Archive of Our Own ^beta

It occurs to Suga, as he sits in his dorm room and waits for Daichi and Asahi to get on Skype for their biweekly group call a few months into his first year of university, that maybe his mother was right and Kyodai was too far from home to be very good for him. Asahi’s at a small technical college in Miyagi, Daichi in Tokyo, and Suga had surprised everyone by not only applying to one of the most competitive schools in Japan, but also getting in, and then enrolling.

“Somehow,” Daichi had said, at their high school graduation, “I was expecting us to be stuck together forever.”

“Right?” Suga had laughed, then. “We’ll still see each other on breaks and stuff, it’s not a big deal.”

Daichi’s smile had vanished, and he’d said, “Yeah, of course,” in the stiffest, most wooden voice Suga had ever heard him use. It made Suga ache to fix whatever had caused Daichi to sound like that, but then he turned around to congratulate Shimizu, and when he’d turned back again Daichi had left.

He hadn’t realized how much he’d taken Daichi’s physical presence in his life for granted until it was gone.

The bloopy “incoming call” sound rings in his headphones, and Suga hits accept call before he could get any more sentimental. “Hey guys! How’s everything?”

They chat about their classmates and their homework, and how volleyball’s going (Daichi’s playing on his university’s team, and Asahi in the neighborhood league. Suga’s the only one who’s dropped it completely.) Suga’s missed their faces, their voices, so much that when the call ends he pulls his knees up to his chest and stares at his laptop’s blank screen, wishing they were there with him.

The transition from seeing someone for many hours a day, every day, to never seeing that person at all, is more than Suga expected it to be.

Going back to Torono for Golden Week feels strange, like the month in Kyoto was an extended educational vacation from the everyday life Suga was used to. But his mother insisted and paid for the tickets, claiming that she missed her dear Koushi too much. And his former volleyball cohorts all come back too. The four of them pick a day to drop in on Karasuno’s practice.

Daichi steps through the gym door ahead of them and says in his Captain Voice, “Are you all practicing your receives?” Everyone on the court freezes at once for a few gloriously stunned seconds before Noya and Tanaka yell “DAICHI-SAN” at the top of their lungs, and then Suga and Asahi and Shimizu all walk in behind Daichi and chaos ensues. There is yelling, there is jumping, there is hugging. It feels a little like the moment after a hard-fought win, but warmer, somehow.

The new first years are shy and eager to prove themselves. Shimizu joins Yachi by the bleachers and they instantly lock themselves into a private conversation none of the boys are privy to. Ennoshita, though he seems nervous now that his senpai are watching him, is a perfectly capable captain, Tanaka balancing him out as the vice. Suga smiles as he catches Daichi’s eye and he can tell they’re both thinking the same thing. “We left this team in good hands.”

Noya corners Asahi and tries to convince him to join the practice, and Suga can see he’s about 30 seconds away from actually agreeing so he grabs Asahi by his shoulders and shoves him back out the door. “Sorry for disturbing your practice, Ukai-san, Ennoshita-kun! We have dinner plans now, so we’ll get going.”

They do have dinner plans, actually. The four of them end up in the restaurant they went to after they lost in the Interhigh, more than half a year ago at this point.

Suga punches Asahi in the shoulder as they walk in.

“What was that for?” Asahi complains.

“You were going to get sentimental. I could feel it. I could feel the sentiment brewing.”

Asahi rubs his arm and rolls his eyes, and Shimizu chuckles behind him, a pretty silver-bells sort of laugh. They settle into a corner booth, Suga and Daichi against the wall, Asahi and Shimizu across from them. Daichi seems to be taking up more space next to Suga than he used to, Suga thinks, and he has to make an effort not to lean into Daichi’s space.

Shimizu, blushing slightly, tells them about her relationship with Yachi, which had started shortly after nationals and miraculously continued into the new school year.

“It’s really nice to see Hitoka-chan again,” she mumbles into the tabletop, suppressing a smile, and the other three exchange smiles because Shimizu being flustered by the tiniest member of the volleyball club will never not be completely adorable.

This set the tone for the rest of the evening, apparently. A customer at the mechanic’s shop where Asahi works part time gave him her phone number a week earlier and he still can’t decide if he wants to call her or not.

“Was she cute?” Suga asks.

Asahi shrugs. “How would you know?”

“I’m gay, not blind, I know what cute girls look like. Shimizu-san, for instance. Michimiya-san’s pretty cute too, I guess.”

Shimizu raises an eyebrow at him. Suga beams.

“That reminds me! How did your date with Michimiya-san go?” Asahi asks Daichi, and Daichi chokes on his noodles. Shimizu’s eyes widen imperceptibly.

“Uh,” Daichi replies, still coughing. “Awkward as hell and not worth discussing?”

Suga, meanwhile, is appalled. “How did you just not tell me you went on a date? Your first date! Does the title of ‘best friend and ex-vice captain’ mean nothing to you?” He poses dramatically.

“I honestly forgot,” Daichi says, sounding earnest and apologetic. The knot of anger barely has a chance to materialize before it dissolves from that voice. “Asahi only knows because he accidentally overheard the end of the confession.”

“When did this even happen?” Suga asks, stuffing some vegetables into his mouth to keep himself from asking a thousand questions at once.

“Right after graduation. She actually confessed to me after the ceremony, and I thought we’d been pretty good friends so what could it hurt?”

Suga can picture it: Michimiya slapping her cheeks to give herself confidence, pulling Daichi off into a quiet corner behind the school and then blushing and stammering until he got the point. Something dark and unpleasant seems to sink through Suga’s stomach as he thought about it, so he shakes his head a tiny bit and concentrates on his food.

“So what went wrong?” Asahi asks.

Daichi puts his head down on the table. “What didn’t go wrong, really. She showed up half an hour early, I was late because my mom made me run an errand first and I didn’t realize how long that was going to take, the cafe Michimiya read about online had a line going around the block so we ended up going somewhere else, and we were both so nervous and awkward the whole time...And at the end of it she was like ‘This is exactly what I needed to get you out of my system before university.’ The whole thing was just really weird.”

Suga pats Daichi on the head a few times, because he looks like he needed it. The dark and unpleasant feeling lingered. “Did you even like Michimiya?” Suga asks him, and Daichi just sighs.

“I don’t know...How can you tell the difference between liking someone as a friend and liking someone romantically?”

They all turn to look at Shimizu. She blinks a few times, and says nothing.

They wait for Shimizu to drain her glass of water.

She sighs, like this single conversation was more of a trial than managing the boy’s volleyball team ever was. “Did you want to kiss Michimiya-san? Hold her hand? Do...” she gets slightly pinker and slightly quieter, but soldiers on, “...physically intimate things with her?”

Daichi stares at the table for a few moments before saying, “Not really...”

“There you go.”

Suga isn’t sure why this conversation is making him feel so out of sorts. Normally he’d be teasing Daichi about his shitty date, poking and prodding until Daichi was laughing and happy again, but for some reason he can’t make light of it this time. That and the fact that he didn’t even know it had happened until more than a month later.

Suga imagines Daichi getting married to some girl he doesn’t know, maybe five, maybe ten years into the future, and moving far away, until Suga is nothing but a faded memory of days long past, and resolves to do whatever it takes to keep their friendship from deteriorating to that point.

“Are you and Michimiya still friends at least?” Suga ends up asking Daichi later, when Daichi’s dropping him off at his house after dinner.

“I guess? We message each other sometimes. Not very often, though.” Daichi pokes Suga in the shoulder. “What about you? You’re the only one who didn’t share any juicy gossip at dinner today.”

Suga just shrugs. “Not much to share. Studied for a test with a cute boy once, listened to him tell me about his girlfriend for twenty minutes. I don’t really have time to go out with classes and stuff, so it’s whatever, really.”

Romantic relationships really are whatever , Suga thinks as he waves goodbye to Daichi from his porch, as long as I can keep my friends .

-

Suga’s not completely alone, in Kyoto. Yaku from Nekoma lives in his dorm building, and they make it a point to get food together a few times a week and catch up.

“Do you ever think about how Karasuno’s doing, now that you’re not there?” Yaku asks him, one night when they’re eating okonomiyaki by the river.

“Sometimes,” Suga replies. “We visited them over Golden Week, they seem to be doing okay.”

Yaku tears off a piece of his okonomiyaki with his chopsticks. “We did too. Yamamoto’s a better captain than I was expecting from him, I was impressed. Kenma too, he’s like, actually putting extra effort in, it’s a miracle.”

“I’m proud of them.”

Yaku kicks a pebble into the water and watches it splash far below. “I can’t believe I actually miss those dorks. God.”

Suga laughs. “Me, too.”

“What’s it like playing volleyball with a new team?” he asks Yaku later, and Yaku shrugs.

“I’m not a starter yet, and I didn’t know anyone there before I joined, so. It is a little weird. But we’re doing okay so far. You should come to a game sometime.”

