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Nothing about Atsumu—not the glint of his eyes, not the edge of his smile, not the lilt of his voice—promises relief. Kiyoomi goes to him anyway.
"Of all people, really? You're gonna try to fuck my advisor?"
Atsumu grins. "Yeah, I am." He tips his glass towards Osamu. "So put in a good word, won'tcha?" To be extra insufferable, he winks on the question.
Atsumu tilts his head to watch a slice of orange light bend over the impassive planes of Sakusa’s face. He is absolutely, ruthlessly beautiful. It makes Atsumu want to punch something—put his foot through the windshield—scream, maybe.
Kiss him again, maybe.
His cold black eyes turned men to stones. Atsumu was blind.
Suddenly, he realizes the man is more uncomfortable with this whole thing than he is. It shouldn’t be surprising, considering all he said, but it’s a revelation. And it makes him loosen up. It’s like when a hitter arrives at a game stiff or unsure—Atsumu revels in drawing them out, in showing they can be at ease.
“You won’t regret this, Sakusa-san,” he says, with a grin. “Be as much of an asshole as you want. Trust me, I’m worse.”
For Atsumu, sadness always starts in the wrist.
“Ya never let anyone touch ya,” Miya complains after three days of training.
“I never will,” Kiyoomi says and it’s a promise he intends to keep.
Atsumu lives his life to the fullest and pretends that he’s not waiting for the other shoe to drop. Kiyoomi handles everything with care and sets things down gently instead of letting them tumble out of his hands.
Atsumu commands, soft, “Stop.”
Sakusa stops.
“Right there.” He feels those words like a hand on his jaw, holding him in place. “Don’t move.”
“Ya ever been in love?” Miya asks him, quiet, when Miya Two vanishes with two cups of tea to wake Suna. Kiyoomi thinks about Miya’s laugh and Miya’s hands and Miya’s pretty, honey-warm eyes and the way Miya looks on the volleyball court, like he’d savour devouring you whole.
“Maybe,” he says into his teacup.
“How’d it end?”
“I’ll let you know.”
Atsumu can't sleep. Kiyoomi refuses to. They happen to have the misfortune of being next-door neighbors.
Atsumu does not get sick. He is healthy, he is hale, he is the starting setter of a team deep in the throes of a turbulent volleyball season and, even more importantly, he is—
Flat on his ass, ow.
Osamu is silent. Then he says, “Eight minutes I carried him. All seventy kilos of that fucking idiot. Arms shaking like you wouldn’t believe. The entire walk to the school grounds, I kept having the thought that maybe I should've done more weights. Would've made it easier to bring him back.”
Kiyoomi can’t unstick the knot in his throat enough to reply.
“Miya. It’s cold. I wanna go home.”
Atsumu knows he’s being petty, but he sinks to the ground in a crouch and curls himself into a miserable ball. Sakusa doesn’t trust him. His hitter doesn’t trust him. His best friend on the team—scratch that, in life—doesn’t trust him. How is he supposed to live? He won’t make it to the Olympics if Sakusa doesn’t trust him. If Sakusa doesn’t like him, Atsumu might as well stay out here and wait to die.
“You’re so dramatic,” Sakusa says.
Atsumu’s only response is a hiccuping sniffle.
Yer doin' this to me, he thinks furiously, as Sakusa derails his thoughts with kisses that come more and more frequently now. Yer conditionin' me, and I can't stop it.
Atsumu had that effect: the world rearranged itself to accommodate him. Kiyoomi felt some days that Miya Atsumu was the centre of the universe.
“‘Course he is, Omi-Omi, I just saw ‘im.”
Hot, powerful fingers grasped the material of his shirt. They yanked him around so he was face-to-face with Sakusa, who had forgone his mask for the moment to enjoy his drink. Which meant Atsumu had a front-row-seat to his pretty mouth set in an annoyed, displeased line.
“No,” Sakusa said, “He’s not.”
Sakusa confesses to Atsumu with all the enthusiasm of someone reporting a traffic jam.
The MSBY Black Jackals test their friendship as they probe deep into each others' personal lives.
In the summer of his sixteenth year, Sakusa Kiyoomi meets Miya Atsumu at the local planetarium.
Sakusa has been a doctor for three years and he’s long since fallen into a routine. He diagnoses a patient, treats them, and moves on to the next. He doesn’t linger and he certainly doesn’t build any lasting connections. There’s no time for that in his line of work.
