Chapter Text
Magic use during a sporting match is strictly prohibited. What the refs don’t know won’t hurt them, though.
Back in high school—when kids were just getting a handle on the magic at their command—it was harder to hide because everyone was so obvious about it. They’d get spotted by a ref at the beginning of their incantation or painting runes onto a volleyball.
But some people were good enough to sneak it into a match. Atsumu had his suspicions about that pesky Shiratorizawa MB, and in his least charitable moments wondered if Shouyou could Fly with a capital F, but he and Osamu had tried something during a match only once: swapping their vision so Osamu could see what Atsumu saw and vice versa.
He killed the connection after thirty seconds, because Osamu slammed directly into Suna during a rally and Atsumu swiftly developed a migraine. After that, they only used their connection—part of the magic of twins—to show each other what the specials at the cafeteria were when one of them was running late.
But he’s definitely had magic used against him in matches, both in high school and at the professional level. Spells that swapped his and Osamu’s hair colors so the refs tried to ding them for wearing the wrong jersey until Atsumu opened his mouth, or made him trip over his feet, or made his hands so slippery with sweat he had to bench himself until he stopped fumbling every ball. Magic always feels like cold water running through his veins.
That’s why he knows, when he receives the serve Goshiki seemed to direct straight at him and feels that familiar chill echo through his body, that the bowl-cutted bastard casted a spell on him. They kill the rally—one up for the Jackals—and Sakusa steps into the serve position while Atsumu shakes out the cold.
“Alright, Atsumu?” Hinata asks, nodding down at his wrists.
Atsumu laughs. “You don’t gotta worry about me, Shouyou. I’m just fine.” He hasn’t noticed any side effects so far, so he’ll pretend nothing happened for as long as he can.
(If he winks at a sputtering, angry Goshiki across the net when he’s next up in the rotation and scores a service ace off of him? Then that’s just between him and Kita.)
The rest of the game passes normally—kinda.
His hitters are hungry for balls on a normal day but they’re not usually this obvious about it, shooting him glances when Inunaki bumps the ball his way that all the Rockets blockers pick up on immediately. It’s amateur behavior. He didn’t tolerate it from Inarizaki and he only put up with it a little in middle school because Osamu threatened to eat all the pudding, no matter how much it gave him a tummy ache, whenever he complained about it.
“You’re the only one showing any sense of decorum, yanno?” he says to Sakusa during a water break.
“What are you talking about, Miya?” There’s a little water dribbling out of the corner of his mouth. Atsumu wants to lick it up. Instead, he laughs and drinks more, too.
He sends most of his balls to Sakusa and a mostly unsuspecting Meian until Bokuto and Hinata seem to finally get the picture, and they pull off a win.
In the handshake line he grips Goshiki’s hand a bit tighter than he normally would, as if to say “I know what you did,” without words.
“Hope you have fun,” Goshiki says, a bitter scowl in his brow, and Atsumu shudders. Shiratorizawa is full of weirdos.
It’s odd though. Once he’s finished with his post-game stretches and he’s dried off from the showers, he still feels cold deep in his veins as though the spell is still running through him. He thought maybe it had dissipated immediately; he didn’t notice any chill while he was on the court, but the sweat he works up while playing can definitely obscure it.
The cold distracts him enough that he doesn’t notice the weight of his teammates’ sideways glances on his back as he changes. They’re all talking about going out to celebrate the win, but Atsumu isn’t really up for it with the strange way his body feels.
“I think I’ll head back to the hotel,” he admits, when Hinata asks if he’s coming along.
“Aww, Tsum-tsum! I’ll keep you company if you like,” Bokuto says, throwing an arm around his shoulder. He shrugs it off.
“Don’t worry about me! You all have fun, I’m just not feeling too hot, yanno?” It’s an understatement; he’s just narrowly concealing a shiver, and he wants to get back to the hotel and hide under the covers and drink some of the shitty free instant coffee from the amenities basket because it’ll keep him warm. Maybe he’ll see if he has the energy to cast a warming charm, or ask the front desk if they have spare hot packs.
