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There is no room for failure in the lives of the Miya twins. Not since they were kids, and not ever. Failure wasn’t a concept either of them acknowledged. If you lost a volleyball game, then you just had to practice harder. If you lost a fistfight, then you just had to pull out all the punches next time till you could knock out all your brother’s loose teeth. Losing was only an obstacle on the way to victory, never an end point. So long as they had one another to run past, finish line after finish line after finish line.
There is no room for failure now, in Miya Osamu’s third year of business school. Not when he gave up volleyball for this. This being the ultimate goal of opening an onigiri shop. Not the endless pile of textbooks lying haphazardly across his tiny-ass coffee table in the one-room studio apartment he had impulsively signed for, eager to finally for once in his life have his own damn space, only to realize it couldn’t even fit a desk.
Coming all the way to Tokyo, to attend business school no less, was originally a plan that made Atsumu scoff in his face. “Yer givin’ up pro volleyball to do what? If ya wanted to be a snake, ya should've just joined Nohebi.” He’d tried to explain that sure, he could make a mean onigiri, but he couldn't run a food establishment if he didn't know the first thing about management. He’s not sure how much Atsumu believed him. But he knows this: that he has always been driven by the desire to prove himself against his twin. Even as he begins to realize that business doesn’t come intuitively to him the way that hitting Atsumu’s tosses once had, or the way that he can mold a perfect onigiri with his eyes closed.
Fistful of hair in one hand as he scribbles notes with the other, he doesn’t notice his phone buzzing until it falls off the edge of the table. He sets down his pencil and picks up the phone.
“Hey, Samu-Samu.” It’s Kuroo. Years later and Osamu still hasn’t gotten the hang of anyone other than Atsumu calling him ’Samu. Not that he’d admit that out loud. “You free tonight? I’m goin’ clubbing. Was gonna bring Akaashi and Kenma, but they both ditched last minute.”
“I’ve got plans.” A long night of poring over notes and lying horizontally as he contemplates which is worse: dropping out more than two-thirds of the way through his degree, or the howling laughter Atsumu would no doubt react with.
“Like date plans or studying plans? No, don’t finish that. I’ve seen the bags under your eyes. C’mon, it won’t kill you to come out for just a night. Have some drinks. Aren’t you gonna serve drinks at your restaurant? Think of it as a field study.”
Osamu can’t deny the pull of alcohol. Especially if it means he doesn’t have to think about this, or anything at all. “Okay. I’m down.”
“Cool. See you at Azabu-Juban in an hour?”
“See ya.”
He’s been subconsciously suppressing his Kansai dialect ever since he moved to Tokyo, and he surprises even himself when it slips back out. It’s not so easy to rid yourself of the things you were born and raised with after all.
He gets dressed, rubs some year-old product he stole from Atsumu into his hair, and heads out.
He pre-games with a couple cans of Strong Zero, then gets off the train at Azabu-Juban and heads over to the club. Kuroo is chilling outside, taking a long drag of his cigarette before neatly disposing of it. He catches sight of Osamu and waves, grin spreading across his face.
Osamu remembers the warm feeling he had the first time he ran into Kuroo on campus. It’d been a pleasant surprise to run into a familiar face in the business faculty. To learn that Kuroo wanted to work in recruitment for the Japanese Volleyball Association.
Everyone had their own dreams. Some dreams were tied to the sport they played in high school— Kuroo’s, Atsumu’s— and other dreams were tied to the times one had made onigiri for one’s twin brother, and said brother had gobbled it all down with the biggest, fullest smile on his face.
“C’mon, what’re you waiting for? Let’s head in.”
Kuroo’s a VIP here, real friendly with the staff and all, so Osamu always gets in for free. Free drinks, too, because it’s somebody’s birthday, some guy Osamu doesn’t know but Kuroo is friendly with. Everyone gathers around the VIP lounge on the second floor as they pop bottles of champagne. Osamu never truly got the hang of socializing without the ever-reliable Atsumu and his stupid antics to rebuff. Besides, the clubs in this area attract a pretty big international crowd, so half these people are foreign anyway. So he just takes shots and talks when spoken to.
