Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Koushi is seventeen when he learns the wrong way to cope.

The habit starts so laughably simple, so unnoticeable he can’t really pinpoint the exact moment it began. He thinks it may have emerged from the most horrifying period of his young life, those pitch-black days from which he recalls only disconnected snapshots of events. The order of these events has long since been muddled in his mind, even the most vital moments little more than a distorted collection of sensations and emotions too awful to dwell on for very long.

Koushi didn’t dwell on them when he first picked up the blade, and he doesn’t dwell on them in the present, in the quiet stillness of his bedroom, his hands trembling from pure adrenaline and his own blood dark and sticky where it stains his fingers.

Instead, whenever any heartache tries to surface from the murky, churning depths of his subconscious, he angles his blade above an untouched patch of skin on his thigh, takes a deep breath, and slices. A new cut weeps red and sings with pain, but Koushi himself gets to remain unaffected, gets to push down the worst of his emotions without ever having to touch them.

If a year and a half of riding the bench with a smile on his face has taught Koushi anything, it’s that he can shove as many of his own feelings down as he likes if he focuses on everything else but what’s going on inside him. Emotions like the ones he’s experiencing today are strange and unpredictable and downright unnecessary now that the worst of things has passed, but if he can just keep himself busy enough, pay those emotions no mind, then surely they’ll go away on their own.

He isn’t even sure why his brain is dredging the past up now of all times, but he can’t escape the sharp twisting of fear and apprehension that braids its way between his ribs, the vague twinge of nausea buried deep in his gut. The emotions fit his current situation well enough, but every few minutes his mind gets pulled back into a different time, into those horrific few hours where he felt his life was on the line, and he can’t get the emotions from that day to subside. He never knows when to anticipate a reaction like this, not when he never remembers the details of what happened, not anymore. And even without a source, the feelings just won’t go away, swirling around and around in his head until he makes the first cut, and then they fall silent.

It’s fucked up to do this to himself, that much he knows better than to try to deny, but he also can’t deny the effectiveness of it. The cutting works better than the compulsions do – hurting himself relieves tension instead of adding it, doesn’t force him into a never-ending loop of anxiety and intrusive thoughts – so much so that he sometimes cuts to stave off performing his compulsions at all.

And he can hide this new behavior better than he could mask the old ones. He used to fall to pieces whenever his obsessions reared their ugly heads, but now if he can just find a few minutes of guaranteed seclusion, he can regain enough composure to appear normal to everyone else.

All that matters, he thinks as he cleans himself up, is that he looks normal. If he can bandage the wounds, if he can hide them with enough layers of fabric, if he can leave this place and push down and down and down on any thoughts about the reason he did this in the first place until he forgets that reason completely, then he’ll be fine in the end.

So he pulls on his uniform, pulls his warmups on over that, and banishes all thoughts of anything but the pull of his shorts against his new wounds as he makes his way downstairs and out of the house. Inside the solitary confines of his room, he can be vulnerable all he wants, but the moment he steps outside of that space he has to be reliable and dependable and whole.

This is more important today than it is most days, because today the air buzzes with anticipation and his duffel bag hangs heavy against his back and Daichi waits nervous and eager at their usual meet-up spot.

“Am I late?” Koushi asks with a grin, even though he knows he’s not. He checked his alarm and the tournament schedule a dozen times each last night to make sure he got the time right. “Asahi’s not here.”

Daichi’s shoulders hold an almost imperceptible tension in them, and his steps are stiff as they turn together and begin walking towards the school. “He ran ahead. Literally. He couldn’t even keep still for the five minutes it took for you to show up.” Daichi takes a deep breath, the sound of it shaking a little in his lungs. “We’ve got this, right? I mean, our new libero is incredible, and Tanaka is a really reliable spiker, and I think we seem more cohesive this time around.”

“Or maybe you just jinxed it by saying that. Maybe we were going to go all the way and now we’ll never get a chance.”

“Gods, please don’t talk like that.” They draw closer in the cool twilight, Daichi arm bumping against Koushi’s as they make their way past the Sakanoshita Market. “You know the only time I ever pay attention to any kind of superstition is when we’re about to play.”

“We’ll be fine, Dai, you get too worked up about this stuff,” he says, ignoring the tiny part of his brain that mutters something about pots and kettles.

“I don’t want a repeat of last year. I want to make it to at least the second round.” He glances down at Koushi, and Koushi glances up at him, both of them holding eye contact before Daichi breaks away to stare at the sidewalk ahead of them. “Please tell me you’re freaking out too and you’re just not showing it. You look way too calm given the situation.”

“So, you’d rather have me panicking alongside you? Do you want the entire team to break down with you for solidarity’s sake?” Daichi’s mouth flops open and closed for a few seconds, then he frowns when Koushi starts laughing. “Relax, I’m joking. And of course I’m nervous, I could barely sleep last night because of this, but you know I won’t really feel it until the game starts.”

“I’m glad one of us can keep it together.” Something in Koushi’s chest constricts at those words, but he returns the smile Daichi sends him and says nothing.

They stay quiet all the way to the front gates of Karasuno, but just before they pass between them, Koushi notices their silence growing awkward and glances to his side to find Daichi frowning out at nothing. “What’s wrong?” Koushi asks. “Are you catastrophizing about the tournament again?”

“No, it’s not that.” He huffs a breath out of his nose, his expression thoughtful. “It’s nothing, really, it’s not a big deal.”

“It’s something, so tell me.”

Daichi reaches down to take Koushi’s hand, swallowing thickly before speaking again. “We just… haven’t done this in a while. Just spent some time together without anything else going on. I know you’ve been crazy busy and you had a lot to deal with these last few weeks, but it feels like I haven’t really seen you since you moved out of my place. Hell, your birthday was last week and we didn’t do anything to celebrate.”

Koushi left the Sawamuras’ house three weeks ago, going to live with his half-brother’s dads for a more permanent placement, and in the aftermath has indeed isolated far more than he probably should have. “Yeah, I’ve had a lot to do. But we can hang out more after this weekend, if you’d like.” He doesn’t know what else to say, and he always knows what to say in response to Daichi.

“I’d like that. I just sort of miss you, I guess. Are you…?” In the distance, the captain shouts at them from his place at the team van, and Daichi waves before continuing. “Are you doing okay? With the move and adjusting and everything, I mean.”

“It’s been fine. I’m fine.” He leads Daichi towards the rest of the team and pushes down on the guilt that springs from such an obvious lie, just like he pushes down on everything else.

Koushi is not fine.

He is not fine, because Karasuno loses in the second round on a spike a little too far outside, and while everyone around him has no difficulties expressing how they feel about that loss, he can’t get himself to react at all. It’s like somebody twisted the stopcock closed on his bottled emotions, and now he can’t figure out how to unscrew it. He wants to feel something, wants to cry like Asahi or sit with his head in his hands like Daichi or stomp around in rage like Tanaka, but no matter how many times he replays the last few seconds of the match in his head, all he comes up with is numb frustration and an awful sense of detachment from the rest of his team.

The air in the locker room is heavy with sorrow, with dejection, but none of it comes from Koushi. No one dares to make a sound, so he sits against the far wall and glances around him from one face to the next and tries to recall how he reacted to the last hard loss.

It was before his whole life changed, before he had even an inkling of the horrors he’d endure in the upcoming months. He’d cried silent, angry tears with Asahi and Daichi by his side, his hands balling into fists as he’d shoved his things into his bag; his senpais had patted him on the back, offered advice or consolation, but nothing could tame the howling flame of rage and the gnashing teeth of guilt that fought for control inside of him.

Logically, he remembers all of this. He knows, in the way he knows how to read or knows the dates of his friends’ birthdays, how unbearably heartbroken he’d been for days after the loss, but for the life of him he cannot now remember what that felt like. It’s as if he’s thinking back on someone else’s emotions, as if he’s watching through someone else’s eyes as a younger him breaks into pieces. That Koushi, that naïve first year who had little more to worry about than grades and friends and impressing a certain opposite hitter, no longer exists. He met a violent end ages ago, or maybe he just crumbled into dust without resistance. It’s so hard to remember what happened. It’s so hard to remember anything at all.

When he snaps back to the present, the captain is making some final speech, dancing around the fact that this is probably his and the other third years’ last game. The team huddles together, fists thrust towards the inside of the circle and chants so much quieter than they used to be, and then they all wander off to do their own things.

He hears Noya sneaking up on him and turns, plastering the biggest smile on his face he can manage. “What’s up?”

“The Aoba Johsai game is starting in a few minutes,” Noya says, his outward nonchalance betrayed by the puffy redness of his eyes. “Takeda-sensei is letting us stay for it if you wanna come watch with us.” He wiggles his eyebrows. “Daichi will be there.”

Spending time with his teammates when he has this great distance between him and them sounds awful, especially if those teammates involve Daichi, who won’t stop looking at Koushi like he’s a puzzle that needs solving ever since their conversation than morning. “I was going to take a shower.” It’s not a total lie; he can’t stand any sort of uncleanliness for longer than a few hours now, and his own cooling sweat has started to bother him. “Maybe I’ll come out after.”

“Sure thing. We’ll be easy to find, ‘cause we’re gonna spend the whole game heckling that loser Oikawa.” He gives a quick wave, then tackles Tanaka out of the locker room door.

Koushi showers in mechanical motions, like he's stuck on autopilot, but at least he doesn’t have to wash himself exactly three times to avoid dredging up old traumas like he used to. Progress is progress, in his book, even if he doesn’t feel all that much different than he did when he first moved in with the Sawamuras.

Those thoughts of progress, of old behaviors dropped and new habits begun, has his mind wandering to the little pocket in his bag where he keeps his blade. He takes it almost everywhere he goes now, a sick kind of security blanket, bringing it along to school to use during lunch or to practice just to have it by his side, and now he can’t stop circling back to it.

He’s never in a good headspace when this happens, is never thinking clearly, and this time is no exception. Before he can stop himself, he already has the blade out, a stripe of red already painting his thigh.

Here, leaning against the wall of a tiny shower stall and letting the pain of the cuts wash over him, he finally feels something. It isn’t much, isn’t close to what he knows it should be, but for the first time since the loss he embraces what little emotions flood him. Every regret and worry and sorrow has its own slice, burying themselves heavy and hollow in his chest, vibrant and stinging against his skin, bleeding into each another until he can’t make one out from the next. He never quite brings himself to tears, though, never quite restores the unbridled expression he showed just a year ago. He can’t remember the last time he knew how to open the floodgates.

The bathroom door opens, and a handful of what sounds like spectators come in, the noise of their chatter shaking Koushi out of his trance. He wonders how much time he’s spent like this, then fishes his phone out from his bag to confirm that he’s probably been gone long enough to worry his teammates. Not willing to endure the pain of washing his wounds, an irony that is not lost on him, he pats his legs dry with the darkest piece of fabric he has, then dries the rest of himself and pulls on his warmups.

By the time he gets out of the shower, he’s alone in the bathroom again, which is a great relief because he only notices the wide streak of red staining the bottom of his white shirt when he stands in front of the mirror.

Then, in a luck so great it must have dropped on him from the gods themselves, before he can try to scrub the blood away or change shirts or even move at all, the door slams open with such force it bounces off of the wall behind it. Daichi rushes in, lighting up when he sees Koushi and saying words that Koushi only half catches over the roar of panic in his ears.

“—you’re done you should come watch. Dateko is blocking everything, it’s like Seijoh doesn’t even have a chance, and…” Daichi trails off, only now realizing that Koushi is staring at him in absolute horror. His eyes trace a line from Koushi’s face to the mess of his shirt, and the corners of his mouth twitch upward in a nervous smile. “What is this, a murder scene or something?”

Koushi cannot get his mouth to move. He only blinks at Daichi, his hands clasping at the offending part of his shirt as if blocking it from view will make them both forget it’s there.

“Seriously, though, what’s going on?” Daichi takes a step forward, the awkward grin melting off his lips as he begins to comprehend what he’s seeing. “Are you hurt? Do I need to get the first aid kit?”

“No, it’s alright, I can handle it.” Koushi tries to turn away from Daichi, but his whole body has gone stiff and he can’t peel his eyes from the other boy’s face, from his gaze that is equal parts cutting and confused.

Daichi shakes his head, expression growing graver and graver. “I’m not sure you can, because that’s kind of a lot. Of blood, I mean. Did you… will you please tell me what I’m looking at?”

Koushi finally manages to move again, his hands flying to the zipper of his jacket because it seems his mind has subconsciously decided it’s best to hide the evidence even now, when he has nowhere to go. “I swear, Daichi, it’s nothing. I promise it’s nothing.”

Daichi seems to have overcome his initial shock in an alarming amount of time, and he crosses the floor and engulfs Koushi’s hands with his own, trying to wrest his fingers from the jacket. “You’re not getting away with that, not this time.” He finds purchase on the zipper and begins to tug on it, pulling it down to reveal the soiled shirt. “Is it your hands again? With the washing? I know it’s really hard to have to break that habit, but I don’t want you hurting yourself, so if you just—”

“It’s not that. It’s not anything, and I’d appreciate if you just forgot about this.”

He doesn’t give Daichi time to answer. With a quick step backwards and a yank, Koushi breaks free of his hold and zips the jacket up to his chin, then grabs his bag and brushes past Daichi, letting the door slam behind him.

For reasons he can’t fully explain, Koushi’s mind keeps telling him to run.

He weaves through the clumps of players and coaches and parents that crowd the auditorium’s foyer, clenching the strap of his bag in one hand and nervously straightening the bottom of his jacket with the other, ignoring the handful of odd stares that get thrown his way. If he can get out of sight, get somewhere he can blend in and disappear, maybe he can steer clear of Daichi or any of his other teammates until it’s time to leave. Hopefully that’ll be enough time for everything to blow over.

Running only makes things worse, he knows, only makes him look more suspicious. But if he’s going to remedy this situation, he needs an excuse, and even after several minutes of sitting in the audience of the Aoba Johsai game and doing nothing but trying to think of one, he comes up blank.

Before he can come up for any coherent explanation for his actions, the game ends and people file out around him, discussing the results of a match he looked at but didn’t even really watch. He doesn’t even know who won, can’t make sense of the jumbled cacophony of conversation around him as he follows the other spectators towards the exit. All he knows is that he has to get back to the rest of the team so he doesn’t cause another scene by making them wait.

Takeda stands in the doorway to their locker room, doing his best cat herder impression as he tries to double check that they have all their belongings while simultaneously keeping Tanaka from starting fights in the hallways with passing members of other teams and Noya from jumping on Asahi’s back. He gives only a brief nod as Koushi enters.

“Sugawara, make sure you take that bag out to the van to get it loaded up,” he says, returning to packing his own satchel. “Oh, and Daichi wants to talk to you about something.”

One of the few advantages of having a faculty advisor as the only adult supervising their team is that they can get away with quite a bit. Koushi rarely abuses this, except to occasionally peck Daichi’s cheek in public for the sole purpose of embarrassing the underclassmen, but now he finds his sensei’s frazzled state something of a blessing. With his simple inability to take on more than a few tasks at a time, his failure to question what Daichi wants or why Koushi looks so distraught, Takeda may have saved Koushi’s skin.

It is not as easy to avoid Daichi, who stands just inside the door and follows Koushi’s every move with a quick, concerned sweep of his eyes. Koushi manages, though, performing three inspections of his spot in the locker room before hauling his bag up higher on his shoulder and marching out to the van without so much as glancing back.

The two of them don’t say a word to each other on the ride back, and Koushi even goes so far as to take a seat next to Narita so Daichi can’t try to sit beside him. Instead, he spends the whole ride fiddling with his jacket hem, making sure it covers up the bloodstains, and does his best not to think about how long he has until he can’t run from Daichi anymore, even though he can’t stop the possibilities from spinning themselves in his head. Usually, to combat raging thoughts like these, he cuts, but he’s never cut himself twice in one day before. Doing so feels like a dangerous step, one he doesn’t yet want to take.

In the end, his peace lasts as long as the ride home does. As they begin hopping off the van, Koushi spots Daichi speaking with Takeda, who’d been too busy driving to discuss anything serious, and he watches long enough to see Takeda’s eyes go wide and his head swivel in Koushi’s direction.

Koushi grabs his things from the pile that someone dumped on the ground and walks away, not even pointing himself in the direction of his house so much as just going towards the fastest exit.

He isn’t fast enough, though, because Takeda lands a gentle hand on his wrist, and he doesn’t have the heart to shrug it off. “Sugawara,” he says, pulling a little to twist Koushi towards him. Koushi obliges, but stares off into the middle distance instead of looking the man in the face. “Do you have something you need to tell me?”

“No.” His response comes too quick, too loud, and with the sound of it a few of his teammates glance in his direction, falling silent as they look on in confusion. “I don’t. There’s no problem.”

“Okay, let me try again.” He sighs, adjusting his glasses, and grips Koushi’s wrist tighter. “Daichi told me that you have something going on, something we have to address. I think it will make things a little less scary if you just go ahead and tell me, so I don’t jump to conclusions and get something wrong.”

“It’s nothing. He’s exaggerating, probably.” Koushi clamps his lips shut, wills himself to keep silent, but as Takeda searches every inch of his expression for answers, he finds words tumbling out of his mouth unbidden. “There’s nothing on my shirt. There’s nothing going on.”

“Nobody said anything about your shirt. Is there a reason you’d bring that up if there’s nothing on it?”

The emotion that hits him is one he cannot fully describe, some horrid mixture of guilt and fear and self-loathing at his own stupidity. All he knows is that it feels like someone just punched him in the chest.

“Please, Sugawara, I want to help.” Takeda tilts his head to one side, a tenuous smile contorting his face. “I know it’s hard to talk about this, but we have to address it. I can’t just let you go home. So please, just tell me what happened so things don’t get worse.”

Despite Takeda’s best intentions, his unwavering gaze and vicelike hold on Koushi’s arm have already made things worse. The longer this goes on, the more his teammates turn to gawk at him, and the more he feels trapped beneath their curious stares, backed into a corner and surrounded by a dozen people watching and waiting for the moment something happens. The moment he snaps. Any lingering desire to just come clean about the whole problem disappears, replaced with smoldering indignation. Why would Takeda force him to reveal his greatest secret in front of everyone, force him to reveal it at all? Why did Daichi take this issue up with him in the first place?

“There’s nothing, sensei, really. I promise, it’s nothing.” He shuffles backwards, but the man doesn’t let go, digging his fingers into the fabric of Koushi’s jacket.

A jolt of panic, careening through his entire body like a lightning strike, washes over him, even though Takeda poses no threat to him. It’s the unrelenting grasp he has on Koushi that makes him intimidating, that makes Koushi’s skin crawl and his thoughts spiral. He can’t get away, he realizes, not without humiliating himself by tearing the man’s arm away from him, and with each passing second that escape is denied to him, his mind devolves further and further until the only solution he can come up with is to run.

So he runs.

He wrests his sleeve from Takeda’s hand and bolts, feet pounding across the school parking lot and over the sidewalks in town and up to his front door, where he tears through his house and locks himself in his room before anyone can speak to him. The rest of the night, he shakes so badly he can’t even hold his blade steady, so he curls up in bed and ignores his guardians knocking on his bedroom door and digs his fingernails into his arms because it’s the only thing that keeps him from breaking all the way down.

Chapter Text

Tonight’s nightmare finds Koushi crumpled on the hardwood kitchen floors of his old house, dressed only in an oversized, bloodstained t-shirt, the smell of copper sharp in his nose. He grips his blade in one hand, dangling it above a swath of bare skin on his arm, his fingers wrapped so loosely around it that it begins to slip.

He lays on his side, bringing his knees up to his chest just as the blade falls. It plummets in slow-motion, inching downward like it’s dropping through tar instead of air, and he convinces himself that it won’t even do him any harm, won’t do anything more than bounce ineffectively off of him.

But at the last minute, the blade changes, morphs in a moment from the small blade he’d dug out of a pencil sharpener to a knife the length of his entire forearm. The knife speeds up at the last second, turns point-down mere millimeters above his arm and sinks itself in.

The pain is like nothing he’s ever felt before. Something deep in his arm, deeper than he’d ever believed he could feel, rips like paper as the knife cuts straight through it and plants itself in the floorboards beneath him. Blood spurts out of the wound, which grows past the place the knife cut, runs the length of his arm along whatever artery he’d severed and splits the vessel in two. Within an instant, everything is red, a fountain of crimson gushing with every beat of his pulse, and despite the rivers splashing up against his face and filling every crack and crater in the floor, he only watches on, waits unfeeling for his body to bleed out.

When he does not, indeed, bleed out, he takes the knife by the handle and pulls, and it comes out with no great struggle. He stumbles to his feet and grasps the knife in his good hand and heads towards his front door. By this point, this many nights into dreaming about more or less the same thing, he knows this next part by heart.

Daichi is almost always outside the house, waiting there with his parents or by himself, and sometimes Koushi even gets to go with him. The times he isn’t there are the worst, are the ones where a howling monster crawls out of the shadows in the kitchen and yanks Koushi back with it, are the ones where his abuser holds him close and kisses him on the lips with a tender softness he never showed in real life, and Koushi kisses back.

Daichi is here tonight, though. He is here and gawking at the scene before him, fists clenched and chest heaving with the force of his breath, the force of his absolute shock.

And in response, Koushi lifts his bad arm, placing his palm on Daichi’s shoulder and leaving a dark handprint. “I’m fine,” he says to no one, says maybe to the drops of blood splattering black like oil against the sidewalk below them. “I’m fine.”

“You’re not fine, Suga.” Daichi grabs his good hand, fastens his fingers around the wrist and tries to take the knife, but Koushi just shrugs him away and moves past, on down the road. Daichi doesn’t follow.

He loses time for a while, wanders the streets of Karasuno and runs into no one. By the time he comes to again, he’s standing in the school parking lot and time seems to have moved backwards, because what was the dead of night only moments ago is now dusk. A group of boys huddles near the old gymnasium around the back of the main building, and Koushi stumbles towards them.

As he walks, he plunges the knife into himself over and over again. On one swing, he takes a clump of skin out of his right thigh; on another, he makes a long cut from the top of his shoulder to just above his hip bone. He bends down and slices both Achilles tendons in one swoop, reaches up and shoves the point of the knife into his mouth and down his throat, reminding himself not to swallow, and for just a moment the liquid pouring across his tongue does not taste like blood.

Bits of exposed bone glisten pale in the moonlight, glowing bright white against the crimson skin of his arm and legs and chest. He makes it to the group of boys at the gym, who busy themselves unloading bags and backpacks onto the pavement, chatting about tournaments and losses and next years, and he takes his place among him. He belongs here, after all; it’s his bag on the ground, his uniform suddenly covering his skeletal shoulders.

What he looks like, he can’t even imagine, but judging by the horror on everyone else’s faces, it can’t be anything good. A small man in glasses turns towards him, blanches, and tries and fails to speak.

“You’re overreacting,” Koushi says as Takeda flounders, even though his mouth is nearly too torn up to speak. “You’re all overreacting. There’s nothing wrong. I’m fine, it’s all fine.”

No one moves, no one blinks. He knows he should recognize the faces of those around him, knows they should all be his teammates, should all be familiar, but all he can see is their eyes. Their eyes that linger on the remnants of himself that stands before them, their eyes that search his maimed and broken body. They stare no matter where he turns, no matter how much of himself he cuts away, and in a final, desperate attempt to shake off his ceaseless watchers, he twists the knife towards his own eyes.

Koushi wakes with a jolt, a sharp pain skittering across the back of his eyelids. In the total darkness of his bedroom, he gropes for the lamp on his nightstand in a panicked frenzy, unable to discern if he cannot see because the world around him is pitch black or because his dream was not a dream after all.

The light switches on, confirming that he has indeed not gouged out an eye, and with shaking hands he examines the rest of him. He is free of blood, cannot spy his own bones poking out from beneath a gash of broken skin, but this confirmation does nothing to calm him.

He doesn’t sleep again for the rest of the night, instead lying motionless in his bed and glaring up at the ceiling as the last few moments of his nightmare repeat in his head. His own mangled body flashes through his mind, the memories of the gore as real as if they actually happened, and each replaying of a slice or cut or swing comes with a sickening clenching of his chest. But more than that, he remembers the expressions of his teammates, of his teacher, of Daichi, the abject fear that crowded their faces at the sight of him.

For the first time since the incident, he thinks he understands why Daichi told on him to Takeda. If he walked in to find someone trying to hide a blood-soaked shirt, only to have that same person freak out at a simple question about it, he’d probably bring it up with an adult, too.

So Koushi will just have to be more careful, then. He doesn’t want to bring attention to his bad habit, and he certainly doesn’t want to bring any undue attention to himself. More than anything, he wants Daichi and everyone else to believe that he’s okay, that he isn’t a burden anymore that they have to deal with. And losing it over a single well-intentioned confrontation does nothing to lessen any sorts of burdens. Daichi’s probably been worried sick over this whole thing.

By the time his alarm goes off, Koushi has crafted a plan to both remedy anyone’s concerns about him and to keep the reason for their concern hidden, and he wastes no time putting that plan into action.

Koushi hates the nightmares, not because they force him to sudden alertness at unholy hours of the night, or because they sometimes steal hours of sleep from him, or because they make him dread even going to bed most of the time, but rather because they are the last thing standing between him and perfect repression of the past.

In the waking world, he has spent a countless amount of time building up dozens of defenses against what little pieces of what he went through pop into his head. He forces his brain to recognize that it’s in the present, makes himself focus on something more painful than the memories, and for the most part this technique works.

But the moment he goes to sleep, all of his indomitable walls crumble. He can’t stop the thoughts, can’t quiet them or distract himself from them or push them away, can only watch in helpless terror as he relives them. Because of the dreams, he has to admit to himself that even as the time and distance between his old house and his new one stretches, his mind hasn’t truly recovered. With no other idea as to how to make the thoughts vanish, he does his best to act normal during the day and hopes his subconscious catches on.

So, the first thing he does once he gets to practice is to head towards Takeda, ignoring the way his teammates fall silent as he enters. He plants himself in front of the teacher, who sputters a bit but doesn’t get a word in before Koushi speaks.

“I’d like to apologize for how I acted after the tournament.” He drops into a low bow for a few seconds before standing up straight again. “I didn’t mean to disrespect you in any way.”

Takeda frowns and adjusts the glasses that have fallen crooked. “You aren’t – you didn’t… you didn’t disrespect me, Sugawara. I’m not offended. But we should talk about this, I think. I know you don’t want to, but it’s important to address what Daichi told me.”

“In all honesty,” Koushi says, preparing to do nothing but lie, “I had accidentally cut myself on a bit of the shower tile that was chipped. For some reason, I used the bottom of my shirt to clean it up instead of going to the locker room and getting the first aid kit. I think I was just a little ashamed that I did something so stupid.” He glances away and gives a shy smile, feigning embarrassment. “That was probably the reason I made that scene in the parking lot, too. I’m sorry about that, I should have just admitted it then so you wouldn’t worry over me.”

It’s obvious that Takeda doesn’t buy his story, but he doesn’t have an immediate answer to Koushi’s explanation. He just glances back and forth between Koushi and the rest of the team stretching in the middle of the court, and he lets out a tiny sigh. “If you ever have any problem, and I mean any problem, my door is open, alright? You can come to me any time. Understand?”

“Of course.”

“Alright.” His shoulders slump a little, and he waves towards the others. “Go warm up, I guess.”

Koushi slinks into the circle of stretching players, his chest no lighter than it was the night before, even though he has effectively redirected all of the focus that was placed on him. Well, most of the attention, because Daichi is trying and failing to hide how openly he studies Koushi, how glued his gaze is to every move Koushi makes. Koushi remembers his dream, remembers all those eyes, and he shudders and turns away.

Once they finish warming up, they move to run simple bump-set-spike drills on one side of the court, Takeda and Kiyoko standing on the other side and serving over the net. Koushi busies himself with taking second ball and sending it up for the spiker running up behind him. He does his best to match his tosses to whatever each of his teammates prefers, throwing it close to the net for one set, farther away for the other, working towards the ultimate goal of figuring out those preferences by just looking at his friends’ faces. So far he can only do this for Asahi; even Daichi is often a bit of an enigma.

Speaking of Daichi, Koushi can feel the other boy’s eyes on him for the entirety of the drill and most of the next one. Whenever he glances over, Daichi doesn’t look angry or upset or even worried; he just seems to be observing, gathering information, like Koushi is some challenge he needs to overcome.

“You staring at my ass or something?” Koushi asks in an undertone when they get a break. He smiles slightly, but his eyes don’t. “Like what you see?”

“Very funny.” Daichi’s tone indicates he finds no humor at all in the situation. For the first time all practice, he refuses to spare Koushi even a glance.

“What’s with the rubbernecking, then?”

“Lying doesn’t suit you.” He takes a swig out of his water bottle, and his throat bobs nervously even after he swallows. “You might’ve fooled Takeda with whatever you told him, but I know there’s something more going on with this whole thing. That’s why I talked to him in the first place, because you’ve been acting strange and it’s a little worrying. I don’t want you dealing with something on your own again.”

“There’s nothing to deal with, I promise. I get that you’re a little paranoid after everything, but I’m fine. I shouldn’t have acted like I did, I don’t know why that happened, but nothing bad happened before that.”

“You’re not tricking me with that.” The captain calls for two more minutes until practice resumes, and Koushi wanders towards the rest of the group, Daichi trailing him. “There was blood on your shirt, Suga, it’s not nothing. If the compulsions have come back and you’re getting stuck in a loop again, there’s no shame in it. I just don’t want you to hurt.”

Koushi takes a breath to reply, but thinks better of it and changes the subject. “Your spikes kept careening wide earlier, and we can’t afford those errors in this scrimmage we’re about to play. What do I need to adjust in my set?”

“Suga, don’t do this—”

“Please just let me adjust my sets.” His voice quivers more than he intended for it to, and Daichi raises an eyebrow, like that tiny waver somehow proves his point. Koushi does his best not to react one way or the other to the whole thing, standing in silence as he waits for a reply.

Daichi caps his bottle with a huff and returns it to his bag. “You could toss a little bit higher, maybe. I think that would be good.”

“Consider it done.”

“And, Suga?”

He spins to face Daichi once more, forcing his expression into perfect neutrality as he prepares for another retort. Instead, he finds Daichi’s features softened, his face filled with something worried and almost young, mouth drooping downward into a frown. “Just be careful,” he says. “And don’t run away this time. You know I’m here, and you know you can always talk to me if things get bad.”