Mortifyingly, Meian walks over and places a giant hand over his forehead, like Atsumu is a child with a fever. “You don’t feel sick,” he says, before carding his hand through the hair Atsumu carefully styled after showering. The soft gesture sends a shiver—not caused by the cold—through his entire body. “Let us know if you need anything, alright? You’re our setter, so you’ve got to let us take care of you.” He beams down at Atsumu and it’s so unsettling to him, because Meian never acts like this, almost like he’s babying him.
Across the locker room, already masked up, Sakusa surveys this all with a face that looks as confused as Atsumu feels, and he’s relieved that someone understands. “Can you stop fondling Miya and let him go? If he’s sick, I don’t want his germs all over the place.”
Nevermind. Sakusa has a bottle of sanitizer in his hand, wielding it like it’s a weapon. He’s ready for violence.
As Meian starts protesting, Atsumu slips out of his grasp and out of the locker room entirely. If MSBY’s gonna be weird (again) he wants no part of it.
It’s only when he gets back to the hotel that he realizes he’s left his team jacket at the facility. Oops.
Three little packets of instant coffee, a spare blanket from house-keeping, and an Onigiri dinner from 7-11 that had Osamu angrily texting him ‘Et tu, Brute?’ like they were in some Shakespearean tragedy later, Atsumu hears a knock at the door.
Weird. He’s sharing with Sakusa who is unsurprisingly diligent and has his wallet clipped to his jeans whenever they go out, so he’s never lost a room key in his life. It’s incredibly dorky and Atsumu would rather have to ask the Front Desk, drunk as a skunk, for a new key before he’d ever subject himself to the indignity of a wallet chain, but he’s soft enough for Sakusa that he thinks it’s cute.
(On Sakusa. Not on anyone else.)
The knock grows more insistent, but it’s early enough in the evening that he thinks it might be housekeeping or the front desk—even though it’s weird that they wouldn’t call first—so he gathers one of the comforters around his shoulders like a cape and looks through the peephole.
And throws open the door. “Shouyou? What are you doing here?”
Hinata’s bouncing on his toes and he’s got a bag from the same 7-11 Atsumu went to wrapped around his wrist. “I wanted to check in on you! We were all so worried at dinner since you felt so sick. I’ve got supplies!” He barrels his way in underneath Atsumu’s arm. Hinata isn’t tiny but he feels so small when he does shit like this, and by the time Atsumu recovers he’s spreading an array of thermometers and cans of hot tea and snacks across the small desk in the room.
“That’s so nice of ya, Shouyou,” Atsumu replies, even though it’s actually weird as hell. “But I stole one of Omi’s thermometers and my temperature’s totally normal. I think I just got a chill overworking myself and by tomorrow I’ll be right as rain?”
At the mention of Sakusa’s name, Hinata’s face goes dark for a split-second, blink-and-you’d-miss-it. As a setter Atsumu can’t miss a single thing, so he notices it, but by the time he stops talking the sunshine is back in Hinata’s expression. “If you’re feeling better, we can hang out!”
Atsumu sighs. It’s hard to say no to Hinata when he’s like this, bright and bubbly and willing to take time out from hanging with the rest of their team to focus just on him. He’s a bit of an attention whore and he’s willing to admit it— privately, that is, because he’s not about to give Suna more ammunition—but he does kinda want to relax for the rest of the evening before Sakusa gets back and sees the wreck he made of his travel bag.
“Sorry Shouyou—” but then the downcast expression, the dark gloom, crosses Hinata’s face again and Atsumu never wants to see him look this sad, “you can stay, but you’ll have to leave once Omi gets back, ‘kay?”
“Of course, Atsumu!” Hinata says, like the storm never crossed the sky, and he tugs Atsumu into the bed with a package of his favorite horribly healthy bran bites so they can—
Is something in the water? Everyone’s being a complete weirdo today.
—cuddle, apparently.
At least Shouyou’s warm, he concedes, sparing his friend a quick glance where his head rests against Atsumu’s shoulder, before pressing play on the Germany Vs South Korea match he was watching before he was interrupted.
The game is long over and they’re talking through one of the moves Germany came up with, trying to figure out if they could adapt it into the MSBY playstyle, when the door clicks open and Sakusa walks through.
