spray launches upwards.
Shoot. Hinata jostles the door against the upper tray, but nothing moves. This, too, has happened before, but not while the dishwasher was running: the top tray gets stuck on something in the back and the dishwasher refuses to move past three-quarters closed. Pedro had taken care of it last time with an air of monk-like solemnity, producing a screwdriver from a drawer and unhooking some latch in the dishwasher’s guts that Hinata knew he wouldn’t be able to find even if he tried. What Hinata wouldn’t do to have him here, now: his stoic, unreadable roomate and the secret latch in the dishwasher that he refused to explain. He feels the pang of irony in his gut as he shields his face from the spray of water.
Puddles are beginning to spread themselves out against the linoleum. Hinata jostles the door once, then once again, and grimaces as the tray cements itself only further against the broken track. The LED clock beside the handle on the dishwasher’s door reads 09:10 in a winsome shade of green. It ticks down one second.
Hinata sits down on the floor, where the water has already claimed great swaths of tile. Nine minutes until the dishwasher shuts itself off. The water isn’t coming out too fast, it’ll be fine. Maybe Pedro will even be home before then. He settles his back against the dishwasher, tips his head back to lean against its surface. It vibrates against the top of his head to the rhythm of the water pulsing inside. When he lets his jaw slack it makes his teeth chatter. Two streams of steamy, frothy water are flinging themselves onto the tile on either side of him.
Hinata watches with mild interest as the puddles crawl towards each other on the floor, joining beneath his legs. His left calf is bruised and sun-raw where he’d scraped it earlier falling off his bike. When the water begins to soak into the material of his shorts, he doesn’t move out of its way, instead glancing down to the floor to stare at his reflection. The image of his forehead is weak and wobbly in the soapy layer of water. He remembers staring at that same reflection in the window of the sports bar, earlier this morning, trying to read his own expression as if it were a stranger’s.
The words replay in his head, on cue. ELE SÓ TEM 19 ANOS! TOBIO KAGEYAMA!
Hinata smiles a rueful, private smile. There had been a time he couldn’t speak Portuguese, when those words would have rolled on past him in blissful meaninglessness. Maybe there’d been a time where the image of Kageyama playing in the V-League on TV would have sent his heart soaring with pride. There’d even been a time he’d lived on the other side of the Pacific, he thinks, when the tosses launched from those televised fingertips had been intended for his palm.
The puddle has reached the far wall of the kitchen, coloring the wooden trim a shade of gray. The dishwasher shudders against the back of his head.
Hinata is vaguely aware of the fact that there are a million things he could be doing, fetching towels to dam the flood, searching for that latch on the tray to unstick the door, calling Pedro and asking him how he’d done it. Yet something keeps him sat on the floor. Maybe some messed-up part of him wants the dishwasher to be broken, he thinks, to see how high the water might rise, and to see if he can’t disappear into it. It’s probably another eight minutes until the cycle stops and it shuts itself off. The whole kitchen could be flooded by then, consumed by a mass of lemon-scented foam that spreads itself to the walls and rises high enough to brush the ceiling.
He imagines Pedro arriving and cutting through the great white mountain of lather towards him, to pull out his damp, hunched form and bring him to safety. What would Hinata say to that wordless face? He couldn’t fix the dishwasher? He didn’t know how to? He didn’t want to?
But Pedro isn’t home yet. Hinata lets himself cry.
\/\/\/
Oikawa appears in Brazil like a whirlwind. The reality of his life here, which Hinata had felt he was only just beginning to coax into something operable, seems to bow and warp around his presence. Oikawa has with him only a handful of things--a small suitcase, a couple of indoor volleyballs, the brand of shoes that Hinata recognises--but to Hinata it’s as if he’s uprooted the entire prefecture of Miyagi and brought it in tow. His watchful gaze, now shot at Hinata through the Brazillian sunlight, seems to pluck him off of the beach and land him once more on the court in Miyagi’s public gymnasium, where those eyes had studied him for the first time through the net’s flimsy blockade. The set of his shoulders, near-aristocratic in its certainty, looks almost wrong draped in a color other than Seijou teal. Oikawa is inextricably, tangibly, the very same person Hinata had met five years ago; the familiarity he radiates is uncanny, and it feels almost as if by meeting him Hinata has stepped off of the beach and back into some part of his high-school self that he’d been trying to suffocate in the sand.
Hinata catches the way they look at each other in the first few moments of stunned silence at the beach’s edge, the way a monkey looks at itself in the mirror: lifting an arm and watching the reflection lift it in unison, tapping a finger against the glass to see if it’s real, holding a guarded posture until deciding whether this reflected person is friend or foe.
Oikawa is friend. Even someone as dignified as him is powerless against the absurdity of the situation, and the dumbstruck full-body hug that Hinata feels himself being pulled into sends his head spinning. We were never even close , Hinata finds himself thinking, face pressed into the sun-warm material of Oikawa’s shirt. He’s aware of passersby turning their heads. But something about being on the other side of the world seems to break the ice.
