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If ever there was a mistake worth repeating, it would be Kageyama Tobio.
Kageyama Tobio is dumber than a rock, sometimes. Step off the court and he loses all of his grace. He carries Shouyou around as an accessory in hopes of distracting others from this fact but it doesn’t work. In any room Kei has ever been in, and he’s been in a lot of rooms with that pair in particular, the one who exasperated Kei the most has always been Tobio.
Running counter to reason and sensibility in every way, Tobio is also the one person who understands Kei the best. He has been the one person who somehow located each of Kei’s buttons in precise accuracy, made a remote control out of them and carried it around for all of those long, long, excruciatingly long years they’ve been together and then apart.
Now, as a world-renowned volleyball player, with a hideous side part and—impossibly—even more self-satisfaction in his gait, Kageyama Tobio is back in town.
And Kei’s door is the first one he comes knocking on.
The years are always the kindest to those who don’t need it.
“Why have you become so tall,” Kei grunts, low enough that Tobio can’t hear it over his own munching noises. He’s lost a considerable percent of his height advantage over the other and he doesn’t even have the satisfaction of looking down at him anymore.
He crosses his arms over his chest and leans on the counter to watch Tobio eat but his frustration grows even more with the added curiosity of not knowing why exactly Tobio didn’t visit his parents or sister or literally whoever else first, opting to head straight for Kei’s place from the airport instead.
“Happy to see you again, but may I ask why exactly you are here first thing after landing?”
Tobio barely raises his head from his plate to answer. “I wanted to see you.”
That makes Kei choke on thin air, almost. Then he remembers.
Back when Tobio was about to leave Japan for the first time, he and Kei might have kissed right before his plane took off, and there might have occurred some petting in Kei’s bedroom the night before that. In a bed of unspoken words and undiscussed feelings, they focused their attention on hands and skin to dismiss thoughts. Kei used to think there might have been something between them, something worthwhile and something real and something mutual, but with Tobio abroad and away for greater horizons than Kei’s could ever match, it wasn’t fair on either of them to let it drag.
Kei has never been someone remarkable enough to stay in the radar of an existence as dazzling as Kageyama Tobio’s for more than just a night, anyway. He’s never thought he had a chance. He’s never had a chance. It was only a matter of time until Tobio woke up one day and realised he’s had enough, he’s seen all Kei had to offer. There would be nothing more, nothing new, nothing exciting, nothing to give him a reason to stay anymore.
Now Tobio sits in his kitchen, eating his food, wearing his slippers, curiously looking around to see more of his decorations, and the two trains of thought collide. Something doesn’t match, something’s off, but Kei doesn’t want to believe it was his line of reasoning that erred.
Tobio must have forgotten his disappointment, his frustration, his dissatisfaction. He must have forgotten how, even on their last night together, Kei couldn’t articulate his feelings, couldn’t tell him he’d miss him, couldn’t give him a reason to want to come back.
“I’m glad,” he says in the end, honest with Tobio for perhaps the first time in his life, “I wanted to see you, too.”
But this doesn’t even begin to explain why, as he sits on the couch waiting for Tobio to come back from washing up post-meal, Kei suddenly has his lap full of almost two metres of monstrously built Olympic athlete.
He has to watch the characteristic calm of Tobio’s face crumple into the exact same expression he found there back when Tobio was about to leave and none of them could say anything at all.
“You acted like everything we had before I left didn’t even exist,” Tobio says, and it’s exactly what Kei’s been afraid of. “I had to play along because I was afraid you would shut me out if I confronted you. You owe me so fucking much, Tsukishima Kei, your whole life won’t be long enough to repay it.”
With the way he pushes into Kei’s forehead with his own, leaving him no chance but to recline his head until he’s trapped between the couch and Tobio’s face, there’s no way to escape his gaze. Kei searches for hate. He can’t find any.
He swallows, desperate for some moisture in his dry throat. “There was no point in continuing.”
“You don’t get to decide that on your own,” Tobio snarls. Then, just as suddenly as he caged Kei in, he eases off, throwing his head back. “God, I was so calm coming here. I meant to have a civil talk.” His lolls his head forward again, eyes finding Kei’s with practiced ease. “But my blood always boils when I’m around you.”
