Paranormality

by KingsHighway

Summary:

After a chance encounter in the woods at night, Daichi is catapulted into a rapidly changing conspiracy in which Oikawa has missing time in his childhood, Daichi's father is part of a secret government agency, Tendou doesn't seem to be human and, mostly bizarrely of all, the boy's ghost hunting adventures go viral when Kenma posts videos of them online.

Daichi probably wouldn't hate being internet famous with the four other volleyball captains if it didn't seem to also come with ghosts at the edge of his vision and uncovering something deeply, fundamentally wrong with his family.

Chapter 1: What Fell to Earth?

Notes:

I have been trying to develop a ghost-hunting captain squad fic for so long and I finally have something to show for it. Thank you to everyone who clicked on it, a few quick housekeeping comments before you read:

This is going to be very plot heavy and as a result is probably going to become less and less canon-compliant as it goes on. It's going to be slow on the introduction of characters and dynamics. Kuroo and Bokuto will come in next chapter, Ushijima probably in the chapter after that. Romances? Who knows. I have some end-game stuff in mind but that's way down the line, y'know? There's gonna be lots of ghost hunting and cryptids content between the actual plot, consider monster-of-the-week pacing where the main plot gets sidelined for 10 episodes then comes back for the finale.

Anyway thank you all for reading, I hope you will enjoy this wild ride as much as I do!!

xx

PARA  [ noun ]; from the Greek “para,” meaning “beside” or “adjacent to.”

[ prefix ]; denoting irregularity in a function or faculty; “beyond.”

 

NORMALITY [ noun ]; the condition of being normal.

 

1.a PARANORMALITY [ noun ]; the condition of being in an unfamiliar or irregular state that ceases to resemble the condition you were previously in.

 

---

 

The dog was technically a mutt, if you asked Daichi to guess at what was in him, he’d probably shrug and say “something big, something that used to guard herds.” In fact, that was the exact answer he’d given to pretty much anyone that had wanted to inquire into the Sawamura family dog’s lineage. It was one of those big dogs, with so much thick fur, and a wide, broad face and big paws and a demeanour that seemed just a little bit checked out from the world at all times. He liked to lay down in bodies of water, scared little children despite being a sweetheart, and in one particularly powerful memory of Daichi’s, had once taken kid-Daichi’s full face in his mouth.

He was a fluffy dog, mottled mostly white and light cream with some brown. When he was a puppy, he was all white. Daichi had insisted upon naming him Kumo. As the only child at that point in time he had had zero competition and won the debate with a landslide. 

Kumo was, in all meaningful ways, Daichi’s dog. 

Part of the contract of getting a pet had been that he would need to maintain regular walks, feeding, grooming, and all associated challenges. In many ways, Kumo had been his first foray into responsibility, the first kid he helped raise, and a shockingly useful learning curve both for the future baby siblings he would tend to and also to the very intense and rambunctious first years he was currently dealing with. 

Daichi kept the dog well groomed, Daichi fed the dog on a regular schedule, Daichi took it for nice long walks every evening, or, when possible, over to the park to toss a ball as far as he could and watch him bolt. He was older now, they didn’t do that much. But Daichi was the one who trained him, and he was quite proud of that . Kumo had excellent recall, an assortment of tricks, and never pulled on the leash. 

Unfortunately, because of this disparity between the management of the dog and the number of people in the household, Daichi was also the only person the dog really respected, and only his father came close to a second. That father, however, was currently living in Tokyo which meant he was Daichi’s responsibility.. Kumo was a sweetheart and never caused any trouble, but his mother, also, could not for the life of her get him to do anything . 

Which is why she’s yelling. 

“Daichi!”

Daichi has only just stepped foot through the front door of the home, volleyball practice having run long and then he’d gotten distracted talking with Suga and Asahi at the street corner. They’d only remembered they had to go when the sun had gone down and the streetlights had come on. 

“Ah - yes? What-?” 

He tosses his school bag to the side, hurrying up through the livingroom and into the kitchen, finding his mother half finished with dinner, frazzled and standing in the back doorway, cool air billowing in. 

“Go get your dog, he’s gone off into the woods somewhere,” she says, stepping out of the doorway so that Daichi could pass through. “I’ve been calling him for half an hour, he won’t listen.”

“Were you using the commands?”

“I’ve been screaming my head off!”

“That is literally the opposite of what I asked. I told you, he only responds to the German,” Daichi replies, slipping his shoes back on and heading out into the back garden. 

“Why the hell you taught that dog in a language nobody speaks-”

His mother is cut off by her own choice to walk away to attend to dinner, and Daichi is thankful for it, since he’s actually quite tired of trying to explain it to his mother. 

The Sawamura family home was a lot bigger than everyone expected it to be. There were a lot of reasons why people tended to think Daichi’s home would be smaller and more humble than it was, though Suga had defined it mostly as Daichi having what he called ‘overworked orphan-boy energy,’ which he still hadn’t decided how he felt about. 

Either way, it couldn’t be further from the truth, and the Sawamura family money was something Daichi specifically avoided talking about almost exclusively to prevent Tanaka from having an excuse for asking for more meat buns than he already did. 

“Kumo!” Daichi called, stepping through into the slightly damp grass. “Hier!”

The yard in the back opened up without a fence to a patch of woodland that, in essence, was a rather uninhabited, rather useless little patch. It was only technically not farmland because it took a sharp turn into rocky, mountainous terrain just a little bit in, and on three sides was cut off by major and minor roads. Daichi wasn’t even sure if it was technically their property, but they’d been treating it as such. 

There were no animals living in it bigger than a rabbit, and the most interesting thing about it was that  a family of little falcons liked to nest in some of the bigger trees.

It’s unusual that Kumo doesn’t come right back to him. He really doesn’t want to enter the forest, since the grass is damp and the undergrowth is a little bit dramatic and honestly he probably wouldn’t escape without a couple of bugs on him, so it was better to avoid. 

“Hier!” he calls again, louder, and this time, finally, he hears a loud crashing noise as Kumo came tumbling down the rocky terrain and through the undergrowth, undoubtedly proving why no animals permanently lived or thrived there. 

“Hey, buddy,” he coos, once the dog has reached him at the forest’s edge, and he can crouch down to scratch at his face. Kumo is happy to see him, licking at his face before letting Daichi scratch down his neck and under his collar. “Exploring, eh?”

It wasn’t really like Kumo to wander into the forest. It’s unusual enough that Daichi glances up over the dog to stare off into its green, dark depths and wonder what might have caught his interest. Kumo likes low-effort activities nowadays. (He was, after all, almost twelve years old.) Daichi had once seen him let a treat hit him in the face, fall to the ground, and then completely lay down to eat it. 

He hadn’t gone off into the forest like this in a long time - and certainly not been so caught up in whatever he was doing that he ignored the recall command. 

But the forest is still and quiet. There’s nothing there , not really. The mountainous terrain got steeper, and steeper, and maybe there’d be interesting smells coming off from the proper wilderness, but Kumo had never cared before.

“Okay, let’s go,” Daichi says eventually, standing up.

 

---

 

Nightmares have always come easily to Daichi. Ever since he was a kid. Something about after the night fell itches his brain with all sorts of intrusive, ugly thoughts.

Insomnia came naturally too.

Having to sit and walk yourself through every reason you’re not going to be axe-murdered really was not conducive to falling asleep.

Suga always laughed at him for it. Not for the sleep issues, but for the way he talked about it. 

“I’m not an insomniac,” he’d say, even though he did not sleep that much on average. “I just have insomnia.”

“Cute, but that’s definitely not how it works,” Suga had laughed.

“I mean… Look, I just mean… I have trouble falling asleep for other reasons. It’s like… insomnia by association. I just have an overactive mind.”

“I get that,” Asahi says. “Sometimes, especially before games, or tests, I’ll lay in bed and just think about it. Like… just… everything that could possibly happen. Every play that could possibly be made. Every question that might be on the test, every answer I might give. All of it.”

Daichi nods. “Exactly. It’s not my fault if the night is so still and dark and I can’t help but notice every tiny sound and shadow.”

“Oh my god,” Suga usually replies around that time. “No, Asahi, you have an anxiety disorder, and you -” and here he’s usually beckoning to Daichi. “Clearly are just afraid of the dark. Get yourself a nightlight and sleep more than three hours, I am begging you.”

“I am not afraid of the dark,” Daichi always, at that point, scoffs. 

He’s thinking about that now as he sits at his desk. He’s really not afraid of the dark. Or… not all dark. His room light is turned off - that doesn’t bother him at all, sitting in the dark of his room. 

The shadows of the world outside, though, that he can look at through the glossy reflection of his window, that’s a little unnerving. 

His foot is bouncing against the floor, and has been for a while. He knows he’s safe, he knows he’s fine , he knows it all. There’s nobody outside, There’s nobody outside. There’s nothing in the crack under his bed or the shadows from his closet or between the slivers of moonlight scattered against the wall of his room. 

The clock on his phone says a dozen minutes after two am. 

He rubs a hand over eyes. He’s exhausted, he can feel his need to sleep starting to pull at his body. 

He usually falls asleep around this time. Maybe if he crawls into bed now, he can fall asleep before he thinks about what might happen if he does. 

And then, as his head begins to droop from its place propped up by his hand, there’s a single, low, but firm, boof sort of bark from Kumo downstairs. 

Daichi stays perfectly still. Maybe it’s just a dog-dream. 

But, no-

Kumo barks again, and then a little bit louder, and then louder, and then-

Daichi is up on his feet and stumbling out of his room before he even decides to go. Kumo didn’t bark for no reason, and Daichi was not going to let him wake the neighbourhood. He almost trips going down the stairs, blinking rapidly to try and clear his head. 

“Hey, buddy, nein , nein , stop, no-” and he finds him at the back door, a glass sliding door that stares out into that nauseatingly rich darkness of the forest. 

Daichi crouches down to grab Kumo by the neck, wrapping his arms around him as he looks out into the woods. 

“What is it, boy?” Daichi mumbles, and he thinks his presence has succeeded in calming him down enough, until Kumo reaches to start scratching at the door. “Do you need to go out?”

I let you out before bed , he wants to add, but doing so would be silly, because Kumo is a dog and dog’s don’t particularly operate on rational thought. 

Kumo boofs again. Daichi frowns slightly, scratching him for a moment more before standing up to slowly unlock and slide open-

He barely has it open wide enough to let the large dog out before Kumo has shoved his way through and bolted out into the woods, barking only a couple of times before disappearing. 

“H-hey! Ach-” Daichi stumbles around, taking off after him and leaving the door open in the process, cold, wet grass soaking his toes as he heads to the tree line. “Kumo! Hier! Hier!”

What in the hell is going on? 

There’s an oppressive air of uncertainty that he doesn’t like. Kumo is not an energetic dog that chases any scent it finds. The forest is not a dangerous or even particularly interesting place. Daichi has trained him well , he never ignores a direct command - especially not from him. The forest feels sickeningly unknown at this moment, but Kumo is gone from his sight and his hearing.

Daichi takes off into the woods before he can think a second more about the dark and the unknown.

“Kumo!” he calls again, because he doesn’t know what else to do. He thinks he can hear rustling and sniffing, he thinks he can follow the trail as he uses both hands and feet to grab at trees and rocks and pull himself up a steeper part of the mountain. 

He follows the path of least resistance, because that’s where he imagines his old dog would do, but he’s got quite a head start. 

“Hier, Kumo!”

His toes sink into wet moss and peat, sticks dig into their soles and rocks scratch at the skin. It’s cold, it’s uncomfortable, Kumo is not listening , but-

A shriek. Something undeniably human is screaming. Daichi reaches a flatter part of the woodlands at the same moment, in time to see Kumo leaping and barking, hackles raised slightly as if fighting something of substantial worry. 

“Hier! Nein, Kumo! Hier!”

And there’s a person, understandably very flustered by the dog that’s targeting them. Tall, and coated in shadows, the flashlight they had been using dropped to the forest floor and casting harsh light up behind them, but only serving to backlight and obscure their features. Even so, there’s something oddly familiar about the voice and posture, and Daichi takes a few more steps forward, to try and see-

Slam!

Something hard and painful absolutely cracks in the back of his skull, and it’s so much force that Daichi is immediately sent to the ground, vision sparking out black and a solid ringing deafening him. Fight or flight engages immediately, but cannot overcome the wave after wave of woozy darkness, as he tries to push himself up and pull himself together for what was, potentially, going to be a fight for his life. 

“Oh my god!” a, somewhat, familiar voice shrieks. “What did you do?”

He can hear Kumo barking, even more ferociously now, and when Daichi tries to shift his legs he realizes the dog has gone into position to guard him. 

“Oh, good boy,” Daichi manages to wheeze out, blinking light back into his vision, everything fuzzy and slowly orienting itself. 

“What did I do? Oh, I’m sorry, there was a fucking stranger shouting in a foreign language and you were screaming bloody murder! I had a perfectly reasonable response with the limited information given!”

“It was the dog , Iwa-chan! It snuck up on me! I was startled by the dog!”

“Why is the dog here-”

“Iwa-chan?” Daichi wheezes, and when he opens his eyes both people swivel flashlights over to him. It burns his eyes, and he has to close them again, fighting against the throbbing in his head. 

Kumo’s growl is throaty and vicious, snapping at both of them to make them back up. 

“Wait holy fuck,” Oikawa says. “That’s Karasuno’s captain.”

“What? No it isn’t.”

“Yes, it totally is! You just killed Karasuno’s captain!”

“I didn’t kill him! Dead people don’t groan and roll around in pain!”

“Kumo,” Daichi wheezes, trying to decide which of his simple commands translated to ‘don’t attack these two chucklefucks,’ the best. “ Halt, ” he tries, followed immediately by: “ Platz. Halt. ”

And Kumo listens, whining slightly and moving around to nose at Daichi. He’s happy to use the dog as support for sitting up, trying to get the light spots out of his eyes now. The two idiots have had the good sense to move their flashlights off. 

“Uh… sorry,” Iwaizumi says after a moment, a little awkwardly. He tosses the branch he had swung off into the bushes. “Didn’t… uh… didn’t see it was you.”

“What are you even doing out here,” Oikawa replies, putting a hand on his hip. 

“Wh… what am I-? I live here,” Daichi says, looking up at him, one hand lifting to rub at his head. “I… this-” well it’s not technically my property. “-I… no, Seijoh is… so far away, what do you mean what am I doing here, what are you doing here?”

Oikawa and Iwaizmi exchange a glance, before Oikawa replies with:

“That’s classified.”

“I’m going to have my dog kill you,” Daichi replies. 

Oikawa shifts slightly. “Well… we’re… investigating. That’s all.”

“...investigating what? Dead trees? Squirrels? The fucking moon?”

“Aliens,” Oikawa replies. 

“There are no aliens,” Iwa cuts in.

“ Probable aliens.”

“No.”

Oikawa ends up just pouting at him for a moment, before sighing and heading over to Daichi, offering a hand down to him. The moment he does, Kumo begins to bristle, and Oikawa’s hand is swiftly redacted. Daichi is left to get up on his own. Which he does, with considerable dizzy difficulty. 

“What in the hell is a probable alien?” Daichi says. 

“There was a meteor, a couple nights ago,” Oikawa says. “Came down around here, we’re trying to find it.”

“Well I think I would have noticed if a damn meteor crashed into my backyard,” Daichi replies. 

“Probably not,” Oikawa says, shrugging. “It’s estimated it came down around this area, but if it survived the atmosphere, it probably wouldn’t have been very big by the end of it. Just a little guy-” and here he holds up his fingers, just an inch apart. “At least, that’s what I’m hoping-”

“Hang on- are you telling me you’ve been fucking around in the woods these last few nights?”

Oikawa nods. “I want to find it.”

“You’re the reason my dog has been acting crazy?”

“In my defense if your dog is crazy that sounds like your problem.”

“My dog is fine,” Daichi replies, waving a hand. “My dog is perfectly well trained and you have been terrorizing him with your trespassing. ”

Oikawa blinks back, the picture of innocence. Daichi eventually turns his attention to where Iwaizumi was standing, looking significantly less interested in the conversation, casting the light of his flashlight about the woods. 

“Well,” Iwa starts, sounding a little bit apathetic. “You can’t blame that on us.”

“Yes I can!”

“No, you can’t. We’ve never been in these woods before. Last night we were on the other side of the highway, and the night before that even further off. We weren’t here.”

Daichi stares at him. 

“How often are you guys lurking in the woods?”

“Please, when you say it like that it implies we’re being creepy,” Oikawa scoffs. “And… not that often. Not usually like this. I just wanna find the meteor.”

“And you’re planning on searching the entire goddamn mountain, apparently?”

“Don’t underestimate his crazy,” Iwa cuts in. “Do not.”

Oikawa shrugs. “As much as I can, I guess. It’s not like I’m bothering anyone. And it’s super cool, most meteorites hit the ocean, or whatever, it’s not usual that one comes down in your own backyard.”

“You’re bothering me .”

Oikawa shrugs. “Sorry. But you can go rest easy knowing there’s nothing out here but-”

Oikawa cuts himself off, because there is someone else out here. Another set of footsteps, another beam of a flashlight, another rustle. Kumo begins to tense up, so Daichi grabs him, mumbling under his breath to try and calm him down. 

Oikawa steps back a few steps, and Daichi briefly wonders why he looks so concerned before realizing that whoever was approaching was doing so from up the mountain. Away from the city. 

Iwaizumi immediately moves to grab his weaponized branch again, before returning to his place beside Oikawa and tensing up not unlike Kumo was, eyes locked and body ready to swing. 

Daichi has a probable concussion, is on no-hours of sleep, and doesn’t have shoes on. He’s a little bit concerned he’s about to die. 

“Hey!”

The sharp bark of a voice shocks them all into straightening up slightly, and they’re very surprised to see the uniformed silhouette of a police officer. 

Everyone just stays perfectly still. 

“What are you kids doing out here?”

“I live here,” Daichi says quickly. “I was just-”

“We were just celebrating passing our exams,” Oikawa laughed, scratching at the back of his neck. “Sorry if we were being too noisy. Daichi’s house is just down the hill, we… well we thought it would be fun to go-”

“What, drinking? Doing drugs? Burning stuff?”

What? Daichi wants to ask, but he probably has a concussion and honestly everything has been confusing so far so he just lets it slide. 

“No, no, none of that,” Oikawa laughs, waving a hand. “We were just playing with the dog,” he adds. The police officer raises an eye, and to prove his point, Oikawa takes the large stick Iwaizumi had intended to weaponize and shakes it at Kumo, before tossing it into the woods. “Fetch!”

Kumo doesn’t even twitch in the right direction. 

Oikawa must absolutely dominate in poker, Daichi decides, since he smiles at the police officer with a sweet, confident expression as if that had gone perfectly well. 

The officer stares a second more, before just nodding to them. “Get on out of here, then. You’ve got no business being in the woods this late.”

It’s public property, Daichi wants to reply, but Oikawa is already nodding and chirping a yes sir! so he supposed that answered that. 

Under the watchful eye of the officer, Daichi, Oikawa and Iwaizumi all turn and begin slowly trudging back through the forest. Kumo stays close to him, looking up at Daichi on occasion as if asking ‘what the hell is going on?’

They hear the officer leave as well, the light that had been following them disappears. Oikawa switches his flashlight back on, and Iwa does the same. 

“Should I be worried about how easily you lie to cops?” Iwaizumi says after a minute. 

“Don’t worry about it,” Oikawa replies, though he sounds a little distant, off in thought. 

Daichi doesn’t even realize he’s leading them home until he’s dropping the last rocky ledge from the mountain and crossing the threshold of the forest back into his backyard. Flashlights swivel up, investigating the house for a moment before Oikawa says:

“Holy shit, dude, is this where you live? ”

“Uh - yeah?”

“What the fuck do your parents do, shit gold?”

“Oh, ah… no, no, they’re- both in government jobs - well, my moms a legal consultant, but my Dad’s in Tokyo, working-”

“Alright, alright, I get it,” Oikawa says, cutting him off with a wave of his hand. “Back to the matter at hand, though -” he adds, before turning and heading around the edge of the forest, leaving them behind. 

“Oikawa!”

Iwaizumi takes off after him, sounding a little bit flustered himself, and Daichi, perhaps just magnetized towards them, compulsively follows. 

“Where are you going?”

Oikawa glances back at him. “To see what the hell the police are doing in the woods. It’s probably some kind of cover-up.”

“...excuse me?”

“Oh my god, not this again,” Iwaizumi groans. 

“Think about it!” is Oikawa’s response, looking between them. A meteorite comes crashing to earth and for some reason a random municipal cop is out in the woods demanding we leave? We weren’t doing anything wrong! They’re clearing the area for something.” 

Daichi hates that it makes some kind of sense, but he’s not sure the conclusion is space conspiracy . 

“I mean… maybe some else happened. Maybe the meteorite hit something.”

“Maybe the meteorite wasn’t a meteor,” Oikawa counters, wagging a finger at him.

“Maybe you need new hobbies,” Iwa throws in. “Come on, you’re not really going to drag us back into the woods, are you? To what, spy on the police? Come on-”

“You said you’d accompany me!” 

“I agreed to doing a silly thing when the silly thing was just walking around a forest at night. This is borderline illegal.”

Oikawa laughs. “Well, if the police are doing stuff that’s illegal simply to see , then maybe they shouldn’t be doing it, yeah?”

Daichi also hates that that’s some kind of good point. It’s not really convincing him to go chase down the police in the woods, but before he can decide to leave these two idiots to do whatever this was alone, Oikawa has already started into the woods along a little path some distance from his house and Daichi is already following him. 

“So do you guys lurk in the woods most nights, or…?” Daichi asks, lowering his voice as he leaned over to Iwaizumi. 

“Don’t intentionally make it worse than it is.”

“That was not a no-”

“No! No, we don’t, this isn’t… normal, it’s… just…”

They get a firm shush from Oikawa, who waves a hand irritatedly at them, before glaring at them. Oh, right, the borderline espionage. He supposed they should be quiet. 

Kumo has been following along behind quite happily, before suddenly taking off into the woods again. Daichi bites his cheek, before hissing, as quietly as he could shout: “Fuss, Kumo!”

Kumo, this time, listens, but he turns back to Daichi with baleful, sweet eyes, as if he didn’t understand why he was not allowed to go running into the woods. He probably didn’t. 

He resists the urge to explain it out loud. People could see him. 

“Actually, let him,” Oikawa says, glancing down at the dog. “He probably can sense whatever it is they’re hiding in here.”

“...excuse me?”

“You said he’s been acting weird, right? Dogs have all sorts of abilities that we don’t, he probably knows something weird…”

“Stop analyzing my dog,” Daichi replies. 

“Seriously! Let’s see where he goes,” Oikawa says. 

Daichi thinks about this for a moment, before sighing and glancing down to Kumo. “Lauf,” he says, and Kumo tenses, as if confused. “It’s okay,” he says. “Lauf.”

And Kumo does, excitedly starting off into the words on his little dog mission. Oikawa gives Daichi a look as if he’s proven anything , but either way all three boys are now following the dog so he doesn’t have a strong defense. 

Daichi wishes he had shoes on. 

Light from the moon brightens their way, but it’s through dappled, dark shadows that they start to realize they’re are going towards something. Oikawa makes another motion to silence them, even though nobody is speaking, and when suddenly they realize there is light in the forest, a harsh, artificial whiteness that lights up the trees, they also realize there are voices, and movement. 

The moment they see a person, Daichi hisses as softly as he can for Kumo to return, and thankfully the dog listens, though he seems incredibly resistant, torn between obeying and following whatever had caught his interest. 

Daichi grabs his collar, not used to not being able to trust the dog. 

The lights aren’t flashlights. They’re floodlights, set up in the distance, in an area taped off with yellow police tape. Oikawa crouches down, and continues moving forward like a fucking animal, slinking through the undergrowth to avoid being spotted. 

Iwaizumi is a reluctant follower, and Daichi, realizing he’s already this far into this bullshit, goes along with them much the same. It’s cold and wet, he once again wishes for shoes, but there’s an odd kind of excitement in his stomach. He knows it’s dangerous, sure, but the allure of doing something a little bit dangerous is undeniable. 

Kumo is very interested in nosing in at him, curious as to what they’re doing. He keeps getting distracted trying to wander off, and Daichi hopes the police assume it’s some nocturnal creature. 

They have to stop eventually, the light being simply too bright, too risky to approach. They tuck themselves in bushes and dead leaves and the underbrush, blinking against the harsh white light and hoping to use its brightness to deepen the shadows they crouched in. 

Daichi tries to make sense of the scene he’s looking at. 

There are municipal police, mostly standing around, looking like they were on some kind of guard. They’re carrying guns, which he takes note of. But that’s not the only group here. 

There are a couple of people, off to the side, in sleek black suits covered by garrish blue raincoats. It’s not raining. 

Kumo has started squirming, so Daichi has to yank him back by the collar and shush him. What the hell is he so excited about?

In the middle of the gathering people there’s a white canvas tent set up over something low on the ground - undoubtedly the object of interest. Daichi is sure that Oikawa must be sure that that is the meteorite, or whatever fell from the sky. 

Kumo squirms again. Daichi tightened his hold. 

One of the raincoats turns, and he can see the yellow writing across their back. 

PSIA.

He can see Oikawa’s lips moving, seeming surprised. What the hell was going on? What was so involved that the PSIA was out here managing it? 

Oikawa squirms around and pulls out his phone, carefully adjusting the settings before lifting it up to try and take a photo of a scene. 

Oh my god this is so illegal. This is so illegal. This is so illegal.

And then one of the PSIA agents turns around, calling something to one of the officers to beckon them over, and the voice is gut-wrenchingly familiar. 

Kumo recognizes it too, and Daichi’s own shock stops him from keeping a tight enough grip as Kumo takes off, barking his excitement and startling the entire gathering into swiveling their attention - and their guns - onto the dog. 

