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We shake with joy, we shake with grief
What a time they have, these two
housed as they are in the same body.
-Mary Oliver
Kageyama is sixteen and just as stupid as he’s given credit for by Tsukishima.
He’s a genius on the court, gets praised as such constantly. He’s talented, skillful, has a deep sense of commitment and responsibility in order to hone what’s already there. None of this means anything though, not when he’s sixteen and lives in an empty house and cannot get through the copy of Norwegian Wood his sister got him months ago.
It is perhaps because Kageyama is sixteen and stupid, which shows in his half-read books and big, bare bedroom and just barely mismatched socks—always one white and the other some sort of off-white unless they’re in an official match— that he agrees when Hinata finds a rusted shopping trolley on the side of the road after practice and immediately suggests they drag each other across an empty parking lot with it.
It’s harmless, he thinks. He’d never do anything that could seriously hurt him, not when he sticks to nurturing diets and strict schedules, not when he keeps a journal for his everyday and stretches with care and as many times as needed until his body sighs. Kageyama would never indulge in anything with the potential to keep him from playing and he’d certainly never let Hinata do it either simply because he’d never let Hinata get hurt at all, not when he files his nails for him twice a week and carries double pocket warmers during the winter because Hinata’s stubborn and silly, but he's also his best friend and copes poorly with the months surrounding Kageyama’s birthday, his hands trembling in the cold.
Kageyama is sixteen and Hinata’s seventeen and they drag each other in a shopping trolley until a piece of gravel sends them skidding off across the empty lot, shrill laughter deafening under the dying golden sunlight. Other than a sore elbow and reddened knees, they’re fine. They’re always fine and Kageyama keeps laughing as hard as he can at the way Hinata’s eyes widen when he’s first sent off flying for so long that he snorts, loud and ugly until Hinata’s smothering his face with his schoolbag, growling at him to “quit it, douchy-yama!”
The next morning, when they greet Ennoshita for morning practice, Kageyama will think for a long time of the way Tsukishima says their minds are like empty houses, lights on but no one home.
Tsukishima means nothing by it and Ennoshita means even less in his light scolding, but Hinata, who knows a fair share about building homes from scratch with just his grin, means the world when he puffs out his cheeks, annoyed but also secretely amused. Perhaps Kageyama will ask Hinata for help with Norwegian Wood. He’s always been the brightest of the two, anyway.
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Kageyama knows more than he’d like to about empty houses and some about homes.
He knows the kitchen floor of the home his grandfather’d built for him and Miwa is always warm because the pipes for the bathroom run beneath it and so whenever someone takes a scalding hot shower, you can feel it humming under your feet as you wait for the kettle to boil. He’s nearly an adult now, though, and Miwa spends most of her time in Tokyo, so there’s no dancing feet to worry about Kageyama’s reddened back and raw knuckles. Miwa’s not coming back to Miyagi, ever, and with every book or dessert she brings Kageyama from other prefectures it feels more and more like she’s waiting for all the milk and yogurt in the world to stretch his bones into larger, more resilient ones, to magically turn them into those of a person who cares about matching socks and reading literary classics and leaving their hometown for foreign, stranger places. It’s not that either of them dislike Miyagi—it is, afterall, the only home they’ve ever known and the one they were born into—but it’s more like they weren’t really made to cling to anything at all, the Kageyamas. Tobio had clung to his grandfather and he died. Miwa’d clung to Tobio and her brother'd still gotten hurt.
Sometimes, during days when math homework comes scarily easy to him and Hinata brings to morning practice leftover cookies his mom made Natsu, Kageyama gets inexplicably sad.