“I will, if they get bad.”

“I want to believe you,” is all Daichi says before he walks back onto the court.

After practice comes and goes and Daichi doesn’t approach him again, Koushi grows anxious. He knows that Daichi won’t let his half-answers and misdirection slide, not without prying as much as he possibly can, digging deeper until he either finds what he’s looking for or pisses Koushi off enough for things to blow up in his face. Both outcomes are equally likely at this point.

Koushi changes as quickly as he can once practice ends, not even bothering to tie the laces of his shoes, just so he can get away before Daichi finds him. They live so close together they often take the same path home, but if Koushi sneaks off and takes the backroads, then he should—

“Mind if I walk with you?”

Daichi stands in the threshold of the gym, bathed in the harsh lights of the overheads that stream through the doorway. “Can I walk with you?” he asks again, and Koushi can’t make out his expression.

“We’re just going to take the same route anyway.” Koushi ties his laces, figuring that if he has to deal with this, then he at least isn’t going to trip in the middle of it. “Don’t really have a choice.”

“You make it sound like spending time with your boyfriend is a chore.”

He doesn’t have a response to that, so he just slings his bag over his shoulder and starts to move, letting Daichi choose whether or not he follows. Of course, he sidles right up beside Koushi, close enough that their elbows brush every few paces, and for some reason Koushi finds he can’t stand it, this proximity, this awkward silence that’s fallen between them. It isn’t just a lack of conversational topics; Koushi knows that Daichi wants to force him to make a comment, to speak up and reveal whatever kind of guilt the other boy thinks he bears.

The tactic shouldn’t work. Koushi should have enough fortitude to last a single uncomfortable walk back to his house without spilling, should have the patience to wait until Daichi cracks first, but he doesn’t.

“Alright, fine, what do you want?”

Daichi just gives him a pointed look, then turns his gaze back to the sidewalk ahead of them. “I’m pretty sure you can figure that one out.”

“You know what, I really can’t.” He shuts up before his frustration can seep into his voice, taking a few deep breaths and trying again. “You’re the one who’s acting like I committed some heinous crime. I know this is about what happened after the tournament, but I told you it wasn’t a big deal then and isn’t one now, and you just won’t believe me. I don’t know what else you want to hear.”

“The truth,” he says, expression unmoving.

“No, jackass, you want your truth. You’d rather think that I’m struggling through some crisis than that I’m fine, and nothing’s going on, and that you got it wrong for once.” He tips his head to the side. “I don’t appreciate you always assuming the worst. It’s like you don’t have any faith in me.”

“It’s not that.” Daichi’s hand tightens around the strap of his satchel, his feet pounding a faster rhythm against the ground. “You just have a tendency to, well…” Koushi looks him dead in the eyes and says nothing, and he gapes like a dying fish before finding his words. “You tend to pull away from people when things get rough, okay? I understand that you hate hearing it and that you’ll try to deny it, but it’s the absolute truth.”

“I’m not pulling away from anybody.” He says it before he can stop himself, then winces when he realizes he just proved Daichi’s point.

“You’ve been distant. More distant than you usually are, more distant than I know you like to be.” Koushi starts to protest, but Daichi just holds up his hand. “Don’t even argue it. Don’t you think I know you well enough to know that? In a perfect world, you’d be in the middle of whatever you’re invested in, trying to help everyone and know everything, but right now? I feel like I haven’t seen you since you moved out.”

“I’m always around,” he says weakly, glaring at the ground. “I haven’t missed class or practice since I left.”

“But you’re not really there. You come in and listen or work or do what you need to do, but you’re not really involved. Don’t you remember this time last year? Remember how you and I and Asahi used to stay after practice every night and run through plays? Do you know that he and I still do that?”

This is a revelation to Koushi, but what’s even more troublesome is that he hasn’t even noticed, hasn’t even realized how many nights a week he walks home by himself. “I’ve just been really busy with moving into my new place and everything.”

“And at some point all of that gets overwhelming.” He reaches down to take Koushi’s hand, and Koushi lets him, but the contact is stiff enough that he eventually gives up and lets go. “At some point you have to take a break from it, or let somebody know what’s going on, or ask for help. I can see it on your face that whatever’s making you push us away is something you can’t stand, and I don’t want to just sit back and let you go through it by yourself again.”

“Again,” Koushi echoes, the word barely more than a whisper.

“Yeah, again. The last time you kept away from everyone like this was when that asshole wouldn’t let you leave your own house.”

Koushi recoils, shoulders tensing as a fresh wave of anxiety rolls through him. It isn’t anxiety over this situation; it’s probably some left over reaction to whatever Daichi’s talking about, but he can’t recall the details well enough to know for sure. “It’s not like that, though. Nothing’s going on, I swear.”

“I’m not saying that’s what it is, but it’s something just as bad.” Daichi’s face is much more relaxed, and he watches Koushi not like he’s a puzzle, but like he’s something fragile about to break.

“Nothing’s ever going to be that bad, ever again. It’s not possible.”

“Maybe you’re right.” He keeps glancing at Koushi as they walk, and Koushi wonders if Daichi can hear how loud his heart has suddenly started beating. “And maybe whatever’s up with you now has to do with what happened back then.”

The panic grows, mingled in with confusion, because Koushi has no idea what set him off. He isn’t afraid of Daichi, doesn’t find this conversation any more threatening than ones they’ve had previously, but bringing up his past like this has his breath catching in his throat and his hands shaking and no matter how hard he pushes down on these things they won’t go away. “It’s not still going on. It ended months ago, I’m done with it, I don’t want to deal with it again.”

“I get it, Kou, I get it.” He stops walking altogether and turns towards Koushi, eyes filled with concern. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to upset you.”

“I’m not upset,” Koushi says, and his voice breaks on the last word.

“But you are. And it’s okay that you are, it’s understandable, but you’re acting like you’re over it and you’re obviously not.” Koushi plays with the cuff of his sleeve, and Daichi places a gentle hand over his fingers to get him to stop. “I’m not asking you to wallow in it, no one is. I just don’t think this is something that you can forget about all at once.”

“I did forget about it, though.” Daichi starts to speak, brow furrowing, but Koushi keeps going. “That thing you said about me not being able to leave the house, I don’t even remember it.” He doesn’t think about the fear that spiked through him at the mere mention of that situation, and he certainly doesn’t wonder if some part of his body and brain does indeed remember. “Even if I try to bring it to the front of my mind, nothing happens. Those months are like one big empty space.”

“Suga, I don’t think that’s—”

“And if I don’t remember it, it’s like it didn’t even happen. I don’t have any reason to feel sad if there’s nothing to be sad about in the first place.”

They reach the spot in their walk where their paths diverge, and Koushi angles himself away from Daichi and starts to walk towards his house, but Daichi’s voice follows him. “That’s not how that works, though. You’re not over it, you’re trying to ignore it. It’s still there as much as it’s ever been.”

Koushi has no smart comeback to that, and he doesn’t try to come up with one. Instead, he keeps his back to Daichi and pretends he didn’t hear the other boy’s words, even though they stick with him for the rest of the night.

Chapter Text

Ignoring Daichi becomes even more of a priority after their talk, especially if he’s just going to keep bringing up things that are better left untouched.

Still, Koushi can’t get Daichi’s words out of his head, can’t forget his accusation that Koushi hasn’t been dealing with his problems so much as he’s been hiding from them. And he knows that it’s true, deep down in his heart of hearts; he knows that he can’t keep pushing down on things forever, that the cutting is just a distraction like the compulsions had been, that he won’t get over his problems by trying to run away from them.

But accepting those facts is another ordeal entirely. If he hasn’t already accepted what happened, if what he’s been doing isn’t acceptance, then he doesn’t know where to start. All he seems capable of these last few months is staying away, from his team, from his emotions, from his past – hell, he’s more than aware that even now he’s not avoiding Daichi, he’s avoiding the problem.

He looks for help on the internet first, spending more than half an hour procrastinating before finally typing something barely related to his real question in the search bar. He skims over other people’s stories and pretends to read self-help articles, then concludes that in comparison to some of these people, he didn’t have it that bad, he really shouldn’t even be looking this shit up. It doesn’t matter that he had to deal with it for months, not when some people spent years in worse conditions.

And yet, there is the matter of the it, of the thing-that-shall-not-be-named, of the man whose face flashes in his nightmares and whose voice still sometimes rings out in the shell of Koushi’s ear. There is at times the feeling of cold hardwood floors against his back even when he’s standing upright, the sensation of hands around his wrists, of a pain that sometimes flashes when he—

Koushi cannot remember the last day that it, that that man, held no sway over his life. It makes him hide from the people he cares about, makes him slice into his own skin, makes him feel his past in his present. If he lets himself admit it, he’d say that it was bad, that it was a difficult time to live through. That he struggled and feared and ached in ways he never should have had to. But he doesn’t let himself admit that most of the time.

Whenever a memory comes to him, he reminds himself that it could be worse. That he had it better than some, that he brought this upon himself in some ways, that he made a choice back then and a choice now and he has to live with the consequences. He can hardly stand to think about what would happen if he admitted that it was real, or that it was bad, or that it wasn’t his fault. He doesn’t think he could handle it being all of those things at once.

For the most part, he keeps his newest crisis under wraps, makes sure no one else can tell what’s going on. But every once in a while, something slips out, and people notice.

Asahi notices, more specifically.

“Are you okay?” he asks one day after practice, shuffling over to stand at Koushi’s side.

Koushi, nearing the end of another intense round of internal deliberation, snaps out of it and finds he’s just been staring at the wall in the clubroom. “Oh, um, yeah. Fine. Just a lot of… stuff going on, I guess.”

“Clearly.”

His instinct is to respond to sarcasm with sarcasm, but he bites his tongue at the last second and changes directions. “Why are you asking?”

“Because you do a terrible job of taking care of yourself.” Asahi says it like he’s giving a weather report, like it’s something easy to comment on. “And you and Daichi aren’t talking right now, so there’s no one else to make sure you’re not just zoning out all day.”

“I do not zone out all day.” To emphasize this, he storms out of the clubroom and lets Asahi follow behind. “And you make it sound like Daichi and I are fighting or something, but we’re just—”

“Not speaking to each other. Not looking at each other. Pretending like the other person doesn’t exist.” When Koushi glares at him over his shoulder, Asahi shrugs, but that’s all the courage he can manage, and he looks away.

“You’ve just been watching us?” Koushi asks. “What’s that about? You’re not usually so invested.”

He hasn’t glanced back yet, eyes trained on the ground as they walk. “It’s just that…”

“Yes? It’s what?”

“It’s nothing.”

“Asahi, come on.” This must be what it’s like for Daichi, Koushi realizes, whenever Koushi swears there’s nothing going on. “It’s something, so just tell me.”

“You – it’s just—” Asahi clamps his mouth shut, eyebrows furrowing, and several seconds pass before he tries again. “It’s stupid, it kind of makes me sound like a little kid, but I feel sort of… left out. I get you two are together, but we’re all still friends I think, and I feel like you guys don’t always tell me things?” He ends the sentence like it’s a question, as if he isn’t quite sure.

Koushi doesn’t even have to play up his confused expression. “You feel left out of our weird mutual silent treatment? I can ignore you too, if you really want me to.”

“No, that’s not what I mean.” Koushi stops walking and turns in time to see Asahi make a vague gesture to all of him. He places one hand on his hip and waits, and Asahi runs a hand through his hair, working his ponytail out of its holder. “I might be completely wrong, and I hope I am, but something happened during the spring, didn’t it? Something that made you move to a new house with new parents.”

“I was, um…” His voice trembles, and he clears his throat. “I was under the impression that you knew. That somebody – that somebody told you.”

Asahi just shakes his head. “I didn’t hear anything, and then I walked in on you that day and you’d washed your hands so much they were bleeding, and I—”

“Hold on, sorry, go back to that.”

“That I didn’t hear anything?”

“After that.”

“That you washed your hands until they bled?” Koushi nods mutely, and something akin to horror crawls onto Asahi’s face. “Please tell me that happened. I mean, I don’t want it to have happened, but I don’t think I hallucinated it or anything.”

“No, it probably happened, I just don’t remember it. I don’t remember a lot of what happened back then.” He stares at the back of his hands, flexes each of the fingers in turn. “It makes sense, though. I kind of get an… itch sometimes.”

“An itch?”

“You know what, don’t worry about it.” He balls his hands into fists and stuffs them into his pockets, because he’s begun to feel that desire to wash them, to scrub off dirt that he knows does not exist, and the sensation is both familiar and alien and he hates every part of it. “I’m really sorry, Asahi. Like, really, actually sorry. I’d like to clear things up, if you want to know what’s going on.”

“I mean, if you don’t – if that’s fine, we can—” Koushi lets him ramble without interrupting, and soon enough he gathers himself. “Yeah, I think it would be good if we did that. There’s a little tea shop near my house, and we don’t have practice tomorrow.”

“That makes it sound like we’re adults, like I don’t have all of three thousand yen to my name.” Asahi pales a little, starts to backtrack, but Koushi interrupts him. “It’s good with me. See you tomorrow.”

“Washed them until I bled, huh?”

“Um, yeah.” Asahi takes a sip of his tea, then presses his mouth into a thin line. “It was all over the sink and stuff. You don’t even remember it?”

“You know, now that I’ve had a day to think about it, it sounds kind of familiar.” He props his elbow on the table and leans his cheek against his fist. “I think you looked like you saw a ghost and went, ‘Suga, there’s blood everywhere’. Is that right?”

He pinks a bit, but nods. “Something like that. But I just – it doesn’t bother you? That you did that, or that you forgot you did that?”

“It might sound weird, but honestly, it doesn’t. As for forgetting it, that’s not the worst thing that I’ve been through that I don’t have many memories of. And for the other part, I’ve gotten used to seeing the more gruesome stuff.” He forces himself to stop speaking, worried that a much more potent secret will spill out if he doesn’t. Just talking about any part of this at all is a huge step; he’s not ready to deal with the ramifications of the cutting quite yet.

They fall silent, Asahi warming his hands on his cup and Koushi watching as people stream in and out of the shop. Asahi let him lead the way when they entered, let him take them to a table in the back corner away from the main bustle near the counter, somewhere Koushi can sit without having to worry about anyone coming up behind him.

“I guess this is where I start actually talking about it,” Koushi says, just loud enough for his voice to carry above the background noise of the shop.

“I guess.”

Koushi bites at his bottom lip, trying to figure out a way to start. “When I was… last spring I…” Gods, it’s so hard to tell a story when he doesn’t actually recall half of it and wishes he couldn’t recall the other half. “Sometime around the start of last winter, my mother’s new boyfriend moved in with us. He was… he was a terrible person, just an awful, horrible person to be around, and I had to live with him for months. And I tried to handle things myself and not get anybody else involved, but it only got worse and then my own mother wouldn’t believe me and—”

“You don’t have to talk about it,” Asahi break in, “if it makes you upset. I don’t have to know.”

“It’s fine.” If Asahi of all people is trying to calm him down, he needs to get a grip. It shouldn’t be so hard to recite police records and hospital documents and other people’s testimonies. “Anyway, not long after the guy moved in, things got…” Bad, he almost says but doesn’t. Because it wasn’t that bad. Or maybe it was that bad, and it always had been. “They got to a point where authorities got involved, and it was decided that this guy should get locked up and my mother shouldn’t be allowed to keep me.”

“Oh,” Asahi says, voice whispery. He studies the pattern of the tabletop.

“And I just went sort of crazy. Thought he’d come back to take me. Kept checking for him behind doors and out windows and behind my back and all that shit. The whole thing made me feel kind of… disgusting, and I became obsessed with being clean. That’s why you found me the way you did back then, I literally could not get myself to stop washing my hands.”

Asahi runs a hand through his hair, taking a long breath before daring to speak. “That’s… that’s a lot, gods. I’m really – I was going to say I’m sorry, but that probably doesn’t help, does it? Are you… in a better place now? Like, physically and mentally?”

“Yes, and yes.” That second thing feels like a lie, might even be a lie, but he sticks with it.

“Really?”

Koushi goes to respond, to answer in the way that would fix this situation and get the attention off of him at last, but he can’t get the words out, so he just nods. Asahi clearly isn’t convinced.

“You don’t have to keep this stuff from me, you know.” He gives a sheepish smile but looks Koushi in the eyes. “I get that I’m prone to freaking out about little things, but I do still want to hear about them even if I panic over it first. I mean, we are friends, right?”

“Of course.” Those words come easy enough, come so quickly he doesn’t even have to think about them before they leave his mouth. “It’s not that I didn’t want you to know, I just didn’t involve you because I didn’t want you to have to worry about it. I was just overreacting about the whole thing, I really shouldn’t have even pulled Daichi into it.”

“Were you?”

He frowns. “Was I what?”

“Overreacting.” Asahi fiddles with his teacup, running his fingers around the rim of it. “I don’t have all the details, but it sounds like you had a really hard few months. Do you think you blew it out of proportion? Do you think you could blow something like that out of proportion?”

A lump settles in Koushi’s throat, and for a few seconds he can’t make a sound. “Don’t ask me questions like that,” he says eventually with the ghost of a grin.

“I just don’t think you’re that dramatic about things like this.”

“I have my moments.”

“No argument there,” he says, and laughs. “But when it comes to the really important stuff, you always stay calm. Whenever I start to get too deep in my own head, it’s Daichi that makes a plan to help me out, but you’re the one who keeps me from losing it in the first place.”

“To be fair, I usually end up teasing you to get your mind off of it, which can’t be that helpful.”

“The point is, when things get tough, your instinct is to joke about it.” He seems so confident about it, able to comment on it with such casual assurance, but Koushi still doesn’t believe him. “If anything, you undersell whatever’s going on.”

“Well, maybe that’s how things went in the past, but since this whole situation ended my brain’s gone haywire. I jump at things all the time and worry over everything.” He stiffens, gaze distant, trying to walk the thin line between remembering and reliving. “When I got out of that place, out of that man’s hold, it was like I was a different person. Whenever I think about the way things were before, it feels like I’m thinking about someone else entirely. It’s hard to accept that I was ever that naïve.”

Asahi sets his cup down on the saucer, gentle but certain, and throws his hands up in a pleading gesture. “Alright, no offense or anything, but I think I’ve reached my limit on pretending to know what I’m doing. Can I be straightforward about this?”

“It’ll be the first time in your life,” Koushi says, but he doesn’t smile.

“I think what you’re going through is kind of serious.” He chooses each word carefully, a sharp contrast to the anxious ramblings he often gets himself into. “And I know you’re more likely to not take things seriously enough in general, but I think you’re really downplaying it this time.”

Koushi slumps in his chair. “Daichi said the same thing. Said I was just ignoring the problem instead of addressing it.”

“Yeah, maybe he’s right.” Koushi’s glare borders on a glower; it isn’t directed at Asahi, more at the possibility that Daichi won their little tussle the other night, but Asahi backs off anyway. “I mean – okay, look. He can be… intense, like really, really intense. Scary, even, sometimes. Or a lot of the time, like when he—”

“Asahi, focus.”

“Right, sorry. What I’m trying to say is that he gets intense about things, and it feels like he’s just arguing or yelling at you, but a lot of the time he’s right. And I think he’s right about this.”

He bites back the kneejerk reaction to disagree, to claim Daichi is babying him and that he’s getting himself worked up over nothing, that he can handle this on his own. Instead of saying anything, he rights himself as Asahi continues.

“Don’t get mad about me saying this, but maybe you should talk to someone. Like, an adult, someone who can actually give you good advice. The school counselor, maybe, or one of our teachers, or—”

“Takeda,” Koushi murmurs, with no small level of resignation.

“Or Takeda, if that’s better.” He peers at Koushi, eyes narrowing. “What’s that look for? Did I say something wrong?”

“No, I don’t think so.” Koushi pushes his chair back and stands, giving Asahi the most pleasant expression he can manage at the moment. “Thanks for this, really. And I’m sorry we haven’t done it sooner.”

“Just let me know if you need something, okay? Please?”

“I will,” he says, and for the first time in a long time he means it.

He should not be so intimidated by his tiny, mild-mannered literature teacher, and yet here he is, standing just outside the teachers’ lounge and trying to psych himself up to go in.

Stepping inside feels a little bit like skydiving, or maybe more like the part right before skydiving, when you have to choose of your own free will to step out of the plane while every primal, self-preserving cell in your body screams at you to stay where it’s safe. Koushi’s brain tells him to get out before it’s too late, to just turn around and leave without a word before he has to hear something he won’t like.

But Takeda catches him the moment he enters. “You can sit anywhere, Sugawara,” he says with a deceptive lightness. “I’m glad you decided to talk to me.”

Koushi drops down into one of the empty rolling chairs near Takeda’s desk, feeling horribly exposed in the room’s stark openness. No one else occupies the lounge, but anyone could walk in at any second, and Koushi can imagine no greater humiliation than someone stumbling in here in the middle of a conversation like this. He should have expected this when he first asked to speak with Takeda, but it’s yet another thing that slipped his mind.

“We could go into an office, if you want,” Takeda says.

The thought of sitting behind a closed door with someone he doesn’t know all that well makes any potential humiliation suddenly seem harmless, and he shakes his head. “I’m fine if we do it in here, if that’s alright.”

“Of course.” Takeda pushes away a small stack of paperwork, ensures his computer screen is off, and flips his phone face down. “What would you like to talk about?”

Faced with such a vague question, Koushi struggles to find a place to start. He doesn’t want to talk about any of this, really, but he knows he needs to, knows that if both of his closest friends are telling him to reach out, then he should. As the seconds tick by in silence, he begins to wither even beneath Takeda’s unassuming gaze, and he blurts out the first thing that comes to his mind.

“How do you know which side of an argument is right?”

Takeda’s eyebrows shoot up, and he hums. “That would… depend, I think. For some things, there’s one view that’s undoubtedly correct, but sometimes both sides have a point. I need a little more context to give you a good answer.”

“What if it’s all in your head?” Koushi asks. “If you keep thinking two opposite things and they both seem right and you don’t know which one is actually right?”

“Ah, that’s one of the hardest situations to be in.” He taps his fingers against his desktop, crossing one leg over the other as his eyes turn thoughtful. “I would handle it the same way that I would handle determining truth in a disagreement between two people. I’d try to find all the facts, see which option does the least harm, and then make my decision based on that. Again, sometimes it’s more than possible that both sides are right, just from different points of view.”

“And what if you don’t know all the facts? What if you can’t remember them?”

“Sugawara.” Koushi digs his fingers into the cushion of his chair, studying the fabric of his uniform pants as Takeda speaks. “I don’t think you came here to debate philosophy, did you? You don’t have to go into specifics, but if you tell me what’s going on, I can help better than I can if I don’t know anything.”

Koushi swallows, and his throat grinds like sandpaper. He wonders if this part will ever get better, or if he’ll ever stop having to do it. “You know a few months ago, when I was out of school for about a week straight?” Takeda nods but says nothing, willing Koushi to continue. “Well, something… happened during that week. And before then, too. And it wasn’t a – it wasn’t great, what happened. I thought I’d gotten over it by now, but it keeps popping up even though I don’t want it to, and half of me thinks I’m freaking out over it for no reason, and the other half says that I should be upset because what I went through was really bad.”

“But you can’t recall the objective details of it?” Takeda says.

He nods. “It’s like some kind of subconscious part of me does, though. I feel the emotions but don’t know where they’re from.”

“I’d still deal with it the same way.” Somewhere beneath the slight smile Takeda gives him is that faint look of sadness that Koushi has gotten so used to, but the man scrubs it off quickly enough. “Even though you can’t look to the past for answers, you can look to the present and what you know from common sense. You could even let both sides play out fully, pick a stance and defend it all the way through, then do the same for the other.”

“As if I were two different people arguing with each other?”

“Something like that. I think it’ll become clear which option is the right one.”

Koushi jumps out of his chair with so much force he almost topples over. “Thank you, sensei, I’ll try that.” He begins to make his way to the door and leaves before there’s any time for Takeda to bring up any subsequent concerns regarding what Koushi has told him, and certainly before he has time to ask about that awkward situation in the parking lot a few weeks ago.

Once back at home, Koushi locks himself in his bedroom and situates himself in front of his mirror, taking a breath before doing just as Takeda told him.

“It wasn’t really that bad,” he begins shakily, staring his reflection in the eyes. “It wasn’t that bad, it didn’t happen for long enough to really affect me. I could have… I should have been stronger, or smarter, or quicker to tell someone. I shouldn’t have relied so much on my mother to help me, because I knew what kind of person she was even before it all started.”

Watching himself speak these things, seeing his own mouth spew the words he’d only dared think in his mind up until this point, steals the air from his lungs. He steps away from the mirror and crumbles beside his bed, pulling his legs up to his chest. “I was – I was weak. I was stupid for choosing to stick around. I chose to go back to the house and to stay there when I should’ve run away. I didn’t even fight it, I just let that bastard do whatever he wanted to me, just let him ragdoll me around while I laid there and did nothing.” His breath hitches, and he grips his knees, fingers twisting into the fabric of his pants. “I deserved it. I was stupid and spineless and I deserved it.”

The silence that follows resonates, the sound of it so painfully loud that Koushi covers his ears against it even though all of that came from inside him. He hears the echo of his own voice – I deserved it, I deserved it, I deserved it – ricochet in his skull, bouncing around without slowing, circling again and again until it overpowers even his other senses.

Takeda was telling the truth, Koushi realizes with as much bitter humor as he can manage, because this feels horrible. It’s clear that this isn’t the right choice, isn’t the right viewpoint.

But if this is wrong, then admitting he was hurt must be right, and he isn’t ready to face that. He can’t get himself to open his mouth again, to offer any rebuttal to what he’d already dredged up out of the darkest parts of his mind. He isn’t even sure he can come up with a counterargument, if he has ever allowed himself to see what happened without blaming it on his own decisions.

He spends the rest of the night feeling empty, for lack of a better word. He no longer identifies with the vile lies he’d spoken of just hours before, but he can’t find it in him to think of himself as some kind of victim.

Sleep doesn’t come to him, but he doesn’t bother to try drifting off anyway, choosing instead to stare up at the ceiling and think of nothing at all.

Chapter Text

Koushi does start to see things from the other point of view, but it happens in stages, and takes him far too long to fully accept.

He can spout the things he knows about what happened, about his assault, as he’s begun letting himself call it, with ease. Once he allowed himself to admit that he was assaulted, that he did go through something objectively harmful, he could ramble off other people’s words without problem; the attack was violent, the perpetrator deranged, the incident life-changing, according to the police and the Sawamuras and the courts.

Getting himself to really believe it, though, to integrate their words and their sympathy and their frustrating pity with his view of his own mind and his past and his future, proves much more difficult.

The first time he makes that emotional connection is during an otherwise normal practice, as he tries to help the first years with their returns.

“I’m aware that you’re the libero,” he says before Noya has a chance to complain again. “I’m aware you’re a really good receiver and that you could probably do this with your eyes closed, but you still need to practice just like everyone else.”

Noya hops up and down in place, his mouth pulled down in a frown. “This is an insult to my skill and you know it. I shouldn’t be practicing these baby receives. I’m not a wing spiker.”

“The hell’s that supposed to mean?” Tanaka demands, puffing out his chest.

“You know exactly what that means. Don’t tell me you forgot about that dive you made in the tournament where you stopped a meter short. Maybe if you got that ball, we wouldn’t have lost.”

“Don’t fucking talk about—”

Koushi throws himself between them, preventing either of them from rushing forward. “Come on now, you know that’s a low blow,” he tells Noya. “We’re all still dealing with the loss, it’s a touchy subject.”

“But I’m right, he messed it up.”

“And you never mess anything up, I’m sure,” Ennoshita says, rolling his eyes at the whole altercation.

With a huff, Noya takes a few steps back and crosses his arms. “Yeah, but the rest of you had more return errors. It’s just a fact. I shouldn’t be working on these, they’re boring and a waste of time and I should be doing something more advanced. Did I tell you guys I have a new rolling receive I’m calling—”

“Take it up with captain if you have a problem with the drill,” Koushi says. He resets his own stance and angles the ball towards Kinoshita, who drops into ready position and returns the serve without protest.

“Suga-san, can’t you have a little mercy on us?” Noya asks, eyes large and pleading. “Don’t you agree we have better things to do?”

Koushi drops his head into his free hand. “Look, captain just told me to work on this with all of you, so I did. I know no one wants to do this, but we’re also all trying to make good impressions for when the third years move on, so I think you should just—”

“You’re trying to make vice-captain, aren’t you, Suga-san?” Tanaka smirks, but the expression vanishes the moment Koushi turns to glare at him.

“I don’t think he’ll have to worry about that,” Ennoshita says without hesitation, like this is just something open for discussion. “Daichi-san is going to be captain, and that means Suga-san will be vice-captain almost by default. I mean, who else would it be? Haven’t you seen how those two act around each other?”

If Koushi’s cheeks begin to grow red, thankfully no one comments on it. “Guys, please focus. We’re just supposed to be practicing our returns, and you keep derailing things.”

Despite his best efforts, both his pleadings and his attempts at redirecting their practice session do little to change the situation, and they talk themselves in circles without getting anything done. The captain seems to have expected this outcome, because he gives Koushi a good-natured pat on the back and a smile at the end of practice.

“Was this all some weird test?” Koushi wonders aloud in the clubroom that night. “Does captain hate me or something?”

“He’s seeing if you’ll make a good vice-captain,” Daichi says without hesitation from the other side of the room.

“But he doesn’t get to decide that, you do.”

Daichi gives a quiet laugh, his gaze soft. “I know that, Suga, it was a joke. He probably just wanted you to wrangle them for twenty minutes because someone told him you’re good with kids.” Koushi doesn’t mention that Daichi was the one who told him that, and, more importantly, he doesn’t mention that Daichi is speaking with him after almost a week of nothing but awkward, stilted conversations. “But really, was it that bad?”

“They just kept bouncing all over the place. They wouldn’t spend more than twenty seconds on a single topic.” Daichi laughs again, and Koushi throws him a pointed look but says nothing. “Even Ennoshita got in on it. Were we that bad as first years?”

“Me? No, of course not. You and Asahi?” Daichi cringes. “Absolutely terrible. An embarrassment to be around, if I’m honest.”