When Oikawa joins him in playing on the beach, Hinata watches himself in third person going through every physical and mental blockade that beach volleyball had presented him with a year ago. It begins with the sand, and the deep tracks left in the court by Oikawa’s footfalls as they’re playing their first pickup match against strangers. Hinata stands before him and pounds the sand with his feet in a comically solemn demonstration of how to jump right.
“You jump like what ?” Oikawa’s gawking at him, squinting into the sun.
“You have to stomp on the sand when you jump, or else it sucks you down.” He steadies himself by grabbing onto Oikawa’s forearms, and pounds his feet against the sand twice more. “Look, it makes a surface to jump off of!”
When Oikawa gets it on his first try, and his look of confusion transforms into amazement, Hinata has to push down the thought that it would have been nice, last year, to have had someone to show him that too.
Their first set goes utterly sideways. Hinata continues to watch his own learning curve on replay when Oikawa struggles to serve into the sun’s glare, and then whiffs a set into the wind, and then trips over himself going for a simple run-up. Oikawa takes on the difficulties gracefully, adjusting his tosses in the next round and pounding his feet when he jumps like Hinata showed him. There’s a humor in the way he plays that does beyond just his laughter, Hinata thinks, like the dignity that he’d carried on the court in highschool has shifted into something even more playful and free--maybe it’s the people, or the sea, or the knowledge that this game isn’t really his, and he’s allowed to mess up. He converses with their opponents in a goofy mixture of English and Spanish, and laughs without ill will when they ask him obtuse questions about Japan.
And later, Oikawa’s tipping his head back into the sun and shouting: “TAKE A HINT THE WAY THE WIND TOOK THAT BALL!” and Hinata nearly comes to a complete halt at the lightness in his chest. Has Oikawa always been like this? Has Hinata always been like this?
They play five pickup matches in their first afternoon together, winning none of them. And yet, the group of players that frequent this beach and know Hinata’s name seem to like Oikawa, and spare him the pitiful looks they so often give newbies when they lose. When the two of them call it an evening and find themselves settling onto the sand, Hinata doesn’t have to waste time choking down the childlike hope that Oikawa might be able to play more later.
“Everyone’s going bar hopping tomorrow,” Oikawa says lazily, like he’s only just nursing the thought. They’re not far from the water, leaning into a cooling bank of sand. “The rest of my team, I mean. I think I’d rather stay here and lose a few more sets. They can get out of hand sometimes.”
And yet his Argentinean teammates seem agreeable enough, Hinata considers, from the few moments that he’d seen them on the boardwalk. They were all tall and varying levels of bearded, and all bold enough to tease Oikawa when Hinata came scampering over to him. He can easily imagine Oikawa governing them the easy way he’d seen him governing Seijou, conducting from the tips of his fingers. Those had been happy hitters, clad like a flock of sheep in brilliant white, springing under the watch of a setter they knew would accommodate them. A great king.
Hinata studies the high arch of Oikawa’s nose, the lazy set of his gaze as he stares out over the horizon. The title fits. The image of Oikawa conducting a swath of blue-clad Argentineans isn’t too hard to grasp, either. Neither is the shining image of Oikawa tossing to him .
Hinata, buoyed by the reality of that image, lets the questions fall out of him. “And you guys are just here for vacation?”
Oikawa laughs. “A training trip. We had an exhibition match here two days ago.”
Hinata nods. He’s been piling sand over his legs in smooth mounds, and they’re now almost entirely concealed. He imagines Oikawa conducting Seijou, and Oikawa conducting his Argentinean team, flipping between the two images. “Do you feel like it’s different?”
“What?”
The picture of an indoor court comes to him, in shapes and colors that he’s never seen before, occupied by Oikawa’s swath of blue-uniformed hitters. The indoor court he practices on here in Brazil floored in tan. He pictures, for some reason, the courts in Argentina floored in deep cerulean. He tries to imagine voices speaking in Spanish; he falters when he realizes he’s not sure what it sounds like. “Volleyball in Argentina, I mean. Compared to Japan. Is it different?”
Oikawa exhales long. “Of course it’s different.”
“In what way?”
Oikawa pauses with a smile on his face, as if considering whether or not to humor his question at all. He opens his mouth to speak, and then closes it. His smile suddenly turns into a brilliant grin. “Why don’t you ask me that again over dinner?”
Hinata knows a good ramen place a three-blocks’ walk from the beach, so they go. Oikawa launches easily into a discussion about the Argentinean league; the different rules, the personalities on his team, the near-comical magnitude of the hurdles he faced upon arrival. Hinata catches himself flinching at all the ways he begins to see Oikawa’s internal conflict peeking out at the edges the more he talks. Their conversation is stilted once they reach the subject of why they left Japan to begin with, as if the other is staring into his own reflection, listening and measuring up his own carefully selected details and leaving out the great well of anguish that sat beneath every decision. Oikawa mentions something about being unsure about what he wanted to do after high school. Hinata offers an abridged anecdote about developing an interest in the sport after seeing a beach volleyball game online. He leaves out the name Kageyama , and duly notes that the names of all of Oikawa’s old teammates are missing from the table, too. They sit across from each other, nodding and eating as the topic slowly exhausts itself, avoiding holding eye contact for too long.