“Kumo!” Daichi’s father says, surprise clear in his voice as the dog happily bounds up to him, sniffing and nudging at his hands and knees and whatever he could get to. “What are you doing out here? You should be in bed!”

Oikawa is looking at him, glaring why does that PSIA agent know your dog? very accusingly, and Daichi has a very good answer that he doesn’t want to say out loud. 

My father isn’t a PSIA agent, though… 

He… 

“Sir, do you know this animal?” 

“Uh, yeah,” he laughs, “Sorry, it’s my son’s dog, the ah - the family home is nearby. He’s usually inside at night, though…”

Oikawa is, as silently as possible, smacking Daichi furiously. 

Sawamura Rion, a man that, until this exact moment, Daichi had believed was currently in central Tokyo, lifts his head to look around.

“Well it can’t be here ,” one of the other PSIA agents says. 

“Right, right, ah - Toshiko! ” Rion shouts, catching the attention of one of the police officers. “Come here, you need to take this dog out of here, I’ll give you the address to return it to.”

“Yes sir,” is the chirped reply. 

Oikawa is still hitting Daichi. Daichi is just barely getting his brain to process again before he says, in the most hushed whisper he has ever managed: “We need to go, we need to go we can’t be here we need to go we have to go like right now we need to-”

Oikawa, apparently now clueing into Daichi’s meltdown, nods along before nudging him and beginning to scoot backwards. Daichi hesitates before doing the same, the cold in his toes suddenly unbearable and painful. He’s glad for it, though, giving his brain something else to think about. 

When they’re down a hill a bit and out of sight of the white light, they stumble back to their feet, covered in dirt and leaves and twigs. 

Oikawa shoves at him to go, and so he does. Iwaizumi follows up behind. 

It’s not until they are stumbling down a much steeper part of the hill, and then stumbling out of the treeline onto the side of a narrow, quiet highway, that they make noise again. 

“Holy shit ,” Oikawa laughs, putting a hand on his chest. “Oh my god, oh my god, that’s definitely a conspiracy, first off-”

“Or a crime scene,” Iwaizumi says. “The tent could have been covering a body. Something normal.”

“Why would the PSIA be out here for a body?”

“Why would they be out here for a meteorite!”

Daichi feels lightheaded. He hasn’t slept. He’s taken a hit to the head. 

He sways on his feet. 

“Daichi!” Oikawa says, turning on him. “Your dad is- do you know what-”

He manages a shrug. “Last I heard he was managing an excel spreadsheet in a government building. I mean… the move to Tokyo was… We assumed he was just…. I… he doesn’t-” Daichi turned around to look back into the little forest that had for so much of his life been nothing more than an interesting footnote in the landscape of his town. 

“I think Oikawa’s right,” Daichi says, after a second. 

“Excuse me?” Iwaizumi replies. 

“Not... I mean… I don’t know about the meteorite, but they’re covering something up.”

“You can’t-”

“My dad doesn’t work for the PSIA,” Daichi replies, turning back to him. Perhaps it’s just the fervor in which he stares that shuts Iwaizumi up. “He doesn’t. Or, he does . If it wasn’t some kind of conspiracy, he’d be allowed to tell his family about it. Why would he be lying?”

“Maybe he’s not lying,” Iwaizumi says. “Come on, okay, so… if he’s got this crazy government job, maybe… It was this last minute reassignment and he just got out here tonight, and won’t have time to visit, and just… didn’t want to disappoint you by not swinging by while he can before heading back. Maybe he didn’t have time, or was so busy he forgot to mention he had to come down for a bit.”

That’s reasonable. 

“Right,” Daichi says, before pulling out his phone. 

“What are you doing?” Oikawa asks. 

“Calling him. Figuring it-”

“No!” Oikawa says, snatching his phone from him. “It’s… three in the morning! If you call him now, especially after he saw your dog, they might figure out we were there. Call in the morning. At a normal time.” 

Daichi stares at him, nodding slightly before tucking his phone away again. 

“Now… okay, just-”

“We need to get home,” Iwaizumi says. “There’s school in the morning. God. Tomorrow’s going to suck.”

“Blame it on me,” Oikawa says. “You usually do.”

Daichi turns his feet towards his house, trailing behind Oikawa and Iwaizumi as they bicker back and forth. 

“I will,” Iwaizumi says. “But to be honest, if I was going to be losing sleep staying up with my boyfriend, this is not the activity I’d have hoped to be doing.”

“Iwa-chan! You’re awful. You agreed to come! If you wanted to stay home you could have.”

“Mhm… that’s barely true.”

“Well if you don’t want to uncover the truth about our world with me, just say so.”

“Next time I will.”

“Fine!”

Daichi’s feet hurt. He’s so cold. 

“We’re going to turn here,” Oikawa says, stopping at a fork in the road. Daichi lifts his head slowly, still a little bit unsteady on his feet. 

“Oh. Okay.”

Oikawa is looking at him, a little bit empathetically, perhaps, before sticking out his hand. “Give me your phone.”

“What?”

“Phone. Give it to me.”

Daichi isn’t sure he should just trust him like that, but after a second is too exhausted and does as told, handing his phone over to him. Oikawa taps around in it for a moment, before handing it back. 

“There. Please text me if you learn anything. Good or bad. It’s going to eat me alive if I can’t figure out what they were doing up there."

“I’m sure it’s nothing,” Daichi says, staring down at his phone. “But… sure, yeah, I’ll tell you what my dad says.”

Oikawa nods, before a nudge from Iwaizumi convinces him to turn and start walking down the road. Daichi waves them off, and finds himself, once again, alone in the darkness. 

It’s cold, dark, his head is spinning. 

Iwaizumi is probably right. It’s probably fine. You never really understood his job anyway. It’s probably fine. It’s fine. He’s fine. You’re fine. It’s normal and everything is normal and nothing is weird and everything is perfectly regular. It’s… normal. This is fine. 

He’s shivering and dragging his feet back through his backyard when a sharp noise of surprise catches his attention, and he looks up to see a young police officer, with a makeshift leash around Kumo’s collar. 

Daichi stares at him. 

The police officer stares back. 

He’s not sure what comes over him, perhaps it’s just his exhaustion, or the left over anxiety about not being caught spying, but he opens his mouth and what comes out is:

“You found my dog.”

The police officer, clearly glad to avoid having to lie himself, nods. “Yes, sorry, he was… just loose-”

“Yeah, I… he ran off, I was looking…”

The officer unties the dog, and Daichi is happy to finally, properly, let the dog back into the house. He glances back over his shoulder. 

“Thanks,” he says. The officer gives him a nod. 

“You should… you should keep those pets on a leash.”

“With all due respect, I was not trying to take him on a walk.”

 

---

 

Daichi wakes up the next morning, and for a second it feels like it was another nightmare. It certainly could be, disjointed and irrational, filled with deep-seated anxieties, about being alone, about not knowing what to do, about being powerless. But he knows it’s not a nightmare. His nightmares end when he wakes up. That one ended when he went to bed. 

He grabs his phone. Operating on barely two and a half hours of sleep, he stares at his phone for long enough that he sees when Suga’s text message comes in. 

Good morning! Suga sends, followed immediately by: can we meet up before school? I need to check my answers for that math homework.

Daichi nodded to himself, before sending back: Sure. I’ll meet you in the clubroom.

He gets a long string of happy emojis back from Suga, but Daichi has turned his attention away from that, finding his father’s contact number and hesitating over pressing ‘call.’

Do I even want to know?

It might be better not knowing.

He presses call. 

It rings. 

It rings.

It rings. 

Then, finally, it’s answered: “Hey, kiddo,” his father chirps, slightly distorted over the phone. “Everything okay? Shouldn’t you be getting to school?”

Daichi is quiet for a moment before remembering he needs to speak. He leans forward, pressing a hand over his eyes as he mumbles: “Uhm… right… sorry, it’s so early - did I wake you up?”

“Not at all, you’re fine. Actually I haven’t gone to bed yet. Late night with my boss, working on a new account.”

“New account?”

“Yeah, it’s not very interesting, sorry.”

“So that means you’re still in Tokyo?”

“That’s right,” he says. “Why?”

Daichi nods along for a second, before putting a cheery note to his voice to reply: “Ah, no reason. The kids were just starting to miss you, that’s all. Think you’ll be making it home anytime soon? I know they’d appreciate it.”

“Sorry, but it doesn’t look like it. This account’s gonna be eating up most of my time for the next few weeks.”

“No worries,” Daichi says, then: “Ah, sorry, yeah, I do need to get to school. I’ll… yeah, talk to you later, or-”

“Alright, alright, get on to school then. Tell your mom I say hi, okay? Love you.”

“Yeah, sure,” Daichi says. “You too.”

The phone call disconnects, and Daichi stares at his phone for a moment before pulling up Oikawa’s contact. 

It’s Daichi, he sends. 

My dad lied. 

 

---

 

PARANORMAL [ adjective ]; denoting that which is beyond the scope of scientific explanation or understanding. 

 

1.b PARANORMALITY [ noun ]; when those new conditions you find yourself in are absolutely fucking insane.

Chapter 2: Saitama's Haunted Mansion

Daichi offers to buy his drink, as a thank you for coming out to meet with him early on a Saturday morning. Oikawa doesn’t even offer faux humility and lets him do so without a second thought, settling into one of the seats in the understaffed cafe and crossing one leg over the other. 

“Sorry for… calling you out here like this,” Daichi says, taking a seat across from him. Oikawa is mostly absorbed in stirring his drink, some sweetened vanilla mixture that maybe didn’t count as coffee anymore. 

“Oh, it’s no bother. I was hoping you would, actually. Would have bothered me until my dying breath if I hadn’t gotten a follow-up.” 

Daichi nods. 

“But based on the desolate and tired expression you wear, I imagine there’s not much to report on.”

This draws an awkward chuckle out from him, and Daichi nods along an agreement. “I guess not, no… I… Well I just didn’t know what to do! Like I guess I could accuse him of something, or tell him I know he lied, but… I mean, he’ll just deny it, right? And what if it makes it worse? What are you supposed to do in this situation?” 

Oikawa thinks on that for a moment before saying: “Keep tabs on him? Try and figure out what the government is trying to hide from us?”

“... what?”

“Well, it’s… well it’s obviously aliens. I mean, the PSIA has been covering up alien encounters for decades, they-” he cuts himself off for a second, taking a sharp redirection in his sentence to: “your father might not be a bad person , y’know? If he just got a job with a government agency that demanded him keep it a secret he wouldn’t have had a choice. I mean, it clearly pays well, right? How could he turn that down?”

Daichi blinks, before saying: “What? Are you suddenly in favour of the government agencies that are lying to the public? What are you talking about?”

Oikawa seems surprised for a moment, before laughing and saying: “No, no, I just mean… Well, I guess from my perspective, covering up aliens is sorta disconnected from anything inherently malicious. Of course, I want the truth, that’s why I-”

“Spend your nights in the woods-”

“Continue investigating. Don’t interrupt me. But aliens… could be dangerous. They could be anything. And as much as I don’t love the idea of the government hiding alien life from us, I mean… I wouldn’t get caught up in a moral quandary simply because one employee is doing his job. I mean, maybe the secret PSIA unit in the woods that night was investigating a murder or something like Iwa said, and he lied because the victim is sensitive information. Would you have a problem with that?”

Daichi leans forward, folding his hands in front of his face. “I think you’re being very cavalier over the PSIA agents covering-up events in the woods part of this.”

“Well if you’re just learning about government conspiracies now, that’s your own problem. I’ve known this is happening since I was twelve.” 

“Since you were twelve?” 

Oikawa doesn’t directly reply to this, instead taking a sip from his drink and looking away. When he’s done, he changes the conversation topic with:

“I take that to mean you’re not exactly a believer in alien life?”

This catches Daichi off guard. 

“Well… I don’t know, I’ve never really thought about aliens. I guess… I mean I guess it’s possible, somewhere, but… I don’t really believe in that… bug-eyed, grey-skinned little guy alien stuff. I think the Egyptians built the pyramids, and I don’t think crop circles are anything but mischievous farmers-”

“Okay, touché on the pyramids, but you cannot think farmers are just independently carving up their fields into highly intricate and massive designs only usable from above. That’s ridiculous. What kind of farmer would do that? And how? Crop circles have appeared since long before people had drones or access to any view from above, and yet they still managed to make these perfectly symmetrical patterns?” 

Daichi frowns. 

He’s oddly defensive about crop circles.

“I mean… I’d think if anyone was able to make that kind of pattern, it would obviously be farmers, who not only have extensive experience operating the equipment they would need to use to do so, but also know the layout of their fields.”

“Why would they ruin their fields? Farmers' livelihoods are dependent on the harvest each year, carving up thirty, forty percent of their fields just to prank their community seems like an incredible waste of resources. Who in their right mind would do that?” 

“Someone who realizes that they can get double the revenue of thirty percent of their crops from selling their story to a magazine?” Daichi says. 

Oikawa glares at him. “Alright, you’re clearly set in your ways. I’m assuming this means you’ll be no more open to ghosts or spirits.” 

“Please, I’d more likely believe in aliens than ghosts.”

“Is there anything you believe in?”

Daichi thinks about this for a moment, before saying: “I don’t understand the question.”

Oikawa groaned, sinking lower into his seat. “You’re impossible. I hate people like you. You have no sense of wonder about the world and can’t see that there’s obviously more to it than what meets the eye. I mean… even probably PhD scientists aren’t always in agreement over the nature of reality. Hell, we just started beginning to poke into quantum physics and it’s threatening to rewrite our understanding of the physical world. And you want to draw a hard line and say yep, we got it all correct. Go us.”

“Dude, I’m gonna be totally honest with you, I don’t even know what the study of quantum physics is.”

The look Oikawa gives him could probably break a more fragile person. 

Daichi just stares back. 

“I bet you’d change your mind, if you actually had some experience with it all,” Oikawa says after a moment. 

“I would agree.”

This seems to catch Oikawa off guard, and he raises an eye in response. Daichi decides to fill the silence. 

“I mean… if I had actual proof of ghosts or aliens or whatever, obviously I’d believe in them. I just don’t think squeaky doors and dust on a camera lens is very compelling. Do you have experience- actually, as I started to ask I realized that’s a stupid question.”

“It is. And I have. There are so many haunted buildings and locations, even just in Miyagi alone, let alone in the bigger cities. Japan’s history is rife with spirits and misery and reasons for ghosts to stick around. You’re never more than a stone’s throw away from something restless.”

Daichi frowns at him. “I don’t know. I think it’s natural for people to want to think there’s more to life than just the present. Makes things meaningful, if those who die might stick around.”

Oikawa huffed. “Well it’s not like ghosts are all fun and sweet. In fact, in most traditional lore, spirits that stay on earth are usually samurai or warriors that died in battle. If you died in a gruesome or traumatic way, you’d stick around causing trouble for those who were still alive until your soul was appeased. Actually-” and here Oikawa leans forward, as if getting closer to Daichi would make his argument more convincing. His eyes have positively lit up, clearly having struck a subject of considerable interest and passion for him. Despite himself, despite everything he wants to feel or think, Daichi cannot help but find it endearing. It’s neat to see someone sharing a part of them he hadn’t known before. Like there might be more to him than killer serves and game sense. “-the history of spirits and ghosts is fascinating. In fact, people were so worried about creating ghosts, that Emperors would host elaborate rituals for the rivals and enemies that they had defeated in combat to honour their souls and hopefully prevent them from becoming vengeful spirits. And part of why samurai have such an infamous reputation as loyal and honourable is because at the time, following someone’s order into battle was a death sentence. I mean, if these samurai failed their mission and were killed in battle, it was almost impossible for them to pass into a normal cycle of reincarnation, following the orders of their masters usually doomed them to eternal restlessness. So it’s not just that they were risking their life, but all their potential lives, by going to battle, really it's - why are you laughing?”

Daichi can’t help it, and hadn’t meant to be so obvious, so when Oikawa cuts himself off with an annoyed huff, he hurries to lift a hand up to cover his mouth. 

“Sorry, sorry,” he says, quickly. “I’m not-”

“If you’re gonna sit there and laugh at me, I’m leaving.”

“I’m not laughing at you, it’s just… I dunno, I wouldn’t have guessed you’d be like… this.”

Oikawa sits up a little straighter. “I’m not sure what that means.”

“Like… a nerd, I guess,” is Daichi’s response, and then he’s snickering again. “Like you genuinely do… really like this stuff, don’t you?”

And the little nod Oikawa gives a sheepish sort of nod, sitting back in his chair and taking a sip of his drink to cover his embarrassment, eyes flicking away. Daichi watches him for a moment longer, biting at the inside of his cheek to stop himself from smile before saying: 

“Look, if you have any good proof of all this, please, do show me. But… I’m not convinced as of yet.”

And perhaps that’s a mistake on Daichi’s part, because Oikawa glances over at him with a look in his eyes that he should have anticipated - Oikawa Tooru did not back down from a challenge. 

 

---

 

It’s only a week later, at a practice match, and Daichi has actually almost managed to put everything behind him. He hadn’t mentioned what had happened to Suga or Asahi or any of the team, partially because maybe it didn’t matter, and partially because he really didn’t want it to matter. He tried to remind himself that Oikawa was right, in that just because his father had lied, it didn’t mean he was inherently covering up something horrible and scary. After all, Daichi didn’t believe in aliens, or monsters, so maybe something genuinely dangerous had fallen from the sky, and there was a relatively normal reason for them to be keeping the public away from it. 

There are a couple of Miyagi teams at the little training camp. ‘Camp’ is a very generous definition. Inspired by the Fukurodani Academy Group, they’d been trying to build relations with local schools to train together regularly. Johzenji had been quick to agree, and Date Tech, too, had been happy to have people to consistently through their wall up again. They mostly met up after school and evenings now, but Coach Ukai was excited about the prospect of hosting their own weekend camps soon.

This time, Aoba Johsai had, actually, agreed to participate. They’d been on the fence for a while, but something must have shifted. Johzenji and Date Tech were both thrilled by their appearance, and Daichi had noticed how much more energized Kageyama and Hinata were with the Seijoh kids in the mix of set rotations. 

(Shiratorizawa had rejected their proposal, though Daichi had seen a familiar, relentless look in Takeda’s eyes and honestly, he’d be impressed if even someone as stubborn as Coach Washijo could resist their teacher’s incredible capacity for making himself someone’s problem.)

Karasuno had just edged out a victory over Johzenji, only by two points, and were gladly letting the other team take their lap of dives while they cooled off. 

“Those guys are going to be a major issue next year,” Ennoshita is saying, as he stretches out his arms. 

“Yeah,” Tanaka laughs. “Let’s hope they get some dud first years. Otherwise their team will be damn annoying.”

“It won’t even matter,” Narita groans. “Basically everyone we just played is still going to be here for another year, even if their first years suck , they’ll have months to train them before they ever need a new starter.”

“We’ll just need to figure out how to manage them, then,” Ennoshita says. “Like we always do.”

Daichi, in other circumstances may have jumped in, but he figured that they had a pretty good handle on their morale as it was. He listens to the conversation and tries to catch his breath, watching, out of the corner of his eye, the Seijoh kids come wandering over, stretching and laughing. They’d also just won their last game.

He can see Kageyama glaring across the court to where they were laughing amongst each other, looking like they were actually having fun, which Daichi admitted was a little odd for the usually uptight team. That being said, when Oikawa was in a good mood, they were generally rather jovial - and winning a set would do that to a person. 

And then-

“Oh! Sawamura!” Oikawa sings, patting Iwaizumi’s back as a goodbye before pulling away from the team and skipping over to them. He ducks under the net in a smooth motion, popping up on their side without much warning. 

Out of the corner of his eye, Daichi watches Hinata raise his hands up, as if ready to chop Oikawa in the neck if he got too close. He also notices Kageyama mouthing Sawamura in reply - Daichi struggles to pin down the emotion he’s expressing, before realizing that Kageyama’s confusion is simply at the fact that it’s not him that is the object of interest for his old rival. 

“Yeah?” Daichi replies, capping his water bottle. 

“I wanted to show you something,” he says, waving his phone to emphasize the point before opening it up and flipping through his tabs.

“Oh, okay-” Daichi leans in, as Oikawa finds what he’s looking for and lowers his phone down for him. 

It takes him a second to figure out what he’s looking at, before he realizes it’s a photo of a massive building, looking a little rundown but still glorious in its size and columns and windows. When Daichi doesn’t have any immediate reaction, Oikawa uses two fingers to zoom in to one of the windows where, Daichi will admit, there is a very fucked up looking face in the corner. 

“Ew,” he says, because it looks like the face’s features are distorted and twisted and it’s very unnerving. 

“Ew,” Oikawa echoes back, rather snidely. “Look, this is a clean, detailed picture, it’s no blurry security footage, it’s not something pulled off the internet, and-” and here he taps at the face. “That is a ghost. You cannot deny me that that is a freaky non-human something.”

“What do you mean it’s not something you pulled off the internet?” 

“I took this photo!” Oikawa says. “This is a haunted mansion out in Tokyo. Me and Iwaizumi went two years ago, and I took a ton of photos of the outside and all of them turned out normal except for this one with this freaky horrible spirit in it. In fact, I have three other photos taken at the same time and angle as this one that don’t have the face. Isn’t that proof enough?” 

Daichi raises an eye at him, before being unable to stop himself from breaking into laughter. 

“Hey!”

“Sorry! Just, no, it’s not. Your story isn’t-”

“Then let’s go!” Oikawa says. “Come on, it’ll be fun. Me and you can go up and get you proof of ghosts, and then you’ll believe me and stop being lame.”

“Why does this even matter to you?” Daichi laughed. “I don’t understand why this is a hill you’re willing to die on.”

“Because…” and he cuts himself off for a second, glancing around fervorously before lowering his voice and saying: “Your dad is covering up aliens, and I think-”

“You’re using me to learn government secrets,” Daichi says, scoffing. “That’s so rude! I’m not gonna spy on my dad for you!” 

Oikawa clasps his hands together - awkwardly around his phone. “That’s not what I’m asking! I’m asking you to give me a chance to prove ghosts are real!” 

“Mhm…”

“Please…?” Oikawa says, begging, and for the first time in his life Daichi is struck by an experience that the rest of Seijoh is more than overly familiar with - being on the victimized end of Oikawa Tooru’s painfully effective puppy eyes. “Come on, it’ll be fun…”

“... okay,” Daichi says, and the agreement is taken from him almost against his will. “But only because I have nothing else going on this weekend. Not because I think there’s any weight to your stupid little ghost mansion.”

“That’s everything I could ask for,” Oikawa says, clapping his hands in delight. “Thank you, thank you, you will not regret this. Oh! But do you think you could buy the train tickets? I think Iwaizumi’s going to break up with me if I ask him for anything else, and I haven’t had a job in like seven months.” 

Daichi squints at him. 

Oikawa is still looking at him with that tooth-rotting sweet expression on his face. 

“Fine,” he repeats, stiffly. “But don’t start thinking I’ve got some unlimited well of cash I’m able to spend. Only this once.”

Oikawa breaks into a grin that, as much as Daichi hates himself for thinking it, is very satisfying to have been the source of, clapping again before nodding. 

“Yes, sir,” he chirps. “You’re an angel, thank you, ah! This is going to be so much fun. I can’t wait. Okay-” and here Oikawa seems to lose his ability to exit a conversation gracefully, as his coach blows a whistle to announce everyone should get into their positions to start the set, and he reaches a hand up to pat Daichi’s head. “I gotta go whip your team’s ass now. Bye-bye!”
And without much else fanfare, Oikawa waltzes away and joins his team on the other side of the net. 

When Daichi turns around to get into his own position, he finds his entire time staring at him with wide, curious eyes. 

He doesn’t even know what to tell them, and instead just gives them all an awkward wave before hurrying to his first position. 

“Hey,” Asahi says, beside him, shifting awkwardly from heel to heel. “Not that it matters to me, but… uh… did you at some point become… become friends with… with Oikawa?”

Daichi chuckles. “Don’t be stupid.”

“I just… I just mean I’m pretty sure I just heard you agree to take a weekend trip to Tokyo with him, so I thought I’d… I’d ask…”

“Oh my god,” Daichi echoes back in shock. “I think I’m friends with Oikawa.”

 

---

 

It takes just under two hours to get from Sendai station into Tokyo. They don’t leave super early in the morning, since Oikawa had insisted it wasn’t really all that important to get there during the day. Fair enough. 

Daichi doesn’t mind getting to take the Saturday morning easy, working on finishing up homework he wouldn’t have another chance to do and fielding confused but entertained questions about his team regarding this unusual weekend activity with Aoba Johsai’s Great King. 

It’s relatively busy on the train, but that’s also relatively common, so they don’t blink twice. They sit shoulder to shoulder, and struggle to make small talk, though it gets easier once they’re out of the city and properly settled into the ride.

He was a little surprised that Iwaizumi wasn’t accompanying them, he’d gotten the impression that they’d been a duo in this whole affair, though as Oikawa advised, Iwaizumi tended to ‘prefer not to do any of this at all, actually,’ and had usually joined Oikawa out of a sense of obligation to prevent him from getting murdered in the night being somewhere he wasn’t supposed to be. 

Apparently Daichi going along was sufficient for him, and he was happy enough to let someone else handle his boyfriend’s crazy. 

The sun is already setting when they arrive at their station. Daichi lets Kumo pull him forward and off the train, Oikawa just a couple steps behind them. 

“Did you have to bring that thing?” he says, eyeing Kumo as the dog began sniffing around at all the new scents and trails, excited by the busy city rumble. 

“If I’m buying the tickets, I can bring who I like,” Daichi replies. 

Oikawa just grumbles about that because he can’t really argue it, crossing his arms. “Whatever. At least we-”

“Oh my god is that a dog?”

The voice is too loud and very excited, and before Daichi can even think to react, none other than Bokuto Kotaro has crashed into their personal space with a one-track mind to shower the dog in affection. 

Kumo liked attention, so when Bokuto grabs his face and scruff and goes to town on him, he responds with a happy sort of chuff, mouth open. Bokuto opens his mouth in response. They seem to have a connection. 