Koushi sighs in exasperation and follows Daichi out the door, the two of them falling into an easy lockstep as they head towards the gym to help close up. He can’t bring himself to voice any of the questions flooding his mind – questions of why Daichi chose to jump right back into their usual dynamic given their last big talk, of why he was willing to give Koushi space even after Koushi called him a jackass and all but ran away – for fear of breaking the tremulous peace they’ve woven between them.

Instead of speaking, he thinks back on the failed practice session, recalls his underclassmen’s lackadaisical attitudes and petty fighting with a surprising level of fondness. He has memories of when he acted the same way about practice, when he had same kind of energy and excitement towards things as they do now.

Something worms its way deep inside his lungs, something heavier than pure nostalgia. It aches a little bit, tightens around his throat, a feeling like sorrow if he could only remember what sorrow felt like.

“You okay?” Daichi asks, tipping his head to the side to get a better look at Koushi’s face.

“Yeah, fine.” Koushi bites at his lip to hide the way that crushing sensation grows at the lie. “They really are just a bunch of kids, aren’t they?”

“Are you still on about that?” He shrugs, feigning nonchalance even as he studies Koushi’s every movement. “I mean, I guess they are pretty young. Or naïve, or however you want to look at it. It’s normal for their age, though, I think. What are you trying to get at?”

“We were just kids as first years, too, right?”

“Um, yes, by necessity we were younger in the past than we are now. Seriously, are you okay?”

Koushi can’t bring himself to form a response, because the sudden realization hits him with enough strength to steal his breath away. He was so young when it happened, he was just a child, and someone had the fucking audacity to steal that from him. That bastard knew what assaulting him would do to Koushi’s mind, knew that it would destroy his worldview and rob him of his innocence, and the man still chose to act on his impulses.

Hiro chose to do that. He chose of his own volition, and then he decided to do it over and over again without a single consideration for how it would affect Koushi.

The white-hot rage that flows through him threatens to take him off his feet. Daichi is saying something at his side, but all Koushi hears is his own pulse racing in his ears, and he has to fight to keep his anger from showing on his face.

They drift away as Daichi goes to talk with the captain and Koushi carries on towards his house. As Koushi falls back beneath the deafening silence of his own thoughts, he realizes that the hollow feeling in his chest has been replaced by something splintering and singed at the edges.

By the time afternoon rolls around the next day, that splintering sensation has spread from Koushi’s chest to his whole body, fracturing into cracks that spread like spiderwebs through every inch of himself. His hands shake as he tries to write his class notes, his mind stuffed with cotton and white noise, and he jumps at every little sound and movement around him.

Even the quiet thud of Daichi’s bento hitting his desk is enough to make Koushi flinch away, which has Daichi frowning down at him. “You good?” he asks as he pulls his own desk over, forming the second point of the triangle they always sit in during lunch.

“Yeah, I’m fine.” He reaches down to pull out his own lunchbox, but his fingers won’t wrap around the zipper of his bag, and Daichi has to fish it out for him. “It’s not as bad as it looks.”

“Not the most convincing thing you’ve ever told me.” Asahi appears at the doorway, face cloaked in uncertainty like it’s the first time he’s ever come into their room and not the hundredth, and Daichi waves him over while still speaking to Koushi. “Does this have to do with last night? Because you were sort of… rambling about the first years. It was a little weird.”

“It’s not that.” It is that, and only that; his first time fully accepting how much the assault cost him has sent him tail spinning, his mind flipping over and over itself until he can’t even think straight. “I’m fine.”

“If you’re having a bad day or going through it or something, it’s okay if you need to talk about it—”

“I said I’m fine.”

His words come out sharper than he intended, barbed in ways they never are, and it’s nearly enough to make Asahi turn on his heel and leave to avoid any kind of conflict. Daichi tells him to sit down with a sigh, giving him a quick greeting before focusing back on Koushi. In that one moment, a dozen different emotions run across Daichi’s face, frustration and irritation and worry all melting into one another, and each of them digs into Koushi like needles.

Daichi shouldn’t have to feel so annoyed around him, shouldn’t have to spend all of their time together wondering what Koushi’s hiding from him, wondering how close he is to another breakdown. Koushi should be able to just spit it out, to just admit he’s struggling, should have the strength within him to say that he’s stuck in some awful loop and thinks he’s about to fall apart.

But he doesn’t have the strength. He doesn’t have the strength to admit his weakness, not now, not back then when he chose to go back with Hiro. It isn’t his fault, what happened after that, but that doesn’t change the fact that a better person, a stronger and smarter person, would have talked to somebody, would have accepted help, wouldn’t have even had to go through what Koushi went through. He has to deal with the repercussions of what happened because he couldn’t bring himself to reach out, and now he’s doing the same thing again and he can’t get himself to stop.

“Do you need to step out for a second?” Daichi’s voice floats to him from somewhere far away, the sound of it muffled beneath the pounding of blood in his ears.

Asahi nods his agreement, concern clear on his face, and even his quiet words echo through Koushi’s head. “You look a little pale, actually. Sometimes when I get really nervous, I have to go outside and walk around and stuff.”

He grips the edges of his desk, using the last shreds of his composure not to snap at Asahi for just trying to make things better. “It’s fine, I’m fine.” But the whole world is closing in on him, and he can’t draw in air, and he’s been like this all day and gods know how much longer he’ll have to deal with it. “I don’t need to leave.”

“You’re sure?” Daichi leans in close, too close, eyes searching, and Koushi feels so exposed, all his layers peeled away. There’s a phantom sensation of a hand on the small of his back, the brush of invisible fingertips, and when Daichi speaks again the hold tightens. “I’m not trying to make things difficult, alright? It doesn’t have to be difficult. I’m not trying to hurt you or anything, I promise.”

It’s so stupid, that that’s what sets him off. Words so similar to something that Hiro said months ago, back when things weren’t even at their worst, when all Koushi had to endure was the odd bitemark and a pair of wandering hands venturing past his waistband. But Daichi keeps rambling on like he can’t hear how fast Koushi’s heart is racing, like he can’t see the vague form of a man leering down at Koushi in his mind’s eye, like he can’t feel the fingers that crawl up Koushi’s thighs and force themselves inside of him.

Koushi can feel cool hardwood floors against his back and a body pressing down on top of him and pain like lightning that shoots up his spine. His hips ache, strained past the point they’re supposed to bend, and blood pours down from between his legs, and it hurts. It hurts, and Daichi is still talking, some nonsense about taking a deep breath or thinking calm thoughts and Koushi can’t take it anymore.

“Shut up.” It comes out as little more than a murmur, but it’s enough that Daichi pauses for a second before continuing. His words are just a jumble, little more than a droning buzz as nails dig into Koushi’s skin and teeth sink into his lip. “Shut up, just shut up.”

Daichi recoils, pulls away in the way someone pulls back from an otherwise friendly dog who just tried to bite them. “Damn, okay. Look, I’m just trying to help, you’re having a hard time and I—”

“It’s not fucking helping. You’re not fucking helping.” There are fingers inside him, twisting and scraping spots he didn’t know could even feel, and Daichi can’t figure that out and Koushi can’t find the words to tell him. “I’m trying to deal with it, and you just keep talking and I can’t even hear myself think.”

For just a moment, just long enough for a full-body shudder to run through Koushi, Daichi falls silent. His expression is one of confusion, not anger or indignation, and he hesitates before he speaks again. “Let’s move this to the hallway, alright? People are staring, I know you don’t like that.”

“No, I’m not leaving. I don’t need to.” The truth is, he doesn’t he think he can get up, thinks that if he tries to stand he’ll end up collapsed in a heap on a ground. “I keep telling you that I just need to handle it, I’ll do it quietly but you just—” He gasps, struggling for breath, the air burning in his throat. “You have got to stop talking. Stop, please.”

“I think it’ll be better if we go somewhere quieter. You’re having a panic attack or something, and all the noise in the classroom is probably making it worse.”

“Daichi, when I’m telling you to shut up you need to shut up.” He lifts his hands to his head, combing through his hair in a weak attempt to center himself, grasping the strands and yanking when that doesn’t work. Out of the corner or his vision, clouded as it is by the pain and his own arms thrown in front of his face, he sees Daichi step closer, and the light brush of his fingers against the skin of Koushi’s forehead feels like an electric shock. “Don’t touch me, what the hell are you doing?”

“I’m trying to help. You’re going to rip your own hair out.” There’s clear heat in his voice now, and he tries again to remove Koushi’s hands from his head.

Koushi jolts away, thoughts mangling into nothing but memories of bloodstains on hardwoods and alcohol-tinged breath hot against his ear and a shame like sludge in his veins that eclipsed even the agony. “Get out of my face, get away from me.”

“Suga, you’re not—”

“Go away. Leave.” The words don’t feel like they come from his own mouth, spilling out beyond his control. “You’re just making it worse, stop making it worse.”

A terrible quiet follows, even the chatter of his classmates falling away, and he realizes with belated humiliation that everyone must be watching him fall apart. Daichi finally, finally moves back, retracts his hand, but when he speaks again it’s the coldest thing Koushi has ever heard.

“You want me out of here.” It isn’t a question. “I’m trying to fix this and you want me to go.”

“Yes, gods, please. You’re not fixing anything.”

He doesn’t hear Daichi’s footfalls pounding across the floor, doesn’t register the way the boy jerks his desk to the other side of the room and sits facing the wall; Koushi just drops his head in his hands and rides out the pain in total silence. Even once things have subsided, once he’s reduced to frayed nerves and sore muscles and dwindling adrenaline, he can’t bear to look in Daichi’s direction, and he spends the rest of the day acting like the whole episode didn’t even happen.

Guilt gnaws at Koushi after the ordeal, and he has no good solution for it.

He doesn’t know what to do, because even though Daichi kept pressing, kept touching him even though he should know how Koushi reacts to that when he’s panicking, Koushi did snap at him. No, not just snap, yelled, spouted horrible things about someone who was just trying to help, just trying to make things better.

It felt like emerging from a thick fog, once the flood of memories passed and he could take a more logical look at how he’d acted. It felt like someone else was controlling him, like he was a puppet tied up with strings, but he knows that he alone is responsible for what he did. Daichi was just doing his best, is doing his best, and Koushi has ignored him and avoided him and shouted at him and treated him like shit.

The next day, Koushi waits until the end of morning practice, when Daichi is helping to coil up the net, to try to speak with him. He grabs the other end of the wrapped-up net, and something dangerously close to a scowl crosses Daichi’s face.

Koushi deserves that look, so he doesn’t comment on it. “Can we talk?” he says, just loud enough that only Daichi can hear him.

Daichi turns away, begins walking the net towards the storage closet with such speed that it nearly lands Koushi on his face, but just as they cross the threshold, Daichi glances over his shoulder. “Later. Before classes start.”

So Koushi only has fifteen minutes at most to fix this. That’s fine, he can handle that, can get out everything that he needs to before the bell rings.

They wind up in a corner of the second-year hall, near a window that Daichi stares out of so he won’t have to meet Koushi’s eyes. Other students stream by, crowding the walkway and filling the air with a hundred different conversations that all blend together into wordless cacophony. At some point, Asahi crosses in front of them, his hair sliding out of its bun and his notebooks bleeding their papers across the ground as he rushes towards a class he’s always early for. His gaze falls on the two of them for just a second, and his expression grows grave, his already hurried pace speeding up.

Once he’s gone, Daichi says something that Koushi can’t make out over the chorus of other voices. He figures he won’t be any louder if he tries to talk, so he just furrows his brow and mouths “what?”, which almost brings something like a grin to Daichi’s lips, though it quickly vanishes.

“I said,” he repeats when most of the noise dies down, “that you really freaked him out yesterday.”

“Asahi?” Daichi nods, glancing out the window again. Koushi clenches his hands into fists, deciding that Daichi just isn’t going to look at him, that he’s going to have to win back the other boy’s attention. “I’m pretty sure I freaked everybody out yesterday. Did he run away?”

“Yeah, right back to his classroom. I went back after you kicked me out—” He spits the words like they burn his mouth “—to try to talk to him. He wouldn’t even move from his desk.”

“Is he scared of me?”

“You know, I think he might be. I don’t blame him.”

Koushi doesn’t, either, but he can’t bring himself to say so out loud. “I just wanted to tell you that I’m sorry.” He takes a deep breath to keep his voice from shaking, because the last thing he needs is to seem like something pitiful. “I yelled at you and – and pushed you away, and I acted like a child throwing a tantrum. You were just doing what you could, and I’m sure I made you feel like you weren’t wanted, or you were making things worse, and that wasn’t what I meant to do.”

For just an instant, just the moment between one breath and the next, Daichi watches him out of the corner of his eye, and Koushi takes it as quiet permission to keep going.

“I was having a – a panic attack, I think, I don’t even know what it was, but that didn’t make it okay for me to treat you like shit. I shouldn’t have done it, and I won’t do it again, and I’m – I’m sorry. And if you don’t want to forgive me, it’s fine, I get it.”

Silence falls, and Koushi waits. Waits for something, anything, for acceptance or refusal or for Daichi to scream and curse at him like he deserves. Daichi turns away from the window in what feels like slow-motion, face blank and eyes boring into Koushi’s. He doesn’t open his mouth, but it’s obvious he’s trying to find words, trying to come up with a response.

“You know,” he says, slow, deliberate. “At some point you’ve got to stop just apologizing after the fact.”

That stabs him clean through, hurts almost as badly as the episode yesterday had, and yet Daichi’s right. He nearly says he’s sorry again, but he’ll only be saying it because he feels guilty, because it’s easier to ask forgiveness than to change.

“I tried to give you space.” He finally faces Koushi, and Koushi hates it, hates seeing how angry Daichi isn’t. He’s always so patient with Koushi, always so calm, even now when he has every right to rant and rage. “I tried to give you time. I didn’t want to hover over your shoulder or bug you all the time or get on your case every time you did something that concerned me. I wanted you to be able to figure things out yourself, because I know how independent you are, but…”

“But?” Koushi prompts, breath catching in his throat.

“But everybody has a limit. At first it was just what happened after the tournament, and you worried me, but I was willing to let you handle it. But then we had that talk on the walk home, and you didn’t speak to me for a week after. And now you panic in the middle of class, and you lash out, and yeah, it did make me feel like shit.”

“It won’t happen again.” Of that he is sure; he doesn’t care if he has to suffer through those memories a thousand times over, he won’t take it out on Daichi ever again.

Daichi seems less convinced. “I understand that you’re dealing with a lot, and that I’ll never understand what it feels like to go through it, but I don’t want you to stagnate. You’ve been ignoring things and I—”

“I’m not.” Daichi pauses with his mouth half open, confusion clear on his face, and Koushi stumbles over himself to explain. “Ignoring things, I mean, I’m not ignoring them anymore. I talked with Takeda and got some advice and I’ve been trying to follow it. It’s working a little, I think.” He doesn’t mention how on-edge he’s felt since he stopped running from his past; Daichi doesn’t need anything else to worry about. “Yesterday was just a… bit of a bump in the road, is all.”

Daichi moves to speak, but just before he can get a word out, the bell blares at full volume and Koushi flinches so violently it hurts. “We should get to class,” Daichi says, then walks off without another word.

Koushi follows him, trailing far enough behind to put some distance between the two of them. He doesn’t try to say anything else, doesn’t try to press any further, even though he knows deep in his heart that they’ve resolved nothing.

Chapter Text

Despite Koushi’s best efforts to change, things between them don’t get much better.

He and Daichi don’t talk anymore, not like they used to, not like before all of this happened. They used to be able to sit down and tell each other their problems and come up with some solution for whatever was causing them friction, but now Koushi feels like he can’t even speak up. He feels like acknowledging the assault only opened up the door to something he doesn’t know how to control, revealed a knot of emotions too tangled for him to unwind.

He wants to blame Hiro for this. Maybe he does blame the man, just a little, because yes, Koushi chose to hide and chose to lash out and chose to push people away, but had he never gone through any of this, then he wouldn’t have anything reason to act like this. He’d be normal.

That’s all he wants, really, is to feel normal. He misses the person he was before, the life he had before, and he’s tired of faulting himself for all of the ways he’s different now. It was Hiro’s fault, his and his alone, and Koushi hopes that the man rots for the rest of his life, because Koushi isn’t sure he himself can escape a similar fate.

Regardless of who caused all of this, the fact is that Daichi has begun to drift away from him. Koushi wants to pin his distance on the upcoming changing of the guards, when the third years will step away and hand Daichi the captaincy, on all of the new stresses he’s preparing for and all the new things he needs to know. But he knows this isn’t the only reason, and for the first time since they got together, he is unsure of what will happen next.

“Um, Suga-san.”

Koushi’s feet hit the ground just seconds before he hears Ennoshita’s voice, and he turns to his underclassman with far too much intensity given the situation. The boy shrinks back a little before Koushi can compose himself, and once he does he follows Ennoshita’s pointing finger to the far side of the gym.

A volleyball sits against the wall, and Koushi almost asks why Ennoshita is making him look at one of their discarded warmup balls before it dawns on him that he never heard his set get spiked.

“Oh,” he says, flashing a smile that’s probably a little too wide. “Did I toss long?”

Ennoshita grins back, but his eyes are more than a bit wary. “Yeah, long and high and kind of… off the court completely.”

“Sorry about that. If you want to send it to me we can do it again, I promise I’ll pay better attention this time.”

“Sure.” Koushi goes to get the ball and tosses it to Ennoshita, who catches it without hesitation. He gets ready to bump it up, but just before he moves, he pauses with a frown. “Are you nervous about Daichi getting promoted?”

It’s a good cover, and not a total lie, so he nods. “Just a little. I think he’ll make me vice-captain since he told me he would, but there’s always a little doubt, you know?”

“You’ll be fine. You’ll be a good vice-captain.” The ball sails into the air, and the moment Ennoshita lands after his spike, he flashes a calm smile at Koushi. “And you two work so well together that anything else would just fall apart, so I wouldn’t worry.”

They practice for another few minutes, talking only to comment on technique or form or to clarify the positioning of the toss, and all the while he can feel his nervousness increasing. In a strange way, it’s nice to feel the kind of anxiety that begins clawing at him; it’s the normal type of worry, the same kind of jitters he gets before a big game, and he can’t keep his eyes away from the third years deliberating in the corner.

Practice ends, and in the wake of what should be excited anticipation, Koushi feels only dread. He has enjoyed the liminality of these few moments right before the decision will be made, his last few minutes of being a simple member of the team with no responsibilities. They’ll have to get their act together, and quick given the fast-approaching Preliminaries, and he isn’t confident he and Daichi can get on the same page in time.

Captain calls everyone over, having them all stand in a semi-circle around him, the vice-captain, and Daichi, who looks so nervous he might actually be vibrating. “We know how much you all respect Daichi,” the captain says, “but we should take a formal vote just to be sure of this decision. All against Daichi becoming the new team captain, raise your hands.”

No one lifts their hands, of course. Noya and Tanaka are grinning like idiots to Koushi’s left, Asahi shuffles from one foot to the other in anticipation to his right, and even Kiyoko listens in from across the room.

The captain nods. “Seem like it’s anonymous. In that case I would like to officially promote Sawamura Daichi to captain of the Karasuno boys’ volleyball team, effective immediately.”

A cheer fills the room, and Koushi allows himself to smile at the scene that unfolds. Noya gets a running start and tackles Daichi to the ground, Asahi rushes over like he wants to do the same but just ends up awkwardly hovering over the pair of them, the third years look on like proud parents, and Takeda tries to congratulate their new captain but can’t find a safe way to do so without risk of getting dragged into the growing dogpile.

After a few minutes, things settle and people climb off of each other and Daichi brushes himself off with a smile. His gaze falls on Koushi for the briefest moment, and the grin drains off his face as he turns away.

Before Koushi can question what the newly uncomfortable look on Daichi’s face means, Tanaka speaks up. “What about vice-captain?”

Daichi freezes, eyes going wide as the team’s attention falls back on him. “Well, you see…” He glances to the third years, whose expressions are stone cold and whose shoulders are wound tight. “We’ve – or, um, I’ve decided that it’s better for all of the adjusting if I announce vice-captain a few days after announcing captain. It helps you guys get used to the change one step at a time.”

Koushi knows a lie when he hears it, and he feels something as cold and sharp as a knife pierce his chest. The rest of the team seems to accept this explanation, even if Asahi and Kiyoko share a confused expression between them, leaving Koushi alone in experiencing the sensation of a rug being pulled out beneath his feet. He doesn’t even have the mental space to get mad about this, because he genuinely can’t understand what just happened, why Daichi would ever do anything other than hand him the vice-captaincy the first moment he could.

He tries to talk with Daichi about it, to ask about him making such an odd choice, but Daichi is surrounded by their teammates and Koushi can’t find enough room for a private conversation. The rest of the team bursts with excitement around him, a dozen different tiny celebrations happening all at once, and even in the middle of all of these people he can’t help but feel alone.

“Care to tell me what’s going on?”

It takes Koushi the rest of the week to find the guts to confront Daichi. He’s spent too much time in his own head at this point, spent too many hours questioning why things happened the way they did, wondering if all of this was his fault or if it was just some big misunderstanding. He can’t handle his own perseverance anymore, can’t block out the insecurities that circle around and around but never land. Vice-captain still hasn’t been announced, and he just wants to know why.

To his credit, Daichi has made it incredibly easy for Koushi to pull away from him. By the time Koushi realizes the other boy is avoiding him, he’s gotten so good at it Koushi couldn’t find him if he tried. Even now, when he calls out to Daichi on the walk from the school building to the clubroom, Daichi does his best to wriggle away.

“Very Suga of you, don’t you think?” Koushi says when he catches up, trying to fall in at Daichi’s side, but he’s going so fast their steps fall out of sync.

Daichi frowns over his shoulder, genuine confusion in his eyes, and slows down. “Did you just turn your own name into a verb? And I don’t know what you’re talking about, nothing’s going on.”

“That’s what’s very Suga of you. The running and the clear lies and the pretending everything’s fine.” They make it to the stairs leading up to the clubroom, Daichi moving up the first few steps before sighing slightly and turning to face Koushi. “Can we at least talk about this?”

“About what?”

“Come on, Dai, you’re a terrible liar. You know what I’m going to say.” He begins to creep up the stairs, and Daichi does the same in an attempt to keep distance between them.

“You’re a terrible liar, too, you know,” he says, almost under his breath.

“Is that what this is all about? Is this some convoluted way to get back at me for being a douche the other day?” And the day before and the day before that, but he doesn’t say anything about that part. The clubroom is empty, the lights turned off and the whole space bathed in shadow. Daichi flicks on the overheads, staring straight ahead as Koushi continues. “I want to say that’s shitty, but maybe it’s fair, I don’t even know. But if it’s that, will you just tell me?”

“I already said I’d appoint a vice-captain a few days after I became captain, and I plan to stick to that. It’s not been that long.”

“Yeah, I guess, but I just thought you’d… let me in on it?” The sentence ends like a question, uncertainty creeping into his voice. “If we’re going to lead this team together, then we need to be on the same page. And if it’s not going to be me…” He swallows around the sudden lump in his throat, his own words hollowing out his chest, like after everything, this is the worst thought he’s ever spoken out loud. “If it’s going to be Asahi or Ennoshita or something, please just let me know.”

Daichi presses his mouth into a thin line and says nothing, instead reaching for the buttons of his uniform shirt and beginning to undress. Koushi is always the first to change into his practice clothes, or the last, or he does it in the bathroom stall where no one can see. He’s done this for months, and he thinks Daichi thinks it’s because he’s developed an odd relationship with privacy and nudity, but the truth is that he has a bandage adhered to his thigh even now that he isn’t willing to let anyone see.

Maybe that’s where the distance started, maybe in some way related to nails and straws and camel’s backs the cutting led to Daichi making this decision. Koushi certainly wouldn’t put any trust in a person who acted like he’s acted these last few months, someone so flighty and standoffish and strange.

So this could all be Koushi’s fault. He did choose to take things out on his own skin – that is objectively, undoubtedly his fault – and then he chose secrecy instead of honesty, and running instead of facing himself, and in the end it’s not so much like hapless dominos falling as it is like the intricate weaving of a spiderweb he himself created.

He’s not fit to lead, maybe. Probably.  He won’t be the kind of vice-captain that Daichi deserves, that the team deserves, that they need to get any further than a miserable loss in the second round of Interhighs. Everything he does and says and thinks is clouded by the memory of Hiro’s hands, every inch of him inside and out is soaked through with the man’s stench, and now it’s gone so far that it’s destroyed the one thing in his life he thought was assured, the only thing he felt he could rely on.

But he can’t even blame Hiro for this, not like all the other things he blames the man for. Hiro didn’t force a blade into his hands, didn’t make him run when his teacher tried to have a simple conversation, didn’t tell him to snap at and retreat from everyone who wanted to help.

This is Koushi’s fault. He’s done this, he’s ruined himself, and he can’t even get mad that Daichi’s treating him like he isn’t here. He wouldn’t meet his own eyes, either.

“Are you catastrophizing again?” Daichi asks, just like Koushi had asked him back before everything fell apart, and there is no humor in his voice. “There’s no need to panic about it.”

Such confident words from the person who doesn’t have to worry over this. Or maybe he is worried over this, maybe he keeps looking anywhere but Koushi’s face because he already knows the outcome and can’t bear to embrace it. “I just want to know,” Koushi says, subdued.

Daichi runs a hand over his face, stretching the skin of it into something tired and gaunt. “You don’t, though. You don’t want to know.”

“Yes, I do. Please just tell me what’s going on, even if it’s awful.” Daichi’s expression doesn’t change, and something pleading creeps into Koushi’s words. “I can’t stand not knowing why. What’s keeping you from giving me the position? Or not giving it to me, whatever.”

“There’s not an easy way to say this.” Koushi’s stomach drops, but Daichi seems unaffected as he continues. “But over these last few weeks, and with everything that’s happened before this, I’m not so sure any more about making you vice-captain. I don’t think you have the – the mental space to take on leading a team on top of everything else going on.”

He expected this, he knew it would happen, but it still hits him with enough force to almost bring him to his knees. “You don’t have faith in me.”

“I – Suga—” A sliver of emotion, of regret or sorrow, crosses his face. “I wish I didn’t have to do this, but I have an entire team that I have to lead now. We don’t have a coach, we don’t have a lot of support, and if we’re going to get anywhere close to nationals we need to be at the top of our game.”

“And I’m not a part of what makes nationals happen. I’m a burden to the team.”

“Come on, you know I didn’t say that.”

“Will you give me a chance to prove myself, then?”

Daichi says nothing.

“That’s what I thought.” The anger that flares in him isn’t from frustration at this situation, or from a feeling of betrayal, but rather from the deep, simmering recognition that he did this to himself. He killed his chances of making vice-captain, he ruined his relationship with Daichi, he destroyed every last scrap of trust the other boy had in him. But it’s too much to think about on top of everything else, and with a level of finesse he didn’t know he had, he redirects the fire. “Were you just not going to let me know? Were you going to wait forever for me to figure it out on my own? Did you really think it’d be better to do things like this?”

“We don’t have to do things like this,” Daichi snaps, fists clenching. “We don’t have to do anything like this, but you get mad about everything I do now, so forgive me for not wanting to be yelled at all the time.”

“I wouldn’t yell at you if you just—”

The door to the clubroom swings open, Ennoshita and Narita stumbling in, though the moment they see the scene unfolding before them, they back out with wide eyes. It shatters the tension anyway, and Daichi breaks away and moves to leave.

“We’re not done talking about this,” Koushi calls at his retreating back.

Daichi slams the door on his way out.

It’s a horrible kind of apprehension that takes hold of Koushi for the rest of practice, devoid of anything to look forward to, just the slow build of anxiety as the end of the night draws nearer. He doesn’t want this, wants nothing more than for this to all blow over, but given both of their track records for avoiding things, he knows they can’t just hope to get over it.

So he goes up to Daichi once they get everything cleaned up. It’s his responsibility to lock up now, and even though he doesn’t have to, Koushi sticks by his side just like a good vice-captain would.

“You’re set on this, aren’t you?” Daichi says as he closes the door to the storage room, and Koushi doesn’t respond.

They stand alone in the gym, their teammates having long since gone home and even Takeda leaving them to their own devices. Koushi couldn’t ask for a better setup, but even in such perfect circumstances he can’t bring himself to start the conversation.

He doesn’t need to, in the end, because Daichi gets things going all on his own. “I’d actually really like to hear you finish whatever you were saying before the others walked in. Something about not having to yell at me if I just… did something. I’d love to know what that something could be.”

“I don’t know what I was going to say,” Koushi admits, and it’s the truth. He would’ve probably stumbled to finish the sentence, but Daichi doesn’t seem to believe this.

“Were you about to say that you’d stop yelling if I was, what? Better? If I listened to you? Because from my point of view it feels like no matter what I do it’s a problem.” His voice takes on a harsh edge, words all knives and needles. “Leave you alone? There’s a problem. Try to talk to you? It’s a problem. Try to help you when you’re panicking? Guess what, it’s a fucking problem.”

“I never said you leaving me alone was a problem.” It’s out of Koushi’s mouth before he can stop himself, and Daichi’s face twitches in an emotion he can’t name. “Hey, I didn’t mean it like that.”

“No, no, of course not. And you didn’t mean to lie to my face about the blood on your shirt, right? Or to avoid me for weeks, or to scream at me in the middle of class, or to attack me just because I made the best decision for my team.”

“Attack you?” He rolls his eyes. “That’s dramatic as hell and you know it. The only reason you didn’t like me confronting you was because you didn’t like what I had to say.”

“That sounds familiar.” Daichi crosses the floor, Koushi mere inches behind, and begins collecting his things like they’re done talking.

“Not as familiar as you sticking your nose in where it doesn’t belong. If you kept your distance we wouldn’t have to do any of this.” Except, that’s not true at all; if there’s anyone who’s not responsible for this whole situation, it’s Daichi. It’s Hiro’s fault – no, at this point, it’s Koushi’s fault, his and his alone, but he can’t put that into words, not before he carries on in his anger instead. “When I asked you to get away from me during that episode, I meant it. It wasn’t some weird roundabout way of asking you to come closer. And you just didn’t listen.”

Daichi lets the jacket he just picked up fall out of his hands, and he twists with dizzying speed to face Koushi. “So I was just supposed to leave you by yourself in the middle of a panic attack? What kind of useless boyfriend do you think I am?”