“Well, honestly, Blanco has guided me through everything. I was completely lost at the start. He’s almost like a weird uncle to me now.” Oikawa says around a bite of noodles.
Hinata’s struggling to keep up. Their conversation has quickly shifted away from Japan, to Hinata’s job, to Oikawa’s team manager, now to the Argentinean setter that landed him a place in the league.
“He’d seen right through me, anyways, when I’d first tried to tell him I was thinking about quitting after graduation. I think I should have known that he was onto me, at that point.”
Hinata nods, his eyes lingering on the space on the table between them. Oikawa wanted to quit. He remembers for a second time that Oikawa never made it to nationals during high school. The thought is absurd, even insulting, against the backdrop of his tosses arcing perfectly through the wind on the beach.
“And he alone got me through the tryout process the week after I arrived. It’s not that often that they get a nineteen-year-old who can’t speak a word of Spanish.” Oikawa smiles ruefully. He taps a chopstick against the side of his bowl. “Once I made it into the league, it wasn’t long until he started showing up at my games. He’d got a regular spot in the lower stands. He gives me notes after most games. The disciple becoming the star, just like that!” There’s irony in his bragging tone, but Hinata catches the way his smile lingers.
“That must be weird, someone who you used to watch watching you.”
“It’s no weirder than running into you here, shortie-pie.”
Oikawa’s smile is finally relaxed, Hinata thinks, his posture unguarded. The question is launching out of him before he can stop it: “Have you watched any of Kageyama’s matches?”
Oikawa barks a laugh before tipping his head back to meet the wall. A smile is still playing at his lips. “Nah. I don’t watch them.”
Hinata nods. He unclenches the muscles in his legs, pushes away an image of a blue-linoleum court. So it’s that simple.
They play four more matches the next afternoon, and win none of them. It’s only yesterday that they started, but Hinata even dares to let himself feel like it’s a routine: Oikawa meets him after lunch, they warm up, find a group to play with, and wear themselves sore on the sand until they let themselves lay down in it. Oikawa is still good-natured about their losses, even when the last match runs late into the evening, and their two opponents--two pickup players that Hinata knows--tease him about whiffing the last touch into the wind.
Hinata’s the one to suggest they go to dinner again, after dunking himself in the ocean and returning to the other three with his wet clothes plastered to him. They’d been trying to make a deal about drinks, anyways, since their opponents offered to buy them if they lost; Oikawa had refused, but lights up at the thought of dinner. The four of them find themselves huddled around a table at Hinata’s favorite boardwalk bar not ten minutes later, nursing the drinks they’d said they wouldn’t get. Hinata watches Oikawa get buzzed. He’s effectively holding court as soon as it comes out that he’s a professional, doling out stories of Argentina like they’re candy, the other two hanging onto his every word. He’s not different. Oikawa’s holding a hand over the table to request a reverent hush before delivering the punchline of an anecdote. I didn’t really get to know him in high school, Hinata thinks over the sound of his own laughter, but I know he hasn’t changed.
With Oikawa’s sameness comes the question of whether or not Hinata, too, hasn’t changed as much as he feels he has. A thought occurs to him with unnatural clarity, later in the evening, as Oikawa himself has his head tipped back and his whole neck exposed in rum-buzzed laughter at a bad joke: the great prideful distance he thinks he’s put between himself and Miyagi must be imagined, if the arrival of an old high school opponent can make him feel like he’s fifteen and infatuated again. He ignores the tingling in his hands, and pushes against the memory of something he’d once thought from the far side of the court in Miyagi’s public gymnasium, fifteen and just teetering on infatuated: Oikawa-san is very beautiful.
Oikawa is not only beautiful, but surprisingly gentle and deliberate, when he ends up in Hinata’s bed that night. They’re both at least three drinks in, but the agreement had been made with a great deal of sobriety; Hinata had held his gaze across the dinner table while their two pickup opponents chatted away beside them, and asked him if he wanted to come over after dinner for another quick drink. There was no drink, there was only Oikawa clicking the apartment’s door shut behind them and leaning into Hinata’s kiss with overwhelmingly tender focus. His hands are hesitant at first, going only where Hinata leads them, as if he needs reminding that they are in fact adults, here, pressing themselves hard against each other’s thighs, and not high schoolers launching stares through a volleyball net. Hinata responds to his hesitance without letting himself think too hard about it, pulling them towards his bedroom as if to tell him yes, I know, come over here anyways . He sprawls himself across the mattress and gets to watch victoriously as something lights in Oikawa’s eyes.
The reminder of Oikawa’s experience is written in his every movement: the assurance with which he cups Hinata’s jaw in his hands, the knee he slides between Hinata’s legs, the hum in the back of his throat as he peels his t-shirt off of him. His kisses grow more eager, but no less careful; the fingers tugging at the waistband of his shorts more insistent, but no less gentle.