“That’s one thing we have in common,” Kei grumbles, no longer able to ignore Tobio’s sound weight on his lap and the way he’s trapped Kei completely in. He grabs Tobio by the nape, and he doesn’t have to do anything more.
When their lips meet, it’s the emotional weight of it more than anything that has Kei gasping for breath. I don’t care if it’s been two years, it’s as if Tobio is saying, you’re going to remember me. You’re never going to forget how my lips feel slotted perfectly against yours. I’ll make sure of it.
And do they, do they slot perfectly against each other, like they were made for this.
When they were high schoolers, dancing around each other, Kei sometimes fancied he saw hurt in Tobio’s eyes in the tomorrows of the nights when he didn’t wait for Tobio after practice. He felt Tobio was slightly more hostile towards Tadashi than everybody else, for all the time he got to spend with Kei when Tobio himself couldn’t. Kei thought it selfish, he suppressed it, but he found comfort in it, perhaps cruelly.
Now there’s desperation and passion and longing in the way Tobio’s fingers keep clasping and unclasping around Kei’s biceps as they kiss, there’s want and joy and—fuck it, maybe there’s even love in the way he melts against Kei when Kei’s hands find purchase against his thighs, and Kei isn’t so sure anymore those times at high school were merely his wishful thinking.
Now that it’s warm and soft and damp all over his lips, he notices how cold they have been in Tobio’s absence.
He might have hated himself for depriving himself from his own feelings, the deserved joy of having someone close to your heart and residing close to theirs, the sheer happiness he could have had only if he let Tobio in, but the exhaustion in Tobio’s body slumping against him and the melancholy in the slow glide of their lips has him concerned for Tobio over anything else. Tobio told him so—and he’s grateful for it because he knows he deserved it—his entire life won’t be enough to compensate.
But somebody wants him to have a try.
Just as the sounds and the sensation start to get too much, they have to part and rest their tired lips. Tobio’s arms slide around Kei’s neck as his head tilts back, eyes shut and lips parted to let some air in. Kei’s glasses are askew, Tobio mostly blurred in his vision, but he sees more than he needs to remind him of the years they’ve missed, and he wants this man all for himself for the rest of their lives.
It’s like Tobio can hear him thinking. He opens his eyes to meet Kei’s head-on; unfair, because no one can hide anything when Kageyama Tobio, the king, looks at them like this.
“Tell me you don’t want any more of this,” Tobio demands. “Can you?”
Kei doesn’t trust himself with words. He also still doesn’t feel any more ready than he’s ever been to admit vulnerability, especially with Tobio. He only shakes his head.
“Then you have to speak up and tell me exactly what you want, because when I try to guess and act on it, you always turn the tables on me no matter what you might have wanted in the first place.”
Tobio has always been blunt and earnest, and he has always poked and prodded at Kei to get him moving the way he wanted, always called him out on his pretense and lies, but such openness about feelings when it comes to the two of them, together, as a singular entity—he’s never made a clear point like this. It echoes between the walls of Kei’s mind.
“You’ve always been too much of a coward to tell me what you feel about me,” Tobio continues with zero inhibitions. “You never asked for anything, like it was all the same to you no matter what I did. You would look at me soft and touch me gentle but always had your eyes closed like you were afraid to see me reciprocate. But worst of all, Kei, you never asked me to stay.”
That awakens his deepest fear, activates his mouth before his filter can evaluate the words.
“Like you would if I did?”
Tobio looks like he’s been waiting for this question to be asked; for years, Kei’s afraid. “I was ready to, the moment you did.”
Kei discovers a painful lump in his throat when he tries swallowing. His eyes brim with tears.
Tobio braces a thumb against Kei’s cheekbone as if he wants to say he’s ready to catch any tears from falling. “I’m still ready if you decide that you want me to.”
Kei hides his face in Tobio’s shoulder. In that moment, he wishes he were smaller than Tobio, to crawl his way beneath his hands, into his embrace, into his heart, to feel Tobio’s presence surround and soothe him.
At least, this position has Tobio towering over him, and maybe he doesn’t need to be smaller than Tobio and worm his way inside, anyway. He just needs to ask.
“Then stay this time.”
It’s the brightest, sharpest he’s ever seen Tobio’s eyes shine as he replies, “I will.”
And it’s because Kei’s always been aware Tobio is the one person in his world he can put his complete trust in, that he knows he doesn’t have anything to fear anymore.