“You didn’t have to leave, at first. I just wanted you to step back, but you wouldn’t, so then I just wanted you away from me.”

“You didn’t tell me that,” he says, half-frustrated, half-confused.

“Yeah, because I was freaking the fuck out. Sorry I didn’t have the right mindset for meaningful conversation.” Daichi heads towards the door, and Koushi moves to block him, jumping out in front of him and refusing to budge. “Thought you in all your noble boyfriend bullshit should’ve been able to figure that part out.”

“Guess I’m not so perfect, that must be such a hard revelation for you.”

Koushi can see it in his eyes, the moment he quits pretending he isn’t invested, the moment he plants his feet and truly enters this argument, truly becomes determined to fight this thing to the bitter end.

“And you wanna know what?” He pauses like he really needs an answer, and Koushi gives a sardonic nod, a humorless grin carving his lips. “I don’t care what you think is best for you. I don’t care that you think running away will fix all of this—”

“I am not running away anymore.”

He waves a hand in front of him. “Sure, sure, like you aren’t unloading on me just so you don’t have to think about your own shit.” That stings, just for a moment, but Koushi pushes down on the feeling. He is so very good at pushing down on things these days. “But even though you keep running, I’m not going to give up on you. I’m not just going to let you hurt by yourself, and I’m not going to let you keep hurting yourself. If you think that’s annoying, you’ll just have to deal with it.”

“Oh, pull your head out, Daichi.” Daichi gives him a dark look, but Koushi isn’t fazed; in fact, he’s been waiting quite a while to say this. “You think you can make everything perfect and whole and like it used to be, but you can’t. You can’t do it, because it will never be the same, we will never be the same, and you just won’t accept that.”

“And you’re not even willing to try. It’s all doom and gloom and ‘my life is ruined forever, better give up’.” He glances away, his voice growing quiet. “You used to always take everything in stride, but now it’s like you’ve just rolled over because you think it’ll be too hard.”

Some emotion other than blind fury builds within him, and no matter how hard he tries to get rid of it, it still sends his voice quivering. “Yeah, it’s so awful for you that I didn’t just get over it. So terrible that I’m not dealing with it the way I’m supposed to, limping to you and begging for your eternal wisdom. Do you want me to act like some broken little fragile flower so you can fix me?”

“You’re twisting my words. You’re twisting everything, honestly, and you’ve done it since this started. It’s not ridiculous for me to want to help you get better.”

“But you don’t want me to get better, do you? You just want me to be like I was before.”

“I never said—”

“No, but you show it.” He balls his hands into fists to keep them from shaking. “You wouldn’t let me be vice-captain because I don’t fit the picture of me you have in your head anymore. And it’s not even about the position, it’s the fact that you won’t even let me try.”

He crosses his arms tight over his chest, jaw set and eyes hard. “I didn’t give you the position because I don’t think it should be your priority right now.”

“You don’t get to decide that,” Koushi says. “You have no idea how I’m feeling or how I’m doing.”

“Right, because cutting yourself means you’re doing great.”

Everything stops. The tension, the back-and-forth rhythm of their argument, the anger in Koushi’s veins, the anger on Daichi’s face, it all drains away as the silence stretches, the words hanging in the air between them. Dread, heavy and choking, explodes in Koushi’s chest, worming its way up his throat until it pulls the air from his lungs. His knees go a little weak.

“What?” is all he can croak out, whispery and broken and trembling.

Daichi laughs, he laughs, and his eyes are equal parts wild and distraught. “That was a… a shot in the dark. I wasn’t actually sure that was what was going on, it was just a hunch, but now that I… gods, Koushi. And you’re going to lie to my face and tell me that you’re fine?”

Rage floods back in, because Daichi is looking at him like Koushi’s the most pathetic thing he’s ever seen, because rage is easier than the overwhelming shame that this reveal brings, because the cracked and crumbling thing Koushi has become shatters into a thousand pieces like glass thrown against the floor and he doesn’t have the time to acknowledge it.

“You know what, no, I’m not fine. I’m not fine, everything I have ever known got flipped on its head and I can’t shake it and I want nothing more than to just forget about it, and you keep trying to force me to face it like that won’t just make it all worse.”

“If you’re looking for my sympathy,” Daichi says, far too calmly, “then you’re not getting it. Not now. Nothing will change for you if you don’t face this, and you know it.”

“Maybe I don’t want things to change. Maybe I’ve decided that it’s better to stay here than to have to relive it. It’s going to hurt too much, it’s going to hurt like it did before, and I cannot go through that again.” That hits too close, and for a second his head spins.

Daichi shrugs and turns away. “Then maybe I don’t want to deal with this, with any of it. It’s not worth getting treated like shit all the time just because we’re pretending we’re still together.”

“Pretending?” Koushi echoes.

“Yes, pretending. All we’ve done these last few months is ignore each other and snap at each other and hide things from each other. Does that sound like a relationship to you? Two people who can hardly stand being in the same room as each other? Because it doesn’t to me.”

Koushi’s chest clenches. “The hell are you on about?”

“Exactly what you think.” There’s nothing on Daichi’s face but cold, collected certainty. “What’s the point of calling ourselves a couple if neither of us really wants to be around the other?”

“You’re breaking up with me.”

“I think we broke up weeks ago, to be honest.” Daichi grabs his things one by one, Koushi watching in mute horror, and crosses the threshold of the gym’s main door. “Now get out of here, I have to lock up.”

Chapter Text

The very next day, Daichi promotes Koushi to vice-captain.

It’s something to do with formalities and needing to have one to be eligible for competitions, he says with a blank look on his face, and Koushi wants to kill him. They get their new jerseys a few days later, and Koushi wants to burn his, to scrape off the number two emblazoned on the back of it.

But he doesn’t. He doesn’t, because he’s not so petty as to ruin the whole team over this, because he got what he wanted even if this isn’t the way that he wanted it. So he settles for flashing the harshest glare he can manage whenever Daichi dares to look at him and becoming the absolute best vice-captain that Karasuno has ever known out of nothing but spite.

Given the team that is Karasuno, however, this is not the easiest job in the world.

“Noya, please climb off of Asahi,” is not a sentence he ever thought he’d have to say multiple times in a row, and yet, here he is.

“He’s not hyped up enough,” Noya says on Asahi’s back, wrapping his legs around the other boy’s torso like a belt. “We’re leaving in fifteen minutes and his head isn’t in it, I gotta hype him up.”

“You’re scaring him, is what you’re doing. Just get off.”

“But I’m trying to help.”

Koushi does not possess a glare like Daichi’s, one that could cut through solid steel, nor does he know the correct combination and order of vaguely threatening words to use to make his underclassmen listen to him, but he does have an ungodly amount of stubborn persistence. He tips his head to one side, crosses his arms over his chest, and waits, staring Noya dead in the eyes until the younger boy shrinks away.

“You’re no fun.” Noya pouts, but he hops off of Asahi all the same. Asahi scuttles away to avoid a repeat of the whole situation, disappearing back inside the gym, and Noya lets him go. “Where's Ryuu?”

“He’s checking his bag over, I think.” There’s a pause, in which Noya’s face goes carefully blank, and Koushi has to force himself not to drop his own head in his hands. “You did bring your bag to the van, right?”

“Think I left it in the clubroom,” he whispers, wincing, before bolting to go find his missing luggage.

For about thirty seconds, Koushi lives in total peace, free to remedy the great calamity that is ten different boy’s personal items strewn about the pavement, none of it any closer than six feet to the van they were told to place it in. He shoves bags and jackets and volleyball gear into the trunk, and hears rather than sees Ennoshita come up behind him.

“Yes?” he says, voice exuding a practiced calm.

Ennoshita blinks twice and bites at his lip. “We may have accidentally… lost Narita somewhere between the bathroom and the storage room.”

“Did you try to call him or text him or something?”

“No, um.” Ennoshita clears his throat, pulls his cellphone out of his pocket. “I’ll go do that.”

And so it goes for the next fifteen minutes. How last year’s vice-captain didn’t rip his own hair out wrangling his teammates is beyond Koushi, and he sends a mental prayer up for the boy and all the trouble he had to endure. Koushi does his best not to think of how he himself would react to having an underclassman show up with blood on their shirt, refuse to talk about what happened, and then run away from Takeda. It must have been terrifying or mortifying or both to have someone on your team act out like Koushi acted out that night after Interhighs; he sends up a quiet apology to his former vice-captain as well.

Another set of footsteps pounds in his direction, and he turns towards them, expecting to find Tanaka bringing his things down at the last minute. But when he looks up, he meets a pair of dark brown eyes that peer at him with nothing short of disdain.

Daichi seems to be physically fighting the urge to curl his lip up at Koushi. “Tanaka’s stuff,” he says, holding out a duffel bag and a pair of shoes.

Koushi takes the items and puts them away, but Daichi doesn’t leave, just glances around him to survey what’s in the trunk, and Koushi steps in front of him with his hands on his hips. “Can I help you with something?”

“Making sure everything’s in place, is all.” It’s not all, though, because he clicks his tongue at the way Koushi placed Kinoshita’s suitcase but says nothing, even though his disapproval is clear in his gaze.

“Pretty sure that’s my job,” Koushi says, “so if you’ve got a problem with it, speak up now.”

“Just came to see if you were having any issues.”

“If you think I’m so incompetent that I can’t do this, then you can go ahead and take over.”

He raises an eyebrow, mouth pressing into a thin line. “There’s no need to get worked up.” Koushi knows that Daichi knows how annoyed he is by Daichi’s mere presence, by them spending more than ten seconds together; the innocent façade is only to dig farther under Koushi’s skin. “We’re leaving in a little bit, and since this is our first tournament as captain and vice-captain, I had to check that we haven’t half-assed anything.”

“Well, we haven’t, so you can head on back inside and do whatever last minute duties you’re neglecting by being out here.” He makes a shooing motion with his hands. “Go make some dipshit inspirational speech or something. That sounds like your style.”

Daichi leaves without looking back, but Koushi gets no reprieve, because as soon as he vanishes from sight he’s back with the rest of their team following him. They all line up to thank Takeda for his assistance up to this point, he gives a last-minute pep talk, and they all clamber into the van, Koushi sitting near the back while Daichi takes a spot at the very front.

No part of the ride is anything close to relaxing, and it does nothing to calm Koushi’s rising nerves. The other boys constantly make noise, shouting or laughing or, on one occasion, spilling the entire contents of a water bottle across the floor. They move without warning and brush his knee when they pass through the aisle; Noya at one point reaches over the back of Koushi’s seat to muss up his hair, a simple, childish prank, but the sudden contact roils over his skin like tsunami waves.

He hates this. He hates that things are no better now than they were with Daichi crowding him, that even though the other boy isn’t worrying him with his incessant attempts to fix everything, Koushi still feels like he’s breaking into pieces. The odd outbursts of anger and fear and pain still blindside him sometimes, the cuts on his thighs still sting where they meet his pantlegs, the nightmares still ruin his sleep most days, but now he has no one to confide in. Even more than that, he has to appear perfect, flawless, because he cannot let on that he’s struggling; if he shows an ounce of weakness, it will just give Daichi that much more ammunition.

And Koushi wants to say that it’s all Daichi’s fault, that if the boy had just stepped away when asked they wouldn’t be in this mess, but it isn’t true. He contributed to this as much as Daichi did, if not more, because if their situations were reversed Koushi knows he wouldn’t have the patience to deal with his partner constantly acting strange and freaking out on him and pushing him away. The fact that Daichi hadn’t snapped sooner is honestly rather impressive.

In the end, Koushi got exactly what he asked for, in more ways than one. He wanted time alone, so he sits isolated as his team interacts around him, never with him. He pushed Daichi to his absolute limits, so he doesn’t get to enjoy the boy’s company. He ignored all the offers for help, so the fragile glass in his chest shatters further, and he has no way to patch the cracks.

It’s strange, how quickly priorities change.

A few hours ago, Koushi would’ve sooner run face-first into the volleyball net than ask Daichi for any sort of help, and now he clings onto his presence like a life preserver, as desperate and drowning as the rest of the team. Every time Daichi calls his name, calls for a toss, hope floods through him with almost as much strength as the adrenaline that courses through his veins.

But no matter how many sets he sends Daichi’s way, they just can’t pull ahead. Dateko has an unbalanced play style – or at least, they should, focusing as much as they do on blocking and powerful serves at the expense of everything else. From every strategy Koushi has ever seen or implemented, he knows that for an opponent like this they just need to get past the front blockers, just get over the Iron Wall; Dateko has a weak back row and average spikers, and the whole formation will crumble if a ball comes its way.

The ball never comes its way. The sound of it hitting the Karasuno side of the court over and over and over again is imprinted on the inside of Koushi’s ears at this point, the squeak of shoes as his teammates struggle to return it reduced to nothing but an irritating drone. It becomes a monotony, his hands lifting for another toss, his forearms stinging from the receive of another failed attack.

At the beginning of the second set, everything begins to unravel. It starts with Daichi whispering to him with his back turned to Dateko, eyes panicked for just an instant before he gets things under control. “Try to throw to me and Tanaka more,” he says, jaw set.

“More than Asahi?” Koushi asks. Something flutters in his stomach.

Daichi nods, just once, the motion so sharp it looks painful. “Yes, only throw to people who’re calling for it.”

There’s a barely swallowed note of anger in his voice, a kind of helpless frustration painting his words. Koushi doesn’t have time to question him, to wonder why Daichi thinks he’d ever do anything but set for the people who ask for the ball.

It takes six more hard-fought points on their side, eight easy scores for Dateko, for Koushi to understand exactly what Daichi meant. He doesn’t notice it at first, doesn’t have the mental space between signaling plays and keeping track of everyone’s positions and trying to fake out his opponents to consider the greater dynamic going on among his own teammates. But once he does see it, it chills him all the way to his core.

Asahi isn’t calling for sets.

He runs up like all the other spikers, jumps like all the other spikers, but he stays quiet even as the ball leaves Koushi’s hands. When Koushi first realizes this, he tries to convince himself that it means nothing, means that Asahi is tired after playing a set and a half against such formidable blockers. But then he doesn’t call, and doesn’t call, and Koushi begins keeping count of who he’s throwing to.

Tanaka, Daichi, Tanaka, Tanaka, a setter dump. Daichi, a very nervous Ennoshita, Tanaka, Daichi again. No Asahi. No Asahi on the next one either, or the one after that, or the next four that follow.

Dateko calls a timeout, and before he and Daichi can go join the circle of their teammates, Koushi grabs Daichi’s shoulder and pulls the boy down to his level. He doesn’t mean for his voice to tremble as much as it does. “Asahi isn’t—”

“I know.” Daichi’s hands clench at his side, breath quickening.

“What are we going to—?”

“I don’t know.” The words rattle out between clenched teeth, every part of him tense like he’s seconds from snapping in two. “I don’t know, Suga. Just keep tossing to the rest of us.”

They lose, in the end. They lose, and Tanaka vibrates from pure rage when he goes to shake his opponent’s hands, and Ennoshita tries and fails to hide his tears, and Noya punches the bench in the locker room so hard his knuckles bleed. Asahi slinks around at the very edges of the team; nobody can bring themselves to comment on what he did or didn’t do out on the court, and he doesn’t look anyone in the eye long enough for them to start a conversation.

At some point, everyone collectively exhausts themselves, the strength of their emotions depleting what little energy they had left within them, and they all split off, quiet and demure. Koushi goes to shower – unlike at the last tournament, he doesn’t take his blade with him – and when he comes back to the locker room he finds Daichi and Asahi alone in the room, unspeaking.

“Are we playing the silent game or something?” he asks, glancing at the two of them in turn. They’re both staring off at nothing, Daichi’s eyes clouded with frustration and concern, Asahi’s filled with such visible disappointment Koushi’s heart twists in sympathy.

Daichi moves first, going to toss his kneepads in his bag. “You have no tact, you know.”

“Who, me?” Koushi drops his things onto a bench and begins to towel dry his hair, hoping the frenzied movement hides the way he’s shaking a little just having to be in the same room as Daichi.

“Don’t play coy with me. It’s been an hour since we lost and you’re already in here stirring things.”

“Says who? I just asked a damn question.”

Asahi’s footsteps pound across the linoleum, and he’s out of sight before anyone else can speak. Koushi can feel the tangle of emotions spilling out of him, can feel the way it lingers even after he leaves, simmering and dark and angry.

“Alright, I really didn’t mean to do that,” Koushi says. “We should go after him.”

“You don’t know how to talk to him.” He says it like it’s a fact, like Asahi isn’t the only person in the entire world that Koushi can set to on instinct alone, like Koushi’s mere presence will be a nuisance. “He’s fragile right now, you have to be gentle.”

“He’s not a fucking vase, Daichi. You don’t have to save everyone. You don’t have to save most people, actually, I promise you they’re not looking for it.”

“And you’re going to be the one to make everything better?” Daichi steps in front of Koushi, even though he knows how much Koushi hates being cornered. “If you go chasing after him you’ll just stress him out. He needs space.”

“Novel concept, isn’t it?” There’s a split second where Daichi realizes his mistake, but he just ends up rolling his eyes as Koushi digs in deeper. “Giving people space.”

“Considering that he’s just upset, I don’t have a problem with it. Now, if he were doing something dangerous, like hurting himself, that would be a different story.”

Koushi feels boxed in, trapped, and Daichi talking about Koushi's cutting with such a flippant attitude is the last straw. “Oh, you asshole. Don’t stand there and act like you did some noble thing by bringing that up with Takeda. All it got me was a trip to the counselor’s office and a painful conversation with my brother’s parents.”

“Was that the wrong thing to do? Was I just supposed to know you were doing that and not say anything?” It might be a genuine question, judging by the way his expression falters, the corners of his mouth turning down.

“You’re not supposed to use your knowledge just to win an argument, that’s for damn sure.”

He moves to sidestep Daichi, and the boy lets him, but he trails close behind as Koushi leaves the locker room. “Seriously, you’re going to make things worse if you try to talk to him. You just rush into everything, and I don’t think he needs that right now. I don’t think you know what he needs.”

“And you do?”

“Yeah, I do, he’s my friend.” Daichi pulls himself a little taller, stands a little straighter. “Besides, it’s my job as captain to figure out how to solve these problems.”

“Because you solved things so well during this game.”

Daichi flinches away, his hands curling into fists but his face going blank, and something cold sinks to the bottom of Koushi’s stomach because Daichi looks hurt, like someone just stabbed him between the shoulder blades. Koushi is supposed to hate him, supposed to abhor him, to want nothing more than to never have to speak to him again, and yet the first emotion Koushi feels after saying that is guilt. He can’t stand it, the way it coils around his lungs. Can’t stand the pain in Daichi’s eyes, the taste of the words like dust in his mouth.

“I’m sorry, Daichi, I didn’t mean it. It’s not your fault, I don’t think it’s your fault.”

“Don’t follow me,” Daichi says, and his voice trembles. “And don’t you dare fucking talk about things you don’t understand.”

Koushi doesn’t follow. He spends the rest of the day watching the other teams’ games from a distance, keeping far away from Daichi so the boy doesn’t have to deal with him. On the ride back home, neither of them speak a word to each other, because Koushi has a million things to say and no idea of how to get them out.

They lose, they go home, and for a while time passes like it always does. By this point, Koushi has gotten used to the bitter sting of defeat, so he falls back into his usual life much faster than most of the others.

And what a routine it is. He goes to class and doesn’t talk to his ex, runs a blade over his thighs during break instead of eating lunch, goes to practice and doesn’t talk to his ex, showers twice in a row because every part of him reeks of filth and slime and some bastard’s hands, then gets up the next morning and does it all again. It’s been his life for months now, and he can’t shake the feeling that this will be his life for the foreseeable future as well.

But, because everything about him must be torn apart on principle, even this routine doesn’t last.

There is no tension, he doesn’t think, before the incident happens. No more than usual, anyway, no more than what’s already caused by the sullen cloud that hangs over the team, the bitter anger between him and Daichi that they barely keep to themselves, the all-encompassing frustration that flows unconstrained out of Asahi. He doesn’t see it coming; no one does, maybe not even Asahi.

The broom snaps in half before he can even completely understand what’s going on, the sound of it ricocheting in his head as Asahi’s footsteps thunder across the gym. He’s out of the door before anyone can react; well, anyone but Noya, who follows close behind yelling something about being a quitter.

Daichi catches the libero with one firm arm thrown across his chest. “Let him go.”

“You’re just going to let him run away again? Let him give up so easily?” Noya’s hands are curled into fists, his shoulders tense, his chest heaving. “He gave in and it cost us the game and you’re the captain, Daichi-san. Shouldn’t you care about your ace doing what’s right for the team?”

“Chasing him down won’t help anything.” Any other time, Koushi would’ve made a quip about Daichi taking his own advice, but he can’t even find breath to speak right now.

“He’s running away, he’s always running. We’re not going to get any better if he can’t figure out how to get out of his own head.” Noya takes a step forward, and Daichi’s fingers grip his shirtfront harder. For a moment, it looks like he might turn on Daichi, and Koushi and Tanaka move towards the pair of them, but he ends up shouting again instead. “You’re just going to let it happen?”

The corner of Daichi’s mouth twitches at that, because he doesn’t just let things happen. That’s the whole reason that he and Koushi can barely glance at one another without clawing for each other’s throats – he doesn’t let things get by him, he doesn’t let problems get out of hand. But there’s something else in his expression, something more than a little helpless, and he looks his age for all of ten seconds before his usual captain face reappears.

“Wait until tomorrow, alright?” Daichi says. “We’ll deal with it when he comes to morning practice.”

Noya bolts, grumbling as he goes about no one having any fucking guts in this place. It feels like a thunderstorm just let up once he’s gone, the air thick and rippling with tension, everyone stranded and battered in the wake. No one speaks, no one moves, all of them stuck in place until Daichi claps his hands.

“Okay, finish cleaning up, please, so we can get out of here before midnight.”

They all jump as if electrified, and the gym gets cleaned in record time with a level of silence Koushi didn’t even know the team possessed. He’s the last out of the doors, waiting for the other boys to tie their shoes before he flips off the lights.

“He’s not coming back tomorrow,” Koushi murmurs to Daichi as he locks the door.

“I said whatever I had to so things didn’t escalate.”

“You don’t think lying to Noya is going to cause a problem in the morning? He can’t handle people being disingenuous.”

“Well, if you know so much about how to run this team, why don’t you just go ahead and take over?” He holds the keys to the door out towards Koushi. “You can take these, and you can start leading practice, and you can do everything all the time because clearly I’m not fit to do shit.”

Koushi plants one hand on his hip, using the other to swat the keys away. They land in the grass with a soft clink. “Quit being so dramatic. One person criticizes you and you fall apart.”

“Because all you do is criticize me! I know that I fucked up saying what I did to Noya, I know it’ll only make things worse, but I’m just one guy. So if you care enough about this team, maybe you can offer some suggestions instead of complaining.”

“Then I suggest we go try to talk with Asahi.” He turns away, ready to walk off before Daichi speaks up.

“I told you that you can’t do that with him. He needs time to deal with it himself.”

“Right, because you're his friend and I'm not, you're so incredibly close to him that you're the only one who knows what he needs. Just look how well you giving him time after Preliminaries went—”

“Guys, please.”

That’s Tanaka’s voice, but it doesn’t sound like Tanaka at all. It sounds like a child, like someone young and confused and desperate. Koushi glances over at the first years and finds them huddled together, shoulder to shoulder in a clump, each of them wearing matching expressions of bitter worry. Ennoshita holds the keys to the gym doors in his hands, fiddling with them and refusing to meet anyone’s eye.

“Just because some of us are having problems doesn’t mean we should all fall apart,” Tanaka says, his voice strangely subdued. “We need to stick together. We shouldn’t fight.”

It occurs to Koushi that they’ve kept most of their bickering away from the first years, so their teammates have no idea that this dispute runs deeper than handling the aftermath of whatever’s going on with Noya and Asahi. And if seeing Koushi and Daichi argue just this one time makes them look this scared, then they’d fall to pieces knowing that the two of them have been inches from blowing up at each other for weeks now.

Ennoshita glances up at them, tossing the keys back to Daichi. “It’ll be okay, we’ll figure it out. I mean, we will figure it out, right?”

“Of course,” Daichi says without hesitation, all trace of anger or irritation or any emotion other than total determination gone from his face. The rest of the team picks themselves up, straightening and donning genuine smiles.

In that moment, Koushi remembers with perfect clarity the reason he wanted to be vice-captain in the first place. He remembers how well the old captain and vice-captain led, how Koushi felt like so long as their team had strong people at the top that they could rally around and count on to keep going no matter what, that they could do anything. They might lose game after game, but it never felt like the end, just like another step. And Koushi wanted to make his younger teammates feel the same way. He wanted to be someone they could rely on.

That’s why he wanted so badly to be vice-captain. That’s why he confronted Daichi in the first place about not getting the position, because he couldn’t bear to abandon his team, because the underclassmen need guidance, need someone they can trust, someone they can depend on.

And he hasn’t been that person to them. He’s only torn things down and made things worse since he got promoted, and this isn’t what he wanted. It isn’t what anyone deserves from him.

“We’re done arguing,” Koushi says, as much a promise to himself as it is to the rest of the team. Daichi cuts his eyes across to Koushi, catching the additional meaning in his words, the only other person here to know that he’s talking about more than just this single squabble.

“Pinky promise on that?” Ennoshita asks with a sly grin.

“Yeah, sure, if that’s what you want.”

Tanaka shakes his head, expression deathly serious. “No, if we’re doing this, we’re doing it the right way. You yell at Daichi-san again and you have to buy us all meat buns for a week.”

He smiles, because he always keeps his promises. “Sounds good to me.”

They all cheer like Koushi losing the bet is a foregone conclusion, but he knows better, knows that he has so much more on the line than just a bit of pocket change.

Chapter Text

Asahi doesn’t come back the next day.

Morning practice is a shit show, filled with nothing but shouting and arguments and distractions. They’ve all been thrown off-balance, Koushi can see it on his teammates’ faces, see their genuine disbelief that Asahi hasn’t walked through the front doors yet, the unspoken question shared between them of if he’ll ever walk through the doors again. The question of what they’re going to do without an ace.

To say Noya is distraught is to cheapen the emotions the boy is feeling. He tries to hide it, tries to stuff it down beneath a dozen layers of charisma and tenacity and a veneer of untouchable toughness, but Koushi has been hiding behind masks for too many months to have that kind of façade fool him. The feigned determination in Noya’s eyes keeps wavering, fading away to reveal a choking fear that Koushi is far too familiar with.

At the end of practice, Koushi makes his way over to Noya, who pushes a mop across the floor, which might not be the best task for him, given what happened with the broom last night. “Leave that,” Koushi says, keeping his tone light. “Come help me pick up the volleyballs.”

Noya huffs and tosses the mop to the ground, stomping over to the cart in the far corner of the gym. He begins throwing balls into the cart with such force that he threatens to tear the mesh, and Koushi has to focus on not flinching away every time, keeping his body language relaxed and his expression impassive.

“I understand that you’re upset.” It is perhaps the understatement of the year, but Noya doesn’t react to it, and Koushi keeps going. “I understand that this will be hard for you, but I want you to try to tell me what exactly you want us to do about this.”

“What, so you can look at me like I’m throwing a tantrum like Daichi-san did?”

Koushi isn’t so affected by the weak jab as he is by the way Noya’s lips quiver as he speaks. There is so much pain and fear and desperation in his voice, in his face, in his entire coiled form, but he refuses to let any of it out. He just lashes out instead, yells and argues and storms around because admitting his emotions would probably make him seem powerless, and the last thing he needs is to feel weak. The anger makes him feel strong, feel capable. It’s easier to be mad, it makes everything a little less scary.

The irony isn’t lost on Koushi, but he leaves his thoughts about that to some other time. “No, I want to know what’s going through your head. I want to know what you think is best.”

“If you’d really like to hear it,” he says, punctuating every few words with another toss of a volleyball, “then I’ll tell you.” Koushi waits, and Noya’s gaze grows enraged, mouth turning up into a snarl. “I think the two of you are useless fucking cowards. I think Asahi’s a damn coward, too. Doesn’t matter how fragile he thinks he is, he can’t just give up on us halfway through a game. And you’re just standing around letting him hide.”

“What do you want us to do?” Koushi asks, trying not to sound as frustrated as he knows he is.

“Honestly? I wish you’d stop pretending like everything’s fine.” He finishes cleaning and takes the cart with him, pausing halfway between Koushi and the storage closet and glancing over his shoulder. “Asahi told me about the fight you and Daichi-san had right after the game. But you weren’t going to tell the team about it, were you?”

“Because that didn’t really have to do with the game, it was just personal stuff.”

“When it spills over and starts affecting the rest of us, it’s not personal anymore, I don’t think.” He smiles, but it’s hollow. “Nobody on this team fucking talks to each other.”

Noya is gone before Koushi can respond, his words ringing in Koushi’s ears. They’re still bouncing around in his head, bitter and cold and yet horribly true, when news comes of Noya and Asahi’s fight outside Asahi’s classroom. Of the shouting and the vase and the consequences. Noya gets suspended for a week, banned from their club for a month; Asahi disappears like he never existed in the first place.

And Koushi and Daichi find themselves in the vice principal’s office, caught beneath the man’s harsh stare and forced to defend their very positions on the volleyball team.

Koushi has, almost a year later, gotten accustomed to yelling in general to the point that he doesn’t panic at the first instance of someone raising their voice. Hell, he’s been the cause of the noise more times that he’s proud of, but something he still hasn’t gotten used to is being yelled at by adults.

The vice principal is an objectively unintimidating man. In fact, Koushi feels almost embarrassed to be as nervous as he is around this man, who runs on nothing but pathetic entitlement and a compulsive need to make himself everybody’s problem. This doesn’t change the way Koushi’s heart pounds around him, though, doesn’t stop the flickering memories of Hiro whispering threats in his ear and screaming slurs and obscenities at him at even the most minor infraction. Koushi can’t quite get his tongue unstuck, can’t quite find his words, which would be a problem if Daichi weren’t fighting back well enough for the both of them.

“Explain to me, Sawamura,” the vice principal says, voice grating like nails against a chalkboard, “what makes you think you deserve to lead a club, if you can’t keep your club members in check.”

Daichi needs no time to answer. “It’s the same thing that makes you think you deserve to be vice-principal when you have delinquents running around the school. I don’t believe I’m responsible for the actions of all of my players all of the time. I can contain them while they are around me, and I can try to guide them to the best of my ability, but they still have to make their own choices.”

