Story Book

Melody of
dreams.
Mark Ace Alfaro
You’d think, living half your life in fear of something, you’d be a little more prepared when it
hits. Not really.
Case in point.
The first time Tobio saw Shouyou fly, he was fourteen and had gangly limbs and an ego large
enough to fill a whole gym. The ball, ultimately treacherous, had landed just out of bounds. I
could barely follow him with my eyes, he thought. That was new.
On the way out of the court, Shouyou caught up to him. He was crying. It tugged on Tobio’s
heart, a little bit, but not enough. He promised to defeat Tobio.
After that first fall, what remains is the old-line ringing in his mind: “I haven’t lost yet, so I don’t
know what you mean.”
The rest becomes history, anyway.
Fear has a way of creeping in. It’s slow but sure, and directly correlated with time, its infernal
twin. It didn’t occur to Tobio until a few years later that their world was not their own, and
their wind was not eternal. When it did, there was no going back.
The first time Tobio thought about it, he was seventeen, and it was springtime. Shouyou was
flying. The wind was still swift on their necks.
Tobio was waiting, with barely bated breath, for Yachi to announce the verdict. His reach, 341
centimeters high, was marked in white powder on the basketball backboard, overlapping now
with Shouyou’s own.
“343 centimeters!” Tobio could swear she was about to cry. Tsukishima sneered at his back.
Whatever he thought when Shouyou turned to him, with that terrifying stillness he'd later
come to know so well, is lost to the sheer force of the moment. He was grinning.
“My win.”
So, it was.
They went to get curry, after – Tobio’s treat, in payment for his fresh loss – and talked all kinds
of mundanity. Spring Inter-High was almost upon them, the last they would ever have – this
time, they’d promised to be done with work before they got detained and risked attendance,
and so they exchanged notes over the table.
Here's the thought that did survive. Shouyou’s fingers were thin, and his skin was pale. He
looked a little like glass. Suddenly it occurred to Tobio that a fall from that kind of height could
break him in two.
It wasn’t the fall that broke him. But something eventually did.
10 June 2024, Tokyo
18 days before the fall
Tobio and Shouyou are apartment hunting in Shibuya. It’s warm, a nice warmth that doesn’t
cling to your bones and yet manages to watch over you, but Shouyou is still wearing his team
Japan jersey jacket.
“Tell me why we’re looking at this one again.”
“Because it’s so close to the gym,” Shouyou whines, “And it’s so pretty.”
“It doesn’t have an elevator.”
“The elevator’s broken. They’ll fix it. Think of it as extra cardio?”
It’s not like Tobio hates the apartment. It’s pricey, but logically well worth it; the living room is
enormous, there’s room to build an indoor gym, the kitchen comes pre-decorated in green
appliances and mosaics. The bedroom – Tobio’s favourite part of any house – has a beautiful
view of Shibuya, the kind that would probably keep them awake from sheer light exposure, if
they forgot to pull the blinds.
Tobio doesn’t really want to settle on anything, not when he’s enjoying the process so
deliciously. They’ve been in Tokyo for a little over two months, after some years spent reaching
out from separate parts of the globe; Brazil to Japan, and then Japan to Italy, and then – in a
fitting twist of fate – Brazil to Italy, too. Now, after a few weeks spent speaking his mother
tongue, carrying Shouyou’s bag around the city as he stomps his way through every apartment
available for renting, Tobio feels adulthood settle in his bones and watches his life unfold like a
spectator.
“Fine.” He tells Shouyou, ultimately weak at his pout, “We can get this one, if you like it that
much.”
Shouyou kisses him – it's a fleeting thing, which flakes off a second later when Shouyou runs to
the realtor to ask him for the paperwork. I could get used to this, Tobio thinks. He checks his
phone for their practice timetable. That’s their first time in the apartment in Shibuya.
24 June 2024, Tokyo

The fall
The Tokyo Metropolitan Gym is currently occupied by the Japanese Men’s National Volleyball
Team, for use in training for the 2024 Summer Olympics. Having taken the bronze medal four
years ago in Tokyo, with much the same crew then in younger skin, this year they’ve got their
eyes set on gold.
One notable absentee is Ushijima Wakatoshi, starting opposite hitter; he’s still recuperating
after a recent shoulder dislocation he’s suffered, back in Poland, which has forced Coach
Hibarida to leave him out of the Olympic roster. He’s thirty this year, and a rude reminder to
everyone left guarding his shadow: things fall apart all the time, and they’re difficult to pull
back together. Even if the thing in question is a body at the peak of the human condition.
“I really like this gym,” Shouyou sings, skipping in his place during warm-ups. “Something
about the lights.”
“All gyms have lights.”
“Yeah, but it’s different here.” It’s really not, as far as Tobio sees it, but practice starts before he
can argue back.
Drills, first. Almost fifteen years later, Tobio still gets the same thrill from watching Shouyou
jump. Blink, and you just might miss the glory in his approach; he levitates off the ground like
he was meant to rule that higher realm, from the beginning of time, and has enlisted Tobio’s
help on this divine mission. In practice, without the threat of the referee whistle and the
blinding adrenaline, Tobio really gets to revel.
Then, a mock match. It is the starting six against the rest, at first, because that is the order of
business; the six need to learn how to form one massive entity together, so they can still
function as one whole when bits of it are replaced. Tobio is at the service line, and Shouyou is
opposite him. He winks before his hands clasp the back of his neck, for a nostalgic jab at high
school.
Tobio’s serve is a little like thunder. Too bad Komori manages to bump it up – though it’s off,
tracking dangerously low – and that Miya manages to get both hands under it. Then it’s flying
off to Hyakuzawa, who meets it halfway in its course, with a deafening crack to his smack
cutting through the air.
It’s headed to Shouyou. Tobio knows this without looking, as he does most things about him.
Sure enough, the ball is in his hands a second later, following a familiar “alright;” just a second
more, and it’ll be Shouyou’s again.
Tobio has lived half his life afraid of the fall. He’s watched however many tapes of Shouyou on
the beach, falling this and that way when the sand trips him up; he’s seen Shouyou rise to the
ball a million times, probably, and land with nothing changed, other than a renewed sense of
sureness around him that everyone else has unquestionably shared in. Confrontation has never
done much to erase his fears. This is probably why.
Tobio is watching, now. There is a delay to Shouyou’s pace. Then, when his feet ask for that
push off the ground, it is dimmed; he reaches up, and the ball slides off his fingertips, and then
he crumples to the floor like his legs were never meant to hold him.
Tobio’s heart does a somersault. Someone screams.
16 June 2024, Tokyo

It’s midday, and Tobio is driving to Funabashi on an expedition to Ikea.
“We should have gone in the weekend,” he’s grumbling under his breath as Shouyou chews on a
granola bar next to him, “We’re going to be late for practice.”
“Tobio, practice is at 5PM.”
“Exactly.” Shouyou groans. His hand is in Tobio’s.
“Think of it like this. Our quality of life is the quality of our volleyball.” This is the kind of logic
with which there is no arguing.
There’s some kind of latent potential in an Ikea showroom. Tobio, who has an ongoing war with
anything even remotely “latent,” has already made a list (by name) of the shelves and candles
he wants. Shouyou, who lives in the margins of the moment always, is absentmindedly walking
around the massive store, trailing a hand over every lamp and frowning at every cupboard.
As it happens, Tobio doesn’t mind as much as he’d like to project he does. He pushes the cart
behind Shouyou with an expertly concealed smile and barricades him with a million stupid
questions. What do you think about the curtains? Doesn’t look like it’ll fit with the carpet. Hmm,
probably not. Have you checked if they have it in black? No?
They’ve agreed on Ikea, for now, because the apartment in Shibuya is a test. It wasn’t exactly an
easy decision to fly back home, having played for years with the best of the world, and
everything else it had to offer. Shouyou held an offer in the backburner from Zenit. Ali Roma
wanted Tobio to renew his contract.
For four years, during cold winter months and crisp springs, they've met each other halfway
anywhere on the world. At the start of the season, Shouyou would fly out from an ocean away
and find him somewhere in Europe; Paris, or Berlin, or Barcelona, somewhere always when the
Christmas lights were up and the sun was down. Towards its end – and Tobio’s always ended
earlier – they’d brave the scalding heat of the Americas together, somewhere in Argentina or
etched between the sand in Cuba. A weekend, maybe three days, of a private, exclusive world
that no one else was let into.
They made the decision in Florence, last November. One year, in Japan.
“A test.” Shouyou said, still in thought. “We might not like it. We might. Both are fine.” He meant
it.
They’re twenty-eight, this year. They’re not getting any younger. It’s a good time now, to try
when they can still fly back out, if they want to. One year, in Japan. It’s Olympic season anyway.
One year isn’t a long time.
They agreed on Ikea, because it’s a simple answer to a test. A toddler can put it up or take it
down (or so they advertise, anyway). It’ll be up fast enough for the Olympics, and it’ll be easy
enough to store in Shouyou’s old garden shed in Miyagi, next summer, if things fall apart.
Still, there is a latent potential to it. Ikea, and the apartment in Shibuya, and Shouyou, and what
that might mean if Tobio lets them.
“Surely you’re not thinking of getting that.” He points at the white bed frame. Tarva is a flimsy
thing, held together by a few measly pieces of faux wood.
“What’s wrong with it?”
“We’ll break it.”
“Oh.” Shouyou must think this is plausible, because he hurries on. They later settle on a
Brimnes.
Once Shouyou is done exploring and they’ve exited the aesthetic comfort of the showroom,
Tobio drags their cart into the warehouse. First thing on the list is Fiskbo, so they head to the
home decoration aisle.
“Do you—” Tobio starts, but Shouyou has already veered off to stare at a shiny mirror. That’s
that, then. He fills the cart with Fiskbo and Sannahed and Rigba, frames for the thousand
moments they’ve compiled from just as many different locations. Next destination is
Sinnlig. Vanilla, Tobio has jotted down next to it, Shouyou’s favourite. Then, in
parentheses, peach?
When he gets there, Shouyou is already trying to reach the candles perched atop a high shelf.
He’d have to stand on his toes to grab them, but Tobio does it for him.
“Still short.” He teases, dumping the candles in Shouyou’s cold hands. Shouyou’s ensuing frown
has no bite to it. Tobio hurries on to the next item.
“You know what?” Shouyou tugs on his arm, at one point, “Why don’t I go get the cart rounded
up while you get the rest, that way we’ll be done earlier.” Tobio nods, even though the absence
of Shouyou around him is a little catastrophic. Looking back, it should have been more.
28 June 2024, Tokyo
The fall
Tobio only realizes at Shouyou’s side that he was the one screaming, and that the scream was
Shouyou’s name. His hands reach out to him in primal instinct, trailing over his head, his face,
the back of his neck.
“Tobio?” Shouyou seems confused. “What the—”
He’s firm in Tobio’s hands. There’s nothing wrong with the neck, or the sturdy back. His chest is
rising and falling. Calm down. Calm down.
“Are you okay?” He asks, momentarily tearing his eyes away to check his surroundings. The
team is forming a respectful halo around them. Coach Hibarida is approaching.
“Yeah? I don’t know what that was.” Tobio’s hands trail over his legs. Nothing. “Hold on one
second.”
Shouyou frowns, like he isn't quite sure what frontier he's facing, or what border he's crossed
to be struck down so suddenly. Everyone in the gym is essentially holding the same breath. His
hands push into the court, and then his body rises in a beautiful arch.
“See? All good.”
“You’re sure?” Hibarida asks, and Tobio knows he’s thinking the same thing. That wasn’t a
wrong step or a wrong landing, but it was something, and it looked like nothing good.
“Yes.” Shouyou skips in his place. One, two. Tobio’s eyes never leave his.
“Alright, then.” Hibarida claps, though his eyes are still narrowed. “We wouldn’t want anything
to happen to our star opposite hitter.” No, indeed. Shouyou grins.
“Yes, sir!”
The group recedes in a slow tidal wave. Bokuto gives Shouyou a hard slap on the back. It takes
his breath away, a little. Tobio watches.
“Kageyama.” Someone whispers. “It’s still your serve.”
Tobio picks the ball up.
22 June 2024, Tokyo

“I don’t understand why we have to do an interview.” Shouyou is sitting on the ground, in the
living room of the apartment in Shibuya. He is trying – and failing, rather miserably actually –
to assemble Tobio’s petroleum green Lommarp.
“It’s for the Olympic channel.”
“Yes, but why us? Why not someone who isn’t busy moving in and—” he puts the screwdriver
behind his ear and holds up the instructions above his head. “I don’t know what I’m doing, but
whatever it is I’m doing.” Fair point.
“Everyone wants to know about you.” Tobio shrugs as he slices his apple. He’s incredibly
amused. “Last Asia MVP, starting opposite...” Shouyou groans.
“Why you? At least you could have finished assembling this—this—what is this? A vitrine? Who
even has vitrines anymore?”
“I do.” Tobio rolls his eyes. “I’m the captain.”
Truly, they’re both trying to act like it has nothing to do with their “salacious romance” gracing
headlines last year, after a twitter flood armed with a picture of them in Lisbon.
kagsfans @kagsfansofficial • 9 min

