Chapter Text
When Kei received a prefect badge just before starting his fifth year at Hogwarts, he’d actually been stupid enough to be pleased. Gleeful, really. At long last, he could bend Shouyou Hinata and Tobio Kageyama to his will with the threat of detention. Just the thought of having the power to make Shouyou scrub toilets with a toothbrush the next time he bounced around the dormitory shouting was almost enough to make Kei look forward to going back to school.
He should have known better. If you let yourself get excited about anything, you just ended up suffering more later.
It was only the first week of school, and already seventh-year prefect Koushi Sugawara was trying to ruin Kei’s year.
“Sorry, but I refuse.”
“The professors are concerned that some of your classmates are going to struggle this year with the OWLs,” Suga said. “If they fail, it’s going to make Gryffindor look bad.”
“You mean Shouyou and Tobio,” Kei said flatly. “There’s no way I’m going to tutor them.”
“You don’t really have a choice, Kei. It’s your duty as a prefect to help your housemates.”
It wasn’t as if he’d asked to be a prefect. The badge had just arrived over the summer holiday in the post. He was perfectly aware that he’d only been chosen because there wasn’t anybody better. Tadashi Yamaguchi was far too shy to get anybody to listen to him, and Tobio and Shouyou were too stupid. They could hardly have a prefect who was probably going to fail all his Ordinary Wizarding Level exams at the end of the year.
“I would, but …” Kei said politely, looking around for an excuse. His eye caught Tadashi watching from the the couch behind Suga. “I’m trying out for the Quidditch team. If I get in, I won’t have time for tutoring.”
He and Tadashi had talked about it over the summer when his best friend had come to visit. Or rather, Tadashi had talked, rather wistfully, about how cool it would be to be on the Quidditch team. It wasn’t a topic that Kei was particularly interested in.
“Hm. Okay,” Suga said, but he looked sceptical. “Well, if you don’t make the team, I’ll ask you again!”
Great. Now he’d really have to do it. At least only Tobio was on the team. Kei would rather play Quidditch with one of the idiot duo than try to beat an education into both their thick skulls.
Which was how Kei found himself standing in the drizzle on the edge of the Quidditch pitch the following Saturday morning with the rest of the sad hopefuls. Despite not having originally wanted to join the team, he was feeling slightly nervous. He didn’t want to be judged unworthy by the team, and be rejected in front of Tadashi and the other applicants. And he definitely didn’t want to admit failure to Koushi Sugawara and have to accept the tutoring assignment from Hell.
“The Quaffle’s going to be slippery,” Tadashi said, wiping off the rain droplets on the handle of his Cleansweep Eleven on his robes. His hands were shaking. “Will your glasses be okay?”
“They’re fine,” Kei said. He’d already cast a water-repelling charm on them. Besides, he had more important concerns at the moment. He turned accusingly to the little redhead standing on his other side. “You never said you were trying out for the team, Shouyou.”
“Yeah! I was going to before but they never had any spots open,” Shouyou Hinata said, bouncing up and down on his toes. His eyes were fixed on the sky, where another applicant was already doing her tryout.
“Didn’t you fly into a tree the last time you were on a broom?” Kei asked, thinking back to their flying lesson in first year. Tobio and Tadashi had had to climb up and disentangle him.
“Shut up! It was my first time on a broom! I’m going to score twice as many goals as you today. Just you wait.”
“So you’ll score none, then.”
Kei blocked the goals. He didn’t score any. Twice nothing was still nothing.
“Huh?”
“Kei’s a Keeper,” Tadashi explained.
Judging by Shouyou’s blank expression, he obviously still didn’t understand, but he just turned to ask, “Are you trying out for Chaser too, Tadashi?”
“Y-yeah.”
“How cool would it be if all three of us got in? Daichi’s looking for two Chasers and one Keeper, right? Then all four of the Gryffindor boys in our year would be on the team!”
As if sharing a room together, going to class together, and eating together wasn’t more than enough already.