“And did you try to guide Nishinoya before he made the choice he did?”

“Of course. I provided a practical solution for him, which involved him giving Asahi space so this exact thing wouldn’t happen.” He doesn’t comment on the effectiveness of that method, but Koushi lets it slide, because the vice principal has begun to stutter a little in his questions.

The man stands up from his desk, and Koushi grips his own seat and bites his lip to keep from doing something ridiculous, like whimpering or jumping away. “But that solution was not enough to prevent such a heinous infraction.”

“In my opinion, nothing heinous happened in the whole altercation, but if you’re talking about yelling and breaking a vase, then yes. I couldn’t stop Nishinoya from getting into the fight.”

“It seems to me, then, that despite your best efforts, you cannot keep a handle on your own clubmates. Perhaps the whole club itself is a little too troublesome for this school.”

For just a moment, Daichi freezes, tensing as he works through what the vice principal means to do. As the silence stretches, Koushi becomes increasingly aware of the man’s empty grin, of the closed and possibly locked office door behind him. He knows that nothing will happen here but a bit of reprimanding, but he just cannot get himself to calm down.

“Are you implying that you think my team should be disbanded?” Daichi asks, and even though his voice is ice-cold, Koushi finds his steady, calm tone comforting.

The vice principal shrugs. “Your words, not mine. Just something to think about.”

He lets them go without doling out any further punishment, and without touching the volleyball club. Koushi still struggles to keep his breathing even as they walk towards the gym for afternoon practice, but white-hot passion burns in Daichi’s eyes, his steps certain and his shoulders square. As he trails behind him, Koushi can hear the last words Noya said to him, can picture the hungry look on the vice principal’s face.

“There’s something really, really wrong with our team,” Koushi says in an undertone.

Daichi glances at Koushi over his shoulder and raises an eyebrow. “You think so? This is why I picked you for vice-captain, you’re so observant.”

Koushi just barely manages to keep from rolling his eyes. “What I’m trying to say is that I don’t think the vice principal was kidding. The guy’s too busy for his own good, he’s always looking for extracurriculars to shut down, and we’re just sitting here with our thumbs up our asses.”

“You are,” Daichi corrects. They reach the front door and begin to change shoes, Daichi lowering his voice so what few teammates still remain won’t overhear. “I am doing everything I possibly can to keep us from falling apart. I just stood up for this whole team all by myself and you said nothing, so if anyone’s got their thumb up their ass it’s you.”

That is more accurate than Koushi would like to admit; he’s done his best to look after the other players, tried to talk to them and help out when they needed him, but he’s also bickered with Daichi and undermined his leadership style and explicitly disregarded his authority, all because he can’t stand Daichi as a person right now. He has let his problems with his own life dictate how he acts around the others – he has made sure his personal issues are no longer personal, as Noya put it – and if he wants this team to change then he’ll have to change too.

“Guess I have some thinking to do,” Koushi says.

Daichi laughs, cold and humorless, and steps into the gym. “Guess you do.”

So Koushi spends some time thinking things over, considering his priorities, trying to figure out what he even wants out of all of this. It’s a lot of honestly pathetic navel-gazing, none of it anything close to interesting, and at the end of all of it he knows what he needs to do, as much as he hates to admit it.

He decides that he wants his team to succeed more than he wants to win in his standoff against Daichi or to present himself as something perfect and unbreakable. The conversation with his guardians about what he’s been going through and how he’s been hurting himself is not as difficult as he expected, but the conversation with the therapist they send him to afterwards is considerably more so. He does not look forward to the appointments, to the things he’ll have to talk about and the exposures he’ll once again have to go through, and even then this is not the hardest thing he needs to do.

The morning in which he plans to do this most challenging thing sees him out of the door well before sunrise so he can catch Daichi on the way to practice. He finds the boy just as he enters downtown and falls in step beside him.

“I’d like to talk,” Koushi says into the heavy silence between them.

Daichi takes a long moment to even react, shoving his hands into his pockets to guard against the early spring chill. “If you’re just going to yell at me, I’m not listening to a word.”

“I won’t yell, I promise. I actually want to apologize.”

Koushi remembers the last time he tried to apologize, after he’d screamed at Daichi to leave him alone, remembers that Daichi wouldn’t even look at him. They meet each other’s eye this time, though, and even though it feels like biting into a handful of needles, Koushi begins.

“I’m sorry for the way I’ve treated you these last few months.” Daichi waits, his breath steaming in the frigid air, his expression patient and open and less angry that it’s been since they broke up. “I’ve done a hundred horrible things, and I’d be glad to list them if you want me to, but I know you could tell me every one of them yourself because I know they all hurt you. Especially when I blamed you for us losing the game, that wasn’t your fault and I knew it and I shouldn’t have lashed out. You were trying your best and you kept calm even when you should have lost it and all I did was treat you like shit.”

“You did treat me like shit.” He says it like it’s a fact, like he’s some outsider making an observation about the two of them. It’s spoken with such coldness, and Koushi knows he’ll never come to terms with how downright callous Daichi can be at times, but it doesn’t change what he needs to do.

“I did, I really did. I was frustrated that I couldn’t just get over what happened, and I hated that you were right about it still affecting me, and I couldn’t understand why you kept giving me the benefit of the doubt even though I didn’t deserve it.” There’s a minuscule waver in Koushi’s careful tone, an almost imperceptible shift in Daichi’s blank expression, but within seconds they’re both back with their masks in place. “But that doesn’t excuse me yelling at you and pushing you away and acting like you were an enemy. You were not my enemy.”

The space between them simmers in anticipation. Koushi swallows all of his wounded pride, forgets about the insults hurled and the feelings damaged and the anger that’s built up, and says, “You aren’t my enemy, even now.”

No one speaks for what seems like hours, and they cross the busiest street in total silence. “What do you want?” Daichi asks once they’re away from the bustle. There’s nothing accusatory in his words, just genuine curiosity. “You came to apologize, but why? Why now?”

“Because I’m tired of this – of this thing that we’ve had for months. I’m tired of always being at each other’s throats, it doesn’t get anything done and I don’t win anything and it doesn’t make my problems go away. And I’m worried that the vice principal meant what he said. We need to show everyone that our club deserves to exist, and we can’t prove anything if we’re always fighting.”

“We’re not getting back together just because you owned up to things,” Daichi says.

“I don’t want that, I’m not trying to do that. I just want to walk into practice without getting into an argument.” They head down the road that leads to the school, and as they turn the corner Daichi gives Koushi a skeptical look. “And I’m willing to hold my tongue if that’s what needs to happen.”

“So you’re not going to pick apart everything I do anymore?”

“No.” Daichi flashes another disbelieving glance, but it only solidifies Koushi’s resolve. “I do have some issues with the way you run things sometimes, but I won’t be so passive-aggressive about it.”

He raises an eyebrow. “And I’m just supposed to believe you?”

“Not right out of the gate. Will you give me a chance to prove myself?”

Will you give me a chance to prove myself? Koushi had asked, and Daichi had shown nothing on his face, hadn’t even given Koushi the courtesy of looking him in the eyes when he crushed his hope. Now, though, Daichi considers him for a long time, biting at his lip as he thinks, and eventually he nods.

“But I want three things from you, if I’m going to stop fighting on my end.”

“Sure, whatever.” It’s an automatic response, because even though he’s pissed Daichi off a thousand times throughout this whole thing, he knows the requests won’t be unreasonable.

“First, I want to see that you’re getting help with everything that’s happening, with the panic attacks, and the – the nightmares if you’re still having those, and with whatever else. I want to see that you're trying to change.”

“Already done.”

“Good.” He actually looks faintly impressed. “Second, if you disagree with something I’m doing, we talk about it like normal people. No shouting. I’ll do it if you do.”

“Not a problem.”

“And third, if you ever feel like you’re going to hurt yourself, for whatever reason, I want you to tell someone. I’m not saying this out of the goodness of my heart or me trying to hover over your or anything. This is just about your personal safety.” The hint of concern in Daichi’s eyes indicate it’s about so much more than that.

At that, Koushi hesitates. He thinks of how he feels when he cuts, of how irrational he gets, how hard it is to stop himself. He wonders if he even can stop himself before it happens, if he can redirect himself in time to prevent him grabbing his blade.

But then he thinks of the team and of the vice principal’s sneering face and of Asahi and Noya’s fight, their faces painted in confusion and pain and fear disguised as anger.

“You have a deal.” He means it, because he always keeps his promises, even if they seem impossible.

Daichi gives the smallest grin, eyes crinkling around the edges, and extends his hand to Koushi, who shakes without pause, grip firm and certain. The atmosphere relaxes into something tolerable, something that doesn’t make Koushi hate walking at Daichi’s side, but a distance remains between them as they pass through the school gates. Daichi stays too far away, pulls too tightly into himself, like Koushi is something strange and unwanted he wishes to avoid.

“Have you heard from Asahi?” Koushi says when the silence grows unbearable, even though he already knows the answer and doesn’t really want to hear it.

“No, but he’ll come around.” They near the gym, Daichi fishing his keys out of his pocket before continuing. “I know you think I’m just ignoring the issue, but I have faith that he’ll figure things out if I give him time.”

“And I disagree with that.” He smiles, and Daichi rolls his eyes but smiles back. “But I’m sure we can work it out during that normal people conversation you were talking about earlier.”

It’s an otherwise unassuming day when Koushi next feels the urge, which makes the whole situation that much worse.

He should be fine, he should have the strength to resist, should have the awareness to recognize cutting won’t solve this problem. The desire doesn’t even make sense, the pull towards the blade that he still stupidly keeps in bag nothing short of illogical, because nothing even happened to kick off the whole reaction.

While Koushi was changing in the bathroom for afternoon practice, Ennoshita came in, didn’t realize Koushi was in a stall, and pushed very lightly against the locked door to try to get in. That was it, nothing more. Ennoshita gave a quick apology and took a different stall, and no true damage was done.

But because Koushi had been half naked, the long, thin scars on his legs and hips shimmering pale pink beneath the shitty fluorescents, he had panicked. Had to talk himself down from a breakdown, had to fight the rush of intrusive thoughts that said Ennoshita had somehow seen him exposed.

For the rest of practice, he finds his mind occupied with thoughts of scars and cuts and blood. At some point the thoughts turn to urges, his fingers all but twitching to hold a blade. When Tanaka screams for a toss, Koushi finds the dull ache of the volleyball leaving his hands to be too ineffectual a pain. When Daichi calls them together to discuss strategy, Koushi loses focus and stares at the top-most corner of an old wound that peeks out from the bottom of his shorts. When Narita scuffs his thigh against the court and gets a nasty floor burn, parading it around as proof of his improving willingness to make receives, Koushi feels like he might scream.

More than anything, Koushi wants to hurt himself. It isn’t as hard to admit now as it used to be, when he pretended that he didn’t like cutting, when he could deny how he used it to soothe himself. It’s occupied every part of his brain for hours now, and before he can stop himself he’s counting down the minutes until practice ends and he can go home and shut himself in his room.

But he can’t do that. He can’t, because he promised Daichi he would stop, promised to let him know when the urge arose. Now, though, he can’t imagine sitting down and having a conversation about this, not when all he can see is red.

Still, he won’t let himself break Daichi’s trust by lying to him, so he wanders over to the boy after practice, hovering by his side with an awkwardness that even Asahi would struggle to match.

“Yes?” Daichi says with a sigh, tucking the volleyball he’s holding against his hip.

“I, um…” Koushi swallows, throat full of sandpaper, the words he knows he needs to say sharp against his tangled tongue. “I think I should… I probably shouldn’t…” He balls his hands into fists. “I probably shouldn’t be by myself right now.”

For a moment, he worries Daichi doesn’t understand, that he’ll have to spell all of it out, but Daichi’s face grows serious and he nods. “You feel like you’re going to hurt yourself.”

“Yes,” he says in a near whisper, unable to meet Daichi’s eyes.

“Okay.” Daichi spins the ball in his hands, then heads towards the storage room, Koushi following behind like a lost duckling. He tosses the ball into the cart in the corner and glances at Koushi over his shoulder. “Why?”

“What?”

“Why do you feel like hurting yourself?”

Koushi freezes, pulse speeding up a bit as he tries to decide what to say, what to mention and what to leave out. He doesn’t know if he can put words to most of what he’s feeling, and what he can speak of he knows will make Daichi think he’s crazy.

“Sorry, I didn’t ask that right,” Daichi says. “You don’t have to tell me specifics, just tell me what in general started this. Are you trying to forget a memory? Did something trigger you? Stuff like that.”

“Oh, um. I just can’t stop thinking about it, I guess. I’m not sure how to get my mind off of it.”

“So you need a distraction?” Koushi frowns and shrugs, because he’s never gotten this far before. Daichi seems to already have a plan, though, grabbing the ball cart and wheeling it out of the storage room, motioning for Koushi to follow. “Can you stay late tonight?”

He raises an eyebrow in question, but Daichi doesn’t clarify anything, so he sighs. “Yeah, just let me text my parents.”

By the time he gets back to Daichi, the boy has recruited another teammate who looks just as confused as Koushi feels. Tanaka always wears all of his emotions on his face, though, so his perplexed expression is so comical it almost shakes a laugh out of Koushi.

“We’re nearing the start of a new competitive season,” Daichi says in his captain voice. Tanaka jolts to attention and stands with his back completely straight; Koushi plants a hand on his hip and tries to hide his eye roll. “And while I fully believe that Asahi will be back soon enough, we need to train up a new ace in the meantime.”

“But we need you for defense,” Tanaka says, visibly trying to connect the dots in his head. “And Suga-san’s a setter. You guys can’t be ace.”

“He’s talking about you, Tanaka,” Koushi says.

“Oh.”

“So I’d like to see what you’ve got.” Daichi nods towards Tanaka. “For about half an hour, I want you to show me your best spiking. Are you up for the challenge?”

“Hell yeah!” Tanaka rushes over to stand beside the net, like a toss might come at him at any second. “This is awesome, actually. Thought I was in trouble or something.”

They wind up practicing for closer to an hour, and the entire time Koushi finds himself amazed by how Daichi handled this whole thing. Not only was he ready and willing to stay late to make sure Koushi was safe, but he knew that having Koushi focus on making things better for someone else would distract him from his own problems, and he came up with the plan in a matter of seconds. It’s incredible, how quickly his mind works, how well he knows his teammates, how intelligent he is and always has been.

It’s the reason Koushi fell in love with him in the first place. Daichi’s confidence pulled Asahi in too when they were first years, but Koushi became enamored with it, enthralled by it. Daichi was always so sure of himself, always knew what to say and how to say it, and in the wild chaos that was Koushi’s home life Daichi seemed secure, easy to understand and easier to trust.

Soon enough, as his hands begin stinging from the hit of the volleyball and his mind begins to clutter with memories of that quiet summer he and Daichi got together, the desire to hurt himself grows faint and weak. Their extra practice session ends with all three of them all but collapsed on the court, Koushi’s arms screaming if he tries to raise them, Daichi’s forearms bright red from a hundred receives, Tanaka just lying spread eagle on the floor.

“Did I prove myself?” he asks, voice warbling.

“Absolutely,” Daichi says. That prompts the most unenthusiastic celebration that Tanaka has ever given, lifting a single fist in the air before it falls limp at his side.

After they lock up the gym, Daichi and Koushi walk home together in silence, but it doesn’t feel as hollow a quiet as it used to. Koushi keeps sneaking glances at Daichi, keeps watching how the moonlight casts perfect shadows over the boy’s face and makes his dark eyes seem to glow, keeps telling himself he isn’t supposed to notice those things anymore.

“Are you okay to be alone?” Daichi asks just before they reach where they have to split off. “You still seem a little distant.”

“Just tired, I won’t try anything,” he says, and it isn’t a lie.

They part ways, Daichi telling him goodnight as he goes down the road, and Koushi says the same back, watching the boy disappear into the night. He doesn’t tell Daichi that he’s still in love with him, no matter how badly he wants to.

Chapter Text

Something in him starts to crumble, after his last talk with Daichi, after the realization of his feelings for the other boy.

He doesn’t even notice the change happening, really; he just goes from angry all the time to too focused on the team’s well-being to get mad over every little thing, and by the time the team is more or less safe from getting scrapped he finds that his anger is gone. Whatever fire had burned in his chest has snuffed out, the fuel used to light it depleted, and in its place sits a pile of cooling ash. That hole that’s carved him out since the assault is still there, equal parts heavy and empty, but the kindling he’s been tossing into it to warm him up has vanished, and it leaves him feeling hollow.

Most of the time, though, even if he starts the day off hollowed out, by the time lunch rolls around and he’s working with Hinata, he’s back to his usual self. He likes teaching Hinata, because he’s a good kid, confident and excited and so willing to learn, and Koushi can’t remember the last time he met someone with such unshakable dedication.

(He can remember, actually, because that person is Daichi, Daichi with twin flames of determination in his eyes, Daichi with every word he speaks and every step he takes pointed towards a singular goal. Koushi can’t think about these things, though, not if he wants to hold himself together.)

But during today’s receiving practice, he cannot shake the tightness in his throat or the trembling in his limbs. He tries to push down on it like he always has, but he has no strength left to fight it, has no way to stop it but to tug at his collar in an attempt to free his neck, like this choking feeling is something physical and not the result of his brain going haywire. The lump sitting in his throat won’t move no matter how much he clears it, and after a few minutes of struggling he’s about to make some excuse to step away so he can deal with this. Hinata beats him to it.

“Are you okay? You look kind of… upset.” Hinata has such a childishness about him, sometimes, with the way he doesn’t try to mince words, the way he doesn’t seem able to speak with anything else but brutal honesty. He seems almost horrified at the sight of Koushi being anything less than perfect, and Koushi almost shares his sentiment.

“I’m okay,” Koushi says, not because he is, but because he should be. It’s a bright, warm day after so many cold months, and he’s outside in the dazzling sunshine, and the thump of the volleyball against the platform of his arms keeps away the sensation of hands clamping around his wrist that he’s been fighting all morning. “Let me see your ready position again. Remember to square your hips.”

Hinata does as he’s told, dropping into the proper form, but he looks unconvinced. They pass back and forth for another minute or so before he abruptly grabs the ball instead of sending it back to Koushi. “It’s fine if you don’t want to practice right now, if you’re sad.”

“I’m not—” He drags in a breath, schools his expression to something calmer. “I’m not upset, there’s nothing wrong.”

“But you are, I know you are. I’m really good at reading people’s faces, and right now yours is all like—” He makes a series of wordless sound effects in quick succession, all of which remind Koushi of the noise a crashing airplane makes when it hits the ground, and none of which make things any clearer. “You know?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

He grips the ball tighter, flashing Koushi a brilliant, bright-eyed smile. “How about this? I’m going to go rub my new receiving skills in Kageyama’s face, and maybe you could go talk to Daichi-san about whatever’s going on.”

Before Koushi can respond, Hinata has disappeared back inside the school, and Koushi finds himself completely alone. There’s something wedged in the hole in his chest, threatening to break free in the same way the anger had, but unlike with that wild fury, Koushi knows that if he releases this feeling he will loosen the flood that’s been building in the deepest parts of himself for a year now. He tried to cauterize that flood with his rage, and to let it run free now feels like allowing all of his hard work to amount to nothing.

Talking to Daichi sounds like a terrible idea, because nothing happened to make Koushi feel like this, so he doesn’t have anything to discuss. Nothing ever happens when it’s supposed to, on the bad days when he has good reason to fall apart. The one-year anniversary of the assault passed a few weeks ago, and he spent the whole day acting like he always does, not even realizing the date until the next morning. And now, on a beautiful, peaceful afternoon, he threatens to self-destruct.

But he won’t just stand here in the yard like an idiot, so he heads back towards his classroom with plans to at least pretend to eat lunch. He doesn’t think he can actually stomach food right now, but no one else needs to know that.

To his absolute dismay, he finds Daichi already in class, sitting at his desk and chatting with some of their classmates. Koushi takes a seat at his own desk anyway, opening up his bento and ignoring the way Daichi’s eyes cut across to him.

After another few minutes of Koushi pushing his rice back and forth with his chopsticks, he glances up to find Daichi right in front of him, looking concerned.

“You okay?”

He’s tired of people asking him that, almost as much as he’s tired of lying when he answers. “Just not hungry.”

It’s more than that, though, because he can’t get himself to breathe all the way in and his fingers shake around his chopsticks and his vision has grown blurry. He wonders if something’s wrong with him, with this pressure in his lungs, wonders if it’ll turn into yet another very public panic attack. Daichi says something else, something he doesn’t catch for the focus he puts into keeping his shit together, and when a shudder runs down the length of his spine, Daichi drops into his field of vision.

“Let’s go outside,” Daichi says from somewhere far away. “How about we sit under that tree in the side yard?”

Unlike the last time Daichi suggested they step away, Koushi follows him without protest, and they end up in the shade with several feet of space between them. Koushi focuses on a spot out in the distance and does his best to let the feelings wash over him, fights with everything he has to stop the whimper that wants to push past his lips, the sudden wetness that springs to his eyes.

Daichi just waits, watching Koushi with concern clear on his face. “Talk to me,” he says when it becomes obvious this episode won’t end so easily. “What’s going on?”

“I don’t know.” He can’t make himself take deep breaths, even though he feels like he has plenty of air. His own body just won’t listen to him, forcing him to take sharp inhales and shaky exhales. “My chest is sort of… tight, but not in the freaking-out kind of way. And it feels like there’s something clogging up my throat, and my eyes keep—” A tear slips through his lashes and trails down his cheek. “Doing that.”

Some emotion flits across Daichi’s face, so fast Koushi can’t catch it in his haze, and Daichi ends up with a small smile curling his lips. “Is that so? And what brought it on, do you think?”

Koushi can’t figure out why Daichi’s treating this like a game, like Koushi isn’t having the weirdest panic attack of his life. “It’s been like this all day,” Koushi admits. “Even… even Hinata caught on, but there’s no reason for it to be like this, nothing happened for me to act like this.”

“You don’t have to have a reason to feel sad. You don’t have to justify that to me.”

He says it with such confidence, such easy assurance, but Koushi doesn’t understand. A few more tears dislodge as he blinks up at Daichi in confusion.

“Wait, Suga, please tell me you were joking.” His smile falters, and he moves closer to Koushi, so close their legs brush.

“Does this look like a joke?” is all Koushi can manage.

“Kou, I don’t think you’re panicking.” He reaches out, watching for Koushi’s response, and when Koushi doesn’t flinch away he places his hand on the boy’s shoulder. “You’re not panicking, you’re just crying. You do… remember what that feels like, don’t you?”

He doesn’t. He realizes with an awful jolt of understanding that after so many months of breaking down, so much time spent pushing and pushing on any unwanted emotion that springs up, so many heated outbursts and stinging slices against his skin, that he does not remember sorrow. It is that thing that has sat within him for so long, that flood untouched and unnamed, and now that someone has brought it to his attention he cannot stop what comes next.

It is the ugliest thing in the whole world, when he finally finds it within himself to cry. It rips his throats to shreds and leaves his eyes aching, his face tender and sore from the onslaught of tears. And through it all, Daichi remains by his side, as strong and stable as the earth beneath Koushi’s feet, an arm around Koushi’s shoulders as he sobs himself ragged.

“Why am I doing this?” Koushi chokes out once he can find the breath to do so.

“You don’t always need to have a reason,” Daichi says, voice just quiet enough for Koushi to hear. “It’s okay if you don’t know.”

But it is not okay, because they shouldn’t be like this. Daichi should not show this much concern to someone who’s hurt him so terribly, should not want to spend any time around a boy who’d forgotten how to cry. And yet, when he runs his fingers through Koushi’s hair, the motion as soothing and centering as when he’d done it that first night after the assault, holding an inconsolable Koushi just as he’s doing now, Koushi yearns for it. He cannot have it, should not have it, but he leans into the touch all the same.

Sometime later, when he’s pulled himself together enough to head back inside, he can still feel the ghost of Daichi’s hand twisting through his hair, and it gives him a guilty kind of comfort for the rest of the day.

Things get worse from there.

All of the feelings he’d worked so hard on locking up tight within him come spilling out, like that moment with Daichi broke down his walls and now the water flows too fast for him to rebuild them. Over the next few days, he battles against the disjointed pieces of memories that spring up at awful times, the feeling of disgust that blooms like mold in the center of his chest and spreads down his limbs and winds an intricate pattern between his legs, the overwhelming pressure of the sobs building in his throat that he just barely swallows down.

But he can’t break down every single time he wants to, so he closes the lid on his emotions with all the waning strength he has left. People are relying on him now, people need him to lead them and help them and guide them, and he can’t do that if he curls up in a corner and gives in. He’d cut himself to relieve some of the tension, just enough for him to get by, but he threw his blades away weeks ago, and besides, he promised himself and everyone else that no matter what happens he won’t resort to that.

In moments like this, though, his resolve begins to waver. He stands on the court at afternoon practice, engaged in an intense set-spike drill that requires all of his skill and attention, so he cannot afford to be anything less than completely focused. But halfway through the drill, he begins to feel it, the deep ache in his lower back, the shooting pain that travels in waves up his spine, and he knows exactly what that means.

The last time he felt like this, he spiraled into a world of agony, became so trapped in the memory of that one hellish night that even his own body forced him to remember. The last time, he lashed out, ruined everything, embarrassed himself in front of his entire class, and he won’t humiliate himself in front of his teammates.

He can’t figure out how to voice his rising panic or how to step away as the pain grows, but in the end it’s Daichi who saves him. “Let’s take a quick break,” Daichi calls. “Ten minutes, and then maybe we’ll scrimmage.”

As soon as Daichi finishes, Koushi tries to stumble over to him, but his legs tremble beneath him and everything has fallen away except the phantom bruises covering his hips and the memories of his thighs being wrenched apart. Daichi glances over towards him, and in an instant his expression changes to one of grave understanding; he whispers something in Ennoshita’s ear and rushes over to Koushi.

They wind up outside under the little covered walkway between the gym and the school. Daichi helps Koushi to the ground – Koushi doesn’t think he can stand any longer, but he also doesn’t want to sit, so he just kneels doubled over on the concrete – and crouches down beside him, a hand resting lightly on his shoulder.

“I need you to tell me what’s going on,” Daichi says. “This is worse than it usually is, isn’t it? You look like you’re about to pass out.”

He grits his teeth and swallows, his throat sore and voice rough from the screaming he did a year ago. “It hurts,” is all he can get out.

“What hurts? Did you hurt yourself?”

“No, it’s—” Each word is a struggle like this, when he's so close to slipping away entirely, when every nerve in his body is on fire and every thought turns to the memory of the cold floor against his back, the memory of hands that dig and twist and scrape at his naked form, the feverish press of a body on top of his. “I feel it, it’s happening again. It’s happening again, it should be over, it should—”

“Oh, gods, Kou.”

There are hands on either side of his face, cupping his jaw line, and they’re Daichi’s hands, he’d know them anywhere, but some murmuring part of his mind tells him that this can’t be right, not like this. A much louder part of his mind wonders how Daichi got here at all, because Koushi is currently stranded in his mother’s kitchen, Hiro bearing down on top of him, pain and fear and shame exploding through every cell in his body, and Daichi shouldn’t be here. Daichi should be at home, safe with his siblings and his parents, and Koushi shouldn’t have gone with his mother, he never should have left the Sawamuras’ house.

“Koushi, please look at me.” Koushi can’t see anything at all; he thinks he’s closed his eyes, but he can’t figure out how to open them. The hands on his face guide his head up and to the side, and he lets them, because they’re so tender with him and even if they weren’t, he couldn’t fight them. “I want you to listen very closely. You are not going through it again. It is not happening again. It is over.”

It seems like a lie, like the sickest joke known to man, because Koushi can feel in every part of himself that it is anything but over. But these hands, this voice, they both act with such kindness, as if Koushi is something precious to be protected and not some ragdoll with its nerves removed, not some unfeeling toy meant only to bend to its owner's whims. That confuses him more than anything, and with the only other option being living every second of this agony, he focuses on the voice as it continues to speak.

“Try to come all the way back,” it says, and it sounds like Daichi, but Daichi shouldn’t be here. But things aren’t progressing like they should, anyway, so maybe he’s not even trapped with Hiro at all. Maybe he’s remembering, a flashback he thinks it’s called, and though he can’t recall where he learned that word from, he knows that this isn’t the first time he’s gone through this. “Look at me, try to really see me.”

Blinking hard, Koushi centers in on Daichi in front of him, his face rushing to Koushi’s vision, and at once everything comes back. He’s at practice, he started to feel the pain again so he went to get help, and Daichi is doing his best to stop all of this even though he has no reason to.

“Dai, it hurts, I don’t know how to make it stop.”

“I know, I know it does.” Daichi’s eyes look teary and pained, and Koushi stares into them, stares at the frantic reflection of himself that glares back. “But it’s just a memory, okay? You’re not back there.”

“But it feels like—”

“You are not back in that place, I promise you. You’re at practice, and you’re a third year, and you’re the vice-captain of the team. No one is going to hurt you.” His voice trembles, but he saves it from cracking entirely and keeps going. “We have these two incredible new players that are going to change everything. You’ve been helping Hinata with his receives every day. We’re going to Aoba Johsai at the end of the week for a practice match.”

Daichi talks about anything he can think of, everything from speculating on Seijoh’s strategy to gossiping about Oikawa's relationship with Iwaizumi, and as he listens Koushi pulls himself inch by inch out of the memory. The pain lingers, but he knows now that he is not truly hurt, not anymore, and the more he reminds himself of this the more the sensations begin to recede.

“Please don’t scare me like that again,” Daichi says with a breathy laugh, not bothering to hide the way his shoulders tremble. “Are you okay?”

“I was – I think I got lost. I don’t think I could have gotten out by myself.”

“I’m just glad you got out at all.” Daichi sweeps a hand over Koushi’s forehead to clear his hair from his face, and after doing so he leans in for just a moment, moving closer to Koushi like they used to do before they split, when Daichi would plant a kiss on Koushi’s temple. Instead of making any contact, though, he jerks away and clears his throat. “I… um, sorry, are you… are you good to stand up?”

“Yeah, I think so.” When he climbs back to his feet, he finds a new emotion coursing through him, something like frustration. He expected that kiss, he realizes, and hates himself for it.