“If I can. Pre-med major, you know how it is.” Suga throws in a self-deprecating eyeroll at the end, and Yaku huffs.

-

Suga sees a flyer for the university’s LGBT organization in the dorm building one day, advertising some social event the group was hosting later that week.

“Should I go?” He ends up asking Daichi over Skype. Daichi’s one of the few people Suga had actually come out to explicitly, back in their second year of high school. He’d never treated Suga differently afterwards, and Suga appreciated it. Even though he’s friends with a few gay people now, he’s still not as close to them as he is to Daichi, so, here he is.

Daichi sips his Pocari Sweat - he’d just gotten back from practice, and his face was still flushed and sweaty from the exercise. “I don’t know, do you want to?”

In the back of his mind, Suga notes that Daichi looks good like that, but he focuses on the conversation at hand. “I’m not sure. I should probably get out more, Yaku keeps telling me I need a life. My roommate too, actually. I don’t even go to all the Medical Society meetings because I have homework...” He puts his head in his palm, thinking.

“Do you have any friends going to the thing?”

“I think Kaneda-san from my biology class is on the committee, but that’s it. God, I need more gay friends,” Suga says with a chuckle.

A weird expression flickers across Daichi’s face, but it’s gone as quickly as it appears.

“So then go and make more gay friends,” Daichi says, in a this should be obvious, Suga tone of voice. Suga’s missed that voice.

“You make a good point, Daichi. How’s Kuroo doing?”

“One sec.”

Daichi unplugs his headphones and yells, “Suga wants to know how you’re doing!” Because the two former captains are roommates now. Daichi complains about it every day, but Suga wouldn’t be surprised if he agreed to room with Kuroo the next school year too.

Kuroo yells back, “Suffering, thank you for asking, Sugawara. Organic chem test tomorrow.” He rolls into view on his office chair and twirls around so Suga can see his face. Kuroo does not appear to be suffering particularly, but what does Suga know?

Daichi rolls his eyes. “Drama queen. You’re top of the class in chem, Kuroo, stop procrastinating and do your fucking math homework.”

Kuroo sticks his tongue out at Daichi.

Suga nods sympathetically, valiantly resisting the urge to laugh. Kuroo sighs and rolls back to his desk.

“Nerd,” Daichi-fake whispers to his laptop screen, and they both snicker.

Suga really does love his friends. But when the call ends, he feels...weird. Like he’d had two cups of coffee on an empty stomach- jittery and full of misplaced energy. Maybe he should take up some form of exercise again, or join an intramural volleyball team.

-

Suga doesn’t quite manage to make friends with Kuroo as an individual, but because his schedule is so similar to Daichi’s, he ends up seeing a lot more of the captain over Skype than he expected. Which is fine, Kuroo’s a reasonably fun person to interact with. One night he rolls into camera view on his office chair, shirtless and in sweatpants, knees pulled up to his chest as he texted someone. Suga coughs and Daichi does his Scary Captain Face at Kuroo, but it’s not very effective.

“Sup, Suga-chan,” Kuroo says with a smirk.

“Sup! Oh, I wonder if Yaku’s around, he’d probably want to talk to you.” Suga’s already pulling out his phone and typing the message when Kuroo winces and says, “I’m not sure that’s a good idea...”

“Oh? What did you do?” Suga hits send anyway, figuring if Yaku doesn’t want to see Kuroo then he just won’t answer.

“Why do you just immediately assume I did something?”

“Because I’ve met you, Kuroo. So what was it?”

Kuroo scowls. “No offense, Suga-chan, but it’s really none of your business.” Beside him, Daichi smiles apologetically, which makes Suga soften.

There’s a knock on Suga’s door, and Suga goes to let Yaku in. On the Tokyo end of the call, Daichi and Kuroo are whisper-arguing about something.

Yaku sits down next to Suga on his bed. “Sawamura-kun. Kuroo. How are you both doing?” he says, in a polite, measured tone.

“Holy fucking shit your hair,” Kuroo blurts out.

“Yeah?” Yaku runs a hand through it, self-conscious. He’d gotten an undercut recently. “Wanted a change.”

“Like moving halfway across the country wasn’t enough of a change for you?” Kuroo asks drily, and Yaku rolls his eyes, while Daichi and Suga look at them with some concern.

“What does that have to do with anything?” Yaku demands.

Kuroo shakes his head. “Never mind. Your hair looks nice.”

“Thanks.”

There is an awkward silence.

“Well,” Yaku says, standing up. “I have to go do homework now. Feel free to call me on your own time, dingus, instead of going through all of our mutual acquaintances.”
“That was my fault, I’m afraid,” Suga interjects smoothly. “Kuroo interrupted my call with Daichi, and I thought you might want to see him so I texted you. Sorry.”

Yaku waves his apology off and leaves the room, Kuroo deflating immediately.

“This is a mess,” Kuroo mumbles. Daichi pats him. “I’m going to go sulk in the library over my chem assignment. Later, Sawamura, Sugawara.”

“Don’t stay there too late,” Daichi calls after him as he leaves.

-

He does end up going to the LGBT club event thing. They have free food, and a guy with powder-blue hair and eyeliner talks to him for like twenty minutes and they end up exchanging numbers. Which is...new, for Suga. In high school, he’d just kind of existed, politely turning down confessions with a “not interested in a relationship right now,” figuring things would get easier once he had more freedom of movement. And there was volleyball.

His fingers hover over his contacts screen and he wonders if he should tell Daichi how it went. He’d probably want to know, but...

Suga hears a disturbingly familiar voice behind him and turns around, but it’s a stranger who just happens to sound exactly like Oikawa Tooru. Now that, he should definitely text Daichi about.

(It happens a lot, seeing or hearing people that remind him of people he knows. He thought he saw the Miya twins in the subway the other day. Suga tries not to think about it too much.)

“We’re playing Oikawa’s school on Tuesday,” Daichi texts back.

“Kick his ass! ψ( ` ∇ ´ )ψ” Suga hits send and looks up to see the guy with Oikawa’s voice leaning against the wall beside him. “Haven’t seen you around here before,” the guy says, and Suga can hear the “Mr. Refreshing” nickname in his head and has to work not to laugh out loud.

He ends up leaving early, not quite sure why.

-

Suga’s social life slowly sorts itself out, if it can be described that way, as he starts to talk more with his classmates and the people in his program. And Yaku, somewhat surprisingly. It’s funny how quickly they go from polite lunch meetups to barging into each other’s rooms to complain about homework and stuff.

“Kuroo got a girlfriend, did you hear about that?” Yaku announces one day, shortly before their very first finals week.

“Yes. He’s being surprisingly lowkey about it, according to Daichi.”

Yaku makes a face. “The idea of that idiot dating anyone is just so strange.”

“Eh. He’s pretty hot until he opens his mouth.”

Yaku stares at him for a bit. “I mean, I guess. But still. It’s Kuroo. ”

“How long do you think it’s gonna last?”

“I’m still not entirely convinced it’s not an elaborate prank of some kind, honestly,” Yaku grumbles, and he looks so annoyed about the whole thing that Suga decides to change the subject for now, and poke him about Kuroo later.

-

Kuroo, Daichi thinks to himself on more than one occasion, is equal parts disaster and terrifyingly competent human being. He’s a neat freak who keeps his side of the room looking like a magazine spread, and also a person who’s set off the fire alarm in their dorm twice in three months. They get along well, going to practice and meals together most of the time, and Kuroo’s good about respecting Daichi’s privacy when he’s talking to his friends and family back home. One day, Kuroo slams the door to their shared bedroom open, launches his backpack onto his bed from the doorway, and yells, “SAWAMURA!”

“What happened?” Daichi asks warily, having learned from experience that this type of excited Kuroo could mean many different things for his future, ranging from “let’s get ice cream” to “let’s scale the math building at 3 am.”

“Remember the girl from the library I told you about?”

“The one with the purple hair? What about her?”

“She asked me out! To see a movie!”

“Congratulations,” Daichi says, unimpressed. Kuroo’s been on more than a few first dates by this point, but rarely a second date. He never seemed too upset about it, so Daichi hasn’t tried to comfort him on it either. He’s...not jealous, exactly, but he wonders what it would be like. To try dating so many different girls, have it end quickly, and be okay with it.

This girl, Uehara Ami or “Ami-chan” as Kuroo starts to refer to her after about two weeks, sticks longer than most. She seems shy the first time Daichi meets her, but warms up quickly, and she and Kuroo argue playfully with each other in a rhythm that seems weirdly familiar somehow.

The conversation Daichi had with his Karasuno friends at dinner months earlier comes back to him. “How did you know you liked Uehara-san?”

“I didn’t,” Kuroo says. He leans back in his office chair as far as he can without falling over, hands crossed behind his head. “I just liked her purple hair at first. And then it turns out I like hanging out with her. She’s funny and smart and nice, and gets along well with my friends.”