And stops, dead in his tracks, at the sight of Hinata wrapped like a tiny octopus around Atsumu. “Am I interrupting something?” he asks, voice full of venom. He’s glaring at them like they’re gum on the bottom of one of Atsumu’s shoes.
“Nope,” Atsumu says, trying to untangle Hinata from around him. “Shouyou came to check up on me and he’s just about to leave, now, right Shouyou?” Damn kid’s got a death grip, but eventually Hinata relents and uncurls from around him.
“This doesn’t look like a normal check-up,” Sakusa bites out as Hinata grabs his stuff and leaves, glaring at Sakusa as he does. “Good night, Hinata.”
“Night, Omi. Good night, ‘Tsumu!” he waves, before Sakusa carefully but firmly closes the door behind him. And deadbolts it.
“Hey Omi, was Shouyou alright at dinner? He’s being weirdly clingy.”
Sakusa tosses something onto Atsumu’s bed before heading towards the bathroom. “No idea, Miya,” he responds icily, before sliding the door shut and cutting the two of them off once again.
Atsumu wants to scream. He has no idea what’s going on, no clue why Hinata’s being all weird, and Sakusa’s being mean to him because of it, and it makes his heart hurt because, well.
There’s the whole Atsumu’s in love with him thing.
When he rises from his misery, he checks out what Sakusa threw on the bed.
It’s the jacket he left at the locker room.
He lets himself have a little yell, as a treat.
Atsumu doesn’t sleep super well that night, too worried about Sakusa in the bed next to him and the chill from earlier, that seems to have dissipated overnight but reemerged at breakfast, so he naps on the bus ride back to their training facility in Higashiosaka and wakes up covered in his teammates’ jackets. Strange, but easy to write off as a prank.
But then he zombie-walks his way to the nearest Family Mart for coffee before going to their afternoon practice, and that’s when all hell breaks loose.
Everyone’s clamoring to stretch with him and it makes him shiver, except Sakusa, so he “C’mon, Omi-omi’s” his way into warm-ups with him, which Sakusa accepts with an eye roll.
It sends Bokuto into a brief dip into emo-mode, before Foster pairs him with Atsumu for drills.
It’s all downhill from there.
His teammates keep switching places with each other, nearly pushing themselves out of drill order to pick up more of his sets, and they keep touching him, patting his back or arm or head or any part of him they can reach.
He’s no Sakusa, but all that camaraderie gets a little annoying.
It’s when Barnes—Barnes, notorious for being more of a prude than Sakusa, and always drapes at least five towels around his body whenever they go to an onsen—slaps his ass that he finally starts to think that maybe something’s going on.
Suna, of all people, helps him connect the dots.
He checks his phone during a break from practice, taking refuge near Sakusa who glares at him for invading his personal space—and at least one thing is normal, even if his apathy stings a little bit—which keeps everyone else away from him too.
Normally after a match he can expect some good-natured goading from Suna; never anything too mean, especially after a loss, but an unflattering screenshot of Atsumu or some commentary on his gym routine was par for the course.
So imagine his surprise when there are two new DMs from his old friend, and neither of them are blurry clips of him looking constipated.
[Sunarin]: you looked good, ‘Tsumu
[Sunarin]: <3
Atsumu should be forgiven for yelling, because “I think Suna got taken over by a pod person, Omi! Stop looking at me like that!”
By the time practice is over, his phone has turned off for some reason—”Did you forget to charge it, Miya?” Sakusa smirks, holding his cell phone with its 80% battery reading up to taunt him, while Hinata and Inunaki scramble through their bags for portable chargers—Tomas has complimented his smile three times, Barnes tried to invite Atsumu to dinner before Bokuto tackled him to the ground, and Meian rested his hand in his hair and looked at him again, and it made Atsumu feel a little bit weak.
He shrugs off their attention, slips out the door with a “‘Samu’ll have something for me” and makes his way to his home-away-from-home-away-from-the-court, Onigiri Miya.
When he opens the door, all of the customers turn toward him and the din of conversation drops to dead silence.
Osamu’s the one to break it. “Backroom, now,” he grits out, dragging Atsumu bodily behind the counter and blocking the door with his own bulk.