“Should you – I mean, if you need to go home or something, that’s okay.”

The way they can go from so intertwined and focused on each other to awkward and distant in a matter of seconds is honestly almost impressive. Koushi nearly turns and just leaves him, not able to bear looking at Daichi any longer, not willing to let the memory of Daichi’s hands on his face and his voice cutting through the chaos and the instinctive embrace he caught at the last second take up any more space in Koushi’s brain than it already does.

But he still feels a little shaky, so he doesn’t try rushing off quite yet. Instead, he takes one step towards the gym and lets Daichi follow him back inside, and he ends up staying the rest of the practice, because he realizes he wants nothing more than to be here watching Daichi play.

Several days and far too many difficult situations later, Koushi pushes through the worst of things and gets himself much closer to baseline, where his brain just hates him instead of actively trying to destroy him.

Sometime at the end of this period, when he can again trust himself to go about his normal business without breaking down, Daichi approaches him in between classes and asks if they can go somewhere on their upcoming free day, just the two of them, to discuss some things that have been on his mind. Koushi agrees, of course he does, because he’s regressed back to that lovesick fool he was as a first year, when every second spent with Daichi felt more valuable than anything else in the world.

Daichi takes them to the park near his house, and Koushi recognizes its function immediately as a neutral, open space for them to talk, a place neither of them will feel cornered. At first, Koushi had thought this discussion would be straightforward, perhaps concerning the team and their new dynamics now that they’ve played an actual practice match, but as he follows Daichi to a secluded cluster of trees and the wooden bench situated beneath him, he realizes he has no idea what will happen.

Maybe this conversation will turn much more serious than he’d prepared for, or maybe Daichi is acting far too intense for the situation as per usual.

“You’re tense,” Daichi says once they seat themselves on the bench, and he looks confused as to why Koushi's so nervous.

“This just seems really formal, is all.” Koushi does his best to relax, to assume only the best from his captain, but the stern expression on Daichi’s face isn’t helping matters.

“I didn’t mean to intimidate you, I just…” He fidgets with his hands for a moment, then settles for clasping them white-knuckled and placing them on his lap. “I just wanted to find somewhere that wouldn’t bring up any memories. It would have been easier to do this at school, or your house, or my house, but all of those places feel… I don’t know, tainted somehow.”

“It does feel like it’d be easier to bring shit up if we’re in the place it happened.”

“Right, exactly. And I didn’t want to pressure you in any way.”

Koushi raises an eyebrow. “Pressure me? Into what?”

He clears his throat like he’s about to speak, but instead of making a sound he just frowns and stares at his feet, lost in thought.

“Earth to Daichi,” Koushi says, nudging the boy with his shoe. “And stop making that face, you’ll get wrinkles.”

“How did you do this?” he says with a laugh, then makes several more noises that might be attempts at words. A babbling, uncertain Daichi is not something that Koushi is used to dealing with, and it definitely doesn’t assuage his anxieties about this whole thing. Daichi figures it out after a few tries, and when he opens his mouth again, he’s much more understandable. “When you did it, it was so good. You admitted to everything with so little hesitation, and you’re so prideful that I could barely believe what I was hearing.”

“Excuse you?”

“You deserve something just as good as what you gave me, and I don’t want to mess it up.”

“Listen,” Koushi says. “I have no clue what you’re talking about, so please just spit it out.”

“I’m trying to apologize.” A silence follows, in which Daichi refuses to look Koushi in the eye and Koushi drills holes into the side of Daichi’s head with the strength of his stare. Daichi takes a few deep breaths and sets his shoulders, expression stony like it is in the second after the first serve of a match. “I shouldn’t have treated you the way I did back when I picked vice-captain, or all of the weeks after that. I shouldn’t have kept my decision from you, I shouldn’t have tried to avoid you, and I shouldn’t have lost it when all you wanted was an honest answer.”

“Not like I was acting angelic in comparison.”

“That doesn’t matter to me. What matters is that I held onto a grudge from that one time you yelled at me in class, and I almost let it mess up this whole team. There was literally no one else in the world who should have been my vice-captain.”

Those last words and the sincerity behind them almost choke Koushi up, but he holds himself together, because he’s been crying over more things than he’d care to claim lately and he can’t let this be one of them. “I wouldn’t have picked me either back then. I still might not pick me the way I am right now.”

“Would you just—” He curls his hands into a fist, frustration flashing in his eyes. “Would you just let me say I’m sorry? You don’t have to make excuses for me, I don’t want to rely on them.”

Koushi leans back, nodding once. “Go for it.”

“You’ve been going through so much,” he says, “and I knew that and I still pretended you were being a dick for no reason. As much as you didn’t want to admit you wouldn’t just get better overnight, I didn’t want to believe the ways you changed after what you went through would stick. Before you moved out, you kept saying that you’d never be the same. And I don’t think that was the truth, I still don’t, but I also couldn’t accept that the you after what happened wasn’t a perfect copy of the you before it.”

“I didn’t fit the picture of me you had in your head anymore.” Koushi can hear himself screaming those words, can feel the rage and heartache that coursed through him on that night that they fought and everything broke apart.

“Right, and instead of accepting that and changing myself, I just became unbearable and obstinate and petty. And I’m sorry, I’m so sorry for all of it.”

“Apology accepted,” Koushi says, voice a little too hoarse to maintain the unaffected air he’d tried to put on. “But, I think I should be able to make some ultimatums for you, like you did with me when we talked.”

“Of course, whatever.”

“It’s just the one. I want us to talk as openly as we used to.” There’s a sharp intake of breath from Daichi, and Koushi rushes to amend. “Not while we were together, before that. Even while we were just friends, we could tell each other anything. If we were mad we could tell each other why without blowing up about it, and I want to be able to do that again.”

“Feels so much harder to talk about this stuff,” Daichi says quietly.

“Because we’re not dealing with easy problems anymore. But I think we have it in us. So, are you in?” Daichi nods, and Koushi gives him a second of silence before continuing. “Now that you’ve made this bargain, I have a question for you.”

Daichi drops his head into his hands, groaning. “Please don’t turn this thing into truth or dare, my heart can’t take it.”

“I won’t, I won’t, I promise. This is important.”

He tips his head to the side, his full attention on Koushi, and from the glimmer in his eyes Koushi knows he knows what the question will be.

“When I had that flashback,” Koushi says, “that one outside the gym that you had to walk me through, at the end of it you brushed my hair back and sort of, um…” He bites at his lower lip, worrying it between his teeth. “You leaned in towards me. It felt so familiar.”

“I’m sure it did.”

“What were you going to do?”

He sighs, eyes fluttering closed. “Gods, look, I was—”

Koushi summons up every last inch of courage he has and murmurs, “Were you going to kiss me?”

The air grows so heavy it seems to cling to Koushi’s skin, and for the long, horrible moment it takes Daichi to answer, he worries he’d interpreted the whole thing wrong and only made their situation worse. But eventually, Daichi speaks. “Yeah, I was,” he says. “It was instinctual, almost. And the funny thing is, the only reason I didn’t do it was because I thought you might not want that kind of contact. I didn’t even consider that people who are just teammates don’t touch each other like that.”

“And when you did consider that, what did you feel?”

“What did I feel?” He glances at Koushi, the expression on his face so raw and unmasked that Koushi can’t even interpret the emotion, can just feel it like he’s wearing it himself. “I felt longing, Koushi. I felt like something was missing.”

There is a moment, just a moment, when Koushi wants in a way he has never wanted before, when he desires the boy sitting next to him like he desires to reclaim a severed limb. A hole the size of Daichi has carved itself into him, a hole that through all the anger and the fighting and the bitter loneliness has remained, a hole that all of the things he tried to do on his own couldn’t fix, and it grows more and more each day.

“It didn’t feel bad?” Koushi asks.

“Define ‘bad’, Kou.” Daichi is fighting something himself now, his jaw clenched and his entire body tense. “Bad as in I hated it and don’t want to do it again? No, not at all. But bad as in I’m not supposed to wish I could kiss my ex? The answer to that is yes.”

“We don’t… have to be exes.”

That pulls a laugh out of Daichi, and Koushi’s face heats up in embarrassment. “Sorry, that was mortifying, please forget I said that. What I mean is, the only people who decide how we define ourselves is us, and to be honest, I haven’t been thinking of you as my ex for at least a few weeks now.”

“It really is like we’re just putting on a show for each other,” Daichi says.

Koushi scoots closer to him, acutely aware of how terrible he is at all of this. “I don’t think I want to pretend anymore.”

“I don’t want to, either.”

In the end, it’s so easy to move in for the kiss. It’s so easy to take Daichi’s face in his hands and to lock their lips together. It’s so easy to fall back into this, to lean into the touch, because Daichi is and always has been strong and stable and reliable, like Koushi could tumble down from any height and find solid ground to stand on in him.

They pull apart when they’re both smiling too hard to get anything done, but they stay close, foreheads pressed together. “So,” Daichi says, “does this mean we’re a thing again?”

“Sure hope so. I don’t do this with friends.” Daichi laughs, which makes Koushi laugh, a frail and trembling thing, dangling on the edge of hysteria, but he manages to collect himself enough to say, “I love you.”

“I love you, too,” Daichi says, and kisses him again.

To Koushi’s great disappointment, he does not find himself magically fixed. He does not find his mind healed or his fears chased off or his past erased. But he does find the pain dulled, and what he cannot dull he can fight off with the warmth of this body pressed against his, with the knowledge that Daichi is his, and he is Daichi’s.

Chapter Text

Summer preliminaries come and pass in a rush of emotion, the high of getting further in the tournament than any of them ever have before and the low of that final losing point against Seijoh.

And then it’s over. It’s over, but it’s just beginning, the bitter loss only solidifying the team’s resolve, only strengthening their hunger for reaching nationals. The atmosphere on the ride back to the school is sharp, just as electrified with the force of their determination as it is heavy with the pain of their defeat.

Takeda’s talk with the third years about making good decisions for the future is nearly enough to drive all of that energy into the ground, at least for Koushi. He has kept such a narrow view on his life for months at this point, from worrying about his own personal problems at the start to placing most of his focus on the steady development of the team as the tournament approached, in part because he does not want to consider anything else beyond what he has in front of him, in the present. The future awaits him, the whole world opening up to him, but he isn’t ready to face it. He wishes to live in this new springtime of his life, with Daichi by his side and the team at their backs, where the only challenge he has to conquer stands on the other side of a volleyball net.

So he throws himself into his present, into practice and his classes and the tutoring of the second years before the upcoming training camp. He really doesn’t mean to repress his feelings again, he’s just trying to ignore the scary stuff and make his life a little easier, but he winds up making a mess of things anyway, as he always does.

He’d be lying if he said the day everything catches up to him is like all the other days. On that day, he wakes up with a thousand worries crowding his mind, from whether he has enough time that afternoon to work with Tanaka on his math homework to how many days he has until he has to send his transcript to his university to when the persistent and vivid memories of Hiro threatening him that one night in the car will finally subside, as it’s been nearly a week since they started plaguing him.

For most of the day, he distracts himself in any way he can; in second period, he highlights and annotates his notes until he can barely read what’s on the page, and during lunch he studies for his upcoming English finals, but as the hours wear on and his brain won’t stop spinning, his actions become much less helpful. He traces the writing on the blackboard with his eyes over and over, scuffs his foot against the dent on his desk leg again and again, and by the time he starts his tutoring he’s completely entrenched in his old repetitive behaviors.

“Why can’t I get the derivative of this?” Tanaka says that afternoon, pushing his notebook across the clubroom floor and shaking Koushi from another round of counting the floor tiles in groups of three.

At this point, over a week into studying with another several weeks to go, Koushi has already learned how to set aside his frustration at repeating himself for the thousandth time. Instead, he’s already begun to think about how to rework their formation for training camp to accommodate for the loss of a wing spiker and libero. “Because this is trigonometry, it has nothing to do with derivatives. Your entire class this year had nothing to do with derivation.”

“Really? Could’ve sworn it was in there.”

“Honestly, where did you even learn that word?”

It seems Tanaka hasn’t even heard him, because he returns to scribbling across the page with unfettered enthusiasm. “So, more like this, then?”

“No, not really.” Not at all , Koushi just manages to keep from spilling out, because Tanaka has just drawn two triangles on his paper that have nothing to do with the problem he should be solving. Koushi doesn’t even know how to retrace the steps the other boy has taken or what his thought process involved to get to this point, and after just a few seconds of scanning the problem, he begins to share Tanaka’s bewildered expression.

“It’s that hard, huh?” Tanaka says, shaking his head. “If even a third year can’t figure it out, it’s probably so difficult it won’t be on the test, so it’s not even worth studying.”

“That’s not a good way to think about—”

“I don’t think we need to worry about it, then.” He slams his books closed and begins stuffing them in his backpack, speaking rapid-fire as he stands and throws his bag over his shoulder. “And if we do, we’ll work on it later when I’m better at all of the basic stuff. Or maybe we just shouldn’t do it at all. It’s such a small part of the class and I don’t want it taking up too much mental space or whatever.”

“You’re just trying to get out of studying,” Koushi says, but he doesn’t have the energy to fight Tanaka today.

In lieu of an answer, Tanaka rushes out and slams the clubroom door closed, and Koushi listens as he sprints down the stairs off towards gods know where. In a perfect world, Koushi would put on his vice-captain face and go have a talk with Tanaka about how running away from his troubles won’t make them vanish, but Koushi himself has spent most of the last few hours doing anything but facing his own problems. So he lets the boy go; at least he came to study at all, Noya just made up some excuse about developing a mysterious illness that only made him sick during the exact period of time they were set to have their session.

On the other side of the room, Tsukishima and Hinata seem to be going over literature notes while Yamaguchi explains some biology concept to Kageyama. They all look engaged and productive and as unlikely to start a fight as the four of them ever are, and Koushi can’t take another second of compulsively scanning the ceiling for cracks, so he gets up and leaves.

He wanders down to the gym, where Daichi stands alone in the middle of the room, frowning at the rolling whiteboard in front of him containing a sketch of a formation they used in the Aoba Johsai game. “Your students ditch you?” he teases, marking dramatically through Noya’s name on the board.

Koushi can’t find words in time to respond, so he shrugs.

“What’s going on?” Daichi asks. Again, Koushi just shrugs, and Daichi kicks aside the whiteboard and walks over.

All of the things he wants to say, every last word explaining the mess going on inside his head, evaporates the moment Daichi wraps Koushi in his arms. Koushi doesn’t worry about talking, just lets himself be held, lets Daichi grip him tight and nose into his hair.

“Having a bad day?”

“Something like that,” Koushi murmurs. He’s been doing his best to name his emotions before things escalate, but today he has no idea how he feels; he just knows that everything has been too much lately. “It’s not even like I’m about to have a breakdown or something, I just… wish everything didn’t have to happen all at once.”

“You’ve been doing a lot these last few weeks, it’s got to be tough.” Daichi backs away, but he keeps Koushi’s hand in his, using the other to push the board towards the storage closet, and Koushi lets himself be led across the floor. “I appreciate you helping with the second years, though. How’s studying going?”

Koushi thinks of Tanaka and those damn triangles. “It could be better. Noya suddenly got sick after classes and said that he didn’t know when he’d be over it, except that he’d be fine before practice.”

“Sounds like he and I need to have a conversation about his priorities, I think.”

“Don’t be too harsh on him, please.” Noya is tough, but probably not tough enough to handle Daichi’s famous lecture about responsibility and maturity. Koushi once had a first-year Daichi scold him about those very things when he skipped two days in a row because he wasn’t understanding his math class, and Koushi nearly cracked beneath the force of Daichi’s intensity. “I wasn’t the most enthusiastic today, either.”

Daichi tucks the board into a corner of the closet, then turns to face Koushi. “You’re allowed to have bad days, you know. Just because you’re getting better doesn’t mean you’re always going to be perfect.”

“I wish it felt a little different. Most of the time, ‘better’ just means I’m barely hanging on instead of actively falling.”

“I don’t have an answer for you, really,” Daichi says. “All I know is that this stuff passes, because it’s passed for you before, right? And in the meantime—” he holds up their joined hands “—we still have this. Not sure if you feel the same, but for me, everything’s improved since I got you back.”

A blush creeps across Koushi’s cheeks, and he glances away. He doesn’t have the humility to admit it, but he does feel the same, feels the relief of having someone to confide in after so many months of dealing with everything himself. Some part of this sentiment must show on his face, though, because Daichi smiles and kisses Koushi on the back of his hand.

“Besides, once we get to the weekend, things will start to look up,” Daichi says, his smile growing more than a little cheeky.

“Do I even want to know what you have planned?”

“It’s nothing crazy, I don’t want to ruin your birthday celebration.” The sound of voices floats in from just outside the gym, and they both head back towards the court. “Besides, Asahi’s coming with us, so we can’t do anything too scary. We need our ace in one piece for the camp.”

Daichi’s super special birthday surprise ends up being a day trip to the nearest beach. They get up early on Saturday morning and take a short train ride to the coast; Daichi and Koushi bring only the bare essentials, which for Daichi of course includes a volleyball, since they’ll only be there until sundown, but Asahi insists on all but packing a suitcase and nearly tries to shove an entire umbrella in the train car before Daichi talks him out of it.

“There’s stuff we can rent there,” Daichi says, fighting harder than he ever has before to keep from bursting into laughter at the sight of Asahi holding two beach bags and wearing a wide-brimmed hat. There’s a strip of sunscreen running up the bridge of his nose.

“And it’s an overcast day,” Koushi adds. He has not tried to fight his laughter whatsoever. “We’ll be fine with what we have.”

Asahi shakes his head, slow and gloomy. “That’s what everyone always says. And I bet neither of you brought food, did you? What are we going to do when lunch rolls around?”

“Rolls around? Who are you, my mother?” Daichi swipes the hat off of Asahi’s head, and Asahi shrinks away like he’s never been in the sunshine in his life. “There’s food stands, don’t worry. Please just try to relax, we’ve got most of it covered, and what we don’t have we’ll figure out when we get there.”

They board the train sans umbrella and spend most of the ride in a companionable quiet, the conversation among them clipped but light. It’s a mostly uneventful trip, the landscape passing outside the window very familiar to Koushi and the sky crowded with darkening clouds casting shadows on the world below. He wonders if it’ll rain while they’re out today and decides that he won’t mind if it does, not when he’s surrounded by his two best friends, when he can reach for Daichi’s hand whenever he likes and know Daichi will interlock their fingers together on instinct. Getting a little wet can’t ruin this day, this outing that means so much more than the three of them celebrating him getting a year older.

If they hope to get the team to nationals, then they’ll have a busy schedule in the upcoming months. The Tokyo camp immediately precedes the qualifying round of Preliminaries, which comes just before the provincial tournament itself, and then it’s nothing but nationals and schoolwork and preparing for graduation after that. There’s no more waiting for next summer for the three of them, not anymore; a year from now they’ll be heading down their own paths, entrenched in whatever next step they decide to take for their lives.

So for them, this is just about it. They won’t have much free time after the training camp, or at least not enough for them to spend hours and hours with each other like they did when they were younger. This may very well be the last meaningful moment they have with each other, and no matter what happens, Koushi will make the best of it.

The beach is sparsely occupied, with the ever-growing blanket of clouds and the fact that it’s still too cold to swim in the water, but all of the amenities are still open. Daichi puts on a very mature act to rent their umbrella and a few towels, which only grows more hilarious when he has to defer to Koushi, the only legal adult among them, to pay for everything. He grumbles about it all the way down to the ocean, and Koushi wastes no time digging into him.

“Don’t be mad about it,” he says, resting a hand on Daichi’s shoulder. “You should hold onto your youth while you have it. Believe me, it goes by so fast.”

Asahi comes up on Koushi’s other side, a rare sly grin on his face. “You would know, wouldn’t you? You’re so old, your hair’s already turned gray.” Koushi aims for the back of one of Asahi’s knees, and the boy hardly flinches when his foot makes contact, carrying on like nothing happened. “Really, though, what’s it like to be eighteen?”

“Why do you want to know? Just so you can plan? It is absolutely nothing special, just the same as being seventeen. Almost disappointing, honestly.”

“Here’s a good place, I think,” Daichi says, breaking their banter. They spread their towels out beneath the umbrella, far enough away from the waves that they’ll be safe even during high tide, and toss the rest of their belongings to the ground before sprinting towards the water.

It really is too cool to swim or even wade in, so they instead race the waves like children, rushing down the shore as the water retreats and bolting in the opposite direction before the frigid spray can reach them. They pick up seashells and skip them – or try to skip them, in Koushi’s case, only to end up watching shell after shell splash ineffectually beneath the surf – then use them to comb the sand for the tiny creatures left behind by the receding waves. Before long, they’re building a castle that gets destroyed the second it’s finished by a rush of water that pools around their ankles, which sends them scampering away before their feet freeze off.

At some point, Daichi brings out the volleyball and they play the most unofficial game of their lives. They decide to switch positions, Asahi trying his hand at setting and Koushi repeatedly getting a face full of sand as the world’s shittiest libero. Daichi falls into his new spiker role with ease, because he’s Sawamura Daichi and Koushi’s convinced there’s nothing he can’t do.

They play for hours, stopping only once for lunch, and even when the sky opens and fat raindrops begin to soak them, none of them can come up with a good reason to put the ball away. How they’ll get dry and clean enough to hop back on the train home is beyond any of them, but in the moment it doesn’t matter, because Daichi overshoots his spike and Asahi undershoots his toss and Koushi is exactly where he’s not supposed to be and all three of them end up tangled together on the ground, laughing too hard to even sit up straight.

Soon enough being wet and sandy loses its novelty, so they do their best to wash themselves in the downpour before huddling beneath their umbrella and waiting for the storm to pass. Koushi flops back on his towel and clasps his hands behind his head, listening to the rain patter against the canvas.

“Did you have a good day, old man?” Daichi asks, prodding Koushi’s leg with his foot.

“I did.” He answers without hesitation, the pleasant thrill of the afternoon still thrumming through his veins, memories of running from waves and watching their castle crumble and arguing with Asahi about an obvious carry still filling his mind.

An incredible sensation of lightness has fallen over him. For the first time in far too long, he feels almost weightless, untethered and unafraid, like the person he was before the assault, and it’s so strange. It is so strange to feel fine, to not have worry wrapping itself around his ribs or shame braiding itself over his thighs or guilt sticking heavy and clinging in his throat. He does not know what to do with this sensation, this new-old experience, does not know what to do with a him that does not feel like falling apart.

That perhaps explains the sudden wetness that springs to his eyes, despite how oddly at peace he is. He tries to shield his face from the others, to deal with his confusion of emotions on his own, to isolate himself like he so often does, but his friends don’t allow it.

Daichi speaks up first, looking at Koushi with concern but not panic; even in the short period of time since they got back together, he’s adapted with ease to Koushi’s new tendency to cry over everything. “You okay?”

He nods and wipes at his eyes. “Yeah, sorry, I don’t know what’s going on. I feel really good, actually, this doesn’t even make any sense.”

“It doesn’t have to,” Daichi says.

“Right,” Asahi cuts in. He’s peering at Koushi around Daichi’s shoulder, like a teary Koushi is some unidentified new species, something he’s never seen before in his life that must be approached with caution. “It’s okay to just cry sometimes. I cry over stuff all the time, like yesterday I did it because I saw a cat and its ears did that little airplane thing which means it might’ve been nervous, and I didn’t want it to be nervous.” Even now, he sounds a little choked up.

Koushi laughs and sits up. “Whatever you do, don’t tell that to the teams in Tokyo, okay? We need them to think you’re an unstoppable spiking machine.”

“So we better not run into any cats,” Daichi says, “or it’s all over for us.” He glances up at the sky, and Koushi follows his gaze to find that the rain has let up. “We should probably head back before it starts up again.”

They pack up their things like they’re about to walk away, but the ocean calls to them, so they go to stick their feet in the icy water one more time. For just that one moment, that one instant in time with the sun setting at their backs and the wind mussing their hair and their shoulders brushing together, everything is perfect.

Chapter Text

Tokyo is, in a single word, overwhelming.

Koushi thought he’d done enough research into the city to at least feel prepared, thought only staying around Shinzen High would shrink his world down a little, but even a cursory glance at the Tokyo skyline makes him feel tiny. Turns out he’s more of a country kid than he’d ever be willing to admit.

The training camp itself doesn’t help alleviate those small fish feelings. This is his first training camp with other teams involved, and within minutes of stepping inside the gym, the sheer force of dozens of different strong personalities mixing and clashing hits him like a brick. Daichi immediately starts shit with Kuroo, which Koushi would almost find impressive if it didn’t leave him to herd an entire team of excited, anxious, confused high schoolers around in an unfamiliar school all by himself. 

At least he does run into a few familiar faces, though it’s unfortunate the first time he gets to speak to one of those people is directly after finishing the most intense round of receiving drills he’s ever done.

“How the hell do you do this all the time?” he asks, running his hands through his sweat-soaked hair.

Yaku shrugs where he sits beside him and offers the unused towel around his neck. “You get used to it. I still don’t know how you do that reverse set, if I tried it I’d throw my back out.” He gazes across the gym at the clusters of players chatting during break, his eyes falling on where their respective captains are having a strangely subdued conversation. “Speaking of breaking backs, I heard that you and Daichi got back together.”

The choked sound that comes out of Koushi’s mouth is not one he’s particularly proud of. “That is so uncalled for. You should honestly be ashamed of yourself.” He whips out the towel and catches Yaku on the leg.

“Really, though, I’m glad for you two. You’re cute together.”

Koushi almost gets him with the towel again, but refrains for fear of awakening his wrath. “You’re just glad I’m not sending you angry texts at one in the morning anymore.”

“Little bit of A, little bit of B, really.” He nods towards Daichi. “Though I will miss the gossip, I have to admit. You sure went through all the stages of grief for that one. And what’s he even got going for him?”

“Thighs,” Koushi says without hesitation. It’s far too quick an admittance, and it sends Yaku almost into hysterics; Koushi’s just glad the physical exertion already has him flushed, or else the bright blush currently warming his cheeks would make him too mortified to make eye contact with anyone on Nekoma ever again. “And, you know, other things. He’s patient and loyal and all that shit.”

“And he has nice thighs, apparently.”

“You’re one to talk. Your version of a perfect boy has never had a good hair day in his life.”

“It’s one of his charms,” Yaku says, an eyebrow raised as if daring Koushi to question him, like he really thinks he can intimidate Koushi into silence.

Before Koushi can quip back, though, Yaku’s gaze shifts and his face grows serious. Koushi follows his line of sight to find that the bottom of his shorts have rolled up one leg, a number of wide, pale pink scars visible against his skin. He flinches as if struck and quickly pulls his shorts back down, gripping the fabric white-knuckled. Yaku says nothing, glancing away again towards Kuroo, and before Koushi can offer up any of the half-assed excuses he keeps so ready, everyone is called back to practice.

There’s a reason he keeps the scars hidden as much as he can. He doesn’t want to remember those times, doesn’t want to constantly relive the loneliness and fear and desperation that led him to angle a blade against his own skin. Just the slightest view of them reminds him of how he acted after the tournament a year ago, of all the lying and running he did, the stubborn refusal of help or advice or even company.

But he also keeps them hidden so he doesn’t have to see the reaction on other people’s faces. Once, in that fight with Daichi that seems so long ago now, he had his scars thrown back in his face, used as a weapon against him, and though he’s more than forgiven Daichi for that he doesn’t want it to happen again. He doesn’t want people to see him differently because of it, to think of him as crazy or fucked up or attention-seeking. He doesn’t want to lose contact with someone like Yaku, someone so enjoyable to be around and yet someone he only met a few months ago, whose outlook on such serious things as this Koushi hasn’t had the time to completely discern.

These thoughts occupy his mind for the rest of the day. Hinata and Kageyama arrive soon enough, and with Kageyama serving for the rest of the day, Koushi has a lot of time to think. Or, rather, he has a lot of time to blow things out of proportion and come to the conclusion that Yaku will probably never speak to him again after what happened.

This is not the case, of course, something that he hears from Yaku himself later that night. He’s in the middle of breaking up a play-fight between Noya and Tanaka that’s started to get a little too real when he hears someone hissing his name from the doorway, and he turns to see Yaku staring at him.

“Suga, help,” he whispers, expression grim. “I’m this close to losing it.”

Once he can trust his own kouhai to keep to themselves, Koushi follows Yaku out into the hallway.

“It’s like doing fucking calculus in there.” Yaku gestures wildly as he speaks, face red with his frustration. “Kenma wants his futon beside Kuroo, but Yamamoto wants to sleep near Kuroo, but Kenma doesn’t want to be anywhere close to Yamamoto. And don’t get me started on whatever the hell Lev’s doing because he wants to be beside three different people and I keep trying to tell him that isn’t physically possible —”

“Okay, breathe, first of all.” He does as instructed, taking a slow breath and sagging a bit. Koushi places a hand on each of his narrow shoulders and presses down on them, forcing him to relax. “They’re just futons, right? Nobody’ll die if they don’t get exactly what they want.”

“But then I have to deal with the complaining and I do not have the time for it.”

“If they have the energy to act up then I guess they didn’t work hard enough today. They’ll have to run more tomorrow.” Yaku gawks at him like he’s some kind of monster, and Koushi offers his sweetest smile in return. “That’s what I just told mine. It shuts them right up most of the time.”

“You’re a little evil, you know that?”

He laughs, but it’s too forced, and Yaku gives him a suspicious look. “I, um…” He trails off and glances away, but Yaku doesn’t try to fill the dead space, instead waiting for Koushi to continue. “About earlier, that was kind of weird, I didn’t mean to – it just kind of—”

“Oh, that?” He shrugs with an easy nonchalance, making a shooing motion with his hand as if brushing Koushi’s concerns away. “The scars don’t bother me, if that’s what you’re worried about. They looked old, and so long as you’re not still hurting yourself I’m not going to complain about seeing them.” Yaku fixes him with the look he gives Nekoma’s new libero whenever the first year doubts his own skill. “And even if they did bother me, you shouldn’t have to hide them, yeah? That shit’s not up to me to decide.”

“I guess.” He has to all but physically shake the awkwardness out of him, forcing himself to just speak to Yaku as he always does. “It just makes me feel so ashamed, because I know it didn’t solve anything and now it makes me feel so vulnerable, to know that it took so little to get me to hurt myself like that. It made everything worse, and now no matter how far away I get from it, the scars will still always be there.”