[Photo: the blurry image of two men walking out of a restaurant, holding hands.]
Japan’s volleyball superstars, Kageyama Tobio and Hinata Shouyou, have been in a secret
relationship for years. Here’s your proof.
15,6k comments | 100,9k retweets | 270,3k likes | share
It wasn’t really too big a deal if Shouyou addressed the rumors with a selfie in the airport, not
when they’d both have their phones off for the next hours anyway. The storm died down,
eventually. Next time they met, it was in a tiny hotel in Corfu, and they were – wisely – wearing
sunglasses, even though it was dark and cloudy.
It’s never good, when you put so much of yourself into something else – something that your
heart burns for, like a single luminous torch at night, careless as to what it wrecks along the
way – and have it sidelined, even by something inherently and absolutely greater. Their sphere
was always meant to be their own, in Tobio’s mind, and anywhere else in the world. Suddenly it
isn’t, and it bleeds into how people watch them chase the ball.
“Well, fine, I guess. Come give me a hand.” Shouyou’s holding the screwdriver up for him to
grab, though his eyes remain glued on the blueprints. Tobio reaches for it.
The screwdriver chooses that minute to fall gracelessly out of Shouyou’s hand. First, somewhat
perplexed, they both look at where it lies, on the glass that’s supposed to be the front of Tobio’s
Lommarp. Then, Tobio raises an eyebrow.
“Are you trying to sabotage my vitrine?”
“I would never dare.” Shouyou laughs. “Can’t a man drop something in his own home?”
That's the first time they’ve called the apartment in Shibuya home.
28 June 2024, Tokyo

72 minutes after the fall
The locker room after practice is filled with a lot of chatter. Not all of it is entirely as carefree as
most its occupants would have you believe.
“Please don’t hurt yourself right before the Olympics, Shouyou.” Yaku says, pulling on a shirt
that Tobio knows from experience is designer, “There’s no one to replace you, kiddo.”
“Sorry, Yaku-san.” Shouyou is sheepish as he scratches the back of his head. “You know me.” He
doesn’t, really, not as well as Tobio.
Miya claps Shouyou on the back at this, probably with a force roughly akin to that required for
a jump serve. “Come on, Mori-kun, look at him.” He stretches his hand out, as if to prove a point.
“He’s made of steel. Nothing’s gonna happen to him.”
“Yeah!” Shouyou puffs his chest out. To his right, Bokuto also shouts out his assent. Years later,
there is still nothing that can break through the sheer chaos of the MSBY Four, not even the fall.
You’d think, living in fear of the same thing for half your life, you might be a little more
prepared when it hits you. Not really. What does happen is a painful awareness of every second
when it has, like the aftertaste of a straight spirit left on your tongue long after it’s welcome. On
the way out of the gym, Tobio's mind is still flitting through every fragment of every moment
he's watched Shouyou fly, every untold sigh he's breathed at his landing.
“Hey.” He hums, looking ahead at the sky. Tokyo looks like an inferno, blazing with synthetic
light at night. “You’re really okay?”
“Yes, Tobio.” Shouyou rolls his eyes at him. Tobio knows this, without looking, from the sound
of his voice. “Other than the bruised back from the slaps.”
Then, tentatively, a single beat later: “Wanna race back home?”
“Yes.”
They do. Tobio thinks this is why Shouyou must have liked the apartment in Shibuya. It’s a
fifteen-minute jog – an insane run, more like, that sends their bags and limbs flying in the air –
from the gym to home, where they have to apologize to every pedestrian they pass by and one
unfortunate little boy, who Tobio almost flattens into the ground.
When they arrive, Shouyou is fumbling for his keys. He’s trying, and he deserves credit for that,
especially because Tobio is kissing him in a competent attempt at inhibition.
“Tobio—mmph, hey, stop just one—” He’s breathing, under Tobio’s hands, standing on his two
familiar legs. Tobio has mapped them to his liking, now, years into the joined thing they are,
and he knows their anatomy too well. The keys make a clinking sound when Shouyou drops
them onto the floor.
For a while they stay like that, Shouyou against him and he against Shouyou, ascertaining each
other’s existence. Then Tobio picks up the keys, and Shouyou flashes him a grin, and they go in
hand-in-hand.
(24 June 2024, Tokyo

“Hello! I’m Hinata Shouyou.”
“I’m Kageyama Tobio.”
“And we’re here to answer the web’s most searched questions!”
The producer places the first question board in Shouyou’s arms. Shouyou’s fingers battle with
the sticky paper valiantly, before Tobio retrieves it from him – much the same way a mother
might remove a spoon from a child’s hand – and promptly tears it off. The whole studio laughs.
“Is Hinata Shouyou… dating Kageyama Tobio.” Tobio sighs.

“I knew this would happen,” he breathes, trailing a hand through his hair. Shouyou grabs his
free one.
“I am, actually.” He shoots the camera a grin, a young twist of the lips that could hold a million
promises and secrets, and it makes Tobio want to smile, too. “So just stop asking.”
And the world snaps back into its axis.)
4 July 2024, Tokyo

6 days after the fall
“I can’t believe it’s taken us this long to set this thing up.” Shouyou huffs, admiring the
Lommarp. “What are you even going to put in it? Your mother’s china?”
Shouyou is amused at his own joke, though Tobio thinks his humour resembles a middle
schooler’s. He leans an elbow on Tobio’s shoulder as they look around their living room, freshly
assembled; it’s cream against gold, petroleum green and dark navy, lined with plants in every
vacancy. On two parallel Vitssjö, standing at opposite ends of the room, Shouyou has made a
point of placing their more impressive medals, atop the many frames of pictures that Tobio has
curated.
“Seriously, though. What are we putting in it?” He hums, holding the vacuum cleaner against his
hip.
“You’ll see.” Tobio muses, diving into the heaps of boxes around them.
The subject of his attention is a massive black box, with a special lid and a metal window for
labelling. Tobio’s handwriting glares at him, stark over the white paper. Plates.
“So it is your mother’s china!”
“Shut up, dumbass.” Tobio lifts the lid off the box and hands Shouyou the first plate.
The first time they reached for each other, halfway through the world and over, they met in
Lapland. It was around the time the northern lights should have been winking – though three
days wasn’t enough to hunt for them, as it turns out – and it was too cold and dark to step
outside, for any sane mortal man. They stayed cocooned in bed, staring up at the stars in the
tiny chalet they’d rented, through a window fixed at the sky and all its mysteries. They learned
to trace each other’s bodies like renaissance painters.
On the way back, as they parted in the airport, Tobio stopped at the gift shop. He bought the
plate and stuffed it into his backpack while Shouyou browsed t-shirts for Natsu, and he carried
it back to Rome.
It’s a plate of the northern lights, and Lapland is inscribed over it in gold lettering. This is one of
the better plates in Tobio’s collection. Some of them are downright rubbish, like the flaky one
he bought in Madrid for one euro, or the (now) faded one he got from Stockholm and
mistakenly washed once in a dishwasher.
“Aw, Tobio,” Shouyou smirks at him, “You’re a sap.” His hand trembles around the plate.
“Whatever.”
(“Too bad we’re off to the Olympics in a week,” Shouyou whispers against him in bed, that
night, “This apartment still needs to be christened in so many places.”
“Hmm.” Tobio smiles into his mouth. “We could start now. A month isn’t such a long time to be
away.”
“That’s what I hoped you’d say.”)
11 July 2024, somewhere in the sky

Tobio and Shouyou have been on a million airplanes to and from each other, but rarely ever on
the same one. It is a kind of delicacy, reserved only for when they’re wearing the familiar Japan
red on their backs. Now is one of those times.
“I’ve missed eating carbs.” Shouyou wheezes next to him as he stuffs his face with creamy in-
flight pasta. Tobio thanks the stars they already know everyone on the front and back rows.
They’re headed to Paris, which means there’ll be two more servings of food during the flight.
They’ve been to Paris before. It was last December, to celebrate Tobio’s twenty-seventh
birthday.
“It’s always a good day when I’m not older than you anymore.” Shouyou joked, hooking his
hand through Tobio’s as they walked through the soft snow.
“We’re not even thirty.” Tobio pointed out gently. He was looking ahead.
When you know someone as long as they’ve known each other, you know the lines of
landmines you need to skirt around. Shouyou has always had this clock ticking in his head. His
father died aged twenty-eight, before Tobio ever met him. His mother, Tobio mourned together
with Shouyou, when he was twenty and barely half her age.
“Yeah, well, one day we will be.” He squeezed Tobio’s hand. “When we’re old and grey and you
start to care about being half a year younger don’t expect any sympathy from me.”
Old and grey doesn’t really occur to Tobio, at twenty-seven and the height of health, eternally
youthful the way all professional athletes think they must be. Statistically, a volleyball player
will have his best times somewhere between twenty-four and twenty-nine. The art is to enjoy
this and stretching it out, as far as it goes, as high as you can rise, as Tobio is.
He lays his head on Shouyou’s shoulder. It is firm, taut with barely contained power
underneath. It smells like Shouyou and the apartment in Shibuya
“Hey, Tobio.” Shouyou doesn’t nudge him, but his voice is a rumble through Tobio’s whole
being. “There’s something I have to do. Can you remind me to do it later?”
“What is it?” Sleep is threatening to claim him. Tobio is melting against Shouyou.
“Never mind that. Just remind me, after we win.”
“Okay.”
Silence.
19 July 2024, Olympic Village, Paris
The Olympic schedule is tight. Worst case, you’ll play five matches. Best case, only three more.
It is an extremely tiring two weeks, spent in heat and sweat and not much else, surrounded by
five thousand athletes who are all doing exactly the same things.
Team Japan have their first match tomorrow, with Italy. Not only are they one of the toughest
teams in the pool, they also happen to boast half of Tobio’s teammates from Ali Roma on their
roster, and that means they’re due a short reunion.
“Come on, be a good sport,” Shouyou says to him, after he’s just forcibly stripped Tobio of the
Japan jersey and pulled a blank black over his head, “We’re all friends here.”
“No we’re not. We’re opponents.”
“Hush, don’t start with that.” Shouyou sighs as he hands Tobio his phone. “Be nice.”
“I’m not nice.”
“Yeah, well, try.” A playful smack on the shoulder.
“Fine.”
Tobio sits on his side of the bed – it is actually two beds that they’ve pushed into one, with
eternal annoyance – and gets to tying his shoelaces. Shouyou throws himself unceremoniously
on the other side.
“Man, I’m tired. Practice must have wiped me out.” Tobio grunts in assent.
“What are you doing while I’m gone?”
“I don’t know. Maybe I’ll meet Oikawa-san, if he doesn’t have practice.”
“Without me?”
“Are you admitting you want to see him, then?” Cheeky. Tobio really should have seen that
coming. “I’m teasing you. I’ll phone up an old teammate of mine, from Brazil.”
Tobio stands. He pulls his wristwatch on, gives his hair a final look in the mirror, checks his
phone in his pocket. Shouyou is still lying on the bed. Tobio’s hand is first on his thigh, and then
their lips are over each other’s.
“See you tonight.”
“Yeah.”
Tobio is – famously, royally – not the friendliest of people. He made his peace with this long
ago; partly because amending it is too much hassle, and he has too little time, and partly
because Shouyou fills all the gaps in his life left over from volleyball. He’s dimly glad to see his
teammates, after just a few months of having left Italy, because they’ve played the best of
volleyball together, and the best of volleyball is the best of life. A short burst of electricity goes
through his body at the prospect of playing on the court opposite them tomorrow.
“Is your boyfriend here, too?” They ask, as Tobio is finishing the last of his tea. Tobio smiles
when he says yes.
On the way back, he thinks about this. There’s a privilege to sharing your whole world with
someone, and at having done so always, even two worlds apart. He thinks about the apartment
in Shibuya, about the plates – they’re missing one from Paris, he jots down in his head, better
get one – about Shouyou, who will crawl up into him, tonight, and stay there even as they sweat
through the night's tired heat, just to breathe and be against him.
He’s still lost in thought, when he pushes his keycard into its slot. The lights are still off, but
there’s something else; Tobio recognizes this as the smell of antiseptic before the familiar
bubbling of alarm returns to his chest.
“Tobio?” Shouyou’s voice. “Okay, I need you to not panic when you—” Tobio has already hit the
light switch. “—turn on the lights.”
Shouyou has a cut on his brow, is the first thing he notices. It looks worse than it is, probably,
because it is slathered with iodine and is still swollen from his body’s acrid shock. Tobio feels
the sting like a bullet against his own temple.
“What happened?” He asks, trailing one hand over the right side of Shouyou’s face. Shouyou is
holding an ice pack over his head, just above the cut.
“Funny thing, I tripped.”
“You tripped.”
“Yes, over my shoelaces, in the garden. Is that so uncommon?”
Not really, for most people, but that’s not who Shouyou is. They’re professional athletes, with
near complete control over every inch of their bodies; Shouyou is more than that, with his feet
firm on the ground even when he digs the ball out of an impossibility, as if he still trusts it as
little as he had when it was pure sand.
Tobio doesn’t say anything while he changes into a clean t-shirt. He turns the light off with a
blizzard of questions raging in him. He sits next to Shouyou.
“If there was something wrong,” he tries, like saying the sentence alone isn’t taking an
enormous effort out of him, “If there was something wrong, you’d tell me. Right?”
“Of course.” Shouyou says as he lays his head on Tobio’s chest. “Hmm. I think I’m going to tell
everyone I got in a fight. That’s a cooler thing to say.”
“You’ll be benched for unsportsmanlike conduct.”
“I don’t like you when you’re right.”
They both pretend they don’t want to say more, that night.
24 July 2024, Olympic Village, Paris