There’s nothing depressing about things making sense or his teammates being his friends, but there are plenty of sad things about being abandoned by your team when you’re just fourteen and grieving over your dead grandfather. The stark contrast between nothing being right because you feel desperately alone and hungry, and math coming naturally to you for once while surrounded by teammates who feed you cookies and slap your back because they’re your friends and love you is too much to bear when you’re freshly seventeen and much too lanky for your sister’s liking still. Kageyama thinks he’s well past letting the guilt hinder him and Karasuno, but children get hurt daily and while the world may face famine and war, these small, personal defeats are things we must all carry forever. There’s hurt in others being cruel to you, but there’s a worse, deeper hurt in learning to be cruel to others yourself, because it comes with a shameful aftermath.
It takes a long, long time to grow into the kind of person who’s willing to go through the effort of defining what it means to be cruel and Tobio finds it’s a bit of a team effort for people like himself. He thinks of Suga-san’s beaming face, a mischievous glint to his eyes. He knows what it means to be cruel now, but Kageyama's learnt by Suga proclaiming “I won’t lose!” as a third year and Tanaka yelling “One more time!” even while feeling defeated and by Hinata singing “Toss, toss, toss, grumpy-yama will toss, toss, toss to meeeee!” on his way back from the bathroom in official matches that perhaps his greatest and most impressive strength and act of kindness lie in being so ready to ask his teammates to give him their all, whether they know what that entails or not.
Hinata recrowned him when they’re still kids. Karasuno as a team embraced him. Kageyama holds out his arms and is enveloped by warmth.
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Old people are always going on and on about how you “never know what you have until you lose it.” Kageyama, because he’s only ever heard it coming from old, old people who are in their mid-thirties at least, thinks that it’s bullshit, nothing but a mere excuse to shun younger generations for being ungrateful, and naïve and blah, blah blah. It’s impossible to not know what you have when you’re Kageyama Tobio, who’s well acquainted with loss.
He’s lost important matches at nationals with his team. He’s lost teammates and their trust. He’s lost loved ones. He’s lost class worksheets and Hinata’s pencils and meal coupons, and every time something better came his way, he knew exactly what he had as his fingers curled around the opportunity precisely because he knows that it means to lose things. It’s condescending, he believes, to tell people they don’t know what they have until they lose it. It implies they’ve never lost anything before, or that if they have, they learnt nothing from the experience. How stupid, he grumbles. Even Tsukishima-proclaimed idiots like himself and Hinata know no better than to keep learning, to hold every lesson dear and near to their hearts.
The third years leave and Kageyama doesn’t feel grief. Instead, he feels grateful Sugawara and Daichi took a single look at him and carved a spot in the team for him to nestle into. He cannot imagine the team without Asahi-san bleeding blind trust for his teammates out every pore because he knows he can afford it, they can afford it, and he cannot picture Yachi without Kiyoko next to her, a water bottle held out and private smile as a reward because she’s not only the team’s manager but a friend to them all. He can't picture the team, he can't imagine an after, but he can't find it in him to feel grief either, because he knows the third years are proud of the work they’ve done.
It doesn’t qualm the churning of his stomach, though. Kageyama will miss them anyway.
The queasiness doesn’t go away when they’re in their third year themselves. It’s not unbearable or even noticeable most days, but Hinata talks about leaving Japan, mentions Shiratorizawa’s coach and a guy in Brazil who could help him fly higher. Since that winter during their first year, Hinata always talks about upping Kageyama as flying higher. It’s confusing, but while Washijo seems to hate Hinata’s guts, he also helps him with the paperwork diligently and scolds him if he’s neglectful for even a second after graduation. He’s not, though—Hinata’s serious about the whole ordeal.
A year later, Kageyama’s nineteen and debuting at the Olympics in Río. He’s in the same city as Hinata and as he lies on his bed at the village, he gets as close as he’ll ever do to understanding what old people mean about loss. It’s a near thing but not quite because despite refusing to meet up, Hinata still texts and calls him whenever possible. Kageyama misses him, but they’re still by all means a package deal. You can miss things you haven’t lost, he thinks, and you can’t forget where they belong either. Hinata could drop off the face of Earth, he could very well fling Kageyama across the ocean in much the same way he flew himself across the globe after highschool, and they’d still be a package deal because here’s the thing—when Kageyama’s a child, his grandfather looks him in the eye and tells him if you get really good, someone even better will come and find you.
