Archive of Our Own

i.

Yuu startles as his phone rings, his heart pounding and his mind sluggish with sleep as he fights to wake up. He fumbles for the phone, ignoring the grumbled complaints from the three other strangers in the room, and stumbles into the hallway, then out of the hostel’s front doors. He shivers in the cold air as he answers the call and wraps his arms around himself. 

“Yuu! Took you long enough to answer,” his grandfather greets, his voice underlined with crackling, vague static. “C’mon kid, you’re only nineteen, and it’s already seven! Up-n-at-em.” 

“It’s four in the morning, Jiji,” Yuu groans. He rubs a hand over his face and yawns. 

“Four? Huh?” 

“I’m in India, remember? I’m hours behind you.” Time zones aren’t usually a problem like this because Jiji almost always sleeps in until at least noon Japan-time; Yuu racks his brain for a reason for him to call, or even be awake, this early. 

“Well, anyhow.” Yuu pictures Jiji waving his hand through the air and shrugging. “I was awake at four when I was nineteen. Most of the time because I never went to sleep in the first place, but…that part doesn’t matter.” 

“I’m not nineteen. Is your memory going or something?” 

“You callin’ me old, you little brat?” Yuu jerks and holds the phone away from his ear as Nishinoya Mineo tears into him about his age, about respect, about how if he weren’t an ocean away, Yuu would surely be regretting his words by now. “And, anyway, you are nineteen. Last I checked, it was October tenth, even the whole way over in India.” Jiji scoffs, and Yuu blanks. 

“It — what?” 

“You’re makin’ fun of me when you’re the real old fart here. Jeez, Yuu. But, I called to tell you — HAPPY BIRTHDAY! ” Yuu pulls the phone away again, but he isn’t quite fast enough, and his grandfather’s yelling leaves his ears ringing for a split second. “You’re a good kid. Though, I guess you’re not a kid anymore, Mister World Traveler.” Jiji snickers. 

“Hey! Are you making fun of me?” Jiji only laughs, still, “The hell, Jiji — not cool! On my birthday and everything.” Yuu rolls his eyes, but he’s smiling. The wind blows through the tops of the trees of the woods that surround the hostel, and he shivers again. The moon is out and high in the sky, still, because it’s four in the freaking morning , but it casts nice shadows over everything. “Thanks, Jiji. For calling and for reminding me and — for raising me like you did.” 

“What was I supposed to do? ‘Course I was gonna raise you. Best thing I ever did, too.” And Jiji sounds so disgustingly soft as he says it that Yuu wants to cry. He doesn’t because he’s a grown man, now, and he won’t cry before sunrise. 

“Oh, shut up. You’re going all soft and mushy. Like a prune.” Yuu laughs as he says it, and he laughs a little louder and a little harder when Jiji hangs up on him. He stands on the hostel’s front porch for another few minutes, basking in the moonlight and the quiet breeze, before his fingers start to go numb with the cold.
He’s been in this little beach town in India for a few weeks now because, frankly, he doesn’t know where to go next. This hasn’t been a problem before. Usually, the flow washes him away to his next location before he gets stuck in the sand, but…the more he travels, the bigger the world seems. The more people he meets, the more isolated and alone he is. 

Yuu forces the smile back onto his face and retreats into the warmth of the small hostel. The receptionist is a nice woman named Priya who cooks breakfast every morning. Priya is a year older than Yuu, and she’s pretty — her hair is dark and long and just the right amount of wavy, and her eyes sparkle when she laughs at the dumb things Yuu says to her. She’s pretty, sure, but Yuu doesn’t find himself wanting to be with her like he would’ve, probably, if they’d met when he was in high school. 

Oh, how things change. 

Look at Yuu. Barely nineteen-and-a-few-minutes, and he’s already getting mushy and nostalgic. 

He closes the door as quietly as possible on his way back in. The floorboards creak under his weight despite his efforts to avoid making any noise, and by the time he makes it to the doorway of the room where his own bed is, Priya is coming down the stairs in her sleeping gown. She rubs at the side of her face, yawning. 

“Mister Nishinoya?” she mumbles. He’s told her to drop the Mister, to just call him Nishinoya or Noya or whatever she wants because the Mister is so foreign, so uncomfortable, and it only serves as a reminder that this is not Japan, but she still calls him Mister unthinkingly. (“It’s only polite,” she says when he insists.) He turns to look at her over his shoulder. The moonlight makes her glow in her flowing, little gown, her dark skin smooth and flawless. If Ryuu saw her, he would say something stupid like she’s a beaut or a wolf-whistle or — Yuu thinks she’s pretty, but not like Ryuu would think she’s pretty. Maybe that means something. Maybe it doesn’t. 

“Sorry,” he whispers back, one hand resting on the edge of the doorframe, “had a phone call. I didn’t mean to wake you.” 

“No, no. I was getting up anyway. Just wanted to check on you.” She smiles, and she looks far more awake, now. More awake than Yuu feels, at least, but he’s too awake to go back to sleep. He plans on curling up on his bed until sunrise, awake and trying not to think too much about everything. 

Something about birthdays, man. Make him mushy and weird. He’s been like that since forever, and usually, Ryu is around to make fun of him for it. This is the first year they’ve spent their birthdays apart since they met, and that alone aches somewhere deep inside of Yuu’s chest. 

“A cup of tea?” Priya suggests, nodding toward the kitchen. Yuu shoots a look into the dark bedroom where he can hear three different people breathing, asleep. His sheets are ruffled and cold, by now, and his backpack sits at the foot of his bed. He turns back to Priya with a small smile. 

“Yeah, sure.” 

He follows her into the kitchen without another word from either of them. He can’t tell if it’s because they’re both still half asleep or if four a.m. just isn’t the time for conversation. Priya keeps her back to him as she heats the water, and Yuu takes a seat on one of the counters like he does every morning before he leaves to explore the town a little more. There isn’t much left to explore; some people have started to recognize him on the street, greeting him with short waves or nods like they’re acquaintances, maybe, instead of strangers. 

As she pours the water into two different mugs, she breaks their silence. 

“It’s your birthday today, isn’t it?” she asks, which isn’t what he’s expecting. His surprise must show on his face when she turns around because Priya laughs as she slides a mug and a teabag toward him. “Your passport, you gave it to me when you checked in. Date of birth, October tenth. Today is October tenth, no matter how early it is.” 

“Oh. Yeah, I’m nineteen today.” It feels weird to say, for some reason. He doesn’t feel nineteen. He barely felt eighteen, to be honest. Like an imposter who buys his own plane tickets and checks himself into hotels, like he’s just been waiting, for the past year, for an adult to come around. “My grandfather called me — that’s why I was awake — to remind me.” 

“You would forget your head if no one reminded you you needed it, Mister Nishinoya.” She smiles down into her cup of tea. The tea here is different than it is back home, which is the case with everywhere he’s been since he graduated and left Japan. He doesn’t know if it’s the water that makes it different, or the tea itself, or him , or the way it’s prepared, but the tea is different everywhere. Here, in India, the tea is spicy, all hard edges on his taste buds, where Japanese tea is soft and gentle. Priya drinks it without problem, but it makes his body tingle like a foot that’s been sat on for too long. “I remember being nineteen.” 

“You’re only a year older than I am,” he points out, but her expression is wistful and sparkling. 

“So young —

“You’re twenty — 

“So youthful —

“Not even a year, you’re seven months — 

“Practically a baby —

“ Priya ,” Yuu says, snorting with laughter. She grins at him over the lip of her mug, her eyes bright and her teeth straight and white. Another pang of something unidentifiable (something he is too tired to identify, or maybe he just doesn’t want to) hits Yuu through the middle of the chest like a sharp, frozen icicle as the two of them fall into a comfortable quiet. Priya nurses her mug between both of her hands, her fingers wrapped around the porcelain and her eyes trained on her reflection in the bottom of the cup. Yuu watches her and blurts out, “I think I want to go back to Japan soon.” 

Well .

That’s new. 

He and Priya blink at each other, both of them surprised. She lowers her mug and sets it on the table, her full, dark lips parted and moving around silent words like she’s suddenly lost her voice. Yuu wears a similar wide-eyed and gaping expression. His own words take him by surprise; never before, in his year of jumping from one place to the next, leaving behind strangers and local secrets, has he wanted to go back to Japan, not since he left it. He’s made a promise to himself not to revisit any one place, no matter how much he enjoyed it while he was there, so he always sort of figured he wouldn’t go back to Miyagi until he forgot everything about it, until he forgot the little things, even: the way the sunrise looked in his bedroom, the smell of the shop on the corner, the number of streets he had to turn onto to get to school. Those memories linger on the edge of his mind (the sunrise casts orange-lined shadows on the wall in the shape of his dresser, the smell of the shop is stale and warm like plain bread or rice, and he takes a left, two rights, and another left to get to school) but here he is, with Priya gawking at him. 

He wants to go back to Japan. 

“Japan?” she asks. Her eyes flutter, her long lashes just barely brushing the tops of her cheeks. 

“Yeah, Japan. I guess.” He isn’t really sure, but now that he’s blurted it out, maybe it’s not such a bad idea. Maybe trying to force himself to forget all the small, little details of home has made him miss it more, made him want to return just to prove to himself that those small, little things don’t change, haven’t changed, won’t change for as long as he’s gone. He doesn’t tell Priya any of this, despite her perfectly quirked brow and dark eyes that whirl with questions she’s too polite to ask. He knows her as nothing more than the woman who’s housed and fed him for longer than he’s ever stayed in one place before. Weeks, maybe, but he isn’t sure what day he stumbled into this little beach town, dressed terribly for the weather in his long pants and flannel shirt. 

“Japan,” she says again as if working the word over, pressing it into the corners of her mouth and under her tongue. Priya makes a face into her mug and swirls her tea around, biting her lip. 

“Um,” Yuu says. “Yeah. Japan, you know, like — 

And she must not be so polite to not ask any of the questions she so obviously wants to ask because she interrupts him with, “Why?” 

“I’m — that’s where I’m from?” 

“No, no,” she shakes her head, and her hair dances around her head before falling over her slim shoulders again. “Why are you going back now, Mister Nishinoya?” There is something in her voice, the soft vulnerability of it, and the Mister that is so different from what he knows (the honorifics are different, here, just like the tea and just like the air on the beach and just like so many other things) that gives Yuu pause. He blinks, smacks his lips, and tries to will away the wetness on the backs of his eyes. It’s dark enough in the kitchen, he thinks, that she won’t see the redness of his face or the shine in the corners of his eyes.

“I — I don’t know,” he says. It’s a half-lie or a three-quarters-lie. He shrugs and jumps when she smacks both of her hands palm-down on the counter, her mug abandoned between her elbows. She shakes her head, her hair jumping and dancing again and her eyes screwed closed and her lips pressed together. 

“Huh-uh,” she says. “Huh-uh, no. Not I don’t know .” She keeps shaking her head like the prettiest bobblehead he’s ever seen. She almost glows in the moonlight. “You know, you know.” 

“Priya, I don’t —

“You do. ” She grunts and picks her mug up again, and her tea is no longer steaming into her face. Still, she blows across the surface of it to see the ripples. The silence stretches between them until Yuu’s insides start to buzz with nerves; it’s too late to answer, now, the quiet has gone on too long, but she’s waiting, and he won’t be able to leave unless he answers. Part of him wishes he had just gone back to bed after Jiji hung up, but the other part of him is sure he would’ve never left this place if he hadn’t ended up here, in this moment, drinking lukewarm, hard-edged tea with Priya. He opens his mouth to respond, finally ( I really don’t know, Priya. I don’t know. ) but one of the dormitory doors closes out in the hallway, the floor creaks, and a tall, broad-shouldered woman walks in, yawning and stretching her hands up over her head so her thin tank top rides up and exposes a shadowy tattoo on her hip, half-hidden by the waistband of her shorts. 

“G’morning,” the woman mutters as she flicks on the stovetop under the cooling kettle. 

“Morning,” Yuu greets at the same time Priya nods and says, “Good morning, Mrs. Johannessen.” Yuu finishes his tea as the two of them make small talk (“How goes it?” “Oh, you know.”) before he excuses himself back to his cot. The sheets are cool and rumpled as he straightens them, wrinkled from him leaving the bed in such haste this morning, and his backpack is heavy as he heaves it onto his shoulders. Practically his whole life is in his backpack, now, a ratty, old thing he’s had since high school — on the day he graduated, he’d gone home and dumped everything into the garbage and left with it the next week. By now, the zipper is dull and catches more often than it doesn’t, and the ends of the straps are frayed, the bottom long since faded into a jaundiced, sickly shade of yellow. 

He sneaks down the hallway to the front door. It’s still dark out, the moon barely visible between the trees surrounding the hostel. Distantly, he can hear the sound of waves on the beach, a calm swish that covers the silence of early morning because it is — it’s early. The clock in the kitchen read 5:17 just before he left, but the people in this little town are early risers, for the most part. There are lights on in shop windows as he wanders through the streets, despite the “CLOSED” signs still hung in doorways and window sills. But he finds a little bakery shop, the one he’d bought lunch from on his first day here — a sandwich served with some kind of sauce he can’t remember the name of — and the front door is propped open invitingly despite the early hour and lingering moonlight. 