Hinata has had a handful of late nights in strangers’ beds in Brazil. It’s enough to count on one hand. Drunken ventures with young men he barely shares a language with, or more than a few hours together, the greater part of which were to be later forgotten. It’s the grand total of his experience, a collection he never had much faith in to begin with. Oikawa’s head is soon dipping between his thighs as if in dutiful confirmation: nothing is like this. Part of Hinata wants to send a message back to that skinny high school first-year, tell him that his fleeting thought about the rival captain is exactly five years from being delivered on, halfway across the world.
And then the question asks itself, as Hinata’s breath begins to hitch under Oikawa’s touch: where was this during high school? Stretched across a volleyball court, Hinata imagines, disguised as the clinical rivalry between a captain and an opposing spiker. But that was never more than a passing thought. Maybe none of this existed in high school, or if it did, only in the shadow of something much bigger, sitting firmly on the Karasuno side of the court; the very thing that Hinata is suddenly trying to ignore, as he watches the nondescript head of dark hair bobbing between his thighs and catches another name trying to form on his lips.
Oikawa kisses him tenderly, later that night as they’re both coming down, and he holds his gaze for a long time before his departure the next morning, as he stands in the middle of the sun-bleached street with his suitcase at his side and calls Hinata “ Shouyou.” Hinata’s stomach flips.
His disappearance is as sudden and reality-warping as his arrival. The memory of his form in Hinata’s bed seems to be sunken into it, like heavy footfalls in the sand. The memory of his cologne and his shampoo and his deodorant is quite literally sunken into the pillowcase that Hinata presses his cheek against the next morning. The smell doesn’t stir the longing that Hinata half-expects, only the vacant, anonymous image of a presence come and gone. Whatever it was, Hinata thinks, and whether or not it existed in high school, it’s all fine. He stands in front of the bathroom mirror brushing his teeth for several minutes longer than necessary, watching his own expression. Trying to imagine what Oikawa was thinking, watching his expression. Trying to imagine what he was thinking, running his fingers through a dark head of hair, leaning into the touch of a setter’s hands, letting his gaze blur at the sight of that lean figure hovering over him and going positively electric when he heard a voice, any voice, call him Shouyou.
He spits his toothpaste into the sink and stands back upright to stare at himself. The hair, the voice, the hands, all of it was close enough. He doesn’t have to imagine what he was thinking or who he was thinking of; he sees the crestfallen look on his face in the mirror and he knows.
\/\/\/
The gap between coming home rom Brazil and Black Jackals tryouts had been brief, but painful; the gap between Black Jackals tryouts and learning whether or not he’d made the team had been briefer, and more painful; the following weeks are some of the best in his life.
He’d begun parsing through Brazil as an event as best he could from the day he arrived back home. There are some habits he keeps: he gets eight hours of sleep. He thins out his electrolyte drinks with water. He meditates each day. He stretches before and after he runs. These practices he manages to detach from the place and time he’d developed them, to excavate them from the sand like a sun-warm water bottle and dust them off, set them atop a blue linoleum court. These practices are stabilizing, bolstering, a channel for the overwhelming feeling of urgency he’s always had but was never really sure how to handle, until he’d stood knee-deep in the Brazillian ocean at eighteen years old and realized it was time to start handling it.
Translating these routines back to his life in Japan isn’t hard, but the awareness that comes with it is. He’d thought, when Oikawa left, that he hadn’t changed: he’d taken their drunken night together and Oikawa’s sameness as proof of his own sameness, as if Oikawa were to be his mirror. It’s when he comes home to his parents house in Miyagi and immediately begins clearing room on his old bedroom floor to meditate that this sameness crumbles. The moment is funny, private; he laughs as he sits there on his carpet with his legs crossed, trying to imagine what his fifteen-year-old self would say if he could see him now.
There are some things he leaves in Brazil, like staring into the windows of electronics stores and sports bars. He avoids opening the dishwasher, too, but he doesn’t have to admit this to himself at first: Bokuto doesn’t have a dishwasher, which he learns when he spends the week of tryouts crashing at his apartment. When he goes back to Miyagi for the following weekend and stands in the kitchen of the house he’d grown up in, he aborts the motion twice before yanking the beeping machine open. The water does not come spilling out.
After tryouts end, getting onto the team feels like an impossibility and an inevitability. He turns this feeling over and over on itself in his hands, the night before he’s supposed to hear from the Black Jackals’ coach, searching for any sense in it. An impossibility, because that would mean that he’d have an answer for the Hinata who had lain awake through a dozen Brazillian nights, asking himself what a V-league jersey would feel like against his back, convinced that an answer was never going to come; an inevitability, because Miya Atsumu had stared him in the face the moment they’d first laid eyes on each other in MSBY’s practice gymnasium on the first day of tryouts and spoken to him with the confidence of a man who had seen the future: “I’m tossing to you.”
The image had come to him in that moment, of a second-year Miya Atsumu pointing through the net’s flimsy barricade, feet at shoulder width, sweat-slick arm and trembling forefinger directed at Hinata’s face: “I’m gonna toss to ‘ya one day.”