“It’s not so bad to see where you’ve come from, I don’t think.” His gaze softens, a small smile painting his lips. “And feeling vulnerable isn’t always so terrible, if you’ve got good people around you. And Sawamura’s a good guy as far as I can tell, even if I don’t get why you think his thighs are so great.”

“Don’t even get me started, I swear to the gods.”

Yaku hits him lightly on the arm, sidestepping any further discussion of Koushi’s love life with practiced grace. “But you seem better, at least from what I see. I know it’s hard to be open about this stuff, but I think it’s helping you.”

“Doesn’t always seem like it.”

“Why’s that?”

He worries his lip between his teeth. “It’s like once I started to open up I just fell apart, like I’m not even strong enough to keep myself from breaking down.”

“You’re not weak for having emotions, Suga. You do know that, don’t you?” Koushi would lie and say that yes, of course he does, but Yaku is too sharp for him to get away with that, so he stays quiet and waits for the other boy to continue. “It’s good to feel everything instead of bottling it up. It can help, I think.”

“Even the awful stuff?” Koushi murmurs, almost too quiet to be overheard.

“Especially the awful stuff.” Down the hallway, coming from somewhere within Nekoma’s sleeping quarters, someone yells in wordless protest. “Looks like that’s my cue,” Yaku says with a sigh, throwing a tired wave over his shoulder. “Good talk.”

He disappears into the Nekoma quarters, the sound of his shouting audible even all the way down the hall. Koushi stays rooted in place for a long minute, thinking over the other boy’s words before giving up and heading back towards his own futon, where he spends a mostly restless night playing their conversation over and over in his head.

The next few days of the camp pass without incident, and Koushi settles into his new routine well enough, even going so far as to think that for just this short span of time, his past will leave him alone.

Of course, he does not get off so easily. The nightmare he has on the last night of the camp is a horrible one, but not because it is full of violence and malice, or because the memories repeat for what seems like days until he wakes up, or because he finds himself in some awful inescapable place with only his abuser by his side.

No, tonight he does not get the pleasure of such a simple dream. In tonight’s nightmare, Hiro approaches him in the bathroom of his mother’s house, just like he had the very first time he put his hands on Koushi, but unlike in that moment, in the dream Koushi does not fight. Hiro slips a hand beneath his shirt, snakes fingers below his waistband, and Koushi leans into the touch. Hiro calls him beautiful but leaves deep bruises wherever his fingers make contact, and Koushi thanks him, believes him, maybe even says the same words back. Hiro sucks a bite mark on Koushi’s jaw, and Koushi turns his head so their lips meet.

He wakes with a jolt, nausea churning in his gut, his entire body covered in sweat. Hiro’s taste lingers on his lips, in his mouth, and for an agonizing second Koushi cannot be sure that he didn’t accept Hiro’s embrace in the real world, too. Everything from back then blurs in his mind, his memory nothing more than disconnected snapshots of moments too painful to remember in full.

Did he fight? Did he let it happen, just to keep Hiro pacified, to keep his wrath away? Or, he thinks as disgust rolls over him in waves, did he want it?

That old familiar filth crawls back over him, a thick layer of grime that seeps through his pores and infects the deepest parts of him. It clogs up his lungs and drips across the scarred skin of his hips and coats the palms of his hands, filling his mouth up until he swears he feels that bastard’s tongue swiping itself across his teeth.

It’s well past midnight at this point, but he can’t fall back asleep, and he refuses to sit like this until morning. He gets out of his futon, tiptoes over the blanketed forms of his teammates, and grabs his toiletries out of his bag.

Showering in this state of mind is a bad idea; he knows he’ll end up scrubbing himself raw, knows that he’ll be tempted to grab the nearest sharp object he can to make his thoughts quiet down. But he can’t wallow in his own filth, imagined though it may be, for any longer than it takes to make the walk from their sleeping quarters to the showers.

Once he gets beneath the spray of the shower, turned up so hot it scalds his skin, he pushes away the memories of the nightmare like they’re physical things he can shove aside and focuses only on the mechanical movements of his hands as they wash the rest of his body. When he cleans the space between his thighs and down his legs and across his hips, he pictures the invisible filth falling off him like thick globs of mud and running down the drain. It was just a dream, something he reminds himself of over and over again, forcing that fact to overwhelm any nagging doubts that tell him he wanted it or asked for it. That tell him he deserved it.

He does end up with his skin bright red from how hard he’d scraped at it, but he only has to shower once before he feels clean enough to dress back in his sleep clothes. He still feels like he could throw up, and he very nearly forces himself to, just so the acrid taste of vomit can cover up any of Hiro’s lingering scent, but he leaves the bathroom instead and doesn’t turn back.

Daichi waits near the door to their sleeping quarters. Of course he does, of course he knows exactly what’s going on and exactly where to position himself – far enough away from Koushi to give him space, close enough for Koushi to know that he’s there and ready to help. 

“I wish I could still be angry about it,” Koushi says instead of any kind of greeting. “It was easier.”

“It wasn’t the best for you, though.” He must understand somehow that Koushi doesn’t want to be touched right now, something in the way Koushi holds himself keeping Daichi from reaching out for an embrace. 

They’re both too wide-awake to go back to sleep, so they wander around a little bit looking for a place to talk, coming up on some kind of teachers’ lounge that has its door unlocked. A comfortable silence falls over them, the kind of quiet that doesn’t pressure Koushi to explain what he’s doing up at some unholy time of night taking a shower. He sits cross-legged on one of the sofas in the lounge, hands clasped around his ankles and shoulders hunched, feeling like he just got done with a strenuous practice, his muscles aching and his limbs trembling.

“I dreamed that I liked it again,” he says, his voice barely a whisper. “It felt so real, it always feels so real, and all I want to do is ask you over and over if I ever acted like I wanted it.”

“But you’re not going to?” Confusion paints Daichi’s face, as if Koushi showing a shred of self-awareness is unbelievable behavior. And maybe it is unbelievable, after so many months of Koushi getting locked in his own head, incapable of separating fears from facts.

“That only makes things worse. I already have the answer, it’s just reassurance seeking and that locks me in a loop and it’s not worth it. I know that now, it’s so obvious.” He sinks deeper into the sofa, laying his head against the back of it; he’s tired, he realizes with a strange sort of distance, that kind of exhaustion that will keep him from sleeping. “And I guess I’m supposed to call this improvement, that I have all of this knowledge and every once in a while I get to use it the right way.”

“Doesn’t stop it from being so difficult, though, does it?” Daichi leans forward, placing his elbows on his knees, expression subdued. He isn’t so quick to rush to Koushi’s protection these days, giving Koushi space to work through things on his own when he needs to, and now is no different. It’s strangely assuring, this occasional distance, this silent show of trust.

“No, it doesn’t. I think sometimes about moments like this, where we’re sitting here at almost two in the morning talking about whether I asked for what happened to me, and we’re both so…”

“So casual?” Daichi finishes, managing a single breathy laugh.

“Like we’re talking about the weather or something. It’s ridiculous.” He stretches his legs out and turns his head just enough to see Daichi out of the corner of his vision. “It doesn’t make any sense. Sometimes I fall apart for no reason, and right now when I should have every right to freak out, I’m completely calm. I don’t think I’m repressing anything, either, I just have no emotions about it. I know the dream was just a dream, so it’s no big deal.”

Daichi frowns. “Is that… progress?”

“It’s inconsistent, is what it is.” His eyes are drawn to his left wrist and the scars that lie there, less numerous than the ones on his thighs but just as visible. He runs his fingers over it, feeling the rough, raised surface, and his conversation with Yaku comes to his mind. “Maybe it’s… not so bad, though. At least I’m not doing the more dangerous stuff anymore. I guess.”

“You guess?” A flicker of that old desire to smother comes over Daichi, but he manages to keep it at bay. “You guess it’s good that you’re not doing anything dangerous, or you guess that you’re not doing anything dangerous?”

“The first one. I know I should be glad that I’m not hurting myself anymore, I know I’ve gotten better, but sometimes it doesn’t feel like it. It doesn’t feel like it should a year later.”

“There’s no set time frame for when things are supposed to change,” Daichi says.

“I know, I’m just impatient.” He intertwines his fingers, curling and flexing them in turn, watching with detachment as they seem to move of their own accord. “I thought once I got past the anger, I’d be free of all of this. And for a while, I felt free, and everything was perfect and I had you by my side again.”

He stops speaking, but Daichi lets the silence between them linger before he responds. “You don’t feel like that anymore?”

“Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want to go back to the way things were, but I feel…” It’s too late for him to be thinking about such difficult topics, and it takes him what feels like ages before he can even vaguely put into words what he’s experiencing. “I think I lost something. Some part of me is missing, not like there’s a hole that can be patched up, but like there’s something that’s just… gone. Something that won’t come back. And I don’t know how I’m supposed to cope with that.”

Daichi stands and offers Koushi a hand up, which he takes, though it’s the extent of the contact he’s willing to endure tonight. “I wish I could do something to make this better,” he says once they’re out of the lounge and wandering back down the hallway.

“It’s not your fault, there’s nothing you can fix because you didn’t cause it in the first place. I’m just complaining, really.”

“Does it help?”

“To complain?” He considers, thinking of how quickly he went from restless, on the border of scrubbing himself bloody with memories of a nightmare flashing through his mind, to comfortable enough to let someone touch him. “Yeah, I think it does.”

“Then I’d tell you to complain all you want,” Daichi says, “but you already do that anyway.”

All Koushi has the energy for is a single eye roll. They make their way back to their room and to their respective futons, the two side by side in the corner, and drop off to sleep in minutes. For the rest of the night, Koushi does not dream.

The Tokyo camp ends, the bubble of intense, singular focus breaks, and life returns to normal. There are a scant few weeks left to work on all they’ve learned as a team before the first round of Qualifiers starts, but they refuse to let even a single precious second go to waste. Practices are long and brutal, preparations for competition all-consuming.

That is why, with their first game mere days away, Koushi accepts Daichi’s offer to sleep over at the Sawamuras’ house. He needs a quiet night, one with just the two of them, where for just a little while Daichi is only his boyfriend and nothing more, his roles as captain and teammate forgotten the moment they step into the genkan.

When he enters the Sawamura household, he expects to have memories and emotions rush into his head as swiftly as all of Daichi’s little siblings rush to greet them at the door. What he does not expect is the kind of emotions he feels. He worried he’d be overwhelmed, that remembering hiding here from his mother and Hiro or walking away from this place only to endure the worst few hours he’d ever lived through would have him panicking. He’d prepared for even such a slight thing as the sight of the house to all but bring him to his knees, to force him out of the place altogether because he is just too afraid of recalling the things that happened inside it.

He does not expect the sorrow. It rushes like a flood through him, filling his lungs until he’s drowning beneath it, lacing itself through every part of him until he almost crumbles right there in the living room. The house is just like he remembers, warm and vibrant and full of life, but Koushi is so cold, stranded in the middle of all of these happy people who welcome him into their dynamics with ease. This place should not feel as sad as it does; there is no hidden undercurrent of tension amongst them, no indication in the Sawamuras’ words or expressions that they’re thinking of anything but the present and Koushi’s place in it.

And yet, it takes everything he has to hold himself together.

Despite this, that evening is one of the best ones he’s had in far too long. It’s been more than a year since he stepped foot inside, since he exchanged any more than a few words with Daichi’s family, and they spend all of dinner and most of the rest of the night just catching up. Daichi’s parents, pride clear on their faces, explain all of the minute details and smallest accomplishments of their childrens’ lives since Koushi last saw them. Koushi talks about the training camp, about the team’s push for nationals, even a little bit about his own family situation and how it’s been steadily improving since he moved in with his brother’s parents.

Then the night draws to a close, and he and Daichi get ready to go to sleep. Daichi’s bedroom, the place where Hiro threatened Koushi with a thousand unthinkable things if he didn’t come back, the place where Koushi decided to run away, does not scare him as much as he thought it would. Instead, it brings all of that repressed sorrow crashing to the surface.

Daichi doesn’t even ask what’s wrong, just gets up from where he’s setting up a futon and envelops a crying Koushi in his arms. “You’re okay,” he says as he leads Koushi towards the bed. “You’re alright.”

And the strangest thing is, Koushi is alright. He doesn’t devolve into wracking sobs, doesn’t have to force the tears out like he used to, doesn’t fall into inconsolable pieces. He just leans against Daichi’s chest, curling against him like the boy is a shield, and cries until he doesn’t have to anymore. 

“Sorry.” His voice warbles, and he clears his throat and wipes at his eyes. “I’m fine, really. I guess there’s just a lot of memories here.”

“If it’s too much, we can figure something else out. Have you sleep somewhere else.” Daichi pushes Koushi’s bangs out of his face. He doesn’t seem worried, not like he used to be when this happened; instead, he’s just waiting for Koushi to make a decision, fully trusting that his boyfriend will tell him what he needs.

“No, no, I promise I’m fine.” He laughs lightly, which causes Daichi to look more concerned than he had when Koushi was crying. “This isn’t so bad.”

“It’s not?”

He pushes away from Daichi a bit, straightening as he tries to make sense of his emotions now that the most intense of them have passed. “When I first came into your house, I was overwhelmed by this feeling of… I don’t even know, it was almost like grief.” The sight of the room doesn’t evoke such a sense of loss anymore, even though the memories of what happened here still play on repeat through his mind. “But now it’s weaker, that feeling. It still hurts, but not as much.”

“So it was cathartic, then, whatever this was?” Koushi hums his assent, and Daichi quiets, weaving their hands together as they sit in total silence, both of them lost in their own thoughts.

Koushi stares out into a middle distance, simultaneously seeing every detail of the room and nothing at all. He can’t stop thinking of his younger self the moment he saw the messages Hiro sent him, viewing the whole scene as if from another person’s perspective; each detail of his terrified expression is plain on his face, his hands trembling around his phone, legs shaking with such ferocity he threatens to collapse. What seems like only seconds later, the younger Koushi brings an even younger Daichi into the room, explaining that he has to leave but refusing to tell him why, pressing a chaste kiss to his lips for what he thinks will be the last time.

Although much of what happened in those moments and the dreaded hours after still hold vicious sway over so many aspects of Koushi’s life, he cannot connect with the boy who went through them. That boy, the child that lived through that hell, does not feel like him; that child feels like a stranger, yet looking at him even in his mind’s eye brings such an intense sense of deja vu that it nearly sends Koushi reeling.

Despite this, Koushi has nothing but sympathy for this pitiful creature in his memories. He has the horrible knowledge that the moment his younger self steps out the door, everything will fall apart. He knows now that he should not have left that room, should have stayed in the warmth and safety of the Sawamuras’ house, but he can’t change what has already happened, and no amount of ignorance or denial or anger about it will ever bring him back to the point before he left Daichi’s side. It’s like watching a horror movie for the hundredth time, when all the scares have become dull and the mysteries lay unraveled, and all anyone can do is lament the foolish decisions of the hapless protagonist.

Daichi seems to catch on to where Koushi’s thoughts are headed, and he gently restarts the conversation. “You said it felt like you were grieving. What does that… feel like for something like this?”

“Like someone died. Like something is gone forever, and I can’t get it back.”

“But for you, it’s like you’ve lost some part of yourself, right? That’s what you said that night during the camp.” Eagerness to understand is so clear on Daichi’s face that it pulls a smile to Koushi’s lips.

He leans over and kisses Daichi on the cheek for no other reason than that he can. “I lost so much.” His voice doesn’t shake at that admittance, at least not as much as he thought it would. It’s just a fact now – he went through far more than anyone should ever have to, and he didn’t come out of it unscathed. “My innocence. My sense of safety. My trust in people who are supposed to care for me.”

“You lost a lot.” Daichi, too, speaks about this like it’s a simple fact.

“I did.”

“Not everything, though,” he says, and grips Koushi’s hand tighter.

In that moment, he is no longer a year younger, and the Daichi sitting beside him is not that same naive boy he was when Koushi left. A thousand things separate the people they were then from who they are now, and for perhaps the first time, Koushi does not see all of those things as terrible misfortunes. When he looks at Daichi he does not think of running away, or of cold hardwood floors pressed against his back, or of a dizzying string of words neither of them wanted to say but yelled at each other anyway.

Instead, when he looks at Daichi he thinks of all the ways they’ve grown, of apologies given, of promises made and kept and carried out day after day after day. He looks at Daichi and he sees strength, and some of that strength he stares at is merely a reflection.

“No,” he says, falling in for another kiss, “not everything.”

Chapter Text

Karasuno makes it through the first two rounds of Qualifiers as easily as they could ever hope to, which is not all that easily in the grand scheme of things. 

Now they all sit in anxious waiting, knowing that they’ve made it to the main part of the tournament but having several months before their next game, and the lingering apprehension of such a gap in action spares none of them.

Despite this, the growth they experience in those few short months is so incredible Koushi almost can’t believe what he sees every day in practice. They’ve gone beyond working together as a strong team or even as a well-oiled machine; indeed, it sometimes seems like they move as one when they play, that they all act as individual parts of some interconnected whole, all of their hearts beating as one, their thoughts so synchronized that they often communicate with each other through facial expression alone.

Even on the sidelines, Koushi finds himself more and more intertwined with his teammates, more receptive to their moods, to what new anxieties may have cropped up and what old ones still hang around.

It is for this reason that Koushi quickly notices the sudden change in Yamaguchi’s behavior. So far, Koushi has seen two facets of his personality: the shy, insecure newcomer he was at the beginning of the season, and the sharp-eyed pinch server whose confidence now all but radiates out of him.

This new behavior, this switch that only started today, is neither of those things. The Yamaguchi that walks into practice that afternoon is neither nervous nor assured, caught up in neither his worries nor in his gameplay. That’s not to say that he isn’t focused, however, it’s just that instead of the things he’s usually focused on, today he sets his sights on Koushi.

He’s staring, frankly. No matter where Koushi moves, no matter what he does, that pair of amber eyes trails his every movement. Only when Koushi turns to stare back at him does Yamaguchi divert his attention, showing his more expected timidness, but the moment he looks away the boy is back to gawking at him. It’s this open, almost curious gaze, like Koushi is some kind of puzzle he wants to crack, and the whole thing is a little unnerving.

Koushi assumes the absolute best intentions from Yamaguchi, knows that the boy has always been a little awkward and probably doesn’t even know that he’s lurking. That doesn’t change the way Koushi’s skin crawls at being watched, because even though Yamaguchi’s inquisitive glances are nothing like the ogling leers Hiro used to shoot him, finding himself under such intense scrutiny brings up those unwelcome memories.

The moment practice ends, he sidles up beside Yamaguchi, reaching him before he has a chance to run off with Tsukishima. “Are you okay?” he asks, keeping things as light as possible.

“I - yeah, I’m, um…” Yamaguchi clears his throat, gaze now fixed to the floor. “I’m fine, I shouldn’t have been just glaring at you, I kept doing it because I…” The words seem like a struggle to even get out, and his face has begun to blush a deep pink, hands curled into fists. “It’s nothing. Sorry.”

“If something’s wrong, you can tell me.” All suspicion Koushi had for him melts away, replaced with pure worry at the growing distress on his face. “I promise I won’t get upset.”

“It’s nothing, I swear it’s nothing. It’s not a big deal.”

“I can tell it’ll be better if you get it off your chest. It doesn’t help to hold it in, believe me. Hiding from it doesn’t get you anywhere.” Yamaguchi looks up in confusion at that, but doesn’t say anything. “If something’s going on, you can tell me and I’ll do my best to help.”

“Nothing’s happening,” he says, his voice barely above a whisper. “It’s about something that did happen.”

For a long moment, Koushi’s heart lurches, and he hopes against hope that Yamaguchi isn’t about to lay out a familiar story, to divulge something as brutal and horrific as what Koushi himself has already gone through. He doesn’t think he can handle that, if it turns out to be that kind of confession.

But before his thoughts can spiral, Yamaguchi reaches his left hand out, turning it palm-up with a hesitancy that suggests such a simple movement carries with it a great secret.

And it turns out, he does have something like a secret etched into the skin of his forearm. There are thin, pale lines covering the area between the bend of his elbow and his wrist, the scars aged and mostly faded, only visible if Koushi squints in just the right way.

“They’re old, I don’t do it anymore.” He quickly pulls his arm back, tucking it against his chest to hide the scars, face downturned again. “But I just – I wanted to talk with you, because you…”

“You saw mine?”

He nods and buries his face in his hands. “I’m so sorry,” he says, voice muffled. “That’s really creepy that I stared at you long enough to see them. I just – one day I thought I saw something on your, um, your leg, and I kept looking because I wanted to make sure. I’m really sorry.”

“It’s okay. It’s not as creepy as you think.” Yamaguchi makes a refuting noise, his hands still plastered over his eyes, and Koushi tilts his head to one side. “Tadashi, look at me.” He does so, barely peeking through his fingers. “There’s nothing wrong with wanting to relate to someone else, even if it’s about stuff like this.”

“You’re not freaked out that they’re visible enough for someone to see them?” he asks.

Koushi almost lies, almost says that he doesn’t mind people looking, that his talk with Yaku cleared up all of his insecurities about the scars, but he can’t bring himself to tell the kid in front of him anything but the truth. “A little, it does bother me a little. But I figured you’re better at finding that kind of stuff than the average person, so it’s not like some random stranger glaring at me. There’s less judgment.”

“There’s no judgment, not from me.” For a moment, he stutters the start of a few different sentences before sighing and trying again. “I don’t even know why I came here to show you. I don’t need any help or anything, it’s not like I’m in danger of starting again or something like that. It’s just nice to know that someone else has dealt with the same things.”

“Makes you feel less alone, right?”

“It makes me feel a little less messed up for what I did.” He takes a few steps away, hands dropping down to grip the fabric of his shirt, wringing anxious circles. “I didn’t mean to bring up memories or anything, I know it’s really hard to keep from cutting when you’re reminded of it.”

“Don’t worry about it. I honestly think about it… most days, really. You can’t make it any worse.”

Yamaguchi laughs once, quietly through his nose in a way that implies he knows exactly what Koushi’s talking about. The conversation stalls after that, Yamaguchi shuffling a bit and biting at his lip before turning and beginning to bolt.

“Wait, Yamaguchi!” Koushi calls after him, causing him to freeze with a jolt. He glances over his shoulder, expression pinched, but Koushi does his best to wave away any worries. “You can talk to me whenever, you know,” he says. “About whatever.”

“Okay,” Yamaguchi says, then quite literally runs out of the gym doors before anyone else can stop him.

Despite the awkwardness of the whole situation, Koushi finds himself smiling faintly at the memory of the conversation. He’d meant what he said, that talking with other people like this helps stop the loneliness, and in that moment he feels his connection to his team grow, finds as much solidarity in Yamaguchi as Yamaguchi now hopefully finds in him. His teammates trust him enough to reveal such personal things to him, and he feels stable enough to work through those things without having to sacrifice his own wellbeing.

It’s a good balance, better than anything he’s had in the past, and he knows that the only reason he’s able to do this at all is because of what he’s lived through. He’s lost so many things, had to deal with so many things he never should have had to go through, but maybe, just maybe, he’s learned a few things from fighting so hard to survive.

Koushi makes sure Yamaguchi reunites with Tsukishima so the two of them can walk home together, then joins the other third years to lock up.

“What was your talk about?” Daichi asks as he jiggles the lock on the gym doors, trying to get the key to turn. “Everything okay?”

“Yeah, it wasn’t anything serious. He just wanted to tell me something.”

The lock won’t cooperate no matter how much force Daichi puts behind it, and he abandons it with a frustrated huff; Asahi takes the key in his hands and gets it to turn immediately. “I loosened it,” Daichi says, cheeks faintly red. “Anyway, ignoring that, I noticed some new things about our formations today and wanted to talk with both of you about it before I mentioned it to Ukai.”

Asahi half-turns away, looking vaguely uncomfortable. “It’s really late in the season to be switching things up.”

“Not a switch up.” Daichi pockets the keys and tosses his satchel over his shoulder, striding out across the schoolyard as Koushi and Asahi both flank him. “I like the setup we have now, but I think we should make some minor changes now that we have the control to do so.”

“Like what?” Koushi raises an eyebrow. “Because if you want to let Hinata use his back attack more I’m going to have to override you.”

“They’re getting better at it, they’ll figure it out when it counts.”

“Relying on luck is not the best gameplan,” Asahi murmurs, refusing eye contact and stuffing his hands in his pockets.

“You’ll see, they’ll pull it out and blow everyone away.” They pass through the school gates, the streetlights on the sidewalks bathing them in warm light, and the shadows cast across Daichi’s face make him look more serious than he actually is. “In the meantime, I’ve noticed that Tanaka’s riskier shots are working out more than they used to. They’re still not the cleanest spikes, and his form could still use some work, but I think we’d improve as a team if we tossed to him more.”

“Assuming those are permanent changes,” Koushi says. “The only people more prone to flukes are the freak duo.”

“Right, but I think it’s happened enough times that we can rely on it. The question for you—” He points to Asahi “—is whether you feel better having a little pressure taken off of you, or if you think it’ll mess up your rhythm.”

“I won’t complain about somebody else taking a few of my spikes.” Asahi shrugs, doing his best to feign indifference, but his relief at the possibility of weight being taken off his shoulders is clear.

“So, Suga,” Daichi says, “from a setter’s perspective, would you be willing to toss to someone like that? Someone who takes so many questionable shots, but makes a lot of them?”

Koushi takes a few seconds to think, his lip caught between his teeth. “There’s no single setter’s perspective, I don’t think. Would I set to him? Sure, because I watched him improve for a full year and I know exactly what to expect from him. But that’s not what’s important for the team, what’s important is if Kageyama would set to him.”

“Would he?” Daichi cocks his head to one side, gaze curious and far too intrigued, like this isn’t just about volleyball anymore.

“Kageyama… might.” He racks his brain for memories of the interactions between Kageyama and Tanaka, coming up with a few short seconds of them talking with each other, a few longer segments of their gameplay together. “Not as readily as I would, though. You’d have to convince him somehow. You couldn’t just tell him he has to set more to one person, you’d have to tell him why, give him good proof, or he’ll never do it.”

Daichi is fully grinning now, smile stretched as wide as it ever is, some odd mixture of pride and amusement in his eyes. “Good to know. I’ll keep it in mind.”

“Alright, what’s the joke?” He reaches out and flicks Daichi on the forehead. “I don’t get what’s so funny.”

“Nothing, nothing’s funny.”

“Don’t you dare lie to my face.”

“There’s no joke,” Asahi says, then shrinks away like he’s scared Koushi will flick him too. Instead, Koushi just stares at him until he speaks again. “It’s just really cool that you can do that.”

“Do what?” Koushi grips and releases the strap of his bag, feeling his last shreds of patience draining out of him.

“The whole… analysis thing.” Asahi makes a series of gestures that mean nothing to Koushi, and may mean nothing to Asahi himself, because he only looks more confused as he continues. “You know, how you just know stuff about all of us. How we tick and how we act around each other, those kinds of things.”

“He’s broken down all the different dynamics in the team,” Daichi says to Asahi, like this is some incredible feat and not something Koushi mapped out one day when he got bored. “He could tell you all of them if you want to hear them.”

“Oh, shut up.” Koushi drops his head, worried that even in the low lighting his friends will see the blush crawling across his face.

“You’re just invested in the team, it’s nothing to be ashamed of.” Daichi links arms with Koushi, pulling him closer to his side, neither of their strides breaking as he does so. “I think it’s fantastic that you’re so good at reading other people, because gods know I could never figure out all that stuff on my own.”

“If it’s so fantastic, wipe that stupid smile off your face,” Koushi says, elbowing Daichi playfully.

Surprisingly, he does, the grin falling away to reveal something much more serious, a strange, unreadable expression coming over him. “I’m glad you’re my vice-captain,” he says, clinging onto Koushi tighter.

Koushi hasn’t thought about their argument in the gym in a long time. So much has happened since that night, so much has changed with both of them, with their relationship, with the team and everything else going on around them, and he hasn’t had the time to dwell on it, much less to work through all the emotions that spring up at just the memory of it. Hearing Daichi turn completely from where he’d been, when he didn’t even want to make Koushi his vice-captain, to a place where he has no trouble admitting his appreciation fills Koushi with a rush of something like relief.

But Koushi has never been great at showing how he’s feeling, so he just laughs and elbows Daichi harder. “I’m glad I’m vice-captain, too.”

“Asshole,” Daichi says, voice fond.

On Daichi’s other side, Asahi watches them banter with great engagement, when before he would slink away at the first hint of any kind of romantic tension between them. The atmosphere among the three of them is pleasant and comfortable, the night cool with fall beginning to roll in, and Koushi drinks in all of it. Despite the constant chaos that their lives have become, despite the constant activity and their ever-tightening schedules, they’ve always kept this part of their routine intact, always made sure that they walk home together.

“We can do this, can’t we?” Koushi says before the silence stretches too far.

Daichi just looks at him for a long moment, eyes tracing Koushi’s face, before he nods once. “Of course we can. We’ve gotten so much better in such a short time, there’s no reason for us to fall apart now. Why are you asking? Is something wrong?”

“No, everything’s fine, and that’s the problem.” He thinks of his talk with Yamaguchi and with Yaku, of the new bonds he’s formed with so many different people, of all the ways he’s improved in just a little over a year. He thinks of their team, of those moments while they play when they seem to move as one, everything connected, everything perfect. Too perfect. “We’ve never even made it this far before, not as long as we’ve been in the club. I don’t really know how to handle all of this… anticipation.”

Asahi makes a quiet noise of agreement, eyes downcast. “It’s the first time since we were first years that I felt like maybe we could win this. In a weird way, it’s kind of terrifying that we might actually make it.”

“But it’s not worse than losing over and over, is it?” Daichi raises an eyebrow, glancing back and forth between them.

“No,” they both say at the same time.

“Then it looks like we only have one option.” He shows nothing on his face, only his hand shaking around the strap of his bag betraying his nerves. “We can do it. We will do it, because we’ve got no other chances after this, and I’m not leaving this place empty-handed.”

That doesn’t do much to soothe Koushi’s worries, but it encourages him nonetheless. The strange mixture of abject fear and absolute excitement stirs up a feeling Koushi has never had before, a sensation like lightning jolting through his veins, a thousand butterflies taking flight inside his chest. He no longer fears that he’ll crumble, hasn’t felt like falling to pieces in a long time, that old heavy hollowness replaced with something lighter, something vibrant and wild and alive.

