Chapter Text
When Kageyama says he won’t practice with Shoyo anymore, at first it feels like a complete insult. Shoyo spent the better part of the day getting his temper back in order, he’s not in the mood to hear Kageyama telling him to leave.
Except when Shoyo confronts him about this—not caring anymore that he’s in front of Yachi, ready to throw down all over again—Kageyama responds:
“If I’m still screwing up the sets, how is that any kind of worthwhile practice for you?”
Something about that breaks the silence between them from the last three weeks. Shoyo thought it would be the new quick but apparently all he needed was to hear Kageyama say (in not so many words) that he views Shoyo as an equal. That his time practicing is valuable outside of their super quick. That it isn’t Shoyo who’s the problem during their practice matches, it’s Kageyama.
Within seconds, they’re back to their usual antics. Kageyama gets pissed that Shoyo went off and got training with Gramps, Shoyo gets pissed right back because he didn’t plan it or anything, Ukai was the one who brought him there, and everything is as it should be.
Shoyo feels all fired up and tracks down Kenma.
“Nooooo,” Kenma moans when Shoyo asks him to set.
“Please?” he needles. “Just for a little while!”
Kenma sighs loudly and agrees, allowing himself to get pulled into Gym 2.
No one else is in there at the moment, so Shoyo takes that time to say, “Kenma, can I ask you something?”
“What’s that?” Kenma replies as he picks up a ball from one of the two carts waiting for use by the net.
“Is it true that you’re asexual?”
The ball slips from his fingers and Kenma whips his head around. “What.”
Shoyo puts his hands up. “Sorry,” he says, a bit guilty now for blurting it out like that. “Inuoka-san and I were talking last night and he said…well, that Kuroo-san was like me, you know, and that you weren’t…well, that you’re different, too—”
“Not straight?”
“Uh…yeah.”
Kenma glowers as he picks the ball back off the ground. “Inuoka should know better.”
The guilt grows. “Sorry,” Shoyo says again. “He was only trying to make me feel better. It’s just that I don’t know anyone else like me.”
“I don’t mind that you know,” says Kenma. “I mind that Inuoka told you without asking if we were fine about it.”
“Oh.”
After a moment Kenma heaves a heavy, put-upon sigh. “It’s fine, okay,” he insists. “Look, let me just tell Kuroo you know and he won’t mind talking to you about…whatever. Can we start already? I want to go to bed, I’m tired.”
Shoyo takes a couple steps forward eagerly before hesitating. “I don’t want you to be mad at Inuoka-san or anything,” he says.
“I’m not,” Kenma assures him. “Hurry up.”
*
After five sets Kenma looks like he’s ready to melt into a puddle and dissolve. Shoyo manages to keep him around for three more, though, by asking him to explain asexuality if they’re done for the night. At the end of those three sets Kenma vanishes like a ninja when Shoyo runs to retrieve the last ball he hit.
He can’t even get mad when he thinks of how fast and sneaky Kenma had to be to get away with it.
It’s probably for the best. Without Kageyama, Shoyo needs to seriously think about what to practice in the evenings. When he gives it some thought he finds the answer, though he doesn’t like it.
Shoyo’s got to know how to get past blockers. The whole point of him keeping his eyes open during the super quick is so he doesn’t get caught when the blockers manage to meet him in midair. In order to learn how best to beat blockers, he’s got to go up against the best ones available to him. Aside from Datekou’s Aone, Kuroo is the best blocker Shoyo has ever faced.
The problem, of course, is that Kuroo has already taken Tsukishima under his wing.
He struggles with it for a few minutes. On the one hand, he wants to keep away from Tsukishima outside of practice during this training camp. He doesn’t want anyone to misunderstand the way Tsukishima acts around him, or finally realize what Shoyo’s been so bad at holding back. On the other hand this is practice and if it’s just three other people, will it be so bad? Especially if Kuroo is like Shoyo. He wouldn’t make something of it, Shoyo thinks.
That’s the deciding factor in the end. Once he makes up his mind Shoyo takes off for Gym 3. He skids to a stop in front of the door and pokes his head inside.