The inside of the shop is almost stiflingly warm and humming with a noise he can’t place. There’s someone mulling about in the back of the shop, but Yuu is the only other person inside. He lingers awkwardly in the doorway, debating on calling out to whoever is in the back, but before he can, a man a few inches shorter than Yuu (which is to say, the man is absolutely tiny ) emerges. The man startles at the sight of Yuu before laughing and shaking his head at himself. 

“Sorry,” Yuu stutters, suddenly feeling very unsure of himself. He fiddles with the straps of his backpack and shifts from foot to foot. “Are you — you’re open?” 

“Oh, yes. Yes, we’re open!” The man has small glasses perched on his nose and a mustache that’s graying around the corners of his mouth, and his sweater hangs off his narrow shoulders as he hobbles toward the counter. He waves a dark, bony hand through the air. “We just don’t normally get anyone in before sunrise, is all. Most tourists like to sleep in — vacation, time to rest.” He tilts his head to the side and pillows his cheek on his hands, imitating sleep. “Even then, hostel owners cook breakfast. Good for their business, not so much for mine.” He waves his hand in the air again. Any other morning, Yuu would be eating breakfast with Priya and the others at the hostel, but he needed out this morning. His restlessness, which had evaded him for weeks until this morning, is returning in full force. “It is all right, I suppose. I just started the ovens, so anything you order will be from yesterday — not to say stale or old, no, just left over.” 

“That’s okay,” Yuu told him, not quite sure if the man was finished talking or if he wanted an answer at all. “Do you have any cupcakes left from yesterday, then?” If the man thinks it’s weird that Yuu wants a cupcake before the sun is even up, he says nothing. He taps his finger on his chin for a second before grunting and bending over to get into the glass display case next to his cash register. He procures a small cupcake with light frosting adorned with a curled flower petal. It looks dainty in the man’s hand, nothing like Yuu would usually eat, but he digs out his wallet anyway. 

“Just one?” the man asks, his bushy eyebrows raised. Yuu nods, swallowing around his rough throat. “A candle, then?” 

“What?” 

“I have candles if you need one.” The man’s lips are turned down in a frown. Not pitying but…Yuu averts his eyes. 

“How did you know?” 

“Ah, just a feeling,” the man says. “A birthday or a life celebration — seen it before. One cupcake, lonely eyes.” Yuu hadn’t been aware his eyes were anything, let alone lonely. Is he lonely? “Hold right there, I’ll get you a candle.” The man turns on his heel and takes the little cupcake into the back room. 

“I don’t have — a lighter, anyway. But the man returns with a candle perched in the heap of icing, the flame flickering shadows across his aged face. He carries the cupcake with both hands, his steps slow and deliberate as he returns to the counter. 

“Go on. A wish can only come true if someone’s around to see you make it, didn’t you know?” The man’s eyes are sparkling and lively, but Yuu blames it on the flame of the candle. He slides the cupcake over the counter, and Yuu leans over it. With a whoosh of air, the flame flickers out. 

Yuu isn’t sure what to wish for. For the heaviness in his chest to go away? To stop feeling like this? It seems sad to wish for that — pathetic, really. So he wishes for nothing, and he’s glad about the tradition of keeping the birthday wish secret because he isn’t sure what he would tell the man if he insisted on knowing. 

“Good, good. Now your wish can come true.” The man glances at him over the top of his glasses, smiling, before he turns to the register. “One gulkand cupcake, discounted. 110 rupees, sir?” Yuu slides the bills across the counter and plucks the cupcake off the counter. “I wish you well, stranger.” The man nods before bounding back into the back room. 

Yuu wanders along the beach until he finds a good spot to sit and eat his cupcake. He ends up sitting on a big rock that he dusts the sand off of, his legs crossed in front of him and the ocean lapping at the shore below him. He turns the little cupcake over in his hands, thumbing at the edge of the wrapper. 

“This is stupid,” Yuu mutters to himself, to the ocean, to the empty beach. He unwraps the cupcake, flicks the little rose petal off the top of the icing, and takes a big bite out of one side. It’s a little bitter but sweet and flowery at the same time, nothing like any cupcake he’s ever had before in his life. The rose petal probably meant something, then, but Yuu doesn’t know what roses taste like, so it doesn’t really matter. He eats the rest of the cupcake in a few bites, licks his lips, and fishes his phone out of his pocket. 

Before the sun rises, he books himself a plane ticket for Japan. 

ii.

Yuu doesn’t have much to pack for his trip home. His backpack, a gift to take home for Jiji because he’ll complain half-jokingly if he doesn’t get any sort of souvenir, but that’s it. Nineteen years old, and Yuu has very little to show for himself. Does he have friends, anymore? Friends in more than just passing, people he’ll never see or talk to again once he moves onto the next place? No job, of course, and he isn’t going to college. He’s got a high school diploma and too many pictures on his phone of sunsets and markets and buildings in foreign places. 

“You’re really going,” Priya says as Yuu checks out at the front desk. It’s literally a desk, a rickety thing Yuu might’ve done his homework at back when he was in school or something. She writes in the reception book, her messy scrawl stretched across the lines in a language he can’t read. “Back to Japan, then? Not just telling me that?” 

“No, I’m headed back to Japan. For real — not lying about that.” He rubs the back of his neck and laughs. 

“Excited?” She sets her pen down and folds her hands together as she looks up at him. She looks different in the day than she did in the kitchen, under the moonlight streaming in through the thin curtains. Her hair is tied back at the base of her skull, away from her face, making her cheekbones look sharper, and she wears makeup — not a lot, just some dark stuff around her eyes and glossy stuff on her lips. Yuu shrugs; he doesn’t think whatever he’s feeling now could be called excitement, per se, but he doesn’t tell her that. “I can’t imagine ever leaving here,” she says, “let alone staying away for as long as you’ve been away from Japan.” She makes it sound like he and Japan are magnets, held together at similar ends so they repel each other. 

Priya’s heard his stories. He regaled her and the others staying in the hostel with his tales of seeing the world during breakfast one morning soon after he checked in. Most of the people who were so captivated with his recount that morning are long gone by now, their restlessness getting the better of them and forcing them to move on. He feels like he’s been stuck in a sludge since he got here. Each step takes more effort than he can handle. 

“I expected to stay away for longer, honestly,” Yuu admits, “but I guess not.” 

“Why are you going now, then?” she asks, and there is no broad-shouldered woman to interrupt them this time, to save him from having to think too hard on it. No one is here; it’s midday, and by now, everyone else living in the hostel is down by the beach or hiking through the woods or finding all the nooks and crannies of the town that Yuu has already seen and found. They won’t be back until sunset at the earliest.

Yuu heaves a sigh that sits heavy on his shoulders.

“I want to go home ,” he says, and doesn’t he just sound so pathetic? His voice doesn’t quite crack, but it’s a close thing. God. 

“It’s lonely, isn’t it?” Priya asks, nodding before he can reply. The man in the bakery shop had called his eyes lonely, and maybe she sees whatever it is he saw, too. Yuu can’t see it; he’d come back to the hostel after he booked his ticket to Japan, told Priya he would be checking out, and retreated to the bathroom so he could pick apart his face in the tiny mirror hung in the locker with his name on it. The mirror is so small he can barely see his whole face in it at one time, and he has to get closer and farther away and turn his face this way and that in hopes of catching himself at the right angle to see what the man in the bakery saw. Sad eyes, lonely eyes. 

Yuu doesn’t see it. 

(He ate alone on the beach on his nineteenth birthday, could go days without talking to anyone out here if not for Priya and her polite conversation, and he has no friends anymore, not since he left Japan for the first time two months after he graduated. He’s had acquaintances, if he could call them that, in every place he’s gone: business-owners, hostel workers, tourists, travelers, locals, all people he made laugh and shared drinks and meals and hours with and has never and will never see again after he drifts on to the next place, but he isn’t — he isn’t lonely. The word only makes the hole in his chest gape wider, ache worse, so it can’t be that. How pitiful it would be to be lonely , and Yuu hates pity.) 

(There is pity in Priya’s eyes, now, as she waits for his answer.) 

“No, no,” Yuu waves his hand in front of his face as if swatting the idea of loneliness away, “not lonely. My grandfather just asked when I was coming back — a lie, Jiji would never ask such a thing — “so I thought, you know, ‘might as well surprise him. Show up on his, our, uh, doorstep without warning.’” Yuu shrugs and shifts on his feet. Priya flips through his passport, her thumb brushing over the pages filled with stamps from so many other countries; China, Australia, Greenland, Argentina, Malaysia, Finland, so many their edges overlap, the ink muddied and faded. 

“So nice of you, Mister Nishinoya. You love your grandfather?” She hums to herself as she goes over the details of his stay in her documents, marking his name, his bed number, his locker combination, everything, and he stands on the other side of the desk curling his fingers into the material of his shorts because what kind of question is that? He draws in a sharp breath through his nose, but she doesn’t seem to notice. 

“Yes, yeah. Jiji — he’s all I have.” Please, just give me back the passport, tell me ‘have a good life, Mister Nishinoya,’ let me get out of here.  

Priya, as if somehow hearing his internal pleading, glances up from her records, closes his passport, and slides it across the desk with a polite, measured smile. Professional and nothing like she’d been in the kitchen before sunrise. 

“I hope you enjoyed your stay,” she says, folding her hands together. “You’re always welcome back if you ever find yourself in town.” It will take him so long to forget the little things about this place, he doubts he’ll ever be back. He doesn’t tell Priya this, of course, just forces a close-lipped smile as he tucks his passport into one of his backpack’s pockets. 

“Try not to forget me too fast,” he says, half-joking.

“Never, Mister Nishinoya. Never, ever.” She shakes her head, and he is reminded of the way it fell over her shoulders in the kitchen, long and thick and dark and almost metallic in the moonlight. 

Yuu turns and leaves the hostel, and that is the last time he ever sees Priya. 

iii.

Miyagi is the same as it had been the day Yuu left, which is both comforting and not. He’d been hoping for it to be just how he remembered it: purple flowers blooming on the bushes in Misaki’s front yard, the distant sound of cars braking and accelerating away from the stop sign at the end of Yuu’s street, the even more distant sounds of children playing on the playground the next street over. At the same time, he hates it. Nothing is different. The houses have not been painted or renovated or changed; if Yuu didn’t know any better, he’d say the grass hadn’t even grown since he left like the world stopped the moment he got onto that first train. He’s not so self-centered to think like that, but…the stagnancy of Miyagi drove him up a wall in high school. It’s the reason he wanted to get away so bad. He’d lived in the same house since primary school, went to school with mostly the same people, never saw or knew anything different. 

He doesn’t hate the lack of change—it’s comforting in more ways than Yuu can explain, even to himself. He tries not to dwell on it, the way he hasn’t felt so peaceful in longer than he can remember. 

No, he hates the fact that everything he hated a few years ago, (that is to say, the idleness of the town, as if it’s always on standby, waiting for a signal for something) he takes solace in now. Finds warmth in it. Has he changed that much? 

Yuu stumbles past Jiji’s old car, a classic thing that’s covered in pollen and is hardly ever used, anyway. He brushes his hand over the roof, leaving three bold lines in the grime on it, and he knocks his hip into the corner of the bumper so hard it ricochets through his whole body. He’s disoriented, jetlagged, and wide awake from the recycled, stale air from the airplane and the time difference. He’s sort of drunk on it, with the way his vision is too sharp around the edges like some picture someone edited too much and his stumbling and the unreal quality of the sound in his ears (a car’s exhaust pipe spluttering somewhere down the road, kids laughing and yelling, someone talking somewhere, all of it wavering and distorted). 

He’s long since given up on the idea of surprising his grandfather. Subtlety has never been his thing (“ ROLLING THUNDER! ” God), and he yearns for his own bed if it’s still there. For all he knows, Jiji changed his bedroom into some sort of sewing room like old women do in movies or something. If it’s anything, Yuu hopes it’s not a sewing room. 

He stumbles up the single porch step. The boards protest his weight, and he all but falls into the doorbell, catching himself on the doorframe before he can faceplant into the siding. He hears the echo of the doorbell through the door, a loud and unfamiliar noise — not like anyone who came over when Yuu was in high school ever rang the doorbell; Ryuu, Shoyo, his sisters’ friends, all of them came in without knocking because they were family, and Yuu isn’t sure why he’s ringing it now. He could walk in like the rest of them. Toe off his shoes in the entryway and puts them where they go (in a pile next to the door, not the cubby), but he rings the doorbell. There is nothing, no movement or sound, on the other side of the door for so long that Yuu debates on ringing the bell again or just walking in, maybe, but there are loud, clumsy steps accompanied by muttering getting louder inside the house before he can make up his mind. The door swings open so fast the hinges creak. 

“Quit ringing the —” Jiji cuts off his own muttering and drops his hand away from the door handle, his eyes widening. “Yuu? Oh my God! ” Jiji surges forward and wraps his arms around Yuu’s middle. He lifts him an inch off the ground before making a groaning noise and dropping him back down, but his arms stay firmly around Yuu’s middle. Yuu pats Jiji on the shoulder, a little awkward and a lot disoriented. 