Miya Atsumu, his new appendicitis patient, seems determined to make a lasting impression.
Still, nothing can prepare him for what it's like to have the attention of Miya Atsumu. Atsumu is many things: chatty, endearing, earnest. But he's more observant than most give him credit for.
And he might be the only person who reminds Sakusa to take care of himself.
The pros and cons of swiping right on your very attractive teammate.
“Did you need something, Miya-san?” Sakusa asks. Is this, Atsumu wonders wryly, how thieves feel when they’re caught.
“Omi-kun,” he replies with a slow-blooming foxkill grin. “Lemme set for ya.”
Ah, there it is. A flicker of something colder behind that flat gaze, a there-and-gone-again that still hits Atsumu like a lightning strike. It makes his grin widen.
“My name,” the other boy says, in a voice of steel under paper, “is Sakusa.”
Atsumu reaches out, clearly ready since birth to fuck with people. "Hey, I'm Atsumu Miya. Nice to work with The Lonely Lance." Osamu tries to kick at the back of his knee, but Atsumu is already moving toward Sakusa to get into his space.
Sakusa grasps the tips of Atsumu's fingers with his gloved hand for half a second before snatching it back. The warmth of the leather makes Atsumu's fingers twitch.
"It's Sakusa. I know who you are." Atsumu notes that he does not look pleased at all.
"Do you not know the fear my name incurs in the ranks of the race of men?" Sakusa hisses, teeth flashing in the rays of sun that filter through the cave's opening. "I was born Sakusa. They call me Medusa now."
A moment passes. Then two. Miya's lips tip downward into a frown that betrays an air of confusion. By now, even the stupidest of soldiers would be scrabbling out of her cave as quickly as his feet could take him.
"And I'm Atsumu," Miya repeats slowly, as if Sakusa is attempting to make her acquaintance rather than send her dashing into the hills. "Nice to meet ya."
“So, which one is he?” Lord Sakusa asks. His face is impassive as he crosses his arms, eyes moving slowly between Osamu and Atsumu with what appears to be boredom.
Sakusa Kiyoomi is uptight and irritating and waspish and haughty. Atsumu is also, unfortunately, in love with him.
"Sakusa, right?"
The tribute across from him only has noodles, blond hair falling over his forehead. His eyes are arrogant. There are two black studs in his ears. Sakusa files this fact away.
"What do you want?" He asks.
Atsumu doesn’t faint, but it’s a close thing. “What the fuck,” he says again. “Why do ya have that?”
Sakusa tilts his head to the side, expression neutral - but Atsumu spots the small twitch in his eyebrow, which is the equivalent of confusion written all over his face. “You gave it to me?”
“No the fuck I didn’t,” Atsumu immediately says.
“Sakusa Kiyoomi,” Grunts Sakusa. He still hasn’t shaken Atsumu’s hand. Someone sniggers from his back, and Atsumu doesn’t need to turn around to recognize that it’s Osamu. Well, fine. He started with the whole being an asshole thing, now he has an excuse. He relents and lets his hand drop.
The way the coach says Miyas, it's like it should be immediately obvious to Kiyoomi who the Miyas are.
Identical like the Miyas, Kiyoomi thinks, so the Miyas are twins too, and then with a starburst flare of irritation, who even are the Miyas?
“I’m Atsumu! What’s your name?” The boy mumbled out an answer, and because his voice was muffled by his mask, all Atsumu heard was “...Omi.”
“Omi?”
“Kiyoomi,” the boy said in a much clearer voice.
But Atsumu was already attached to the name. “Omi-Omi! Let’s go!” Shamelessly, he grabbed him by the hand and tugged him behind him. He felt responsible for him — the boy clearly needed all the protection and guidance he could get. Atsumu can be his hero.
“If you couldn’t pay for your medical bill,” Sakusa begins solemnly, staring at Atsumu with narrowed eyes, “I have no hope that you’ll even be able to pay for a fraction of the cost to smoothen out the dent you left on my car.”
Atsumu bristles, even as his cheeks flush in indignation. “It’s only there ‘cause ya hit me, asshole,” he replies as he tries not to shift the sling, and glances at the medicine-filled bag between them. “How do ya wanna do this, then?"