The words seemed pedantic, brazen, meaningless, then, and they rolled off his back with the beads of sweat that caught beneath the number 10 on his jersey. He, age fifteen, in the middle of nationals, had a one-track mind: he had another match the next day, he had to rehydrate, he needed to review game footage, they were going to the bus soon, he had Kageyama to toss to him. The image of a setter on the other side of the net was merely another image of an opponent; the image of a setter on the other side of the net pointing to him and declaring that he was going to toss to him one day was only an absurdity, a distraction, to be ignored expressly because it was a distraction, a distraction expressly because it grabbed onto something knotted in his chest and seemed ready to obliterate the idea of those gentle hands, that dark hair, launching the ball into the air and therefore into infinity. He had Kageyama to toss to him.
Now, the words had become prophetic, impossible, inevitable; Hinata finds himself laying in bed seven years and a lifetime later considering the possibility that a second-year Miya Atsumu had somehow stood feet shoulder-width apart on the sweat-smeared court of Tokyo’s Metropolitan Gymnasium, pointed a finger at Hinata’s face, and seen into the future.
Maybe he’s the sort of person who can will the future into place. Hinata has met such people, he thinks. People like Bokuto, like Ushijima, who go forth in life with such transparent, blind confidence that the world seems to take one look before spreading itself out before them in accomodation. But Atsumu doesn’t seem like one of those people. His finger had trembled, age sixteen, as he’d directed it towards Hinata’s gawking face through a volleyball net; that same finger had tapped unsteadily against his car’s steering wheel when Hinata told him Thank you two days ago on the highway north of Tokyo. If Miya Atsumu is a future-seer, which at this point seems irrefutable, he must not be the kind who can will the future into place. He must only be able to grasp, Hinata thinks, at the visions that come to him, and try to tie them together with his bare and sometimes trembling hands.
That presents another truth: that the future-seer Miya Astumu had laid eyes on a fifteen-year-old Hinata Shouyou and decided that that was the future he was going to chase down.
When Hinata gets a phone call Black Jackals’ head coach the next morning, he wonders for a moment if he, rather, might be the kind of person who can will the future into place.
The weeks following his drafting onto the team are a whirlwind. He had played indoor volleyball in Brazil, and in the weeks after he’d gotten home; he’d never truly forgotten how, but he still has the sense that he’s learning it all over from scratch again. This, to his own surprise, is more exciting than exhausting. His feet readjust to the feeling of linoleum beneath them immediately. The jersey feels like electricity on his skin. His teammates are lovely. He likes the way he can make Sakusa smile just a little and only sometimes. Spiking alongside Bokuto stirs up some deep well of excitement stored away by his fifteen-year-old heart. Above all else: Atsumu’s tosses are gifts, wrapped in air and time, arcing towards his hand not nearly so much as they shoot against it. The more Hinata watches those balls, the more it seems that they’re somehow drawing themselves to his fingers by some great mysterious force of magnetism, as if it’s a law of nature that they belong there.
The speed of the quick that he and Atsumu develop is thrilling, at first, buoying him to and from practice and in every moment in between, until one day it blows past a wall that Hinata hadn’t realized he’d erected: it reaches a level of of synchronisation that he had neared, with Kageyama, but never arrived at. That barrier, to him, had counted as some law of nature.
His and Kageyama’s final plays together at their third-year nationals had been loaded with awareness. It’d been the culmination of their work, of their partnership, Hinata let himself think, and it was the fastest they’d ever played. Ball in air, Hinata’s palm, ball on ground. They were faster than they’d been in their first year, in their second, faster than their former opponents, faster than the team on the other side of the court. Not fast enough to win it all, but at the time, that had been okay. They had been impossibly fast at nationals. Hinata hadn’t been able to imagine anything faster.
And yet, Atsumu is faster. That Kageyama Tobio’s high school speed barrier is broken, unannounced, at some unclear point during one of the Black Jackals’ practice matches seems almost blasphemous. It’s the kind of thing that needs ceremony, that needs closure, an official declaration that the dark-haired image of a toss into infinity has been obliterated; something more concrete than a ball ricocheting off the other side of the practice court and Hinata’s numbing awareness that that set was faster than anything Kageyama had ever sent to him. Hinata lands on the court like this time and time again, drummed on by the percussive bash of hand against ball, ball against floor, and catches himself staring at his hand and searching for the ghost of the set that had just departed from his palm. He resents those tosses, for a while, for the numb feeling they leave on his skin.
And then, later, Atsumu begins asking him if the tosses are good enough. Hinata nearly balks. The tosses are unbelievable. The tosses are too good. Hinata tells him yes because he has to. The question seems so insultingly obvious, and so unlike anything that Atsumu would ever ask, that Hinata wonders between these first few “yes” s if Atsumu only poses the question because he likes hearing the reply. The thought, and the grin on Astumu’s face, leaves the same numb feeling on his skin that the ball does.
It’s the fourth or fifth time Atsumu asks, and Hinata is about to balk, that Hinata sees it: Atsumu’s fingers are clenched, tapping at his side, punctuating his question. Are the tosses okay today? A nervous drum rhythm, against the fabric of his shorts, against the leather of a steering wheel, against the surface of a volleyball. His fingers release from their spasms only when Hinata tells him, Of course.