“Maybe he’ll fly into a goalpost this time,” Kei said to Tadashi, when Shouyou had left for his turn.
But Shouyou was surprisingly not terrible. Granted, he missed a few passes and completely undershot the goalposts when he tried to score, but he dodged the Bludgers like a natural, rolling, swerving, looping and nailing a freak shot with an assist from Tobio.
“When did he learn to fly like that?” Tadashi asked.
“No idea.”
It was annoying to watch, actually. Kei would never admit it out loud, but he wouldn’t have been able to pull that off, and he’d been flying since he got his first toy broom at the age of two. Shouyou hadn’t even known that brooms could fly until he got to Hogwarts, and since he was Muggleborn, he probably couldn’t practice at all over the summer holidays.
“He’s really good,” Tadashi mumbled.
“There are two spots for Chasers open,” sixth-year Chikara Ennoshita reminded all the other applicants. It was obvious to all of them that Shouyou was a shoe-in. “Good luck, Tadashi.”
But Tadashi completely botched his tryout. He kept fumbling the Quaffle and threw it two metres wide of the left hoop when he tried to score. Kei knew that his best friend could fly better than this. They had spent half the summer on their brooms, with Tadashi practicing against Kei to prepare for this moment. But Tadashi was so nervous that he almost fell off his broom when Ryuu Tanaka, one of the team’s two Beaters, aimed a Bludger at him.
When he came back to join the others, it was with his broom trailing in the wet grass, and his eyes on his shoes.
Kei knew there was nothing he could say to help, so he said nothing at all.
In the end, the two new Chasers selected were Chikara Ennoshita and, to Kei’s irritation but nobody’s surprise, Shouyou Hinata.
Next were the Keeper tryouts. By the time it got to Kei’s turn, the only thing preventing him from twisting his fingers with nerves was the broom in his hand. At least the rain had stopped.
“What kind of broom is that?” Daichi Sawamura, captain of the Gryffindor team, asked when Kei walked onto the pitch.
“It’s a Moonbeam,” Kei said. He’d known this was coming.
“Woah!” Yuu Nishinoya, team Seeker, said enthusiastically, coming up beside Daichi for a look. “They had an article about it in the Quidditch Quarterly! I thought it was only coming out next year!”
“It is.”
“How did you get this?”
“My mother’s on the design team.”
It was a bit embarrassing, really. Kei hadn’t even wanted the broom. He’d found it hidden in his trunk while he was unpacking in the fifth-year dormitory, along with a note from his mother that read, ‘Happy early birthday!!’ He should have expected it of her from the moment she overheard Tadashi talking about the open Keeper position over the summer. His parents were Quidditch mad. And look what had happened.
They were all going to expect Kei to be amazing, now that they knew he flew a world-class racing broom.
“What are they doing here?” Tobio asked abruptly.
They all followed his narrowed gaze to see the Ravenclaw team striding across the pitch. Daichi glanced at his watch and made an annoyed sound.
“Ravenclaw booked the pitch for the afternoon, Sawamura,” the Ravenclaw captain, Tetsurou Kuroo, said as he drew near. “We’ve got tryouts to get through too.”
“Sorry, Kuroo,” Daichi said. “We had a bit of a late start because of the rain this morning. We’re almost done. This is the last one.”
The Ravenclaw followed Daichi’s gesture to look at Kei. He was nearly as tall as Kei and quite handsome, in a just-rolled-out-of-bed sort of way, with a casual self-assurance that drew the eye. His hooded eyes made him look bored as he gave Kei a once over, eyes lingering for a second on the Moonbeam clutched in his hand, before lifting to meet Kei’s. One corner of his mouth curled up into a smirk.
“Mind if we stay?” Kuroo asked, turning back to Daichi.
Kei dropped his eyes, feeling suddenly self-conscious and aware of both teams standing around him. He tightened his grip on his broom, irritated with himself.
“Well …” Daichi said, frowning with reluctance. “You don’t mind, do you, Kei?”
“It’s fine.”
What was he supposed to do? Tell them to go stand in the locker room?