Kageyama’s spent most of his very short life getting very good and it still took no time at all for someone even better to find him, to come to him. In some way, he thinks he found Hinata too, came to him. He’s thought it before and perhaps one day he’ll have the guts to say it out loud, but Hinata’s always been the brightest out of the two, in every sense. He’s better at literature than Kageyama could ever be, he even helped him get through Miwa’s copy of Norwegian Wood, but he’s just good in general—he’s good with both people, who often feel they owe him because they fed off his brightness at some point, and also with getting past any obstacle he might face. Hinata’s clever and cheerful, he’s resistant and resilient, but most importantly he never dims. He's always kind and glowing and Kageyama thinks he’s the best player he’s ever met, even back in first year when he sucked, because he’s the best person he’s ever met too.
No truth can cure the sorrow we feel from losing a loved one, Hinata had read outloud for him, belly up and eyes hooded in the late, hazy evening. No truth, no sincerity, no strength, no kidness can cure that sorrow. Kageyama hates Murakami, absolutely can’t stand him. All we can do is see it through to the end and learn something from it, but what we learn will be no help in facing the next sorrow that comes to us without warning. Kageyama hates Murakami and Hinata thinks he’s awful at writing women, or at least he did during highschool. They haven’t discussed Murakami in years.
Tomorrow, Kageyama will score multiple service aces against France and his name will rise above from everyone’s lips all across the globe. Prodigy, genius, polished, terrifying. Tomorrow, Hinata will see Kageyama’s scrunched up face on his way to a delivery at an address he's yet to figure out, grainy features pulled tight with concentration on the TV of a restaurant, and his eyes will widen with delight and an unnamable yet unmistakable kind of hunger.
For now, though, they just text each other about Murakami and Norwegian Wood and Men without Women. For now, they text each other about books they read when they were sixteen and sink into their old, well-worn softness.
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Hinata returns to Japan after two years.
Kageyama doesn’t meet him at the airport, because Hinata’s still stubborn and silly and obnoxious, but mainly because Hinata’s his best friend and he asked him not to. Instead, Yamaguchi and Yachi go and pick him up and Kageyama stays home, with his heart in his lap.
“Yeah, I’m here now,” Hinata’s vicious face will say, and Kageyama’s determination will sing back, will grin back. Win or lose, they’re here now and this, this, this is what volleyball means. Two teams across a net, Kageyama somewhere and Hinata not far away. The Schweiden Adlers lose, not by much, but Kageyama still scrunches up his face in mirth and delight and disbelief, because he’s known Hinata since they were kids and he’s still amazed, time after time, that volleyball can feel this way.
He squeezes his eyes shut with his whole face, tight enough his nose scrunches up. Everything’s drenched in sweat and he can hear Bokuto hollering from the other side of the net. His heart’s lodged at the base of his throat, every heartbeat being this, this, this. This is Hinata’s wide eyes, this is Hinata’s clenched fist, this is Hinata’s incredulous and infectious joy. They shake hands and the tally’s well over a thousand now. They’ve been keeping count since he was fourteen and neither of them will slow down now, they’ve never known how.
Kageyama had a dream when he was ten and his grandfather had just started running a bit slower, his breath turning shallow faster and his kind and calloused hands getting frailer every day. In his childhood dreams, light was born from his hands and he always woke up crying. He tosses to Hinata as they play for the national team together for the first time, tosses against Hinata when they play for foreign leagues. He holds Hinata’s face between both roughened hands and caresses the soft, sunkissed skin of his cheeks. He rubs the spot just beneath his ear with his thumb, nuzzles his nose against the newer freckles there and feels his chest swell with the rumbling of Hinata’s snorting, repressed laughter. From his hands light is born, but Kageyama does not weep now.