Tsukishima is there, standing almost shoulder to shoulder with Bokuto. On the other side of the net is Kuroo and Fukurodani’s setter, a quiet second year named Akaashi. It looks like Kuroo had just blocked one of Bokuto’s spikes.
Shoyo feels a twinge of jealousy in his stomach. Even though he’d resolved—only just yesterday!—to be apart from Tsukishima, these guys have gotten to see more of him in the evenings than Shoyo ever since they arrived. It’s not fair. And while he’s at it, it’s not fair Tsukishima has been working essentially one-on-one with two third year captains.
Bokuto is the one who notices Shoyo first.
“Oh? Did you bring a friend today?”
Tsukishima turns. His eyes widen when his gaze meets Shoyo’s and he takes a few steps toward the door as if on instinct.
“Hinata,” he breathes. It comes out so very tenderly that Shoyo has to work to keep his face from contorting into something disgusting.
“Hi.”
“I thought you were working on your quick,” says Tsukishima. He takes another step. “What happened?”
“Kageyama’s working on his own,” Shoyo explains. “I got Kenma to set for me a little but he ran away.”
“Wow, the fact that he set for you at all is pretty amazing,” Kuroo remarks.
“Uh…yeah,” he agrees. “So, I don’t have anyone to practice with, so… can I join you?”
He hears an echo from his last words coming from above his head and looks up to see Lev. He’s sweaty and a little out of breath, like he’s just come running from somewhere far. Right when Shoyo looks up, Lev looks down, and even though Shoyo was there first Lev seems just as surprised as Shoyo to find someone else there, the jerk.
“Weren’t you supposed to be practicing with Yaku?” Kuroo asks, and when Lev spouts off some obvious crap about doing well enough with receives to be let out early, Kuroo clearly catches the lie but lets it slide with just a warning.
Shoyo looks to Tsukishima, who’s taken the brief pause in training to go grab his water bottle and a towel, wiping at his face while he takes sips. Then he takes off his glasses to clean the lenses on the hem of his shirt and Shoyo has to look away before he completely exposes himself by blushing or…or…
“Ah, well,” Kuroo says, “since we’ve got the numbers, now, how about we play some three-one-three matches?”
As the two team captains present start discussing who they want, Shoyo heads over to Tsukishima, telling himself that this is about volleyball so it’s okay.
Tsukishima peers down at him. “What?”
“Doesn’t this kind of remind you of last year?” Shoyo asks. “All those three-on-threes we did?”
“I mean, I guess.”
A hand clamps down on Shoyo’s shoulder. “Karasuno’s short stack,” he hears Bokuto say loudly. “You’re coming with me!”
Shoyo can’t help but feel excited as Bokuto forcibly whirls him around and hauls him over to where Akaashi waits for them, his brows pinched in dismay. He gets to be on the same team as Fukurodani’s ace and setter—he’ll learn so much! Then he realizes he’ll be playing opposite Tsukishima.
He turns his head to see how his friend is taking it, but to his surprise Tsukishima looks almost…excited.
That can’t be right. Tsukishima doesn’t get excited about volleyball the way Shoyo does. And he’s always hated being on the opposite team to Shoyo. The three-on-three game at the beginning of the school year made that pretty clear. He frowns, trying to make sense of this sudden change.
Bokuto’s hand is still on his shoulder. “Looks like your four-eyes teammate is finally ready to take you on,” he murmurs. “Let’s give him a good game, yeah?”
Shoyo nods, though he’s still confused.
“Um,” Akaashi says, “isn’t this line up a little…unbalanced?”
On the other side of the net, Kuroo grins as Tsukishima joins them and really brings home the height difference between the two teams. “Oh, don’t sweat the small stuff,” he says. “Let’s practice the sort of things we can’t get away with during the day, okay?”
And it’s a tough practice.
As Shoyo hoped, he’s up against Kuroo’s excellent blocks. What he hadn’t counted on was the high level of coaching Kuroo continues to spout off to both Lev and Tsukishima, which means Shoyo has to face rapidly improving blocking over the course of an hour. He watches Bokuto and Akaashi closely, as both of them maneuver their way around that tall wall. Bokuto has more success by far, though he still gets stuffed now and again.