“Nobody told me you had a dog!” Bokuto says, before either Daichi or Oikawa could think to say something, looking up at them as he wrapped his arms fully around Kumo’s neck. “Can I have him?”

“What? No-”

“Well I would have told you but,” Kuroo’s voice cuts in, slipping through the crowd. “But I didn’t want you vibrating off the walls all day waiting.”

Bokuto nods solemnly, before going back to what he was doing, scratching at the dog’s floppy ears. 

Daichi reaches a hand out to greet Kuroo with a fistbump, and Oikawa cuts in with: 

“Excuse me? Who are you?” in a rather annoyed way, which made a bit of sense because Daichi figured he wasn’t used to not being in control. 

“Oh, right,” he says, beckoning to Kuroo. “This is a friend of mine, Kuroo. He’s ah - he’s captain of the Nekoma volleyball team,” Daichi says. “I figured we could use a Tokyo guide, as well as someone to let us crash on his couch. Motels are hard to find on the weekend.”

Oikawa blinked. “Oh, well, okay. What about-” and he looks down to where Bokuto has put his face into Kumo’s neck. 

“That’s Bokuto,” Daichi says, followed by: “I don’t know why he’s here.”

“Ah, that would be me,” Kuroo says. “Sorry, when you texted me I forgot that Akaashi was away this weekend with his grandparents so…” he looked down at Bokuto. “He sorta needs constant attention to stay alive, so I told him you’d be cool if he tagged along.”

Daichi shrugs. “I have no problems with it.”

“I wish I’d been advised ahead of time,” Oikawa scoffed. “I’m not exactly looking to have two deadweights dragging me down all night. We are here for ghost hunting , not a social call, so if you’re not going to take that seriously-”

“Oh!” Kuroo says, nodding eagerly and pulling a bag around from behind him to dig through, producing a neat fabric carrier bag and pulling a very nice looking camera out from it. “Yeah, Sawamura told me all about it. I’m excited.”

“Oh, what’s that?” Daichi says, tilting his head to see the camera. Oikawa is eyeing him with tentative curiosity, not quite willing to accept him but clearly more interested now that he seems on board with it all. 

Kumo makes a soft boofing noise. Bokuto mimics it back. 

“Well, Kenma does this streaming game… thing, He films a lot of games, so I asked if I could borrow his camera for the night,” Kuroo says. “It’s super fancy, it’s got like the night vision stuff and all, high quality. Figured it would help us catch any paranormal freaks that make an appearance tonight.” 

Daichi frowns. “You’re taking this far more seriously than I thought you would.”

“Oh I’m always serious about ghosts,” Kuroo replies, turning to look at Daichi, almost challengingly. 

Oikawa nods, reaching forward to pat Kuroo’s shoulder. “Alright, you’re in. I’m tentative about your weird friend but I like you.”

Kuroo nods back firmly, accepting the friendship before nodding to Daichi. 

“Come on,” he says. “Let’s get out of here. The place isn’t so far away but the sun’s already going down.”

Daichi nods an agreement and as Kuroo turns to lead them out of the station, Bokuto hops back up to his feet, getting directly into Daichi’s face. 

“Can I hold the leash? Please? Please let me hold the leash.”

“Uh… okay, but-” and before he can finish the sentence, Bokuto has grabbed the end from his hand and taken off after Kuroo. Kumo, confused as to why he’s being taken away from his boy, is only hesitant for a second before the leash tugs on his neck and he falls in line obediently. 

“You could have warned me,” Oikawa says, elbowing Daichi. “That you’d invited others.”

“I told you, if I’m gonna be buying the tickets, I'll invite who I’d like.”

This only gets another grumble from him, because once again, he can’t really argue it. 

 

---

 

The haunted mansion isn’t in Tokyo proper, but up to the east of Saitama, towards the mountains. They have one more quick, local, train hop over, before they’re trekking up the streets as the night falls, towards where an old, elegant building is set up away from the local residential neighbourhoods. It’s an interesting mix of traditional Japanese architecture and more modern sensibilities, and Daichi struggles to pick out any clear indication of time period or age. 

“So what makes this place haunted?” Daichi asks, half a step behind Oikawa as he leads them up the hill towards the gate. Kuroo and Bokuto are some distance back, distracted by the camera and panning around the neighbourhood, snickering with each other. 

“Oh, plenty,” Oikawa replies, waving the question off. “I mean, it was the home of a local daiymo when it was originally built, and reportedly the family only saw tragedy after tragedy, his wife had three miscarriages before dying with the fourth child in childbirth. His second wife was significantly younger than him, yet also passed before him due to a chronic lung condition. When his third wife finally had a child, a baby boy, there were rumours that the daiymo was not the father, and the woman had become pregnant through a demon in her desperation to provide a son. The child was apparently a nightmare, growing up spoiled and narcissistic and violent. When his father passed, and he took over the land, it was an all-time low for this area.”

Daichi leans in as he speaks, and Oikawa unlatches the gate to open it, slipping up the stone path towards the main entrance. At this point, Kuroo and Bokuto have caught up, following them in. 

“The son was tyrannical in his rule, over-taxed the peasant, spent lavishly, reportedly tried to have anyone who countered him killed. The shogun at the time probably would have mobilized against him if he’d lived long enough, but a sudden and violent illness took him out, much to the people’s pleasure. However , they do say his soul was so rotten that when he died, he was transformed into an oni that still resides in the trees around the mansion,” Oikawa says. “People report finding animal carcasses, or having pets disappear. They don’t let their children into the woods for that reason.”

“Ooh,” Kuroo purrs, swiveling his camera around to the forest down the hill. “So we gotta go in there.”

“Well, the forest may have the oni, but the house itself plays host to numerous ghosts and spirits - the daiymo’s first wife is said to haunt the uppermost levels and their bedroom, as well as numerous serving staff and ghosts of the victims of the demon son. It was briefly inhabited by a family in the early nineteen hundreds, but they reported having so many problems that they almost had the place destroyed. Then, in the fifties, an unexplainable fire started in the dead of night and killed every member of the family that had been living there. No survivors. The ghosts of that family are known to make moaning noises, tapping noises, and will snuff out any candles that you light.”

Kuroo whistles softly. “That’s one haunted building.”

“I know,” Oikawa replies, grinning. 

Daichi isn’t so sure about that. (He was pretty sure wiring in the fifties was well established to cause plenty of otherwise unexplainable fires.)

“How did you… get permission to come in here?” Daichi says, as the small group heads up to the entrance of the home. 

“Mhm? Oh, well the owner now has it set up for ghost tours or investigators, it appears on many TV shows. But I’ve known her for a while now, she’s always so sweet and willing to do a favour if you butter her up right.”

Daichi thinks about this for a moment, before saying: “What’s her name?”

“Ito Hotaru,” Oikawa replied. “Why?”

Daichi pulls out his phone. “Don’t worry about it.”

Oikawa hesitates slightly, before heading up to the door and carefully unlocking it, pulling the door open into the stale, dust-filled darkness inside, peering in for a moment before pulling a flashlight out of his bag. 

“Oh, baby,” Kuroo sings. “I already kinda hate this.”

“It’s so cool though!” Bokuto replies, taking Kumo and leading him into the house, pushing past Oikawa to do so. “I want to see a ghost!”

“Just calm down-” Oikawa tries, scrambling in after him. “Do you have a light or something?”

“Oh? Uh… I can use my phone-"

“Ito Hotaru,” Daichi interrupts, hesitating at the entrance to the house, eyeing the shadow, heavy shadows that cling to everything. He focuses on the glow of his phone. “She owns three locations around Saitama all renowned for their haunted nature as well as a ghost-walk business called Ghosts of the Countryside .” 

Oikawa turns around. “Mhm?”

Daichi stares at him. “Just saying.”

“Yeah, she’s interested in ghosts,” he replies, waving it off. “Why the hell else would someone own a haunted property?”

“Dude,” Daichi starts, but before he can say anything, Kuroo has shoved him and forced him to stumble into the dark first room. He feels the breath that gets sucked down into his lungs, holding it there as he turns around, glaring at Kuroo. 

“Just shush, you’re ruining it,” Kuroo says. “Now come on, I wanna see some ghosts.” 

“Yeah! Ghosts!” Bokuto says, bouncing into the air. He moves to take off in a sprint towards a staircase, but Oikawa grabs him by the collar before he can, yanking him back. 

“Chill out,” Oikawa says. 

“But-” Bokuto sighs, before nodding. “Fine.”

Oikawa lets go of him, and Bokuto fumbles around to pull out his phone to use as a flashlight. Daichi is about to turn on his own torch light, when Oikawa hands him a heavy, black-handled flashlight instead. 

“I brought two,” he says. 

Daichi grins, reaching to take it from him and flick it on. “Thanks.”

He doesn’t love the way the sharp light of the flashlight makes the shadows jump and jolt around the room, and though he’s not convinced ghosts or demons are real in any way, there’s something deeply disturbing about a house that is left so undisturbed, about the emptiness of something so lived in and with such a track record for tragedy. Daichi may not think ghosts are living here, but the fact that nobody is living here makes the couches and tables and lamps on the shelves disturbing in their own right. 

He doesn’t even realize he’s started to wander off until he hears Bokuto asking how they’re supposed to find ghosts. 

“Yeah, don’t we need to like… talk to them or something?” Kuroo says. 

“Uh, usually, yeah…” Oikawa agrees, shifting his weight slightly. “Uh…” 

Daichi frowns slightly, trying to be respectful and not direct his flashlight directly into anyone’s eyes, but struggling to figure out what the hesitancy was about. He heads back over to them. 

Kuroo seems to be waiting patiently, and it’s not until Daichi has a relatively clear look at Oikawa that he realizes his hesitation is from embarrassment. Oh…

Daichi tried not to chuckle, casting his light around the room one more time before, somewhat hesitantly, calling out: 

“If there are any ghosts here, we, ah… we come in peace? My friend here just wants to prove you’re real, so… I mean if you don’t like us being here, just be a pal and bang some pots together or something and we can get out of here.” 

Oikawa is looking at him in surprise, but nothing replies to the callout, so Daichi tries again: 

“I mean it! Apparently there’s a ton of dead spirits here. I don’t believe it, y’know. If you find that disrespectful or whatever… uh… flick on a light, or… smack me, or whatever ghosts-” he turns over to Oikawa, and catches himself lowering his voice as if worried the ghosts would hear: “what do ghosts do?”

“No you pretty much got it, you’re doing great,” Oikawa replies, patting his shoulder. 

“Alright, so… I’m gonna just take a little tour of your home…” Daichi says slowly, kicking a leg around for a second before slowly beginning to wander to the next room, where he could see light from a window lighting up a kitchen. “If you want to show yourselves or whatever… do that, or… something. Make a little noise, do a little dance. Honestly it won’t matter to me.”

“Yeah!” Bokuto calls, much louder. “Hit the wall, like this!” 

And then Bokuto turns around and absolutely smacks one of the support beams of the house, immediately whimpering and clutching at his hand in pain. 

“Or not like that,” Kuroo says. “Maybe just like… whisper or something. Tap the wall. Sing a song. If you’re able to affect lights, that’s some good shit.” 

Daichi explores the kitchen, with Oikawa just half a step behind him, two beams of light zipping around to take it all in. He feels Oikawa slip away, through the kitchen and towards the staircase, to look up to the second floor. He can hear Bokuto and Kuroo both still shouting to the ghosts, more muffled as they move off in the other direction. 

The kitchen is another study in faux living, a row of pans and pots and kitchenware set up but never to be used, a table with a beautiful table runner that probably hasn’t needed to be washed in a decade. It’s unused and unlived in, but there are no cobwebs and no dust. 

He hears a creak of some kind, and spins around to toss the flashlight up into the doorway, expecting to see someone joining up, but finds it empty, and himself utterly alone in the kitchen. 

He chuckles softly. Old houses… 

There’s another creak. 

Old house. 

Footsteps? It sounds like footsteps, it sounds like someone just walked into the kitchen but nobody is here-

Old house.

He’s taking cautious steps away from the dark doorway, keeping his eyes on it. He can hear the creak of his own footsteps as he walks, which both comforts him, to know it’s a normal sound, and makes him very annoyed to have confirmation that that’s definitely the sound footsteps make. 

There’s a creak right on top of his own step, and he feels something cool brush across his cheek, like a draft of air has made its way into the still room. 

With goosebumps over his neck he whips around to the other kitchen doorway, and his flashlight lights up a massive, hulking-

Daichi is screaming, and then not screaming within the same second, heart in his throat as his brain identifies Oikawa standing in the door, seeming no less startled by Daichi’s brief panic. 

“Woah,” Oikawa says, putting his hands up. 

“Oh my god it’s just you,” Daichi replies, leaning his hands on his knees and bending over. “Fuck.” 

“Uh… sorry, did-”

“No, just - I could hear you walking, I guess, around the house, and-”

“Well I was-” and Oikawa turns and nods further into the next room. 

Daichi looks back to the other doorway. Probably not possible for Oikawa’s footsteps to echo like that…

“Kuroo and Bokuto are making noise, I think, I just got rattled, I…” he swallows, nodding to himself and straightening up. “Too many people in this house.”

Oikawa arches an eye up, before nodding. “Sure.”

Daichi stares at him for a moment, before turning around slowly to let his light explore the kitchen one more time, before brushing past Oikawa and into the next room. He is not afraid of the stupid old house and its fake ghosts. 

He is, generally, afraid of things that he cannot explain. 

Ghosts aren’t real, but I did hear creaking. 

So something was creaking. 

It’s an old house. 

Bokuto and Kuroo are here…

He lets his heart rate return to normal, looking around what looks like a living space, and feeling less concerned about the footsteps he hears behind him as Oikawa comes wandering past him, holding something heavy in his hand, and setting it on a coffee table. 

“What’s that?”

“Candle,” Oikawa says, setting the candle down and striking a match to light it. He flicks his wrist to kill the ember on the match, and the little red glow blooms up into a nice, wavering glow. 

“Right, because the ghosts don’t like candles,” Daichi says. “Do you carry candles everywhere, or-”

“Obviously not. I planned for this trip specifically.”

Daichi nodded along. “Obviously.”

Oikawa glares at him for a moment, before taking a few steps back from the candle and calling: 

“Okay, I’ve just lit this candle here. If you don’t want it lit, you should snuff it out for me. I promise I won’t relight it, but you need to put it out to let me know.” 

Daichi waits in silence, the beam from his flashlight looking over portraits of long dead men and women, and the clock on the wall. It’s not even midnight yet. 

When nothing happens, Daichi calls: “It would be super cool, if you could, like, put out that candle.”

More silence. 

“If you don’t let us know…” Oikawa starts. “We’re going to assume it’s totally okay to just leave this candle burning all night. So you definitely need to let us know now, before we go.” 

They both fall into silence again. Daichi doesn’t expect the candle to be put out, but it’s fun anyway, to listen in anticipation, imagine how genuinely cool it would be if the candle suddenly went out. But nothing like that happens. 

He thinks he hears creaking behind him, but pays no mind. He’s learned his lesson. 

And then something soft is brushing against his waist. 

It’s the jump scare on it’s own - separate from the idea of anything haunting them - that has him shrieking and leaping around, flailing to hit at whatever might be there. He can hear Kuroo cackling, the taller man grabbing his wrists before Daichi could whack him with the flashlight. 

“Dude,” Kuroo snickers, as Daichi feels his blood pressure begin to drop and his head get dizzy. “You’re so jumpy, it’s just me.”

“Don’t… don’t- mmmmh-” and Daichi collapses forward, putting his head on his shoulder. “I hate you so much. Don’t do that. You had to have known that would happen.”

Kuroo still laughs, patting his head for a moment before saying: “Yeah I did. Anyway, it’s boring in here so me and Bokuto are gonna go see if we can find the oni in the woods.”

Daichi lifts his head up to look at him. “Eh?”

“Yeah, Oikawa said there was some evil oni lurking in the woods, so I’m gonna go see if I can feed it Bokuto.”

“I thought you believed in ghosts.”

“I do.”

Daichi pulls himself to stand up properly, running a hand through his hair. “But - I mean, you seem entirely unbothered by-”

“Oh, well, yeah, I believe in ghosts , but I don’t believe in every ghost, I’m not stupid,” Kuroo snickers. “This place is chill, I dunno. I wanna see if there’s anything in the woods.” 

“Chill, sure,” Daichi says. “Leave Kumo outside, he’ll stay put.” 

“Aww, we wanted to take him-”

“Into the woods where animals get murdered a lot? Nope.”

“I thought you didn’t believe in all this.”

“I don’t. I don’t think there’s a demon in the woods, but I do know that animals keep dying so something is in the woods. Both can be true.” 

Kuroo nods at that. “True. Alright, we’ll leave the pup. See you-”

“See you,” Oikawa sings back, making Daichi jump again, having not heard him move so close over his shoulder. 

When Kuroo retreats, Daichi can hear Bokuto’s brief wail of despair being informed he couldn’t keep the dog, before their footsteps receded and he heard them shut the front door. 

Daichi lets his breath out. 

Okay, he had to get his shit together. 

He glances back to the candle, still burning, and then up at Oikawa. 

“Where to?” he chirps. 

“Upstairs?”

“Fantastic.”

With one more call to the ghosts informing them that they’d be leaving that candle burning and leaving the room, Daichi heads to the stairs and follows Oikawa’s lead upwards. 

The stairs creak, the walls seem too narrow, the upstairs level has more natural light and somehow that makes the shadows more threatening. Oikawa seems unbothered by the dark, but moves with cautious and deliberate movements. Daichi is very bothered by every seemingly endless dark corner, but he doesn’t understand why Oikawa is acting like they’ve broken into someone’s home. 

“Here,” Oikawa hisses eventually, from the other end of a long hallway, waving him over. Daichi pulls his head back from where he was checking out a bathroom, and heads towards Oikawa, passing the staircase in the process and-

He stops, pointing his flashlight down the stairs. The empty stairs. 

“What?” he hears Oikawa ask. 

“Nothing, just… something in the corner of my eye. This place is starting to play tricks on me,” Daichi replies, before tearing his gaze away from the stairs and heading over to him. 

Oikawa is nudging open a door, into a large room, the master bedroom. The blinds are shut tight, making the room much darker than Daichi would like, but he doesn’t hurry to run in and open them up. Oikawa moves in slowly, as if scared of disturbing the occupants of this very empty room. 

“So this is that haunted-as-shit bedroom, yeah?” Daichi asks, slowly. 

“Mhm…”

“So…”

“Hello?” Oikawa calls out, tentatively. “Is… is anyone here? If someone’s here and is willing to speak with us, please give us a sign. A tap, or… or a footstep…”

Daichi heads the opposite way as Oikawa, slowly looking over the decorated wall and bedding set up. Another unlived in living space. He heads to the window, peering past the blinds to look out. It overlooks the forest, and he can see flashes of light from between the trees, as Kuroo and Bokuto messed around. 

“I’m not sure if you remember me, I was here a few years ago…” Oikawa says, slowly, and Daichi can hear him step into the middle of the room. “My name is Oikawa, Tooru - this is my friend Sawamura. We don’t mean any harm, we just want to speak with you…”

Daichi pulls back from the window to look around the room. 

“Yeah,” he joins in eventually. “We just wanna talk. We heard this room might have a spirit living in it that had a very unhappy life, the… first wife of a daiymo - what was her name?” 

“Chidori,” Oikawa supplies. “We heard you might still be here…”

“So if you… uh… if you’re lonely,” Daichi tries. “If you want to talk…”

They both fall into silence, but the silence this time is far from pleasant or comfortable. If Daichi was inclined to be more superstitious, he’d call it an intentional silence. Not like nobody was there, but like someone was holding their tongue, and not speaking to them.

“We don’t mean any harm…” Oikawa tries again, turning slowly to look over one of the dressers, an arrangement of old art and pictures set up. “We just want to talk…”

Daichi lets his breath out. 

There was nothing here. It was just a freaky old house and he was psyching himself out over nothing. 

“Do we have another way to talk to the ghosts?” Daichi asks. “Like… What if this lady isn’t strong enough to do anything physical? And she’s just… wondering why we expect her to talk?”

Oikawa blinks for a moment, before saying: “Ah, well… I mean… Apart from the flashlight, I ah… there’s a way to make it blink, like… so that ghosts have an easier time affecting it, but… I don’t have any… any of the fancy equipment…”

Daichi hummed, before nodding slightly. “Well let's do the flashlight-”
There’s a step. He’s sure there’s a step - he’s also sure Kuroo and Bokuto have left for the forest. He sees Oikawa looking at him with a very focused, slightly freaked out look. 

“That was a footstep,” he says, whispering again. 

“Sure,” Daichi says, immediately thinking of whatever he’d caught out of the corner of his eye. “But Kumo is downstairs, he might have just sat down.”

“...who?”

“My dog.”

“Stupid. But we don’t know where the dog is , right? Like what if they tied it up away from the house?”

“...that’s true, but still, it’s more likely-”

Movement catches his attention, and both Daichi and Oikawa spin around as if an explosion had gone off, flashlights locking onto that heavy curtain, as it puffed and billowed gently outwards. 

He feels his shoulder bump Oikawa’s, goosebumps crawling uncomfortably up his spine and into his hair, flashlight, in a shaking hand, roaming the edge of the window and desperately searching for any sign of a crack or opening that would be letting the wind in. There is none. 

 

---

 

The woods really aren’t that big. In fact, Kuroo would be more inclined to label them as a park or greenstrip rather than genuine woods or forest. Regardless of that, it’s rather overgrown, likely due to people’s resistance to stepping foot in it. He kicks tangled stems of a bush off from around his ankle, lifting the camera up to peer through its lens into the forest, the night vision setting lighting up the screen in pale greens and dark blacks. 

“You know I didn’t really think this night would involve wandering through the woods,” Bokuto says, stretching his arms up above his head. He’s seemed relatively unbothered by everything so far, though Kuroo hasn’t yet gotten a read on whether or not he actually believes in ghosts. He’s pretty sure he remembers Bokuto talking about them as if he thought they were real, but maybe he’s just interested in the exploration. 

“You didn’t have to come,” Kuroo reminds him. “You said you had nothing better to do.”

“I didn’t,” he agreed. “I don’t. Also, who is that other guy?”

“I’m sorry?” Kuroo lifts his head from the camera, looking over to Bokuto. “Which guy?”

“The guy Daichi brought! I missed his name during introductions and it’s been way too long, I can’t ask now.” 

Kuroo snickers. “Oikawa,” he says. “He’s a big deal or something, up in Miyagi.” 

“Big deal?”

“Volleyball,” Kuroo replies, and Bokuto nods solemnly, as if there were no other explanation for a ‘big deal’ in the world at all. “Kenma says Hinata says Kageyama talks about him a lot. I think it’s a whole thing.” 

“Oooh,” Bokuto says, nodding in understanding before saying: “And who’s Kageyama?” 

Before Kuroo can reply to that one, a distinct rustling from his right catches his attention, and he turns the camera, and Bokuto turns his light over to where it was. 

Nothing. 

“Animal,” Kuroo says. 

“Right…”

“Daichi made a good… a good point, though…” Kuroo adds. “Even if there aren’t any demons or anything… something does kill animals in these woods.”

“Oh. Uh… like, what, a bear? Bobcat?”

“Bears wouldn’t live in a tiny strip of woods,” Kuroo replies, before frowning and looking over at him. “And there aren’t any bobcats in Japan, you dunce.” 

“I’m just saying,” Bokuto scoffs, before turning his light slowly to look around-

More rustling. 

Kuroo stumbles back on reflex, feeling his back bump into Bokuto as he watches a bush wave and rustle. 

“Mhm… Fuck off!” Bokuto shouts, faking a step forward as if to intimidate the bush. “If you’re a demon or a… or a bobcat or something, just fuck off! Get out of here!”

“Yeah!” Kuroo says, less confidently, before lowering his voice: “Maybe we should go?”

“Maybe we should go…” Bokuto agrees, chuckling awkwardly before a soft, humming sort of noise reaches their ears, and both of them freeze in place. It’s not… deep , and it’s… not nearby, it might be… in the trees behind them-

Kuroo turns around, but when he takes a step back, trying to see what the noise might be, he feels his foot hit a knotted root, and he’s crashing into the ground before he can stop himself. 

“Dude!”

He groans, rolling over onto his side and lifting his head and-

The bushes ahead of him, directly, are tangled and leafy, but he can see through their stems against the ground, and through their stems, it’s… it’s shadow-

It’s in the distance, a refraction of moonlight-

It’s just pareidolia. 

“F-fuck,” Kuroo says, feeling his voice crack over the curse as he tries to get to his feet. He’s about to try and make a joke about the person his brain thought was stomach-down in the dirt three feet from him, when he hears Bokuto shriek:

“Shit-shit-shit- what is that?”

And Kuroo doesn’t have the emotional power to even pretend he’ll stick around any longer, but even if he did, Bokuto is already dragging him to his feet and they’re hauling ass out of the woods. 

 

---

 

Daichi uses his flashlight to bat at the waving curtains, nose scrunching up in annoyance. 

“Just a draft from somewhere,” he says. 

“A draft from where?”

“Somewhere.”

Oikawa hummed a response, looking around the room. “Look, I think we should-”

Someone is screaming. It’s a sudden noise that sends the fear of God through him for half a second, and even Oikawa jumps this time, spinning around and grabbing Daichi’s arm, staring at him with wide eyes. 

“Is that Bokuto?” Oikawa says. 

“I think-”

Daichi stumbles to the window, shoving the curtains aside to look down to the grass, just in time to see Kuroo and Bokuto comes sprinting out of the woods, shrieking and cursing, and once they were close enough, Daichi could hear the muffled words:

“Nope! Fuck that, fuck that, fuck it all, go- go! Go, Christ-”

“Uh, okay, shit,” Daichi starts, backing up. “I think we’re going, something must have-”

“Uh-huh,” Oikawa agrees, and they turn together to hurry out of the room. 