“Alright, then,” Daichi said. Glancing at a Ravenclaw boy with a mohawk standing behind Kuroo, he added, “But no heckling.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it,” said Kuroo. “Right, Taketora?”
Kei was too annoyed when he kicked off the ground to remember his discomfort about showing off his broom. Of course, he knew that if he got in that he’d be playing matches with the entire school watching, but at least then he’d be sharing any failures with the team. If he fumbled the Quaffle now, the only one embarrassed would be Kei.
Once he was up in the air, in front of the three goal hoops, Kei cleared his mind of the Ravenclaw captain’s smirk and focused on the Chasers as they made their penalty shots. Both of the new Chasers were easy to read, and Kei blocked their shots effortlessly, but Tobio Kageyama was an entirely different matter. He’d been lauded as a Quidditch genius greater than Tooru Oikawa since second year, so Kei didn’t really expect he’d be able to do much against him.
His first shot made the far edge of the left hoop so narrowly that Kei heard the Quaffle whisper against the frame. Kei managed to graze the second with his fingertips, despite Tobio pulling a feint, but it still went through the goals.
It wasn’t as if any of the other applicants had done better though.
Of course, his flying didn’t garner the oohs and aahs that Shouyou’s had, but it was adequate. When Kei landed, Daichi gave him a nod and said, “You’re on the team.”
Before he could think not to, Kei’s eyes went to Tetsurou Kuroo, even though he had no reason to care what some Ravenclaw he’d never spoken to thought of him. Kuroo caught his gaze and gave him the same sly little smile as before. Kei turned away immediately.
“Congratulations, Kei,” Tadashi said afterwards. He managed to barely sound envious at all. “You flew really well.”
Of course, Kei ended up wishing he were sitting in the stands with Tadashi as a spectator when the team was crushed by Slytherin in the first match of the season.
The entire thing was a disaster before it even began. First, Yuu Nishinoya got himself banned from the match by accidentally knocking over the Care of Magical Creatures professor while racing on his broom across the school grounds. Then Shouyou got so nervous before the game that he threw up on Ryuu Tanaka in the locker room.
Before the game, Daichi had warned them, “Slytherin’s been playing with the same team for a while now, and they’ve won the Cup the last two years in a row. Most of you have never played a match before, and we still lack experience, but I really believe we’ve got potential.”
Potential didn’t stand a chance against experience and skill. The Slytherin team tore straight through their formations, throwing the Gryffindors into an uncoordinated mess. As for Kei, he’d known long before the game that he was no match for Slytherin’s star Chaser, Tooru Oikawa, and he was proven right on every failed block.
The only good thing that could be said about the match was that at least it was short. After letting through thirteen goals in quick succession, Kei was actually relieved when the Slytherin Seeker caught the Snitch, ending the game in less than twenty minutes.
“You suck at passing the Quaffle,” Tobio growled over dinner that evening.
“I’m not used to playing with so many people in the air,” Shouyou argued, shovelling mashed potato into his mouth. “And at least I tried to pass.”
“Why should I pass to you when you drop the Quaffle and let the other team get it every time?”
“It’s not like you did that much better, Mr King of Quidditch. You only scored two goals.”
“I was getting targeted by Bludgers the entire game.” Tobio tore into a drumstick with his teeth and said through a mouthful of chicken, “I need to practice dodging more.”
“Then let’s go! Maybe we can get Ryuu to hit the Bludgers for us. And Kei can Keep!” Shouyou said, bits of potato spraying across the table in his excitement.
“Not a chance,” Kei replied, cutting a roast carrot into bite-sized pieces. He couldn’t decide what was more off-putting, the duo’s unfounded enthusiasm, or their table manners.
“We can’t. I already asked Daichi. Hufflepuff has the pitch for the rest of the day,” Tobio said, glaring at the Hufflepuff table like their team had scheduled practice purposefully to get in his way.