Japan have only won one Olympic gold medal in volleyball, sometime in the 70s. Today, leading
Pool A with zero losses, everyone thinks the 2024 roster just might get there again.
Tobio supposes there’s some merit to the fact that they’ve all known each other for at least a
decade now. Most of them recognize each other’s presence by the sound of an approach, or by
the slight angle of a toss. It’s kind of a miracle that they’re still together – and, somehow,
dominating the stage – when it’s statistically so impossible. They’ll win a medal, Tobio knows
that much. They’ll win something. But the gold is twinkling behind everyone’s eyes, and why
shouldn’t it, when they’re willing to get it through blood and tears?
Shouyou is a hurricane on the court. They watch the highlights montages at night, snuggled in
bed; this, even though it makes Shouyou feel strange, the way everyone does when they hear a
recording of their voice.
“Huh.” He breathes, his hand over his mouth as he smiles, if he thinks he’s done something
particularly right. “Huh.”
Tobio thinks Shouyou couldn’t do anything less than right if he tried. Now two weeks away
from home – and that’s an odd, luxurious concept, newly developed, home – he’s starting to
understand he doesn’t feel it, not with Shouyou there.
One year, in Japan. Where to go, when it ends? Somewhere fewer eyes will judge, maybe, and
they’ll promise to be there always for each other, wherever the next year is. One year isn’t such
a long time, anyway. Tobio could start thinking now.
“What will you do if we get gold?” He asks Shouyou, lying in bed two days before they’re to play
France for a shot at the podium. Most athletes have promises they make, to themselves and to
others. Bokuto has declared that he’ll get a haircut. Miya thinks he might finally try for an
overseas offer. Tobio’s promise – a terrifying thought, held close to his heart – is just shaping
up, in the crevices of his mind.
“I don’t know.” Shouyou sighs. “I haven’t planned that far.”
They don’t say anything else, but Tobio thinks it’ll be okay if he plans for the both of them, as
usual.
2 August 2024, Olympic Stadium, Paris

They’re playing the final against Poland, racing for the gold. When Tobio is subbed out in set
three – after they’ve taken the first and lost the second – he watches Shouyou. He looks a little
like a god, in the air; it is the oldest he’s ever been, but a million memories of his flight are as
one in Tobio’s mind, pinning him ageless against the lights of the sky. He laughs after every
point, gets back up after every dig. Tobio could almost put the burning out in his heart.
If he tried hard enough, maybe he could still ignore every tug on it. Maybe. Maybe when they
get gold, he could ask.
He’s subbed back in after Miya’s off the service line. “Get ‘em.” Miya grins, giving him a firm
shake from the shoulder. “He’s real good today. You’ll have fun.”
Tobio does. Shouyou is a mirage, today. A miracle.
It doesn’t fall apart for anyone, not even that last moment. Over time, in his career as well as
every match he’s played, a natural progression has appeared to Shouyou. First, he’s
inexplicable; then, he’s the center of attention, and then when people realize he’s a decoy it is
too late to realize, also, that he is – this, more recently – a force of nature, and will slam the ball
against any block with the audacity of standing ahead of him.
Having played five sets, Poland just barely catch on to this, towards those last few miserable
points. They also think it is too late, probably. That’s why there’s no one to dig Shouyou’s last
feint before the block, because the three other players are at the three remaining corners of the
court, waiting for the ball to shoot through.
Tobio’s last was a perfect toss. Pulling it into a feint at the last moment, one second delayed,
must have taken enormous core strength. That’s probably what everyone else assumes when
Shouyou falls.
There’s roaring in the gymnasium. They’ve won. Half the team go crashing into Shouyou with
zero mercy – he’s their new titan, having scored them a little over a set’s worth of points
singlehandedly. Tobio sees Bokuto and Miya crushing him between themselves, pulling on his
limbs like he’s made from rags. Behind him Yaku is sobbing, and Sakusa is hovering, and
Hoshiumi is screaming. Tobio can’t see Shouyou’s face.
You’d think, living in fear of something for half your life, you might be a little more prepared
when it hits you. Tobio’s knees are weak. To anyone else, that last touch of the ball, as fleeting
as a whisper, was pure genius on Shouyou’s part. Maybe it was, in a different way. But Tobio
has watched Shouyou fly, fifteen years straight, as he was compelled to by nature, and he would
know the sound of his wings blind. He saw Shouyou’s legs give out, when he needed them most,
and the rest of his body come up in desperation, for a true miracle.
Amid the tears, no one really thinks to give him a hand. Shouyou is sitting silently on the
ground, and everyone is either assuming he’s deservedly in shock or still reeling from their
own. Tobio’s steps are slow.
He could ask, now, before their sphere crumbles. He holds Shouyou’s hand instead, pulls him
up with everything he can muster out of his bones.
Shouyou grins at him. “We won.”
“We did.”
They walk, hand in hand, into the locker room. When they emerge, Shouyou has regained some
of his color. They stand tall on the podium. If Tobio tried hard enough, maybe he could still
pretend they’re immortal. Maybe.
Shouyou doesn’t cry at all, not once through the whole ceremony. Not when the gold is hung
fast around his neck, not when the MVP Award is tucked into his hand after Best Opposite
Hitter. Next to him, Bokuto remains a weeping mess. Hoshiumi and Yaku are still shaking in the
afterglow.
Tobio could pretend, now. He could ask.
He doesn’t.
“You should get a plate.” Shouyou tells him in the airport. Tobio hasn’t lost sight of him once,
since reality rushed rudely in. Not in bed, not in the shower, not even in sleep.
Shouyou’s hands flit through a selection of plates, and settle on a gold trimmed one – all Paris’
eccentricities are painted on it, Notre Dame Cathedral to the Eiffel, shining below the five
Olympic rings. It makes its way to Tobio’s backpack, somehow.
The flight back is twelve hours and forty-two minutes. Tobio greets every single one in his
ticking countdown. This time Shouyou falls asleep on his shoulder, and Tobio holds him close.
Shouyou is still drowsy in the cab, on the way to the apartment in Shibuya. He’s leaning against
the taxi window, clutching his jacket against himself in the August heat. Tobio swallows
something dangerously like a scream.
“Shouyou.” His mouth won’t move. “There’s something you have to do.”
Shouyou sighs, and it is, somehow, the worst thing Tobio has ever heard.
“I know.”
Part 2: the apartment in shibuya
August 10, 2024
The doctor lays everything out to them plainly, when Shouyou recounts the many moments of
his suspicions. Reaching for candles in Ikea to dropping a screwdriver, falling in the comfort of
their home gym to the Olympics. The paper that slips through his fingers in the interview. The
tingly muscles he feels, sometimes, even as he is sweating.
The tests don’t lie, and the diagnosis is brutal. Familial amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Tobio
greets this under a dissonant veil of shock, like inertia alone might crush the words. It doesn’t.
Shouyou doesn’t ask for a prognosis. He grips the prescription tight in his hand, and he asks the
doctor when he should be back for a check-up. The doctor thinks a month is a good time. Tobio
thanks him numbly. He doesn’t crumble, not until they get to the apartment in Shibuya. The
newest addition to the plates, the cursed one from Paris, is glittering with the light reflecting off
of Tobio’s Olympic best setter award.
They’ve always found it easier to communicate in the dark. The first time Shouyou kissed him –
over a decade ago, now, before either of them had flown out of Miyagi – they were in their dark
high school gymnasium, and Tobio was playing with Shouyou’s hair. Now, they crawl into bed
wordlessly, with that same ancient comfort, and Tobio lays his head on Shouyou’s chest. He
refuses to cry, because that’s an admission, and this is not something he’s willing to admit. The
restraint – or maybe the latent knowledge – makes him tremble in Shouyou’s grip. The hands
holding him in place are strong enough to hold him in one piece, probably. For now.
“How are you so calm?” He asks Shouyou, at some point in the night, before light has broken.
Shouyou is whispering nothings into his hear, rocking him like he’s a tearless infant.
“My dad had it.” Tobio’s blood is ice in his veins. “It wasn’t for sure, or anything. But I still
wondered.”
Morning is upon them too soon. Shouyou drags him to the shower by the wrist. His hands wash
every bit of Tobio that he isn’t kissing. Tobio lets him.
They’re seated for breakfast at an ungodly hour, probably. Shouyou puts the rice cooker on as
he hums a song under his breath. Then, quietly, Tobio mumbles against his hand.
“How long did he last?” Shouyou stops momentarily.
“Eighteen months.”
The rice cooker beeps. The sun rises over the apartment in Shibuya.
August 15, 2020, Tokyo
The V-League season will start in October, but the Adlers are already advertising their new star
duo. For Tobio, it’s a homecoming. For Shouyou, it might have been some kind of betrayal, if
any of his old teammates still played for the Jackals. The last to leave was Bokuto, two years
ago, on an ace-worthy offer from the Red Falcons.
It is still strange, when they’re walking to the grocery store, to see themselves plastered over a
massive billboard in Shibuya. The shots are overlapping with each other; one of Shouyou going
in for a spike, another of Tobio setting him the ball. The managers asked them what to write on
it, when they signed their contracts last year. Fly is the one glaring word, white against the
black of the billboard like their silhouettes. It is, if nothing else, bitterly nostalgic.
“I look so good.” Shouyou muses to himself as he tugs on Tobio’s hand. “Thought I’d say it, since
you clearly have no intention to.”
These days, Tobio doesn’t have much of an intention to do anything. He doesn’t set alarms
anymore; he used to, only to wake up before Shouyou, to watch him as he slept, because it was
impossible otherwise to wake ahead of him. Now, looking at Shouyou, unconscious and
unmoving – but he breathes, Tobio, he says to himself, he breathes – is too much for his
crumbling mind, and so he can't. Shouyou wakes him up, instead, with breakfast sizzling in the
kitchen and the ghost of a kiss on his lips.
There’s a million questions they still can't answer. How long do they have? How will it
progress? Why us? But the only one that they can answer – namely, what Shouyou wants to do
with his Adlers contract – is still up in the air.
There’s only one thing to do, Tobio knows. Sometimes he wonders if Shouyou does, too.
“You know.” Shouyou nudges him. “It’s about time for the annual reunion.”
“We’re still having one?”
“Unless you have a reason not to, yes.” Tobio swallows.
Somehow, their Karasuno year has stood the test of time. It’s not like he and Shouyou could
ever have been apart, no matter what they thought they were capable of in high school, but the
rest is still a pleasant surprise. Last year, they went to Hitoka’s wedding. They watched most of
Kei’s games until he retired. Tadashi is still on Shouyou’s speed dial.
They come together once a year, sometime in the summer, when he and Shouyou are in Japan
for national team practice. Usually, in June. This year it’s August, like it was four years ago,
because of the Olympics.
At home, Tobio lights one of the Sinnlig. A reason. How do you tell your high school friends
everything you’ve ever loved is leaving you, when you can't even say it to yourself?
“Hmm. That smells nice. What is that?”
“I knew it.” Tobio proclaims unwittingly. “I knew you’d like peach.”
“Well, well, look who’s back in the world of the living.”
“That’s not a funny joke.”
“It is, to me.”
“Stop it.”
“Make me?”
He looks at Shouyou a little like he might have looked at his mother’s china.
“Fine.” Shouyou huffs. “You gotta do everything on your own in this house, I swear.”
His legs straddle Tobio. His hands unbutton his shirt – delicately, slowly – as his lips trail down
his chest like a molten line of fire.
He’s just so alive. Tobio breathes him in.