When Jiji pulls away, finally, the tip of his wide nose is red like he’s about to sneeze. He rubs at it and sniffles resolutely before his expression drops to a deep scowl. 

“What’d you go ringing the damn bell for, huh?” He crosses his arms over his chest and furrows his bushy, grayed eyebrows. There are more wrinkles on his face than Yuu remembers, but that is the only sign of time passing.

Yuu rubs the back of his neck and lies, “dramatic effect, Jiji, that’s all.” 

“Ringing the bell like you didn’t tramp through my house for seventeen years, dammit. Dramatic effect? You’re makin’ me miss my program, Yuu.” Jiji cranes up and catches Yuu by the earlobe, tugging and making Yuu wince. 

“Fine, fine! I’ll go back to where I came from —” 

“Huh-uh, no you don’t.”

“Well, are you gonna let me in, old man?” Yuu shifts where he stands. “Or are you gonna make me stand out here on the porch all day?” 

“If you’re going to be like that — calling me old man, ringing my bell — I might as well leave you out here.” But he opens the door wide enough for Yuu to slip into the tiled genkan. The door closes behind him, the warmth of the sun disappearing from the back of his neck as he toes into the slippers Jiji keeps by the step. 

The house isn’t much different, but it hasn’t changed since Yuu came to live with Jiji with his sisters: grayish-green walls the shade of desaturated juniper needles, an antique couch that smells, still, like the many, many people who owned it before Jiji found it at the local market, bookshelves cluttered with weathered books and empty vases and little figurines and picture frames propped up on rickety stands. There are a few new things — a new television, a quilt draped over the back of the couch that looks homemade and lopsided, a ceramic paperweight shaped like a mouse — but they might as well have been there for forever. 

“Come, come,” Jiji beckons, disappearing into the hallway. His voice seems so big in the house like all the rooms are full of him and him alone. Yuu follows him into the kitchen, still wearing his backpack despite the way the straps are digging into his shoulders and his back is aching. “I’ll make tea. You must be tired from traveling, no? I hate planes — you know it, I hate them. Too many people, too many ways things could go wrong. Have I ever told you the story of the time I nearly died in a plane crash?” He had, many times, often while Yuu was calling him from the airport between flights. “Oh, no matter. This isn’t about me — tell me everything, Yuu. All the places you went, the people you met, the things you saw. All of it.” He places the kettle on the stove burner, the gas clicking five times before the flame flickers to life, before ambling over to the cheap table tucked to the side of the room. Jiji lowers himself into one of the seats with a grunt. 

“You’ve heard it all before, Jiji,” Yuu tells him. “I sent you pictures and everything.” Jiji waves his hand through the air in front of his face and scoffs, shaking his head. The white tufts of hair on the sides of his head, just over his ears, dance wildly with the movement. 

“I know, I know. But other things make a story — the way your face looks when you tell it, what you do with your hands, things I can’t get over the phone or in pictures. So tell me all of it again, I want to hear it.” Yuu all but collapsed in the seat across from Jiji, settling his backpack heavily against the leg of the table with a heaving sigh. He debates on where to start, how much to say. He chews on his lip and turns the last so many months over in his head.

“Well, you saw me off at the train station to Kamakura. It wasn’t anything too flashy — nice little beach town, I guess. Lots of tourists. Spent a night sleeping on the beach because all the rooms in town were full, but it was warm enough, and the waves and stars…I’ve never seen anything like it, you know?” The stars, that night, had been so bright and clear in the cloudless sky, like a painting or like he’d been floating in space itself, detached from his body down in the sand. Of course, he’d woken up with sand everywhere and hadn’t gotten the last of it out of his hair for days, but the stars. He still dreams of them. “After Kamakura, I took a plane to Bangladesh, and I went around all over there for a week.” 

“I hate planes,” Jiji mutters, looking darkly down at his hands where they’re folded over the table. The kettle, over on the stove, rattles once but doesn’t squeal. 

“Saw the pink palace, the ship-breaking yards on one of the coasts, a little bit of everything. A few days before I wanted to move onto the next place, I met this group of people — Americans or Canadians, somewhere western, I think — who were headed toward the mountains in Nepal, so I hitched a ride with them and climbed a bit of Lhotse.” The kettle squeals, finally, so Jiji stands with great effort and pours them both a mug of steaming water. He debates over the teabags in the drawer before plucking two out from the assortment and dropping them into the water, letting them steep. “It was amazing, Jiji, never seen so much of the world at one time as I did on that mountain. I can’t even imagine Everest, but — God — Lhoste was enough on its own, all of us struggling to breathe just from standing there half the time. And it was freezing all the time, so I turned back and caught a flight over to Saudi Arabia.” Yuu smiles and accepts the tea with a grateful bow of his head. Excitement races through him at the smell — like home, that’s what it smells like. Not like Priya’s tea or the tea he’d had up on the mountain (practically plain water with how weak it was, made from melted snow and the few tea leaves the others had on them) or anywhere else. Yuu basks in it. “Thanks, Jiji.” 

“It’s just tea, Yuu,” Jiji tells him, giving him a strange look over the top of his own mug. Yuu doesn’t expect him or anyone else to understand the way he’s missed the tea, out of anything he could miss. 

“I know, I know.” Just tea… “But the mosques in Saudi Arabia. They were gorgeous, and I’ve never…the desert is bigger than I thought, you know? I’ve only ever seen so much sand on beaches, but it’s different out there. Not the same color, coming up in your face when the wind blows — if the wind blows, God it was hot. There were some people out there who told me to head out on a safari — said it would change my life, and I was willing to go just about anywhere, you know. I was sort of restless, I guess.” 

“ Sort of ?” Jiji scoffs, running his finger along the round lip of his cup. “You’ve always been that way, Yuu. Always moving. Getting you down for bed used to be a damn nightmare, kid.” 

“ Anyway, ” Yuu goes on, ignoring Jiji like he hadn’t heard him (he had), “I crossed over into Africa and went to Uganda. Did you know they let you go looking for wild animals out there? Like gorillas, chimpanzees, elephants, all of that sort of thing.” Yuu puffs his chest out proudly. “I made friends with a chimp, there. He kept following me around, hanging off of me, offering me fruit. It was amazing.” 

“Oh, I bet you both got along just fine. ” Something about the way he says it — the sparkle in Jiji’s aged eyes, the smirk on his thin cheeks — makes Yuu squawk, indignant. Jiji snorts with laughter and clutches the edge of the table. 

“So rude, Jiji. I could leave, you know.” He wouldn’t. He doesn’t know where to go, now, after everything. Jiji only makes a go on motion, and Yuu rolls his eyes. “I was tired of sweating so much, so I went north. Slovakia, Poland, Germany, Denmark, that sort of region.” 

“Cold up there?” 

“Not as cold as you’d think, probably, but not so hot.” Yuu shrugs. “They were all very similar but…different. Lots of potatoes in Slovakia, foods I can’t pronounce in Denmark, drinking in Germany. Lots of different people, languages, all of that. Different cultures, I guess you’d call it. I loved it, but it was very…” lonely , he doesn’t say, wouldn’t say. “I went on to Haiti because I wanted to see how their island was different than ours, and I wanted to go overseas, like, for real. It’s so busy down there — busy and crowded, but nice. The beaches were amazing, and I learned how to surf better there than I did in Kamakura. I spent most of my time over there in the ocean. The water was just amazing, and the coral and fish…thousands of small fish just brushing past you like they’ve got somewhere to be or something. You could reach out and touch every part of the ocean, but you didn’t want to because that would ruin it, you know?” His tea is going cold, but he doesn’t care. Even cold, the tea is good, better than anything he’s had in so long despite the many wonderful things he’s eaten. “After Haiti, I came back over to this side of the Atlantic. I found myself in this little beach town in India for weeks before I wanted to leave.” Not because it was much of anything special but because he hadn’t known where to go next.

“And then I called you, yeah?” 

“Yeah, you called me, and I figured I’d stop over here and surprise you. Say hi, visit for a while.” Yuu shrugs in a way he hopes is nonchalant and blasé but probably isn’t if the knowing look Jiji gives him is any indication. He chews his lip and sips his tea, and the silence stretches between them like a rubber band. 

“That’s all?” Jiji asks.

“Yeah, that’s all.” Yuu shrugs again. 

“And how long will you stay?” 

“You tryin’ to get rid of me already? I’ve been here — what — an hour? Less?” Yuu shakes his head, but it makes his vision swim with the way the plane-drunkenness hasn’t yet faded. The world is too clear around him and blurs when he moves too fast, which makes him dizzy and disoriented even as he sits at the kitchen table. This place, it looks like home and smells like home, and the tea, but — it doesn’t feel like home. It’s cold, it’s Jiji’s place, not Yuu’s anymore. 

No, he isn’t lonely. 

“No, just wondering.” Jiji shrugs. “And I don’t believe the bullshit about wanting to surprise me, either. You were not gone long enough to want to just pop in for a visit, and I would have been just as surprised if you’d just called me.” Of course, of course Jiji would call him out. Yuu avoids his eye by observing his own reflection in his tea. “So, tell me. Why are you back, Yuu?” 

“I — I don’t…I can’t explain it.” 

“Are you dying?” 

“What? No, of course not.” 

“Sick?”

“No.” 

“In trouble — should I start avoiding the cops?” 

“Jiji, what the hell?” 

“Just tell me!”

“No! I didn’t break any laws, I’m not sick or dying, I’m just — I don’t know where to go.” Yuu’s shoulders slump, and he crosses his arms over his chest and glances out the window. “I keep trying to go with the flow, but it’s like…the water’s all dried up. There’s no flow to go with.” 

“The world is bigger than you thought,” Jiji tells him, leaning over the table to pat Yuu on the wrist. He nods sagely and slips off his seat. “Go, back to your room. Get some rest.” Yuu blinks, licks his lips, nods, and stands, hauling his backpack off the kitchen floor. He only now realizes how dirty it is, the fabric not faded but dulled by the grayish dirt settled over it. He winces, but Jiji doesn’t comment on it. 

His room, he’s glad to see, is still his room, not a sewing room or anything. In fact, the place looks like Jiji hasn’t touched it since Yuu left; the air is dusty, stale, the bed sheets wrinkled around the edges, his desk cluttered with a two-year-old calendar and pencils and pens. There is a thin layer of settled dust on his bookshelf, and there are clothes on the floor that he’s now grown out of: a red shirt with faded kanji on the back, a pair of shorts, a Karasuno practice shirt, an old pair of tennis shoes. He picks up the practice shirt and puts it away in his dresser but kicks the other things into the corner near the door before collapsing face-down on the bed. The sheets are cool and stiff and smell old and like the detergent Jiji used before Yuu left. He draws in a lungful of the smell before turning onto his back. 

The sun is up, still, and streaming through his window, which he opens to air out the room and let some of the warmth in. If Yuu sleeps now, he’ll be awake all night, and he knows from a number of experiences with a ruined sleep schedule that it’s easier to just keep himself away despite the exhaustion that always comes with flying. 

He mills about his room, straightens his desk, throws the old calendar into the full wastebasket next to the desk chair. There are things on the walls — posters, one of his favorite band (it’s changed since he left), a few movie posters he and Ryuu snatched from the local movie theatre — and so many pictures tacked up all over. All of them are from high school, of people he hasn’t seen in a year or more, and the sight of them makes his chest ache again. He clutches the front of his shirt and gapes at the many number of glossy, curled-edged pictures on his bedroom wall. 

The first is from Nationals, when they made it in Yuu’s second year, taken outside the Tokyo Metropolitan Gymnasium. All of them — even Tsukishima — are smiling wide, and the picture itself vibrates with excitement and energy. Yuu runs his finger along the edge of it with a soft smile of his own; he can almost hear the noise of the parking lot that day: cars honking, other teams cheering and bickering and talking as they made their way into the gym, buses blowing out hot air as they parked, Yachi’s meek and slightly awkward we should take a photo! All of us! followed closely by Shouyou’s good idea, Yachi! Even the coaches! In the picture, Yuu is clutching Ryuu’s jacket and jumping, beaming, laughing, happier than he’s ever been in his life, probably. He thought, back then, that he might burst with how much he was feeling. 

The first years graduated while Yuu was away. He would’ve loved to have come back and seen them off like they saw him off (Shouyou and Yachi both crying, Yamaguchi not far behind him, Kageyama and Tsukishima both acting all tough despite their red noses and averted eyes) but he was still going with the flow, then, traveling and unwilling to come home yet. Shouyou is already in Brazil, a fact which he’d excitedly informed Yuu of while he was staying in India, but the others haven’t done much in the way of keeping in touch. He isn’t sure where Kageyama is, now, or where Tsukishima ended up. Yamaguchi, last he heard, was planning on going into the city, and so was Yachi. 

The second years have kept in touch, for the most part. Ryuu is going to university in the city — Kyoto, not Tokyo. Narita and Kinoshita are living together in some small, blip-on-the-map industrial prefecture that looks to Yuu like some sort of post-apocalyptic setting where everyone is dead and the skies are constantly gray and raining ash, but the two of them seem to enjoy it out there. Ennoshita is doing well in his community college in Fukushima, as of the last time Yuu talked to him (which was probably months ago by now, so Ennoshita could be flunking out or graduated already for all Yuu knows). 