“So like, how’s that different from being friends with her?”

Kuroo pushes his char back upright and spins around to face Daichi. “Well, we hold hands, and hug sometimes. It hasn’t been that long of a relationship, okay? I’m not actually an enormously experienced playboy, Sawamura. Despite appearances.”

“I’m aware. I live with you,” Daichi points out. “I’m just wondering, I guess, how you managed to keep dating her, as opposed to all those other dates.”

The other boy pulls a volleyball out from where it had rolled under his desk and starts twirling it absentmindedly. “She wasn’t disappointed with me,” he says finally, a little quieter. “Sometimes people expect me to be someone or act a certain way that I’m not, and I don’t think Ami-chan really expected anything to start with.”

He then throws the volleyball at Daichi’s face and says, “Your turn, Sawamura. It’s Roomates Feelings Talk Time, I’ve decided. And you barely talk about your problems in general. You are allowed to have problems, Sawamura, I hope you realize that.”

Daichi rolls his eyes and throws the volleyball back at Kuroo. They start playing catch. Maybe this is part of the University Experience, Daichi thinks, throwing a volleyball back and forth with your roommate, talking about feelings and blowing off homework.

“Honestly? The worst thing about my life right now is my statistics homework. Volleyball’s going well, you haven’t set anything on fire in over a week, and I’m still keeping in touch with everyone important to me, so. Everything except statistics is great.”

Kuroo gives him an analytical look at that, the kind of look that Daichi had last seen aimed at a complicated multistep organic synthesis problem. “You must miss your Karasuno friends a lot, huh,” he ends up saying.

“You go home every other weekend, you have no room to talk.” Train tickets to Miyagi are expensive, and train tickets to Kyoto are even more expensive. He and Suga haven’t actually talked about visiting each other at university, even though they know their breaks don’t line up perfectly. It could happen, if they try to make it work. But part of Daichi does wonder if maybe he’s clinging too hard to the past and the familiar, and not really embracing all of the new and interesting that Tokyo and university has to offer.

His phone vibrates. “Speak of the devil,” Daichi mutters. It’s Suga, sending him a picture of a cat and a crow fighting over a half-empty McDonald’s french fry packet under the orange glow of a street lamp. The photo’s grainy and a little blurry, and Daichi can almost feel how excited Suga must have been at seeing that happen.

Suga: LOOK WHAT I JSTU SAW OUTSIDE ON MY WAY BACk FROM THE LBIRARY THE BATTLE OF THE GARBAGE DUMP R MAYVE A VISUAL RPESENTATION OF YOUR LIVING SITUATION AT THE MOMENT IDK BUT IT IS A *CAT* AND A *CROW* DAICHI LOOK

Suga:...Can you tell I got 4 hours of sleep last night

Daichi: Amazing

Suga: I know ＼(≧▽≦)／

Daichi: please sleep

Suga: I will! I usually remember to sleep

Daichi: Please Sleep

Suga: okay Dadchi

Daichi looks up from his phone to see Kuroo grinning at him. Daichi bristles on instinct. “What?” he grumbles.

“Nothing, nothing.”

“Stop with the face, Kuroo.”

“You’re talking to Suga-chan, aren’t you?” Kuroo has not stopped with the face.

“Yes? So what? He asked me to show you this, by the way.” Daichi forwards the picture.

“That’s pretty great,” Kuroo says, in response to the picture. “Also, can I call you Dadchi next time you start telling me to go to bed before midnight?”
“Do not.”

-

Yaku’s not annoyed about Kuroo having a girlfriend. It’s none of his business what Kuroo’s up to. Really, he doesn’t care at all. He is a little annoyed that they’re not talking so much nowadays, but that can’t be helped, what with their busy schedules and all. He’s sure Ami-chan is a perfectly nice girl. She’s cute in the selfies Kuroo sends him. Not Yaku’s type at all but he can see why Kuroo would like her.

It is a little weird, though. Having to account for this girl when making plans to skype Kuroo. It doesn’t bother Yaku, of course, but it is a little weird. Really, he’s not sure why he keeps thinking about it.

A few weeks into the relationship, Kuroo doesn’t message him at all for three days straight, which isn’t particularly weird for him. Instead of sending Yaku a link to a cute cat video or obscure meme (his usual conversation starter of choice) he just says “hey.”

“What’s up?” Yaku types back immediately. Even though he’s in class and his professor’s holding a review session for the test next week.

“Ami and I broke up.”

Yaku glares at the blackboard for a second, then at his phone. “I’m in class for another half hour, can we talk about this later?” He hits send and stuffs the phone in his pocket, but when he looks through his notes at the end of the class, he’d barely written down anything.

Fucking Kuroo.

“You didn’t have to actually call me, you know,” Kuroo tells him after class, laughing softly into the phone. Yaku’s hiding in a corner of the library and procrastinating on his readings. “It’s not that big of a deal. We weren’t even together for that long.”

“Shut up, you wouldn’t have messaged me like that if it wasn’t a big deal to you.”

Kuroo sighs. He’s quiet, then. “I just...I don’t know. I thought I really liked her.”

“You thought you did?” Yaku replies, emphasising the word “thought.”

“Mnnnngh. It’s. Difficult to talk about.” Yaku can hear kitchen noises through the phone. The tabletop grill hissing. Kuroo’s probably making his favorite fish to cheer himself up.

“And yet you clearly want to talk about it, or you would’ve hung up.”

There’s a click, and then the sound of chopsticks moving around. “...This was stupid. I don’t know what I’m doing, Yakkun.”

“Don’t call me that,” Yaku says automatically, and Kuroo laughs on cue. “You’re eighteen years old, do you seriously think you’re supposed to have all your shit 100% together right now?”

“So did she dump you, or did you dump her?”

“...kind of both? But she dumped me first.”

“Jeez, Kuroo, what even happened? Was it just like a fight, or...”

“I think we just realized we were better as friends at the same time... She said it seemed like I was in love with someone else. And what’s really stupid is that I didn’t even realize it until she pointed it out to me.”
“What? Who? What?” In love is a pretty serious way of saying it, Yaku thinks, but he’s pretty sure he knows everyone Kuroo’s close to and he can’t imagine who Kuroo could have fallen so deeply for. “It’s not Kenma, is it?”

“ God no.” Kuroo laughs again, sounding a little less tense than before. “Why did you immediately think of Kenma?”

“You’re childhood friends? I don’t know, it seemed like the obvious answer.” Yaku doesn’t think Kenma’s really interested in dating anyone, but if anyone would be the exception to that rule it would be Kuroo. Kuroo, Yaku thinks, could be a lot of people’s exceptions. He doesn’t linger on that thought for too long.

“I don’t think I ever told you I liked guys,” Kuroo’s saying when Yaku’s paying attention again. “I mean, I do, but how did you know?”

“I don’t know,” Yaku says again, because he really doesn’t know why the thought of Kuroo being in love with Kenma was the first thing that came to mind. Kuroo’s into guys, okay, makes sense. “You don’t have that many friends who are girls, so like, who else could it be? Anyway, you broke up with your girlfriend, or she broke up with you, whatever. Are you okay?”

“I said it wasn’t a big deal,” Kuroo replies. “I’m more freaked out about the whole ‘suddenly realizing I am in love with someone else’ thing. But like, it’s fine. It’ll be fine.”

Yaku hears the door open on the other end of the call. “Sawamura! Welcome back!”

“Thanks for checking in on me, Yakkun. Talk to you later,” Kuroo whispers into the phone quickly, and then hangs up.

Yaku looks back to the stack of books on the library table and wonders why he even cares so much who Kuroo’s interested in dating.

-

Kuroo goes to Kenma’s that weekend, even though it takes over an hour and three subway lines to get there. Kenma has a cat and eternal wisdom. They play video games in near-silence for a few hours before Kuroo blurts out, “Ami-chan broke up with me.”

Kenma does not look away from the television. “I figured.”

“She said it seemed like I was always comparing her to someone else, and that it wasn’t fair of me to keep dating someone if I had feelings for another person.”

“So what’s your point?” Kenma’s cat Zelda, nestled comfortably in Kenma’s lap, blinks slowly at Kuroo a few times.

Kuroo sighs. “I just feel like an idiot for not realizing this earlier.”

The look Kenma shoots him is a very familiar combination of exasperated, surprised, and mildly disappointed. “Kuro. I thought you knew you liked Mori and just didn’t want to talk about it. I don’t really want to talk about it either, but how did you just not know. ”

Kuroo can see Kenma is judging him, and he’s like 90% sure the cat is too. “I dunno, I just...didn’t realize how much I cared about his opinions, which are always wrong. Or his face.” He mumbles the last part. Kenma sighs a tiny bit and pauses the game.

Kenma picks up Zelda and drops her on Kuroo’s chest. Zelda is, like her owner, quiet and lazy, and amenable to being picked up by Kuroo. Kuroo pets her. She is a star.