August 27, 2024
The reunion is in the apartment in Shibuya. Shouyou decides not to tell them about the news.
They don’t have to, anyway; half because Hitoka is having a baby, and that’s news enough, and
half because these things come out on their own eventually.
“Congratulations, Hitoka-chan!” If you saw them from a distance, you might think Shouyou the
father, just from the excitement he exudes. “That’s wonderful news.”
It is. Tadashi’s just gotten a promotion. Kei is almost finished – he says “almost” like it is taking
a piece out of his life, ironically – with his doctoral thesis. At some point in the chaos, Shouyou
pours his third glass of wine.
“How about you two?” Tadashi asks, as Tobio is clearing the plates. “What’s new?” What isn’t?
“Well,” Shouyou licks his lips, “Not to toot my own horn, but fresh Olympic MVP here.” Then, he
points at Tobio. “Best setter, too.”
“Not that, Shouyou-kun, we know all that.” Hitoka waves a hand in the air. “We watched the
Olympics, obviously.” Tadashi nods – and, to Tobio’s eternal horror, Kei nods right along with
him.
Three sets of eyes perch on them, as if they can see right through and within. Only then it
occurs to Tobio that they might have caught on, to the apartment in Shibuya and the plates in
Tobio’s Lommarp and Shouyou, and the latent meaning they might present together.
“Well, Adlers number 9 and 10. That’s about it.” Tadashi groans. Tobio considers this.
“Let’s get married.” He says in bed that night, as Shouyou’s slipping into his pajamas.
“No. Did you just propose to me?”
“Yes. Did you refuse?”
“Yes.” Shouyou sighs. Tobio watches him swallow a pill. He slips into bed, after, and Tobio’s arm
slips behind his back.
“Why?”
“I’m your friend.” Tobio snorts.
“You’ve been a lot more than a friend for a while now.”
“But as your friend, I’d never let you marry a dying man.”
(August 28, 2024, Tokyo
Tobio wakes up before Shouyou, for the first time since Paris.
“I’d want to marry you anyway.”
“I know, but you can’t.” Tobio wants to scream. Into the pillow, maybe. Or the ocean.
“I was going to ask you. When we won.”
“I was, too.”)
September 1, 2024
It’s a Sunday, the last before the Adlers are called to duty. Shouyou is cooking udon noodles in
the kitchen, and Tobio is pretending not to watch him taking his every step.
“Have you prepared the bags?” He asks Tobio, tasting half a noodle for reference. “For
tomorrow.”
“The bags?”
“Yes?”
Tobio’s mind mulls over the plural in the sentence. Shouyou is actively avoiding eye contact;
Tobio might buy it, if he was doing anything other than boiling noodles, or if Shouyou was
anyone but himself. He nods at the air before he rises out of his seat to prepare the second bag.
He wakes up to his alarm, in the morning, and Shouyou breathing on his arm. They rise,
pretend to shake the doubts off their shoulders, and head to practice. Pretension, as it turns
out, is rapidly becoming the backbone of what holds the apartment in Shibuya together.
The Adlers are still the top team in the V-League, even five years after Tobio’s left them. They’re
just so young, now. He understands, for the first time, what Shouyou meant by half a year’s
difference. He thinks he feels a little of what Romero must have felt, with a nineteen-year-old
setter running around his feet worshipping him, getting in the course of every ball with a force
and insistence only explicable by youth.
Shouyou is, rightfully, the center of attention. At twenty-eight, he’s old enough – in wing
spiker’s standards – to be a veteran, and he’s just been chosen the whole world’s best. He’s
shorter than all of them, somehow. He also happens to be dying, not that any of them know.
Tobio supposes it is impossible to tell, when Shouyou jumps like that. He’s watched Shouyou fly
a million times, and even he can’t identify a difference, not yet. Maybe, just maybe, if they
pretend hard enough, they just might make it.
November 26, 2024
Nearly two months into the season, Tobio is relearning that hope is a dangerous thing to have.
This is because Shouyou is, as ever, treacherously Shouyou, and beautifully alive, and a
supersonic force on the court.
Last month, the doctor told him episodes like this happen, sometimes, when the disease stops
or at least seems to regress, and that it is, if nothing else, more time. He also said not to be
surprised when it comes back, eventually. He suggested a therapist.
Tobio remembers these doctors’ appointments only through an extended haze, the
composition of which he has never been able to identify. The only thing he wants to hear is
regress. Unfortunately, that is the only thing he shouldn’t focus on. Still.
Still, he watches Shouyou, as he was built to do. They’ve been playing on the same side
permanently for over half a year – seven months and eighteen days, Tobio counts days now –
and Tobio wonders how glorious it might have felt, without the alarm sirens that never go quiet
in his head, if it feels so right, even now.
“Hey, you.” Shouyou winks at him, before the match starts. “Let’s kill it out there.” They do.
Tobio hopes. You’d think, after fearing the same thing for half your life, you’d have the good
sense to know it’s absolute. Maybe, if nothing else, to have some kind of humility in its
presence, to not think about its defeat. But no.
It is set three – and they’ve already taken the previous two, as is – against the Railways
Warriors, when Shouyou tumbles down the sky. This time, Tobio doesn’t see it, because he’s in
the process of setting him a quick, the quick where he knows – where he trusts, where he begs,
now – that Shouyou will meet him, up in the air, where they’ve promised to hold hands.
He doesn’t see it, but he does hear it. The court is made of rubber, which makes even slaps of
flesh deafening against it; Tobio’s already heard it, sure and shaky, when the audience gasps
out a unanimous scream amongst itself, just in case he hasn’t.
For a second, he’s a little too scared to turn behind. What will he find? Shouyou, unmoving,
unbreathing on the ground? Shouyou, already up, laughing like he isn’t dying and taking the
whole world with him? Which is worse?
He doesn’t realize he’s shaking until someone touches him on the shoulder. He knows Shouyou
by the promise of his hand. He turns around.
“Hey, you.”
“Don’t.” He shakes his head. “Don’t.”
The whistle tears them away from each other. If the set wasn’t already so close to its
conclusion, Tobio might even have been switched out. One straight spike, two service aces and
one net-in, and this is no longer a worry he needs to have. Sometimes, he thinks his whole
world revolves around worries.
They don’t talk on the way to the locker room, or when they walk to the car hand in hand.
Tobio is reeling, spiraling into a vicious, wounded thing.
“You drive.” He tosses Shouyou the keys. Shouyou looks at him with half-lidded eyes.
“You know I shouldn’t.”
“I also know you shouldn’t be out there.” Silence.
“That’s not your choice to make, Tobio.”
“This is. So drive.”
“No. I am not putting you in danger.” Tobio’s heart stings.

“But you do. You go out there, you jump, you fall, you expect me to watch you fall. What if you
land wrong next time?”
“And what? I’ll break something?” Shouyou laughs.
“It could be worse.”
“Not really, no.”
Shouyou tucks the key into his hand and closes the other over it, for good measure. There’s a
strain to the way he moves. Tobio numbly turns the ignition, pushes on into the evening sky.
Fear is a cold, lonely thing. It has a way of creeping in. It has even more of a way of staying.
“I don’t want you to keep playing.” He should have said this two months ago, when he first
knew it in his heart. When he hoped Shouyou did, too. Maybe he could have, if it weren't tearing
out a piece of him, too, along with the private world they'd built and protected and forgotten in
their shadows for so long.
Shouyou’s hand slams against the car door. Tobio holds his breath. One, two. Three.
“Damn it, Tobio.” He doesn’t have to look away from the road, when he knows Shouyou
shudders from the way his breaths come. Maybe it is the tension alone that holds them both
together, in one piece apart. “I’m dying.”
Tobio thinks about that. Until now, it’s felt a little like he was, instead of Shouyou. This is the
first time Shouyou is betraying the life walking out of him.
“But I’m not dead yet. Stop acting like it.” He looks a lot like he had, years ago in the spring,
when he was still on the opposite court. I haven’t lost yet, so I don’t know what you mean.
December 22, 2024, Tokyo
Tobio turns twenty-eight in their apartment in Shibuya. It is a Sunday, and it’s snowing outside.
Shouyou is insisting they have a party.
“I was thinking, why don’t we invite everyone over,” he said on Friday, kissing Tobio
everywhere in an underhanded attempt at distraction, “It’s been years since you’ve had a
proper birthday.” It’s true. Most of Tobio’s birthdays have been snuck in between matches and
practices, for the better part of a decade. The last few years, he and Shouyou have met up some
time close to it, and pretended his birthday was whenever they wished as long as they willed it
hard enough.
Tobio said no, on Friday, but he knows Shouyou won't listen. He’s on a mission to make all
Tobio’s decisions for him, these days – which, fair.
They do have a party. Hitoka is abhorrently pregnant, so apologizing to her is the first thing
Tobio does. Kei and Tadashi come in Kenma’s car – an impossibly expensive, shining thing –
and everyone else flakes in one by one. Kuroo, Hoshiumi, Bokuto and Akaashi, the Miya twins;
Miwa, who lives in Miyagi still, arrives side by side with Natsu. It feels a little like seeing ghosts.
None of them know, Tobio muses, and the bitterness is momentarily funny. Not even Natsu,
who he can see is doing the math in her head, trying to figure out how much older they are,
living lives that look so far away to her, just freshly out of college.
Shouyou is drunk, when they’ve all left. Tobio wishes he was, too. He kicks the balloons on the
ground. Shouyou puts on a song, a French melody repeatedly telling Tobio to kiss him.
“Dance with me.” He asks, snaking his hands around Tobio’s neck. He’s lit the peach Sinnlig.
“You’re drunk.” Tobio points out, but his arms come together around Shouyou’s waist anyway.
This is one of the things they won’t be able to do, someday.
“Hmm. I am.” Then, after a short breath, “It’s always a good day when I’m not older than you.”
“Stop saying that.”
“Why? It’s true.”
“I wish you were older than me.” I wish you’d already lived a million times over.
“Ew, I didn’t know you were into that.”