There’s a small table and mismatched chairs back here for Osamu to sit and deal with taxes or eat his lunch, whatever it is business owners do when they’re not at front of house. Atsumu doesn’t spend much time back here because he’ll “muck up my inventory, ya glutton,” or so Osamu claims.
“Do ya have any idea how much trouble you’ve put me through?” Osamu asks. He looks tired, more run ragged than usual.
“What are ya talking about?”
Osamu groans. “You’re an idiot, ya know that? An absolute dumbass. You know I love ya, right? That’s why I gotta be the one to tell you.”
“Are ya dying, ‘Samu?” Atsumu moves toward him to feel his forehead and check if there’s a fever, but Osamu stops him in his tracks by grabbing his wrist. “ ‘Samu, let me go!” he whines, but his brother’s grip is too strong.
Osamu puts a hand to his forehead instead, and Atsumu shudders because it reminds him of Meian’s weirdness the day before. “Aha!” Osamu proclaims, like he won the lottery. “You’re cold as ice, you melonhead.”
“Who is teaching you insults? I wanna have words with them.”
“You’re cursed, ‘Tsumu,” Osamu says, looking for all the world like he doesn’t want to be having this conversation. It’s a face he wore in the days before he told Atsumu he was leaving volleyball behind, and when he accidentally spilled grape juice all over his uniform the morning of graduation. “Someone hit ya with a love curse.”
Atsumu blinks. “You’re definitely dying, ‘Samu, I’m calling a hospital right now.”
A dinosaur roars—wait, no, it’s just Osamu groaning, letting go of Atsumu and covering his face with his hands. “Dumbass,” he mutters. “Idiot baby. Dropped on your head as a child son of a -”
“Hey! Don’t insult our mom like that.”
“Atsumu,” he barks, looking him dead in the eyes, “I have been fielding questions about ya from my customers that would constitute bannable offenses if ya weren’t already a walking nightmare. I cannot repeat what Suna has texted me about ya because I think it might get me arrested. I had to mute the group chat because Gin and Aran couldn’t stop trying to figure out what kind of chocolate ya like.”
“But I hate chocolate.”
“Not the point.” Osamu takes a deep, grounding breath, and then continues. “Seriously, how haven’t ya noticed any of this?”
“My phone died during practice, ‘Samu. Do ya think I need to replace the battery?”
“I’ve got an idea about what happened. Be careful turning your phone back on; I already had to mute Bokkun. Anyway,” he goes on, even though Atsumu desperately wants to know how Osamu got Bokuto’s number, “this love curse.”
Atsumu is about to reply, calling him ridiculous, but then a chill bursts in his veins and stops him in his tracks, giving him time to think about it. He’s only really been around the Jackals over the last day or so, but in light of a love curse, everything—Meian’s hand, Barnes’ touchiness, Hinata’s weirdly possessive cuddling, Sunarin’s weirdo text— makes a shocking amount of sense.
‘Hope you have fun,’ Goshiki said, and now he thinks about why. “Fucking Shiratorizawa,” he curses. Osamu looks confused.
“What do they have to do with anything?”
Atsumu shakes his head. “Don’t worry about that. Do ya know how to stop a love curse?”
Most curses can be broken by a Witch, and all professional sports teams have one on call in case any of their players get caught by one, either in a game or through the chaos of their daily lives. But some—mostly the ones that have to do with people’s feelings, like the spells that make people boil with anger or bubble with happiness—are harder to break.
“‘M’not a witch,” Osamu protests, “but remember Kita? Second year?”
That was when some team from Fukuoka—a school with a whole separate magic curriculum, even, so they hired a sharp-eyed ref and had a Witch waiting in the nurse’s office just in case—came to one of their training camps.
They were slippery. Instead of cursing them during a game and trying to slip past the refs, their Vice Captain cast a spell on Kita’s water bottle before the match began. Riseki, who was the most magically attuned among them, only caught that something was wrong when Kita had chugged half of it down. He’d excused himself to the nurse’s office to chat with the Witch, and the rest of them had gone on with the game.