Kei chose not to mention that he’d seen the Hufflepuff team come into the Great Hall for dinner fifteen minutes ago. He couldn’t stand uselessly hot-blooded people like Shouyou and Tobio. What was the point in trying so hard for a school club? Their next game wasn’t even until March. That was four months from now. So why were they so desperate to get back on the same Quidditch pitch that they’d just been humiliated on today?
Abruptly, Kei put his knife and fork together and stood up from the table.
“Are you okay?” Tadashi asked, twisting in his seat to look up at Kei. He’d been tip-toeing around Kei all afternoon, like he thought Kei was actually upset about losing the game.
“I’m fine. I just remembered I left my gloves in the locker room.” He’d taken them off during Daichi’s consolation speech after the game. “Excuse me.”
“Do you want me to come with you?”
“No, thanks.”
The last thing Kei felt like doing was going back to the pitch, but he couldn’t just leave his gloves there for anybody to find. Hopefully nobody on the Hufflepuff team had already picked them up.
Once outside, he lit his wand with a muttered lumos and pulled his robes tighter around him. The night air was sharp with cold, and the wetness of the grass soaked through the hems of his trousers. It was blessedly quiet. Living in a boarding school like Hogwarts, it was rare to get any time alone.
As the Quidditch stadium came into view, he could see that it was lit up. Somebody must be using it still. Entering the locker room through the outer door, he found his gloves under the bench, exactly where he’d left them. Then he went to the pitch-side exit, curious to see who was still playing. Whoever it was was missing dinner.
He’d intended to just take a glance, but what he saw surprised him enough to pause. Two streaks of Hufflepuff yellow were hurtling up and down the pitch tossing the Quaffle to each other at super speed, while another two students in Ravenclaw blue practiced scoring goals off at one end. They didn’t seem to be playing together, but even so, Kei had never heard of rival teams sharing the pitch. Practice times were usually jealously guarded to prevent other teams from stealing strategies and finding weaknesses.
Suddenly, one of the Hufflepuffs gave a shout, pointing at Kei, and they both slowed down, before swooping down towards him. Great. They probably thought Kei was spying on them. Briefly, he considered ducking back into the locker room, but then he really would look suspicious. So instead, he stepped forward onto the pitch.
As they descended, Kei recognised the two. The first to hit the ground, with a solid thump, was Hufflepuff’s captain and star Chaser, Koutarou Bokuto. Besides the muscular seventh year’s powerful presence on the Quidditch pitch, Kei knew him only for being obnoxiously noisy at mealtimes and in the corridors around the school. Landing next to him was Keiji Akaashi, a sixth-year Chaser who was good-looking enough to rival Tooru Oikawa, but without the Slytherin’s whiny, fake personality that all the girls in school seemed to fall over themselves for.
“Hey, hey! You’re Gryffindor’s Keeper, right? I saw you play today,” Bokuto said, then paused to search for his name. “You’re, uh …”
“Kei Tsukishima,” Tetsurou Kuroo said, before Kei could answer. He landed behind the Hufflepuffs surprisingly lightly for someone of his height and strolled forward like a panther eyeing its prey.
Kei hadn’t even noticed him fly over.
“Ooh, you know him, Kuroo?” Bokuto sounded impressed.
“It’s my duty as captain to know all the other teams’ players. Especially the cute ones.”
Kei blinked back at Kuroo’s smirk, unimpressed. He wouldn’t be teased so easily. He wasn’t an idiot. And what a stupid thing to say anyway. Kei was one hundred and ninety centimetres tall. He could hardly be called cute.
“Hey, I’m captain too, you know!” Bokuto said loudly.
“And that’s why we’re going to kick your arses this year!” Kuroo said, breaking his gaze with Kei to turn to the Hufflepuff.
“You wish!”
“Please excuse me,” Kei informed the air, turning away as the two captains continued to bicker.
“Hang on, Kei,” Bokuto called, before Kei could leave. Then the Hufflepuff frowned. “Wait, we can’t call you Kei. We already have a Keiji.”
“Koutarou …” Akaashi said, presumably warning his captain for being rude. It was the first time he’d said anything since they hit the ground.