“i’m supposed to believe that you’re a pediatric resident moonlighting as an undergraduate statistics student, spending your little free time attending my lectures for, what, fun?” sakusa asks. “lies should at least be believable.”
“Why are you like this?”
It’s always the same question. Atsumu’s gotten it from teachers, friends, teammates. Even his own parents have said it, never harshly, but wearily, as if they couldn’t be bothered to look beyond the surface.
When Miya Atsumu gets off on the wrong foot with a certain Sakusa Kiyoomi on the first day of practice for MSBY Black Jackals, he vows to avoid the stuck-up spiker as much as he can, even while on the same volleyball team. And it would've been a good plan--if Atsumu didn't meet Sakusa again at group therapy that very night.
He had every part of him memorized, from the hair that had lightened to platinum blonde, to the way the sleeves of his shirt stretched over his biceps.
But he figured it was only right.
After all, they were best friends.
With so little time until the deadline, and his job on the line, Atsumu is getting desperate. To win, he'll have to do the unthinkable: cooperate with Sakusa Kiyoomi.
After eighteen long years of catering to his parents’ impossible expectations, high-school graduate Sakusa Kiyoomi elects to spend his summer in the countryside working as a farmhand. But while he’d rather do his job without any distractions, he finds himself enmeshed in a group of farm-raised friends who make it their mission to teach the new “city boy” everything he needs to know. Thing is, Kiyoomi wasn’t particularly interested in farm work—that is, until he met a certain blond farmhand with a wicked tan, a toothy smile, and a strange obsession with root vegetables.
He knows that this world doesn't exist, but Atsumu is sitting there offering this as a possibility for their own little world of Atsumu and Kiyoomi.
Atsumu plays on the University Men's Volleyball team. Sakusa is a nurse at the University Student Health Center. Atsumu promptly falls in love and becomes a regular patient.
The mystery athlete gives Kiyoomi a once over in the mirror. “Yer pretty tall,” he observes. The twang of an accent rasps low in his throat. His brazen eyes drift to Kiyoomi’s legs, and something like exhilaration glints gold in his gaze. “Good quads, too. Ya ever played volleyball?”
Ah. So it’s volleyball.
“I’m a dancer. Ballet and contemporary, mostly.”
In which Sakusa Kiyoomi and Miya Atsumu’s love story starts in high school, but of course they make a complicated mess of it for years. Six, to be exact.
“We aren’t lovers,” Atsumu protested.
“We’re not even friends,” Kiyoomi added.
“Regardless, a photo of you two—” Foster paused, seemingly searching for words. “Canoodling, to put it lightly, is splashed all over the news and social media —”
“Canoodling,” Atsumu repeated. “It was a drunken mistake—”
“It was a moment of weakness,” Kiyoomi interjected.
“We cannot afford another scandal,” Foster said with finality. “We’re telling everyone you’re in a relationship.”
Atsumu has a list of ‘firsts’. Kiyoomi offers to help him with it.
In which Sakusa Kiyoomi is raised to believe that gay people go to hell but then takes one look at Miya Atsumu and thinks, then why the hell did God make them so fucking hot?
Miya Atsumu and Sakusa Kiyoomi’s Co-Stars With Benefits Arrangement Contract
- The span of this arrangement will only last up to the very last day of filming. Anything past that is forbidden.
- This arrangement will be kept top secret. For obvious reasons.
- Absolutely no getting emotionally attached.
- No kissing outside filming.
Miya Atsumu and Sakusa Kiyoomi get cast in a gay film together where they, in the words of The Great Philosopher Rihanna, fell in love in a hopeless place.
Atsumu has a long history of pissing people off, but this time he’s gone too far. Someone wants him dead, and although he doesn’t know who or why, it becomes clear very quickly that both he and Osamu are in danger. After a couple of close calls, Kita - the Kumicho of Inarizaki - decides it’s not safe for the two of them to stay in Hyogo; not until he finds out who placed the hit and eliminates them.
Fuck you, Atsumu thinks, pointing at the pixelated Sakusa in the team photo on his bedside table.
This is Sakusa Kiyoomi's secret alone, to keep, to protect, to hide.
If no one sees it, they can’t hurt him for it.
Not really. Not in any way that matters.
But now someone is seeing it. Atsumu is seeing it.