It’s in the next moment that he realizes that there is no great mysterious force of magnetism that’s been drawing the ball to his palm. There is no law of nature that lets it come faster each time. There is only Miya Atsumu, putting it there.
The realization revises itself: there is only ill-fated future-seer Miya Atsumu, who has the ability to see what he wants, but who has to grasp at it and tie it together with only his bare and sometimes trembling hands. This is him trying to tie it together.
The ball no longer makes Hinata’s hand go numb. It makes his hand go white-hot. Atsumu’s question, his tapping fingers, his That one was okay, right? and the smug grin that follows Hinata’s yes , in all its shielded earnesty, makes his skin go electric. They vault well beyond the high school speed barrier to the ever-accelerating rhythm of Hinata’s hand against the ball and the ball against the court. Hinata doesn’t look back at it; he no longer understands why he’d ever wanted to look back at it, when there’s someone staring him in the face and asking him to come along. The weeks begin to pile themselves into months. The speed of the ball that flies from Atsumu’s hands to Hinata’s begins to eclipse itself into nothingness. The smiles they shoot each other begin to linger ever-longer.
And yet it’s no longer just about the speed, or the starry-eyed stares of the second-string players, or Hinata’s steadily climbing position on the roster: it’s about reaching into the air and clasping your fingers around that wisp of future Miya Atsumu witnessed seven years ago through a Tokyo gymnasium’s volleyball net, pressing it into his hand, looking him in the eyes, and telling him that you’ve decided you want it, too.
\/\/\/
It’s three months into this acceleration that their head coach pulls Hinata aside and tells him that he’s going to move him to a starting position for their match against the Schweiden Adlers.
Hinata had been floating between the bench and the court for the three dizzying months that followed his drafting. He’d be switched in, sometimes, but would never start. The first time he’d set foot on a V-League court during an official match had been an unceremonious, sort-of debut in the middle of a game against the Toray Arrows, in which he was switched in halfway through the third set and subsequently scored five points. They later lost the game in the fifth set, long after he was off the court again. Astumu had set him each of those five points and each of them had struck like a bullet, until they’d begun to pick up their pace and Hinata was promptly switched back out.
It’s a matter of strategic balance, Miya, Hinata had overheard their coach saying to a defeated, argumentative Atsumu, who had started mouthing off in the locker room after the game had ended. We need to find a new offensive rhythm before what you’re imagining can happen. Hinata went still on the other side of the room. He had been happy to have merely set foot on the court; he’d skipped off of it smiling. But he looked behind a row of lockers, to the corner where their head coach thought no one could hear them, and found Atsumu wearing the frown of the deeply wronged.
He’d been on and off the court in those brief stints a handful of times since then, never starting, never finishing. Atsumu would pelt him with tosses each time as if his life depended on it and Hinata would beat them to the earth as if his life depended on it, until Hinata inevitably got switched out, and Atsumu’s shoulders would regain their guarded posture.
That his first match as a starter is going to be against the Schweden Adlers is an impossibility and an inevitability. Hinata laughs to himself privately, ten minutes removed from getting the news, sitting alone in the Black Jackals’ locker room. He had seen this match on the horizon like a lighthouse beaming an alarming shade of red, from the very moment it had announced itself on their schedule: if he didn’t get to play in it, he would sink; if he did play and he didn’t win, he might well sink too. The lighthouse’s beam had neared and flickered in irresolution and come to a halt with the coach’s words. You’ll be our starting opposite hitter. Hinata tips his head back against his locker and smiles. So he’ll be swimming.
When Hinata tells Atsumu the news, he claps him on the back and breaks into what Hinata knows is an utterly helpless grin. The skin on his shoulderblade that Atsumu’s hand departs from glows white-hot for the rest of the day. It makes Hinata feel better.
And when he lines up on the edge of the court for the first time, in a shoulder-to-shoulder wall of black on black with golden slashes, the doubt vanishes. He’s not swimming, he’s scaling the lighthouse. The bodies on the other side of the net are a smear of white until they are not. Kageyama’s fingers are a collection of memories until they are not; until they are wrapped around Hinata’s wrist beneath the net in the one-two pump of a firm handshake, and the crowd is roaring in his ears.
Atsumu had grabbed his pinky finger and squeezed it, as the team stood in a row at the far end of the court. When Kageyama shakes his hand Hinata is surprised it doesn’t burn him: it’s white-hot.
The crowd roars again when Hinata scores the first point of the game; it roars louder when he scores the final point of the game; it roars even louder when Kageyama envelops him in a hug on the side of the court in the wake of the Adlers’ honorable defeat. Hinata is pulled out of the air of the court and into the sound of Kageyama’s heartbeat, the rustling of his jersey against Hinata’s skin, the muffled explosion of the spectators and the fluttering click of a dozen camera shutters closing all at once. The roaring crowd is mistaken, Hinata thinks: on the inside, he is surprisingly quiet.