It works. One of the girls in the friend group seems kinda into him. As everyone heads down to the main dance floor, she links their arms together. The bass gets louder and she gets bolder. Pressing up close, saying things in his ear that he can’t hear. He goes with the flow— the alcohol is thrumming pleasantly in his veins, and human contact is nice. But then some guy comes and pulls her behind him, and yells something at Osamu about stealing his girlfriend and Osamu laughs and says, “she came on to me, so yer probably not good enough.” The guy winds up his arm to throw a nasty punch, but a security guard grabs him before he can take a swing. The guy and the girl stalk off, and Osamu is left to ponder how weird it is that he hasn’t fought anyone in a year, and how it’s even weirder that he misses being punched in the face.
All his life, Osamu had been the one to clean up after Atsumu's messes. It's funny how much he misses doing that now. Maybe if he had someone else's crisis to avert, he could've avoided his own.
It used to be that Atsumu ran his mouth and did stupid things. Now Osamu’s out here, running his mouth and doing stupid things alone.
It used to be that Atsumu lived in his own world. Nothing short of chucking a volleyball at his head could get him to pay attention to the people around him. Now Osamu’s out here, getting elbowed in the head by drunk people in a room that smells like smoke, wishing he could for once stop noticing the absence of familiarity at his side.
He looks around but can’t find Kuroo anywhere. He goes back upstairs and chugs another shot, and another, and another.
He stumbles back down to the dance floor, instantly blacks out, and finds himself lying on the floor.
“I know you’re friends with Kuroo, but you’ve gotta get out of here, you’re too drunk,” the security guard says to him. “Do you know your way home?”
“Yep,” says Osamu. But the home he’s picturing is three hours away by bullet train, a cramped bedroom where he never had enough space or a moment to himself, where he never had to worry about his future when the biggest worry was how to prevent Atsumu from stealing his pudding.
He blinks and suddenly he’s on the train home. Good, he can apparently continue to function when blackout drunk. He should text Kuroo. He should sleep.
He wakes up at the station near his house. He caught the last train, or so the sign flashing above him says. He stumbles out and gazes out at the rotary in front of him, this odd, round, empty space where drunk college students gather on weekdays and weekends. Bustling with activity, with the laughter of groups of people who are too drunk to realize that tomorrow they’ll be lonely again.
Osamu has never shared a drink with anyone from Inarizaki. He turned twenty in Tokyo, the first birthday he spent without Atsumu. He misses his old team, misses having a place to belong to unquestionably. He misses Atsumu. Something wet is staining the front of his face. It’s annoying. He takes out his phone. He’s got a ton of missed calls from Kuroo. He should call him back. Or maybe he should call—
Osamu’s memory blanks out again, but he makes it home somehow. The next thing he knows he’s stumbling in through the door. He gets his left shoe off, but he can’t shake off his right one no matter how hard he tries. Finally, he decides to give up and flops down only to slam his head on the coffee table.
“Fuck,” he curses aloud. His voice sounds strange in a quiet house. He never had a moment of silence living with Atsumu. A long time ago, when they were seven years old, they had a fight over something stupid— who got to use the TV remote or something— and Atsumu had shoved Osamu so hard he smashed the side of his head into the coffee table with a nasty sound. Osamu hadn’t cried. He hadn’t even processed the pain when Atsumu began to howl and sob and cling to his arm. “Don’t die,” Atsumu had begged. “Please ’Samu, please, I’m so sorry. Please don’t die.” And then Osamu had lifted a hand gingerly to his head— ah, I’m bleeding.
It was like that from the beginning of his life to the age of eighteen. Everything he did was done in pairs, everything about the world processed through an extra presence at his side, an unhelpful, unnecessary, but constant buffer.