Daichi takes the steps down two at a time, hearing Bokuto and Kuroo getting even louder before their footsteps hit the porch, and he hears Kumo give a few uncertain, warning woofs as their frantic energy invades his world. 

Daichi is expecting to sprint to front entrance, but when he reaches the bottom of the stairs he cracks face-first into Oikawa’s back. 

“Dude! Go!” he shouts, but when he looks to see what Oikawa is staring at, he finds that it’s the candle. The now unlit candle. 

Oikawa seems frozen, so Daichi shoves past him and grabs the candle from the table. 

“Look if there was a draft upstairs, there was a draft downstairs,” Daichi says. “Draft old house, nothing to freak out-”

“Something’s in the woods!” Kuroo comes in shrieking. “Something is in the woods with a horrible face and it was on the ground like a fucking animal and it looked human and Boktuo saw it and I saw it and it’s probably still there and oh my god what if it followed us-”

Kuroo spins around at that, which is a mistake, because Bokuto is right behind him and now Kuroo is screaming because Bokuto was so close, and then Bokuto is screaming because Kuroo is screaming, and then Kumo is howling in despair to join in. 

“Shut up!” Daichi shouts, and though it gets both Kuroo and Bokuto to shut up, it’s only for a second before Kuroo lunges at him, grabs him by the collar of his jacket and yanks him through the house. 

“We are going! We’re going right now! Right now!”

Oikawa is quick to stumble along behind them, and Daichi only stops to pick up Kumo’s leash before he lets Kuroo and Bokuto’s manic energy ferry them off into the neighbourhood and away from this mansion. 

 

---

 

The adrenaline crash comes the moment they’re under the warm yellow street lamp light, away from the mansion and in the cold air. Kuroo looks visibly sick, heaving in breaths that did not seem to cooperate with his lungs, and even Bokuto managed to look more frenzied than he usually did. Daichi could see his hands literally shaking. 

To calm down, from the screaming and the panic and crazy, they find themselves in a midnight diner outside a train station, crowded around a little table in various states of disarray. 

Daichi’s mildly worried they actually did find something in the woods, and they should call the cops, but they keep describing it as not quite human and very horrible and scary and honestly he’s just going to assume they’d spooked themselves in the dead of night, like he’d done. 

Either way, in the warm light of the diner and with the nice staff serving them warm if not slightly poor quality ramen, it’s easy to relax and come down from the insanity. 

“I can’t believe it,” Oikawa laughs, shaking his head and poking around in his dish. “I can’t believe you guys actually found the oni, that’s insane.”

“They did not,” Daichi snickered. “They spooked themself in the dark.”

“No, no, we saw something,” Kuroo says, pointing at them. 

“Come on,” Daichi laughs, leaning on the table. “We were all amped up and jittery, you just saw a weird tree or something and your imagination got carried away. It was a spooky house! We didn’t even last an hour.” 

Bokuto grumbles in response, and Oikawa leans over to him, snickering. 

“Well maybe you can’t last an hour~” 

“Stop it!” Daichi says, whacking at him in response to shove him and his smug face away. 

Oikawa flinches back, and although he’s laughing he looks like he’s in pain, blinking rapidly, before leaning over and lifting a hand to his face. Before Daichi can ask what’s wrong, Oikawa’s giggling voice comes back with: 

“Fucking hell, dude, you knocked my contact out of place.”

Daichi snorted, as Oikawa tries to right the contact without needing to go to the bathroom, but before he can make a comment along the lines of ‘oh I didn’t know you wore contacts,’ Bokuto is screaming in horror and shouting:

“Oh my god, why are you touching your eye?”

 

---

 

Kuroo had always had a habit of just sort of entering his house and room, which Kenma has grown more than used to enough. 

It’s late even for him, though - actually, Kenma would say it’s early, about five in the morning. (He’d just woken up, intending to try and blast through some levels of his game before his mother realized he was awake.)

He glances up as Kuroo enters, his friend displaying his black camera for him. “Here,” he says. “Thanks for letting us borrow it.”

Kenma smiles. “Ah, no problem. Did you have fun?”

“... fun is… fun… fun?”

Kenma frowns slightly, wondering what Kuroo is struggling over, before he notices Kuroo yawning and swaying on his feet. 

“Wait, did you just get back?”

“Mhm… well, Daichi and Oikawa are crashing at my place - we took Bokuto home first… ah-” he cuts himself off with another yawn. “It was… oh, god, I don’t know… if you wanna look, the footage is still on the camera, I couldn’t figure out how to delete it. But I have it saved on… uhm… the little… the little data stick-”

“USB drive?”

“That’s the one. Sorry, I’m very tired…”

“I can tell. Don’t worry, you can… get some rest-”

Kuroo nods an agreement, and there’s not much else to say as he leaves the camera on the bed and shuffles on to head back to his place to, hopefully, get some rest. 

Kenma waits until the door is shut, before curiosity overwhelms him, and he gets up to grab his camera, settling into bed to check through the footage. There was something oddly pleasing about getting to see Kuroo’s stupid face having so much fun doing something so silly. 

And it is silly. He likes the way Kuroo and Bokuto talk to each other, he likes the way Daichi keeps rolling his eyes, he likes the way that Oikawa talks about the house with something near reverence. It’s entertaining. He likes it. And then-

He’s laughing at Kuroo and Bokuto freaking out in the woods, when Kuroo trips. He can hear the audio muffled by the ground, but the camera is angled-

He pauses the footage, squinting as he leaned in to try and look closer. 

It’s just a shadow. It’s just a shadow, but he’s sure … he’s sure… 

It looks like something, on the ground in the bushes. He can see the head and the shoulders and the eyes, just…

Well it looks like every other spooky film…

Is it a prank?

No, Kuroo wouldn’t… he wouldn’t even know how to edit the footage on the camera itself , unless this was all practical effects.

Did Kuroo even know it was there? 

He had acted weird, but given the way he was screaming at the end of that footage, it was clear he was rattled… why didn’t he mention thinking he’d seen something? 

Well maybe nothing’s there… it might just be shadows, but…

Well…

He gets up and heads over to his desk, opening his laptop and finding the chord for the camera to plug it in. It was really cool footage. It was a really fun film that they had, with the banter between them and the horrifying catch on the camera’s lens, the way it ends. 

Kenma doesn’t have a huge following online or anything, but he’s been posting videos pretty regularly for a while, mostly just gameplay, and stuff he streams. He’s too shy, though. He doesn’t like talking to himself on camera, but…

He can’t help it. 

He starts importing all the video footage to his laptop, pretty sure Kuroo wouldn’t mind at all if he put together a highlights reel to show off. Just for their friends - for Hinata, who’d eat this shit up. It’s not like anyone is actually viewing his YouTube channel anyway. 

Notes:

long chapter
*wheeze*

Anyway, this was a lot of fun. Please don't be shy about leaving a comment or telling me what you think, I had an absolute blast with this chapter and I hope you all do too <3

xx

Chapter 3: Whispers in the Air

He’s not sure who shares the video - he suspects Hinata, but honestly Tora and Fukunaga can both be pretty mischievous if unsupervised, so he’s not sure. Either way, Kenma finds in just a few days that his funny little clipshow of the four idiots screaming and scaring each other had garnered a sudden and unexpected amount of attention. 

Well, that might be overstating things. It had 84 views. 

Significantly more views than Kenma would have ever anticipated, especially when combined with the fact that he had 34 comments.

What in the hell had happened?

He reasoned it made a certain amount of sense. Four captains had four volleyball teams. Assuming each team member watched it through once and nobody doubles up, that already accounts for 48 of the views at minimum, followed by any second-string bench warmers that didn’t go to games Kenma might not know about. Maybe a couple of friends, too, not on teams. Maybe a few classmates. Although it sometimes seemed unlikely he figured they might have friends outside of volleyball. 

So in Kenma’s mind he could easily rationalize 60 or so of the views, and from there, it was easy to say he’s underestimated these boys’ popularity (they did make a captainship after all, in relatively competitive schools), so you know what, maybe 84 wasn’t actually all that much. 

Plus, when he got the courage to look at the comments, his assumptions were quickly verified. He didn’t recognize most of the usernames, but most of the comments read to some degree of familiarity. 

Stuff like “lmao so this is why he couldn’t hang out this weekend??” and “embarrassed for the other teams that they managed to let Oikawa convince them ghosts were real tbh” and “Akaashi literally can’t leave the city for one fucking day can he?”

Kenma cannot help but giggle at some of the responses. It is… oddly charming to watch four rival volleyball teams unit almost instantly over their shared desire to drag the shit out of their captains. Either way, he only really responds to the names he recognizes.

Except for one comment that gets his attention. It takes Kenma a second to recognize the name, and then a second longer for him to remember why he recognizes the name, eventually realizing it was some odd volleyball player from Miyagi Hinata had, very briefly, been very concerned with: Goshiki Tsutomu. 

His comment reads: lmao if they wanted to find a ghost they didn’t need to go to Tokyo to do it,  Shiratorizawa’s been haunted as shit for years.

Kenma stares at that comment for a moment. He doesn’t love talking to strangers, but it’s a lot easier to do over comments like this, and he thinks, maybe, if nothing else it’ll be funny to tell people Shiratorizawa is haunted. 

So he sends back: What? Really? How so?

And this, Kenma discovers, opens Pandora’s box of Shiratorizawa shit that suddenly comes flooding in. He’s not even sure if it’s only the volleyball team, too. Just various students telling hilariously frantic stories to convince Kenma of this haunted school. 

No for real!!! One of the posts says, one of the dozens of replies to Goshiki’s original comment. Like I thought my brother was joking when he told me about it, but the amount of doors that have just slammed shut behind me, or items going missing or getting lost.

Another one, below, reads: That’s barely the tip of the iceberg. Once I felt someone breathing down my neck while I was walking through the courtyard - like, seriously, this overbearing, terrifying presence right over my shoulder and nobody was there!!!

And a third: And oh my GOD the lights seem to be ALWAYS broken. I swear, I almost shit myself leaving the seminar room in the evening once because that stupid third floor hallway just went completely dark on me. 

And a fourth: Don’t forget that girl who went missing.

And this comment brings a new slew of responses, almost all of them fighting over whether or not this was at all true. It seemed very divided. 

Amidst it all, Kenma gets another comment from Goshiki himself, replying directly to him that says:

Seriously though, if you want good ghost content you HAVE to come here. This place is a nightmare.

And Kenma is caught off guard by that. “If you want good ghost content.” 

“Ghost.”

“Content.”

“If you want.”

What the hell was he doing? Did he want good ghost content? No! He’d just posted this stupid little thing to make his friends laugh, this wasn’t supposed to be a… an anything. 

So he replies to Goshiki: haha I believe it. But unfortunately I think the boys were just messing around as a one time thing.

And this, much to Kenma’s horror and surprise, attracts the attention not just of the Shiratorizawa student body, but of the four volleyball teams and the friends they had spread it to. And it’s almost a unanimous outrage as his inbox is assaulted with comments. 

WHAT? NO I NEED TO SEE SHIRATORIZAWA NOW.

Nooooo KENMA please make Kuroo go to the horrible haunted school.

PLEASE I need this in my life go to the haunted school. 

HAUNTED SCHOOL NOW PLEASE. 

Not that I believe in ghosts but I would pay real money to watch these idiots run screaming out of the haunted school. 

PLEASE come to stz.

Kenma has no idea what to do with this. He can track a few of the schools involved - Seijoh, Fukurodani, he recognizes names from Nekoma, even Karasuno is getting in on begging.

He doesn’t know what to do except tell them that he’ll mention it to Kuroo and reach out to him. 

 

---

 

Daichi’s having a relatively normal day. Well, people are really committed to making fun of him for a video that Kenma had shared, but apart from that it’s been normal. He doesn’t really mind people making fun of him for it - he’d watched the stupid video himself, and it was pretty funny seeing the way Kenma had edited it together. (He’s pretty sure Kenma cut out any and all long stretches of time where nothing was happening. Bastard made the mansion look haunted.)

Suga finds it incredibly amusing, mostly since he knows Daichi has a negative belief in the paranormal, but it’s mostly Hinata and Tanaka and Noya who get in on teasing him. (Though Hinata sounds weirdly more focused on the fact of who he was with and not what they were doing.)

But he deals with it for the day and then goes home, and he thinks after a few days the novelty of the experience will wear off and things will return to normal. He considers mentioning the curious case of his father’s double life to Suga or Asahi, but when he thinks about it, there’s nowhere for that conversation to go but down. He didn’t want to hear either of his closest friends telling him his father was probably involved in a government conspiracy alien cover-up whatever . He was getting enough of that from Oikawa. 

(And, truthfully, he didn’t want to hear them say it because he didn’t want to have to debate them. He knew he’d win, but winning only implicated his father in something potentially worse. Honestly, covering-up aliens was significantly preferable to the idea that he might be covering-up murders or other crimes committed at the government’s behest, which he could argue successfully and at great personal cost.) 

And then his phone rang. 

“Hey dude,” Kuroo says, in a casual drawl that does nothing to put Daichi at ease. “Apparently there’s something freaky haunting Shiratorizawa, you in?” 

Daichi frowns, not having expected this response to “hello,” when he answered the phone.

“Well I think his name is Tendou,” Daichi says after a moment. “And you probably shouldn’t talk about people that way.”

“What?”

“Mhm?”

There’s a silence on the other end for a moment, before Kuroo says:

“No, Kenma says Shiratorizawa is haunted and apparently the whole world wants us to go investigate it.”

“The whole world?”

“Well, the whole of that school, and also my school, Bokuto's school, and Oikawa’s… also yours, dude, apparently they want nothing more than for us to get the ‘ole gang back together and go ghost hunting.” 

Daichi pinches the bridge of his nose. 

“I’m sorry?”

“Yeah Kenma was showing me the video, people really fucking liked it. Or they like laughing at us. Honestly it’s unclear. But come on, it’ll be fun. Plus it’s been so long since I’ve been to Miyagi. We can hang out! And arrange a playdate for Kenma and Hinata while we’re at it.”

“I wish you’d stop saying it like that,” Daichi sighs, before saying: “I dunno. I was really only there for Oikawa, and… as I say that out loud I hate it more than I did in the moment. It’s not really my scene, all this ghost shit…”

“Not your scene? Didn’t you have fun?”

“Mhm?”

“Like… I mean… why’d you agree to it the first time then, if you didn’t want to hang out with us?”

“Oh, I…” have a father in a secret government job and I got a little emotionally confused about it and let Oikawa take me on an adventure. “... I don’t know, I didn’t have anything going on, and… Oikawa was weirdly insistent…”

“Look, you don’t have to believe ghosts are real,” Kuroo says, after a moment. “Nobody’s gonna make you convert to a die-hard paranormal investigator. But… I dunno, I had fun. I didn’t think I’d like Oikawa but he’s like forty-percent less intolerable than Kenma made Hinata make Kageyama make him out to be.” 

“...sorry you lost me.”

“I’m just saying don’t do it ‘cause you like ghosts, do it because a bunch of underclassmen think we’re cool shit and you’re my friend.”

Daichi has to think about this for a moment, before sighing and saying: “Okay, okay, I will… reach out to Oikawa and see if he’s interested. But I’m not promising anything, okay? I’m not even sure what this would be. Will Shiratorizawa even let us do something like this?”

“I dunno. Kenma’s dealing with that. Or… Sorry, this dude Goshiki is dealing with that? I dunno. I’ll update.”

“...okay.”

“Great, also, can you spot me the cash for the train ticket?”

“... Dude.”

“It’s just a question. Feel free to say no but you’ll be breaking the hearts of nearly a hundred young ghost enthusiasts.”

“This is extortion.”

“Is it working?”

“Text me your email.” 

“Great, I’ll send Bokuto’s too.”

---

 

Shiratorizawa Academy had a significant portion of ‘live-in’ students. Some of them had come from quite far across Japan, most of them were relatively local in Miyagi or directly adjacent prefectures, and some of them were local enough that they were able to skip the dorms entirely and live at home, commuting to work. 

Goshiki was a part of that lattermost category. 

It wasn’t super relevant, most of the time, except for that only on-campus students could get permits for visitors. And on top of that, only third-year on-campus students could get permits for overnight visitors. 

Goshiki was only comfortable begging a few of his friends for favours.

He tried Tendou, who had immediately informed him that he was on a privileges suspension after getting caught sneaking back into the dorms after curfew. 

Leon was not one of them, but even if he was, he was leaving Shiratorizawa for the weekend to visit his girlfriend anyway , which he did every weekend. 

Semi was a better option. Unfortunately for Goshiki, when he asked, Semi informed him that he had had his visitor rights ‘temporarily suspended’ due to ‘improper school conduct’ on the part of some of his bandmates. (Goshiki would later find out that they broke an upper floor window.)

Which meant he had to suck it up and ask Ushijima, which was arguably the most terrifying thing Goshiki had ever done. 

Ushijima said no. 

Which meant Goshiki had to do not the most terrifying thing, but the most guilty thing he had ever had to do, a trick Semi had taught him only a few weeks after he had started on the team. 

Ask Tendou to ask Ushijima. 

“So let me get this straight,” Tendou says, and Goshiki has to put so much effort into paying attention to what he says, because as he speaks he unwraps a lollipop, puts it in his mouth, and bites down , shattering it off the stick. “You want me to convince Ushijima to sponsor a ghost hunting team, because people on the internet will think it’s cool?”

“Uh… yes? I mean - hey, I thought you’d be totally down for something like this. I mean, inviting some of the coolest volleyball guys into the school expressly to hunt ghosts? That’s pretty rad. Do you like ghosts, Tendou?” 

“Do I like ghosts?”

“Stupid question, off topic, sorry, just - please? There are like twenty guys from four other teams all banking on me getting those guys passes in. Don’t make me disappoint four teams across two prefectures,” Goshiki says, before clasping his hands together to emphasize his begging. “I’ll do whatever you want, promise.”

Tendou sighed, flicked the stick of the lollipop into the trash, and adjusted his bag over his shoulder, seeming to really think this through for a moment before saying: 

“Alright, but this is the last thing for a while. I need to save some of my good favour for my own purposes, y’know?”

“Please,” Goshiki scoffs, watching Tendou pull out his phone. “Ushijima’s so soft on you, I don’t think that’ll ever run out.”

Tendou rolls his eyes. “He is not that soft on me. Done.”

“Done?”

Tendou holds his phone up, shaking it slightly before saying: “You’ll regret promising me anything I want. Have fun~”

And before Goshiki can reply, as Tendou is turning to leave, his own phone chimes. He scrambles to check it, finding a text from Ushijima:

Please send me the full names of the people you wish me to invite overnight. I will also need their contact numbers for the application.

 

---

 

“Oikawa speaking,” the sing-song tone answers, as Daichi tries to pretend he’s not doing what he’s doing. “Hello?”

“Hey, Oikawa,” he replies, chuckling. “I… uh… you probably know, actually, about the video Kenma put up, that… got weirdly popular…”

“Yes, yes,” Oikawa says, sighing. “I have heard nothing but mockery for it, I’m well aware.”

“Sorry. You wanna do it again? We got invited to go investigate Shiratorizawa of all place-”

“I can’t… I can’t articulate to you how little I want to set foot in Shiratorizawa,” Oikawa says, cutting him off.

“Well apparently it’s haunted as all fuck,” Daichi replies. “Kuroo and Bokuto both wanna go see if they can catch a ghost on film, we’ve been invited…”

“Mhm… God… I really don’t want to go to Shiratorizawa.”

“... More than you like ghosts?”

“... that’s a good point. How haunted did they say it was?”

“Very.”

 

---

 

Daichi had never been to Shiratorizawa Academy. He’d not even really seen pictures. It’s much bigger than he’d thought it would be, adjusting his bag over his shoulder as he stepped off the bus and turned to find the school. Oikawa is just half a step behind him, tapping away at his phone. 

Before Daichi can ask where the others are, he catches sight of them across the street, waving energetically. He’s only a little bit surprised to see Kenma clinging to Kuroo’s shadow, face down in a game but carrying a bag over his shoulder. 

“Hey,” Daichi greets, reaching a hand out on reflex to accept Kuroo’s fistbump. 

“Yo. Ready to hunt some prep school ghosts?”

“Sure,” is Daichi’s reply, because he can no longer pretend he isn’t a willing participant. 

“You didn’t bring the dog,” is Bokuto’s reply, before a hello.

“I… did not,” Daichi agrees, turning his attention to him. “Sorry?”

Bokuto just sighs, before turning around to look at the school. “There better be ghosts here, if there aren’t gonna be dogs.”

Daichi nods along with that, before looking at Kenma. “So, are you joining us tonight? Kuroo didn’t mention anything.”

Kenma looks up at him for a moment, before saying: “Uh… no thanks. I’m just here to make sure Kuroo has the right settings on the camera, and stuff… uhm… I don’t like ghosts, I’m gonna be staying overnight with Hinata.”

“It’s good to get him out of the house sometimes,” Kuroo advises.

“I’m not your pet.”

“No but you do starve if I don’t feed you, so-”

Kenma is glaring up at him, annoyed, before just rolling his eyes and tugging the bag off his shoulder. “Whatever. Here. Don’t break it.”

“I wouldn’t,” Kuroo replies.

“Good. And can you guys make sure to film more of each other this time? I think the guys enjoyed when you were together more than anything else. And if you split up, film on your phones or… something.”

“I’m sorry, what’s happening?” Oikawa says. 

“You got invited here because they want to be able to see it,” Kenma says, shifting his weight from side to side. “So you need to bring back something I can turn into a video. Otherwise they’ll be annoyed.”

“Who is they?” Daichi asks. 

Kenma shrugged. “The internet?”

There’s a bit of silence, as Kuroo minds his business pulling the camera out of its bag and checking its battery and setting it up. 

“Alright,” Kenma says. “I gotta catch a bus. Don’t get eaten by ghosts, or whatever.”

And before anyone can reply, Kenma has shuffled away from the group and started off down the sidewalk. 

“Have fun! Make sure you eat dinner!” Kuroo calls. 

“Stop it, you’re embarrassing,” Kenma’s quiet voice calls back. 

“And go to bed at a reasonable time!”

“Kuroo…”

“Text me if you get scared!”

And Kenma gives him the middle finger over his shoulder. 

Daichi snickers slightly, and in the brief lapse of conversation, Oikawa says: “Alright! Everyone up and at’em, let’s get into this horrible, horrible place.”

“Horrible because it’s haunted?” Bokuto asks. 

“No.”

Daichi laughs, and is happy to bring up the rear as they head towards the main entrance. He hates, kind of, that he gets what Kuroo was talking about before. He doesn’t care either way about finding ghosts, but he does kind of like the way it feels to be walking in a group like this. 

It would be fun. 

Oikawa pushes his way through the front doors of the school, takes one look at Ushijima waiting by the front desk, and turns around. 

“Nope!” Daichi says, hurriedly jumping forward to grab Oikawa by the shoulders and turn him around. “Nope, you can’t run away. Be civil. Be calm. And for the love of god , be normal.”

“I don’t wanna…” Oikawa whines, softly. 

“If you walk, I walk,” Daichi says. “And then we’ll never know if ghosts are real.”

Oikawa whines again, before taking in a long, deep breath and pulling himself together. He rolls his shoulders back.

“Yo, Ushiwaka!” Bokuto interrupts, putting his arms in the air. “Long time no see man!”

Ushijima stares at him. “I do not know who you are.”

As if Ushijima had physically struck him, Bokuto recoils in horror and looks at him with big, sorrowful eyes. 

“You don’t remember me?”

“Who are you?”

“Bokuto! I’m Bokuto! Kotaro! From Fukurodani!”

“Oh, Fukurodani,” Ushijima replies. “I’m familiar with your school.”

“We played each other at Nationals in our first year, don’t you remember?”

Ushijima tilts his head to the side. “I played against many teams at Nationals. I apologize, I do not remember you.”

Bokuto visibly deflated, pouting up at him. “Dude…” he whines softly. 

Oikawa leans over to whisper to Daichi: “This is already the worst moment of my life.”

“I admit this is worse than I thought it would be,” Daichi replies, before smacking Oikawa’s back and moving past him, to approach Ushijima. 

“Hey, thanks for doing this, man,” Daichi says, deciding to cut Bokuto off early before this got any worse. “I know you’re not our biggest fan, so… might have been weird.”

“Weird?”

“Yeah, we’ve got-” Daichi vaguely beckons to all of them. “Rivalries, histories, whatever you wanna call it, so it’s super cool that you’re… doing this for us.”

Ushijima blinks at him for a moment, before saying: “Tendou requested that I get you visitor passes for the night at the behest of an underclassman of ours. I don’t believe anything I’m doing is for you.”

“Alright, that hurts,” Daichi says, before reaching out to amicably tap his arm. “Either way, thanks.”

“Don’t touch me.”

“Okay, I’m done, Kuroo?”

Kuroo is trying not to laugh, as Daichi slinks back to stand shoulder to shoulder with Oikawa in his misery. 

“Sorry on behalf of my odd friends,” Kuroo laughs, stepping forward. “But I don’t think we’ve met. Kuroo Tetsurou, I’m ah - Captain of Nekoma, might’ve heard of it, we’re the best team in Tokyo-”

“-no you’re not!” Bokuto shouts. 

“-and it’s an honour, we’ve heard a lot about you,” Kuroo finishes, sticking his hand out. Daichi has always been a little bit jealous at the slick ease at which Kuroo slinks into his calculating, sophist sort of nature. He wonders if it will, at all, be effective against Ushijima. 

Ushijima shakes his hand, short and efficient and firm before letting it go. “Ushijima Wakatoshi,” he replies, before pulling four laminated badges from the inside pocket of his jacket, handing them over to Kuroo. 

“Ah, thanks, excellent…”

They get distributed around, and Daichi only spares a glance at the non-specific ‘visitor’ language written across its purple paper before clipping it to the collar of his jacket. 

