Archive of Our Own

• He was insufferable, but somehow, my hands itched to hold his.

That’s the sentence I type and erase three times because it sounds like the opening of a cheap romance, and I refuse to be the guy who writes cheap romances. I’m the guy who writes truth with a side of volleyball metaphors. Unfortunately, the truth is that Oikawa Tooru smiles like he’s sponsored by stadium lights, and my chest answers with interference.

I meet him again in a gym that smells like resin and ambition. He’s delivering float serves that skim the net with the sociopathic precision of a cat swatting a glass off the counter. I am not impressed. (I am impressed.) He spots me, tips two fingers off his forehead like a soldier of chaos, and calls out, “Suna-kun! Did you come to take notes? I can write them for you.”

“I’d ask you to sign them,” I say, “but your handwriting looks like a seismograph.”

He laughs. It’s the annoying, buoyant kind of laugh that makes other people laugh because of acoustics and peer pressure. The ball ricochets toward the far line, and he doesn’t chase it; he glides, balanced, like gravity wrote him a permission slip. When he sets, the court listens. When he looks back at me, I pretend I wasn’t watching.

There are many types of serves. Jump serve, float serve, the kind where your heart throws itself into the air and hopes for a favorable draft. I specialize in the last one by accident.

Practice ends, but Oikawa doesn’t. He lingers, performing a solo show for the vending machines. “Do you think,” he says, tapping the glass like it owes him money, “that sports drinks taste better if you wink at them?”

“Only if they’re flattered.” I join him because walking away would be suspicious. Also because he’s blocking the lemon tea and I need that to survive his presence.

He buys two and hands me one without looking, like my existence is a foregone conclusion. My fingers brush his. Heat flares up my wrist. That is the moment I realize my body is a traitor and my hands really do itch to hold his, which is a medical condition I will bring up with a professional never.

“So,” he says, leaning back against the rattling machine, “how’s your team?”

“Functional. Blessed.”

“Sounds boring,” he sing-songs. “Mine is loud, chaotic, dazzling. Yes, like me.” He takes a long drink and watches me over the rim, eyes sparkling with healthy disrespect. “You stared at my serve.”

“I stared at the physics failure occurring in your jump.”

He grins and bumps my shoulder with his. “You like me.”

“I like silence.”

“And me in it?”

“That’s not how silence works.”

He hums. “We could try it sometime. I could be quiet.”

Oikawa being quiet sounds like a myth invented by coaches to scare first-years into warming up properly. Still, the idea lands, and I tuck it away like a lucky charm: improbable, shiny, something to touch in my pocket when I think no one is looking.

Atsumu finds me later in the hallway, eyes narrow with gossip. “Ya n’ pretty-boy from Aoba Johsai exchanging fluids now?”

“It was lemon tea,” I say. “And no.”

“Saw him give ya a drink,” he says, bumping my arm like punctuation. “That’s practically a proposal in athlete.”

“Kita-san says proposals need a checklist.” I open my phone to pretend I have emails. “Hydration is on it, maybe.”

“Bet he writes ya poetry,” Atsumu crows, delighted. “Bet it’s got sparkles.”

I say nothing, because the words He was insufferable are still drafting in the back of my mind like a libero reading a setter’s shoulder.

The next time I see him, it rains. The kind of rain that forgets it’s supposed to be water and tries to be percussion instead. Practice has been a grind; my legs feel like they’ve been poured back into me at the wrong angles. I cut through the park to shave time off the walk, only to find Oikawa occupying a bench under a half-dead tree, tossing a ball into the air and catching it like he’s testing gravity’s loyalty.

“Suna-kun,” he says, brightening, rain dotting his lashes. “You’re exactly who I wanted to run into.”

“I’m exactly who most people avoid.” I stop anyway, because rain paints him in high definition and I’m a weak audience.

He pats the space beside him. “Sit. I have a hypothesis.”

I sit. Hypotheses are safe. Hypotheses are not hands.

“If I set the ball and you don’t spike it, does that make us incompatible?” He turns the ball in his hands, contemplative. “Or is compatibility about wanting to move in the same rhythm, even when we’re doing different things?”

“That’s not a hypothesis,” I say. “That’s a confession wearing a lab coat.”

He laughs quietly. The sound is softer in the rain, as if water absorbs arrogance. “Maybe.” He offers the ball. Our fingers brush again, static, heat, the ghost of a future, and I return the ball without throwing it.

His eyes widen, as if I’ve performed a magic trick where the rabbit pulls the magician out of the hat.

“You didn’t spike,” he says, a little breathless.

“I could,” I answer. “But then the moment would end.”

We sit in truce under leaves doing a poor job at their one task. The rain becomes a curtain and the world, a quiet stage. Oikawa tips his head back, lets the drops kiss his throat, and I am a responsible adult who looks at trees, not throats.

“Do you ever turn it off?” I ask. “The spotlight?”

He thinks. For once, he doesn’t answer immediately. “Sometimes I dim it,” he says. “It’s easier to see other people when I do.” He glances at me. “You look back.”