“Tsukishima’s fine,” Kei said. As if he wanted to be called by his first name! He didn’t even know them, and they were all older students from rival Houses and Quidditch teams.
“Oh, hey!” Bokuto exclaimed, like he was suddenly remembering something. “Tsukishima! You’re the one with the broom! The Moonbeam!”
Here it comes, Kei thought, supressing a sigh. In the past two months, he’d discovered that there were typically only two responses when people found out that he flew a world-class racing broom. Either they sucked up to him in the hopes that he’d let them try it out, or they told him that it gave him an unfair advantage and that he didn’t deserve to be on the team.
The first thing that Bokuto did was point a triumphant finger at Kuroo and say, “See! I know about the other teams too!” Then he turned back to Kei and said, “Anyway, can you come defend the goals for us for a bit?”
As expected. So they were the type that wanted to try Kei’s broom. But it was one thing to say ‘no’ outright to Shouyou. Being rude to people he didn’t know, particularly ones older than him, was quite another.
“Shouldn’t you ask somebody in your own House?” Kei asked.
“The rest of the team ran away as soon as our official training ended,” Akaashi said. “Koutarou’s practice is endless.”
“I’d do it, but I’m busy training our new Chaser,” Kuroo added, pointing to the goalposts, where the other Ravenclaw was hovering on his broom watching them. “Koutarou’s probably going to play for the League next year, so it’d be useful to practice with him.”
“Sorry, but my broom’s in my dorm,” Kei said with his best fake-polite smile. If they were just interested in seeing his broom, that would make them lose interest.
But to Kei’s surprise, Bokuto said, “That’s fine! You can use one of the school brooms. I’ve got the key for the broomshed.”
Kei hesitated, trying to think of a better excuse than that he just didn’t want to. But before he could say that he had homework, Kuroo said casually, “Your team just lost, what, two hundred and eighty to twenty, right? As a Keeper, shouldn’t you practice a bit more?”
“Let me get a broom,” Kei said through gritted teeth, ignoring Kuroo’s smug face and Bokuto’s pleased smile as he handed over the broomshed key.
The irritation wore off, and the regret started to sink in, around the fifth time one of Bokuto’s famous power shots blew through Kei’s hand and into the hoop behind him. It didn’t help that the ancient school broom he was riding had an acceleration of nought to sixty in what felt like an hour, or that it juddered whenever he jerked it to a halt.
By the time Kuroo flew over, Kei’s arms felt like lead, and his palms were red and stinging. Of course, as soon as the Ravenclaw was watching, Kei completely fumbled a relatively easy shot, the Quaffle ricocheting off his fingertips into the hoop directly behind him. As Kei dived down to retrieve the falling ball, he willed the breeze to cool his hot cheeks.
“Y’know, you’re good at reading shots, but you’re really weak,” Bokuto said, when Kei flew back up to them with the Quaffle. “My shots just go straight through your hands, like bam! I thought I was going to break your fingers.”
“You need to get your body behind the Quaffle,” Kuroo advised, gesturing catching the ball in front of his chest. “Don’t just stretch for it.”
“I’m riding a Cleansweep Four,” Kei said, managing a cool smile. “I’m surprised this thing can still stay in the air.”
“If you just rely on your super broom, that little redhead who joined the team with you this year is going to outfly you,” Kuroo said. “I heard he’s never even played Quidditch before.”
Kei’s hands tightened involuntarily on his broom. Why do you even care? he wanted to ask, but he didn’t want to give the Ravenclaw the satisfaction of thinking he’d managed to annoy Kei. So he just kept smiling and said, “That’s unavoidable, isn’t it? Shouyou’s innate abilities and mine are completely different, after all.”
Kuroo’s eyebrows twitched upwards.
“Now that you’re here, I guess you don’t need me anymore,” Kei said. “If you’ll excuse me.”
“Hey, wait,” Kuroo called, but Kei was already flying down towards the exit.