He flops down next to the coffee table and suddenly feels the urge to throw up, so he hauls himself over to the toilet and does just that. The last thing he thinks about before he blacks out is that one time when they were six years old Atsumu had shoved his head into the toilet until he couldn’t breathe, or maybe Osamu had done it to Atsumu first, or maybe it never really mattered at all.
When he wakes up again, the sun is high in the sky, creating a burst of colour behind his eyelids before he even opens them. And then he opens them and a familiar head of blond hair is looming over him, prodding at his cheek.
“Oh, good, yer finally up,” says Atsumu. “Thought you were dead for a sec. Woulda been a good time to say yes, you drunk bitch, I did have the happier life.”
Osamu blinks. He blinks again. Atsumu is still there. He reaches up and pinches Atsumu’s cheek just to confirm. His brother smacks his hand away.
“Ow! The fuck was that for?”
“You— why are you here? How did you—”
Atsumu groans and hauls Osamu up so he’s sitting up straight. That’s when he realizes he’s actually been laying on his futon this whole time. He no longer smells like smoke or vomit, and is wearing a set of clean clothes.
“I took the first train here. Took me three fuckin’ hours even by shinkansen. You owe me like fourteen thousand yen, just so ya know. Want some breakfast? I bought it with yer money.”
Osamu takes a bite of the melon bread. Immediately he wants to throw up again. He spits it back out gingerly into the trash can.
“Fine,” Atsumu shrugs. “Suit yourself. Jeez, I’ve never seen ya turn down food, ya freakin’ pig. How fucked up did you get last night? Like seriously, when you called me I couldn’t even tell what you were sayin’, I could just hear all the snot cloggin’ up your nose. I could picture your eyes all puffed up, finally lookin’ as ugly on the outside as the inside. It’s a shame you stole my face, really.”
“I didn’t steal your face, ya stole mine,” says Osamu. And then— “Wait, I called you?” Mortification grabs hold of him by the throat. Now he wants to hurl for a different reason, which is great.
“Yeah. Like I said, I couldn’t tell what you were sayin’ half the time, idiot. Some guy tried to punch you and you wished it was me?”
Osamu wants to crawl into a hole and never come out. Still, he can’t deny the truth that he called, and Atsumu came. Like the way it used to be— the way that Osamu always knew, no matter what, that the ball was coming to him.
But just because there’s no ball anymore doesn’t mean things between them are any different. Maybe Osamu was the idiot for ever thinking otherwise.
He sits there on the edge of his shitty mattress, sun streaming in through the window, and listens to Atsumu talk. About joining the MSBY Black Jackals, who are based in Osaka. How Bokuto is there too, and how cool he thought it’d be to have a bunch of older and more experienced guys hit his sets. But also how for the first time in his life he’s a benchwarmer, and all this time he’s been saying that people who can’t hit his tosses are scrubs, and now he’s the one catching up to everyone else, and with a look of horror: oh God, ‘Samu— I’m the scrub.
Everyone has their own dreams. But everyone has their own setbacks, too. Born into the world seven minutes after his twin, Osamu has never been alone, and never will be. Most of the time it’s a pain in his ass. But occasionally, on sunny afternoons, bumping knees with his brother on the cramped and messy futon, it’s more of a blessing than a curse.
“You gonna stay in Tokyo, or?”
Osamu looks up. “What?”
“After you graduate.”
Just hearing Atsumu say that makes him think: hell yeah, I’ll graduate. Dropping out isn’t an option. He’s made it this far. If Atsumu won’t quit the Jackals, Osamu won’t quit university. It’s always been the two of them surpassing one another, finish line after finish line after finish line.
“Nah,” says Osamu. “When I open up my first branch, it’ll be in Osaka.”
Atsumu looks at him.
“So you’d better not get kicked off the team for bein’ a scrub. Otherwise when I open up shop, they'll see my face and think ya quit volleyball to make onigiri.”
A grin makes its way across Atsumu’s face. He elbows Osamu in the side, and says, “Not in a million years.”