The final set landed 25-21, MSBY Black Jackals. The numbers replay themselves in Hinata’s head in the bus on the way back to their training facility. He leans his head against the shuddering window, lets his jaw loosen until it makes his teeth chatter. A billboard rolls by, and Hinata imagines the final numbers projected onto it, a volleyball scoreboard the size of a building standing beside the highway, his last seven years of effort announced to every commuter whipping by: 25-21, MSBY Black Jackals.
Atsumu is in the seat beside him, his black-and-gold track jacket draped ceremoniously across his front as he sleeps. The bus jerks over a pothole in the road, and his fingertips stir against his thigh. He had passed the final point of the match to Hinata with those fingertips, dangerously close to the net, appearing to him as no more than a flash of skin and movement.
The feint that Hinata scored off of that set was the kind of point that didn’t announce itself. It had arced, impossibly slow, through the great vacancy of air where no blockers stood, before slicing itself neatly in half on the outside line. The whole gymnasium went still as the ball bounced away.
The whistle blew. In.
The feeling that gripped him in the milliseconds after did not heed any of his past victories. It was not a rush of blood to his ears of tears in his eyes or electricity down his spine. It was singular and unmistakable and entirely different: freedom.
It was a freedom that dropped with the ball all the way to the floor, hitting the bottom of his stomach and careening down further right through it; the feeling took up all of the space within him, all of the space outside of him, all of the square inches of linoleum court that he had ever occupied and could ever imagine occupying. This included the courts of Miyagi, the gleaming lights of Tokyo, the sunken beaches of Brazil, the square meter of space where Miya Atsumu was standing beside him, nearing him, enveloping him in his arms, and roaring sweet victory into the fluorescent-lit air. The whole world went white-hot.
It was the same freedom had that had expanded inside of him, into something nearing infinity, when Kageyama pulled him into a hug and Hinata realized that he felt nothing more than warm buzz, like TV static.
He lifts his head from the bus’s window and lets himself study Atsumu’s sleeping form beside him. Atsumu, too, had floated in bliss from the emptied court, to the stands, to the locker room, to his seat on the bus, where he’d collapsed instantly in some satisfied and deeply conclusive form of sleep. Hinata watches the contentment in the shallow curve of his lips. His jacket is piled over him as a makeshift blanket, and the golden number 13 printed onto it, normally set straight against his back and gleaming, is rumpled into unrecognizability. Atsumu rarely looks so peaceful. The rest of the team is in various stages of wakefulness, spread out around the bus. Their coaches converse quietly at the front. Bokuto’s snoring carries up from the back row of seats and mixes with the sound of the engine. The older Hinata gets, the more he finds he can appreciate this part of the game: he calm after the storm.
A row of streetlights rolls by, flashing shadows over Atsumu’s form. Hinata has himself balled up in his seat, knees to his chest, studying him. Hinata considers stirring him awake. It would be selfish, he thinks, and he’d be doing it for no reason other than to watch him like a movie as he rouses from sleep. Hinata chews on this thought for a moment before he presses a hand to Atsumu’s shoulder and shakes.
Astumu stirs, and blinks, and leans forward, and jerks a hand up to catch the jacket that’s sliding off of him. When that white light of a smile appears in sleepful confusion, Hinata starts laughing.
“What?” Atsumu’s voice is low and priceless and soaked in sleep.
“Nothing.”
“ Nothing. ” Atumu repeats. He pushes himself upright and blinks himself awake to the sound of Hinata’s giggles. He reshuffles his limbs beneath his track jacket, and reaches out and grabs Hinata’s hand from where it sat on his knee. There’s tape around Hinata’s ring and pinky finger, from the third set, where he’d taken a hard rebound to the side of his hand. Atsumu picks at the tape, carefully pressing down an edge that’s beginning to peel up. His hands are bare and careful but decidedly not trembling. They sit there like that for a while, watching him press down the tape that won’t stick over and over again, until Atsumu’s voice slips through the silence at barely more than a whisper:
“Were the tosses good today?”
Hinata wonders, over the sound of his own laughter, if this is the feeling of holding a wisp of future in your hands. He says it with his whole chest: “Of course.”
Atsumu beams.
\/\/\/
He stands knee-deep in the Brazillian ocean at twenty-two years old, and finds that the feeling of urgency is gone.
He’d arrived here three days ago, with Atsumu. They’re visiting Pedro. The apartment Hinata once shared with him has changed in his nine months of absence: there’s new dishware, a different painting on the wall, the dresser in his old room now standing where the bed once was. The shutters that hang crookedly from the windows have become just a little more crooked. The stubborn scattering of sand that layers the foyer is a little thinner than it was, when he’d lived here. Atsumu had cursed under his breath when he first stepped in it. Hinata had laughed, before he ran inside to shout at Pedro in Portuguese. He wanted Atsumu to hear him.