It is fascinating that Shouyou can still make him laugh, when all they both want to do is crawl
into each other and weep until they can't. Tobio laughs. When they are curled into each other,
later in the night, Shouyou is humming the song against his neck.
“You should have a birthday party every year.” He says, playing with Tobio’s fingers. You, not
we. “It’s a nice thing, coming together.”
Silence.
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5 February 2025
March 8, 2025, Tokyo
Every week on Friday mornings, Shouyou goes out on a walk alone. This is an unspoken
agreement he and Tobio have come to: that Shouyou needs that one hour away from his eyes,
and Tobio needs every moment but. He gets fresh flowers on the way, to place in the Atgang on
their coffee table – Tobio’s one impulse buy and the one vase in the house, eerie against the
cohesion of the living room – and Tobio waits for him, making the only breakfast he knows how
to.
Today, Tobio is particularly proud of his tamagoyaki. He’s also particularly proud of the way
he’s ignoring Shouyou’s bruised knee, which was perfectly healthy when he was kissing it last
night. It’s a good morning.
“I got something for you.” Shouyou says, rigorously chewing, “It’s on the counter.”
The something in question is a brown, circular package, crumpled craft paper held together by
a single piece of transparent tape. Tobio rips it open to find a plate.
“I got it at a tourist booth.” Shouyou points at it, and Tobio realizes he, also, is pretty proud,
“We didn’t have a plate of Tokyo.”
“We live in Tokyo.”
“Even more reason, don’t you think?”
Somewhere along the way, they’ve agreed to this silently, though Tobio doesn't know when;
the test is over, and they’re living in Tokyo, in their apartment in Shibuya, on the fourth floor of
an ugly building with a glass façade. Shibuya crossing is the major attraction painted (badly) on
the plate, next to the Tokyo Tower and Senso-ji. He trails his hands over the pictures as he
washes it.
“Has the national team schedule arrived?”
“Yes.” Tobio fiddles with his phone briefly. “I still have three weeks off.”
“That’s so boring.”
“I know.”
Later, when Shouyou is brewing tea and he’s drying the plate, Tobio thinks it’s not so boring,
not really. Shouyou is enough to fill all the gaps in his life that volleyball leaves, and sometimes
to do even more; time feels like forever, in their apartment in Shibuya, where he never has to
walk too far to hear Shouyou’s breaths in the air and gym lights cannot blind his view of
Shouyou’s back.
Tobio is sitting in the living room, when it happens. Shouyou is carrying the Bekvam, a measly
three step stool that they got half as a joke and half to use while they were decorating. Tobio is
alarmed. It is a Friday, he says to himself. It’s a good morning, it’s a Friday. It’s okay.
And it is, really. Shouyou steps on it, the Tokyo plate in hand, to reach the top shelf of Tobio’s
Lommarp. He pushes the Paris and Lisbon plates aside to make space in the middle. He falters,
but just a little, and he steadies himself with his hand over the Lommarp shelf. Tobio’s voice
leaps out of him.
“Shouyou.” It’s quiet, more like a question than a warning. But Shouyou’s head snaps at him,
because apparently this is enough to break the ungodly tension accompanying his iron control
over his body. Tobio watches the plate fall out of his hand as if it’s happening in slow motion.
Shouyou falters again.
This time, Tobio is up. There is a calmness in him, maybe the leftover momentum of something
that’s just died. He wordlessly makes his way to Shouyou and puts his arms around him.
Shouyou descends the Bekvam in a daze. His face is buried in Tobio’s chest. Tobio’s eyes are
burning.
“It’s time.” Shouyou whispers.
“I know.”
They stay like that for a while, rocking in synced breaths, enjoying the ground below their feet.
Eventually, it is Shouyou who detaches from him. Tobio understands all too well what Miya
meant, a year ago, when he said Shouyou was made of steel. Shouyou sighs and withdraws his
arms, a determined glint in his eyes, as he walks steadily away to the bedroom to call their
coach.
You’d think, living half your life in fear of the same thing, you’d be prepared better. Not really,
but you learn along the way, once it hits you. Tobio doesn’t even have to try for the tears to
push back into his eyes and leave him to his shambles. He picks the pieces of broken porcelain
off the ground and stuffs them, a little vengefully, into the trash.
He sits on the sofa. He waits. His tea has gone cold; this means Shouyou’s has as well, and that
won’t do. He goes to the kitchen to make him a new pot. He returns. He waits.
Shouyou immediately goes in for the tea, when he’s back. He looks tired. Tobio puts an arm
around him as he scans the Lommarp.
“Where’s the plate?”
“It broke.” Shouyou clicks his tongue.
“You can always fix things, Tobio.”
Not all things, Tobio thinks, not really. But he does fix the plate, for Shouyou’s sake, with
superglue and willpower. Shouyou lets him put it up in the Lommarp.
E-Online
Breaking: Shouyou Hinata, Olympics 2024 MVP, retires at age 28
25 March 2025
FIVB News
Shouyou Hinata announces retirement a month before Nations League
12 March 2025
BBC Sports
Olympic medalist Shouyou Hinata, 28, announces retirement
10 March 2025
NHK
National team’s tearful goodbye to Hinata Shouyou, Japan’s Littlest Giant
New |20 hours ago
Tobio Kageyama spotted in Tokyo for the first time after retirement of partner in early March
5 April 2025
Sky Sport
Volleyball player Shouyou Hinata retires due to unspecified injury
17 March 2025
May 16, 2025, Berlin
It doesn’t occur to Tobio how different their world really is, at least not until he sees other
people concur also. Shouyou flies with him to the Nations League finals in civilian’s clothes
instead of the familiar Japan red, and Tobio has to sit at the farthest seat behind to be next to
him and out of the national team’s many rows. They don’t really talk during the flight, but they
do hold hands.
They stay in the same hotel room, which is a luxury that they have because it’s Berlin and the
Nations League and no one expected Shouyou to be shot out of the sky so soon. If it were the
Olympics they wouldn’t have let him in, because he’s still refusing to sign a few pathetic sheets
of paper to tell the world he has someone waiting for him at home, and Tobio is even more
pathetic not to ask for it again.
“Do we have a plate of Berlin?” Shouyou hums at night, while his hand is exploring Tobio’s
chest. “Asking for a friend.”
“We do.”
“Hmm. What did we do in Berlin, again?” They met up at a train station, had gyro, walked to
their hotel and never walked out, from all the goings-on within. Shouyou clearly remembers
this, judging by the upwards slant of his lips.
“You’ve forgotten?”
“Will you remind me if I have?”
In the morning, Shouyou watches him dress up with a deathly rigidity to his shoulders. Last
time they were in a hotel room together, they were about to face Poland for a gold medal. Now
Tobio is tugging the jersey onto his shoulders for a match with Australia, and Shouyou checking
his ticket to locate his place on the seating chart.
“Ready?”
“Yes.” They leave hand in hand. Shouyou deposits him at the locker room door with a kiss
before he hurries off and up the stairs. There’s a slight wobble to his pace.
Tobio is under the lights, when he realizes Shouyou isn't next to him anymore and never will be
again, missing where his jersey number should have cleanly stuck him to Tobio's side. No one’s
wearing the familiar number 10. No one will for a long time. It doesn’t occur to Tobio how
much has fallen apart, until the whole team is pointing at Shouyou as they sing the national
anthem.
Shouyou is a little coy, where he sits. He doesn’t really know where to put his hands. He’s
embarrassed, and proud, and smiling, and he might have cried, were he just a little less like
himself. He’s alive.
(July 17, 2025
“How does it feel?” It's the first night they're back in the apartment in Shibuya, jet-lagged and
tired, and it is already obvious a nameless thing has shifted abysmally in the air. Shouyou’s
breathing has changed. He looks thinner in the orange light of the peach Sinnlig.
Tobio’s never dared to ask him this before, not when he was still sure he’d kept a tally of
everything Shouyou was and ever could be. Almost a month has passed since, between then
and today’s unknowns, and Shouyou feels a little too hollow and hard in Tobio’s arms. It makes
Tobio’s breath catch in his throat.
“Different.” Shouyou makes that grunt that he makes when he’s thinking. His hand is tracing
circles on Tobio’s chest. “Difficult, I think.”
“What’s difficult?” He kisses the corner of Shouyou’s mouth, as if he could help it.
“Everything. Everything is just a little more difficult than it used to be.” Shouyou heaves a deep
breath and kisses him back. “Except this.” A giggle.
No, Tobio thinks, this isn’t coming as easily as it used to, either, just holding Shouyou and
trusting his breath, when it’s so unfamiliar and shallow against his chest. Endless promises
hang in the air, unmade and unsaid and unfulfilled, and they die with every passing sigh, one by
one. Tobio doesn’t say anything.
“Hey, you didn’t show me the team photo.” Bokuto dragged Shouyou into it, against Shouyou’s
protests but no one else’s. They put it in a frame at the reception.
“It’s somewhere in my suitcase. Do you want me to get it?”
“No. Let’s stay like this for a while.”
They do. The last of the peach Sinnlig goes out at some point in the night. Tobio knows in the
morning he will not be driving to Ikea to get more.)
November 15, 2025
It was a bit of a no-brainer that the Adlers wanted to keep Shouyou in any way they could, once
his illness – still a secret to most, but not to anyone active in the sport – came to light. At 29, he
is somehow one of the most decorated opposite hitters in the history of Japanese volleyball,
and there’s probably something they can use even in his ruins.
Shouyou isn’t showing exactly how unhappy he is, having turned from player to coach in the
span of a few months, but Tobio knows it can’t be easy, just like much of the rest of what their
lives are shaping up to be. Still, he wears his tag for assistant coach proudly in the gym at
Koganei, and savours every moment he gets to touch the familiar curve of the ball.
He doesn’t get to jump anymore – if he could, he’d probably still be out there, anyway, caution
be damned – but his arms still carry a somewhat fearsome weight to them. When Tobio glances
up from receiving practice, expecting to see one of the regular two assistants and finding
Shouyou’s sharp glance instead, it is still almost enough to just lose himself in that glorious
crackling of the spike.
Everyone pretends it isn’t eerie, to see him so high up in the sky still, where he now has to
climb a ladder to stand on a podium. It is still a small miracle whenever he sends the ball down,
and makes everyone – including Tobio – wonder where he musters all that force from, without
the support of his weight and his dying limbs.
“You keep looking at me in practice.” He skips next to Tobio as they walk out of the gym, to the
car. “It’s embarrassing.”
“What is?”
“You have a crush on me, I think.” Shouyou laughs at his own joke. He does that a lot, nowadays.
“I always looked at you in practice.” Tobio says, and it’s true. Sometimes, he feels like he’s
watched Shouyou through a hundred different lifetimes, in utter desertion of the first rule of
volleyball: never looking down from the ball.
“How come I never saw you?”
Because you followed all the rules, he thinks bitterly, remembering the stretches before every
match and the cool-downs after; the way Shouyou tapped his diaphragm when he methodically
exhaled, even as the whole team made fun of him, the way he kicked his feet after jogs and
delicately taped his thin and white fingers, as if bracing for impact all along. That first spring
when they flew far and wide and Shouyou’s own body betrayed him, it taught him that things
fall apart, even if the rest of them hadn’t understood it yet.
“I think you like the ball a little more than you like me,” He says instead, because he doesn’t
want to think about how undeserved this is anymore, and he won’t.
“Nonsense.” Shouyou replies, when he kisses him on the cheek. Tobio realizes he’s skipping in
an attempt to hide a slight limp, but he doesn’t say anything back.
At some point, Shouyou will no longer trust his legs to stay still on the high podium, and he’ll sit
next to Coach Foster during practice. They’ll pull every player apart with surgical precision,
find new plays, designate new strategies; Shouyou will watch a million tapes ahead of every
match to find cracks in the team opposite, scribble down notes that get progressively more
unreadable. Tobio will only be watching him, still. By now, he should probably know that he
shouldn’t.
February 9, 2026
“Wanna get takeout?”
“No.”
“You’re so rude sometimes.”
It’s snowing. Shouyou insisted they have a walk when they walked out of the gym, and so they
are. It is a thirty-minute walk from Ebisu – where Tobio has left the car in an indoor carpark –
to the apartment in Shibuya. It’s taking longer, with heavy boots and coats, extra seconds spent
on balance. Shouyou’s hand is in his. Tobio is pretending not to notice the delay to his steps.
Maybe, if they tried, they could act like it’s just because of the snow.
“Fine, we’ll order off an app. Just stop whining.”
“Yay.”
They enter through the front door of the building. Tobio is in a daze, half due to the cold and
half the relief that comes in the comfort of a home.
“Unadon?” Shouyou asks, climbing the stairs with one thoughtful finger still over his lips, but
Tobio never gets to answer.
You’d think, having spent half his life fearing this, and having survived it happening now over
so many miserable falls, Tobio would be prepared. He isn’t.
Shouyou’s legs give out on the first floor. He looks at Tobio with something a little like alarm, a
lot like terror. He reaches out an arm in a quiet plea. Tobio takes it. Shouyou rises, and for a
second they can still pretend it’s fine, that it was the boots slippery from the snow, or the legs
tired from the walk. Then he falls again, and Tobio with him.
Calm down, Tobio thinks. His heart is going at a thousand miles an hour. Calm down. This is
nothing that hasn’t happened before. This is nothing that wasn’t going to happen. Get home, call
the doctor.
“It’s okay,” he tells Shouyou, as he stands back up. He never knew that was a luxury. “It’s okay.
The elevator—”
They’re at the apartment in Shibuya, when Shouyou’s legs give out. Two years ago, Tobio
almost crossed this apartment off the list, because it had no elevator. It’s broken, Shouyou
said. They’ll fix it. They never did.
He looks at Shouyou. He’s still on the ground; a little perplexed, maybe, checking his limbs for
movement. He looks calm. A little too still for life. A little too much.
It takes Shouyou’s legs to break Tobio. All at once the tears come to him, like they're avenging
all the times they've been denied the liberty to fall. He’s on his knees, sobbing into his hands in
ugly lurches, cursing everything there has ever been. Why us, Shouyou asked him once, about a
stupid interview Tobio would give a world now to return to. Why us, why us, why us.
“Tobio.” Shouyou is touching his leg, but Tobio is inconsolable. He hears something dragging on
the floor. He cries, he cries, he cries.
He’s known Shouyou for fifteen years now. The first time he watched him fly, he was a dim-
witted kid who didn’t know what divinity looked like. He learned the striking of those feet by
heart, to be able to withstand the force of the wings. He’s kissed those legs a million times in
foreign hotel rooms, in moments stolen from the tiny window they never knew they’d have in
time.
“Tobio.” He would know Shouyou’s arms in death, as he does now. They’re still tight around
him. The familiar chest is still rising, with its new kind of rhythm, which Tobio is still
relearning. He pallidly realizes the thing crawling on the ground was Shouyou, in a desperate
bid towards him, on those same legs that wouldn’t listen. He cries more.
“Tobio, look at me.” He can’t. Shouyou pulls his face to his own. It’s an odd feeling. His fingertips
have no sensation to them, but the hands still hold the power of every spike he’s ever scored.
“Tobio. It’s okay. Let’s try again.”
For what, Tobio thinks, and he is startled to realize it isn’t a question. He’ll fall again, is the one
sure truth of their new world, even if he stands. How many, before things break further, in both
of them? How many more times can he watch his demons come to life and fester, like infected
wounds, until another limb is lost to a battle valiantly fought?
Tobio is still crying when his arms find their way around Shouyou. His hands latch on, where
they’ve learned to hold Shouyou well and properly, across many years of reverent exploration.
His legs push.
“What are you—” the question tunes out. There is only the stairs, and Shouyou in his arms.
Even now, a year into retirement, Shouyou has almost all the bulk of a professional. Still, Tobio
pushes on against the screams of his muscles. One step, two, three.
“Stop.” Shouyou is shouting into his ear. “You’re going to hurt yourself, Tobio, just stop.”
There’s some sickly resignation there. Tobio does not stop.
“I can't. I can't.” He realizes he’s still crying. His sobs come in broken wheezes and whimpers as
he tries to drag them through this, whatever this is, because it feels a little like the world is
falling apart, and Shouyou is the only one who can hold it together after the fall. I haven’t lost
yet, I haven’t lost yet, I haven’t lost yet.
Shouyou is quiet against him, once they do make it to the door. Tobio thinks this is what hell
must be like, inhaling fire and melting into the ground and not hearing Shouyou’s breaths to
guide him through. He holds Shouyou still as he reaches for the keys.
They collapse on the inside, like a single colossal structure after an earthquake. Their hands
trail over each other to check for injury. They’re both crying. Tobio, for Shouyou’s legs.
Shouyou, for everything that is Tobio, probably.
“I’m sorry.” He tells him, as they’re stripping garments off of each other, one by one, to try and
locate every forming bruise. “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.” Tobio knows he’s not apologizing to
him, not really. There’s just so much to be sorry for. There’s so much to say. Shouyou’s fingers
aren’t as deft as they once were.
“It’s okay,” Tobio says, instead of the many other things begging in his chest, because he can't
stomach much else. He knows he’s lying as he says it.
Part 3: The house in Tama
March 19, 2026
When they were assembling the apartment in Shibuya – bit by bit, with their own hands –
they’d thought they might take it down, one day, but not that they’d come apart in it, too.
Tobio packs it all himself, with the same hands that helped put it up, in a terrifying silence that
he never breaks. He’s always done things directly, without any lateral thoughts; he makes a list
to stick on every box that he’s packing, of every item it is entrusted with, and also of the
destination it will be shipped off to. Shouyou watches Tobio putting everything away –
tenderly, one by one, cushioned in bubble wrap – and he doesn’t tell him what to take. He does,
occasionally, tell him what not to.
Tobio touches everything with unearthly respect. He packs up the Vitssjö, first, with its many
medals and awards and frames. He places their Olympic awards close in the box, as if they’ll
take care of each other somehow; he places all the frames on top of one another and wraps
them tightly with a string of yarn, to which he attaches a list of the moments that they are. He
dismantles the stands quickly; he wonders why they’d taken so long assembling them, when it’s
so easy for things to fall apart.
The last thing standing is the daring Lommarp. Tobio opens its glass doors. His hand brushes
over the plate from Paris. He wants to smash it, he wonders if he could.
“Don’t.” Shouyou whispers. Tobio doesn’t smash the plate. He knows Shouyou means not to put
it in the pile that will follow them to their new house in Tama, so he doesn’t do that, either.
He used to keep the plates in a wide black box, back when he still lived in Rome. He’s hidden
this in the closet below a few shoeboxes. He retrieves it now. it smells like perfume; he dimly
remembers that he’d put scented paper in it, so the plates wouldn’t break. He wills himself not
to.
He takes the plates down one by one, gliding his hands over them one last time. The plate he
got from Madrid, when Shouyou had managed to get his wallet stolen in the subway. The plate
he snuck out of their hotel in Corfu, because they didn’t have enough time for the exploration of
anything but each other. The plate Shouyou bought of Shibuya crossing, last spring, when they
still hoped things wouldn’t fall this far this soon.
He places them delicately in the box, stuffing the paper in all the gaps between. He closes the
lid. His handwriting, a little faint after so long spent clinging to the paper, still reads Plates.
Tobio takes the box to the left side of the living room. Tomorrow, a moving company will take
these to Miyagi, where Natsu will sign for them, and the Tanakas will help her haul them into
the old garden shed.
He doesn’t cry at night, but he is rocked with something he can't really identify, all the same. It
feels cold, even with Shouyou next to him and the duvet over, and it makes him convulse like
he’s suffocating in a chokehold.
“It’s okay.” Shouyou tells him. “I kind of always wanted a garden, anyway.”
It’s no lie. They talked about this once, back when they were young and felt like new gods in
Shouyou’s backyard. They lied on the grass and discussed a million things about themselves
and the world and how these might maybe greet each other one day. It never occurred to them
that there would be an end to the world, and a divine protection to a home, a bitterness in a
garden, in wondering how long Shouyou would feel grass dancing under his feet.