It’s sort of invigorating, in a way. Shoyo isn’t working with a genius setter like Kageyama but Akaashi is skilled and cool-headed, and handles the unpredictable well enough for Shoyo to feel like he’s getting in just as many spikes as Bokuto. This isn’t a setter who can throw an amazing toss for Shoyo alone. This is someone who sees him as a valuable weapon in their arsenal with or without a quick set to blow the other team’s defenses away.
And with every new play, Shoyo can see the other side of the net with more and more clarity.
Shoyo would have happily gone on playing all night—and he suspects the other five feel the same—but one of the managers pokes her head in to tell them they’ll miss dinner if they don’t hurry up both Shoyo and Bokuto scramble to get themselves sorted away.
“Meet back here again tomorrow night!” Kuroo says as he follows them out the door at top speed.
“Yep!” Shoyo calls over his shoulder, and he and Lev start racing to the cafeteria, trying to push each other off balance as they pick up their pace and it turns into a full-blown competition.
*
“What made you realize you were…” Shoyo trails off, gesturing vaguely. He’s sitting in the grass under a tree, several meters away from the back door of Karasuno’s cabin, legs crossed and one hand playing with a single blade of grass.
Across from him, Inuoka leans his back against another tree, his knees up against his chest and his arms wrapped around his legs, locking them loosely in place.
“Gay?” he finishes.
Shoyo still can’t adjust to saying the word out loud. He blushes lightly and nods.
Inuoka sighs and shrugs. “I mean, I guess I knew I was different even when I was a kid, you know?” he says. “Nothing major. I wasn’t playing with dolls or anything--sometimes you hear people talk about that, when they talk about being gay as a kid. I’ve always liked playing sports and being outside and stuff. I just kind of knew… Well, I definitely figured it out when I had my first crush.”
“Oh yeah?” Shoyo leans forward. “It was a guy, right?”
“Yeah, of course,” says Inuoka. He smiles a bit mockingly. “Obviously it was a guy.”
“I mean, how should I know?” Shoyo says defensively. “My first three crushes were girls! I don’t know how it is with you!”
“First three, huh?”
“Yeah,” he says, and flushes. “How old were you when you had your first crush?”
“Hmm...eight, I think? Yeah, eight. We were on the same junior league basketball team.”
“You played basketball?” asks Shoyo, distracted by entirely the wrong thing.
Inuoka snickers. “I started playing volleyball the second year of middle school,” he says. “Before that I was on a basketball team.”
“Why’d you stop?”
“Because the basketball team captain in my first year, after the third years retired, I mean, he was a jerk,” Inuoka tells him. “I was thinking I didn’t want to join a sports club at all in second year but one of my classmates brought me to volleyball practice, and it was more fun than I’d had all first year.”
Shoyo nods. He remembers playing soccer in elementary school, enjoying it because he had friends on his team but not loving it the way he’d fallen in love with volleyball, headfirst and desperate.
“What about you?”
He blinks. “I started volleyball in first year of junior high,” he says.
Inuoka snorts. “No, when did you first know you weren’t straight?”
“Oh.” Shoyo flushes again, his cheeks unbearably warm. “Right. Um… I mean, someone kind of...told me. I didn’t realize they were right until I had my first crush on a guy.”
It’s a reductive way to explain the complicated emotions surrounding Itagaki and Tsukishima, and Shoyo hopes Inuoka won’t press the subject further.
No such luck, however. Inuoka laughs and says, “Someone told you? What? How would that even work?”
“Uh…” Shoyo rubs the back of his neck. “Well, he’d kind of been--he was after me, because, well, he was, um, gay—and he kissed me and told me I was like that too, except I didn’t…”
“Wait, wait.” Inuoka sits up straight, letting his legs fall to the ground. He scoots a little closer to Shoyo, his eyes wide. “Was this guy your first crush?”
“No,” says Shoyo.
“And he told you that you were bisexual?”
“He told me I was gay.”
“But he didn’t ask you what you felt you were?”
“No.”
“And then he kissed you?”
“He kissed me first, then told me I was gay,” Shoyo explains.
Inuoka’s normally kind expression turns sour. “That’s not okay, Shoyo,” he says.