And the third years — Daichi, Suga, and Asahi — are all in Tokyo together. Sometimes, Yuu stumbles across Suga’s social media profiles (but never follows him; debates on it, always, but never follows him) and sees pictures of the three of them together in their little apartment or in coffee shops or at Daichi’s academy graduation and Asahi’s graduation. They all look so happy, and Yuu, looking at the pictures from Nationals, misses them fiercely. 

Maybe he should go to Tokyo. It’s not far, a few hours by train, maybe — nothing at all like the flight he just got off of and certainly not the longest train ride he’s endured. 

Not yet, Yuu decides, and he lays down on the bed so he doesn’t have to look at all of the pictures of himself smiling and happy anymore. The pictures don’t feel like him; that Yuu is genuine and energetic, and he has no idea how small and alone he’ll turn out to be. 

Maybe he really should’ve just gone to university like everyone told him to. 

iv. 

Yuu calls Shouyou before the end of his first week in Miyagi (spent sleeping and sitting around in his old bedroom instead of doing anything worth doing). The call rings out the first time until that irritating voice forces him to either hang up or leave a message: the person you’re trying to reach is currently unavailable… He hangs up, calls again, and when the call is just about to ring out a second time, the line clicks.

“ NOYA! ” Shouyou yells, and Yuu’s cheeks stretch around a grin despite himself. 

“Shou- YOU! ” he crows, doing his best to match Shouyou’s energy (and volume). On the other side of the world, Shouyou laughs and says something that Yuu can’t hear to someone whose accent is foreign as far as he can make out. Shouyou calls out in another language, there’s the squeal of a door hinge, and sudden silence over the phone, and for the first time, Yuu realizes that it’s past midnight in Brazil despite the sun shining overhead here in Japan. The absence of music, which Yuu hadn’t quite realized was there in the first place, makes his ears ring. “This a bad time?”

“No, no, not at all. I was probably going to turn in soon anyway—Friday nights are the only nights I can party, but I always regret it when I wake up, so you really saved me, Noya!” Shouyou laughs, and he’s so different from the last time Yuu talked to him (how long ago, now, was that? Three weeks? A month and a half? Too long, at any rate). He’s older, more aware of himself and more confident with his words. His voice no longer sounds quite like Yuu remembers. 

He blames it on the distance, the speakers in his phone, and any other thin lie he can come up with. 

“Brazil’s pretty brutal, then?” Yuu asks, wincing. God, how awkward. If Shouyou notices Yuu’s stilted change of topic, he makes no indication of it.

“Oh, yeah. More brutal than old Coach Ukai.” Shouyou laughs. “Team’s amazing here. I’ve even got a cool nickname — Ninja Shouyou. Everybody calls me that.” Yuu can almost hear the way Shouyou is puffing out his chest, jabbing at himself with his thumb, smirking as he stumbles along whatever dark Brazilian sidewalk he’s on right now. 

“That sounds…fake as hell.” Yuu booms with laughter, the first bit of genuine laughter he’s had in longer than he’d like to think about, as Shouyou squawks indignantly and insists that it’s true, everyone in Brazil knows him only as Ninja Shouyou. “Sure, sure.” Yuu shakes his head, rolls his eyes, but he’s still smiling.

The front door opens and closes, the windows down the hall rattling in their frames. Jiji calls out, back from his walk or the grocery store or Jin’s house next door. Yuu calls out his greeting, tilting the phone away from his mouth but not bothering to mute himself. Rude, maybe, but Shouyou won’t care. 

“Where are you? Are you home?” Shouyou asks.

“Oh, uh. Yeah, I’m back in Japan right now. Came back for a while.” Yuu shrugs, suddenly embarrassed or ashamed or some other feeling he can’t quite identify beyond the ache in the center of his sternum and the hotness in his face. 

“For your birthday?” 

“Nah, just…got a little lonely, you know? So many people, but I didn’t know anyone anywhere. It was great, seeing everything I wanted to, but that sucked a little.” His tone isn’t as affected as he feels, faux-casual at best. 

“I know ! I felt that when I came to Brazil. I never knew what anyone was saying, and when I went out, people would just look at me. I wished I could’ve dragged Tobio here with me, but…he had his own training with the Adlers, you know? I couldn’t do that to him.” Yuu bites his lip and falls backward on his bed with a heaving sigh. “But it would’ve made things a little easier, just to have him — someone there with me there at the beginning.”  

Yuu doesn’t know what to say. A long, long silence stretches between them. He stares at his ceiling and thinks, again, of Shouyou over in Brazil, where the air is cool and damp with an ocean breeze. Yuu misses that, as much as he wanted to come home. 

“Noya?” Shouyou murmurs, his voice low. He sounds apologetic. 

“No—yeah?”

“What are you going to do now?” Yuu sighs again, almost huffing on a humorless laugh. If only he knew the answer to that, Jesus. 

“I don’t know.” 

“Well, you’re going to keep traveling, aren’t you?” It’s barely a question, more of a statement with the little tilt of his voice seemingly an afterthought. Like it’s a given Yuu won’t stick around here for long; back in high school, nothing short of dying could keep him still for very long. Maybe that hasn’t changed. Maybe it has. Yuu covers his eyes with his unoccupied hand. “You haven’t gotten through your bucket list already, have you? That was the whole reason for leaving Japan in the first place, wasn’t it?” 

Back before he left, Yuu made a list of all the things he needed to see. Needed, not wanted, because back then it felt like he would cease to exist if he stuck around Miyagi for much longer. He’d forgotten about that list, but most of the items on it he still hasn’t seen. 

Damn it. 

“No, I haven’t — but, Shou, I don’t know if —” 

“Hey, have you talked to Suga lately? I hear he’s still in Tokyo.” Shouyou pauses, laughs. “Well, Tanaka told me how everyone’s doing, and all the old third-years stuck around the city. Suga’d probably kill you if he found out you came back home and never went to visit.” Yuu blinks at the nonsequitur but doesn’t comment on it. Not like he even wanted to talk about his own newfound indecisiveness in the first place. 

“Yeah,” Yuu sighs, “I’ll head down that way probably, shoot him a text. Tell him you called them old .” 

“I — no! Noya-senpai, please!” Oh, it’s senpai now. Yuu laughs. “I’m not kidding, you can’t tell him I —”

“Well, thanks, Shou. Talk later, yeah?” 

“Yeah,” Shouyou answers, sounding miserable at the prospect of Yuu telling Suga what he said. “I hope you figure things out, Noya. I really think going to Tokyo might help a lot.” 

God, Yuu hopes it will. 

v.

  yuu (8:34 am) back in jpn!!!! ok if i visit u guys? 

o captain (not my captain) (8:34 am) WYM IS IT OK YES COME VISIT

o captain (not my captain) (8:35 am) ILL KILL YOU IF YOU DONT COME DOWN HERE NISHINOYA YUU

yuu (8:36 am) shou said u’d say tht

vi.

The train comes to a stop in the Tokyo station, and Yuu all but jumps out of his seat, earning him more than a few disgruntled looks from the businessmen and women also on the train with him. As they pick up their briefcases and straighten out their blazers and dress pants and skirts, he wrestles his bag out of the overhead compartments and double-checks that he knows Suga’s address, which he’d messaged to Yuu during the train ride. After stumbling off the train, limbs aching and slightly disoriented, Yuu manages to shoulder his way along the sidewalks and makes his way on foot to Suga’s apartment building. 

The building is plain and has more windows than Yuu cares to count, and the lobby is quaint when he gets inside. He tells Suga’s name to the attendant near the elevator, and she nods and lets him up with a polite smile. He bows his head in thanks and shuffles onto the elevator, suddenly nervous. 

He hasn’t seen Suga, Kiyoko, Daichi, or Asahi since their graduation two years ago, now. Asahi was crying, then, which was no surprise to anyone, and he was vague about his future plans even to Yuu. Suga spent the afternoon of his graduation consoling the first-years (Hinata, Yachi, and Yamaguchi, mostly), and he laughed at Daichi while he cried with Asahi. Kiyoko, Yuu later found out—much to his chagrin—had rejected more confessions than he could count on both hands before she could sneak off the school grounds. 

He’s missed them. They were his home for a little while, and he hates himself for letting himself fall so out of touch with them. 

Yuu knocks on Suga’s door and shifts on his feet as he waits for it to open. He grins to himself at the sound of heavy, rapid footfall on the other side of the door before the hinges squeak, and there are thin arms wrapped around Yuu’s head. He stumbles, and his mouth is full of fabric, and everything is dark, but he hugs Suga back only a moment later.

“Nishinoya!” Suga greets cheerily, and the word vibrates through Yuu. Suga smells like pine and generic deodorant, just like he did back in high school, and his threadbare t-shirt is soft against Yuu’s cheek as they embrace in the middle of the rundown hallway. After a moment, they untangle their limbs, and Suga grins down at Yuu like he can’t believe his eyes. 

Has it really been that long? Jesus.

“Oh—come in! I made tea with rice crackers if you’re hungry. Don’t just stand out in the hallway.” 

As Suga tuts and tugs him over the threshold of the apartment, he bites his tongue to keep from telling Suga he’s the one who almost strangled Yuu to death in the hallway. 

The entryway of Suga’s apartment is painted a pale shade of beige, and there are frames nailed to the wall, filled with pictures of Suga with Daichi and Asahi and more frames than Yuu can count with pictures of the whole volleyball team. He smiles at the frames as he toes off his shoes and tucks them against the wall near the door. 

“You can set your bag down in the living room,” Suga tells him as he wanders toward the kitchen. Yuu glances around the apartment as he slides his duffel bag off his shoulder and sets it against the arm of the couch Suga gestured to before he disappeared into the other room. It’s nice, as far as apartments go, if a little small. Cozy, Yuu thinks. Homey and very Suga in a way he can’t explain. Maybe it’s the sheer number of photographs he has around—back in high school, Suga photographed just about everything any time the team went anywhere. 

Suga returns from the kitchen holding a tray of tea and rice crackers, half of which are slathered in peanut butter. He sets the tray on the coffee table before lowering himself onto the ground so he’s sitting with his legs crossed under the table. Yuu mirrors him on the other side and accepts the ceramic cup of tea off the tray. It’s warm to the touch and baby blue in color. Suga’s is a garish shade of orange. 

“You still like an absurd amount of honey in your tea, don’t you?” Suga asks as he sips from his own mug. Yuu nods and takes an enthusiastic gulp of the tea; it’s warm and sweet against the back of his throat. He hums, and Suga laughs. “We’ve missed you, Nishinoya!” 

“We missed you, too, Suga! Volleyball wasn’t the same without you third-years, you know?” Yuu shrugs and swirls the tea in his mug, suddenly bashful. 

“Of course it wasn’t,” Suga says. “Do you still play?” 

“Not so much since I graduated,” Yuu admits. He’s missed it, but he hasn’t had the time, the energy, or the team to play like he used to. “What about you?” As Suga opens his mouth to answer, the front door of the apartment opens. Yuu sets his mug down on the table, and Suga perks up, turning over his shoulder to greet the newcomer and grinning in a way that says there’s something Yuu doesn’t know. His eyes are sparkling. 

A hulking figure takes up most of the entryway, despite the fact that he’s obviously hunched over, and Yuu’s stomach swoops with anticipation because he knows the slope of those shoulders and he knows that dorky sweater and he knows this hulking figure. Despite this, Yuu can only gape at Asahi’s back as he arranges his shoes near the front door. 

“Suga, whose…” Asahi trails off as he turns and catches sight of Yuu. His eyes widen, and he freezes as he gapes. Yuu wears the same expression. In Asahi’s startled trance, he drops his messenger bag off his shoulder, and it hits the floor with a dull thump. “You’re here?” he asks, and it’s so awkward and stupid that it breaks Yuu out of his shocked stupor at seeing his old volleyball partner. Yuu jumps up from the floor and all but vaults over the couch to reach Asahi. 

“Asahi!” he shrieks as Asahi catches him in a tight hug. Asahi’s nervous, stilted chuckles rumble through Yuu’s core. He’s laughing, too, because the last time he saw Asahi, he’d been crying and clutching his diploma like someone would take it away from him, and now he’s here, apparently in Asahi’s apartment without even knowing it and holding the man himself.

His hair’s a little longer if the size of his bun is anything to go by, but he’s kept the smattering of stubble on his chin that he had back in high school, and there are glasses resting on the bridge of his nose. His arms are just as big around as they had been, if not bigger because he’s holding Yuu a few inches above the ground with what seems to be no trouble at all. Yuu laughs at nothing and buries his head in Asahi’s sweater because he’s missed him so much, and he never even realized it. How did he not realize it?

As they untangle from each other, Asahi shoots Suga a look over Yuu’s head. 

“You didn’t tell me we’d have company, Suga,” he says pointedly. Suga shrugs it off. “I could’ve been home earlier if I’d known—I’m sorry for being late, Nishinoya.” 