When he got back up to the Gryffindor common room, it was to find Shouyou and Tobio tossing a Quaffle back and forth across the room, arguing about what time to wake up to go flying on the pitch before the teams started practice. Kei confiscated the Quaffle - “People are trying to study” - and went up to the boys’ dormitory.
Why was everybody putting so much effort into a school club? Didn’t they know that if they worked hard now, they’d only end up more disappointed later?
The following weekend, when Kuroo approached the Gryffindor table at breakfast, Kei was already feeling irritable. Because it was a Saturday, the table was almost empty. Ordinarily, Kei would still be in bed too, but Shouyou and Tobio had decided that five a.m. was an ideal time to practice Quidditch and had woken him up by making a ruckus getting dressed long before dawn. After trying unsuccessfully to get back to sleep for a couple of hours, Kei had come down to the Great Hall to drown his misery in coffee.
“Morning,” Kuroo yawned, leaning on his broom. The Ravenclaw team had the pitch for the morning, so his entire team was at breakfast. The captain’s bedhead was worse than usual and his eyelids were drooping. It gave Kei a vindictive sort of pleasure to see that he obviously wasn’t a morning person either. “The Hufflepuffs have got the pitch this afternoon again. Want to come practice with me and Kou and Keiji again tonight when they’re done?”
“Isn’t your team playing Hufflepuff next week?” Kei asked.
“Mm, yeah. So?”
“So why are you practicing with your rivals?”
“Well, we don’t want Slytherin to win the Cup again, and since they thrashed your team, they’ve got a leg up. So, you in?”
“No, thank you,” Kei said, turning back to his coffee.
There was a moment of silence behind him, before he heard Kuroo walk away to yell at Taketora Yamamoto to wake up, and hustle his team out of their seats. Once Kei was sure they all had their backs to him, he turned slightly to watch out of the corner of his eye as they shuffled out the door. As they disappeared into the Entrance Hall, Shouyou came bouncing inside ahead of Tobio, both of them looking wind-swept and muddy, with their broomsticks over their shoulders.
“So, are you joining Kuroo’s little gay flying club now?”
Kei turned to look at a seventh-year Gryffindor whose name he didn’t know, sitting a few seats down on the other side of the table. Kei raised an eyebrow.
“Excuse me?”
“Kuroo asked you to fly with him and Koutarou Bokuto, right?”
Before Kei could answer, Shouyou dropped into the seat beside him, leaning his broom against the bench. He had obviously caught the tail end of the conversation, because he exclaimed loudly, “Kei, are you friends with Tetsurou Kuroo and Koutarou Bokuto?”
“Not even close,” Kei said, shifting his coffee away from Shouyou as his idiot teammate leaned across the table for the sausages.
“Hey, Tobio, Kei got asked to practice with the captains from Hufflepuff and Ravenclaw!” Shouyou said, as Tobio sat down on his other side.
“I’m not going to,” Kei said, eyes on his coffee so that he wouldn’t look up at the seventh year listening to their conversation.
“What? Why?”
“Shut up. I’m not an idiot who only thinks about Quidditch like you.”
“Ugh, what a waste! Hufflepuff and Ravenclaw have completely booked out the pitch for the whole week. Me and Tobio’ve been waking up at five in the morning every day so we can practice, and you just say no like that! What the hell?”
No wonder the idiots needed a tutor. They were probably both sleeping through all their classes. At this rate they really would fail all their OWL exams.
Kei sipped on his coffee, trying to tune out Shouyou’s irritating voice as he thought about what the seventh year had said. Was Kuroo really gay? Immediately, he shoved the thought away, along with his coffee, and got to his feet. He’d spend the day in the library. At least Shouyou would never follow him there.
Still, once he was sitting in the silence of the library, he couldn’t stop his mind from drifting back to breakfast. Kuroo had come over just to talk to him, just to invite Kei to play with him, even though his team was waiting. Why would he even want to practice with an average Quidditch player, and a Gryffindor, no less, like Kei? Was he really -?
It had nothing to do with him, Kei reminded himself firmly. And besides, he’d probably never talk to the Ravenclaw captain again anyway.