“What am I supposed to do now?” Kuroo asks her. Zelda licks his nose with her sandpaper tongue.

“How should I know?” Kenma lies down on the floor. “I think you should tell him. You’ve never been good at keeping secrets from people. But do it in person, so he can’t misunderstand you or anything.”

“Sounds good. Will keep you updated.”

“Great,” Kenma says in a monotone voice.

Kuroo grins at him. “We haven’t talked about your problems yet today! Your mom told me your English grades have dropped since I stopped helping you with your homework. I thought you were good at English.” Kenma’s eyes widen and he pulls a blanket around himself like a barrier.

“You’re not my dad, Kuro,” he protests.

“Come on, let me help you. Let me bestow my collegiate wisdom on you in the form of last year’s notes, which I just so happened to pick up from my mom’s apartment this morning.” His mother also gave him three huge plastic containers full of food, because she’s convinced he’s not eating enough at university for some reason.

“...give me that.” Kenma sticks a hand out from under the blanket and makes grabby motions until Kuroo pulls out his color-coded binder full of English notes from his third year of high school.

Kuroo stays there until late into the evening, and then makes his way back to university feeling refreshed and energized.

-

“So when’s Suga-chan going to visit us?” Kuroo keeps asking, as though it’s a given that it will happen eventually. This time, it’s during their walk back to the dorms after evening practice, as Daichi checks his messages. It had rained earlier, and Kuroo keeps going out of his way to step in puddles, because he is a child. It reminds Daichi of the way Karasuno’s first years were constantly racing each other and competing over every little thing, and something like fondness tugs at his heart.

“He’s pre-med, Kuroo, there’s no way Suga has enough time to go to Tokyo for a weekend.”

“It’s not even three hours on the Shinkansen. He totally could. Yaku too.”

Daichi sighs, then, because with classes and volleyball and other new obligations taking up both his and Suga’s time, they really hadn’t been able to go and visit each other yet.

“How is Yaku?” he says instead, and Kuroo raises both eyebrows.

“Why are you asking me?” His voice is a bit higher than usual.

“You talk to him, don’t you?”

Kuroo makes an “eh” sound. “Not so much lately, I think he’s extra busy now or something. Or maybe...” He trails off, distracted by something or other. “Nah. I don’t know, it’s weird. Things with Yakkun are always either great or uncomfortable for some reason, and I think I know why they’re uncomfortable right now, but I won’t be able to fix it until we see each other again in person, so.”

“Hmm,” Daichi says. “Well, good luck with that, I guess.”

Suga’s message reads: it’s raining here too! I forgot my umbrella when I went to class and had to use my bio textbook instead r i p in pieces

Daichi grins at his phone, imagining Suga in the black Karasuno jacket he’s always wearing in Daichi’s memories, holding a book over his head and running through the streets of Kyoto in the rain. He types back: Oh dear.

Sugawara Koushi, Daichi has learned, is a rare and subtle gem, calm and confident on the surface, funny and sharp underneath. He stares at the contact picture he has for Suga, unchanged since the start of their second year of high school, and feels an inexplicable desire to just...hug Suga, to embrace his best friend of almost-four years and keep him warm and safe and happy forever. Suga now wears his hair slightly shorter than he did in his contact photo, his face slightly thinner, but his eyes are just as warm and bright as they were back then.

He’s amazing, Daichi thinks, and tells him so, whenever it seems appropriate and not too weird.

-

It’s a week into summer vacation when Suga finds himself looking at Daichi and thinking, I want this forever.

Daichi had at some point passed the fiendish driver’s test and gotten a license, so he and Suga drive all the way to Sendai and walk around, shopping and sightseeing. They’re walking down Johzenji-dori, close but not too close, and Daichi is smiling as he recounts yet another story of Kuroo doing something ingeniously stupid, and Suga realizes with a painful twinge deep in his stomach that he doesn’t want this to end. That whatever happens, whatever school friends he may grow apart from and lose touch with over time, he never wants to let Daichi go. It’s whatever he felt when they reunited back in May, but even more intense, a feeling of fondness that seems to seep out of his head and heart, through his bones into his skin.

“Suga? You zoned out for a second there,” Daichi’s saying, tapping him on the shoulder.

Suga shakes his head sharply a few times, and smiles. “Just thinking. I’ve missed hanging out with you.” His shoulder’s tingling where Daichi touched it, but just for a moment. It doesn’t mean anything if Suga doesn’t dwell on it.

“Me too,” Daichi says, and this is the most sentimentality Suga can handle right now so he gives Daichi a friendly punch in the shoulder that has him jumping back and swearing.

“How are you still so strong, seriously,” Daichi mutters, and Suga beams.

Sometimes, Daichi looks at Suga like he’s amazing, and sometimes, Suga can believe it.

-

Kuroo and Yaku never really hung out outside of volleyball club activities during high school, but Kuroo is one of the few High School Volleyball People whose messages Yaku actually responds to, so when Kuroo texts him during the summer break asking if he wants to go to the arcade near Nekoma, he says “sure.”

There’s a line for the DDR machine, but the Taiko Master game is free, and Kuroo goes for it immediately. “Are you good at this game?” Kuroo asks him, setting the difficulty to Demon level for himself.

“Guess we’ll find out,” Yaku tells him, doing the same.

They argue over which song to choose for like five minutes and end up compromising on some anime opening neither of them is familiar with. The drumming game is cathartic, and the two of them are well matched. Yaku ends up outscoring Kuroo by a few thousand points.

“Rematch,” Kuroo demands instantly.

“We paid for three games, you idiot.”

“Oh. Yeah. You can pick the next song, since you won.”

“What, you want me to win again? You pick, since you clearly need an advantage.”

Kuroo makes a face at him and picks the most annoyingly bubbly idol song on the tracklist, specifically to spite Yaku, probably.

Yaku remembers back in first year, when they discovered that the main thing they had in common was the desire to win at Nationals. That drive to win is what made Yaku think that maybe Kuroo was someone worth being friends with, back then. And it’s still part of what makes Kuroo worth being friends with now. Yaku sneaks a glance at Kuroo during a lull in the second round, and something about the rooster-head’s expression, golden eyes narrowed in concentration, makes Yaku’s heart beat faster.

Probably just the adrenaline, Yaku thinks, focusing on the game again.

Kuroo wins the second round. Round three is a tie.

They get drinks from a vending machine after they leave the arcade, and talk about their university experiences thus far.

“Kyodai’s volleyball team isn’t anything special, is it?” Kuroo asks him conversationally.

“Are you trying to start a fight?” Yaku retorts on instinct, but then shakes his head. “It’s not great, but I’m getting some good experiences out of it. And Kyoto’s nice. I feel like I’m becoming more independent now that I’m so far away from everyone I’ve gotten used to.”

Kuroo tilts his head and looks at Yaku then. Yaku bristles automatically. Spending time with Kuroo, he’s noticed, improves his posture, since he has to stand up straight to even attempt eye contact with his tall friend. Fucking 22-centimeter height difference.

“I still kind of wish you’d stayed,” Kuroo ends up saying, softer and more fragile than anything Yaku had ever heard him say before.

They part ways at the subway station.

“Well, this was fun, we should hang out again sometime,” Yaku says and turns to leave, but Kuroo grabs his shoulder and says, “Wait.”

“What is it?”

They look at each other for a few moments, and it feels like an eternity for some reason.

Kuroo lets out a tiny frustrated breath. “Get home safe,” he tells Yaku.

“Okay? You too.” Yaku can tell that wasn’t what Kuroo was trying to say, but he also has no idea what else it could have been. Neither of them seem willing to leave first, but they live in opposite directions. Eventually, Yaku’s train pulls up.

On impulse, he reaches out and grabs Kuroo in a hug, just for a second.

“See you later, dumbass,” Yaku says.

Kuroo blinks back at him, looking dazed. “Yeah. See you.”

-

“Sawamura, we’re friends, right?”

Daichi takes his headphones out and gives Kuroo an incredulous look. “You ask me this five months after I voluntarily chose to live with you?”

“Just answer the question.”

Daichi sighs and rolls his eyes. “Yes, you dork, we’re friends. What do you want?”

Kuroo’s silent for a worryingly long time, flopped back on his bed. Wait, no, Daichi’s bed, probably because it’s closer to where Daichi is sitting at his desk and doing his statistics homework.

“...Did you fall asleep?” Daichi asks eventually, and Kuroo springs up.

“I was thinking about how to say this, shut up.”

“What is it?”

“I’m uh,” Kuroo runs a hand through his hair, making his ridiculous bedhead even worse. “Not straight? I’m definitely into dudes. Probably into girls, but Ami-chan dumped me because I failed to realize I had feelings for a dude. Not you though, so you don’t have to worry about that. Anyway, I am telling you this because we’re friends and also roommates, so you probably should know.”