What followed was a bit of an exercise in frustration; they all felt a little more strongly for Kita than before, and they all had to keep fighting the urge to burst through the doors and chase him down. Eventually Kita returned, the Witch following behind him, and she explained that Kita was under a curse that made everyone fall in love with him, but it would fade away soon because he hadn’t finished the full drink.
Also, the Vice Captain got pulled from the game.
“It’s basically the same thing,” Atsumu says. A volleyball instead of a water bottle, but still a curse. “But I don’t think we were this aggressive about him. Do ya think it’s because we all had crushes on him already, just a little bit?”
Osamu thinks about it for a few minutes. “Yeah,” he concedes.
His brother lets him slip out of Onigiri Miya’s backdoor with a box full of onigiri, but not before they charge Atsumu’s phone.
It turns on with a vengeance, bursting with DMs from a Who’s Who of Japanese volleyball between his JNT teammates he talks to once in a blue moon—and have no reason to text him like this —and the Inarizaki group chat.
He mutes all of them. The quick glimpse he takes of his Twitter is an absolute mess that he doesn’t want to dive into; he’s this close to deleting the app altogether.
Osamu sends him on his way with a gruff message. “Good luck,” he says. “Hopefully it’ll wear off soon.”
“Yeah,” Atsumu agrees forlornly, because he picked a message at random out of pure curiosity and wants to bleach his eyes now. Who taught Ushiwaka to say stuff like that? He’s so scary.
The walk home is a nightmare. Random strangers keep walking up to him, complimenting his hair or his clothes, and shopkeepers try to invite him into their restaurants to offer him free food and something more.
He starts taking back roads and alleys, slipping into a yard for a second and getting his pants all dirty from the unkempt alleyways. A cat crosses his path briefly and it lets him pet it. That’s one positive thing about this mess, I guess.
There’s no one in his phone he can talk to—he has to scramble to mute Ushijima who must have seen that Atsumu left him ‘on read’ and started calling him —so he’s grateful when he finally gets back to the dorms and Sakusa is the only one in the common room.
Sakusa who, Atsumu realizes, is the only one who’s been treating him normal this whole time.
Osamu’s given him some umeboshi onigiri too, so he convinces Sakusa to join him for dinner. He looks at him for a long moment and agrees.
But still, he has to make sure. “Say, Omi-omi, you haven’t suddenly found yourself madly in love with me, right?”
In hindsight he should’ve waited until Sakusa had swallowed before asking, because he nearly chokes on a bite of the rice ball and has to hack it up into a napkin instead, before answering. “What the fuck Miya?”
“Nevermind,” Atsumu replies, already wiping up the mess.
Afterwards they just hang out, Sakusa reading an e-book, Atsumu watching volleyball clips on his phone. It’s kinda lovely, and Atsumu feel warm, and best of all it’s totally platonic, at least on Sakusa’s end, even if Atsumu closes his eyes as the videos load and pretends that it’s a date, because if he’s under a love curse he might as well indulge himself in being a lovesick fool. But eventually they hear the sound of a stampede down the hallway, a clear sign that the rest of the Jackals have returned from wherever they were.
Atsumu stands up, cracking his back and sighing. “Guess I’ll head to my room.”
“Probably for the best,” Sakusa says, not looking up from his e-reader.
Atsumu hesitates at the doorway, looking back at Sakusa. He looks soft, curled up in one of the couches in their lounge, wearing these horrible orange socks and an ancient Itachiyama sweatshirt and his bangs clipped back. All of the colors are neon, and they clash, and there are definitely holes in the sweatshirt, but Atsumu wants to see him like this every hour of every day if he could.
Maybe Atsumu got hit with a Love Curse, sure, but he’s the one cursed with love.
“This was fun, Omi-omi,” he says, still lingering at the door.
Startled, Sakusa looks up at him, eyes dark and inscrutable. “Yeah, Miya. It was nice."
When he wakes up, there’s candy and chocolates and Hinata’s stupid healthy bran bites piled up outside of his door.
He drops them on the kitchen table in the lounge with a little note that says Up For Grabs! :) before heading to practice.
Practice is an unmitigated disaster. Atsumu should have probably emailed their medical team a heads up that he was cursed, but it genuinely slipped his mind when he was spending time with Sakusa.