By the time they’re moving to the house in Tama, Shouyou is as lively as he was before the fall.
They don’t mention the chair he mostly travels on, or the crutches he prefers when he cooks.
He insists that the first be manual, because he thinks it’s good core workout; the second, he
says, is a necessary evil, because Tobio is a ghastly cook.
“I could learn.” Tobio says, taping the last of the boxes shut.
“Why would you, when I can do it?” Silence.
The last night before they leave, they don’t sleep. Tobio holds him in bed, after he lights the
vanilla Sinnlig. They talk, even though they know it is too late to pretend they're still in
Shouyou's backyard.
“I want a bookcase.” Shouyou declares, hooking his hand in and out of Tobio’s numbly.
“But you don’t read.”
“We have a lot of trophies, though.” Then, a second later, “What do you know, maybe
I will read.” Tobio laughs at that, a choked thing that feels a little like a sigh, but it’s still the first
time he’s laughing in two weeks.
Their new house is nothing like the apartment in Shibuya; it is in Tama, and closer to Koganei,
if nothing else, so Tobio can make the drive to and from practice in half the time. It has two
floors and a little garden, but it’s tiny in a way Shibuya never was, maybe because of all the
possibilities it simply does not contain, and it boasts almost none of the same Ikea furniture.
Shibuya was a test – a luxury they had, because they were young, and at the height of their
careers, and fresh into an Olympic season, and Shouyou wasn’t dying. The house in Tama is a
necessity, in all aspects of the word. Tobio has always been much better with these things. He
picks the house out of a dozen contenders that he inspects meticulously, with a checklist of all
the things they have to be and have to have and to withstand. Eventually, this house will have
to adapt to everything they will, and it cannot let them down like the apartment in Shibuya.
Tobio oversees the tweaks before Shouyou and their belongings move into the house. The
lowered doorknobs, the stair aids, soft carpets to insulate any ensuing fall. The edges are
rounded off of every piece of furniture, and everything unaltered is long on its voyage to the
shed in Miyagi. It’s a new kind of house. New doesn’t necessarily mean anything good. Shouyou
still insists on crossing the threshold on crutches.
“They say you finish everything the way you started.” That’s his reasoning, and it’s one of the
many lies they’re telling, now, because there’s nothing else left to do.
April 29, 2026
Each afternoon, when Tobio makes the drive back from Shibuya, he carries a volleyball with
him, whichever is the last he’s touched that day. It’s an unspoken rule that the national team
respect, when it’s not inducing an inclination to tears, which is getting more often by the day as
the World Championships approach. Every morning, the ball travels back with him Tobio
practice, only to be replaced by another one, which is then returned in the same fashion, rinse
and repeat.
“Hey, you.” Shouyou waits for him at the door. On the days where he feels better – and Tobio
has to amend this in his mind, every day, that Shouyou isn’t really feeling better, that the rest of
him is just fresh enough sometimes to carry the parts that are dead – he’s leaning against the
doorframe on his crutches, and probably wearing some silly apron.
On most days, when his body reminds them that it is, still, actively dying, he’s in his chair,
wearing the same insufferable grin. Sometimes, his hands twitch involuntarily, or his legs
under the lilac shawl Natsu has knitted him, and they both pretend they don’t notice this as
Tobio pushes him through the back door, into the garden.
No matter what, the ball finds its way between them, somehow. It’s a steady back and forth of
overhand passes – with the occasional save on Tobio’s part, because Shouyou’s fingers aren’t
cooperating, or he can’t quite tell how fast he is touching the ball. Tobio talks about his day, and
Shouyou asks a million questions, and if they just let go for those few minutes they can pretend
the spring sun upon them is the eco of gym spotlights, and the grass under their feet is the
parquet of Karasuno. Way longer ago than that, even before they’d met, Tobio chose to be a
setter one day, because the setter got to touch the most balls. Now he’s bitterly fulfilled, when
he can share them with Shouyou in these moments of quiet resignation, and that’s probably
worth everything else on the way.
“How was practice?”
“Pretty good. Bokuto-san asked about you.”
“That’s nice of him. We should have them over sometime soon.”
It’s not that they’re actively trying to see less of people; it’s a combination of people wanting to
see less of them, and their wanting to see more of each other. Tobio understands how difficult it
is, especially for the half of Shouyou’s friends who remain professional athletes, to see the
aftermath of his fall. Now that Tobio’s lived most his life fearing it, and enough of it braving it,
he’s developed a sort of second skin for it that they never have. It’s what it is, and it’s not like
he’s particularly keen on sharing Shouyou’s time with anyone else.
It was just this, once; the ball, between them, the ground below and the sky above, when
Shouyou jumped. They just have to make do with the pieces of it that remain.
June 26, 2026
Shouyou turns thirty in their house in Tama. It’s not a massive party; with the Worlds coming
up, most their friends are too busy training, if they’re in Japan at all. Hitoka is having another
baby. Tadashi is getting married in a month, though they’ve just told him they won't be
attending.
As it happens, this is fine. Natsu arrives in the morning, a little before Shouyou has risen, with a
card and apology from Miwa. Shouyou wakes later now, at a time the mortal man would find
acceptable but would have mortified him, just two short years ago. His new medication makes
him ill sometimes, but mostly just drowsy in the morning and at night.
“Hey.” Tobio trails his hand over his face, re-ascertaining the known terrain. “Good morning.”
“Good morning.” A kiss. A grin. “Shouldn’t you be at practice?”
“I took a day off.”
“It’s Worlds season, Tobio.”
“It’s your birthday.”
Shouyou pauses, like this hasn’t occurred to him until now, even though they’ve been talking
about it for a week, planning when Natsu should come and which bakery they should get the
cake from. He puts his hands over his face; they don’t have much strength to them anymore, not
enough to slice carrots and certainly not enough to protect him from a fall, but Tobio can’t
really blame him for trying. He shudders. He breathes.
“I’m thirty.”
“Yeah.”
Maybe he’s never thought, or at least really believed, that he’d ever make it here, to an age that
is so comically young for anyone who’s actually lived. His father never did. Tobio takes his
hands from his face and kisses them, wishing he could share some of whatever strength is
keeping him young in his own shadow.
“That’s so old.” Shouyou giggles as he rolls over.
“No it’s not.”
“Ah, the perils of dating a younger man.”
More and more, the term dating seems ill-fitting. It hangs in the air, still, as Shouyou drags
himself up to get dressed. Today is clearly one of the worse days. His hands flit around the
sweatpants folded on his nightstand and pull them on while he’s still only half dangling out of
bed. When he’s off it entirely, just for a brief second, it is for a fall into his chair. Normally, he’d
insist on pushing the wheels himself. Today, he lets Tobio do it for him.
“Put those muscles to good use, my friend.” He laughs, but Tobio can see the twitch of his
fingers clutching the armrest with absent force.
It’s always haunting to see Natsu next to her brother. They look so similar, Tobio feels like he
could maybe reach out and touch Shouyou, the way he was at twenty-three and shining gold
with Japan number ten, on the way to their first Olympics together. She always cries, when he
holds her, with hands that hang somewhat limp but arms that still at least look strong enough
to carry the world, and Tobio wants to believe that, too.
Natsu has brought them eggs from Miyagi, Shouyou’s favourite from a chicken coop that their
neighbour insistently keeps even though she’s old and the chickens are spoiled rotten. There’s
birthday envelopes from the Tanakas, Daichi and Sugawara and even Coach Ukai. Shouyou
opens these through the day, in between congratulatory phone calls and text messages. Tobio
and Natsu both pretend not to notice when he reaches for an egg, decides he can't and
withdraws his hand. Tobio quickly cracks it over his rice a few minutes later.
“Nothing really tastes like home, huh?”
“Yeah.” Tobio thinks about this – about what made the apartment in Shibuya feel like home,
and what’s holding the house in Tama together – and he watches Shouyou tease Natsu for
crying a second time.
“Let’s get married.” He asks Shouyou, once Natsu has taken her sobs to the bathroom in a
misguided attempt at secrecy. Shouyou puts his spoon down.
“Haven’t I already turned you down once?”
“You have.”
“Do I have to do it again?”
“Not if you marry me.”
“No.”
“Why?” Shouyou laughs as he sips his tea. They can still hear Natsu from the bathroom, heaving
heavy breaths in hopes that they might steady her feet with sheer pressure.
“I’m not sure I like you enough.”
“We just bought a house together.” Tobio pleads. They bought the house in Tama, because it was
permanent, and it’s a house with a stupid garden in the back the way they dreamed of having
when they were boys, before they managed to become each other’s homes somewhere along
the way, anyway, and dared foolishly to believe that that would be enough.
“A house we bought so I could die in it.” Tobio gasps a half-breath.
“We bought it to live in it, Shouyou.”
“Sure.” Tobio can see him straining to keep his smile on, because his control over the rest of his
body is slipping, revealing the devastation the disease is really wreaking on him. His arms are
taut, a little crooked as they give way to his hands, crossed over his chest as if they could
protect him from Tobio now.
They can't. Tobio snaps.
“Do you think by keeping this from me, you’re keeping me from watching you die?" Silence.
"Who’s going to be your medical proxy? Natsu?” This is the second year they’re both pretending
like this will never be important, that a few measly sheets of paperwork won’t keep Tobio from
Shouyou’s last moments. “Because it’ll have to be someone.”
“That’s not fair, Tobio.”
“None of this is fair.”
Natsu chooses that minute to make her way back from the bathroom. She’s washed her face,
but her eyes are still puffy and wet, stark against the pallor of her skin. She’s still whiter than
Shouyou, even as he is dying, because half a decade’s warmth from Brazil still clings to him in
refusal.
“Do you guys want me to leave you alone?”
“Of course not.” Shouyou grins. Tobio hates how easily he can put his guard back up, after
having had it on always for so long.
“Come here. Let’s watch a movie.” They do. Tobio glances Natsu under Shouyou’s arm and
recognizes his own face, when he feels that same safety thick around him. Sometimes it occurs
to him how strong Shouyou really is, from the set of his shoulders as they’re melting away, or
the jokes he wrings out even if they catch in his throat.
At night, once he’s silently wheeled Shouyou to their room, he lights the vanilla Sinnlig. He
helps Shouyou dress with the same deathly quiet. He lays his head on his chest, like hearing the
beating of his heart now might make sure it stays beating forever. He still doesn’t recognize the
new sound of Shouyou’s breaths, which tremble quietly like ghosts crawling on the floor.
“Hey.”
“Hey.”
“At least make sure my ring is nice, after that shitty proposal.”
They get married on a Thursday, a month before Tobio is due to fly to Italy for the World
Championships. Their witnesses are Natsu and Miwa, the latter of whom makes the journey in
a bullet train the day-of. Shouyou’s hands are trembling when he signs his name with a clumsy
flick of the pen. Tobio slides the gold ring onto his finger. It’s daintier than it was when he’d
admired it that first time, all of thirteen years ago.
“Welcome to the Hinata clan.” Shouyou says, smiling softly, even though Tobio knows it’s the
last thing he wants to do. What a clan, the two orphans and the one Tobio they’ve adopted
along the way.
Shouyou goes to bed early that night. Tobio lies awake for a while, just trailing his hands
through his hair, before he gets to ordering things the way he always has in the wake of the fall.
He’s already procured a longlist and shortlist for the nurse they’ve agreed they have to hire
soon, the kind he only now has the authority to sign for. He sends a dozen emails, to his banks
and agent and attorney, explaining the many changes in his situation, pleasant and otherwise.
He examines his own ring in the light of the vanilla Sinnlig.
Shouyou will wake in the morning. He’ll make a joke about having been wrong when he said he
didn’t like Tobio enough, when Tobio pushes his chair to the bathroom. They’ll eat breakfast in
silence. Tobio will ask how it is, because he’s learning to cook, now, and Shouyou still hates
everything he makes except tamagoyaki. Shouyou will try to lie and say it’s delicious. The sun
will rise above the house in Tama, and they’ll pretend it always will.
September 5, 2026
The 2026 World Championships are the first time Tobio is standing at the top of the world
stage without Shouyou at his side. He’s at the start of the line on the podium, the captain’s
armband burning tight on his right as he is handed the medal and the award for MVP. If
Shouyou were here, they’d argue about whose win it was, really, between the Olympic and
Worlds awards, and probably settle on no answer, and forget why they were fighting once they
started kissing.
He isn’t, and Tobio is learning to be okay with it. They talk on the phone most nights, when the
brutality of the time difference is negligible either because Shouyou is fighting sleep, or because
Tobio wakes too early without him by his side.
When they win, the first thing Tobio does is seek out the ball they’ve done it with. It’s not like
anyone’s going to stop him and ask what he’s doing with the federation’s property, but he’s still
somewhat sheepish as he secures it in his bag.
Everyone’s thinking about Shouyou, who held the award before Tobio, the last time they were
standing this tall. He can’t stand at all, now. Ushijima is retiring from the national team and
moving to Russia on an undeniable offer. Sakusa, who injured his wrist earlier in the
tournament, is absent from the podium. Hoshiumi suffered a particularly hard sprain days
before it, and never got to attend at all. One by one, things are falling apart, and Tobio is
wondering how much longer they can act like the world is still going round whole and one.
He flies home ahead of everyone; on a flight he’s booked himself for the night of the win. Every
bit of him is screaming in protest as he drags his suitcase behind him at the airport. He sleeps in
the 10-hour flight like a baby and emerges in Tokyo like magic, when evening is just setting in.
There is a chill in the air, on the way to the house in Tama. Tobio already knows something is
exponentially more wrong than he’d left it as he knocks on the door. Natsu answers it with half
a smile and takes his suitcase.
“He’s in the garden.” Tobio listens to her retreat upstairs, where her room is next to the nurse’s.
He walks ahead.
Shouyou is sitting in a new chair, that's the first thing he notices. Not his slim, shiny one, which
he could still fold himself on a good day when Tobio left him, but a bulky thing that Tobio
knows can probably move itself. His head is slanted back.
“Hey, you.”
“Hey. Welcome home.” There is a delay to his words. Not quite a slur, or a wheeze. But
something. Tobio circles the chair to face him.
Shouyou's arms are folded a little loosely on his lap. There is a passing limpness to him that
Tobio has only seen in sleep, when he woke however many times at night and next to him, in
search of him or in assurance. Shouyou is watching their neighbours’ dog dig a hole in the
backyard opposite theirs with a slightly quizzical brow. His breaths are short and tight and
even newer.
“Not going to give your husband a kiss?”
“That depends. What have you brought me?” He means the award, Tobio knows. It’s still tucked
into his suitcase somewhere below his unwashed jerseys and the medal it came with.
Tobio reaches into his carry-on instead. Something is off about the way Shouyou is holding his
head, but maybe they can still pretend it’s not, when Tobio shows him the ball and they return
to their world. The ground, below, and the sky above, and everything in between that listens
while they talk.
“Here you go.” Shouyou’s eyes shine when he sees it. Tobio thinks it’s probably the excitement.
It’s not. He places the ball – tucks it, really, only slightly alarmed at his unresponsiveness – into
Shouyou’s hands. The ball falls. Time stills.
Tobio picks it up. There’s an exhausted calmness in him. He wants Shouyou to hold the ball, and
smile, and then hold him, too, when they’re inside and Natsu has the radio on and they’re all
laughing because Tobio’s managed to blow something up in the kitchen again. He puts the ball –
a little more firmly, now, with precision and misery – in Shouyou’s hands. They look like they
might hold fast, for a second. Before they don’t.
The ball falls. Tobio holds his breath.
“I can't.” His eyes crawl slowly onto Shouyou. “Tobio. Tobio. I can't. I can't hold it. Tobio.”
Something is rocking his entire body. Either it’s a sob, or he’s grasping for breath, or both.
“It’s okay.” Tobio says, as he kneels and pushes the ball behind him. Shouyou is crying. His head
has dropped in front of him, and Tobio can see his back tremble with the effort of holding
himself up. Tobio reaches for him. “Shh. It’s okay.”
Shouyou isn’t listening. Not when Tobio holds his face in his hands, not when Tobio takes him
from the chair – gently, like he also doesn’t know where to put him now, or how – and wraps
him in his arms. He keeps sobbing into Tobio’s shoulder whenever he doesn’t have to stop and
remind himself to breathe. Tobio cries where Shouyou can’t see him, looking up at the sky,
holding the whole world in his arms, all of it that remains to know.
“I can't feel it. Tobio.” He wheezes, and Tobio relaxes his arms with a jolt. “Tobio. It’s over.”
“It’s okay. It’ll be okay.” Shouyou shudders with all the strength left in his body.
“No, it won't.” That is the first true thing they’ve said in a long time.
E-Online
Tobio Kageyama, World Champion, announces break from the sport
25 September 2026
FIVB News
Shouyou Hinata confirms ALS diagnosis
12 September 2025
BBC Sports
The loss following the win: Tobio Kageyama exits national team
20 September 2026
The inside of Tobio Kageyama’s retirement and what it means for Japan
15 September 2026
November 1, 2026
Having spent half his life in fear of the same thing, Tobio never thought there could feasibly be
anything worse. Fear came to him in the arch Shouyou drew as he fell, first, and then followed
in his weakening limbs, in his thinning breaths. But the end comes to him in the fading of that
light, whatever it was, that was keeping them both going for all the time Tobio did not know it
was burning.
Shouyou can’t write anymore, so a notary has to come to the house in Tama for him to sign the
DNR. It is one of few documents Tobio cannot sign for him, or sign him out of. He and Natsu
watch from the door, like they watched a week ago, when he threw all his medications and
supplements in the trash with a mighty, haphazard toss of the shoulder that knocked him off
his chair. Realistically, they would only give him some months, maybe a year more. Tobio
remembers how little a year had seemed, when they were only just decorating the apartment
in Shibuya. It feels like forever now.
Shouyou can’t hold him at night anymore, even if Tobio puts his arms around his own figure
with hope and love and every good wish there ever was, because it is not a good position to
breathe in. Tobio knows a time will come when he won't be allowed to hold Shouyou, either.
They don’t talk much, in those first days. The whole house listens to Shouyou’s breaths. The
way they come, orderly and deliberate, most of the time, and the searching that accompanies
for more air, and all the times he skips a breath because he’s tired, or because why not. They
listen, and listen.
“I thought you said you’d defeat me one day.” Tobio whispers at night, when he’s pretending
he’s not crying, that he hasn’t cried since the fall.
“I did.”
“Then why are you doing this?”
“Doing what?”
“Leaving me to fight on my own.”
No answer.
December 22, 2026
Tobio turns thirty in their house in Tama, too. It is a cold, quiet day, like all the days that have
recently preceded it. He’s watching Shouyou sleep. He doesn’t wake Shouyou anymore.
He asked Shouyou how it felt, once, in their apartment in Shibuya, and Shouyou answered
difficult. Everything is even more difficult, now, in a way Tobio had never quite grasped was
possible. It’s not like he thought they could have stayed in that moment forever, even though
Tobio had gone most his life believing they would always live in their little sphere; it is more
the way it’s progressing, crushing and fast and absolute, because Shouyou no longer has the
strength to act like it isn’t. It probably wasn’t just a little difficult to hold him, back then, when
Shouyou let him sleep on his heart and live still fearless, but it couldn’t have been as difficult as
it is now.
“Hey, you.” He mumbles groggily, when he wakes at noon. “Happy birthday.”
He lets Tobio dress him, today, instead of the nurse. Tobio likes doing it for him. It hasn’t even
been a year since he carried Shouyou up to the apartment in Shibuya, but Shouyou already feels
half as thin and twice as breakable in his hands. The sun-kissed bulges of muscle have long
since abandoned him, crawling into themselves and deserting Shouyou to his fate.
“Always a good day, when you’re not younger than me anymore.” Tobio’s heart hurts when he
thinks this might be the last age they’ll share.