Daichi blinks a few times. “What, that’s it? You looked so serious I thought you’d broken something important to me by accident.”

“I am a responsible fucking roommate and would have told you immediately, excuse you,” Kuroo snaps back. “But like, you’re fine with it?”

“Of course I’m fine with it,” Daichi says. Suga’s gay, and he’s fine with that. And Shimizu and Yachi, and probably more people he can’t think of off the top of his head. “You’re not my first not-straight friend.”

“Oh. Okay, cool.”

“Thanks for trusting me, I guess?”

Kuroo throws a volleyball at him. “Secret for a secret, Sawamura. Do you have anything to confess?”

“We’re doing Roommates Feelings Talk Time again, huh?” Daichi throws the volleyball back to Kuroo. “I don’t really have any secrets. Sorry to disappoint. Unless you count the fact that I am not doing well in Statistics.”

Kuroo laughs good-naturedly. “I know you’re not doing well in Statistics, Sawamura. It’s okay, I was mostly kidding. Mostly. I might bring up this conversation again in the future.”

“That’s fair. Anyway, I have to do this Statistics homework from hell now.”

Kuroo gives him a thumbs-up and goes to do his own homework, and the rest of the evening passes in relative calm.

-

The point that marks Suga and Yaku officially becoming Good Friends instead of merely Friends, Suga thinks later, is probably that one time they went out for ice cream after class. Yaku had said, “so like, you’re gay, right?” with no subtlety whatsoever and Suga’d dropped his cone for half a second and then caught it in the other hand.

“Yes,” Suga had said with a laugh, “I am definitely that, yup.”

Yaku shoved him lightly. “Stop laughing, this is a serious thing.” He was silent for a few minutes then, looking like he’s trying to decide what to say.

“I think...” Yaku started and then stopped. “Can you like...guys and girls? Like, is that a thing?”

“That is a thing!” Suga replied. “It’s called bisexuality.”

“Okay. Cool.” Yaku had paused to eat his ice cream cone. There was a dot of vanilla ice cream on his nose, and Suga made a mental note to take a picture of it before Yaku realised.

“...Are you having a crisis, Yaku?” Suga asked him, and Yaku snorted.

“What do you mean by that?” Yaku’s ice cream started dripping down the side of the cone onto his hand. “I am having an ice cream crisis, apparently,” he grumbled, staring at the sticky tracks. Suga threw out the remains of his own cone and then took a picture of Yaku covered in melting ice cream, looking distraught. “I meant like. Do you like guys and girls?”

“Delete that photo. And...maybe. Probably. I don’t know.”

Suga set the photo as his contact picture for Yaku and said, “Is there a particular person that made you realize this?”

Yaku instantly turned Nekoma-red and said, “Definitely not.”

“Right,” Suga replied, grinning. “Someone I know? Probably, since you’re so embarrassed about it...a volleyball boy?”

“Just let me die in peace, Suga-kun.”

“I would never.”

Yaku punched him lightly in the shoulder, and Suga punched back harder than he probably should have, and the tension was broken and everything was fine.

-

Suga somehow ends up going on a date. A boy from his physics class asks him to the movies. He is perfectly nice and perfectly boring. Suga actually pays attention to the movie. They don’t have much to talk about, besides their physics class and the people in it. He’s cute enough, Suga supposes, but something doesn’t seem right about the whole situation. Suga remembers going to the movies with the Karasuno volleyball club one time as a team bonding event, and throwing popcorn at the back of Tsukishima’s head while Daichi pretended to be mad about it, and how much more fun that was than this awkwardly quiet, awkwardly uncertain date.

He lets the boy kiss him at the end of it, in the shadow of Suga’s dorm room’s doorway. It’s Suga’s first kiss, and it is more fun than the three hours leading up to it. He wouldn’t mind doing it again, maybe. Suga wonders if he might have enjoyed it more if it was with someone he actually liked to spend time with, but thinking too much about kissing his friends seems inappropriate somehow so he puts that out of his mind for the time being.

He smiles politely and tells the boy good luck with the physics lab, then sits down at his laptop and pulls open Skype.

“What’s up? It’s kind of late for a Skype call, isn’t it?” Daichi asks, voice scratchy from sleep. He looks like he’d fallen asleep at his desk, hair sticking out at odd angles and face red where it had been pressed against the table.

“Well, it’s a good thing I called and saved you from a painful morning,” Suga says, taking in Daichi’s appearance. “How often do you fall asleep at your desk? That can’t be comfortable.”

Daichi rolls his eyes. “What did you want to talk about, Suga?”

Suga kind of feels bad now, since Daichi is obviously tired and not up to dealing with his nonsense, but also. It’s important.

“I just got back from...” Suga pauses dramatically, and Daichi nods at him like “Get on with it” so he does. “A date!”

Daichi instantly looks more awake. “Congrats. How was it?”

Suga shrugs and makes an “eh” sound. “Boring. Good kisser, though.” He looks at his screen, waiting for some kind of reaction from Daichi at this.

Daichi just raises his eyebrows a little bit.  “And you had to tell me about this now because?”

“Because,” Suga says, “I didn’t want to forget and not tell you about my first date for two months, unlike certain other people in this conversation .”

“Oh my god, are you ever going to let that go?” Daichi slams his head back down on the desk.

“It’s a lot funnier to keep bringing it up so, no,” Suga tells him, beaming.

“Well, I’m glad your first date went better than mine,” Daichi says. He takes a sip from the mug on his desk, and makes a face. “My coffee got cold,” he tells Suga mournfully, and Suga cackles.

“You shouldn’t be drinking coffee this late at night anyway,” Suga says, glancing at the time in the corner of his screen. It’s almost midnight.

“I’m going to have to stay up late anyway, this is due at 8 tomorrow morning,” Daichi says, indicating the assignment he’s working on. “College is great!”

Suga makes a sympathetic noise.

“Tell me about your date so I don’t fall asleep at my desk again,” Daichi says.

“There isn’t much to tell, really. He was cute. We watched a movie. It was okay. Making out with him was fun but not fun enough to make up for the rest of it. Like, seriously, talking to you about the weather is more entertaining than this dude. I hope he didn’t get too attached or I’ll have to skip physics on Monday to avoid him.”

“I can’t believe you’d let a boy get in the way of your education, Suga,” Daichi says, shaking his head in mock-disappointment. “Do you know what a z-score is?”

Suga shrugs. “Sorry.”

“Worth a shot,” Daichi sighs.

Suga watches him work for a few minutes. Daichi never did do homework quietly, muttering to himself as he worked his way through problems and sometimes even arguing with his paper. From this angle, Suga can almost pretend that they were back in third year, studying for exams in Daichi’s room. Suga pulls his laptop a little closer to his face and resists the urge to sigh, because that would be embarrassing.

“Like I said I wanted more queer friends, but we didn’t even really click on a friend level, and I think that’s the most disappointing part. The only thing I can see myself really doing with this dude is borrowing a pencil from him in class or something.”

Daichi, instead of laughing obligingly, looks anywhere but his screen and says, “Actually, about that...”

Suga hates seeing anxious Daichi more than anything else. “What do you mean?”

“How did you, like...know? That you like guys?”

“Uh.” Suga freezes. “Well. How did you know you like girls?” This is awkward. This is so, so awkward. “It’s basically...the same...feeling...I guess...Ugh, Daichi, why are you making me talk about what I find attractive, this is so mean.”

Daichi laughs and a bit of the tension dissipates. “I was just wondering. I’ve been thinking...maybe I might be into guys too.”

Well. That sure is. A thing to say. Suga recovers quickly, though. He can think about it later. “And you’re telling me this while I’m 3 hours away so I can’t go over there and hug you immediately? That’s even more mean!”

He pulls out his phone and texts Kuroo and tells him to give Karasuno’s ex-captain a sucker punch and a hug in that order.

Kuroo slides into the room while they’re still on the call, waves to Suga, and does exactly what Suga asked of him.

“What the fuck,” Daichi wheezes, and Suga beams.

“Hey, Suga-chan,” Kuroo says.

“Hi, Kuroo. Thank you for taking care of Daichi in my absence,” Suga tells him, mock-serious.

Daichi scowls. “I don’t need taking care of!”

“You were sleeping at your desk,” Suga points out.

Kuroo sighs. “Seriously? Again?”

“Again?” Suga repeats. “And you were lecturing me about sleeping like a normal person, Daichi.”

“It’s easier to tell other people to take care of themselves than to just. Do it,” Daichi mumbles.

“This is extremely true,” Kuroo adds.

Suga feels strangely relieved at the shift in topic, and he and Kuroo continue to tease Daichi about his life choices. Kuroo tells Suga about how Daichi tripped and spilled a full cup of coffee on the assistant volleyball coach on their second day of practice. Daichi, in retaliation, tells Suga about the time last week when Kuroo decided to grill some fish in the dorm kitchen and then got distracted and let it burn, setting off the fire alarm again and losing kitchen privileges for a month.