The thing about Miya Atsumu is that Kiyoomi is fully and entirely obsessed with him. Every time Atsumu sticks his tongue out like a dog, which is quite a lot, Kiyoomi suppresses the urge to bite it off and lick up the blood. Sometimes he watches Atsumu sleep and wonders what it would be like to climb into Atsumu’s pocket and live there.
“I just got this job, I’m not givin’ it up for some moral boost ‘cause I actually need to pay my rent, ya insensitive -” Atsumu waves his hands around, trying and failing to come up with the right word to convey the amount of injustice that this gaunt motherfucker has brought into his relatively simple life thus far.
Everything about him goes against human instinct, goes against everything he’s heard and read about the inherent human experience.
When Sakusa learns that he’s the top candidate for a promotion at MSBY Consulting, LLC, he knows his hard, quality work should make him a shoo-in. Unfortunately, his competition is Atsumu, the worst coworker Sakusa's ever had.
What Sakusa says is this:
"I told Kuroo-san I would do it, but I thought you should hear it from me." What Atsumu says, in all his infinite eloquence and quick-tongued wit is:
"Wuh?" Sakusa sneers.
"Congratulations, Miya, until the end of Terushima-san's party, we're officially dating."
Atsumu leans closer, strokes over the planes of his pretty boy face, does a 360 twirl in the mirror just to confirm. Yep, still Oikawa, although he can’t possibly imagine why.
Kiyoomi closes his eyes, slowly. He prays that the ground opens up and swallows him whole. He prays that a whole earthquake rocks Tokyo and brings the place down on him, specifically. He prays that some higher power decides to strike him with lightning right this minute.
“Actually,” he says, grinding it out through clenched teeth, “you haven’t seen any other kids around, have you?
Well, if Atsumu’s being honest with himself, it started way before that, but he’s not, so that’s besides the point. And thankfully, he’s just petty enough to blame all of his problems on a thirteen year old girl.
“Dirty. I wanted them to be clean. I tried using water, and they were still dirty.” Sakusa clears his throat, “I know it was a bad thing to do, can I go home?”
Atsumu suddenly throws an arm across his face, saying, "God," followed by a disbelieving laugh that bubbles from his mouth. "I feel like I've cycled through so many emotions in the past couple of hours,"Sakusa quietly huffs a laugh of his own. "Sorry," He says, though he finds that he's not really sorry at all.
"Okay. I get it. You're angry. We're both angry. But do you really think revenge sex is the best course of action here?""...Yes. What? Didja expect me ta say no?
"Mysophobia, also known as verminophobia, germophobia, germaphobia, bacillophobia and bacteriophobia, is a pathological fear of contamination and germs."
"You read that off of Wikipedia."
"That's the point, Omi-kun. I read up on it fer you."
Saying that the world had stopped spinning would be an understatement. Atsumu felt the moment his soul left his body while he stood there in front of the mirror, his reflection gaping back at him in horror.
In his peripheral vision, he saw Kiyoomi freeze, phone slipping out of his hand, the object tumbling in slow motion before meeting the floor with a dull but resounding thump.
Atsumu develops a fixation on Sakusa Kiyoomi in high school but it's just a phase, right?
A one-way ticket to Sakusa Kiyoomi’s personal hell, complete with all the Miya Atsumu he could never want.
According to Sakusa Kiyoomi, there are three parts to having a crush: You think about them all the time. You act differently around them. You want to kiss them.
Sakusa Kiyoomi wasn’t even supposed to be on the goddamn moon.
“When were you going to send that letter in which you tell me you love me?” Sakusa demands. He immediately winces right after and flushes, because a few people look over at him from the volume and the tone of his voice.
“Sometime in the 1850’s, but there’s more where that came from. Every decade since, at least,” Atsumu chirps back.
Sakusa Kiyoomi and Miya Atsumu are bethroded in an attempt by their covens to maintain peace as a new witch war looms.
As an olive branch, Sakusa Kiyoomi turns the wedding gift into ash.
“Yes,” Kiyoomi answers bluntly. “But it’s just a symptom of my OCD.”
“Whoa, what?” For once, Atsumu is stumped.
He can cope with most of the rambunctious crew; though they're armed to the hilt, they're relatively harmless.
He cannot, however, cope with human hurricane Miya Atsumu.
Stuck inside a house with the rest of his teammates, Kiyoomi is not only forced to adapt to a quarantine lifestyle, but he is also confronted by a sexuality crisis. Atsumu is just along for the ride.
dec 25 2024 +