“I know.” Shoyo looks down at his hands splayed out in the grass. “That was my first kiss, too.”
“Uh-uh,” says Inuoka indignantly. He’s vehement enough that Shoyo glances back up in surprise. “That’s not a kiss at all, Shoyo. That’s...that’s an assault, or something. That wasn’t your first kiss. Your first kiss is when you’re kissing the other person back.”
Shoyo presses his lips together and clenches his fingers against the soft blades of grass, unable to put into words exactly what he’s feeling. Gratitude isn’t right, exactly. He feels warm, though, and a soft tickling in his chest that is at once uncomfortable and soothing.
“You think?” he manages to say, his voice coming out mostly normal and only a little shaky.
“I know!” insists Inuoka. “You get to decide what’s your first kiss, not some…” he trails off, apparently unwilling to say anything rude.
It doesn’t make sense, but Shoyo appreciates that. His feelings about what happened with Itagaki aren’t exactly positive, but he doesn’t want to hear someone talk badly about his old senpai all the same. Even if Inuoka is probably the only person in the world that could get away with it.
“Have you had your first kiss?” Shoyo asks. He’s more than ready to move the conversation away from this particular issue.
“Oh, yeah, of course.”
“What’s ‘of course’ about it?” he demands, annoyed.
Inouka snickers again. “Sorry,” he says, but it sounds only half-sincere. “It’s just… you know, it’s a lot easier to find boys to kiss in Tokyo.”
“Is it?” Shoyo asks. “When did you have your first kiss? Who was it with? Was he your boyfriend?”
“Whoa,” says Inuoka. His hands shoot up in a defensive posture. “Okay, so, my first kiss was third year in middle school.”
“So not that long ago.”
“No, just about a year ago.”
“How did you meet him?”
Inuoka looks at him, frowning. “Hang on,” he says. “It was a guy on the swimming team. We met at school normally. And no, he wasn’t my boyfriend.”
“Did you want him to be?” asks Shoyo, and then wonders if that was rude.
But Inuoka doesn’t seem bothered. He shrugs and says, “I haven’t ever liked someone enough to want to date them. I get crushes but it’s like...they fade after a while. It’s never seemed worth the effort.”
Privately Shoyo thinks that if you put the effort into dating someone, the crush probably wouldn’t fade. He doesn’t want to say this, though. Every crush he’s had—with the exception of Tsukishima, which doesn’t really count as a crush anymore—melted away when Shoyo found his attention taken up with other things. Even Aya, whom Shoyo had liked so much for an entire year, had been superseded by a new school year and new classmates.
“What about you, though?” Inuoka asks. “How many guys have you liked? The same as the number of girls, or more? Less?”
“Um…just the one guy,” Shoyo admits.
“So...wait, you said before you have someone you like,” says Inuoka, frowning. “This is the same guy? Or do you like a girl right now?”
“It’s the same guy.”
“Wow.”
Shoyo wonders if Inuoka thinks he’s strange or stupid or a little crazy. He shifts away a little, crossing his arms over his chest.
“I don’t talk about it a lot,” he mumbles. “I told Tadashi a while ago, but… I mean, I thought I could get over him if I really put my mind to it, so then I told Tadashi I was over him, and now… I don’t really talk about it.”
“Why were you trying to get over him?” asks Inuoka.
“I mean…” Shoyo lets out a slightly manic chuckle that he just hates hearing come out of his mouth. “I’ve liked the same guy for two years, you know? And he’s never going to feel the same way, and he’s my friend so I don’t want to make things weird.”
“You don’t have to stop liking him just because he’s a guy, you know.”
“It’s not that!” says Shoyo, though after he says it, he considers it. “It’s not that,” he says again, decisively. “It’s because he’s my friend, and at the time I thought he would be dating someone else, so it just seemed easier.”
“Okay.”
“I’m fine with liking another guy,” he says.
Inuoka purses his lips. “You sure?”
“Yeah!” Shoyo insists. “Like I said, if I didn’t already like someone, I would...with you…” he feels very, very hot.
“Okay,” says Inuoka. His face is red, too, and he looks away shyly.