“Don’t apologize!” Yuu chastises, and it’s so familiar his chest aches with it. “You can’t be late for something you didn’t know what was happening. And anyway, Suga didn’t tell me you would be here, either.” 

“I would’ve told you two,” Suga grumbles, crossing his arms over his chest, “if I’d known keeping it a surprise would mean Asahi gets the better greeting.” He goes on complaining about how Yuu didn’t yell his name when he opened the door, and Yuu once again bites his tongue to keep from reminding Suga that his first reaction to seeing him was to try to strangle the life out of his body. “And anyway, I told Nishinoya that we have an apartment, and he never asked who we meant.” 

“I assumed you meant Daichi,” Yuu defends. “Everyone in high school knew you two were all but married already.” Suga rolls his eyes, but he’s smirking. 

“Daichi will be home soon,” Asahi tells him, checking his watch (he’s wearing watches now? When did he get so old, so mature?) “I mean — unless his shift runs late.” Asahi lowers himself to sit on the floor next to Yuu, taking a cracker off the tray. 

“Anyway, I was just telling Nishinoya that Daichi and I found a team to practice volleyball with on the weekends, but you refuse to join us.” 

“You aren’t playing volleyball anymore?” Yuu asks. Even though he isn’t playing now either, he’s scandalized at the idea that a guy as amazing as Asahi could up and quit like this. Again. 

“I told you, I don’t have the time,” he groans and takes another cracker. “I’m too busy, Suga.” Suga leans over the table and tugs hard on Asahi’s earlobe the same way Jiji does to Yuu when he says something stupid. Yuu winces in sympathy but makes no move to defend Asahi’s honor out of fear for the safety of his own earlobes. 

“You have the most time out of all of us, you big dummy,” Suga grunts, tugging more insistently. “You graduated already—Dai and I find time even though we both still have classes and homework and jobs.” 

“You graduated already?” Yuu asks, half because Asahi’s only been out of high school a few years and half to make sure Asahi’s ear stays firmly attached to the side of his head.  

“Asahi got his degree in two years,” Suga brags and finally lets go. Asahi rubs at his ear and hangs his head to hide behind the curtain of his hair even though it’s pulled up in a bun.

“Woah! Are you some sort of genius, Asahi?” 

“No,” Asahi splutters like the idea is absurd. “It was only a two-year course. I graduated at the same time as everyone else in my class.” He holds up his hands and laughs placatingly. 

“You should’ve said yes.” Yuu rolls his eyes, grumbling. “Make yourself seem a little cooler, at least.” Suga bursts with laughter at this, holding his stomach and shaking his head. 

“I missed you, Nishinoya!” he cries again, throwing his arms around Yuu over the table and rubbing his fist into the top of his scalp. Yuu winces, but it’s a loving gesture. He thinks. 

“What did you go to university for, Asahi?” Yuu grunts around Suga’s suffocating hold because he won’t stand for Asahi being a big, silent giant. He’s missed him, and he wants to hear everything that happened to them after they graduated and left Miyagi. And also because Asahi refused to tell anyone where he was going or what he was going for at his own graduation. 

“Oh, uh…” He rubs at his cheekbone with his index finger and laughs sheepishly. “My degree is in fashion creation and technology. I took a few marketing and management classes before I graduated, too, but I don’t think that’s what I want to do.” He shrugs and stares down at his drink as he chews on his bottom lip. “I never told you?” 

“No, you never told anyone! You wouldn’t tell anyone when you graduated,” Yuu tells him, and Asahi looks like this is news to him. “Don’t tell me you were embarrassed about it! I think it’s a perfectly good thing to do with your life, Asahi. You shouldn’t be ashamed.” 

“I wasn’t embarrassed,” he insists, but he doesn’t elaborate on why he wouldn’t tell anyone. 

“This big idiot thought they wouldn’t give him his diploma,” Suga tattles, snickering behind his hand, “like they would tell him he didn’t graduate at the last possible second.” 

“They could’ve! I’m sure it’s happened before.” 

“And then, ” Suga continues like Asahi hadn’t even tried defending himself, “he thought he’d get kicked out of college on his first day, so he told almost no one until the first month was over and he was finally sure he wouldn’t get turned away at the lecture hall doors.” 

“It was a valid concern, Suga,” Asahi grumbles. Yuu laughs, and Asahi groans. “Well…what are you doing for university, Nishinoya?” 

“Nothing.” Asahi’s brows furrow at Yuu’s answer. “I’m not going to university.” He leans back to prop himself up on his hands casually. “I’ve been traveling, mostly, but came back for a while.” 

“Why?” 

“Oh, no reason,” he lies. “Wanted to come back to my roots, I guess.” He waves off their attention. “I’ve got a list of things to go see, still — probably going to just start checking that stuff off after I leave Tokyo again.” He shrugs and smiles, and he hopes it comes off as nonchalant as he wants it to, needs it to. Suga and Asahi (and, by extension, Daichi) don’t need to worry about whatever Yuu’s got going on right now. 

“Alone?” Asahi blinks owlishly. His expression gives Yuu pause. Something warm blooms in the base of Yuu’s lungs, but he isn’t sure what it is or what it means. 

“Um, yes?” Asahi shakes his head and brushes the few strands that have fallen out of his bun since he got home out of his face. 

“Nishinoya, do you know how dangerous it is to travel alone? Especially to countries that aren’t your home country?” He opens his mouth, obviously ready to list every single worst-case scenario, but Suga interrupts him before he can start.

“Nishinoya doesn’t need to hear about what might go wrong, Asahi,” he reprimands. “He’s a grown-ass man, even if he is a little, you know.” He makes a pinching motion with one of his hands, an obvious nod to Yuu’s height. 

“ I’m right here! ” he argues, crossing his arms over his chest. “And I did just fine despite my height — you know, I’m even a little tall in some of the places I’ve been.” A bold-faced lie, but what they don’t know won’t hurt them. 

Suga grins into his teacup but says nothing. His eyes say he knows Yuu is lying.

vii.

Yuu is in Hong Kong for two weeks before two things happen: one, he wakes up thinking he should probably apply to college finally, and two, Asahi calls him. The second is more pressing than the first. That thought has been lingering below the surface of Yuu’s skin since he woke up in India on his birthday. There’s a tab open on his phone for a community college close to home. He’s been considering just leaving his list for — for when? Never, maybe. 

“Asahi?” Yuu says down into the phone, more confused than anything. Suga had said to keep in touch, but Asahi’s never called Yuu before. “Is everyone okay? What’s happening?” 

“I quit my job,” Asahi says, and his voice is wet and thick, but he laughs. “I quit my job — well, it was barely a job. Another internship. I was getting people coffee, literally. Might as well have been unpaid, Jesus. But I quit. ” 

“Um, Asahi —”

“I hated it there, really, so it’s for the best. I don’t know what I was doing there. Dead end, Suga told me that, but I was too scared to quit until today. Nothing even happened, I just realized how unhappy I was and how you were out there traveling the world, doing what you wanted, but you were alone, and I just…” Asahi laughs again, the sound high. Yuu pulls the phone away from his ear, blinks at the screen, and raises it again. 

“Are you okay?” 

“Yes, yes, I’m okay. I’m perfectly fine.” He’s probably tugging at the ends of his hair, thinking something stupid like I shouldn’t have quit my job or, infinitely worse I shouldn’t have called. “I’ve suddenly got a whole lot of free time, though, I-I guess.” 

“I mean, yeah? I guess you do.” Yuu’s a little lost. Honestly, he’s been floating through these past two weeks, chest aching and thinking he should be enjoying himself more than he was. Hong Kong is gorgeous, just like it had been the first time he came here; back then he’d been about as bright-eyed and bushy-tailed as they came. 

That was then. This is now. Things are different — he’s tired and lost and more lonely than he’s ever been in his life, probably. 

“I think what I’m trying to say is,” Asahi continues, and now he’s nervous, Yuu can hear it in the shake of his voice, “where are you? Right now, where are you?” Yuu glances around. He’s…sitting on his hotel bed. It’s unmade, and the air conditioning is too cold, but he hasn’t figured out how to use the thermostat. 

“Um. What?” 

“The city, Nishinoya. I think I need to get out of Tokyo for…awhile.” Oh. Well, now Yuu feels a little stupid. 

“Holy shit, you’d come travel with me?” he yells into the receiver, jumping off the bed. His grip on his phone tightens. When Asahi says nothing, he holds his breath and winces, again, at his own stupidity. 

“I mean — if you’re…are you okay with that?” Asahi’s voice is small for someone so big. 

“Am I — in what universe would I ever be not okay with that?” 

“I don’t really, uh, I’m gonna take that as a yes.”     

“Yes, Asahi. That’s a hell yes, please come.” There’s a long pause. “Oh, and I’m in Hong Kong. Right now, I mean. Please come to Hong Kong.” He bites his lip and curls his unoccupied hand into a fist so tight his blunt nails dig into his palm. 

“Yeah. Yeah, I’ll be there.” Yuu’s face breaks into a grin. When Asahi hangs up, he jumps on the hotel bed like a little kid and, for the time being, thinks about the community college tab on his phone browser only for a moment, just long enough to close it. Over the course of that one phone call, the city is suddenly a whole lot smaller. 

Still, he doesn’t leave his hotel room until the following afternoon, when he calls for a cab and makes his way to the airport to pick Asahi up. The Hong Kong airport is busier than the airport in Tokyo, and knowing Asahi, he’ll get overwhelmed and end up in a bathroom somewhere; plus, what else will Yuu do with his day? Stay in his hotel room, probably. Again. 

If Ryuu were here, he’d call Yuu pathetic. And Yuu wouldn’t be able to argue. Damn it. 

The airport doors slide open, and Yuu falters at the blast of cold air and noise he’s met with. More people than he’s ever seen in his life filter past him, bustling and not paying him any attention, and he checks the text Asahi sent him with his flight details (flight lands at 1:38 pm, gate 26, subject to change) as he fights the crowds to get to the right gate. 

Asahi’s plane lands early, but no one emerges from inside until fifteen minutes later. Yuu spends the whole time messing around on his phone, knee bouncing, trying to figure out what he’s going to say when he sees Asahi again. What do they have to talk about? Are there any stories Yuu’s never told him? He tries to run through the past few years and the night he spent in the Tokyo apartment with the third-years, but the stories all blur together. He’d hate to repeat himself to Asahi, make him think he’s boring or something. 

Asahi emerges from the plane a head taller than everyone else. He’s easy to spot, but he’s always been like that; the familiarity of his head over everyone else’s helps Yuu relax a little. Some things never change. 

“Asahi!” he calls, waving an arm over his head. Asahi startles, glances around, and catches Yuu’s eye. His face breaks out in a smile under the plain medical mask he’s wearing, Yuu sees it from the scrunch of his eyes, even from across the gate. 

“Nishinoya,” he greets. “Hi — I-I mean, how are you?” his voice is breathy as he comes closer, and he pulls the mask down with a glance over his shoulder as if the flight attendant would attack him for taking it down. 

“I’m good. How are you?”  Oh, shit. This is awkward. Mayday — abort mission — damn it.

“I’m good, too.” They stand there, staring at each other, for a long time. Yuu shifts where he stands. Tells himself this was a good idea; despite the awkwardness, he’s already feeling not so totally alone. The city ebbs and flows around him — him and Asahi. Together. 

It starts like that, in the Hong Kong airport, with an awkward silence. Shaking smiles. Asahi asking, “so, about your list?” 

viii.

Asahi gets it into his head about the list and doesn’t let it go, so they don’t stay in Hong Kong for very long before they head to Cairo to see the pyramids. Asahi nerds out about them for no less than three days, even reads a book about the history of them while they’re in Egypt. With that checked off of Yuu’s list, Asahi made for the next item (some little town in Portugal Yuu heard about once), but Shouyou demanded they come visit him in Rio.

His actual words were, Noya oh my God you’re traveling again are you finally gonna come see me? which might as well have been a guilt trip, actually. 

“ NOY-YA! ” Shouyou shouts, his voice unmistakable even in the midst of the Brazilian airport. Yuu turns and grins up at Asahi, his cheeks already aching with the force of it. Asahi’s eyes are wide, his lips parted. He’d slept for a lot of the flight here, but so had Yuu; it was long, and his legs ache. He can’t imagine how Asahi’s feeling. 

“SHOUYOU!” Shouyou emerges from the crowd, and he’s beaming and throwing his arms around Yuu. There are a few murmurs from the crowd around them, and from what Yuu can make out, they’re saying Ninja Shouyou? 

Holy shit, Shouyou wasn’t lying about the nickname. Wow. 

“It’s so good to see you,” Shouyou says, still beaming. He’s tan and broader than he was the last time Yuu saw him and — 

“Oh my God you grew,” Yuu gasps, scandalized because where Shouyou had maybe four or five centimeters on him before, he’s at least ten centimeters taller than Yuu now. “What are they feeding you over here and where can I get some?” Shouyou laughs and shakes his head. He’s wearing a t-shirt with the sleeves cut off, shorts, and sunglasses. He’s practically unrecognizable if not for his shock of orange hair and his unmistakable, beaming smile. Yuu holds him at an arm’s length and takes in every detail of him. 