It means that he walks into a total clownshow; the entire entryway is filled with vases upon vases of flowers, arrangements of roses and tulips and sunflowers that make Atsumu itchy just looking at them.
Sakusa's mask is up and Barnes is sneezing uncontrollably. "Pollen allergy," he explains, "that's why I didn't get you flowers." He looks more concerned about that than the slowly growing hives on his neck.
"What's going on here? Did we win something?" Atsumu asks, sipping the coffee he bought on the way over.
"You tell me, Miya," Sakusa rolls his eyes. "They're all for you. Is there anything you'd like to tell the class?" Sakusa stares him down with those same dark eyes, and Atsumu opens his mouth to explain what he and Osamu realized when—
"Miya! My office! Now!" Coach Foster's voice echoes down the hallway, muffled by flowers.
"I'll tell you later, Omi!" Atsumu says, before walking off to his doom.
“I just want to let you know that you’re not in trouble,” Coach says in a steady but pained voice.
Atsumu is in a lot of trouble.
“We want to make sure you know you’re going to be fine,” the Witch says, her face shielded by a full Kabuki mask, like it would keep her from catching the Falling-in-Love-With-Atsumu disease. “That’s exactly what it’s for, actually.”
“Can ya read my mind?” Atsumu asks, and then suddenly thinks about the most obnoxious thing he can.
He didn’t think a mask could look so disappointed. “No, you’re just incredibly obvious.” He banishes the thought of Argentina’s setter from his mind.
“Before we begin, I just want to ask one question. Why didn’t you tell us?” Coach cuts in, and he looks kind enough that Atsumu forgets he walked right into a trap.
“I just forgot,” he admits, and Coach's expression grows frosty.
“Atsumu, how do you forget something like this?”
“It’s not like I’m the one falling in love with everyone, right?” he protests. “Even though I’m cursed, everyone else is the one who suffers, so when I’m alone—” or with Sakusa, his traitorous mind fills in—”I’m just not thinking about it!”
Coach sighs, but seems to forgive him. “Fine, Atsumu. Just don’t let this happen again, alright? Setters are critical to game flow and prime targets for being cursed. We want to make sure that you’re safe and healthy.” And not totally ruining the team dynamic by making everyone fall in love with him, right.
Atsumu knows how often setters get targeted; it seems to happen once every few games to him, and more often when he’s playing for the JNT. Setters pass down knowledge to each other: incantations they can mutter to block curses, charms to cast a ward around them before games. Sometimes Atsumu feels a curse bounce off of a shield, or catches the glint in an opposing MBs eye and drops a blocking spell.
This time, though, he’d gotten too relaxed, delivering perfect sets and being distracted by Sakusa and their stupid service ace competition, and let Goshiki slip right by him. Never again.
“So what’s the diagnosis, doc?” he asks, smiling widely at the Witch, whose blank mask looks unimpressed now.
“You’ve got a Love Curse on you,” she says, waving around a thin piece of obsidian that flashes green and purple as it reads the magic wafting off of him. The cold in his veins comes back with a vengeance. It’s weird to think this must have been what happened to Kita, all those years ago. “It’s a pretty powerful one according to my readings, which means the traditional methods we have to curtail the effects until it wears off won’t work. Congratulations Miya, you’ve drawn the attention of a pretty powerful magic user.”
Fucking Shiratorizawa. “What would those methods have been?” Curiosity killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it back, right?
The Witch shrugs. “It depends on the person, the method of curse disbursement, the strength of the spell. Ranges from treatment with herbs to full body immersion. Sometimes eating a raw egg. None of those will work for you. You’ve got to suffer until it wears off under the next full moon.”
The next full moon is over a week away, which Atsumu only knows because Suna will not shut up about astrology in the group chat. Schrodinger’s stupid cat is dead.
“So what can I do in the meantime? Is there any way to get rid of it?” He can’t imagine living like this, with all his teammates suddenly in love with him—except Sakusa, his absolute bastard of a brain reminds him—and acting weirder than ever, with every stranger on the street trying to get his number and Ushijima blowing up his phone.