“Alright gang,” Kuroo says, and Daichi’s thankful someone here isn’t completely fucked socially right now. “Let’s get on our way, I think we have a lot of ground to cover, so…” and he snaps his fingers, pointing down one of the hallways. “Stairwell is down this way, third floor north wing was one of the more haunted locations, so let’s start there and work our way down.”

“Yes, please, let’s get moving…” Oikawa says, turning as Kuroo points to take the lead down the hallway, arms crossed. Daichi waits a moment to follow up beside Kuroo, who’s settling the camera in his hands and starting the recording. Daichi decides to wait on pulling out his phone for the time being. 

It’s when Oikawa gets to the stairwell and stops, opening the door to hold it for them, that he says: “Nope, hang on, wait, why are you following us?” 

And the three other boys turn around to find Ushijima standing there, having come with them down the hallway. 

“You are my visitors,” he replies. 

“Okay, you may have misunderstood, buddy,” Oikawa chuckles, leaning on the open door. “We appreciate the favour but you don’t have to… play with us.” 

Ushijima stares at him for a moment before saying: “It is part of the visitor’s contract that you are here on my name, and therefore the school will see your behaviour and conduct as a reflection of myself. I will be accompanying you for the night for this reason.”

There’s this heavy silence where Daichi half expects Oikawa to slam his face into the door, but it’s thankfully broken by Kuroo before he can do so: 

“Awesome, you can be our expert witness, then,” he chirps, lifting the camera up to center on Ushijima. “Tell us about this haunted third floor.” 

“Ghosts do not exist.” 

“You’re so charming,” Kuroo replies, before nodding to Daichi to indicate he should start walking again. Bokuto and Oikawa take the lead, and Daichi hovers in the middle, listening in on the conversation Kuroo tries to drag out as they climb the staircase and find themselves on the third floor of the main Shiratorizawa building. 

“Okay, so what do people say about this building then?” Kuroo tries. “Like… what fake ghost stories are they telling, what have you heard?” 

Ushijima thinks about this for a minute before saying: “People do not tend to tell me ghost stories. I believe many people talk about the inconsistencies in the lighting, as the hallways have been described as eerie. However given the age of the building I do not find this particularly interesting. This building was built significantly before the rest of the Academy, and has had comparatively little improvement or expansion. The wiring might still be the original, or minimally updated, from the early twentieth century.” 

“Alright, old ass spooky building,” Kuroo says. “Lots of lights flickering, cold spots? Doors slamming?”

Ushijima nods. “The upper floor here is dominantly used for sciences and lab classes. Typically it is occupied by third-year student classes, though all years will use the laboratory rooms for experimentation or demonstrative purposes. I believe most of the stories come from students working late on complex problems. Exhaustion combined with stress-”

“Anyone ever died up here?” Bokuto calls. 

Ushijima takes the interruption in stride, seeming unbothered by switching subjects.

They’d reached the third floor at this point. Everyone had fanned out slightly, though they were slowly meandering their way through the hall and down towards a bend in the building, towards the north wing. Oikawa was paying more attention to the graphic posters hung on the walls and the student projects than their conversation, and overall Daichi had not yet found significant reason to feel spooked by this school. 

It was a little dark, sure. Only some of the lights were kept on overnight and after classes. But it was just a school. Most of the doors are shut, and Daichi tries tentatively to open one of them, finding it locked as well. Shame. He peers through a dark window into a dark classroom and can’t see anything. 

“I am not aware of any deaths,” Ushijima says. “Though considering the length of time this building has existed I would concede it not an unlikely event.” 

“Ooh, so there’s probably some hundred year old dead student’s ghost hanging around?” Bokuto replies. 

“No, because ghosts don’t exist.”

“Well, if they did-”

“They do not,” Ushijima interrupts, before looking back at Kuroo, though Kuroo was more focused on the camera. “Do you all believe this school is haunted?” 

“Well, that’s what we’re here to find out,” Kuroo replies, finally glancing away from the screen to look up at him. “But I do think ghosts are real.”

“I think most places people die are haunted,” Bokuto says. “I mean, how could they not be if someone dies there?”

This catches Oikawa’s attention, and he glances back at them. “Excuse me?”

“Like, I mean, if someone’s died , then their ghost is attached to that place, so…”

“Do… Okay, sorry, Bokuto, do you think everyone who dies turns into a ghost?” Oikawa asks. 

“Uh, yeah. A ghost is a dead person.”

“...no,” Oikawa says. “No, no, no - that would put like… billions of ghosts on every corner of the planet and hospitals would be unusable. There’s no way- Ghosts are way more specific than that, there’s an important set of circumstances, dissatisfaction or unfinished business or malice required to create a ghost tied to a location.”

Bokuto doesn’t seem to really understand what Oikawa is getting at, tilting his head to the side before saying: 

“Does anyone die without unfinished business?”

The question is so aggressively and overtly philosophical that really only someone like Bokuto could pull off saying it in earnest - had Daichi heard Kuroo say that, he would have hit him. 

Oikawa also doesn’t seem to want to deal with that, turning to Ushijima instead, and saying: “Hey, are any of these classrooms unlocked?”

“Some will be, depending on the teacher. Labs are typically locked but standard classrooms may not be. You will simply need to try.”

“Alright, got it,” Oikawa chirps, before pulling out his phone and quickening his pace to pull away and head down the hallway. 

“What about you?”

It takes Daichi a second to realize Ushijima is addressing him, and he has Kuroo’s camera angled directly at him. 

“What about me?”

“Do you believe in ghosts?”

“Oh, uh… no,” he says. “I don’t believe in any of that stuff.”

Daichi has no idea if this registers at all with Ushijima, who only seems to nod an understanding, looking fractionally more pleased with this than previous answers, before he turns and heads down the hallway, once he notices Oikawa has found an open door and disappeared. 

Kuroo snickers slightly before turning around and heading down the hallway himself. Bokuto follows behind, and Daichi is left some distance away in the dark and long hallway of the north wing. 

Once Kuroo’s voice is more of a mumble down the hall, he can start to appreciate how this floor, especially at night, might come across as uncomfortable or eerie. To start - it’s stupidly long. The doors at the furthest end of the hallway look like little more than dark, implied smudges, and to top it off, the large windows that act as the endcap to the hall let in so much moonlight, but the dappled effect from nearby trees cast dancing, wavering long shadows over doors and windows and the ceiling. 

Beyond that far window, there’s few other natural light sources, as the hallway is penned in by classrooms on all sides, and their doors, and sometimes blinds or shutters, are shut. 

It’s dark, and the air is still. 

“Yo, Daichi!” Kuroo calls. “We found an open door, come on.”

So Daichi tears his eyes away from the stretched hallway, and follows Kuroo into one of the classrooms. 

He’s half expecting to be blown away by the rich fancy school, so when he takes a look at the narrow rows of desks and whiteboard up front of the class and the overwhelmingly normal feeling the classroom evokes, he’s almost disappointed. Most schools didn’t have specialized classes or wings - Karasuno certainly didn’t, but he supposed if you had a fancy, overfunded school like Shiratorizawa you could do things like build classrooms exclusively for professors teaching in the hard sciences.

He doesn’t need his phone light, the windows of this classroom provide more than enough cool, blue moonlight to see by. 

“Ghosties?” Bokuto is singing. “Ghostie ghosties, come on out~”

“That’s not how to talk to ghosts, moron,” Kuroo snaps, before more loudly calling: “If there are any ghosts or spirits here, we just want to talk to you. Or see you. If you wanna interact with us, please give us a sign. Knock on the table, or wall - flick the lights, maybe, we heard you’re a big fan of that…”

Kuroo backs up slightly, getting more of a view of the room with his camera. Daichi waves to it awkwardly, not really sure what to do. 

“ Ghosts!” Bokuto shouts, which isn’t really a question. 

Daichi shifts slightly, listening to the silence before finding it overwhelmingly embarrassing to just be standing there on camera, so he awkwardly calls out:

“Uh… did anyone ever die in this room? If there’s a ghost trapped here because of-”

“Shhh-” Bokuto’s aggressive shushing comes with his hand pressed to Daichi’s mouth, which is rather unpleasant, but before he can pull away Bokuto’s other hand is holding him in place. “Listen,” Bokuto orders, voice hushed.

Everything falls silent, until the only sense Daichi has is the thin light from the windows, and the feeling of his heart beating in his chest, and-

“...mhm…”

He frowns, glancing around the room but still pinned in place by Bokuto’s grip on his face. 

“Mhm… death pe…”

Kuroo’s head shoots up, looking around. “Holy shit, did anyone else just hear the word death?”

“Told you!” Bokuto says. “There’s definitely a ghost-”

“Shhhh-” Daichi hisses, lifting his own hands up to cover Bokuto’s mouth, keeping him quiet. 

There’s another wave of silence, and Daichi can feel his heart beating in his throat, save for the soft, distant wind outside. 

Kuroo is frozen like a statue, Bokuto blinking at Daichi in stunned silence. 

Quiet. 

Listen. 

There’s definitely a low murmur. It’s deep and reverberating, as if coming from the walls and from the air itself, into their skulls. Daichi feels the hairs on his arms begin prickling in unease, his body starting to want to run. 

Silence again. 

And then-

“...mmm…mrmm… nobody…”

“Nobody,” Kuroo whispers, voice choked with unease as the whispers reach their ears. “Nobody’s here?” he called, before adding in a more horrified tone: “Or… or do you want to be alone?”

“... gn… no… life…”

Daichi shivers slightly, trying not to let his body shut down in his panic, even if he’s not sure how to breathe anymore.

 

---

Oikawa spins around to lazily wave his flashlight over Ushijima as he comes through the class door, before scoffing and rolling his eyes and turning around again. 

The classroom was nice, but not too special. It’s a normal school, there’s nothing here that Aoba Johsai doesn’t have…

(Well, apart from the six buildings, equestrian program, and student dorms, but that’s all just fluff.)

“You don’t need to follow me,” Oikawa says. 

“I told you-”

“Yeah, whatever, your name or… whatever…” he mutters, not wanting to listen to him speak. He casts his flashlight over the corners of the room, even though the light from the windows is pretty close to being enough. There’s not much special about this room, and he doesn’t quite feel comfortable trying to reach out to any spirits with Ushijima staring at him and judging him. 

Ushijima is quiet for a moment, looking around the class, before saying:

“This evening will be intolerable if you are unable to get along with me.”

Oikawa scoffs, turning around to look at him again. “With no due respect, I don’t care if you’re unhappy. Just lurk in the background like a terrifying, socially inept golem and we’ll all be just fine.”

Despite Oikawa’s desire to be as mean as possible, and Ushijima’s capacity for lack of emotional expression, there’s a moment where his expression wavers, just for a second, as his eyes dart around the classroom, and he gives a little nod of understanding, and Oikawa actually feels bad . 

Stupid. Stupid. Stupid. Stupid horrible mean man with his stupid incapacity for subtly and lack of capacity for malice. Stupid. I hate him so much.

“Look, sorry-” Oikawa starts, despite his brain misfiring for even trying. 

Stupid me, stupid my brain, stupid well honed interpersonal skills. Why do I need everyone to like me? I don’t want Ushiwaka to like me but also I need-

“- I didn’t mean to… I know you’re just… doing what you think is best, and… it’s… nice of you to let us in, I don’t want to be a bad guest-”

-god why do I need him to respect me? Fucking hell I’ve had dreams about strangling him and here I am, still wanting to convince him I’m worthy. I hate this stupid school. We should never have come here. I don’t even care if ghosts are real.

“It’s just… a lot of… It’s a lot, okay? I will… try and… be normal,” Oikawa finishes. “Its just when I look at your face, I’m filled with an indescribable rage, do you understand? You must understand. You seem so angry all the time.”

Ushijima has just sort of been standing there and taking this, looking a little caught off guard, and now replies with: “I am not angry.”

“You’re not angry? How are you not angry?”

“I hold no ill will towards you.”

“Look, I know I’m the bad guy-”

“But I am a little confused,” he says, cutting Oikawa off. “You seem to greatly resent me for the competition we had as members of our respective volleyball teams, but it was Karasuno that defeated both of us most recently. Why is your anger not placed at Sawamura?”

Oikawa has to think about this for a moment. “Oh. Uh… well… I mean… first of all he can’t look down at me, so that helps. And second of all, I do. It’s just Tobio that pisses me off, Sawamura’s kinda just… I dunno he’s just also there. Like - I mean, for example, I don’t really have any negative feelings towards your libero.”

“Our libero has no opinion about you either.”

“... alright.”

Ushijima is quiet for a moment, and Oikawa cannot stand the silence in the room, turning around and pacing between the desks to pretend he was looking at something on the wall. 

“And, whatever. Just let me be bitter, okay? I’m gonna leave Japan and you’ll never have to-” he pauses himself to prevent his voice from cracking, and resumes speech as calmly as he can. “Deal with me or my… mediocre setting again.”

“Mediocre setting?” Ushijima echoes back. “You’re the best setter in Japan.” 

Oikawa freezes.

It’s a trap. It’s a trap. It’s a trap.

He huffs, before turning around again and crossing his arms. “I’m sorry? How is that possible? I couldn’t beat you not for lack of trying, and little Tobio did on his first try, clearly-”

“Kageyama has exceptional talent,” Ushijima agreed. “But that level of precision and power is really only necessary if you have weak spikers that need to be accommodated. I am not a weak spiker. I have no reason to desire someone like Kageyama.” 

Oikawa’s brain is running a blank file, and he struggles to find anything to say before trying: “Okay, well - what about the actual best setter in Japan? That Miya kid. I never got-”

“Perhaps I am biased,” Ushijima says, and he sounds frustrated now. “But neither Miya nor Kageyama possess the skill you do. They are technically talented, but both of them lack a comprehensive skill set in communication and leadership. Both of them struggle, constantly, to maintain the good graces of people that should be their friends and they struggle to know their teammates as more than parts in a machine. Believe me, I am plenty familiar with having technical skill and talent, and it is far harder to practice understanding people. Nevertheless at the level that you seem capable of understanding them.” 

There’s a ringing in Oikawa’s ears. He kinda wishes it was a ghost possessing him. 

“Okay,” he manages, eventually, when he’s learned how to breathe again. 

You don’t need his approval. Fuck. Stop it. Don’t feel good. Stop it. Stop. It. Oh my god it doesn’t matter just stop overreacting it was one compliment and he basically told you you’re not on their skill level so it’s barely a compliment anyway just be normal. 

“You can stay,” he says eventually. “You can’t be my friend, but you can stay.”

Before Ushijima can reply, there’s a sudden shout, a door is slammed open so hard it cracks against the wall, Bokuto appears in the doorway to the classroom, shrieks: “We gotta go, the ghosts are gonna kill us!” and then turns and bolts. 

Oikawa jumps, surprised by this sudden interruption and noticing Kuroo go sprinting off after Bokuto. 

Daichi appears a second later, thankfully, to add in a horrified stammer: “there’s… there’s a… whispering about death… something is… I don’t know what it is but-” and then he’s beckoning down the hallway to indicate they should follow, and chasing after Kuroo and Bokuto.

Huh?

Oikawa glances at Ushijima, before hurrying around the desks and joining him in the hallway, watching the three boys sprint away. In the quiet hallway, he can, faintly, begin to pick up on a hushed, muttering whisper that seems to creep up his neck and into his brain. 

“They are very jumpy,” Ushijima says. 

“Are you not hearing that? What the fuck is that?” Oikawa spits back, rounding on him. “Something is-”

“Debate club.”

Oikawa fully deflates, raising his eyes. “Ah?”

Ushijima waves a hand. “They meet on Saturday evenings and often stay late, their president has a job that keeps her quite busy, so they tend to prepare while they can. I believe they have a competition next week, so they’re probably getting in extra practice. They are nationally ranked.” 

“What?” Oikawa says. “What in the hell are you talking about?”

“They use one of the classrooms on the floor below us,” he replies. “And the ventilation in this building is all connected. I thought it was common knowledge that you could hear other teachers from almost anywhere in the building.” Ushijima pauses to frown before saying: “I am pretty sure the subject of their upcoming debate is regarding the ethics of the death penalty. I hope this hasn’t been an ongoing reason for why so many believe this place is haunted.”

Oikawa lets his breath out, before saying: “Nevermind that, we gotta go catch those guys before one of them has a heart attack,” he says, beckoning down the hall to where the three idiots had disappeared. 

Chapter 4: Ghosts in the Hayloft

It takes a not inconsiderable amount of time to convince the three idiots that there was not in fact a ghost of death lurking amid the third floor of Shiratorizawa Academy. And even once they successfully convince them of the debate club that was currently meeting below them, none of them are willing to re-enter the building. 

So, it is on that note that they head through the campus to the next supposed hotspot of activity, a building that Daichi should have, and yet did not, anticipate. That is, the stables of the equestrian program.

The stables are off towards the right side of campus, it’s a relatively modern looking building, but they are gladly informed that it is just as old as the previous building, it’s just been upgraded somewhat. 

Almost unprompted, the moment they unlock the doors and step into the building, Ushijima starts producing Facts. 

“The manager of the equestrian program has bred and raised horses the majority of her life,” Ushijima says, using his phone as a flashlight as he led them through the building. He doesn’t seem to have much sense of concern for potential ghosts, and doesn’t linger in any place too long. Meanwhile, Oikawa is trying to slow everyone down and get them to actually take it seriously. 

The horses, on the other hand, seem entirely bothered by being woken up and stare at them with annoyance. Honestly, just the rows of horse-eyes staring them down is enough to set Daichi on edge. 

“However, many of these horses are boarding horses. That is to say, they are owned by private citizens who, in exchange for lodging, food and general care, allow them to be used by the students for educational purposes.” 

“Why would anyone do that?” Kuroo says, side-eyeing a chestnut horse that seems especially annoyed by them. 

“It is expensive to own a horse, especially in a metropolitan community. This offers an alternative to having to get rid of the animal entirely,” Ushijima replies, before following it up with: “There are no ghosts here. Only horses.”

“Who’s to say?” Kuroo replies, before looking over his shoulder at the other boys. Bokuto is having what might be the best day of his life, because he’s touched a horse and has now discovered how soft a horse’s nose is. 

Daichi wonders if they’ll have to call security to get him out of the stables. 

“I wanna take him home,” Bokuto whispers, petting the horse's nose. “Oh my god, I wanna take him home.”

“That is Ladybug,” Ushijima calls. “That is a mare.”

“I wanna take her home,” Bokuto corrects, no less in awe of the animal that is mostly just tolerating him. 

Daichi pulls at his arm. “Alright, weirdo,” he says. “Let the horse sleep, we’re doing a ghost investigation, remember?” 

“But-”

“This is not optional, you can’t have the horse.”

“...fine.”

Oikawa is somewhat less interested in the horses than Bokuto is, pointedly keeping himself out of nose-reach of any of the curious animals and trying to laser focus in on ghost hunting aspect of this. 

“So,” he calls, to get Kuroo and Ushijima’s attention from up ahead. “I know you don’t believe in ghosts, but what do people say happens here?” 

“Oh, mostly movement of objects, they say,” Ushijima says. “Stable doors will slam shut, lock people inside. It’s a common joke that you have to be careful how you prop the door open, or the ghost will trap you.”

“Is that connected to a specific legend - any… uh…”

“Are you trying to ask me if anyone has died in the stables?”

“Maybe.”

“I am unaware of any specific legend, though once again as it is an old building I believe it would be likely.”

Oikawa nods at that, before glancing back to Bokuto and Daichi as they catch up. 

“What do you guys think of that?”

“I think it’s so cool and I love all of them,” Bokuto says, immediately leaving again to make friends with a new horse. 

“I think things moving around when you have twelve or so massive equine beasts living here shouldn’t be surprising,” Daichi replied, watching Bokuto. “And doors shutting are a pretty standard thing the wind can do. I’d be curious to check out the locks, though. See if it’s one of those old drop locks, that could be the wind too.”
Oikawa gives him a grin, before nodding. “We’ll check the locks on our way out,” he says. 

“Hey!” Kuroo shouts, and everyone turns to take a look at him. “We should do a seance!” 

“What’s a seance?” Bokuto calls back. 

“I bet Oikawa knows how to do one,” Daichi teases, elbowing Oikawa to make his point. 

“I-Uh…” he stammered back, swatting the back of Daichi’s head in punishment. Ow. “I… maybe do, but this isn’t… I didn’t bring seance gear, so-”

“Lame, let’s just sit in a circle and hold hands,” Kuroo calls, before nodding to Ushijima to follow him back towards the group in the middle of the stables. As he approaches, though, his flashlight catches on a wooden fixture, and follows the ladder up. “Holdup, nope, nevermind, let’s do a seance up in the hayloft.” 

Bokuto doesn’t hesitate to agree and happily follows Kuroo up the ladder towards the hayloft, and Oikawa, after a bit of humming about it, relents as well. 

Ushijima doesn’t seem interested in arguing either way, taking his observational job rather seriously. Daichi climbs up last, lamenting slightly that he was about to lose his status as someone who had never participated in a seance.

Kuroo and Bokuto are already sitting beside each other in the hay, adjusting themselves on the wooden ground and shifting slightly, in discomfort. Oikawa carefully folds his knees under him as he sits down, ironically being a-ok with hunting ghosts but apparently wanting to draw the line at sitting on hay. 

Daichi sits beside him, and after a brief prompting, Ushijima sits down as well, hands folded neatly on his knees like he was waiting for instruction. God he was surrounded by weirdos. 

“Alright,” Daichi says. “How’s this work.” 

“Well, we all need to join hands for a proper seance,” Oikawa says, before turning his hands palm-up for them. Bokuto seems happy to grab both his and Kuroo’s hands, and Daichi wonders, briefly, how nice it would be to live in a world of apparently zero apprehension or concern. 

Daichi does his part, though, taking Oikawa’s hand first before awkwardly having to convince Ushijima to play along. 

And then they’re just five guys holding hands in the dark. 

“So…” Bokuto starts, and gets shushed by Kuroo. 

“Uhm… well we’re missing some details for a proper seance,” Oikawa mumbles, before more loudly saying: “But we do start by welcoming any ghosts into our circle. We are here to communicate and understand you, we are not here to… to harm you. So…”

“This would be better with one of the ouija boards,” Bokuto says. 

“Those are so commercialized,” Daichi scoffs. “It’s just a game.”

“If you two don’t stop talking, we’re never gonna find a ghost,” Kuroo cuts in. 

Everyone falls silent. 

It’s silent. 

“Uhm… at the mansion,” Daichi starts. “You said something about the flashlight - can we use that?”

“Mhm? Oh!” Oikawa nods, pulling away for a moment to pull out one of his flashlights, and fiddle with it for a moment before leaning over and setting it carefully on the ground. “Okay, look - if there are any ghosts here, watch what I’m doing-”

“Hang on,” Kuroo cuts in, pulling away as well to balance the camera on one of the bales of hay. “Say that again.”

Oikawa glares at him for a moment, before saying: “ Well, if there are any ghosts here, this light should be something you can affect, look-” and Oikawa demonstrates, tapping on the flashlight a bit to turn it on and off. He leaves it off, then, and sits back, rejoining the circle and taking Daichi and Bokuto’s hands. Kuroo also settles back into his place. 

“Now, we can ask yes or no questions,” Oikawa says. 

“Just to confirm,” Ushijima says. “This flashlight is going to tell us if ghosts are here?” 

“No, no, the ghosts can touch it to answer our questions.”

“Answer it by touching it?”

“Yes, like… if they turn it on and off,” Oikawa says, sounding annoyed. “We know they’re responding.”

“Like this,” Kuroo says, clearing his throat, before saying: “If there’s anybody here with us, please turn on the light!” 

There’s silence. Daichi stares at Kuroo, and then at the flashlight. He’s not sure how long they’re supposed to wait. Nothing happens. 

“Is it working?” Ushijima says. 

“Oh, shut up.”

“If there’s somebody here that doesn’t want to talk with us, turn on the light,” Kuroo tries instead, tilting his head.

“Oh my god, dude,” Bokuto says, looking at him with an expression Daichi can barely see int he dark. “What if there are horse ghosts!”

The flashlight turns on. 

Bokuto shrieks, before, more delightedly, shouting: “Oh my god there are horse ghosts!”

“There are no horse ghosts!” Oikawa snaps, immediately. “The flashlight will, sometimes, just… do that, from motion or vibrations or whatever-”

“So you’re admitting that there’s no safeguard in place to ensure it is ghosts that interact with us?” Ushijima says. 

“W-well, when you say it it sounds insane,” Oikawa mutters. “I swear-”

“If there are horse ghosts here that would let me ride them please turn off the light!” Bokuto shouts, interrupting them. Nothing happens. 

“Sorry,” Kuroo snickers. 

“Please take this seriously,” is Oikawa’s hissed response. After a second, when nobody replies, he, more loudly, says: “Okay, starting fresh, please turn off the light if someone here would like to speak with us.” 

Nothing. Silence. Waiting. 

“I have a question,” Ushijima says. 

Oikawa scowls at him. “Uh-huh?”

“If you keep repeating the same question, and the light can be random, eventually it would do as you ask. If ghosts are intelligent and real beings, surely your first question is enough to satisfy that answer? You asked them to do so, they did not… ergo… no ghosts.”

Oikawa stares at him for a moment, before saying: “Sometimes they’re just… shy, or whatever.”

“Shy ghosts,” Bokuto says, nodding along as if this were perfectly normal. 

Daichi sighs. “This is insane. I can’t believe we’re doing this. I’m with Ushijima. There are clearly no ghosts here, and pushing our luck is just gonna induce a coincidence. Turn off the light if a ghost here was murdered,” Daichi says. “You could say it a million times, and if one time it worked, you’d suddenly-”

The light turns off. 

Daichi shuts his mouth, turning to glare at the flashlight in betrayal. 

“Hold up,” Kuroo says. 

Oikawa also seems impressed, staring at the light. 

“Ah… okay… Uhm… were you a student that was murdered?” He asks, before waiting a beat. When there was nothing, he called: “A teacher?”

Light turns on. 

“Oh, this game is fun,” Ushijima says, though he does not seem particularly worried about the ghosts. More like it was an interesting bug he was looking at. 