“It’s mostly the same as it is back home, Noya!” Shouyou grins. “It’s so good to see you, too, Asahi.” Asahi reaches out a hand like he’s going to give Shouyou a handshake, but he gets pulled into a tight hug instead. Yuu laughs at his wide-eyed expression and the way he fumbles to return it. He pats Shouyou on the back like they’re long-lost cousins or something. “It’s been so long — you’ll love Brazil, I know it. Beach volleyball is so fun!” 

Shouyou tugs them out of the airport and into a little car. Asahi has to squeeze into the passenger's seat, and even Yuu is cramped in the back. Shouyou doesn’t seem to mind the close quarters of the car. 

“My neighbor Pedro let me borrow his car. Normally, I bike or walk or run, but I thought you’d both be tired. I know I was when I first landed here,” Shouyou rambles as he merges into the next lane over. He’s a better driver than Yuu would expect, but the traffic is insane and Asahi is gripping the side of his seat like it’s his job. Yuu pats him on the shoulder as he leans forward over the middle console. “You booked that hotel I told you to, right? No problems there? It’s not tourist season yet, so I didn’t think there would be, but it’s the closest hotel to the beach and my apartment, so sometimes it gets busy before the rest of the city gets all flooded with people here on vacation.” 

“You get a lot of tourists on your beach?” Asahi asks as he closes his eyes in the middle of a daring turn. Yuu grips the back of the driver’s seat to stay upright. 

“Mostly Americans and Argentinians — hey, did I tell you I saw the Grand King here? Oikawa, I mean. Just up and ran into him on the street. Tobio didn’t believe me when I told him, had to send him a picture.” Shouyou laughs. “He got all jealous, which was cute.” 

Yuu wouldn’t exactly call Kageyama cute , but…okay. 

“Oh! Tobio asked me out,” Shouyou says, sticking out his tongue as the car creeps along the roads closer to the beach. Yuu can smell salt in the air, the ocean. “The long-distance thing is hard, but we Skype a lot. I think I’ve probably been in love with him since high school.” Shouyou says it like it’s the easiest thing in the world, and he doesn’t seem embarrassed about the silence that follows. 

Strangely, Yuu finds himself glancing at Asahi out of the corner of his eye. Is he as shocked about this as Yuu is? The side of his face gives nothing away, and he doesn’t look at Yuu. 

“Beach or hotel first?” Shouyou asks after a beat, glancing at Yuu in the rearview mirror. He shakes his head and puts on his turning signal. “Actually, you’ll regret those clothes — hotel first, trust me.” 

The hotel is nice but not fancy, and the room is cool and smells of lemon-scented disinfectant. There are two beds, both adorned with white sheets and a red blanket, and Yuu takes the one closer to the door, leaving the one by the window for Asahi. Shouyou tells them to put on beach clothes, smirking like there’s something they don’t know. 

“He’s going to beat our asses, isn’t he?” Asahi sighs, plopping down on his bed. 

“Oh,” Yuu laughs. “For sure.” 

And he does. The first few rounds are absolutely, world-endingly brutal — Shouyou alone against both Asahi and Yuu. Shouyou wins every match by a landslide, leaving both Yuu and Asahi to pant and gasp and collapse on the sand as the sun sets over the ocean. Shouyou stands over them, shielding his eyes with his hand, and grins. 

“Alright. You guys ready to learn how to do it right?” Asahi throws an arm over his face and groans. 

“He’s gonna kill me,” he says, sounding strangled. Yuu laughs and punches him in the bicep. 

“C’mon, big guy! It’ll be fun.” Shouyou laughs again, and Yuu groans too because learning is even more brutal than the first matches. Shouyou teaches them how to jump and run on the loose sand (“Focus your body weight! Find the packed sand!”) well into the night. The moon is bright, the beach lit by torches, and the air is only marginally cooler than it had been during the day. Yuu’s skin is tight from sweat and salt from the ocean, and his limbs ache. 

“I haven’t played so much volleyball since…ever,” he breathes as he lays on his bed back in the hotel room. Asahi, on his bed, huffs out a laugh. 

“God, me neither.” He pauses. “I hurt everywhere. ”

The next day is more of the same — Shouyou teaches them how to play, even plays a game with some people who seem to know him (everyone on these beaches seems to know him, though, always waving and talking to him like they’re friends). Asahi and Yuu sit on the sidelines and watch, and it’s on a whole different level from the games they played in high school. 

Back then, they seemed so breakneck. All or nothing. Win or die. But these games, two-on-two, everyone sweaty and covered in sand and somehow still in good spirits, the best spirits in the world…Yuu can’t help but gape as he watches. 

Until he gets a mouthful of sand. Asahi laughs at him as he sputters and spits it out, the big, soft asshole. Yuu glares at him, and he laughs harder. 

“I used to think you were nice ,” Yuu mutters. The ball hits the other side of the court in a cloud of sand and cheers. They’re all saying something akin to ‘Ninja Shouyou!’ which is so cool holy shit and Shouyou turns and shoots and grin and a thumbs-up to the crowd. 

“How did he get so cool?” Asahi murmurs next to him. He rubs at his chin, brows furrowed like he’s seriously trying to figure it out. Yuu pats him on the shoulder to console him. Yuu agrees; it’s a little unfair how charming his little underclassman is now. 

Said underclassman takes them to a bar the following night. Yes, a bar. Oh, God. 

Shouyou has the audacity to say Yuu and Asahi are getting sluggish. Which, yeah. Yuu’s kind of sore all over, and Asahi has been walking lightly since the first day on the beach, wincing as he pulls his shirt on (not that Yuu’s watching, he can just hear the hitch of his breath because of…close quarters in the hotel room). Shouyou laughs when he says it, but neither of them share the sentiment. A night spent drinking is a welcome break from the hellish sand. 

The bar is somewhere downtown, not far from the beach but far enough that there are mostly just locals inside. It’s crowded from wall to wall with sweaty, half-dressed people who are dancing to the foreign music that’s booming through the big speakers pushed against the wall opposite the bar. Yuu’s been to a few bars in his life but none have ever been like this. He wraps a hand around the back of Asahi’s t-shirt, less to keep himself from losing Asahi (he’s still tall by Brazilian standards) and more about not losing himself in the chaos of the crowd. 

Shouyou orders for them in smooth Portuguese without asking either of them what they want to drink. Asahi and Yuu share a look behind him, Asahi’s eyes wide. Yuu shrugs as he accepts the drink from the bartender. It’s sticky-sweet and coats the inside of his mouth when he drinks it, turns his blood warm under his skin. Asahi downs a mouthful of his drink (something that’s tinged an unnatural shade of blue) and winces. Yuu laughs at his expression, but the sound is lost to the noise inside the bar. 

Asahi sticks near Yuu as they both get closer and closer to tipsy — not quite drunk but sure as hell tipsy. Shouyou drags Yuu into the middle of the crowd, and people part to let them through like an ocean. Shouyou turns and dances with some stranger, inches apart but only for lack of room and shouting in Portuguese over the pulsing music and smiling wide like they know each other. Yuu can’t tell. Maybe they do know each other. 

This life of Shouyou’s, over here in Brazil, Yuu knows nothing about it. 

Somehow, sometime later, when the stars are out and the moon rests over the water, Yuu looks up and he and Asahi have left the bar. The air is warm around them, and they’re on the beach — how they got here, Yuu barely knows. These roads and streets are so confusing to him, and they’re both stumbling every other step. 

Yuu runs for the water, kicking off his shoes and laughing, and the sound echoes around him. Asahi is laughing, too, and running behind him, making a break for the water. For as much time they’ve spent on the beach, neither of them have gone swimming at all. Yuu doesn’t know if he even has trunks packed, honestly. He wades into the water, and it laps at the bottom of his cargo shorts, turning the fabric dark. 

He glances over his shoulder to tell Asahi — something, he doesn’t know what, but something. But the moment he catches sight of Asahi, the breath is punched from his lungs so suddenly he almost keels over then and there on the edge of the Atlantic Ocean. He presses the heel of his palm into his sternum and gapes because there , there is Asahi, standing with his head tilted back to take in the moonlight, and the stars reflect off of the tide around him. His shoulders, revealed by the tank top he’s wearing, are sunkissed and covered in freckles and broader than they were in high school, and his hair is pulled up and away from his face. 

The slope of his nose, the angle of his jaw, everything about him — oh.

Oh. Yuu gapes. 

ix.

Portugal isn’t all too different from Brazil. Less volleyball, more time spent in the ocean. Yuu takes it upon himself to teach himself how to surf (not going well, he spends more of his time trying to climb back onto his rented board than he does actually standing on it), and Asahi flip-flops between reading a book on the beach and floating around in the water. He’s a few shades darker than he was back in Tokyo, and Yuu’s blond streak is lighter. 

Nothing has changed, but it feels like it has. Yuu tries not to think about that split second in Brazil after the bar when Asahi was — and the moonlight — and how perfect — but he thinks about it, and he thinks about it often. Everyday. He looks at Asahi and sees him in that moment but also in the moment where he’s looking at him in the daylight. 

The conclusions are the same now, in the sun and sober as a rock, as they were that night. 

Yuu floats on the board, rocked by the waves, and covers his face in his hands. He groans. Maybe he should’ve just gone to college like everyone told him to. Would’ve been a whole hell of a lot simpler than this, he thinks as he cranes his neck to catch sight of Asahi. His beach towel is empty but shaded from the sun by a big, tacky umbrella they bought from a nearby store. It’s a garish green color, and they’ll leave it in the sand when they go. 

“Nishinoya,” Asahi whispers, and Yuu startles so hard he falls off the board. When he comes up sputtering, Asahi is laughing at him and treading water next to the overturned surfboard. A few stray pieces of hair stick to the sides of his face, and he wipes them away, squinting because he doesn’t have his glasses on. 

“When did you leave the towel? I was just looking for you.” Is that weird? Does that sound weird? Is he being creepy? Oh, there’s so much more to think about now. 

“It’s humid, too hot to focus — come on, I want to show you something.” He jerks his head toward the far side of the beach, away from where a little kid is building a lump of a sandcastle. He starts swimming backwards, his arms swooping out and pulling him away from where Yuu is treading, before he turns and starts for the big outcrop of rock that almost no one has ventured toward in all the time they’ve spent on this particular beach. 

Asahi disappears into the rocks. 

“Asahi?” Yuu calls. He glances around. They’re far from the beach, so far Yuu can’t make out anything beyond blurs of color on the sand and distant, indecipherable noises. A child screams. A girl somewhere on the beach laughs, high and loud. 

“In here, Nishi!” Asahi answers, and his voice comes from inside the rocks. Yuu follows his voice and finds himself in a little cove under the cliff near the beach. Asahi treads in the middle of it, looking around the place until he notices Yuu swimming closer. “I found it and wanted to show you.” He smiles like he’s proud of himself. 

Shit, shit, shit. 

“It’s… amazing , Asahi.” Yuu turns to look at every inch of it. The sound of their arms in the water echoes off the smooth rock walls, and light reflects off the water in little, moving patterns. The water here is clear the whole way down to the sand and rocks a few meters below their feet. There’s a rock shelf along the far side that Asahi heaves himself up onto, dripping water and turning the rock a few shades darker. His skin glistens, and he helps Yuu up onto the shelf. 

There’s almost enough room for them to lay down on the shelf foot-to-foot, but Yuu’s feet brush up against Asahi’s calves as they lay there. 

“How’s the surfing?” Asahi asks, and Yuu huffs. 

“Oh, terrible. I have no idea what I’m doing.” A beat of comfortable silence. “How’s your book?” Yuu lets his hand fall back into the water up to his wrist. 

“I can’t focus on it — it’s good! But slow. I don’t know.” Asahi laughs at himself and wipes an ocean-wet hand over his face. “I think it’s…the heat, maybe.” He doesn’t sound sure of himself.

“Maybe?” 

“Maybe. Probably. I don’t know.” 

“Hey, can I ask you something?” Yuu’s voice is loud in the little cove. He wonders, briefly, if the people on the beach can hear them talking but decides he doesn’t care. He hopes they can hear them, two strangers to everyone except for each other. Yeah. 

They’re alone in this cove, and they’re alone on that beach. No one is listening; Yuu could probably scream, and no one would hear him except for Asahi. Only Asahi. 

“Yeah.”

“Why did you stop playing volleyball?” Yuu asks, propping himself up to look at Asahi. Asahi glances down at him then away again. 

“It wasn’t the same,” he says. “I didn’t want to be on the court if you weren’t there with me.” Yuu clutches at his chest and falls overdramatically, and Asahi laughs. “I guess that’s sort of weird, isn’t it?” 

“Why do you think I quit when you left back in my second year?” Yuu asks, and it’s the first time he’s ever really, really thought about why he quit. He told himself, back then, that he needed to get better before he could ever stand on the court again before he could ever call himself the libero, the backbone of Karasuno’s volleyball team. 

“Oh.” Asahi’s quiet for a long moment after that before he shuffles, the sound of his bedsheets loud in the dark. “Can I ask you a question, then?” 

“You don’t need permission. Just ask.” 