“Did you know I have the highest grade in my organic chemistry class right now, and I played in the official volleyball game against Meiji two weeks ago? I’m just saying. I’m not a complete disaster,” Kuroo interrupts, and both Suga and Daichi burst out laughing.

“Fine, I’ll go, I can see when I’m not wanted,” Kuroo sniffs dramatically. “Later, Sawamura, Suga-chan.”

Kuroo leaves, and Daichi puts his head on his desk again. “Blah,” he says.

“Indeed,” Suga says.

Suga leans forward and rests his elbows on the edge of his laptop case. “Hey, Daichi?”
“Yeah?”

“Thanks for trusting me. And being my friend.”

Daichi’s laugh is slightly staticky through the computer, but it’s still his, and Suga wants to wrap it around himself like a blanket to protect himself against the world. “You too, Suga.”

-

Suga taps his fingers against the edge of his laptop and watches the little loading symbol spin on the Skype welcome screen. It’s a Friday night, and his roommate invited him out to some party, but this was more important.

“Didn’t you talk to that friend of yours yesterday?” the roommate had said, and Suga explained that he tried but they were interrupted by the fire alarm going off at Daichi’s dorm room in Tokyo.

The Skype call goes through, and a warm, familiar face fills Suga’s screen. Wait, two familiar faces, the second being less warm and more rougish.

“Kuroo?” Suga asks, smiling slightly. “How are you? It’s been a while!” The former Nekoma captain looks both embarrassed and proud of himself, and Daichi shoves him roughly on one shoulder.

“This fucker,” Daichi says, shoving Kuroo again for emphasis, “almost burned down the dorm building last night.”

Suga’s eyes widen in delight. “So you’re the reason the alarm went off!” He reaches for his phone and shoots a quick text to Yaku, because no one loves to mock Kuroo’s bad decisions like Yaku Morisuke.

“In my defense, there was a spider,” Kuroo says, which explains absolutely nothing. Daichi still has his scary captain face on, and it’s a testament to how close he and Kuroo had gotten over the last few months that Kuroo barely even flinches under the weight of Daichi’s glare.

There’s an insistent knock on Suga’s door then, and Yaku comes in muttering “Sorry for the intrusion” and “What did Kuroo do now.”

Kuroo’s eyes light up and he claps once, like a kindergarten teacher asking for her students’ attention. “Well,” he says. “Did you know that you can make an improvised flamethrower using an aerosol can and a lighter?”

Suga loses it at this point, shoulders shaking with his attempt to hold in his laughter. Yaku just rubs his temples like he’s forgotten that cleaning up after Kuroo isn’t his responsibility anymore, because he and Suga are in Kyoto and Kuroo and Daichi are a three and a half hour train ride away.

“There was a spider,” Yaku repeats, flatly.

“Yes,” Kuroo says.

“And now there is a scorch mark on our wall that I had to color over with white-out,” Daichi adds.

“Wait a second,” Yaku says, “why did you have a lighter in the first place? You haven’t started smoking or something, have you?”

“For science,” Kuroo and Daichi say in unison.

“I put the fire out immediately and then threw the lighter out the window when the alarm went off so we wouldn’t get in trouble,” Kuroo continues.

Suga and Yaku exchange a look, like, these are the people we choose to associate ourselves with, even now.

“Is this the third or the fourth time you’ve set off the fire alarm at your dorm, Kuroo?” Yaku asks, leaning forward. Kuroo looks incredibly flustered as he mumbles “fourth” into Daichi’s desk.

“I only got in trouble for it once,” he adds, grinning into the webcam. Suga and Daichi both lean back a bit to make space for Yaku and Kuroo on either side of the video call.

“I’m surprised someone as conniving as you gets in trouble at all,” Yaku says.

“Was that a compliment, Yakkun?” Kuroo’s voice is different now, low and teasing, and Suga watches with interest as Yaku slowly goes red from the base of his neck up to his ears like a cartoon character.

“Are you ever gonna stop calling me that?” Yaku says.

“Depends. What should I call you instead?” Kuroo’s brain seems to catch up with his mouth at this point and he pushes his rolling chair back away from the computer. “Wow, sorry, I don’t know what that was. I’m going to go do my homework now and not try to light anything on fire.” His voice is weirdly high. Yaku looks...mostly confused.

“ Fucking Kuroo ,” Yaku says. “I should probably go, too, literary analysis paper won’t write itself. See you, Suga-kun, Sawamura.”

The door closes behind him and it’s just Suga and Daichi on different laptops in different cities, connected by the power of technology.

“So that was fucking weird,” Suga says, and Daichi laughs. It’s amazing how everything feels ten times more normal and comfortable when he laughs. It’s Daichi’s superpower, Suga thinks.

“I don’t know what’s going on with those two, I really don’t,” Daichi’s saying, and Suga shrugs.

-

Suga and Yaku are registering for second-semester classes and complaining about the upperclassmen taking all the good timeslots.

“Chem 100? I thought you were a lit major,” Suga says, looking over Yaku’s shoulder at the laptop screen.

“I made a bet with Kuroo. He’s taking intro to Japanese Literature and I’m taking Chem and whoever gets the higher grade in the other person’s major class wins a free meal,” Yaku responds, clicking the button to register for the class.

“...Won’t that just turn into you doing each other’s homework over email?” Suga asks after a thoughtful pause.

Yaku turns around and makes a face right back at him. “Don’t look at me like that, it was Kuroo’s stupid idea.”

“But you agreed to it,” Suga points out, and Yaku makes a “hmph” noise in response.

-

Thinking about Daichi slowly starts taking up more real estate in Suga’s brain than it used to. He misses home, of course, misses his mom and all of his friends, but maybe because he talks to Daichi slightly more than everyone else, he finds himself wondering what Daichi would be like if he were here, in Kyoto, with Suga. Which of Suga’s friends and classmates Daichi would get along with.

He drops into his usual seat in the third-to-last row and pulls his phone out, typing furiously.

Suga: and then I had to straight-up sprint all the way across the campus to give Suzumeda her book and get back to my lecture hall before the class started BUT WHEN I GOT THERE SOME DUDE HAD CORNERED HER INTO A CONFESSION and then she saw me and was like ‘help’ so I had to be her defense force for like a minute and after that she was like ‘keep the book you deserve it’ and like if I wanted my own copy of this thing I would’ve bought it when it was on the syllabus but like thanks I guess

Suga: so I was late to class
Suga: and now I’m texting all of this to you instead of paying attention in class because nothing from these lectures is ever on the test

Suga: how has your day been

Daichi: .... not anywhere near that exciting

Daichi: dude you’re like some sort of superhero or something

Suga: lmao you make me sound so special

Daichi: well, you are, so

Suga can feel the blood rush to his face, and drops his head on the low lecture hall desk. Daichi’s picked up this habit of complimenting Suga recently, a lot more often than he used to at Karasuno, and Suga hates how vulnerable the compliments make him feel. Kind words poking at a raw nerve.

Daichi: Kuroo set off the fire alarm again. No idea what he was doing this time

Suga: why is this a recurring thing in your life and why are you still living with him

Daichi: I ask myself that every day.

A few minutes later, Suga’s phone buzzes again.

Daichi: he bought us a box of donuts as an apology so I guess that explains it

Daichi: why I’m still living with him I mean

Suga: you’re easy to bribe

Daichi: I really am tbh

Suga takes some notes on autopilot and thinks about Daichi, again. As if summoned by his thoughts, his phone vibrates again.

Daichi: I miss you, you know?

Daichi: and everyone else from karasuno

Daichi: kinda miss high school as a concept tbh

Daichi: there was so much less things I had to worry about...

Suga: Big Mood (TM)

Daichi: What is a big mood and why is it trademarked. Kuroo keeps fucking saying it and I do not understand

Suga: lmao

Daichi: (-_-)

Suga: ヽ(￣ω￣(。。 )ゝ

Daichi: I have class now, ttyl

Suga: (・ω・)b

As he stares at the messages, heart beating faster and louder than it has any right to be for such a mundane conversation, Suga comes to a realization.

He turns off his phone and puts his head back down on his desk, while part of him screams, “how long has this been going on? How long have you had feelings for your best friend and let yourself ignore it?”

Fuck it, Suga thinks, picks up his backpack and slips out while his professor’s still talking.

-

They’re supposed to Skype today. Every other Friday is Skype Night. Asahi usually joins them, but he’s been skipping out more and more often lately with pretty flimsy excuses. He still responds to Suga’s messages and e-mails though, so Suga’s not super worried about their deteriorating friendship, but it is a bit weird. Suga and Daichi have yet to miss it once. Which means Suga can’t skip Skype night, because he has absolutely no excuse that Daichi would believe.

He stares at his laptop in despair for a minute, then texts Asahi.