“How did you get murdered?” Bokuto says, earning him an elbow from Kuroo and a reminder that it was confirmation-based questions only. “Uh… right… uhm… Did you care for the horses here?”

Nothing. 

“Did you… get murdered by a fellow teacher?” Oikawa calls, and when there’s nothing, tries: “By your students?”

Nothing. 

“...does anyone know you were murdered?” Daichi calls, voice slightly shaky as he does so. Nothing happens. “So… nobody knows that you died here?” 

The light goes off.

“That is not a coincidence,” Oikawa hisses, immediately, leaning in to bump his shoulder. 

“It is,” Daichi laughs, trying not to let his voice crack, because he didn’t love any of this. 

“Are you angry that nobody knew you’d died?” Bokuto says. 

Light turns on. 

“Shit,” Kuroo says. “Are you going to harm-”

Before he can finish speaking, a bang resonates throughout the barn, spooking the horses into stomping around a bit and making the ground shake. It startles pretty much everyone into jumping, as the place suddenly gets a lot darker. 

He feels Oikawa’s hand tighten on his, and it’s probably only because he’s given the impression there’s someone more scared than he is that he’s able to take action, reaching forward to grab the flashlight they were using and turning it on, just in time to see Ushijima already up and jumping the distance down from the hayloft to the main floor. 

Kuroo is grabbing the camera as well, seeming very obviously interested in not missing out on filming all of this, and Bokuto seems just a little unnerved as he follows over to the ladder. 

“Hey,” Daichi says, looking over to Oikawa as he slowly gets to his feet to brush himself off.

Him speaking seems to snap Oikawa out of whatever headspace he’d gone off into, shaking himself out and letting go of Daichi’s hand. 

“I’m fine.”

“That’s not what I said,” Daichi replies, catching Oikawa’s elbow before he could go. Kuroo was well away with his camera, and he was confident they wouldn’t be heard. “Why do you do this?”

“Eh?”

“If you genuinely believe ghosts are capable of hurting you, why do you do this? It seems stupid?” 

Oikawa stares at him for a moment, before just shaking his head and pulling his arm free and heading over to the ladder. 

“I’m not doing this with you here,” he replies, swinging himself over the edge. 

Daichi hesitates, before deciding he’s not going to be alone in the horrible hayloft, and follows after him. 

“But there is something , right?” Daichi asks.

“I don’t you, I’m not doing this with you right now,” is the response, at the same time a loud , thundering banging starts resonating throughout the stables, and Daichi cannot help but yelp, immediately lifting a hand to cover his mouth and stifle himself. Oikawa also freezes, temporarily, as Daichi whips the flashlight around and finds the source of the banging - Bokuto, on the far end of the stables, at the now shut entrance.

Wait-

“Holy shit, are we locked in?” Daichi calls, breaking into a jog to pass Oikawa and join them at the door. “What the…”

“I cannot believe this,” Kuroo is saying. 

“I have never had this happen to me,” Ushijima agrees. “I do not believe you’ll be able to open the doors. They close with an iron lock.”

Bokuto is still violently rattle the door. “I swear, if we die in here-”

“We’re not gonna die in here,” Daichi scoffed. “We’re… uh… just… trapped, for now. But eventually someone will come to check on the horses and we’ll be let out.”

“We can’t just stay here!” 

“We don’t really have a choice, do we?” he snaps back, and Kuroo rolls his eyes.

“Whatever, man- hey, what are you-” and Daichi turns to see what had caught Kuroo’s attention - it’s Ushijima, who’s wandered away from them and put his phone to his ear. 

“Getting help,” Ushijima replies, as if irritated that they had bothered to spend any time at all on the door to the stables. 

“Oh,” Kuroo says, before immediately going: “Yes, I suppose that is a good option.”

Bokuto relaxes a little bit. “Phones are… phones are good.”

Oikawa joins them after a minute, and Daichi can listen in on one side of Ushijima’s phone call, which sounds, unfortunately, something like this: 

“Yes, it’s Ushijima. It’s going well. No. We’re in the stables. Sorry, I meant that we are locked in the stables. Can you please come and unlock us from the stables. No a ghost did not lock us in here. Ghosts are not real. Please just come unlock us from the stables. I do not wish to be locked in stables.” 

And then he hung up. 

“Someone will let us out shortly,” Ushijima reports. 

“Oh good,” Kuroo replies. “I thought I was gonna die in here with you lot. Not that that’s a bad way to go, just… sounds terrible.”

“Thanks.”

Left in the silence of the dark barn, and not exactly sure if they should talk about the odd flashlight interaction they’d just had previously, Daichi wanders off a little bit to look around the stables. Ushijima stays near the door - Bokuto distracts himself with horses. 

After a moment or two, Oikawa comes up behind him to join him, arms crossed and looking a little put off merely by the concept of speaking to Daichi, despite the fact, and Daichi doubled checked this, he was the one who’d initiated it. 

“For the record, I’m not afraid of ghosts,” Oikawa says. 

“Oh?”

“I’m not. First of all, I don’t necessarily even think all ghosts can harm us, most spirits can’t, actually, so… being afraid of ghosts would be stupid.”

“But some can?”

Oikawa sighed, pinching at the bridge of his nose for a second before saying: “I… it’s great that you have this kind of obscene confidence in the rationality of our lives, but I… don’t. That’s all. So… again, for the record , it’s not ghosts that I’m afraid of, it’s just that… when something like that happens - like, when there’s a sudden door slam, I’m not… capable of writing it off as normal. It could be a ghost, or it could be a monster, or… aliens, or invisible Russian spies, I don’t know, the point is, I have to go through a much longer checklist of possibilities than you do before I can feel comfortable and that’s it , that’s it, okay?” 

Daichi listens to this for a moment, before glancing over Oikawa’s shoulder to make sure they were still somewhat alone, before asking: “I’ve been meaning… to ask… do you… like… have you… why’d you get into all this stuff. Because, like… okay, so Kuroo believes in aliens and ghosts and monsters but he believes in them in a way I can understand. It’s this… scientific fascination, with figuring out if they’re real. You, though, you I can’t get a read on. You feel like… you hate it, even though you’re so passionate, it’s like… if you’ll let me use a rough analogy, like a dog-lover who’s been bitten one too many times.” 

Oikawa stares at him for a moment, before glancing over his shoulder as well, and mumbling: “That’s not so wrong. It’s… I… Look, when I was a kid-”

And then there’s this big, squealing noise, and streetlights from the Shiratorizawa campus are lighting up the inside of the barn as the big doors are dragged open. 

Without finishing his sentence, Oikawa turns to rejoin the group, and Daichi has nothing to do but follow after them. 

“Oh, look at you lot!” Tendou is shouting, seeming overjoyed to have been able to come and rescue them. “Five men democratically elected as leaders of their people, and you managed to get locked in a horse barn together. Absolutely brilliant. Top notch. Good work.”

“Thank you for coming to let us out,” Ushijima says, reaching a hand out to greet him with a half hug from the side. “I hope I did not wake you.”

“Not at all, you know I’m a night owl,” Tendou replies, grinning for him, before looking around at the other four. “God, you all look like you’ve seen a ghost-”

“We need to check the locks on the door,” Oikawa says, cutting him off and brushing past to head outside. 

Tendou watches him go, before calling after him: “You’re always a peach, Mr. Seijoh.” 

“Whatever,” is the response, as Oikawa pulls the door half shut to look at it. Daichi pushes his way through the group as well, to look outside and join Oikawa at the door. 

It’s a typical barn handle, with a metal iron sliding lock. Daichi has to admit, it’s not particularly something he’d think the wind was capable of moving. 

“Not the wind,” Oikawa says.

“I mean, if the door hit hard enough, it could have rattled it into position-”

“Dude!” Oikawa says. 

“I just mean, sure, it’s not exactly the kind of lock I’d think the wind would affect, but that doesn’t mean I’m leaping straight to dead spirit. How could a dead spirit do this anyway?”

“Some spirits are powerful like that?”

“Sure, sure-”

“The same spirits that do things like touch flashlights to turn them off and tell us they were murdered,” Oikawa replies, before sticking his tongue out at him, and then turning and fleeing the conversation so that Daichi was incapable of getting in the last word.

Bastard. 

He has no choice but to turn around and follow the group up to join them again, as they’d gone slowly filing out of the stables. Ushijima takes an extra moment to stay at the door and lock it again, before following. 

“So where now?” Kuroo says. “This is been a crazy night already, is there anywhere else?” 

“Well, the dorms are pretty fucked up,” Tendou chirps. “Then again, there’s also tons of people there and they probably won’t be great for ghost hunting… lights are pretty much always on, and all that…”

“I’m sorry,” Oikawa interrupts. “I do not remember you being invited-”

“Oh I’m sorry,” Tendou cuts him off. “I actually don’t remember needing to be invited, seeing as I live here, and you’re the one wearing a visitor’s badge.”

“Oh, really-”

“Please,” Ushijima says. “Do not. Please do not.”

Both of them stare at him a moment before Tendou puts his hands up in surrender.

“I can be civil.”

Daichi doesn’t really know if that’s true or not, but either way, Kuroo says: 

“Well, one of the other most haunted places Kenma had told us to check out was your guys’ gymnasium. Can we head there?”

Ushijima gives him a slight nod, before taking the lead to head across the campus and towards the gyms. 

“Is nobody going to talk about the fact that we just got locked in by a ghost? A murdered ghost? Maybe they wanted to harm us?” Bokuto calls. 

“Well, we’ll review the footage when we get home,” Kuroo replies. “We’ll see if maybe we can explain it that way.”

“I… still think we should… care more… what if… what if it follows us?”

“It won’t follow us,” Kuroo scoffed. 

Even so, the entire affair did set them all a little on edge - well, with the exception of Ushijima, who seemed completely content to assume something normal had happened and there were no issues to worry about. 

They enter the gym from the outside, Ushijima unlocking the large double doors and pushing them open to let everyone in. 

The lights in here are motion sensored, so when they all wander in, it slowly lights up with a thumping, buzzing noise, one row of lights after the other, the furthest end remaining dark and not yet aware of them. 

“Goddamn this gym is big,” Kuroo whistled. 

“Eh, not that special,” Bokuto replies, to which he immediately gets a glare from Kuroo, followed by:

“Yeah, that’s because you Academy boys are all the same.”

“Don’t be jealous,” Bokuto chides, and there is something especially infuriating about Bokuto acting calm and composed that enrages him. It enrages Kuroo too, apparently, because he lashes out and whacks Bokuto in the shoulder. 

“So… you train here, yes?” Oikawa calls to distract the group from the bickering. Kuroo takes his cue and pulls away from them, to hold the camera and get some wider shots. 

“That is correct.”

“So… what kinda spooky stuff happens?”

“Well, fellow students report lights flickering, noises, cold spots,” Ushijima says. 

“Great,” Daichi calls. “So a big, drafty, old gym with motion sensor lights isn’t completely silent and still all the time. Fascinating.”

“Don’t be such a doubter.”

“Yeah, Daichi,” Bokuto scolds, and Daichi resists taking his turn to hit him for it. 

“Ghosts are not real,” Ushijima agrees. 

At the same time Ushijima says this, there’s a distinct squeaking, like a foot being pushed down on an old floorboard, from somewhere on the other side of the gym. Ushijima hones in on where the changing rooms are, as well as the exit into the school building, clearly trying to decide where the noise had come from. 

“That’s just a person,” Daichi agreed. 

“Uh, a person in a locked locker room? Those doors are shut, who would that be - also, it’s like… midnight,” Oikawa says, slowly heading to the side of the gym, to approach towards the locker rooms. 

Daichi notices the whole team doing the same thing. The only person not particularly invested or interested in finding the source of the sound was Tendou, though he bounced along quite happily behind them anyway, even if he wasn’t paying attention. 

There’s a girl’s and a boy’s locker room, and after a little bit of debate, they figure there’s not much wrong with checking out the girl’s too, since there wouldn’t really be any, well, girls, using the locker room at midnight. 

Tendou takes Oikawa and Bokuto to split off to check out the girls, and Daichi is left, with Kuroo’s camera a little too close to his face for his liking, to follow Ushijima into the boys’.

The lights here are not censors, so they quietly walk through the dark. Daichi fumbles to pull out his phone, not seeing anything immediately as he scans the room. It’s a really nice locker room, he thinks, a little distracted, for a second, seeing how much space they had. He moves a little bit away from the other boys, but after a few seconds, realizes there really isn’t much going on here. 

“Sometimes a squeak is just a squeak,” Daichi calls, turning around to face them again. 

Ushijima looks over, nodding slightly for a moment, before pulling on one of the shower stall curtains, rustling it around a bit and just generally messing about. It takes Daichi a second to realize that he had come in here with intent to “investigate” and he was, for the first time, seeing Ushijima do something halfheartedly. 

God, he really didn’t believe in ghosts, did he? 

“There’s nothing here,” Ushijima agreed. “Something else made that noise.”

“And judging by the lack of screaming, I assume the other guys didn’t find anything either.”

“Alright, let’s go.”

They reconvene just outside the changing room doors. 

“Nothing,” Oikawa reports. 

“Nada,” Kuroo chirps back. 

“Fascinating,” Daichi contributes, before following up with: “So what do we do now? Just stand around in the gymnasium for an hour?”

“Well, we could try and speak to the ghosts again, set up that little flashlight,” Bokuto suggests. “That seemed to work in the stables.”

“True,” Oikawa says, before sighing and saying: “Honestly, I wish I hadn’t been so distracted by the Shiratorizawa part of this experiment. I would have prepared a little better if I was taking it more seriously.”

Daichi chuckled. “Yeah, figured that might happen. I don’t have much either, maybe we-”
And then, something happens. 

Daichi’s first reaction is fear, mostly horror and shock, because the locker room door that Ushijima is standing with his back to opens, leaving a gaping pit of darkness behind him. 

The second reaction is to shriek, but this time not in fear, but in pure surprise, because whatever opens the door reaches out to touch Ushijima, and Ushijima’s first response is not to shout, or scream, or get out of it’s way, but rather, to spin around and strike with full force at whatever snuck up behind him. 

 

---

 

Goshiki sits on the ground, holding paper towel to his bloody nose. 

“I can’t believe you punched me,” he complains, voice nasally and upset. 

“You should not have snuck up behind me,” Ushijima replies, and though he had sounded, briefly, very sorry for his actions, quickly he had grown tired of apologizing and was no longer accepting Goshiki’s attempts to guilt him into empathy. “You knew we were ghost hunting. You could have anticipated this outcome.”

“I’m sorry, are you saying I should have expected you to punch ghosts?”

“Ghosts are not real. Sneaking up on someone in the night is a plausible reason to be punched.”

Tendou, crouched down with Goshiki and somewhat concerned with his likely to-be black eye, looks up at him, giving a sheepish sort of grin. 

“Ah, don’t go too hard on him, Tosh,” he says. “It was my bidding. He owed me anything I wanted, so I told him to go fuck with you guys. I didn’t tell him to get punched, but-”

“Are you the reason we got locked in the barn?” Oikawa cuts in, accusingly. 

Goshiki, already red in the face from being assaulted, just gives him the meekest, most apologetic smile in the world. 

“See? Not a ghost,” Daichi says. Oikawa glares at him. 

“This is ridiculous. I told you this school is horrible,” Oikawa says, throwing his hands in the air. “Debate clubs, and interloping first-years. Nothing we’ve seen today is worth anything.” 

Tendou gets to his feet, helping Goshiki up as well. 

“Well, if it makes you feel better, ghosts are pretty stupid anyway, so-” Tendou starts, before just cutting himself off with a shrug. “Honestly, if he’d done his job well and not gotten himself caught he would have actually made a very interesting video for you.”

“I don’t want an interesting video,” Oikawa replies. “I want an accurate one!” 

“Well sor- ry ,” Tendou replies, before pulling away from Goshiki to head over to Ushijima. “How’s your hand? Did you hurt it, punching our first year?” 

“No,” Ushijima replies. “His face was not particularly hard.” 

Tendou chuckles at that, before waving his hand to beckon him to show him anyway. “Okay, come on, come on, let me see-”

“Satori,” Ushijima repeats, more firmly. “I’m fine. Please just take Goshiki to the nurse. Or… the hospital. Whatever-”

“I’m sorry-” Oikawa cuts in, suddenly, prompting both of them to turn and look at him with surprise. “What did you just say?”

“I said he should take Goshiki to the nurse?”

“No, before that?”

“Goshiki’s face was not hard?”

“No, after - what did you call him?” 

“Oh - what? Satori,” Ushijima says. “That’s… that’s his name.” 

“Like a nickname?” 

Tendou tilts his head to the side. “No, it’s my name,” he replies.

“Your legal given name is Satori?”

“...yes, my legal given name is Satori,” he confirms, a little bit hesitantly, before glancing at Ushijima. “How’d you find new friends even weirder than I am?” 

Oikawa is just staring at Tendou for a moment, eyes flicking up and down his body, before he does absolutely no service to disproving Tendou’s accusations of weirdness by damn near scurrying back to join Daichi a few meters away and tugging out his phone. 

Tendou stares at him for a moment. 

“Okay…” he says, before glancing back up to Ushijima. “And okay, if you boys will be alright here, I will take the blame for putting Goshiki in harm’s way and-”

Daichi is distracted from listening to the conversation because Oikawa is, once again, shoving his phone screen into his face to take a look. Daichi lets his eyes adjust to the light, and scans down the article to read what it says. 

‘Satori in Japanese folklore are mind-reading monkey-like monsters said to dwell within the mountains of Hida and Mino (presently Gifu Prefecture).’

Daichi frowns, reading this a couple of times, before skipping down to the other text he could see. 

‘ Upon reading a person's mind, the satori would say the person's thoughts aloud faster than a human could.’

Oikawa is looking at him. 

Under his breath, Daichi hisses: “You are not allowed to suggest Tendou is a mythical monster from folklore.” 

“Why not? You cannot - this cannot be a coincidence - you’ve seen what he’s like!” 

“Because that’s insane, Oikawa! You’re a crazy person! Ghosts are one thing, mythical mind-reading monsters are another-”

“What are you two arguing about?” Ushijima cuts in, and then, as if wanting to make Daichi’s life more difficult, Tendou answers without looking at them: 

“They think I’m a magical mountain monster.”

And then , as if to double down on making Daichi’s life difficult, when Oikawa says: 

“I was not!” in self defense, Tendou says it, at the same time , in a pitched, fake-Oikawa impression. He glares at him for a second, and Oikawa surrenders, putting his hands up. 

“Okay, maybe I was,” Oikawa says. “I’m just saying, it’s… pretty crazy… I just… it’s… neat , that you… have the reputation you have and also have the name - what kanji do you use, is it-”

“Yes, it’s the same ones,” Tendou groans, turning to look at him fully. “How many times am I gonna have to tell people I’m not a mountain monster?”

Oikawa blinks back innocently. 

“I mean,” Daichi cuts in. “It’s pretty easy to settle, right? Like, you have two human parents who bore and raised you, so… not a mountain monster.”
Tendou just stares at Daichi for a second, but something about this seems to confuse Ushijima, who looks down to Tendou and, not quite quietly enough, says:

“Were you not a closed adoption?” 

Tendou groans, more of a wail, really, and thumps his forehead down against Ushijima’s shoulder. “No! Don’t tell the crazies that! Now they’ll-”

“I’m sorry,” Oikawa says, cutting him off. “Sorry, wait, so you… you can’t prove that you have human parents?”

Tendou pulls himself together, sniffing. “I guess not, maybe, shut up,” he says, before nodding to Goshiki. “Let’s go get your nose fixed.”

“Tendou,” Oikawa calls, before he can leave. Tendou - clearly regretting getting himself involved in this - turns on his heel and smiles as politely as he can. 

“Yes, Mr. Oikawa?”

“May I make a guess?”

Tendou narrows his eyes. “Proceed.”

“Were you raised in Gifu prefecture? Before moving here for boarding school, of course?”

Tendou stares at him, before nodding to Ushijima and saying: “Text me if you get locked anywhere else,” and turning to leave. 

“That’s a yes,” Oikawa says. 

“I… hated this whole conversation,” Daichi says, as Ushijima turns slowly to watch Tendou leave, clearly wondering if he’s supposed to do some kind of damage control on his behalf. “However, I have to admit, that’s the most compelling paranormal evidence we’ve had so far.” 

Oikawa nods.

 

---

 

Sometimes, Kenma thinks, Kuroo comes over and doesn’t want him to be convinced to go out and practice volleyball. Sometimes, Kuroo likes having an excuse to “lose” the argument, and be convinced to stay inside. Sometimes he likes stealing Kenma’s PSP and laying on his stomach and getting entirely too engaged in trying to save all of Yoshi’s eggs. 

That’s okay. Kenma doesn’t mind winning arguments on occasion. 

“Fucking,.. Dinosaur…” Kuroo is muttering, mashing at buttons. Kenma doesn’t blame him - he’s at a very high level, and swooping in to try and pick up where Kenma left off probably isn’t easy. 

Kenma sits with his knees up, tabbing his way through editing the hours of raw footage Kuroo had brought home. It’s… good.

It’s good like the last stuff was good. It’s funny, and honestly, with just a little bit of audio adjustment, some neat editing - it could be scary too. There’s a bit, in a horse barn - (Kenma was pretty sure he’d dropped them off at a school?) - where the flashlight is flicking very in line with what they’re saying, and the audio picks up the slam of the barn door so clearly, watching all five of them nearly leap out of their skin heightens the feeling of authenticity. Honestly, it’s not even ruined learning it was that weird first year kid at the end. 

Plus, watching Ushijima break a kid’s nose is, honestly, hilarious, and Kenma is glad to have seen it. 

It almost makes him… feel bad, about just posting it to his channel for those few that were interested to see it. 

It’s good. It’s really good. Something is here. 

“Kuroo,” he calls, softly, not quite loud enough to be heard over Kuroo’s crusade into Yoshi’s Island. Kuroo is, still, cursing at an animated green dinosaur creature. 

“Kuroo,” Kenma tries again, louder. This time he hears the music of the game stop, and Kuroo looks up at him. 

“What’s up?”

“Uh… sorry, just… some of the footage here is… I… well I’m almost done, I guess, and… Well…” Kenma’s not even sure what he wants to ask. It seems… almost silly. Kuroo has a life, and they do volleyball, and besides, as far as Kenma was aware, it was the two boys in Miyagi that had headed this whole affair. Kuroo might not even have a say in it. “Just… this stuff is really funny. Y’know? If you… if you liked doing this sort of thing, there’d… definitely be something there.”

Kuroo raises his eyes, seeming surprised, and rolling to prop himself up on his elbows. “Oh? What do you mean?” 

“Well… You guys… like all of you are really funny together, y’know? And… like… The ghost-hunting theme is really scary, and… combined with, like… Bokuto is funny, and Daichi’s… refusal to believe, and Ushijima’s fight reflex, and, like Oikawa’s… Oikawa, he’s hot as hell, people would probably watch just to see him, like… this is an awesome group of guys doing a fun thing, I think people could-”

“Hang on,” Kuroo said. “You think Oikawa’s hot?” 

Kenma frowns, staring at him for a moment before saying: “Do you not?”

“Wh-what? No! I just, like, what, is he your type or something?”

Kenma slowly swivels his chair away, to look back at the computer, returning to his work. “No, that’s not what I meant. Just… girls are always swooning over him, and - all of you are good looking guys, I just mean the internet is fickle, and and you guys hit all the marks for an awesome show, and… I… I mean, I think you have something here. If you guys wanted , I could… set up a proper channel, give it a name - I mean, Kuroo, there’s real money, in making something like this. If you did it properly.” 

“Oh,” Kuroo says, seeming to have recovered from his early Oikawa-related distraction, pushing himself to his feet and heading over to lean over Kenma’s chair and look at the nearly complete video.

“You really think?”

“Yeah.”

“Well…”

Kuroo seems to think this over, and Kenma stays quiet to let him do so. Kenma might not be a star athlete like these guys were, but this is something he knew. He knew what the world wide web wanted, and he just… knew. He knew something good was here. 

“I… wouldn’t be against it,” Kuroo says, before putting his hands on Kenma’s shoulders, squeezing gently. “But you’d have to stay on as our editor, I don’t think I could put this shit together.”
Kenma smiles slightly, leaning back into his touch for a moment before nodding. 

“Okay,” he says. “I could do that, that’s not so bad… but… if we’re gonna do this properly, we need everyone to be on board. We can’t… launch something and then immediately have people drop out. Get everyone to confirm they’re in.” 

Kuroo nodded, staring at the screen for a moment, falling quiet. Kenma lets him for a moment, eyeing the screen before glancing up at Kuroo. 

“What are you looking at?” 

“Oikawa,” Kuroo says, nodding to the figure on the screen before pulling away from the chair to go grab his phone. “He’s not that attractive.” 

 

---

 

Bokuto was unpredictable on the best of days, but Akaashi had gotten pretty good at managing him anyway. 

Ghost-hunting was new. 

Akaashi had been shown the first video, having had a good laugh about it once Bokuto had filled him in on what was a shocking dog-oriented story considering everything else that had apparently happened that evening. It was odd to see him so fired up about something other than volleyball, but Akaashi reasoned that he hadn’t really known Bokuto outside of volleyball. In fact, they’d barely known each other two years, so he supposed he couldn’t say it was out of character for him to be into this sort of thing. 

Either way, the second ghost hunting trip had caught him off guard, but then again, who was he to understand Bokuto? 

“Akaashi?”

He lifts his head, surprised slightly to hear Bokuto calling his name in a way that a) wasn’t shouted as loudly as possible and b) wasn’t in a panic. 

“What is it?”

“I have a question.”

Another weird statement to come from Bokuto, since usually his questions were, against, simply declared or shouted without any preamble. This alone is enough to draw Akaashi’s full attention, and he turns and focuses on Bokuto properly, prompting him along with a wave of his hand. 