It feels like they’re sitting too close. Stupidly, a little sprout of guilt shoots up from Shoyo’s stomach, like he’s cheating on Tsukishima or something. It is stupid, because Tsukishima wouldn’t care if Shoyo did anything with another guy. He didn’t even care when Shoyo said he had a guy he liked, after all. So feeling guilty over nothing is just stupid.
He jumps to his feet. “I gotta go in before someone comes to yell at me,” he announces. He feels a little lightheaded.
“Yeah, okay. Me too.”
*
Shoyo has a hard time sleeping that night, and he feels it keenly in the morning. The first two practice set are brutal for everyone, but Shoyo feels it the most. He isn’t at his usual high speed when it comes to their penalty runs, coming in behind Kageyama and somehow Tanaka and Noya as well. Noya actually asks if Shoyo is okay after the second uphill sprint.
He brushes that question off, citing a slow start to his morning and hoping that becomes the truth.
Fortunately, something happens during their third practice set that invigorates the entire team, including Shoyo: they win.
Even as they celebrate, Sawamura and Ukai caution them that it’s almost definitely a fluke, that as they continue to practice new techniques and test their strengths, they will lose a lot more than they’ll win. Ubugawa was having a rough morning as well, having lost both of their first sets that day along with Karasuno. The fact that their team won this time had just as much to do with the rotation as anything else.
But it doesn’t matter how it happened, honestly. Just the fact that they won after so many losses is enough to pump fresh life into everyone. Even Tsukishima seems peppier in his own quiet way, though that could be Shoyo’s imagination.
He fares a bit better after that. During the next two penalty sprints Shoyo still loses to Kageyama—who is quick to add it to their running tally with a smirk, the bastard—but at least he finishes before anyone else.
*
For lunch, Shoyo finds himself with what’s become his usual group for this training camp, Kenma to his right at their table, Lev and Inuoka across from them.
He has a hard time looking directly at Inuoka, still embarrassed by what he said the night before. Thankfully Lev is always distracting, and Kenma lets Shoyo peek over his shoulder now and again to watch his fairly expert gameplay.
Twenty minutes into this Shoyo feels a hand wrap firmly around the back of his neck and looks up to see Kuroo standing behind him. His other hand is on Kenma’s neck, which Kenma accepts without so much as a twitch.
“Lev, scram,” says Kuroo.
“Wha—why?” Lev demands.
“Because I said so, you little punk.”
Lev gets up, muttering something about not being little but unwilling to question Kuroo further. As soon as he’s gone, Kuroo releases his hold on Shoyo and Kenma and goes to take Lev’s now vacant seat next to Inuoka.
“So,” he says casually, “I heard from Kenma you’ve been outing us?”
Inuoka loses some of his color. “Um, only to Hinata.”
Kuroo tsks and shakes his head. Something about the gesture makes Shoyo think this is at least half Kuroo messing with Inuoka. He’s got no basis for it, except after spending the previous evening witnessing Nekoma’s captain at his most serious he feels that right now, Kuroo is lacking some of that focused intensity.
“I’m...sorry?” Inuoka says, cringing away.
“You know that’s very rude, don’t you, Inuoka-kun?”
“He was just being nice to me,” says Shoyo, deciding to rescue his friend. “I told him I didn’t know a lot of people like me and he said you and I were the same, so—”
“You are ruining my fun,” Kuroo says, sighing dramatically and dropping his elbows on the table. “Do you know how often I get to torture this kid? He’s too good most of the time.”
“But you get to torture Lev all the time,” Shoyo points out, “so it should balance out.”
Kuroo blinks in surprise, then laughs. It sounds a bit evil. “Okay, shorty, you have a point,” he concedes. He leans forward a little, apprising Shoyo. “So, you’re bi, are you?”
“Um. Yeah.”
“I knew it.”
It’s Shoyo’s turn to blink in surprise. “You did?”
Is he that obvious? First Inuoka, now Kuroo—and, for that matter, how did Itagaki know back then, anyway? Shoyo doesn’t think he’s doing anything different than anyone else, so how are these people figuring him out.
Kuroo grins his sharp smile. “I can usually tell.”
“Me too,” Kenma volunteers, not looking up from his game.
“How?”