Suga: skype 9pm be there or be square

Suga: be more of a square than you already are I mean

Suga: seriously tho I haven’t seen your grizzled face in like a month

Asahi: ....“grizzled”??? seriously???

Suga: yes.

Asahi: is something up?

Suga: does something have to be up for me to request my dear friend’s virtual presence?

Asahi: :[

Suga: why have you been ditching the Skype Night lately?

Asahi: ahhhhh its just. I kinda feel like I’m third-wheeling you and daichi

Suga: hahaha what???

Suga’s heart is beating way too fast again and it is awful and he can’t believe how much a single sentence reduces him to a pile of emotions.

Suga: listen daichi is my Best Friend but you are also my good friend okay! I want to talk to you on skype too!

Asahi: :]

Asahi types for a while, probably trying to figure out how best to phrase whatever it is he wants to say. He does that a lot.

Asahi: ... okay i don’t know how to put this delicately but...

Asahi: are you sure you don’t.... like daichi? ...romantically? ...and are you sure he doesn’t like you?

Asahi: because like.....you guys kinda act that way sometimes...and not that there’s anything wrong with that! Just when the three of us are all chatting I sometimes feel like you two would rather be alone...

Suga: oh my god

Asahi: i’m sorry!! i didn’t mean to imply anything weird

Suga goes for a run, his usual two-kilometer route, and then runs the same route again because part of him hopes that if he’s physically exhausted he won’t be able to think about his stupid feelings for a while. His heavy metal playlist blares through his headphones as loud as possible, but it can’t drown out the roar of his thoughts. He’s looking back on his entire history of Being Friends With Daichi and wondering when he started thinking of Daichi as more than his best friend. He’s thinking about kissing Daichi, of putting his hands on Daichi’s face and his own lips on Daichi’s, and that image is looping in his head like some goddamned animated GIF of things that will never happen because like hell is Suga going to ruin the closest friendship he’s ever had .

That’s probably the core of it, Suga thinks, turning the music down once he realizes it’s not helping. The fact that this friendship isn’t worth ruining.

He figures he should confide in someone, but he’s never been very good at relying on other people. Except Daichi, of course, and he can’t go to Daichi with this. Of course.

The fact that Asahi somehow knew about Suga’s feelings before Suga knew himself is just the cherry on top of the cake. Ugh .

Suga buys an ice cream from a convenience store near campus to drown his sorrows in. It feels nice after the run, and does cheer him up a little bit. He walks through the narrow back alleys back to the dorms, and the familiar routine helps too. The dorm building is still in the same place, the twists and turns required to get there the same as always. His world did not literally flip upside down, no matter how much it might feel like it.

“Suga-kun?”

Yaku sees him from the other side of the street, walking back to the dorm after volleyball practice. Suga waves. Yaku waves back. Suga can’t decide if he’d rather pretend nothing is wrong or just tell his friend everything.

“You seem stressed,” Yaku tells him when they’re at the entrance to the dorm building, and Suga laughs.

“Feelings,” Suga says, “are terrible.”

Yaku nods solemnly, and then punches Suga in the shoulder, hard. “What’s wrong?”

“I’m an idiot who let...feelings...happen,” Suga manages. Actually verbalizing it feels like standing on the edge of the high diving board at the pool, precarious and terrifying. Maybe if he doesn’t say it, it won’t be real.

“That guy you went to the movies with?”
“No, worse.” Suga can’t look at Yaku while he’s talking about this, so he looks at the sky. It’s overcast today, and it rained earlier. He can feel Yaku watching him.

“...did you fall for a straight dude or something?” Yaku asks, which helpfully reminds Suga of the awkward sort-of-coming-out conversation he’d had with Daichi a few weeks earlier. Suga’s not sure if Daichi maybe possibly being into guys makes this whole situation better or worse.

“Uh,” he says instead, and makes an “eh” motion with his hand. “It’s the specific person that I’m freaking out about. He’s...someone I’m really close to, and the thought of possibly destroying our friendship is terrifying me.”

Yaku hums. “Can I ask who it is?”

Suga laughs, helplessly. “Isn’t it obvious? I feel like it would be. Asahi somehow figured it out before I did.”

“Oh. Sawamura, then?”

Suga’s face heats up and he continues to look away from his friend.

Yaku puts a hand on Suga’s shoulder. “I’m not a relationship expert or anything, but I feel like you should probably tell him. You get along too well to let something like this ruin it, and there’s always the chance he’ll feel the same way. And that chance is worth it, I think.”

Suga actually does feel reassured, hearing this. “We have a video call thing every other Friday night, including today, and I don’t have a good excuse to skip it and I don’t know how I could possibly talk to him now that I finally...admitted it to myself, I guess.”

If he’s being honest with himself, really honest, something’s been there probably since the first day of volleyball practice more than four years ago, some seed that grew roots and sprouted until it was too big and overwhelming for him to ignore it any longer. Maybe if he’d noticed it earlier it would have been easier to deal with.

Yaku’s typing something into his phone. “Hey, how much homework do you have to do this weekend? And also how much spending money do you have?”

“A reasonable amount of both, I think? Why?”

“Do you want to just...go to Tokyo? Like, right now?”

Suga gapes at him. “Wh— this isn’t a romantic comedy, Yaku, we can’t just hop on a train and go to Tokyo to see our friends for the weekend, it’s three and a half hours and fourteen thousand yen one way — ”

“It would be fun,” Yaku cuts in. “And I miss home. I know you and Sawamura have been talking about visiting each other, so it’s not like you haven’t been at least thinking about it.”

Suga has been thinking about it, which makes this terrible idea a little less terrible because he already has a working plan of what to do and bring for the trip. But it’s still sudden, and Suga has never really been a crazy impulsive kind of guy.

“I’ll tell the coach I have a family emergency and can’t go to practice this weekend, and since I’ve never skipped before and our next game’s Thursday it should be fine. We could leave tonight, stay at a hostel for the weekend, come back Sunday afternoon. And even if your thing with Daichi doesn’t go well, Tokyo’s a whole big city, we could do tourist stuff all weekend and pretend it never happened.”

Then again, isn’t this the kind of thing you’re supposed to do in college?

“How much time do you need to pack?” Suga asks, and Yaku beams at him.

-

It’s after evening practice, and Daichi and Kuroo are playing Mario Kart in their room. Kuroo has years of experience playing against Kenma, so he’s crushing Daichi by a truly embarrassing margin. Both their phones go off at the same time.

Suga: random q which building do you live in again

Daichi: why

Suga: which building, daichi

“Hey, did you just get a weird message from...” Kuroo says. They look at each other.

“You don’t think...” Daichi’s heart is pounding in anticipation as he grabs his coat and shoes. They race each other to the door.

Their friends are standing under a street light in the quad, their light hair gleaming and making them extremely visible. Something in Daichi’s chest drops, like he’s on a rollercoaster. He slows to a walk and approaches carefully, as if terrified that Suga was going to vanish at any moment.

Suga waves a little sheepishly and yells “Surprise!” And it’s his voice, and it sounds so close and warm and real. Daichi tackles him in a hug.

“‘Sup,” says Yaku, not even trying to hide his smile.

“‘Sup,” says Kuroo.

Kuroo grabs Yaku under his arms and spins him around, while Yaku swears. “You could’ve at least told me you were coming, asshole!”

“Put me down, you dimethylformamide!”

Kuroo drops him, and Yaku lands neatly on his feet. “Thanks.”

They’re all quiet for a moment.

“Well,” Kuroo says eventually, “if you’ve come all this way, it’d be rude of us not to invite you in.”

Daichi’s face is starting to hurt from smiling so much, but he can’t stop. “I can’t believe you’re really here,” he keeps saying, and Suga can feel his face turn redder and redder until he can’t blame it on the cold night air anymore.

“It was kind of an impulse decision, really,” Suga tells him. “I spent most of the train ride panicking and trying to finish my homework.”

“Good. More time for us to have fun here,” Daichi says.

“Don’t you have homework too?”

Daichi makes a face and mutters “Statistics,” and Suga laughs. Daichi and Kuroo fight over who gets to open the door to their room first.

“Ta-da,” Kuroo sings, swinging it open triumphantly.

Their room is a lot neater than the room Suga shares with his roommate or Yaku’s place, but it’s obvious who lives there. There’s Karasuno gear on Daichi’s side of the room and Nekoma things on Kuroo’s. Kuroo has some music posters and artsy prints taped up next to his bed. Daichi has a bunch of photos of his friends and family over his desk, and Suga’s heart swells when he sees the photo of the team celebrating after their win at Nationals the year before.

Suga can see bits of himself in Daichi’s side of the room. There’s that “#1 Dad” mug he got Daichi for his birthday last year as a joke, half-full of cold green tea. A scarf Suga lent Daichi two years ago and never got back. A postcard from Kyoto, taped next to the photo from Nationals.

It reminds Suga of home, and he wonders when “home” became a person to him, instead of a place.