“Didn’t I tell you I like older men that one time?”
“Gross, we’re married.” He grins, with just the one side of his mouth, as he reaches for his straw.
Natsu isn’t in today, though she hasn’t said why. Then again, she’s out more and more, recently,
and Tobio suspects it has something to do with the way they have to cool Shouyou’s tea before
putting it in a cup, or touch his legs to make sure he isn’t too cold. It’s difficult to watch, for
anyone who doesn’t have the lifetime’s training that Tobio does. Shouyou understands, because
these are the only memories he’s retained of his father, the father that Natsu never knew.
Though it does make Tobio feel guilty, he does feel some relief at getting the day alone with
Shouyou. As alone as they can be, with the prattling of the nurse on the floor above, and the
neighbour’s kid screaming whenever Shouyou looks about ready to doze off on Tobio’s chest.
Their rings clink together when he plays with Shouyou’s fingers, numb and limp but still his
and still warm, glowing in the light of the vanilla Sinnlig.
“We’ve wasted so much time.” He breathes against Shouyou’s neck, where he knows he can feel
the rush of air, “So much time.” They’re thirty, and they’ve known each other for half a lifetime,
but if they added the days up it wouldn’t amount to a third of what they might have had.
“No we haven’t.” Shouyou coughs. Tobio immediately withdraws, but Shouyou hums to let him
know he’s fine. “We’ve done so much.”
“We’ve done nothing.” They’ve gotten married out of convenience, with only their sisters to
stand watch. They’ve only been to Ikea once. They never got to go to the Olympics again.
“Look around you,” Shouyou gestures with his eyes, now that he can’t with his hands, “We did
all that.”
Their living room looks more like the trophy display of a successful high school club. There are
medals dating as far back as Tobio’s middle school days, ones they never placed on the Vitssjö
before they moved here and now keep on Shouyou’s coveted bookshelves. The medals they
won in the Spring Inter-High, the one Shouyou got the first time the Jackals beat the Adlers for
the V Cup, Tobio’s World Club Championship award for best setter next to Shouyou’s for best
opposite hitter of the Superliga.
They’re their lives’ work. Thirty short years, not even half the life expectancy of the average
Japanese male. It all looks so eerie, shining against the black breathlessness of their lives now,
reminding them of all that could have been. Eight years it took, to just look down from the ball
and at each other, for a single year, where they promised each other they would live, or at least
try to. It took Shouyou’s life for Tobio to understand there could have been more to his than
volleyball, once.
“I never should have told you to put the plates away.” Shouyou sighs against him, snuggling
closer with his cheek. “You keep forgetting we saw the world.”
Tobio knew, when he was burying them in their scented coffin, that Shouyou wanted them
gone because he'd realized there would never be another one, the way Tobio knows now that
he will not turn thirty-one with Shouyou on his chest. Tobio has no idea what the Eiffel Tower
looks like, now, but he could have described Shouyou’s fingerprint in crisp detail before the fall.
They saw the world together, but he only remembers the moments he stole from it with
Shouyou in his eyes.
“Which one was your favourite?” He asks Shouyou, wondering how much remained with him,
between the adrenaline and the kisses. Shouyou smiles against his arm, the way he used to in
high school, when he thought he was hiding the curious glances he threw Tobio’s way by the
fluttering of his eyes.
“The Tokyo one. With the Shibuya crossing on it.”
“Yeah.” Tobio closes his eyes. “The apartment in Shibuya.”
“Yeah.”
January 9, 2027
Natsu leaves on a Friday. Tobio never does learn what Shouyou said to her in the kitchen,
behind the closed door, but he does see her emerge crying and pack a suitcase. It takes her
three days to leave for Miyagi, after a tearful goodbye with her brother and a short hug with
Tobio.
“Are you okay?” Tobio asks Shouyou in the bath, where he lies still and breathes short gasps of
air, as though a sigh might break him altogether.
“Yeah.” Shouyou replies, their favourite lie. There’s a permanent lisp to his words now. Tobio
never mentions it, because he sees Shouyou frown at the sound of his own dimming voice. “Can
you phone her in a bit? To make sure she makes it home safely?”
“Of course.”
“Thank you.”
Shouyou lets Tobio bundle him up like a baby in the towels, tuck him delicately into the bed
and pull the duvet over him. He’s thinking about something, Tobio can tell. He still recognizes
Shouyou's eyes.
It’s not really a surprise when Shouyou asks him to get a paper and pen, and to sit next to him
when Tobio acts as the hands he no longer has. Dear Natsu, the note starts, this is your brother. I
hope you will forgive me for Tobio’s terrible handwriting.
Shouyou’s eyes let his tears ago a few times during the process. Tobio wipes these off, too,
along with his own, taking great care not to stain the letter. Once done, when they’re both
hopelessly spent and the effort of having expended so much breath settles on Shouyou, he
hides the note in between Shouyou’s “Mastery” books on the shelves, the ones he first got in
Brazil and never gave up on.
“She’ll probably be glad I had you write it,” Shouyou muses, once Tobio sits next to him to comb
his hair, “She had such a crush on you when she was little, you know.”
“Who? Natsu?”
“Yeah. She worshipped the ground you walked on.” Tobio lets out a short huff of air, the closest
he can manage to a snort.
“So did you.”
“Yeah, well,” a breath in between, “Look where that got you.” Silence.
Tobio thinks about this, sometimes, when his mind can’t stand to dwell in reality anymore.
What might have happened if he’d closed his eyes during that first brief bout of flight he’d met
Shouyou in, or if Shouyou hadn’t kissed him in that dark gym, after they’d buried that last ball
and said a final goodbye. The many courses his life could have taken, all leading to volleyball,
without Shouyou to shine light into the cracks and make it whole.
“I never regretted any of it. I don’t.” And Shouyou probably believes it, even if he doesn’t like it,
because he lets himself sigh.
February 28, 2027
They’re still in their house in Tama, even though the nurse has told Tobio very politely that
they should go to the hospital now, if they have any intention to at all. These last stages of the
disease are more aggressive, and they take even more away much quicker.
Tobio can’t hold Shouyou anymore, even though he insists on sleeping next to him still. On a
good day, he puts one arm under Shouyou’s neck, where he still feels Tobio’s pulse beating
against him as he drifts into sleep. On a bad day, when he’s too scared that he’ll turn in his
sleep, or move the sliver of a muscle the wrong way, Tobio takes one of Shouyou’s dead hands
and hopes that’s enough to tether him to life.
They don’t talk much anymore. They listen to a lot of music, though. Shouyou has a million
playlists that he made when he was waiting for Tobio to come back from practice, or come back
from a match, or land after a flight. So much time that just flew away, when Tobio could have
held them all together.
“I don’t want you to die.” He tells Shouyou, when he’s watching the snow outside one morning.
“Please don’t die.” He’s wanted to say that for a long time now.
“I don’t want to die, either.”
“Then let’s go to the hospital.” The medicine will not help them now, because it was never
meant to remedy the damage, from the start. It could only have slowed what was to come. But
other things still can.
“No.”
Tobio is livid, in that inexplicable way children and teenagers seem to be, endlessly and
absolutely. First, at the fact that they must have this conversation; then at the fact that that is
the one thing Shouyou can still say, without wheezing or trembling, and at the fact that he’d
rather lie in bed and watch the snow than look at Tobio and try to keep looking at him for
however much longer he can.
“Why?”
“It won’t change anything.” It will. They’ll do something to keep him breathing, even if he's not
doing it himself anymore.
“You’ll be alive.” Shouyou’s eyes turn to him. They always look a little frantic now, when they
seek him out, without aid from the rest of his body.
“I haven’t—” He releases a breath, and takes two more in quick succession before he can go on.
“Lived in… a long time.”
But you have, Tobio wants to say. I made sure of it, I made sure you were breathing, I made
sure to kiss every bruise before you woke, I made sure to check if you were warm under the
covers or if you were sweating through the sheets. I watched you glow next to me in bed every
night. You’ve been alive, all this time.
He doesn’t say any of that, because he saw something in Shouyou break, that day in the garden,
with the same loud crack he’d once broken the Tokyo plate in the apartment in Shibuya. Maybe
it released something, or maybe it was the furnace that kept feeling in Shouyou’s hands, but
Tobio watched it crumble, and there was no superglue in the world that could stick it back
together.
“Okay.” He kisses Shouyou with his eyes closed, scared to open them at all. A part of him always
knew he’d watch Shouyou die in the house in Tama.
March 20, 2027
Spring comes all at once. Suddenly their street is swamped with pink Sakura petals that travel
on the wind. Shouyou can’t crane his head to watch, so Tobio wheels him outside for it, a short
half hour of every day.
The house is always bursting with music, because there isn’t much else they can do. It drives
Tobio a little mad to listen to Shouyou’s silent gasps, so he only does this at night. Sleep is a
distant, comforting memory.
Tobio’s set up an armchair for Shouyou in the living room, where he can watch everything
through the window comfortably. The television hurts his eyes, so they don’t turn it on. He
claims the window is enough. Tobio still reads him every text conversation he’s having, puts
every phone call on speaker, so long as they’re not about him.
It’s astounding how many people still call on a weekly basis, because they haven’t seen much of
anyone for a little over a year. Even Natsu has been gone for almost three months. It is just
Shouyou, Tobio, and death looming a little further to the side. Tobio always looks over his
shoulder, like he could intimidate it the way he used to scare intruding eyes away from
Shouyou in high school.
Shouyou slips in and out of consciousness a lot. Sometimes, he wakes up from a bad dream, and
Tobio knows he is shivering in his soul even if his muscles don’t cooperate in real time.
“Tobio.” He breathes – he breathes, he breathes – “Don’t… let anyone… see me.”
And Tobio knows it’s not because he’s ashamed of the disease, or of the person it has made of
him, just the way he was never ashamed to stand five feet tall in a league of giants. In his
dreams he sees Natsu’s face, or any one of their friends, watching him fall and falling
themselves into an unseen oblivion.
“I won't. I promise.” Tobio was built to watch Shouyou. No one else has to.
Sometimes, Tobio surprises himself by how much he speaks. Shouyou always filled the quiet
between them, as was his nature; his presence was constant, and it needed words to be freed
from his confines. Now, when it is much more difficult to just breathe, he can’t do it anymore.
Maybe that’s why he’s dying. Tobio does it for him, instead, just in case.
“Noya-senpai sent this in the mail.” Noya sends them many things from his travels – tea from
England, postcards from Venice, even cheese from the Netherlands – as if he hopes to make up
for every nook and cranny of the world they should have seen. Tobio shows Shouyou the
catalogue in his hands, glossy in the way expensive paper always is. “It’s the Louvre Museum
collection.”
He flips the pages one by one. He talks nonsense, and sometimes he reads out the descriptions
to bring at least some structure to the conversation between the surprised “ooh”s and
thoughtful “ah”s that Shouyou utters. They stare at the Mona Lisa.
“She’s—” Shouyou breathes, “A little ugly… I think.” Tobio laughs.
“I have no idea why people go to see her, either.” He shrugs. It seems to Tobio that nothing good
has ever come out of anything French, at least not for them. Shouyou smiles, and not in the half-
witted way that the lady in the picture is doing.
“We... never did.” His voice is a whisper. He sighs with such little breath, it's barely audible.
“No.” Tobio agrees, and he wonders how anyone would, when Shouyou is still the most
beautiful thing he’s ever seen, in death as he was in life, and he promptly decides love is a little
like that, maybe, a privilege that others may have never had to hold.
“I love you, you know.” Shouyou smiles at him, and it is something like the sun, the way it felt
cool and eternal in their youth.
“I love you…too.”
March 29, 2027
You’d think, living half your life fearing the same thing, once it has proven there is no getting
back up, you might be strong enough to at least withstand the fall.
Tobio wakes up in bed, and he already knows some things will be different. It’s still night time,
or maybe early morning. The window is open. The vanilla Sunlit has burnt out, in the hours just
prior. Shouyou is dead.
He realizes this like it is second nature, because it is. At some point, it’s become instinct to
count Shouyou’s breaths against the quicker rhythm of his own. He knows, as sure as he knows
he is still breathing, that Shouyou no longer is.
His hands act on a mind of their own, but then they always have. They gather Shouyou up. He’s
so light, now, as light as he was years ago in high school, before the heat calcified him into
something deceptively stronger. He’s unfamiliar, as if he is not the same person Tobio has seen
the world with, and has somehow never looked away from.
Tobio’s watched Shouyou die in their house in Tama, so he doesn’t plead with him to wake up.
He was there the last time he closed his eyes, to the same melody they danced to in their
apartment in Shibuya, with a loose smile and a rasp to his breath. He is here now, when
Shouyou is still warm under the duvet with receding life and love, and he is crying.
At some point, it became impossible not to, roughly around the time Shouyou’s legs left him.
Tobio wonders if it’ll be possible to stop at all, now, when the whole of him has. He’s scared that
he’s going to hurt Shouyou with the way he’s holding him to his chest, even though he knows he
can’t anymore.
There is a liberty to being the one that remains. As the one who watched the fall, he couldn’t let
himself fall apart, just as Shouyou didn’t until that final snap of their world in the garden. Now,
with Shouyou gone, and the world with him, there is nothing preventing Tobio from returning
to the broken porcelain he was, on the floor of the apartment in Shibuya, and waiting for the
day his own breath wills him away.
The sun does not rise over the house in Tama that morning, when Tobio is drowning on air and
burning out into his own sighs.
The funeral is in Miyagi. Tobio selects the photo to put in the frame, and it is the one that they
submitted for their Olympic player IDs three years ago, before that first fall that brought them
to the end.
What strikes Tobio is the number of people that gather, even though the last two years were
largely his alone with Shouyou. The whole of the Japanese national volleyball team, based in
Japan or otherwise; half the V-League, who’ve happened to play Shouyou in this or that game,
Oikawa from Argentina, all of Karasuno from the far corners they’ve flown off to. Shouyou’s
friends from middle school, who were there the first time Tobio watched him fly. The old lady
who feeds chickens next door to Natsu’s house, who is still alive when Shouyou is dead.
“This is for you, Tobio-nii.” Natsu shudders, when she tucks the notebook into his hand. Tobio
gives her the letter Shouyou had dictated in the house in Tama, and then he watches her cry
herself to sleep. She is all that there is left of Shouyou to hold, and he the only semblance of a
brother she has left, and they have to learn to be alright with that much, now.
Tobio doesn’t open the notebook until she’s asleep, and he’s bought a ticket back to Tokyo with
a hotel reservation. He will not go back to the house in Tama, where he slept through the last of
Shouyou’s lovely breaths, at least not yet.
He takes the envelope out of the notebook, first, stows it to his side like an afterthought.
Shouyou has touched these pages. Tobio glances the stains of soy sauce on the first one. He
realizes almost sleepily that it’s a cookbook, starting in Shouyou’s shaking handwriting with
no-rice-cooker tamago kake gohan and ending in Natsu’s stark pen strokes against the white of
the paper. They’re all dated to that lost time, when he was playing the World Championships in
Italy and Shouyou was dying silently at their house in Tama. His heart clenches, and then
unclenches into a sob, and then he has to hold the notebook out of the way because his tears
could ruin the last of Shouyou’s handprints.
The letter is older, he can already tell, even though there’s no date on it, and he’ll probably have
to ask Natsu. He knows, because the handwriting is funny in a distinctly Shouyou way, in the
way it always was in high school, before it became wobbly and unfamiliar and fleeting. The
paper still smells like the peach Sinnlig that burned out in the apartment in Shibuya.
Dear Tobio,
If you’re reading this, I’ve gone ahead. Please put a strike in my tally of losses.
There’s so much I want to say to you, but there isn’t enough time to write it out, even if I devote all
my remaining days to it. I don’t want to do that, anyway, I’d rather you remember me alive than
hear me when I’m dead.
I know you’re probably mad at me. I am, too. This is one of the things we can’t fix. I want you to
live well. Don’t rush. Take a breath. You know I have more time now than I know what to do with.
I love you. I wonder why we never say that to each other, sometimes.
You haven’t lost yet, Tobio.
In the end, when Shouyou gave up on his breath, there wasn’t anything Tobio could do. Reading
the letter teaches him that Shouyou had always thought on giving it up, even as he kept waking
ahead of Tobio and greeting him at the door with his slanted crutches. This was one thing that
had already fallen apart, before Tobio had even witnessed it slipping. Ultimately, that last
breath was always going to leave him.
Once upon a time, there might have been a million ways Tobio could have gone. They all would
have led to volleyball. Whatever else he could have been was only ever lit up by Shouyou, and it
died right along with him, in the garden of the house in Tama where the world stood still to
watch them fall. Once upon a time there might have been something else to him, but now it is
lying in the ground with Shouyou, just as dead and gone.
For a while, he’s still in that limbo. He dresses pillows in Shouyou’s shirts to trick him into
existence at night. He cries. He orders the peach Sinnlig by the bulk and cannot sleep when it is
not burning. He cooks Shouyou’s recipes, one by one, through cuts and smashed plates and
breakdowns, and he eats with the hunger of something wounded beyond life. He swallows
mouthfuls of rice mixed with tears and fears and he burns his mouth when he imagines
Shouyou racing to eat faster than him.
Then, eventually, the lights dim out. You haven’t lost yet, Tobio. He wears Shouyou’s wedding
ring on his finger every day, stacked atop his own, even though it’s a tight squeeze until the
metal bends to his insistence. He throws himself back at the world. Once upon a time it was just
him and Shouyou, the ground below and the sky above, beholding them share a ball. Now only
the ball is left with however much of Tobio remains to chase it.
They make it work, somehow. The Adlers take him back that first year. He is not on the team
that qualifies for the Olympics, but he is on the roster that goes. No good came of forcing
Shouyou to marry him, not while he lived, not after he signed the papers that locked his life out
of Tobio’s reach. He’s dead, now, but Tobio gets to wear his name on his back as he wreaks
havoc on the world. Hinata, 10, Japan.
He fulfils the Zenit offer that Shouyou never got to, when their test in Shibuya never ended. He
touches all the balls Shouyou never had the time to touch, and more, and more, the way only a
setter could. He breathes every breath Shouyou should have, with the sure knowledge that they
were always made of the same thing, and if he died with Shouyou that day then Shouyou must,
in return, be living in him also.
At thirty-five, Tobio goes to his final Olympics, and he makes history. His shoulder gives up on
him soon after, though not with the ferocious insistence Shouyou’s own had let him down. He
falls apart.
He goes to the shed in Miyagi, where the Lommarp is still waiting neatly disassembled, and
next to it the black coffin for all the half-lives he and Shouyou have lived. He never goes back to
the apartment in Shibuya, but he does go to the house in Tama. The plates have never seen it
before.
The Lommarp was a fickle piece of furniture, never meant to last long to begin with, from the
first moment Tobio plucked it out of an Ikea showroom and brought it to the last place he
called home. He crudely nails some of the pieces in, sticks others with hot silicone glue. He sets
it up, somehow, steadier than Shouyou had in the apartment in Shibuya. He places the plates in,
one by one. He kisses the Tokyo plate, and the texture of the superglue stain hurts his lip.
He walks out to the garden in the back, where Shouyou is waiting for him, bright and breathing.
He’s standing on his legs, still holding all the power there is to hold in the world. The ball Tobio
brought him from the World Championships is under his arm. Tobio’s heart knows him too
well to trip up on itself now. He walks.
Shouyou turns around. The sun rises once again over the apartment in Shibuya, the house in
Tama, and everywhere else in the now whole world.