“Maybe I don’t like getting blinded.”

“Maybe you like me.”

“You recycle lines a lot.”

He smiles without showing teeth. “Only the true ones.”

I draft the sentence again. He was insufferable, but somehow, my hands itched to hold his. I let it stay. Atsumu texts to ask if I’ve joined a dating app for setters. I turn off my phone and imagine what Oikawa’s hand would feel like fully, not by accident, solid, warm, a little dramatic in the way hands can be dramatic by choosing how to fit. I fall asleep thinking about momentum: the physics kind, the heart kind, the way both can tip on a breath.

We agree to pass together after practice “for footwork,” which is a lie we jointly own. He is annoyingly excellent. He moves like the ball is his rumor to spread.

He keeps up a running commentary, half of it addressed to me, half of it addressed to an imaginary camera filming his biopic.

“And here we see Suna-kun,” he narrates, “pretending not to be charmed while being extremely charmed. Note the eyes. Note the stoic jawline battling a smile.”

“Note the desperation,” I say, sending a clean pass that kisses his hands and sticks. “For attention.”

He tosses me the ball. “Attention is a gift. I’m generous.”

“You’re a clearance sale.”

He laughs, and I catch myself smiling back with poor impulse control.

There’s a moment when the ball leaves his hands, and before it reaches mine where we’re strung together by air and intention. I like that moment more than is ideal.

The first time we hold hands, we don’t call it that. The sidewalk is crowded, and his palm finds mine to tug me out of the path of a runaway bicycle. It’s practical. Efficient. His thumb presses against my pulse in the split second before he lets go, like he’s checking the pace of a game we’re both playing and both pretending not to keep score of.

“Watch it,” he says, close enough that his breath catches on the high collar of my jacket. “I can’t set for two.”

“Didn’t ask you to set for one,” I reply, and he looks pleased. It’s subtle, but I’ve been studying his expressions with the same focus I study opposing spikers. Somewhere along the way, I became an expert.

We reach a stalemate that looks like friendship and tastes like a held note. The team notices. Kita-san says nothing, which is his way of saying a lot. Atsumu says too much, which is his way of saying he cares.

“Ya gonna confess on-court or off-court?” Atsumu asks, chewing gum like it wronged him. “Bet he’s the type to want a soundtrack.”

“There will be no confessing,” I tell him. “There will be strategic clarity.”

“Clarity like ‘we hold hands’?” he singsongs.

“Clarity like ‘I win.’”

“Love’s not a match, Rin.” He pops the gum. “It has to be an entire tournament.”

Oikawa texts me a link late one night: playlist for when you pretend you don’t like me. It is eighty-seven minutes long and features aggressively upbeat songs with clapping tracks. I listen to all of it while folding laundry and then again while staring at the ceiling. In the morning, I send him a photograph of my hand holding a pen. working on my confession, I caption. He replies with seven sparkle emojis and a gif of a cat screaming.

.

We meet at the court before sunrise because he claims magic hours are for setters. He stretches, the line of his body long and loose, and I look at the floor like I’m devout. The gym is quiet, the kind of quiet that remembers noise and misses it. He sets me soft balls on purpose, like he’s handing me fruit, and I return them with patience until we are less two players and more a proof of concept: that rhythm can be shared without being the same.

“Do you ever get tired of being obvious?” I ask finally, stepping into his space because the question requires proximity.

“Do you ever get tired of pretending?” he returns, eyes bright, sweat at his temple. We are close enough to fog each other’s thinking.

“Yes,” I say, and there goes the match point I was saving. I reach for his hand. It fits. Of course it fits. The itch quiets, like skin finding its correct temperature. He inhales, surprised, delighted, greedy, and squeezes once, twice, three times: a code we didn’t agree on but understand anyway.

“I can be quiet now,” he whispers.

“Don’t,” I whisper back. “I like the noise you make.”

.

We stand in the baseline hush, hands linked, and the gym sees us the way courts see things: not as a scandal, but as a system finding balance. I think of that first sentence and how I tried to delete it. I think of how some openings are inevitable because the story wants to be told and because the body wants what it wants and because sometimes a setter asks a middle blocker to trust the air between them.

He leans in, not to kiss me but to rest his forehead against mine. It is so Oikawa: dramatic, tender, aware of angles. “We should play a game,” he murmurs. “First person to let go loses.”

“I don’t lose,” I say, and I don’t.

Post-game analysis: The hand-holding lasted three hours, interrupted only by necessary hydration and Atsumu yelling from the doorway that we were ruining sports. Kita-san clapped exactly once, which is a standing ovation in his language. Later, when Oikawa falls asleep on my shoulder during a team movie, I draft a new opening: 

• He was inevitable, and when inevitabilities arrive, the only respectful thing to do is meet them with steady hands.

I keep the original line, though. It’s earned its place on the page.

Notes:

Thanks for reading. If you got here because a certain someone scrolled my profile during practice: mind your business, grand king. (You looked pretty, though).