Bokuto waits a bit, before saying: “Okay, well, you know I was hanging out with those guys in the haunted places recently, right?”

“Right.”

“Well… Kuroo says… Kuroo says there’s… like… something… Kenma wants to make it something proper. He says if we commit to it it could become, like… a thing. So… well…”

Akaashi tilts his head to the side. “What are you asking?”

“Is it a good idea?”

Akaashi gives a shrug, slowly turning away and adjusting his bag over his shoulder. Bokuto dutifully falls into pace beside his shoulder, leaning into him to listen to him talk. 

“I don’t think it’s really about whether it’s a good idea or not… why wouldn’t it be?” 

Bokuto thinks about this for a moment, before saying: “It could take a lot of my time up… I could get bored of it… Kuroo says he needs some kind of commitment, and… I dunno, I hadn’t… I wouldn’t have ever gone if you hadn’t needed to visit your uncle.”

“Grandmother. And I see your point, but… you had fun, right?”

“I did. A ton of fun. And I’ve seen more animals than ever! It’s awesome.”

Akaashi smiles a bit, before forcing his face neutral. “I think, if it’s something you had fun doing, you can make it work. You’re… well, you’re amazing, and smarter than people give you credit for, so… you make what matters to you work, and this would be no different. If you want to.”

“I think I do,” Bokuto says, and it’s with a note of curiosity, as if surprised by himself, that he says it with. Akaashi has never heard that level of introspection out of him. And then-

“Okay!” Bokuto adds, bouncing back up and slapping Akaashi’s shoulder so hard it hurt. “I’m gonna go text Kuroo. Thanks for the advice!” 

“Ah - no problem! Good luck!” Akaashi called, because he wasn’t sure what else to say. 

 

---

 

Iwaizumi likes the period of time between Oikawa getting ready for bed, and Oikawa doing anything after getting ready for bed. It was one of his favourite parts of sleeping over. Mostly, because it coincides with the moment Oikawa takes out his contacts and before he remembers to check where he put his perpetually disappearing glasses, and then Iwaizumi gets to watch him stumble around like an idiot and try and find the tortoiseshell frames that blended into every background with his shitty eyesight. 

Which is what’s happening now, as Oikawa is trying to pretend he can see so that Iwa won’t make fun of him, standing in fuzzy pajamas, with his arms crossed, staring around the room as if he didn’t trust it, trying to predict where his glasses will be. 

“Can I help you with something?” Iwa asks. 

“...no, I’ve got it,” Oikawa replies, slowly starting towards his dresser. Iwa watches him go. He whacks his knee into one of the knobs, cursing in response as he stumbles, before running his hands along the top to try and find the glasses. 

Iwaizumi slowly closes his book, folding his hands neatly in his lap. 

Oikawa shifts away from the dresser, still squinting and eyeing the room like it was the scene of the murder, shuffling with his feet against the ground to avoid tripping himself against the edge of the bed as he headed up to the nightstand, messing his his phone, the other items there… 

“Where in the fuck…” he’s mumbling, under his breath, before glancing over at Iwaizumi as he snickers at his plight. “Wait-”

With a gasp of betrayal, Oikawa launches at him, grabbing at Iwaizumi’s face, and removing the glasses he had stolen from his nose. 

“You brat!” Oikawa scolds, stealing them back while Iwaizumi cackles in delight and rolls back on the bed. “Don’t do that!”

“I asked if I could help! It’s not my fault you’re too blind to recognize my face!” 

Oikawa snorts, righting his glasses on his nose and blinking down at him.

“You wholly make my life more challenging,” Oikawa sighs, before getting his revenge by flopping down, resting his head on Iwaizumi’s stomach. “You suck.” 

Iwaizumi grins back, happy to take the opportunity to card his fingers through Oikawa’s hair and enjoy the moment of closeness. Not that they didn’t have plenty of opportunities, but it never failed to feel special. Or, perhaps, Iwaizumi was just a romantic. 

And then, Oikawa says: “We’re starting a ghost hunting series.”

“Eh?”

Oikawa tilts his head up to look at him. 

“Me and the other - uh, weirdly, me and the other volleyball captains. Heh. That’s weird. I don’t know. It was Kuroo’s idea, but… it’s… it feels good, so…”

Iwaizumi brushes his hand down, to run his thumb over Oikawa’s cheek, prompting the other to close his eyes and relax almost entirely against him. 

“I thought… I thought you were more about aliens,” Iwa said, eventually, before following up with: “Well, I know you liked everything paranormal, but…”

“I… maybe we’ll do aliens,” Oikawa says. “Maybe. But… I… I know, it’s not exactly what I… wanted, but it’s something. And it’s fun, and… Well, we haven’t solved the mystery of Daichi’s father, but surely this isn’t a step in the wrong direction-”

“I just want you to be safe,” Iwa says. “You know how I feel about all this.”

“Please, Iwa-chan~” Oikawa sings, though Iwaizumi is smart enough to recognize it as deflection. “I’m a big boy now. I can take care of myself.”

“I know,” he replies, before pushing himself to sit up, and forcing Oikawa to shift a bit in the process, so that he could lean down and press a kiss to his lips, which leaves Oikawa smiling. “I just… I also know how you feel about this paranormal stuff, I don't want you getting carried away, and… I… I don’t want you getting hurt. In any way. If anything happened-”

"I won't get carried away."

"But I know you think Daichi's father-"

“Iwa,” Oikawa says. “I promise. I promise. I promise. You’d be the first to know, if anything happened. I promise. I thought you’d be thrilled to not have to babysit me anymore.”

“Mhm… good point. I should have thought of pawning you off on Karasuno earlier.” 

“Hey!” 

 

---

 

It is, unfortunately, not exactly uncommon for Leon to open his bedroom door to the sight of Tendou scrambling off of Ushijima and trying to pretend they hadn’t been making-out for god only knows how long. 

“Why am I not safe entering my own room?” Leon says, pressing a hand over his eyes, because one of these days he’s sure it’s going to be worse than kissing. “Why does this always happen?”

“Because you don’t knock!” Tendou replies, and even if he sounds angry, Leon knows it’s mostly embarrassment. 

“It’s my room, I shouldn’t have to knock,” he replies, taking the hand off his eyes. 

“Well if you hadn’t ratted us out to the dean,” Tendou spat back. “Me and Wakatoshi would still be roommates, and you wouldn’t have to deal with this,” he adds, as he swings his feet around to sit on the lower bunk properly. 

“Sure,” Leon replies, because, yes, it was entirely his fault the dean of the school (and student accommodations) knew about their relationship. “But still. I mean, I guess I expect this shit from you, but - I mean, Wakatoshi-”

But his reprimanding glare is not received, just Ushijima seems, mostly, interested in the colour of the paint on the wall and is not looking at him. 

Leon stares at him for a moment before just rolling his eyes, and putting his bag down. 

“You know what, whatever, I can’t have this conversation for a hundredth time…” he mutters to himself, starting the process of unpacking. And besides, maybe it was a little bit hypocritical of him to critique them, considering he had just spent an hour and a half on a train for the purposes of visiting his girlfriend. 

A phone dings. 

Leon reflexively reaches to check his, but that’s not the source of it. 

He turns around, hearing the bed moving, and finds Ushijima sitting up as Tendou unlocks his phone. 

“How do you keep guessing my passwords?” Ushijima asks, as Tendou opens his messages. 

“The real question is why do you keep changing your password?” Tendou replies. “Why don’t you want me in your phone?” 

Before he can say anything, Leon intervenes with: “Don’t answer that.”

Ushijima shuts his mouth. 

Tendou spares a glance up at Leon, giving him half a grin for a second before saying: 

“Clever. Benkei won’t be here to save you every time though.”

Ushijima gives Leon a helpless sort of look, but honestly, that’s not Leon’s problem. Ushijima was the one who chose to engage in a relationship with the least comprehensible person in the school.

“It’s… from Kuroo?” Tendou says, tilting his head. “It’s a group chat, actually, to all the guys. They’re… looking to start a ghost hunting team. Fantastic.”

“But ghosts aren’t real,” Ushijima says. 

“What is happening?” Leon contributes. 

“Oh, Ushijima accidentally joined some guys while they were ghost hunting,” Tendou fills in, then adds: “They went… like… local-viral a week ago for getting scared in Saitama and Goshiki really wanted them to come check out Shiratorizawa because it would be funny, and then-”

“Hang on, is this part of why Goshiki has a broken nose?” Leon says. 

“Yes,” Tendou replies. 

Ushijima is looking at that paint colour again. 

Leon is going to need to investigate this further. 

“So, what do you want to tell them?” Tendou prompts, gently elbowing Ushijima to get his attention. He had this way of lowering the pitch of his voice to something borderline sweet - and borderline normal - when talking to Ushijima that irritated Leon only because it proved Tendou was capable of being gentle and kind and was simple choosing not to with anyone else. 

“I don’t know. I don’t think I should. I’m not sure why I was even… invited, I was just there to supervise-”

“Oh, come on! You seemed like you were having fun until you assaulted Goshiki. And that won’t happen again because he won’t be there the rest of the time. Plus, even if one of them is Seijoh, the rest seemed cool, and you need other friends,” Tendou goes on, leaning into him. “And this is funny, and stupid, and if you really don’t believe in ghosts, then there’s nothing to lose!”

“I have you, though,” Ushijima says. “And Leon. Do I need more friends than that?”

“Absolutely,” Tendou replies. “If you’re looking for a sign, I say, you go for it. Do it. Even if you don’t need more friends, you do really need a non-volleyball hobby.”

“I’m sorry,” Leon says, waving a hand. “I left for a single weekend and I’ve come back to find out Wakatoshi has joined a ghost-hunting troupe? What in the hell happened?” 

“Don’t worry,” Ushijima says, holding a hand out towards Leon to assure him everything was alright. “Ghosts are not real.”

---

 

“Question three?”

“Negative sixty four.” 

“Mhm… yeah, got it,” Daichi mumbles, scratching his pencil down his math work to make sure it was all in line. Suga had this very sweet tactic of asking Daichi to “check their work” before they had to hand in math assignments, which was his clever way of giving Daichi an excuse to get all the correct answers, since, in the three years they’d been doing this, Daichi had, maybe less than a handful of times, ever gotten an answer right that Suga didn’t already have. 

“And… four?”

“Seven-eighty.” 

“...fuck, okay, what’s… why is it so high? I thought thirty-two?”

Suga laughs, happily pulling his work up and scooting in closer to Daichi to take a look at his page. 

“Okay, I see where you went wrong…” he mumbles, leaning in with his pencil to show him. “See, right here-”

His phone buzzes. With a mumbled apologize Daichi reaches to check it, surprised to see a group chat, created by Kuroo, with three other very specific people involved. He’d seen the initial message get sent - Kuroo’s business proposition. 

And now-

Bokuto: I’m in!!!!

Oikawa: I’m in :)

Ushijima: I’m in.

They’re just waiting on him. 

“Who’s that?” Suga asks. 

“Uh…” Daichi isn’t even sure if there’s a lie that would be more outlandish than the truth, so he eventually just settles on: “That’s Kuroo, and the ghost-hunting… guys.”

“Huh.”

“They… okay, get this,” He says, shifting to look at Suga properly. Suga sits up, folding his hands on his lap and nodding as he looked at him. 

“Yeah?”

“Kuroo wants to do it, like, properly. Like intentionally finding places to investigate to make videos and share with people.”

Suga raises his eyes. “Why?”

“I don’t know, but… he… it was a lot of fun, you know, and I’m not against the idea, but…”

“But…?”

“Why… why would I?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, I… My hobby is volleyball, and… I’m going to graduate, and then… hopefully get into the police academy, you know, live my life,” and he stops, trailing off slightly as he stares at Suga, who just smiles back, listening with some level of amusement. “And… you know… meet someone… get married…”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah, all that, uhm… I just… this is… so weird , and so not in the plan, and…”

“Daichi,” Suga says. “I know you love volleyball, but… truth be told, we’re kinda done with it, aren’t we? You’ve already started having Ennoshita lead some practices to get him ready for next year, and the kids are doing great, and we’re not getting sports scholarships… We can hang out and play volleyball our whole lives if we want, but… we’re never gonna get to compete at nationals again. And if this is… letting you have fun like that, giving you something new and exciting to try, you should do it. It’s not what I’d have picked out for you, but… I mean, I saw that video they posted, and… you looked…”

“Crazy?”

“Happy, you like those guys whether you want to admit it or not,” Suga says. “So I think you shouldn’t stop yourself from having fun just because it doesn’t… fit the model of what you were supposed to do with your life.”

“Okay,” Daichi replies, nodding, before pulling out his phone again. 

Before he can say anything, though, he sees another message had come in, this one, though, from his father. 

Hey! Just checking in, everything good at school? Any news? How are things in Miyagi?

This message was not unusual. His father always texted like this, and Daichi had always assumed it was just his weird fatherly way of trying to stay connected. 

He’d realized, now, that this was, more likely, his way of keeping his finger on Daichi’s - and his family’s - pulse regarding what they were reading in the news. 

Hey, his father is saying. Any interesting news articles? Read anything about the forest lately? Did Kumo get brought home by a police officer at one in the morning? Did you see anything weird in the woods? Did you see me?

Daichi ignores his message, and sends back to the other captains:

I’m in.

Notes:

End of... arc one? Anyway I am having SO much fun with this stupid little thing so I hope you're all having as much fun as I am <3 if you have thoughts, feel free to share them below, otherwise, I will see you in the next update <3

xx

Chapter 5: At the Yamaneko Ryokan

The campground is not situated too far outside of the city, but it’s far enough away that, with a near-cloudless sky, the stars are infinitely more visible than they were amid the warm-lit houses and streetlights. Perhaps, maybe, the reason why Tooru thought the stars were so magnificent came from the fact that you had to work to find them. You had to pack up your gear, you had to drive for an hour, you had to hike up a hill. He did not, in any way, enjoy the process of camping. He didn’t like the food, he didn’t like the sleeping bags, he didn’t like being pushed to the edge of the tent, sandwiched against nylon fabric and his sister and her boyfriend. But he liked the stars, so he put up with it. 

Oikawa Saku watches her younger brother get distracted by the bugs in the bushes as she tries to fiddle with the telescope and get the instrument tuned correctly onto Saturn. It’s a challenge - this is, after all, only a hobby. She’s never been so good with the little dials anyway. 

“Is it ready yet?” Tooru complains, from where whatever grasshopper he’d been terrorizing has escaped him, and he’s back to being bored. “I wanna see.”

“It’s… almost good…” she mumbles back, carefully tapping at one more of the dials to fine-tune the image into something clear. “Okay, good, come over here.”

Tooru appears at her side in an instant, and she sets a little folding stool down so that he can step up to be level with the telescope. He hasn’t quite hit his first growth spurt, yet, but he’s only eleven. Based on Saku’s own experience with puberty, he’d probably shoot up soon enough. 

“Careful,” she says, holding him back from the telescope. “Go slowly - if you bump it, you won’t be able to see it.”

“I know, I know…” he mumbles back, before slowly leaning in to look through the lens. There’s a bit of a silence, where he’s just staring, and she can’t handle it. 

“Can you see it?” 

“... Yeah,” Tooru says eventually, voice soft and barely audible in the night air. “Is that Saturn?”

“That’s Saturn!” she laughed back, as Tooru lifted his head to look up at her, smiling wide. “Isn’t it pretty?”

“I thought you were kidding when you said we’d be able to see the rings,” he admits. 

“We can’t always,” she agrees. “But when the nights are perfect, like tonight, and the season is right…”

Tooru nods along, and she wonders if he’s actually listening to her, or too caught up in the abstract prettiness of the image Saturn makes. She hopes he’s listening. She hopes he really does care, she wants him to find it all as wonderful as she does. The movement of the celestial bodies, the way they dance around in the sky, the pull of the ocean, the gravity of the sun, the asteroid belts and the rings around Saturn, all of it, is so gloriously wondrous she hopes he cares, even a little bit, about the unique circumstances that had to align for them to see this planet tonight, an incomprehensibly far distance away, and right there, in the glass of the telescope. 

“Do you think there are aliens on Saturn?” 

She frowns, and finds in her reverie, Tooru has started looking at her again. He’s all big eyes and innocence, and she laughs at the question. 

“Uh… well, I don’t think anything is on Saturn, per se.” 

“What do you mean? I thought you believed in aliens?” 

“Well, remember, Saturn is a gas-giant,” she says, and Tooru steps down from the little stool, so that she can step in and take another look at the marvelous planet. “There’s no surface of the planet to be on.” 

“Oh,” he says. 

“Now,” she corrects quickly, before he can get distracted again. “That doesn’t mean that Saturn doesn’t have alien life. See, there’s this common perception, of aliens as being little grey guys-”

“The Greys.”
“Yes, that’s correct,” she teases, pausing to run a hand through his hair, before backing up a bit to take a seat on the grass, letting her breath out. These days, her back ached, her feet ached, her head ached, all of the time. The grass is cool beneath her, though, and even without the view from the telescope, the sky is dazzling above them. It makes the ache worth it, a bit. Tooru moves to sit beside her, knees drawn up and eyes wide in rapt attention. He always paid more attention to the aliens than the actual science, but that didn’t bother her. “The Greys. But that’s mostly pop culture, y’know. I can almost guarantee you that there is alien life out there, but it’s probably gonna be in the form of… some bacteria, from another planet, or… bugs, or… small fish. I mean, maybe bigger, more complicated animals too, stuff we might even be able to recognize, but… like on Saturn, what’s to say the alien life isn’t found in swarms of microscopic bugs or bacteria that can survive and eat in the gaseous body, kinda like the organisms down in the deep sea vents?” 

Tooru is staring at her still, and apparently all he gets from that is: “Alien bugs?”

“Yes, alien bugs. Maybe. I just mean… Greys are so boring. There’s so many more possibilities out there, and if we stopped worrying about flying saucers, we might be able to find them.”

Tooru nods along with that for a minute, sitting in silence for a second before turning to look at her, scoot a little closer in beside her, and say: “Will we still come out here, once the baby is born?”

Saku smiles, lifting an arm up to wrap around his shoulders and tuck him in against her side. 

“Of course,” she says. “We’ll teach him everything about the stars. No kid of mine is going to grow up with his eyes pointed to the ground.” 

Tooru smiles, leaning his head against her shoulder and falling quiet again. Saku hopes that it’s true. 

“I can’t wait to meet it,” Tooru mumbles after a moment, and Saku lifts a hand up, to rest on the large swell of her belly, rubbing her thumb gently in circles. 

“Him, Tooru, it's him.”

“Him. Right. Sorry. I can’t wait to meet him. I’m gonna be the best uncle ever.”

“I know you will,” Saku mumbles, squeezing him gently for a moment. “And I know things have been… crazy lately, but… me and Jun are gonna get married, the baby is gonna arrive… Jun’s got this… great opportunity, at his dad’s company, he’ll make it work… I’ll… sort out the issues with Mom… and me and you… we’re never gonna change, okay? You don’t have to worry about what happens next. I know things are hard right now, but we’ll be okay.” 

Tooru is quiet for a moment. “You’re really gonna marry Jun?” 

“Of course I am…” she says, softly. “I’m lucky he’s stepping up as much as he is, it… With the issues with Mom and Dad, if I didn’t have him, I’d have nobody…”

“You’d have me,” he corrects, instantly. 

“Sorry, you’re right,” she says. “I’d have you.”

 

---

He moves as fast as he can without actually jogging, and when he pops up onto the worn down, wooden step, the front door swings open before he can knock. He sways back to avoid being hit, as Saku immediately turns away to disappear back into the small home. 

“You’re late!” she scolds, and Oikawa slips in through the doorway. 

“I know, I know-” he replies.

“I told you to be on time,” she shouts back, and as she does, Oikawa moves through the little living room area, dropping his bag on the couch. Saku moves through the house and disappears into the bathroom, leaving the door open. 

“You’re not even ready,” he calls back. “You can’t yell at me for being late if you weren’t able to get ready at the right time either.”

“I can do whatever the hell I please.”

Oikawa rolls his eyes, moving from the living room to the bathroom door, and popping his head in to look at her in the mirror. 

“You’re going with that shade of lipstick?”

She scowls. “If you’d shown up earlier, you could have had a say.”

“Fair enough.”

She takes a minute more to adjust how she looks in the mirror, checking herself out and fiddling with every tiny detail before pulling away. Oikawa leans out of the way for her to pass by, splitting off from her to head into the kitchen. 

“ Thank you, by the way,” Saku calls after a moment. “For coming on such short notice. I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

“Oh, it’s no problem,” Oikawa replies, swiping an ID badge off the counter, tucked underneath a pile of chaos, bill payments and letters from the bank organized in the least organized way possible. He glances over it only for a second before turning to head back towards the living room as his sister keeps shouting back: 

“Seriously. And I promise, as soon as I get paid next week, I will reimburse you for all of the work you’ve been doing for me-”

“You don’t need to worry about that,” Oikawa says. 

“I just hate taking advantage of you-”

“You’re not taking advantage of me,” he corrects, as Saku comes over towards him, eyes darting around the living room, clearly looking for something. “I love watching Takeru, I don’t mind doing it.”

“Still,” she says, pausing where she stood and pressing the back of her hand to her forehead, as if trying to willpower a headache away.

“But,” Oikawa said, after a moment. “You can repay me by being better than me and returning home at ten as you promise , because I have plans that I cannot cancel. People will be waiting on me.”

“ People? Oikawa, you’ve had the same three friends since you were fourteen, you can just say-”

“These are new friends, actually, thank you very much,” he corrects, giving her a grin and holding out the ID card for her. “Is this what you’re looking for?” 

She raises an eye at him for a moment, before stepping forward to swipe the card from him. 

“Yes, thank you,” she sniffs, before adding: “So what are you and these new friends doing at ten at night. Should I be worried?”

“No,” he says, pointedly, before adding: “Actually, we’ve started a ghost-hunting team. If you can call it that. We’re going to stay overnight at the Yamaneko Ryokan, apparently it’s-

“Ghost hunting?” she replies, arching an eye up. 

“Oh, come on, don’t give me that judgment.”

She puts a hand over her face again, careful to not rub or smear any of her make-up, but clearly wanting to. “Christ, Tooru-” she starts, clearly frustrated. “I thought we were over this. Ghosts? Really?”

“Yes, really!” he scoffs back, and Saku pulls away to cross the room to the closet, digging around for a jacket. 

“I thought you were over this,” she corrects. “I thought you were all gung-ho for volleyball now, gonna move across the world, be a star, whatever. I don’t want you wasting your life chasing UFOs and shadows.” 

“I’m- I’m not wasting my life, it’s… just a bit of fun,” Oikawa says, dancing around her to get out of the way as she closes the closet and heads for the door.. “And besides, this might actually be something. And - and one of the guys, yeah? Sawamura, his father is like… properly in the PSIA, lying, government cover-ups and everything, right? Like we went out, a couple weeks ago, to-”

Saku has stopped moving, stiff and staring at the door, hand poised at the handle to open it and leave. 

“-look for that meteorite, y’know? The one that came down that weekend, and they were literally in the woods, blocking it off, and it was important and secret enough that his dad lied , so like, that’s obviously aliens. And, yes, I know the ghost-hunting thing seems like a departure from the aliens but honestly it’s all connected, right? And I think Sawamura-”

“Tooru,” Saku says, after a moment, and with a suddenly dry mouth Oikawa shuts up, staring at the back of her head. After a beat of silence, she says: “It’s one thing to read the news, it’s one thing to speculate, but this wild goose chase you have put yourself on is going to get you arrested. Nothing is worth fucking around in the PSIA’s business, okay?”

He steps around her, to try and get into her line of sight. 

“But don’t you want to know the truth?” he says, putting a hand on her shoulder. “Don’t you want-”

She swats his hands away, turning to glare at him. He takes a step back on reflex, putting his hands in the air. 

“Look, all I want right now is to impress my boss tonight, get a promotion, and make sure Takeru doesn’t have to go to bed hungry, okay? I don’t give a shit about who you’re friends with or how many aliens you think you’ve caught, I don’t want to hear it. I… cannot keep listening to this, Oikawa. Stick to volleyball. Or get a fucking therapist if that’s what you need, I don’t care. Just… keep this bullshit out of my house.” 

Oikawa swallows, nodding slightly in surrender, and taking another step back. 

Saku nods in return, before adding: “I’ll be back by ten. And thank you, again, for coming over.”

“No problem,” he replies, voice softer than he would have liked it to be. “Anytime. Anything you need.”

She stares at him for a moment, before mumbling a goodbye and disappearing out the door. 

 

---

 

It’s a highway inn. Yamaneko Ryokan is an odd mix of historical relic and tourist attraction, boasting a haunted premises combined with an authentic history and a founding quite a few centuries ago. Despite this, it had never managed to feature on any national curiosity, and no professional team had ever investigated it. It was more of a local legend in Miyagi, and considering the state of things, Kuroo was pretty sure their attempts at drawing in tourism via ghost-legends had not succeeded. 

It wasn’t that it was an uncared for building, but rather it was very old , not making any money, and in desperate need of more significant attention and upkeep. Situated just off the highway, the unpaved road leading up to it is lined with old fashioned oil lamps, lit with real fire. 

“Mrrp?”

Kuroo stops where he’s walking, staring at the big, thick-furred cat that stretches up on its hindlegs, licking at the dish of the oil lamp in an attempt to get at the oils it was burning. When Kuroo had disturbed it, it had stopped, looking across at him with yellow eyes so round and big it looked almost… wrong. 

A long, long tail swishes against the grass and gravel. It’s mostly dark furred, a mottled blackish grey, but its tail, that long tail, is almost entirely white. 

Kuroo stares at the cat. 

The cat stares back. 

It slowly starts trying to lick at the oil again. 

Kuroo, not one to be deterred by a weird moment, pulls his bag off his shoulder and crouches down. He keeps an eye on the cat, who’s only passively interested in him, and digs around to see if he had any food on him the cat might like. Unfortunately, although he had prepared for an overnight stay with quite a few snacks, none of them were particularly cat-appropriate. 