“Why didn’t you keep in touch after we graduated?” It’s the most blunt Asahi has ever been in his life, probably, and it sounds like the words escaped out of his mouth without him wanting them to. But he doesn’t take them back, and that means he must really want to know. It means it must’ve been eating him up inside for the past few years. Yuu hates to think about it. 

“You all went to college,” Yuu says. He doesn’t dare look over at Asahi. “And I was so scared of that. For myself — I didn’t want it. The three of you represented everything I was scared of, and I just…couldn’t make myself face it. And that meant never talking to you, so I’m sorry. I’m really sorry, Asahi, I am.” 

“It’s okay.” 

“It doesn’t feel okay,” Yuu grumbles. 

“I promise it is, but if it helps: I forgive you. So does Suga, and so does Daichi. We all forgave you a long time ago.” Yuu sits up, dangling one leg over the edge of the rock shelf. Asahi sits up, too. For a long time, they just stare at each other, blinking. 

“We should —” 

“The beach —” They start at the same time. Yuu flushes and tips over the edge into the water before swimming away. He stays underwater until his lungs feel like they might burst and when he looks back, Asahi is swimming back toward the beach. 

He sits down on his towel under the green umbrella and hides his face in his knees. Yuu goes back to his surfboard, but his face is hot, still. 

The sun, he tells himself. It’s from the sun. 

x.

They have all the time in the world, so they get a car and drive inland, into France. The goal is Paris, but it’s a long drive — eighteen hours stretched over a few days. 

When Asahi drives, Yuu takes up the passenger’s seat with a map and Asahi’s iPod, which is connected to the radio. His playlists are cheesy and kind of terrible, all top forties pop songs, half of which are American and the other half of which are the sort of J-Pop only teenage girls listen to. Yuu sings along to them despite not knowing the words because it makes Asahi laugh. 

The sun starts to set on their second day of driving when they’re still hours away from Paris. Another day’s drive, probably, they’ll have to stop for the night at some point. 

“We could stop?” Asahi suggests, nodding to one of the signs on the side of the road. It’s advertising a little hotel, but the sign looks old and weathered. Not exactly trustworthy, and there’s still daylight left. 

“Switch with me,” Yuu says. He unfolds the map and points to the next rest stop before refolding it. “I’ll drive a little more so there isn’t so much tomorrow — I’ve been sleeping most of the day, anyway,” he adds when it looks like Asahi might protest. “You can get some sleep and we can finish the drive tomorrow.” Asahi presses his lips into a thin line for a second before nodding and merging into the right lane. 

The air at the rest stop is cool and humid, and Yuu takes a second to stretch before lowering himself into the driver’s seat. It takes both of them no less than three minutes to adjust the seats; Asahi moves the passenger’s seat back enough so that his legs stop brushing the dashboard, and Yuu scoots his seat up so he can reach the pedals. Embarrassing. Yuu turns to make a comment about Asahi’s long-ass legs, but he’s leaning on the window, half asleep already as Yuu turns back onto the highway. He turns down the volume of the radio, glancing at Asahi out of the corner of his eye every few minutes as he drives. 

His legs are curled half to his chest, his hands tucked into his t-shirt, and his hair falling out of his bun in wavy, messy strands. His face is relaxed, and his glasses are askew. His breathing is even and deep but soft in the quiet of the car. Yuu sort of wants to lean over and — and nothing , he tells himself. Jesus, this is his best friend, he can’t go around molesting him in his sleep. He would bash his head into the steering wheel if it wasn’t a safety hazard. 

Yuu drives for hours in silence, too scared that the music might wake Asahi, whose soft breaths keep him company instead. There aren’t many other cars, even, as the moon gets higher in the sky, and Yuu passes through little towns without seeing anyone on the streets. 

He passes a sign labeled " Bienvenue à BRIVE-LA-GAILLARDE ! ” two hours before dawn, when his own eyes are heavy with exhaustion, and Asahi manages to wake himself up, yawning and rubbing at his face. He stretches, and Yuu forces his eyes to stay focused on the road instead of darting toward the thin sliver of skin revealed by Asahi’s t-shirt riding up. 

“How long did I sleep?” 

“Not long,” Yuu says, his voice quiet. “Four hours. Five?” 

“You…kept the radio off?” Asahi blinks. Yuu rubs the back of his neck, his face hot.

“Well, yeah. I thought it might — you know — wake you up.” He shrugs, acts like it’s no big deal. He hates the quiet. Asahi says nothing, and Yuu doesn’t let himself look away from the road.  

“Nishinoya?” 

“Yeah?” The car jerks over a bump in the road. The little commune rises up around them, and Yuu glances at the few street signs in hopes of seeing one for a hotel. He needs to get out of this car for the night, stretch out in a bed or something, get a few good hours of sleep in before they drive again tomorrow. 

“Thanks for letting me come with you. Tokyo was…” Yuu waits for him to continue, but Asahi trails off and doesn’t finish his thought. Still, Yuu thinks he understands. 

“I should be thanking you. Traveling alone — it’s less about the danger and more about how much of the world there is to see, you know? Gets lonely.” He shrugs and tries to sound nonchalant. Maybe he sounds lame instead. He can’t tell, and he’s almost too tired to care. Almost. 

“You were lonely?” Asahi sounds like he can’t quite believe it. Yuu huffs on a laugh. He turns down one of the streets where he thinks there might be a hotel, and — yes, there’s a building with some lights on that looks like it could be a small hostel, maybe. 

“Yes, I was lonely. Everyone gets a little lonely sometimes. Mine just…followed me around the world.” Asahi doesn’t say anything for a moment. Yuu chances a look at him, finally, and Asahi is rubbing at his cheekbone, something he does when he’s thinking or embarrassed. Yuu’s not sure how or why he knows that after all this time or why he knows it in the first place. He tries not to think too hard about it. 

“Are you lonely now?” Asahi asks in a low whisper. His voice seems to vibrate around the car. Yuu slows to a stop in front of the building. The lights on the street accentuate every angle of Asahi’s face as he looks so openly at Yuu. 

“No,” Yuu says, and it’s the truth, “I’m not lonely anymore, Asahi.” He puts the car in park and gets out before they can say anything else. He isn’t sure he can handle much more of that particular conversation without, embarrassingly, crying.

The inside of the hotel is warm and lit by little lanterns. A woman sits behind the tall, wooden reception desk, her feet tucked under her butt as she turns the page of the book in her hands. She doesn’t straighten up until Yuu makes it to the front of the desk. 

“Is it too late to book a room?” he asks. Asahi stands behind him, glancing around the little hotel and taking in every detail. The woman startles and starts typing away on her computer. The sounds of her keyboard are loud in the empty lobby. 

“We’ve got a room open,” the receptionist says in accented English, eyeing the both of them over the top of her computer, “and it’s a honeymoon suite.” Asahi makes a high-pitched noise that sounds vaguely like a protest, but Yuu hands the woman enough cash for a night without much thought. He’s sluggish, and his legs ache like he just finished a five-set match. He needs to be horizontal, like, yesterday. Literally, since it’s hours past midnight by now. 

“Nishinoya , ” Asahi mutters as Yuu stumbles toward the room. The hallway has green baseboards and beige paint, and the ceilings are low. It’s cozy. “Should I just go sleep in the car?” 

“What? No. Why would you do that?” He finds their door and slides the key into the lock (a real, metal key and lock), and the door swings open. The room has the same color scheme as the hallway and — 

“It’s a honeymoon suite, Nishinoya.” 

— one bed. There’s one bed, a Queen, in the middle of the room, pushed against the wall. Yuu stares at it for a minute as if it’ll duplicate into two. 

“You know what? I’ll just go sleep in the —” 

“No, Asahi, you’re too —” 

“It’s fine, really!” 

“It’s not fine!” 

“I’m not going to make you sleep out there!” 

“Neither of us have to sleep in the car. Neither of us are going to sleep in the car.” Yuu shakes his head and forces Asahi into the room, closing and locking the door behind them. He checks the peephole before venturing deeper into the room. Asahi stands near the desk, arms wrapped around himself like the bed might attack him or something. 

God, he’s so awkward. Yuu likes him so much. 

“Okay, plan — we both sleep in the bed. It’s big enough for both of us.” Even with Yuu’s size, it’ll be close quarters, but it’s just for one night. He can handle one night without making things weird. He’s so tired, he might lay down and fall asleep, and it’ll be okay. “If that makes you uncomfortable, I’ll take the —” 

“No! I’m not uncomfortable.” Asahi shuffles his feet and looks at the ground, hiding his face. “I thought you’d be uncomfortable.” 

“Me? I’m not uncomfortable. I-I really don’t mind it, Asahi.” Yuu bites his lip and makes for the bed. He strips out of his jeans, and Asahi does the same on the other side of the room before they both stand and stare at each other. 

Yuu takes the corner of the bedspread and drags it down the bed like ripping off a bandaid. The sheets are cool and soft to the touch, and Yuu sinks into them with a sigh. The bed dips as Asahi slides in next to him. He radiates heat, and it takes almost everything in Yuu’s half-asleep brain to keep himself from turning over and smothering himself in Asahi’s warmth. 

Maybe this was a bad idea.

“Night, Asahi,” Yuu says to the wall on his side of the bed. 

“Goodnight, Nishinoya.” Yuu closes his eyes and forces himself to breathe normally until he falls asleep. 

He wakes up to the sun filtering in through the curtains, sweat gathering on the backs of his knees, and an arm thrown over his waist. Asahi’s hand is fisted in the fabric of Yuu’s t-shirt as if daring him to try to wiggle away (not that he wants to, he’s pretty sure he died in his sleep and woke up in heaven), and his breath fans out over the back of Yuu’s neck, even and soft like it had been in the car. Yuu blinks at the wall, swallows. Blinks again. 

No, this was not a bad idea. This was probably the best idea Yuu’s ever had. He wishes he could turn over and see Asahi to take in the way his sleeping face looks in the daylight, too. Maybe try to memorize it.

Creepy, maybe, but Yuu doesn’t care anymore. His chest aches with the need to do something about this little crush. No, not little. It’s bigger than him by now, after all the hours spent with Asahi in the past few months, traveling together and never more than a room apart no matter where they are. Even so, this has been burning under Yuu’s skin since high school, probably. How he could be so oblivious, he doesn’t know. 

Asahi shifts behind him, and Yuu can hear his breathing change. It hitches, and the hand withdraws from Yuu’s shirt slowly like Asahi’s trying not to wake him. Yuu rolls over to see him as he’s putting on his glasses. 

“G’morning, Asahi,” Yuu murmurs. He doesn’t sit up, not yet. He admires Asahi from this angle; his cheeks are flushed, and his eyes are wide. 

“You were awake?” 

“Yeah.” 

“I’m so —” 

“Don’t apologize.” Yuu closes his eyes. His voice is breathy, pleading. “Please. It’s okay.” He wants to reach out, to touch Asahi. Grab his hand, run his fingers over his jaw, something, but he doesn’t. He wraps his hand up in the bedsheets and watches Asahi heave himself off the bed. 

xi. 

By the time they make it to Paris six hours later, Yuu has successfully acted like nothing has changed like he didn’t wake up to Asahi spooning him and like he isn’t almost hopelessly head-over-heels for his best friend and only traveling partner. He deserves an Oscar, he thinks. 

He follows Asahi to The Louvre even though Yuu’s never seen the appeal of some old paintings. He listens to him talk about the history behind each painting, trying his hardest to keep all the names and time periods straight in his head as if Asahi will quiz him on any of this later. 

The museum is crowded with families and couples, and Asahi takes Yuu by the hand. To keep him from getting lost, probably, but he doesn’t let go, even when they make it into a less crowded room. Yuu prays to God his palms aren’t too sweaty, but he tightens his hold on Asahi’s hand anyway and forgets to listen to his spiel about the painting they’re looking at now. Instead, he’s trying to memorize the feeling of Asahi’s big, calloused fingers between Yuu’s own smaller, leaner ones. 

“Nishinoya?” Asahi asks, and Yuu startles. He blushes like he’s a schoolkid who got caught playing video games under his desk. 

“Yeah?” 

“You’re not listening, are you?” 

“Of course I am!” Yuu shakes his head and tugs on Asahi’s hand insistently. Asahi laughs. “I am — I’m listening. Keep going about this guy Cor-ra-reggie-oh.”

“Correggio,” Asahi corrects, his expression fond as he looks down at Yuu. 

“That’s what I said.” Asahi shakes his head with a smile but keeps talking about the painter, gesturing to the paintings on the wall every few words with his free hand. His other hand is still tangled with Yuu’s. 

Before they leave, they go to the Eiffel Tower, of course. Asahi insists they haven’t really visited Paris until they see the tower, which makes no sense to Yuu since they’re literally in Paris. Still, he doesn’t argue. How could he? 

The skies are dark and overcast, the air humid and muggy, and Yuu wipes a fat drop of rain off his forehead before they get even halfway to the Eiffel Tower. Asahi glances at the sky, squinting, but he flinches when a raindrop hits him square in the middle of the forehead. Yuu laughs until the sky quite literally opens up on the two of them, pouring rain in a matter of seconds, and neither of them had the foresight to bring an umbrella. 