Atsumu is bad at playing beach volleyball, and it makes Hinata laugh. His footfalls land heavy and his feet get sucked into the sand when he halts for a leap. Hinata had considered, briefly, teaching him to pound his feet against the beach the way he’d taught Oikawa; he’d then seen the screwy, determined grin on Atsumu’s face growing ever-wider and decided he enjoyed it too much to snuff it out. The beach strips Atsumu of his years of experience and his practiced grace all at once, leaving him equipped only with the strength in his legs and his impenetrable will. The pride in Hinata’s chest swells towards the sky as this slowly proves itself sufficient. They play five sets during their first afternoon on the beach, and as the sun sinks towards the sand, they start winning them. Atsumu roars sweet victory into the sun-warped air.
The match against the Schweiden Alders was three months ago. Hinata hasn’t moved from his starting position since that victory. The quick that eclipsed its own speed into nothingness has only further eclipsed itself, to the point where time feels like it rolls backwards with the spin of the ball. Hinata slams down one of those quicks onto a sandy court for the first time, six months after they’d first discovered it, seven and a half years after it was promised to him.
They’re in Brasil for two weeks They visit the bar that Heitor frequents, get stopped in their tracks by friends and friends-of-friends that had seen them in the V-League on TV. Hinata gets questions flung at him in English and Portuguese, and manages to answer at least half of them. Heitor and Nice run through theatrical and exaggerated play-by-plays of the Black Jackals’ most memorable victories, and the buzzed crowd hangs on to each word, cheering Hinata on as if it’s live; the most Hinata can do is stop himself from keeling over with laughter. He catches Atsumu smiling at him from across the bar.
That’s what Atsumu does, here in Brazil, without knowing it: he strides through Hinata’s halls of memory with the blinding grin of those who are benevolently ignorant. Hinata stalls at this realization at first, faltering at the image of Atsumu’s feet, his legs, dashing through the sand on the beach that Hinata had once tried to suffocate a part of himself in. He falters again, later, at the sight of Atsumu tossing his Black Jackals backpack into the far corner of Hinata’s old bedroom.
He falters for a third time when they’re stumbling towards the boardwalk late at night, half-drunk among a group of Hinata’s half-drunk friends, and they walk past the facade of sports bar. It’s a daytime bar, closed at this hour, its interior illuminated a shade of gray only by the stray glow of streetlights. A TV hangs high in its window, displaying nothing. When Hinata stops, his reflection halts with him in the half-mirror of its surface.
A memory halts with him too: yellow subtitles, a flash of dark pixels, a delivery bike teetering to one side, his own shuttered expression. Hinata sucks in air.
Hinata had left Brazil without expecting to return. This was a thought he’d kept to himself, packed away somewhere in his luggage, when Pedro and Heitor and Lucio saw him off at the airport with questions of when he’d come back and visit. He’d dodged their questions, gotten onto the plane, curled his knees up to his chest, and pulled up the V-League tryouts schedule on his phone.
The rest of the rum-buzzed group is already several paces ahead, while Hinata stands unmoving beneath the sports bar’s TV and studies the expression on the face reflected back to him. He had left Brazil expecting never to come back, having buried something contorted and barbed beneath the beach, expecting it to ossify into anonymity forever. His reflection in the window, the very existence of it, seems to parody this: here he is, uncovering it. He hears his friends’ voices calling in the distance.
Hinata starts, then, faltering for a fourth time at the realization that Atsumu has broken off from the rest of the group and appeared in the window beside him. He nears Hinata until he can grab him gently by the elbow, and then turns to face the window’s mirror. His figure tilts his head to the side in the way of the benevolently ignorant.
“What?”
It’s a question asked in Atsumu’s blunt, impatient way; the way that makes others balk at him, the way that makes Hinata laugh. It hits Hinata, then: Atsumu doesn’t see the memory of yellow subtitles, or a shimmer of dark pixels, or a delivery bike with a slashed tire. He only sees himself and Hinata, side-by-side, staring dumbly into their reflections in a bar’s window. This makes Hinata laugh, too.
And then Hinata sees himself, laughing, in the window’s half-mirror.
\/\/\/
Atsumu kisses him that night, in the apartment’s back alleyway. It’s sweet and molten and impossibly white-hot, white-hotter than the ball against his hand and white-hotter than Atsumu’s sweat-slick arms around him on the court, a new kind of white-hot that careens down through his stomach to join the freedom that Atsumu launched to him there three months ago.
Atsumu stirs him from sleep in bed the next morning, in the same selfish way that Hinata stirs him from sleep in the bus after their matches. Atsumu is above him, kissing him awake in the sunlight and thanking him for everything and Hinata’s not sure what he means but he’s laughing and gasping and kissing him back and trying to find a part of his body that isn’t white-hot.
In the sweet stillness that follows, with Atsumu’s brow tucked into the curve of Hinata’s neck and his heartbeat thrumming beneath his fingers, Hinata has a dozen half-finished thoughts: something about about impossibility, and inevitability, and the sheer number of things that he’s seen through the flimsy barrier of a volleyball net, and how a second-year Miya Atsumu, with one sweaty, trembling finger pointed at him, might be the most important of them all.
And then there’s a moment, later that morning, after Atsumu has fallen asleep again in a pool of white sunlight, when Hinata rolls over to look at him, and feels like he sees the future written on his face.