“When you’re different, you can spot people who are different, too,” says Kuroo. “Sometimes you get the details wrong. But I knew you were bi all the way back from Golden Week.”
“Oh.”
Shoyo thinks about this. He never considered looking for people who were different in the way he’s different, but… hasn’t he been wondering about Yachi this whole time? And hasn’t he thought Kageyama might be different, too?
“So now that’s settled,” Kuroo continues, “As long as this one”—he sits up and elbows Inuoka in the gut—“can keep his mouth shut, I can help you meet the other guys here who aren’t straight. If that’s something you want to do.”
“Yeah—yeah, thanks!” says Shoyo. He hadn’t realized until this moment how much he’s wanted that. For the first time since Kuroo sat down, Shoyo realizes he’s at a table—small though it may be—where he can talk about being different and every single person there would understand. Not just be supportive, but know exactly what he means.
It’s overwhelming.
“Then after practice tonight,” Kuroo says decisively. “You’re still coming to the third gym, right?”
“Yes!”
“Looking forward to it, shorty,” he says, and stands up. It’s a graceful movement that Shoyo could never hope to imitate. “Get ready to be crushed after lunch, though. We’re playing against you in the next rotation.”
*
The rest of the day passes in something like a blur. Shoyo is paying attention for each game, of course, but after it ends he barely recalls what transpired. For the first time, or so it feels, Shoyo wants volleyball to be over for the day.
Their three on three matches after official practice is much the same, except now Shoyo can feel Kuroo watching him as he impatiently throws himself into each new play. Shoyo feels he makes a lot of mistakes but thankfully having Bokuto on the same team means the spotlight is off him.
For the most part, anyway. Even if Kuroo hadn’t been eyeing him with that knowing smirk, Tsukishima has been paying particularly close attention to Shoyo all day. Considering his rocky start Shoyo isn’t exactly surprised. It’s just that with only four other people in the gym, the attention is a lot harder to brush aside. When Tsukishima looks at him, Shoyo feels it on his skin like a prickling, burning infection. It doesn’t help his nervous, excited state that’s the root of his embarrassing errors.
Finally Kuroo calls it, ending their practice after about four sets and about one thousand instructions shouted to Tsukishima, Lev, and Shoyo.
As they pack up Shoyo hovers near Kuroo, knowing he’s probably being obnoxious and unable to restrain himself all the same.
Kuroo glances over at him as he wipes his face and neck down with a towel and snorts. “Alright, shorty, get over here,” he says, and Shoyo goes to him like a magnet.
“We’re going?”
“Yep.” Kuroo grabs the back of Shoyo’s neck again and it feels oddly comforting. “You’ll explode if we don’t, so—”
“Hey!”
Shoyo aims a half-hearted swat at Kuroo, who dodges it by turning Shoyo away from him. Shoyo ends up facing Tsukishima, who stares at the pair of them with some unreadable expression.
Feeling like he’s done something wrong, though Tsukishima doesn’t seem to be upset, Shoyo says, “I’ll be back soon.”
“Don’t worry, I won’t keep him up late,” Kuroo adds with a teasing note Shoyo doesn’t understand. “Oy, Bokuto!” he shouts suddenly.
“Huh?”
“Let’s go!”
Bokuto cocks his head to the right, examining Kuroo and Shoyo in one brief glance, then breaks into a wide grin. “Hey, hey, hey!” he says, and bounds over to them.
“Where are you going?” Lev asks, but the three of them are already on the move.
“None of your business,” Kuroo says over his shoulder as he guides Shoyo out of the gym and into the warm night air. More quietly, he asks, “Should I have invited Tsukki?”
Shoyo doesn’t know when the two captains started referring to Tsukishima by Tadashi’s nickname, but since Tsukishima hasn’t been correcting them he doesn’t either. Even though Kuroo saying it has Shoyo reacting with a surprising spike of jealousy.
“No,” Shoyo replies after he takes a second to wrestle his unneeded emotions under control. “No, Kei isn’t like that.”
“Is that so?” says Kuroo. He doesn’t sound convinced. But he doesn’t push the issue, and Shoyo doesn’t ask him what makes him think Tsukishima was like them.