“Shit!” Asahi mutters, and he takes Yuu by the hand again and starts pulling him down the street in a run. Yuu stumbles and tries to keep up, laughing the whole time. His hair is plastered to his forehead, and Asahi’s glasses are fogged over and probably impossible to see out of, and the sidewalks are rapidly emptying as the tourists and French take refuge in the cafes and shops lining the street around them. 

Yuu stops running in the middle of the street. The rain is warm despite having soaked through his clothes to his skin. Any hope he had for his hair gel is long gone as he wipes his hair away from his eyes. 

“Nishinoya, come on!” Asahi shouts over the pounding of the rain. He’s shielding his face with one of his hands, but it’s useless. He’s soaked, too, dripping wet and looking back at Yuu from a few paces down the sidewalk. 

“No!” Yuu calls back. He smiles, laughs. “Asahi, you make me want to be quiet! ” And he’s still yelling because otherwise, Asahi won’t hear him. He needs him to hear this. 

“Is that a good thing?” Asahi sounds incredulous, and he’s coming closer, and Yuu can see every detail of him even in the haze of the rain. There’s water dripping down both sides of his face. There’s maybe a foot of space between them, and Yuu inches closer. 

“I think so. I mean, it’s like — it’s like I’m on the edge of my seat just waiting for what you’re going to do next, and if I talk too loud, I’ll just have to wait longer. Or something.” He needs Asahi to understand. 

“Or something?” Yuu reaches up and flicks Asahi in the middle of his forehead, sticking out his tongue. 

“Yeah, or something. You got a problem with that?” 

“No, I don’t have a problem with that.” Asahi doesn’t say anything for a long time, and neither does Yuu. Because Asahi makes him want to be quiet. And it’s raining. And he’s probably in love with Asahi. “I think I get it.” 

“You do?” 

“I think…being around you makes me want to be louder.” Asahi comes closer, too, and Yuu almost can’t take it — Asahi is so breathtaking he almost can’t take it. “I just want to stand on a rooftop and yell, and I want everyone in the world to hear what I have to say — because of you.”

“Why don’t you?” Yuu sure hopes they’re both on the same page here. It’s hard to tell, all these weird little metaphors and things. The rain, the city; it’s making them crazy, surely. 

“I’m…scared.” Asahi shifts on his feet. Looks away from Yuu for the first time since he turned around and started coming closer. He bites his lip and fiddles with his own hands. 

“I used to be scared, too,” Yuu murmurs, barely loud enough to hear over the rain, as he takes Asahi’s big hands in his own. Asahi nods and gapes at Yuu. 

“You were? Of what?” Asahi says it like he can’t quite believe it or wrap his head around the fact that Yuu has ever been scared of anything. Yuu bites back a laugh at his unwavering belief that Yuu is brave when he’s anything but. He is a coward; Asahi just can’t see it. 

“Of everything. I think I’m still a little scared all the time, but it’s…” He trails off, not sure what he wants to say or how to say it. Asahi nods like he understands anyway. 

“How do you do things, then?” 

“Being scared is a waste , Asahi. What’s the use of never doing anything at all? Isn’t that boring?” Yuu swings his arms out around them. It’s a waste to be scared right now; kiss me, Yuu thinks. God, please kiss me. 

“Yeah, I — I guess it is pretty boring.” Asahi gives a half-hearted shrug and retracts one of his hands to wipe his face. “I’m still scared, though.” 

“Me too — I’m still scared of plenty of things,” dying, what comes after this, moths, “but I can’t let it stop me, you know?” 

“So, I shouldn’t let it stop me,” Asahi says, and it’s less of a question and more of a statement. His voice is hard, determined, and his hands are suddenly on Yuu, and then — 

And then — 

And then, Asahi is kissing Yuu in the rain. Yuu’s hands come up to cup the sides of Asahi’s face, and he’s up on his toes trying to get closer, and Asahi is bent over himself trying to get down to Yuu’s level, his hands on Yuu’s hips. They’re warm, and Yuu’s chest is going to burst, probably. 

That’s okay. He could die happy here. 

Asahi pulls away but doesn’t let go of Yuu’s hips yet. They blink at each other for a second, saying nothing. 

“We should…get out of the rain, shouldn’t we?” he suggests. Yuu nods; his lips tingle. 

xii.

Asahi books the room in the Italian hotel, and there’s only one bed again. Neither of them comment on it, even as they sleep shoulder-to-shoulder only to wake up curled around each other. Yuu doesn’t think he’s ever been so happy in his life. 

One night, four days into their stay in the single-bed hotel room in the little, Italian port town, Yuu overhears Asahi on the phone. Yuu had gone out to get them dinner (fish from a local restaurant) and came into the room quietly in case Asahi was sleeping. They spent most of their days in the sun on the beach again, Yuu wrestling big fish with the local fishermen and Asahi reading like he did back in Portugal. The heat is tiring, and they’re both prone to falling asleep midday and sleeping well into the evening. 

If he had been asleep, Yuu would’ve put their dinner in the minifridge in the room and curled up with him. They could’ve had a late dinner or something; it wouldn’t have been the first time. 

But Yuu came back to his muffled voice. 

“Suga — no, I…” Asahi says as Yuu quietly closes the door behind him. He sighs, laughs, huffs. “Suga, I kissed him. Like in The Notebook …stop it. It’s a good movie. There wasn’t — no, it was just raining. God, shut up.” Yuu shuffles away from the door and peeks around the corner of the entryway. Asahi has his back turned to the door, his shoulders hunched over as he smiles at his lap despite the fact that he’s rolling his eyes at whatever Suga is saying to him. Yuu presses himself against the wall to listen without being caught. “I didn’t think I was brave enough, but — hey! Obviously, I was brave enough because I…yes, I’m sure I kissed him. It — you know what? It doesn’t matter. I’m just…” He trails off for a long time. Yuu’s heart might burst if he says anything else, though, so maybe it’s for the best.  

He opens and closes the door loud enough for Asahi to hear this time. 

“Suga, I gotta go. Yeah. Love you, too. Bye.” He puts his phone down just as Yuu saunters into the room with their dinner. Yuu sets down the paper bag and slots himself into Asahi’s arms for a hug, trying not to cry into his shoulder. 

“Everything okay?” he asks, his voice rumbling through Yuu’s body.

“Yeah, yeah. Just wanted a hug.” 

“And I’m the dork,” Asahi grumbles as Yuu untangles himself from his arms. 

“Yes, you are the dork. You’re a total dork.” Yuu taps him on the side of the head and hands him his takeout container. “Now, eat. We’re going out tonight.” 

“Since when?” Asahi manages around a mouthful of fish. 

“Since now. Pio invited us to a bonfire on the beach, and I just decided that we’re going.” Yuu sits down next to Asahi and crosses his legs to balance the food container. He bows his head over it before digging in.

“A bonfire?” 

“That’s what he told me. I think it’ll be fun.” Yuu shrugs, and that’s exactly why they find themselves huddled together on the beach an hour later. The breeze is cooler than Yuu expected it to be, and the beach is crowded even though the moon is high overhead. The tide laps at the sand, and the fire crackles. Everything smells vaguely of smoke, and Yuu presses himself into Asahi’s side to keep warm. Asahi wraps an arm around his shoulders.

“Come swim with me,” Yuu whispers, leaning up so only Asahi can hear him. Asahi glances down at him then around at the crowd of locals before nodding. They sneak away from the crowd hand-in-hand and wade into the water a little ways down the beach where there is no one else. The water is cool, but Yuu falls backwards into it with almost no hesitation. Asahi stands in the calf-deep water and watches him. “Come on, get in.” Yuu stands and tugs on Asahi’s hand until he swims out to where neither of them can touch the sand anymore. Their feet knock into each other as they tread, and Yuu keeps his hands on Asahi’s shoulders. 

Just like in Brazil, Yuu admires the way he looks under the stars. This time, though, Yuu leans forward and presses his lips to Asahi’s, laughing at the way Asahi starts to sink the moment they start kissing. 

“Don’t drown ,” Yuu tells him. Asahi rolls his eyes and wraps his arms around Yuu’s middle to drag him around in circles in the water. 

“I’m not gonna drown,” Asahi promises. “I just got…distracted.” 

“Oh, am I distracting you?” 

“No. There was a fish. I saw a fish.” Yuu rolls his eyes, but he’s smiling so wide his cheeks hurt. Asahi is warm where they’re pressed together. 

“I had nothing to do with it?” 

“Nothing at all.” Yuu presses his lips to Asahi’s again and again as they swim around in the night. The sounds of the party are distant, and the fire burns bright on the beach a little ways away. Yuu tangles his hands in Asahi’s hair and tugs until the hair tie comes loose, letting his hair fall in a curtain around his face. “Hey.” 

“Hey,” Yuu mimics. He steals the hair tie, swimming away as Asahi tries to get it back.

“I need that.” 

“No, you don’t.” Yuu evades his grasp by diving underwater. Asahi still catches him by the wrist and drags him closer. They’re both breathing hard, and a vague smile graces Asahi’s face.

“I need that, Nishinoya.” 

“No! I like you like this.” Yuu reaches up and twirls a long piece of hair around his finger. “You don’t need it.” Asahi stares at him for a long moment before he pulls Yuu flush against his chest and buries his burning face in the junction between his shoulder and his neck. He makes an incoherent noise. Yuu runs his fingers through his wet hair with a snicker. 

“You’ll kill me, I swear.” 

“Then we’ll both go down together.” Asahi kisses him again, and Yuu smiles into it. 

xiii.

Yuu startles as his phone rings, his heart pounding and his mind sluggish with sleep as he fights to wake up. There’s some sort of twisted deja vu, but Asahi is in the bed next to him, his arm wrapped around Yuu’s waist and his hair a wild ring around his head. He draws in a deep breath and stirs as Yuu answers the phone. 

“Hello?” he murmurs into the receiver. 

“ HAPPY BIRTHDAY, YUU! ” Jiji cheers, and Yuu’s ears ring. He pulls the phone away from his ear to check the date and — sure enough, it’s October 10th in Greece already. Barely. “You sound half asleep.”

“It’s seven in the morning , Jiji. I’m going back to sleep — I’ll call you —” 

“It’s seven ?” Asahi hisses next to him, fumbling for his glasses. Yuu runs his hand over his shoulders as he scrambles. “Shit, shit, shit.” 

“Love you, Jiji. Call you when it’s not the asscrack of dawn, all right?” Yuu hangs up the phone as Asahi rolls off the bed. He sits up on his knees to watch as Asahi searches for his phone, still swearing and muttering under his breath. “What’s going on, ‘sahi?” The room is dark and lit only by the dim, fading moonlight filtering in through their thin curtains. 

“I slept through my alarm,” he answers, almost absent-mindedly, still looking for his phone. Yuu finds it buried in the mess of blankets on the end of the bed and hands it over to Asahi. He glances at the time on the screen before he tugs Yuu out of bed. Yuu stumbles and hisses at the coolness of the floor on his bare feet. “Come on, we still have time.” 

“Time for what ?” But Asahi is already moving away without answering. Yuu shivers in the breeze and stoops to pick one of the sweaters up off the floor. He figures it’s Asahi’s — Yuu doesn’t exactly wear that many sweaters — but puts it on anyway. He yawns and stretches and waits for Asahi to emerge from wherever he went off to in their little, shared rental apartment. 

When he reappears, Asahi is wearing shorts and a sweater, too, but his hair is still down. Yuu smiles and pulls him down for a chaste kiss. He misses, still half asleep, and catches the corner of his lips instead. 

“Come on,” Asahi whispers, and he takes Yuu by the hand and drags him out of the apartment. The town is quieter than Yuu’s ever seen it; usually, it’s bustling with activity, but now, it’s dark and still. 

But Asahi drags him in the opposite direction, toward the cliffs. They hike up one of the trails, an easy slope up through the green vegetation. Asahi leads the way but never drops Yuu’s hand, and he walks like he’s made this trek a million times. Yuu’s never been this way. 

By the time the trees open up into empty space near the edge of the cliffs, which are just sheer, rocky drops into the bay below, the moon has sunk below the horizon behind them, and the sun is turning the sky golden. Asahi seems happy about this and sits down on the grass, pulling Yuu down with him. The grass is soft under him, and Asahi is warm next to him. 

“What’s going on?” he asks as he leans closer. Even the short hike up here hasn’t fully woken Yuu up. He blinks slowly and rests his head on Asahi’s shoulder. Their hands are tangled together between their bodies. 

“Happy birthday,” Asahi murmurs, and he procures a white cardboard box from somewhere. Yuu hadn’t noticed him carrying it with them up here. 

Inside the box is a cupcake with white icing. 

“I, uh…I made it—for you,” Asahi stutters. His cheeks are pink, and he rubs at his cheekbone with the pad of his index finger. Gingerly, Yuu lifts the cake out of its box. It’s a little lopsided the more he looks at it, but he absolutely loves it. This time last year, he was sitting on a rock wishing he could just go home. He ate that cupcake alone and booked his flight.

“Share it with me?” Yuu asks. 

“Sure. Whatever you want, Yuu.”