It’s almost unbelievable, given everything that has happened to him, every mistake he’s made and everything he’s endured, that he’d ever find himself at this point. At this place, where his greatest concern is the fate of his volleyball team, where his only enemies yet again stand on the other side of the net.

But here he is, walking beside his friends, their conversation switching to something more relaxed, and he feels like he’s better. Not perfect, not completely healed, but better, and in this moment that is all that matters.

Weeks pass, the leaves turn fiery shades of red and orange, the air grows sharper, and in the midst of all the beauty there is homework, as there always is and will always be.

Koushi has pulled himself a long way from being that first year that almost failed algebra, but even so, the unending slew of assignments and midterms hit his grades harder than he’s expecting, especially given the standards of the university he’s hoping to attend. He wastes no time in working to get them back to where he needs them, which involves him going to ask Daichi questions about material he doesn’t understand, which then involves him answering Daichi’s questions, and soon enough they’re spending a few nights a week studying together after practice.

Tonight finds them in Koushi’s bedroom, hunched over textbooks and searching for explanations online and trying to decipher Daichi’s nigh-unreadable excuses for chemistry notes. Koushi’s younger brother filters in and out sometimes, and his parents check in twice, but aside from that they’re alone with one another, quiet and focused, barely a dozen words passed between them the whole night.

By the time Koushi drags his attention away from his work, packing a book for literature back in his bag and rubbing at his eyes, he has to blink at the clock beside his bed a few times before the numbers set in. “Um,” he says, voice raspy from having stayed so silent, “it’s almost midnight.”

“I guess it is.” Daichi closes his textbook and checks his phone. “I should probably head back now so I can make it before curfew.”

“You’re going to walk?”

“Well, yeah, I don’t really have another choice. Buses don’t run this late.” He raises an eyebrow at Koushi, whose worry must show on his face, and shakes his head. “Suga, I’ll be fine, it’s just a ten minute walk. It’s safe enough.”

He shrugs. “Still kind of late, though. I don’t want anything to… happen to you.” It’s a much more poignant fear now than it had ever been before the assault, the possibility of harm befalling him or someone close to him a constant in his mind. But he doesn’t want to force Daichi to bend to his anxieties, so he stops talking and balls his hands into fists.

“I’ve done it before and there’s nothing dangerous about it.” When that doesn’t seem to convince Koushi, Daichi leans over and kisses him on the forehead.

“You could stay over,” Koushi says before Daichi can pull away.

A pause follows, a smile beginning to creep over Daichi’s face. “Is that what this whole thing’s about? You want me to sleep over with you?”

“No, it’s not, it’s…” He glances away, feeling his cheeks heating up. “It’s not the only reason. I also really don’t want you to put yourself in harm’s way.”

“Wow, I appreciate that. You’re absolutely nailing this whole boyfriend thing.”

Instead of shooting back some equally snarky answer, Koushi grabs the front of Daichi’s shirt and yanks him closer, shutting him up by pressing their lips together. Daichi winds an arm around Koushi’s waist and pulls him over until he’s sitting on Daichi’s lap, his own hands gripping the fabric of the other boy’s shirt. They stay like that for a long moment, Koushi relaxing into the embrace, Daichi’s palms cupping Koushi’s face.

And then it ends. Koushi backs off, because even after everything he can’t bring himself to go any further than this, and Daichi doesn’t hesitate to move away as well, his hands leaving Koushi’s face and wrapping around his shoulders.

“I’m enjoying this, I really am,” Daichi says with a lopsided grin. “But we do have school tomorrow.”

“Oh my gods, you’re right, I forgot.” Koushi hops up and straightens his shirtfront, then heads towards his bedroom door. “Let me go get the spare futon. I think it’s in the linen closet.”

The futon is, as it turns out, not in the linen closet. It’s not in the spare room, either, or Koushi’s closet or the little storage area off of the kitchen or anywhere else that it should be, and no amount of tearing the house apart with far too much vigor given the time of night brings him any closer to finding it. He returns to his room and breaks the news to Daichi, who almost collapses from the force of trying to quiet his laughter.

“You’re living in a rom-com, you know that?” He sobers enough to catch his breath and wipe the tears from his eyes, but the sight of Koushi’s defeated expression nearly breaks him all over again. “Are you telling me there’s only one bed?”

“We might have a… sleeping bag somewhere.” His voice wavers on the last few words, betraying his embarrassment, because he knows he’s lying.

“Look, Suga, how about this?” Daichi says. “We could sleep in the same bed. It’s big enough for us to keep apart from each other.”

“It’s really not.”

“Okay, fine. But we could still fit comfortably enough, even if we have to touch a little. It would be sort of like at camp, where we had our futons next to each other and sometimes one of us rolled over in the night, and when we woke up we were more or less sleeping together.”

“I don’t know,” he whispers. Anxiety coils small but undeniable in the pit of his stomach.

Daichi pauses, tilting his head to one side, and his expression grows serious. “You don’t have to do anything you’re not sure about, okay? I won’t pressure you into doing this if you don’t want to. We can figure something else out, it’s not a problem.”

Koushi’s first thoughts are of the assault, of Hiro curled around him, his grasp so tender even though he was the only reason Koushi was covered in blood and bruises, the only reason fear and pain as sharp as lightning burst through his veins. Every touch that man made, no matter how gentle, burned Koushi’s skin and filled him with such potent disgust he feels sick just thinking back on it.

But then he thinks of those early mornings during the training camp, of blinking sleep from his eyes to find Daichi’s legs wrapped up in his, their arms entangled together, their faces inches away from each other. This touch did not hurt, did not burn him; this kind of touch felt warm, made him feel protected, secure, safe. Hiro had touched him to pin him down, to force him to bend to the man’s twisted will. Daichi touches him to hold him, nothing more behind the contact than the simple desire to be together, nothing more expected of Koushi when they end up brushing against one another.

“I think I want to try.”

“You’re sure?” Daichi searches his face for hints of anything beyond total certainty. “You don’t have to if you don’t want to.”

“I want to try.”

Daichi doesn’t argue the matter any further, but he does keep a close eye on Koushi as they get ready for bed. Once they turn the lights out, he crawls in first and lets Koushi follow, lets Koushi decide how close they get to each other, how much contact they make.

Koushi wavers at first, lying stiff beneath the sheets, muscles tense in his effort to keep to himself, but after just a few seconds he gives in and relaxes. His hand brushes Daichi’s as he does so, a section of their thighs pressing together, and he almost flinches away. But the touch is warm and comfortable and above all else safe, it makes him feel safe, so in a moment of boldness that surprises even him, he rolls on his side and presses his face into Daichi’s chest.

“Is this okay?” he asks.

“It is.” He can hear the smile in Daichi’s voice in the almost total darkness of the room. Daichi twists so he can wrap his arm around Koushi’s waist, his broad hand bracing against Koushi’s back. “Is this okay for you?”

“It is.”

They stay tangled in some way or other for the rest of the night, and not once does Koushi feel terror or hurt or disgust. Not once does he worry about a hand wandering where it should not be, about waking up to find the grasp on him tightening until he cannot move beneath it. He never has to fear that this simple touch will ever morph into something more, that more will be asked of him than he is comfortable giving.

Instead, he finds himself thinking about how easy this is. How well they slot together, how well his body matches up with Daichi’s, how right it feels to be pressed up against him. He can imagine doing this again, can imagine wanting to do it every night, to have Daichi’s arm around him forever. He can picture the future, and it looks exactly like this.

Chapter Text

The tournament is like nothing Koushi has ever experienced before.

It is wild and hectic and terrifying and unforgettable. It is simultaneously the most exciting and most nerve-wracking thing Koushi has ever lived through. It is the frenetic energy of the Johzenji game, the heart-stopping anxiety that led to Daichi having to sit out against Wakutani Minami, the rush of pure exhilaration that comes alongside finally besting Seijoh.

It is the last point against Shiratorizawa, the slap of the ball against the court echoing as Koushi’s feet carry him away from the bench of their own accord. There must be hundreds of spectators in the auditorium, hundreds of fans rejoicing or mourning, the sound of them all surely cacophonous, but in that moment the only people Koushi can see or hear or think of are the other two third-years standing motionless just a few feet in front of him, their faces frozen in pure shock.

They cry together, they sob together, three long years of heartache and disappointment and defeat melting away as the truth sets in. It’s unbelievable, to win after everything that’s happened, to have all of their hard work culminate in this success that Koushi almost can’t comprehend. 

He isn’t the only one who can’t quite wrap his head around all of this. “We did it,” Daichi keeps muttering, maybe to himself, maybe to them, maybe to no one at all. “We did it. We did it .”

Somehow, they pull themselves together enough to make it through the award ceremony, where Daichi accepts their trophy with a stoic, tear-stained face. Every inch of him is a contradiction as he stands there with their prize in his hands, his shoulders set but trembling, his gaze confident and yet ready to break at the slightest reminder of their victory, his words perfect and measured but his voice trembling on every syllable. He is at once the formidable captain who led them all to this stage and the young boy who just watched his first ever volleyball games, at once totally assured of their place on top of the podium and baffled as to how they could ever be standing in this spot.

Koushi watches him more than he pays any attention to the announcers, watches all the tiny flickers of emotion on Daichi’s face, and he falls in love all over again. He loves all that Daichi is, all he has become, all he has yet to be. The thought is nearly enough to choke Koushi up again, but he just manages to keep control.

The rest of the night passes in a blur, a haze of celebration, of parents swarming the team to congratulate them and former competitors giving them begrudging approval for the win and little elementary and junior high players trailing behind them in wide-eyed wonder. Somehow they get everyone on the bus and headed back towards the school, the entire ride spent reliving the game over and over, seemingly each second of it covered and commented on in excruciating detail. Noya and Hinata nearly leap into the aisle to demonstrate moves they made, Tanaka all but climbs over his chair in his haste to give Ennoshita an explanation of his thought process for every single spike, and Daichi and Koushi are too emotionally strung out to discipline anyone, but they somehow make it back in one piece.

Ukai’s post-game speech consists of two sentences – one to commend them on a job well done, and another to tell them to stay safe after they leave. Instead of scattering like Koushi thought they would, his teammates all rush into the storage closet and emerge with a handful of volleyballs.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Daichi calls to them. The last few days seem to have finally caught up with him, exhaustion clear on his face.

Hinata lifts the ball in his hands up like he’s about to toss it. “I was going to show Noya-san a move I did. He says he didn’t get to see it all that well and wants to know how I did it. It’s the one that’s all ‘fwoom’ and ‘wuh-bang’ so it won’t take long.”

“Which move is that again?” Daichi asks Koushi standing beside him, voice a whisper.

“That close to the net spike, I think,” Koushi answers, equally quiet.

Daichi claps his hands together and speaks to the group, who have now moved on to dramatic recreations of the last few seconds of the game. “Alright, nothing else for tonight. You all need to go home and rest.” He lifts a hand in Noya’s direction just as the boy opens his mouth. “Even if you’re not tired. Especially if you’re not tired, because you will be in an hour.”

“How are we supposed to just go home after this?” Hinata asks, the ball and his legs bouncing in sync. “There’s no way I’ll be able to sleep for the next week.”

“Bold words from the kid who crashed every single night of camp. Let’s get going.” Even as tired as Daichi is, all it takes is a single glare from him for all of the others’ objections to die on their tongues. “I want to see everything put away and everyone out of this gym in five minutes. Starting now.”

That gets them moving towards the door, and just as Daichi ordered, within five minutes he and Koushi are standing in an empty gym. Koushi almost comments on their teammates’ speed, ready with a joke about how he wished they moved that fast on the court too, but before he can make a sound Daichi pulls him close, kissing him without warning on the temple.

“Thank you for all your help in getting us here,” Daichi says, as calm and certain as always, as if those words don’t mean Koushi’s entire world.

“I didn’t do all that much, really.” If his voice sounds as shaky to Daichi as it does to his own ears, Daichi doesn’t mention it. “Yelled a lot from the sidelines. Watched you get hit in the face. Freaked out at the beginning of the Shiratorizawa game.”

“And kept our emotions in check, and made sure everyone was where they were supposed to be, and played fantastically every time you got subbed in, and spiked the ball.” Koushi purses his lips to hide his smile, turning his face away as Daichi continues. “Oh come on, you spiked the ball . How does it feel?”

He can still remember leaping into the air, the smack of the volleyball against his hand, the whole motion such a different sensation from setting. He remembers the sound of the ball hitting the ground, and even now he struggles to wrap his mind around the fact that he scored. “It felt good.”

“Just good?”

“Okay, fine. It was… like nothing I’ve ever felt before.”

“Yeah, you’ll be hooked now, spiking every chance you get.” Daichi’s expression sobers, and he moves away from Koushi only to reach out and grab his hand. He’s quiet for a long moment, but his gaze is so intense Koushi can’t bring himself to break the silence. “We did it, Kou.”

Koushi squeezes his hand back. “We did. It still doesn’t feel real, I don’t know how long it’ll take for this to sink in.”

“This is what we’ve worked towards for three years, what we couldn’t achieve with our senpai. All the losses, all the hurt, all of our hard work, it all went into that one game.” His eyes look wet again, which even Koushi in all his nascent acceptance of his emotions thinks is a pretty fast turnaround, because Daichi’s cheeks are still tearstained.

Instead of coming up with a quick response, Koushi pulls the arm he’s holding up and over his shoulders, and Daichi brings his other arm around until he’s all but clinging onto Koushi, broad shoulders shaking. Koushi does his best to hold him tight and steady and secure, to be that rock for Daichi that Daichi always is for him. Little by little, Daichi unravels in the embrace, crying quietly against Koushi’s shoulder.

“Is it everything you thought it would be?” Koushi asks when he thinks Daichi can answer.

“It is. It really, really is.” He wipes at his face, running a hand over it as his breaths even out. “It feels like everything finally paid off. Like we’re exactly where we’re supposed to be.”

“Good, because you deserved it.” Koushi leans forward until their foreheads rest against each other. “Because no one else has had to take on the kind of pressure you have. No one else could have handled it like you’ve handled it. You got us here, you deserve to feel every part of this win.”

“We all deserve it. All of us gave everything we had.”

They walk home hand in hand, talking about all of the little things that passed by too quickly for them to comment on in the present, all of the small moments that led to the win, all of the moments that led to this instant in time. This place, this easy feeling between them, the light in Daichi’s eyes, the floating feeling in Koushi’s chest. Daichi was right; they are exactly where they’re meant to be.

Koushi swears that all he did was blink, but now the season is over and the school year draws to a close and he now has a high school diploma framed up on his bedroom wall. There’s so few days left until he and Daichi leave for university that he can count them on his fingers, and he can no longer ignore the date circled in bright red on his calendar.

His only reprieve from the steadily mounting anxiety over going away is that he and Daichi managed to get into the same Tokyo university. Their families have already coordinated as best as possible so they can move in on the same day, something that they’re all hoping will mitigate the loneliness they’ll all be feeling, though Koushi worries that having to say goodbye to not one but two sets of parents may only make things worse.

But whatever happens on the day he moves in, however bad it may be, it cannot be worse than today.

Today, a heavy, heavy air has fallen over their team. The energy of it crackles through each of them, jumping from one of them to the next, this unshakable feeling of sorrow, of fear, of all the worries over change and the uncertainty that comes with it. It’s like staring at mounting storm clouds, watching a train barrel towards them at full speed, and no matter what they do, they cannot escape what is coming. They must face it, must embrace it with as much grace as they can when it knocks them all to the ground.

Koushi watches the clock and wills it to stop. He wills the world to pause, just for a moment, just for a little longer, long enough that he can hang in the limbo that is created in the middle of a volleyball game. If he had his way, he would live in the Karasuno High gym for the rest of his life.

But he has no control over these things, no say on how quickly his life hurtles forward, and the clock ticks on unrelenting. Seconds slip by, disappearing faster the more engaged he is in this ridiculous scrimmage they’ve designed. 

It started out with Daichi giving them a free night for their last practice all together, which led to Tanaka declaring that he wanted to make the game of volleyball even harder than it already is, which then led to them as a team coming up with increasingly elaborate hoops they have to jump through to score points. By this time in the night, with less than fifteen minutes left and more than a dozen new rules added, they’ve decided they can only score if Tsukishima receives it, it bounces off of Ennoshita’s shoe, and it lands in the volleyball cart they’ve set up ten feet from the court. It’s stupid, neither team has earned a point all night, and Koushi hasn’t laughed this hard in a long time.

And then practice comes to an end. It actually should have ended a while ago, but no one could bring themselves to stop, so they play on until Takeda gently tells them they have to wrap things up so people get home on time.

“Looks like that’s game, then,” Daichi says. There’s no emotion in his words, not yet, but Koushi can see how hard he’s fighting. “Get everything cleaned up and meet us back here.”

For maybe the only time in his life, Koushi wishes they’d clean the gym a little bit slower, maybe bicker a little longer about who sweeps which part of the floor, or toss a few more volleyballs around instead of putting them away. But they don’t; they rush through their chores, because as sad as this is for most of them, it’s also an important time for the underclassmen.

They gather together in the middle of the gym, standing around him, Daichi, and Ennoshita, who looks so nervous he might actually be vibrating. “I’m pretty sure I don’t need to do this,” Daichi says, “but we should take a formal vote just to make sure. We as captain and vice-captain have chosen Ennoshita to become captain after we leave.” There’s the tiniest hitch in Daichi’s voice, and Koushi glances away to get himself under control. “All against this decision, raise your hands.”

No one lifts their hands, of course. Each face Koushi sees wears the same expression – anticipation, excitement, uncertainty – and they all as one turn from watching Daichi to watching Ennoshita. None of them seem to notice that they’ve done this, none of them bar Koushi seems to realize how much that means.

“Seems like it’s anonymous.” Daichi extends his hands towards Ennoshita. “Ennoshita, will you accept the position as captain of the Karasuno boy’s volleyball team?”

Ennoshita shakes with him. “I will.”

The celebration is raucous, because they don’t do things any other way here, and before anyone can stop their wilder members, they’ve pinned their poor new captain to the ground in a group hug. Asahi rushes over like he wants to join but just ends up awkwardly hovering over them, Yachi is jumping up and down and clapping, Tsukishima cracks something that almost counts as a smile, and through it all Koushi just watches. He watches the torch trade hands, and it feels right. It feels like a punch in the gut, but it’s right.

“What about vice-captain?” Tanaka asks from the top of the dogpile.

“It’s you, you idiot,” Ennoshita wheezes out, struggling to free himself from the throng atop him. “Now get the hell off of me.”

One by one, they release Ennoshita from their grip and stand, brushing themselves off; Hinata has managed to get dirt in his hair in fifteen seconds of being on the ground, and somehow Noya’s practice shirt is torn.

Silence falls over them, the last notes of cheerfulness falling away as Daichi surveys them one final time. “I won’t get poetic here, I promise,” he says. “That’s what Takeda-sensei’s here for.” There’s a bit of subdued laughter, but it fades away almost instantly. “I just want to tell you all that I’m proud of you. You gave everything you had, and together we made this school into something worth respecting. Together we did what people told us we never would, and it’s all because of your hard work. So thank you guys, for everything.”

People are probably crying at this point, but Koushi can’t bear to look, the ground beneath his feet now the most interesting thing in the world.

“Anything to add, Suga?” Daichi asks.

“Um.” His voice catches, trembles even on that single sound, but he centers himself. He isn’t going to just walk out of here without addressing them, without looking them in the face, so he swings his head upward only to find his teammates blurry in his teary vision. “I don’t know if you all understand how much it meant for us third years to go to nationals. The crows have wings again, and I honestly never thought I’d see that happen while I was here, but against all odds it did. So, what Daichi said. Thanks.”

He hears someone take a few quick steps towards him, and something hits him square in the chest. Hinata’s head of unruly hair is all Koushi can see, Hinata’s face buried in his shoulder, the boy’s arms wrapped tight enough around him to steal his breath away.

That’s all it takes. Within seconds almost all of them are a mess, hugging and holding each other, trying and failing to keep back their tears. Even Asahi, who’s going over to Koushi’s house the very next day to help him pack, wraps Koushi in a spine-crushing embrace like they’re never going to see each other ever again.

Once they get themselves back in order, Daichi claps his hands and draws their attention. “Alright, everyone, huddle up,” he says, then adds much more quietly, “Last one.”

They gather as close together as possible, fists thrust into the middle of the circle, and they scream their chant louder than they ever have before. For just a moment, Koushi swears that the gym has fallen away, that he’s back in their huddle at nationals, that he can see all of his teammates in their uniforms, faces filled not with pain and sorrow but with overwhelming determination as they prepare for what they’d later learn was their final game together.

He holds onto that moment at nationals, this moment in the now-quiet gym, in a part of himself that can never be erased. When he and Daichi lock the doors for the last time, Daichi handing the key to Ennoshita, Koushi can still hear the roar of the crowd and can feel his teammates surrounding him, even as the night stills into silence and he finds himself with only Daichi by his side on the walk home.

Two months. That’s the time it takes Koushi to feel any sense of belonging at university. That’s how long it takes to shake off most of the homesickness, to miss his parents a little bit less than he had when they first left him in his tiny, dreary dorm room, to get the hang of balancing schoolwork and his social life and the intramural volleyball team he joined almost as soon as he arrived.

Now, though, after sixty-odd days of struggling to fit in, of worrying that he’d made a mistake or that he didn’t have what it takes to be here, he’s developed a routine that makes the massive university campus and even more massive city of Tokyo seem a little more manageable.

It’s a pretty mundane routine, filled mostly with classes and homework and studying, but it’s the end of it that always makes the rest of the day worth it. At the end of the day, he rushes back to his room, changes into his practice clothes, and practices with his team until the faculty is about to shut the lights off on them. They only get the courts late at night, since the varsity team uses it in the afternoon, but it doesn’t matter. The fact that he’s on the volleyball court at all, that he plays starting setter and gets to feel the ball against his hands on almost every play, makes up for any exhaustion that comes from playing so late.

And still, this isn’t the best part of his day. The best part happens once they put everything away, once they close up for the night, because he leaves the gym to find, without fail, Daichi standing just outside, waiting for him.

Tonight is no different. Daichi, already changed and showered from his own practice with the varsity team, beams as soon as he sees Koushi. When they get close enough to touch, he takes Koushi’s hand and kisses his knuckles.

“I hope you’re not trying to be too romantic,” Koushi says, ignoring the warm feeling that blooms in his chest as Daichi’s lips brush his hand. “We won’t have time for it tonight.”

Daichi laughs, beginning to lead them away from the gym and towards Daichi’s dorm nearby. It’s closer to the courts than Koushi’s by almost two whole blocks, since Daichi’s an official student-athlete and gets all the perks that come along with it.

“We can be romantic,” Daichi says. “My roommate won’t mind.”

“Your roommate’s an asshole, I can’t believe you put up with him.”

He pulls a face. “Oh, come on, it’s not that bad. I mean, he could be a little neater, I guess, and I never believe him when he says he did his laundry, but other than that it’s fine.” Koushi raises an eyebrow, and Daichi acquiesces. “Okay, he’s an asshole, but he’s a charming asshole.”

“The Daichi from six months ago would be appalled at you saying that. This feels like blasphemy.” Nevertheless, Koushi enters Daichi’s building without hesitation when they arrive.

“That Daichi only ever had him on the other side of the net.”

They reach his room, Daichi moving to unlock the door when it swings open on its own, a head of wild dark hair leaning out of it. “Oh, hell yeah,” Kuroo says, giving a fist pump or two for emphasis. “You brought the boyfriend.”

Koushi is now close enough with Kuroo that he’s allowed to karate chop him if he gets annoying, so Koushi does so now, aiming for his ribs. Kuroo doubles over, but he’s still laughing that obnoxious laugh, which means he still won. He ushers them inside despite his obvious pain and despite the fact that Daichi lives here.

All the lights in the room are off except for the meager glow coming from Kuroo’s laptop sitting on his bed, and in that glow Koushi can see that a large white sheet has been strung up across the only window. Kuroo rushes around them and reaches blindly for something on his desk, coming up with a small projector that, judging from the wordless sounds of frustration he makes while trying to so much as turn it on, has bested him and will continue to do so. The whole place smells faintly of burnt popcorn.

“I left you for five minutes,” Daichi says, gesturing to the room as a whole. He takes the projector out of Kuroo’s fumbling hands, presses a few buttons, and a blinking light on the side turns on.

Kuroo ignores him, setting the projector on the floor and moving over to his computer. In seconds, the opening credits of some movie Koushi has never heard of flashes on the sheet on the wall, and Kuroo nods to himself. “Easy as that,” he says, and Daichi sighs. “Okay, Suga, listen. I know you said you don’t like action movies, which is ridiculous and a wrong opinion, but this one’s really good so I know you’ll like it.”

“You said that about the last one,” Koushi says, not unkindly.

“Maybe I did, but I really mean it this time. This one has not one but two alien robots trying to kill the hero, and a love triangle with a spaceship apparently, so you have to admit it sounds like this one’s worth the watch.”

Apparently, Kuroo’s been doing this ever since they first got to university. Hosting movie nights, that is, not being equal parts an insufferable asshat and an absolute film dork, which he’s almost certainly been doing for far longer than Koushi has known him. Every Friday night he turns on a movie and invites anyone willing to come, usually getting a good number of people squeezed into their little dorm room, but tonight it seems to just be him, Daichi, and Koushi.

That certainly doesn’t bother Koushi, because within the first twenty minutes of the movie, Kuroo is completely entranced, unresponsive to the outside world, leaving Koushi and Daichi to curl up on Daichi’s too-small bed and talk.

“I really like being here,” Koushi says apropos of nothing, once he’s sure he won’t interrupt Kuroo and face the boy’s wrath at messing up movie night.

Daichi is sitting on the foot of the bed, leaning against the frame so he can watch the movie without making it obvious that he’s invested. “You like being in my dingy dorm room while my roommate gasps at the worst CGI explosions known to man? Do we need to talk? Are you okay?”

“You know what I mean.” Koushi kicks at Daichi’s feet from where he’s resting against Daichi’s pillows. “Here, at university. I really like it here, and I don’t feel as homesick anymore.”

“I didn’t know you were still dealing with that. You didn’t really tell me.”

Something on-screen blows up, momentarily jolting them out of their quiet conversation, but Koushi manages to collect himself. “It wasn’t always there, it came and went.” He throws one arm behind his head, leaning further back. “Besides, you’ve been busy.”

“Never too busy to help you if you need it,” he says, attention now focused completely on Koushi.

“Really, I promise it wasn’t that bad.” Daichi gives him a suspicious look, and in return he gives his most placating expression. “Now, though, I’m not homesick at all. I mean, it’s still nice to talk to my parents when I can, and I can’t wait for break so we can go back and see everyone, but I feel like I belong here. Things are so different, but I think they’re different in the right way.”

Daichi doesn’t say anything for a long time, staring off into the middle distance, gathering his thoughts. Just before he starts to speak again, he nods towards Kuroo sitting on the floor a few feet away. “It’s strange,” he says. “That guy right there used to be my mortal enemy. He was that jerk on the rival team I spent so much time thinking about taking down. And now I get here and find out he’ll be playing with me, and my whole view of him changed. My whole view of everything changed.”

“It’s a good thing, I think. Kind of like high school was just a stepping stone.”

“Is it a good thing?” He pauses again, falling so still that he blends into the shadows. Koushi studies his face, trying and failing to read his expression in the darkened room. “I don’t want to forget that team, I don’t want to forget what we did.”

“You won’t, but don’t you already see it differently, even just a few months later?” Koushi does, finding those three years strangely condensed, and while they definitely still take up so much of his memories, the good and the bad so vivid in his mind, he no longer feels like he’s entrenched in them, unable to escape. “We’re not forgetting, we’re just moving forward.”

“Moving on,” Daichi says, so quiet he’s barely audible over Kuroo’s movie.

“Right. But moving on the right way this time. We’ve learned from what happened and worked through everything we needed to and now we’re… better, maybe. More prepared.”

“This does feel nice.” He glances at Kuroo again, still oblivious, still staring wide-eyed at the screen. “In a weird way. I’m not as confident as you are about moving on, but if the future looks like this, then I don’t think I can complain.”

“If the future looks like this?” Koushi asks, indicating their surroundings.

“No, if it looks like this.” 

Daichi crawls over to him, leaning down until their faces are inches away, and Koushi rises up to meet him. Daichi kisses him soft and slow, hands cupping his jaw, Koushi’s arms thrown around Daichi’s waist. It only lasts a second, but to Koushi it feels like ages, like an eternity spent in this tender hold as sparks fly in his chest, as if this is the first time Daichi has kissed him and not the thousandth.

When they pull apart, Koushi is grinning so hard his face hurts. “I won’t complain, either, if you keep doing that.”

Daichi laughs a breathy laugh, but soon he sobers, taking Koushi’s hands in his own. “I want to keep doing this, I really do. And I don’t want things to - to change so much that this changes. I don’t want to lose this.”

“You won’t.” Koushi flashes his brightest smile, and Daichi relaxes enough to smile back. “Wherever you go, whatever you do, I’m coming with you. I promise.”

“You seem so sure about that. Anything could happen.”

“It could,” he says. “But no matter what happens, we face it together.”

“Together,” Daichi agrees, and kisses him again.

Chapter Text

All of these songs are by Bob Dylan, and they all in one way or other inspired various parts of this fic, so if you want you can pretend this is like those spotify playlists that AO3 authors sometimes put in the notes of their fics.

Entry format:

“Song title”; Album title

Fic name and all chapter titles: 

“It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue”; Bringing It All Back Home

Chapter summaries, in numerical order:

“It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)”; Bringing It All Back Home

“It Ain’t Me Babe”; Another Side of Bob Dylan

“I Shall Be Released”, Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits, Vol. II

“All Along the Watchtower”; John Wesley Harding

“One of Us Must Know (Sooner or Later)”; Blonde on Blonde

“Girl from the North Country”; The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan / Nashville Skylines (with Johnny Cash)

“Tombstone Blues”; Highway 61 Revisited

“Like a Rolling Stone”; Highway 61 Revisited

“Shelter from the Storm”; Blood on the Tracks

“Just Like a Woman”; Blonde on Blonde

“Changing of the Guards”; Street-Legal

“Jokerman”; Infidels