It was nice that the barista this morning gave him his drink for free, but he’s never going to call the number she scribbled on the side of the takeaway cup and he doesn’t know how he’ll face her when this is all over. They did the best Americano in walking distance of the dorms, too.
“There’s only one way to destroy a Love Curse this strong before it wears off,” the Witch begins. At his desk, Coach braces himself like he knows what’s coming. “True love’s kiss.”
In his defense, Atsumu only laughs himself to tears because what else could he do?
The person he’s in love with can barely stand him, calls him a germ most days, and has been totally unaffected by this curse.
Atsumu is fucked.
Coach ends up canceling practice for Atsumu when they finally enter the gym and Inunaki almost barrels him over trying to reach Atsumu first. There was some kind of argument happening amongst the rest of the team, with the exclusion of Barnes—who had gotten sent off to their actual doctor to handle his allergies—and Sakusa, who was stretching in the corner like he couldn’t handle the immaturity around them.
He makes eye contact with Sakusa, and in that moment of perfect stillness he rolls his eyes and gestures at the open door behind them. ‘Go now,’ he mouths, which makes sense. The team is still distracted—and Coach is arguing with Inunaki—so he bolts.
Gracefully.
While making the slow walk back through the alleyways that are starting to become home to him, like he’s friends with the wild weed and stray cats that haunt the hidden spaces behind homes, he does what he always does when he doesn’t know what to do.
He calls Kita.
“Y’know Atsumu,” Kita drawls out, “I’ve been hearing about ya a lot more than normal these days.” It’s one of those days Kita doesn’t have to be out in the field, focusing instead on the numbers for his farm, so he’s welcome for the distraction. “I’ve been expecting your call to be honest.”
“Really?” Atsumu didn’t think he was that transparent.
On the other side of the line, somewhere deep in the country, Kita laughs—just like in high school, it sounds like bells to Atsumu. “Of course! I don’t know who else ya know that’s got hit with a Love Curse. Plus, I know all the signs. And when Suna started texting me, asking me about your favorite colors and snacks and if ya ever looked at him when I was Captain, well, I knew this was coming.” At the idea of him having a crush on Suna, Atsumu gags. Kita chides him lightly. “Manners, Atsumu.”
“Sorry Kita,” he says, muscle memory. Then something horrible comes to mind. “Kita, you’re not suddenly in love with me, right?” His phone hasn’t been full of texts from Kita, but he was always the picture of self restraint.
Blessedly, Kita laughs again. “Nah, I think I’m immune. Curses like this only affect people who aren’t already in love. And I’m so full of love for everything and everyone—including you, Atsumu, and your brother too—that it’s not making me act any different.” Atsumu breathes a sigh of relief and leans down to pet another one of the stray cats in the alley, a fat calico. There’s fresh laundry drying in the balconies overhead and the air smells sweet, like this is the first burst of hope he’s gotten in days. And he doesn’t feel–”Bet you’re not feeling that cold in your veins right now, huh?” Kita says.
“How’d you know?”
“Ya told me about it once, in passing, that you feel magic like cold. I feel ‘em hot, so when I was hit with that Curse I felt overheated in the gym and had to leave. But when you’re talking to someone who’s already in love the feeling goes away, and leaves ya feeling normal.”
Huh. He wonders who Sakusa’s in love with then, because he feels normal around him. “Oh…” Atsumu’s wilting fast, straight downhill into a horrible revelation. “Thanks for your help, Kita, I’ve gotta go.”
“Wait, Atsumu, what’s wrong—” he hears Kita say, before he hangs up. He can imagine the confusion curdling his brow, followed by disappointment as Kita realizes Atsumu is letting him down again. He mutes Kita’s number for good measure, in case he tries to call him back or text him.
Instead of heading directly back to the dorms, Atsumu wanders the network of alleyways in the city, killing time before he has to confront the inevitable.
He wasn’t too good at school, but Atsumu can handle some basic algebra.
A) The Curse doesn’t impact anyone who’s already in love.
+
B) Sakusa is acting totally normal around him.
+
C) Atsumu’s veins don’t feel like ice when he’s with Sakusa.
=
Sakusa’s in love with someone, and there’s no way it’s him.