“Wow, a college dorm room. Incredible,” Yaku says, deadpan.

“You shut up,” Kuroo retorts, like it’s not obvious how much he missed being able to tell Yaku to shut up in person.

“Where’s the scorch mark from the flamethrower incident?” Suga asks, and Daichi points to a small blob a slightly different shade of white from the rest of the ceiling.

“My curiosity has been satisfied. We can go now,” Yaku says, and Kuroo throws an arm out to stop him from actually leaving.

“I was brutally destroying Sawamura here in Mario Kart, but we have enough controllers for four players if you want to join,” Kuroo says, twirling a controller around in one hand.

Yaku looks Kuroo in the eye and takes the controller. “Let’s fucking go,” he says.

They proceed to play Mario Kart for the next two hours.

“So where are you guys staying?” Daichi asks conversationally, because he’s in last place and has nothing to lose anymore.

“Some hostel a few subway stops away from here,” Yaku replies. “My parents live on the other side of the city, and I don’t know how they’d react if they knew I’d just decided to come home for a weekend with no warning. We’re not all that close.” Kuroo’s trying to drive Yaku’s character off the racetrack, and Yaku retaliates by shoving Kuroo with his elbow.

Suga launches a blue shell at Kuroo’s kart. “Daichi, do you want to meet up for breakfast tomorrow? Just the two of us.” It’s easier to ask for this with the game going on as a distraction.

“Yeah, sure just text me when— oh come the FUCK on, I’m already in last place! Was that really necessary? Was that fucking necessary, Kuroo?”

Kuroo, having covered the track in banana peels, is unrepentant. And in first place.

“Red shell me again, Kuroo, I fucking dare you,” Yaku hisses. Kuroo leans in the direction of the turn when he turns, and he leans so far left he ends up slumping against Yaku, who shoves him off.

“Daichi,” Suga says seriously, when they finish the last round, “you are absolutely horrible at Mario Kart.”

Daichi grins at him, a little embarrassed, and the sight does things to Suga’s heart ten times as much as when he was on the other end of a text conversation on a phone. Suga’s not sure how he’ll get through this weekend. “It was fun though, wasn’t it?”

“It really was.” Daichi’s leaning into Suga’s space a little, and he’s so warm and solid and real, and Suga feels like he might die a little bit.

“We should get going,” Suga says, before he gets too comfortable.

Suga and Yaku don’t talk as they take the subway to the hostel they’d checked into earlier. It’s not until they’re getting ready for bed that Yaku says very quietly, “How the fuck did we get to this point?”

“What point?”

“You know what I mean.” Yaku scowls. “I don’t like saying this stuff out loud either. Ugh.”

He drops down onto Suga’s bunk and says, “I just feel like if I don’t say something soon, I’m going to explode.”

Suga exhales. “Me, too.”

He meets Daichi for breakfast the next morning, Daichi leading Suga to a hole-in-the-wall bakery he says has the best pastries he’s ever had. They buy some rolls and wander around the neighborhood, Daichi telling Suga about his college experience. He doesn’t keep up a running commentary, just occasionally points to a building or a landmark and says something like “I usually go running here,” or “there’s a really cute dog that lives in that apartment and sometimes the owner lets it out on the balcony and makes my entire day.”

It’s deeply endearing, and Suga thinks that if he hadn’t fallen for Daichi yet, watching him now, welcoming Suga into the space he’d made for himself in Tokyo, would definitely do the trick.

They end up in a tiny park on a bench, sitting and catching up. There isn’t all that much to catch up on, since they talk all the time, but there’s always something to talk about. They sit side by side, close enough that even though they’re not touching Suga can feel Daichi’s warmth beside him, and it’s too much and not enough all at once.

“You still haven’t told me why you decided to come over here without warning,” Daichi eventually brings up, and Suga stills.

“Um,” Suga says. “I probably should have practiced this, huh.” He laughs a little, but it’s strained and nervous. He looks at the ground in front of him. “So what happened was, I realized something, about myself, and I freaked out about it so much I couldn’t do the Friday Night Skype Call thing, and then Yaku suggested we just come visit you guys in person instead of talking to you on video chat, so we just went and did it. And the thing I was freaking out about...” He takes a deep breath. “It’s. I. I like you,” he blurts out in a rush. “I have feelings for you, Daichi, and I want to hold your hand and kiss you and do all that stuff with you, and I don’t think it’s just going to go away if I don’t at least try to do something about it now, but I value our friendship more than literally anything else and I don’t want to mess it up, so if you don’t feel the same way we can just pretend I never said anything and I’ll just move on. It’s not a big deal, honestly—”

“Suga,” Daichi interrupts him. “Stop talking yourself out of things you want.” And Daichi kisses him. It’s not perfect, he gets the angle a little wrong and they bump noses, but it feels a little like fireworks, and a little like winning nationals.

“What,” Suga says, breathless.

“I like you too, you dork. I think I have for a while,” Daichi says.

“Oh. Well then. Great.” Suga can’t stop smiling. It’s ridiculous. He feels giddy with relief and joy and something else.

“Does that make this our first date, then?” Daichi asks him later, when they’re wandering back to Daichi’s dorm room after lunch. Daichi has to get ready for volleyball practice, and Suga’s willing to wander around the area and explore while his boyfriend(?!?) is busy.

“What, I can’t watch you practice?” Suga had asked, and Daichi had flushed and told him, “How could I possibly focus on volleyball if I knew you were watching?”

Suga kisses Daichi quickly before he leaves, marveling at how he could, in fact, kiss Daichi whenever he wanted to now. It’s amazing. He texts Yaku as he walks down the street.

Suga: am alive

Suga: everything is great!!! (°◡°♡)

Suga: how are you doing on this fine day?

-

Kuroo sleeps in late on days he doesn’t have morning practice, so Yaku agrees to meet him for brunch at a gyudon place exactly halfway between them. They sit down at the counter in the corner. Kuroo seems even taller than he actually is in the low-ceilinged space, slouching slightly, and realizing how much space Kuroo takes up is a little overwhelming.

“So what’s up?” Kuroo says. “How’s intro to Chem treating you?”

“Just fine, thanks,” Yaku informs him. “Not failing yet. And I don’t even need your help with it either.” Whether or not he wants Kuroo’s help with Chem is another question entirely. It reminds Yaku of high school, of last minute entrance exam study sessions with Kuroo and Kai all crowded around Kai’s kotatsu, burying the living room with study guides and notes and quizzing each other about any and all subjects.

“How’s literature?” Yaku asks.

“Also just fine, thanks,” Kuroo says, attempting to imitate Yaku’s tone. “But I get the feeling you  didn’t come all this way to talk about homework.”

“That, I did not.” Yaku concentrates on his beef bowl for a few minutes, thinking about what to say. Kuroo watches him anxiously.

“Why are you looking at me like that?” Yaku says eventually.

“I don’t know!” Kuroo’s barely touched his food. “Why are you here? What’s so important you had to tell me in person? Are you transferring here? Are you going to study abroad? Did you make the national volleyball team somehow? What’s going on? ”

“Calm the fuck down,” Yaku says, kicking Kuroo under the table. “I’ll tell you later, okay? I’m not moving anywhere, and I didn’t make the national volleyball team, what the fuck.” The guy behind the counter is giving them weird looks. Probably because they’re the loudest people in the shop right now. Yaku kicks his friend again. “Eat faster.” Kuroo makes a face at him.

“Why did you even guess any of those things?” Yaku asks.

“I dunno,” Kuroo says, looking away from him. “I just worry sometimes.”

“About what?”

Kuroo’s still not looking at him. “You leaving, I guess.”

They leave the shop and argue over where to go next. Central Tokyo’s not as familiar as the suburban outskirts the two of them grew up in, but it still feels more like home than Kyoto. Kuroo insists that one crepe place in Harajuku is totally worth the weekend crowd. Yaku insists that absolutely nothing is worth the weekend crowd in Harajuku, plus neither of them are fashionable enough to be on that street. They end up at a small shrine, a serene empty pocket in the urban crush.

“Remember new year’s, when we all prayed for victory at nationals? God, that feels so long ago,” Kuroo says. “It hasn’t even been a year.”

Yaku nods. He looks at Kuroo and he sees that Kuroo looks almost scared, for some reason.

“Wait, before you say anything, I was going to tell you this over summer vacation but I chickened out and I’m not letting that happen again.”

Yaku rolls his eyes, but listens anyway.

“Remember that time I told you I realized I was in love with someone? Surprise! It’s you! You’re the someone!” Kuroo hides his face in his hands. “Wait, no, that was awful, let me start over.”

“Nope, no do-overs,” Yaku tells him, and then yanks Kuroo down by the collar of his T-shirt into a kiss.

The look on Kuroo’s face when Yaku lets him go, so surprised and delighted and shy and happy all at once, is the best thing Yaku’s ever seen.