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Melody of

The rest becomes history, anyway.

“Tell me why we’re looking at this one again.”

24 June 2024, Tokyo

“All gyms have lights.”

Tobio’s heart does a somersault. Someone screams.

16 June 2024, Tokyo

It’s midday, and Tobio is driving to Funabashi on an expedition to Ikea.

“Tobio, practice is at 5PM.”

“Exactly.” Shouyou groans. His hand is in Tobio’s.

“What’s wrong with it?”

“We’ll break it.”

“Tobio?” Shouyou seems confused. “What the—”

“See? All good.”

“Kageyama.” Someone whispers. “It’s still your serve.”

Tobio picks the ball up.

22 June 2024, Tokyo

“It’s for the Olympic channel.”

“I do.” Tobio rolls his eyes. “I’m the captain.”

kagsfans @kagsfansofficial • 9 min

“Are you trying to sabotage my vitrine?”

28 June 2024, Tokyo

Then, tentatively, a single beat later: “Wanna race back home?”

(24 June 2024, Tokyo

“Hello! I’m Hinata Shouyou.”

“I’m Kageyama Tobio.”

“And we’re here to answer the web’s most searched questions!”

“Is Hinata Shouyou… dating Kageyama Tobio.” Tobio sighs.

And the world snaps back into its axis.)

4 July 2024, Tokyo

“That’s what I hoped you’d say.”)

11 July 2024, somewhere in the sky

“Never mind that. Just remind me, after we win.”

“No we’re not. We’re opponents.”

“I’m not nice.”

“Yeah, well, try.” A playful smack on the shoulder.

“What are you doing while I’m gone?”

“I don’t know. Maybe I’ll meet Oikawa-san, if he doesn’t have practice.”

“See you tonight.”

“Funny thing, I tripped.”

“Yes, over my shoelaces, in the garden. Is that so uncommon?”

“You’ll be benched for unsportsmanlike conduct.”

“I don’t like you when you’re right.”

24 July 2024, Olympic Village, Paris

“I don’t know.” Shouyou sighs. “I haven’t planned that far.”

2 August 2024, Olympic Stadium, Paris

Tobio does. Shouyou is a mirage, today. A miracle.

Shouyou grins at him. “We won.”

Tobio could pretend, now. He could ask.

August 10, 2024

“How long did he last?” Shouyou stops momentarily.

August 15, 2020, Tokyo

“We’re still having one?”

“Unless you have a reason not to, yes.” Tobio swallows.

“Hmm. That smells nice. What is that?”

“I knew it.” Tobio proclaims unwittingly. “I knew you’d like peach.”

“Well, well, look who’s back in the world of the living.”

“That’s not a funny joke.”

“It is, to me.”

He’s just so alive. Tobio breathes him in.

“No. Did you just propose to me?”

“Yes. Did you refuse?”