“Sorry,” he says, holding his hand out anyway, brushing his fingers together. “I don’t have food for you, but… hey… come here… come on…”

The cat shuffles back from the lamp, and it’s deeply unnerving to watch the cat stay balanced on its hindlegs for a second, staring at Kuroo, before slowly - too slowly - lowering itself down to sit properly. It’s a pretty damn big cat. 

It just looks at him. 

“Come on…” he says, trying to scoot himself closer without tipping over from his crouched position. “Come on, baby…”

“Kuroo!”

At the shout, the cat is gone - Kuroo isn’t even sure it ran away, there’s no waver in the bushes behind it, or the sound of gravel. It turns and flees so efficiently it may as well have just blinked out of existence. 

Kuroo sighs, before lifting his head to look up towards the ryokan. Bokuto is standing in the doorway there, waving him over. 

“Hey,” he calls back, glancing to where the cat had been once more before trying to shove it from his mind. “Everyone else here?”

“Nah, not yet,” Bokuto says. “Daichi and Ushiwaka are inside, though. Oikawa’s held up somewhere, apparently.” 

Kuroo nods, and lets Bokuto lead him through the entranceway and through the old ryokan. It’s nicer inside than it is outside. Maybe they could use a new groundskeeper, or something. 

The benefit to arriving late is that Kuroo doesn’t have to deal with checking in or getting set up. Bokuto leads him to the room they were in, sliding the door aside and dramatically beckoning for Kuroo to enter first. 

“He has arrived,” Bokuto declared. 

“Woo,” Daichi says, not particularly enthusiastically, from where he’s laying on the floor. 

Ushijima, carefully finishing pouring tea where he sat at the table, does not vocalize. 

“I thought Daichi was making tea?” Bokuto says, following Kuroo in. 

“He was doing it wrong,” Ushijima replies. 

“I was doing it wrong,” Daichi echoes. “Oikawa texted. He’s on his way.” 

“Sweet,” Kuroo says, trying to rapidly get on the same wavelength as whatever the hell was going on here without him. “I’ll get set up. And you’re sure the owner is cool with us filming?”

“Oh, they are so cool with it, man. In fact they asked to include as many features of the place as possible,” Bokuto answers, heading over to join Ushijima at the table. 

“That tracks. Alright-”

Kuroo heads over to an open space on the floor, setting his bag down and starting the process of unpacking the camera and making sure the settings are all in order. He brought Kenma’s tripod, this time, since he wasn’t expecting to have to do as much walking around, but just set it aside for now. 

Movement. 

Their room has a small porch-like attachment, overlooking the beautiful natural landscape of what appeared to be rocks and a tree, separated from them by a thin sliding door. That door, it seemed, had been cracked open slightly to cool the room down, and now lets Kuroo peer out into the darkness. 

Two yellow eyes peer into the room.

Kuroo jumps slightly, but before he can open his mouth the cat is gone. 

Nobody else seems to have noticed. 

 

---

 

As far as being a ‘ghost hunting team,’ the initial experience at the ryokan is not especially heartening. Daichi and Ushijima are a suffocatingly unyielding presence when it comes to these matters, so any attempts to create a spooky atmosphere get shut down immediately. It does not help that neither Bokuto nor Kuroo had ever heard about this place, and didn’t even know why it was supposed to be scary. 

Oikawa was just not here, and also the only one who knew what the hell was supposed to be going on. 

So Kuroo shuffles around for a bit and gets some b-roll footage, the staff has long since stopped regular operations and as far as he can tell, they’re the only people even here . 

“Oh,” Daichi says, suddenly, sitting up and grabbing his phone. “Oikawa’s here.”

Oh, thank god.

Kuroo glances at the time - it’s almost midnight. 

Everyone, as quietly and respectfully and feverishly as they can, leap to their feet and rush out of the room, out of the ryokan entirely, to find Oikawa dragging himself up the gravel road towards them. 

“You’re late!” Daichi shouts. 

“Sorry! I know,” he replies, waving a hand as they all came out to crowd him. “My sister’s thing ran long, I couldn’t get out of there.”

“Well, you’re here now, and I’m already very tired, so I want to get the ghost hunting part of this sleepover done, so I can do the sleeping part,” Daichi says. “Also, this place is cute but totally not haunted. It doesn’t even feel fake haunted.”

“What is fake haunted?” Oikawa says. “You know what? Nevermind - let me just put my stuff down and we’ll get to work.”

 

---

 

Daichi had never thought he’d be glad to see Oikawa, but it was a much needed boost to the energy of the group. Something about having formalized their efforts had suddenly made it seem so much more difficult. Was it really still just a couple of guys goofing off and looking around dark corners? Did they have to perform?

Kuroo had mentioned it was probably going to be a while until they found their rhythm, and that they shouldn’t be afraid of playing around with different energies, or film, but Daichi wasn’t quite sure anyway. 

“So, what’s got this place so haunted?” Daichi says. 

“Well,” Oikawa starts, as Kuroo settles into his role as camera operator, sitting down across from him to film him talking. “There are several more traditional ghosts that are said to inhabit this place. Hayato Rei , is one of them, a young man who apparently hung himself in the eighteenth century. Almost nothing is known about him, except for this insanely morbid record that had been kept in the ledger, where the innkeeper at the time wrote his check-in time, name, whatever, and then, must have had a sick sense of humour, because where he was supposed to document the check-out, he’d just written: n/a.”

“Oh, that is morbid,” Kuroo snickers. 

“Shit,” Bokuto agrees, before looking around the room. “Where did he hang himself…?”

“Uh… that’s not exactly known,” Oikawa says. “But they did say one of the rooms.”

Daichi glanced around their room. With Oikawa’s mind, it was probably this room.

“Okay, okay, but that’s not what makes this place so cool,” Oikawa goes on, waving a hand to get everyone’s attention again. “So, in the early nineteenth century, the owner’s daughter, a young girl at the time, found this abandoned kitten, in the woods. And she ends up raising this cat, right, and it lived for a decade, but - well, you know what they say about old cats-”

“Literally what the hell could you even be talking about?” Daichi cuts in. 

Oikawa rolls his eyes. 

“You all have got to learn your folklore! This is embarrassing, honestly.”

“Just tell us what happened to the cat,” Bokuto demands, leaning into him. Oikawa shifts away a bit, before continuing. 

“Well, they say if you raise a cat for twelve years, it’ll turn into a bakeneko ,” he said, eyeing the four people sitting in a circle around him. “And this young woman did not want to get rid of her cat. And she knew her father was very superstitious, and would try and kill it, or get rid of it another way, so she lied and said it had died, and then hid it in her room. And, well…” Oikawa holds out his hands, as if to indicate they should know the rest of the story.

“And?” Ushijima demands, not capable of that kind of extrapolation of information, and seeming annoyed at the insinuation he should even try. 

“The cat - it turned into a bakeneko, ate the young woman, and has never let anyone drive it away from its home,” Oikawa says. 

“There’s a haunted cat here?” Kuroo says, and the strain in his voice is unusual for someone Daichi usually thought sounded like he was always trying to sell you something.

“Well technically it’s a kind of yokai but - yeah, why?”

“No reason.”

Oikawa also seems confused by this, but Bokuto is there to save the day by being not interested in what Kuroo is saying at all, pushing himself up to his feet. 

“I told you all, Daichi should have brought his dog! Protection from the demon cat!”

Daichi groaned. “And I told you this place doesn’t allow pets. I promise, I’ll let you see the dog soon, I just can’t break any laws to do so.”

Bokuto scoffed. “Fine. But just so you all know, now, because Daichi isn’t willing to break the law, we have to go catch the demon cat on our own with dog protection.”

Oikawa snickered. “It’s… highly unrecommended to try and do so. Bakenekos are not to be fucked with. They can shapeshift, possess people, manipulate the dead, and they will try and kill you, they are not bothered by killing you.”

“I believe I am capable of taking down a cat,” Ushijima says. 

“It’s not that easy!” Oikawa laughs, before pushing himself up to his feet. “But yes, let’s take a look outside, see if anything’s there.”

“Sure, outside…” Kuroo mumbles, getting up as well. 

Everyone gathers themself together, and they leave through the porch entrance, out into the slightly sloped, rather uninspired back courtyard area. Kuroo is quiet, scanning his camera around, and Daichi decides to do his due diligence and pull out his phone camera as well. 

“We could really use more than one decent camera,” he mumbles. 

“Hey, you said it, not I,” Oikawa replies, doing the same to get his phone out. 

Ushijima, not afraid of the dark, cats, or this place, has already started wandering off towards the treeline, and Bokuto is happy to hoot and jump after him. Daichi sticks with Oikawa and Kuroo, following along the outside wall of the building and stepping over rocks. 

“So, Kuroo, got any special connection to haunted cats?” Daichi says, after a moment. “You seemed a little-”

“I… okay, it’s stupid, I just saw a cat when I-”

“You saw a cat?” Oikawa interrupts, whipping around to look at him. 

Kuroo freezes for a second, before saying: “Yeah, when I was coming in. It was… this really big, dark cat, it had a white tail-”

“White tail?”

“Yeah, a long white tail-”

“Long white tail?”

“Yes. And it was out front, trying to get at the oil in the lamp - it must be fish oil or whatever-”

“It was licking at the oil lamp?”

“Holy shit, Oikawa,” Daichi interrupts. “Let him tell the stupid story.”

“I’m sorry, but - ugh, you’re so dumb - he’s literally describing like… textbook bakeneko behaviour. Next he’s gonna say that it walked on two legs.”

Kuroo is quiet for a moment, which only prompts Oikawa’s eyes to widen further. 

“It didn’t,” Kuroo hurried to correct, before saying: “But… it did… kinda stand like that for a while-”

“Okay,” Daichi cuts in, putting a hand on Oikawa’s shoulder to stop him from combusting. “Cats are weird, that’s very well documented, Kuroo didn’t meet an evil yokai, okay? Okay?”

“Show me where it happened.” 

“This way,” Kuroo says, and then Oikawa and Kuroo have jogged off and Daichi is left standing alone in the night. 

He should follow. 

There’s a chill in the air and he can hear bugs chirping. He doesn’t want to run, it’s quite dark, but it’s really unpleasant, being alone. 

He moves slowly, before lifting his camera up to film himself, deciding that was weird, and putting it down. Then he decides that’s what they agreed to do, lifting it up again, staring at himself in the dark reflection, not having any idea what to say or do, and then-

Something creaks.

He’d almost passed by the door they’d left ajar, their dark room waiting inside, and…

Another creak.

Daichi has always been… bad with the dark. He’s always hated it. Not afraid, mind you, he’d never say afraid, but-

He stumbles back a step, wondering if his eyes are playing tricks on him, wondering if he’s just exhausted, because it’s well past midnight, wondering any number of things. 

But through the crack in the door, he is sure , beyond positive, 100% convinced, that he can see the slowly swaying silhouette of a hanged man. 

He feels sick. He lifts his phone up, slowly, hoping to focus it on the darkness, hoping to capture whatever it is. His hands are shaking, though, even if the camera can pick it up, he can’t hold it steady enough to be worth anything. 

He tries to blink it away. It’s still there. 

A creak, as the body sways to the left. A creak, as the body sways to the right. 

He takes another step back-

His ankle twists on a rock he wasn’t paying attention to, and he stumbles, and he expects to go tumbling down further but stops suddenly against something soft and warm. 

He almost screams at the suddenness of it all, before his brain is able to process that it’s Ushijima behind him, now very confusedly holding him upright, and not something horrible. 

“What are you doing?”

“Uh…”

Daichi lifts his eyes up to the crack in the door, and finds that while the darkness still sways with the movement of the trees in the courtyard, he’s unable to get it to form the shape of a man. 

“You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” Bokuto chirps, and Daichi is very aware of the phone camera, and light, in his face. 

“Yeah, I… just the shadows, spooked me. Oikawa and Kuroo ran off… what are you guys doing? I thought you were… somewhere else, but that was really quick.”

“We got yelled at by a staff member for looking through the window and scaring them,” Ushijima replies, stepping away from Daichi and heading back up towards the room. 

“Apparently, we can’t film everything,” Bokuto scoffed. 

“Did… did you… I’m sorry, did you try to film through a window to where people were?”

“We were looking for ghosts!”

“Don’t film people who don’t know you’re there!”

 

---

 

With the exception of a few passing cars, rare at this time of night, the front path to the ryokan is quite and still, and though Kuroo spends some time filming into the woods and through the bushes and trees that surround them, neither him nor Oikawa have a great desire to stumble their way into a ditch in hopes of finding a cat. 

Especially because it was just right here.  

Oikawa looks at the lamp the cat had been licking, Kuroo comments on how the little crack in the glass does look like it would be letting some of the fish oil out, they nod about it a bit and he goes back to filming the woods. 

He doesn’t have a lot to say to Oikawa. Not even just about the odd interaction he’d had with the cat, but in general, as a person. 

Daichi had just… not followed them, for whatever reason, and he’s not sure he’s ever really been alone with the guy otherwise. So apart from the few quick fill-ins Daichi had provided, regarding who this guy was and how they knew each other (a story Kuroo was still a little hazy on, and had come half through a Kenma-Hinata-Kageyama grapevine), he didn’t know who he was. 

Oikawa, too, at this moment doesn’t seem particularly interested in getting to know him, standing off a bit, down the path, phone out but seeming more thoughtfully observant with his own eyes, rather than trying to catch anything on camera. 

After some time of this, in which Kuroo forgets he’s supposed to be filming as well and has just started desperately searching for something - anything - to say, he’s relieved when footsteps announce the arrival of Daichi, who’s being tailed by both Ushijima and Bokuto, both of which seem tired, if not a little bored. 

This wasn’t exactly going as planned.

“Caught the bakeneko yet?” Daichi calls, somewhat sarcastically. 

Oikawa sighs. “No,” he replies, earnestly. 

They reconvene in a small huddle, just five adult men past one in the morning on the side of a highway.

Kuroo taps his fingers on the camera for a second before saying: 

“Hey, if I can ask… uh… what are we… what are we actually doing?”

He gets four pairs of eyes on him. 

“What do you mean?” is Oikawa’s response, the first to speak up. 

“I mean… okay, so… We all decided to jump headfirst into this ghost hunting thing, but… What are we trying to do? Like… is the goal just to get proof of ghosts on camera? Is the goal to disprove ghosts are here? Is it to find a bakeneko and prove their existence? Is it just to make a funny video that’ll get attention? Like… What are we doing?”

“I… second Kuroo’s question,” Daichi says, running his hands together slightly. “I was trying to film myself earlier and just… I had nothing to say. I mean, it’s weird being alone and filming yourself alone but honestly the issue I had was it was just… not knowing where to start. Do I just narrate how I feel? What we’re seeing? What’s the angle of this all-”

Ushijima is nodding along, supplying: “I have had the same issue. I do not believe in ghosts, so identifying when to film or comment on individual events has been hard, since if the goal is to find ghosts, none of it would be relevant to film, since… it is not ghosts.”

Oikawa listens to both of them, before glancing at Bokuto. 

“Do you have the same issue?”

Bokuto shrugs. “I mean kinda. But honestly I thought we were just here to goof off and hang out. I’d be fine doing anything, though… yeah, it has been kinda a bummer tonight. The mood is all weird.” 

Oikawa thinks about this for a moment, before saying: 

“Well… my goal…” and then trailing off slightly, frowning a bit and saying: “Hey, why don’t we all go inside where it’s warmer and figure this out there?”

“That is a good plan,” Kuroo says, before shutting his camera off. 

 

---

 

Inside, they get ready to go to bed. Kuroo sets his camera up on the tripod, plugging it in with the intention of filming them while they sleep, in case any ghost activity occurs overnight. 

Even if they are all pretty exhausted, it’s well into the early morning hours now, and none of them lay down, but rather choose to sit, some distance away from each other but close enough in a circle that they could talk without shouting. Kuroo - previously held up by the camera - is the last to be ready and while they wait for him to join, Daichi watches Oikawa hold and play with the arms of his glasses, as if looking for a nervous fidget. 

When Kuroo sits down, finally, there’s an air of expectancy in the group that nobody knows how to address. Thankfully, Ushijima has never been one to pick up on awkward silences and starts with: 

“I believe if we intend to do this consistently, it would be important to have clearly defined goals. You all came to Shiratorizawa as a group already, so I would be curious as to what instigated that initial coming together.”

“Well,” Kuroo says. “Daichi had texted me saying they were going to be coming to Saitama for the weekend and wondering if they could crash at my place to save on hotels… When I found out what he was doing it sounded like a lot of fun, and I invited Bokuto since we’d been planning to hang out already.”

“I wasn’t aware they’d be there,” Oikawa adds.

“Right…” Daichi picks up. 

“So why were you guys going?” Ushijima replies, nodding to Daichi. “Based on my understanding of both of you individually, you are not friends. Or, were not friends.”

Daichi glances to Oikawa, trying hard to read what his expectations for this conversation might be but finding he was just not able to figure it out. He didn’t know him well enough like that. 

“It’s… an odd story,” Daichi says. “We… ran into each other at night… I’m not sure it’s relevant to all this, actually, why… But… I dunno, I went along with the Saitama thing mostly…”

Oikawa is watching him for a moment, before saying: “If you tell them your thing, I’ll share mine.”

Daichi arches an eye up. “Oh?”

He only gets a slight nod back, and of course, now, the other three boys have had their interests piqued, and they’re looking at them intently. 

Daichi stares back for a minute before nodding and saying: “A couple weeks ago, uhm… I… well, it’s a long story. My dog was acting weird and ran off and I ran into Oikawa in the woods, who was with Iwaizumi… they were looking for a meteorite that had come down… whatever… I… tagged along, I guess, and we saw… the police had quartered off a chunk of the forest, and the PSIA was there, even, monitoring things. It… looked like a pretty serious operation. But we… I noticed that my dad was with them. But he’s not… like he’d… I was told that he was working in an office, as an accounts manager, or… something, somewhere, in Tokyo, and when I asked, he… told me he was still in Tokyo. So… I don’t…”

There’s silence that greets him when he takes a breath, so in a desperate attempt to fill it, he continues rambling. 

“I don’t know what that means. I don’t believe in aliens or the paranormal or ghosts, but I do know that he is lying. For some reason. And… Well, Oikawa had… I guess we went up to Saitama because Oikawa had joked about trying to prove to me the paranormal was real, so that he could convince me that my dad was… helping the PSIA cover up aliens, I guess?” 

“Oh,” is Kuroo’s response, frowning slightly as he listened. 

“That’s all… that’s all I’ve got,” Daichi adds, after a second, glancing up to Oikawa and expecting some end of his promise to be fulfilled. 

Oikawa nods a bit, before saying: “So… I… when I was… no I need to start…” he paused, putting a hand over his face for a moment before saying: “So when I was a kid, a really little kid… so my sister… We used to camp a lot. She was a big… she was obsessed with astronomy and meteorology and pretty much any natural science, but we used to go out and she’d show me the constellations, and the planets… and she had a boyfriend at the time that came with us. I… actually don’t remember much about him, honestly, but I know they were pretty serious and she ended… she ended up getting pregnant, super young. She was only sixteen I think… but… On one of our last camping trips, we had hiked out to our usual spot, but decided to go even further, to get a better view, and the weather had gone bad. So… I… honestly… don’t remember most of what happened. I remember… My sister, and her boyfriend were there… and then suddenly, there was this… light. Movement in the sky… If I close my eyes I can visualize it, but it’s hard to explain, like something invisible was spinning, and the forest was lit up with flashing lights, and suddenly, I remembered my sister… screaming, I remembered her trying to get to me, but there were these… sometimes, something… odd, and inhumane, coming out of the woods and I panicked, I turned and ran and I ran as far away as I could and then everything is gone from there.”

There’s a silence around the room. Daichi isn’t even sure what he’s listening to or what Oikawa is trying to say, but he doesn’t speak up yet. 

Ushijima does, though, simply prompting: “Gone?”

“Like… in my memory. I don’t know how I got out of the campgrounds, I don’t know how long I was running for, my next memory is… being in the police station. I remember being questioned by the local police and then I remember when the PSIA came in to take over the case. I remember them shutting everything down. I remember them telling me that Jun - ah, that was my sister’s boyfriend - had fallen , and that he’d… died. But they wouldn’t tell me anything more. They told me the weather was bad and the ground had been destabilized and it was a freak accident but… I know what I saw. I know there was something in the sky, I know something had come to us, and my sister… She was there. She was screaming, and calling for me, she says now nothing happened. She refuses… she says… she says she remembers Jun slipping, she remembers calling the police, but… I don’t know, no, I know… I know what it is. I know what I saw, I know they did something to him, there’s a gap of time between the movement in the sky and the police station too long for it to be true, they did something to Jun and… god only knows if they did something to me or my sister too, that we just can’t remember, but… I…”

“You want to know the truth,” Daichi says, sitting forward a bit more. “That’s why you’re convinced… that the PSIA are hiding aliens-”

“Why else would they have taken over an accidental death? A national organization? Because a kid slipped? No. No way. I was trying to tell them what I remembered, it wasn’t until after I started telling them that we had seen aliens that they brought the PSIA in, and it wasn’t until after the PSIA had arrived that my sister stopped backing up my story. So… I… Daichi’s father is clearly lying to him. They were covering up something in those woods that, unless it’s aliens or some… insanely twisted crime, shouldn’t be worthy of national attention like that, so… Especially since there’s been no reports of missing people, bodies, anything that would have gotten their attention, I’ve checked, believe me. So… I don’t… think Daichi’s in danger, I don’t even think, necessarily, that the PSIA are covering up anything nefarious. I just… know that it wasn’t an accident that killed Jun, and I… I need to know. I need to know what actually, definitively happened. What they covered up.”

There’s a long silence. Daichi searches for something to say for a minute, before Kuroo beats him to it. 

“Alright. Sounds good,” he chirps. 

It’s an odd tone to take in this moment, and he gets everyone’s attention. 

“Sounds good?” Oikawa echoes back, with a shaky voice. 

“Yeah, I mean… I think we know what we’re doing here, now. We definitely are trying to prove that the paranormal exists, right? But more specifically we’re trying to prove to Daichi that the paranormal exists, because he’s dad’s a fucking secret agent. And it matters to you that people know the truth about the world. That… we can do that.”

Oikawa blinks for a moment, and then is looking at Daichi again. 

“We can do that?” Daichi echoes. 

“Yeah,” Kuroo says, shifting forward a bit. “We’ll be better prepared next time. Figure out specifically what kind of haunting we have going on, figure out how we can test it or replicate it, and then put you in the middle of it and see if we can prove that ghosts are real. With Ushijima as a heavyweight non-believer he can be in charge of debunking everything Oikawa and I can think of trying. At least then we’re not going to show up to another haunted location and flounder for three hours.” 

“Okay, so just to back track real quick, none of you have any issues with me just dropping the fact that I’ve seen aliens?” Oikawa cuts in. 

“Oh, no, I think you're as crazy as they come,” Kuroo says. “But I don’t think you’re stupid, so whether or not it’s aliens is irrelevant to me, you’re probably right about them covering something up. Or maybe you’re right about the aliens.” 

“I think you’re right,” Bokuto decides. “Though I actually wasn’t really listening. It was hard to follow.”

“I believe aliens have more credibility than ghosts,” Ushijima supplies. 

Oikawa’s attention gets around to Daichi again, who gives him a half smile back, and says:

“I don’t believe in aliens,” as he had many times before. “But… I know my dad is lying. So you’re at least half right. And… this ghost hunting… whatever isn’t going to prove anything, about what happened to you, or give you any answers, but if it would make you feel better just to get proof of the paranormal, that there are things in the world that are unexplainable, then… I want to charge ahead. I like you guys, I like hanging out with you. So I don’t mind being the little guinea pig of this operation if it gives us a direction to go in. But just so we’re clear, I don’t think my father is covering up aliens.”

“That’s okay,” Kuroo says. “We can change that.” 

Oikawa smiles back at him. “We can change that.”

 

---

 

The rest of the night is uneventful. They fall asleep late, and sleep in. They get up and have breakfast and clean up in the morning, and check out at the right time. They all go their separate ways from the ryokan, with promises to figure out a better, clearer plan for next time. And Kuroo has to admit, it does already feel better, knowing that they have more of a direction now. Something to actually do rather than just standing around and hoping something happens. 

He’s the last to get picked up, and he stands outside texting his mother, yawning slightly as even sleeping in wasn’t quite enough sleep after the long night. He’d go home, review the footage they’d taken overnight, and-

“Mrrp?”

He lifts his head, slowly turning to the side, where that damned black cat - the one with the long white tail - is standing, stretched up on its hindlegs to peer over the railing of the front steps, looking up at him. 

Kuroo stares at it for a moment. 

“You’re not a demon, are you?” he asks. “Because I’d like to try and pet you, but I don’t love the idea of petting a demon.”

The cat makes a soft mrr noise, so Kuroo crouches down, sticking a hand out to try and entice the cat over. It wobbles back on its back legs for a second before moving around the railing to carefully trot up the steps, reaching out to sniff at his hands. 

“There you go…” Kuroo coos, moving his hand around to scratch behind the cat’s ears. It’s immediately more relaxed with the attention, rubbing itself along the step below Kuroo before laying down there and stretching out, letting him scratch at its neck and shoulders. 

He hears his mother’s car pull up, so he mumbles an apology to the cat and gets up to leave, hurrying down to meet her. When he looks back, the cat is already gone. 

 

---

 

“How’s the editing going?” Kuroo asks. 

“This footage is a mess,” Kenma replies, without looking up at him. “And half of the cameras have terrible quality, the phone cameras are not ideal…”

“Well, I’m sure if we were a bigger operation we’d invest in more cameras, but this is still pretty new. And we know it was kind of a disaster. We’re gonna do better next time. Is there anything good in the footage you can use? Anything that makes it interesting at all?”

Kenma is quiet for a moment. Then a second moment, and then Kuroo realizes that it’s actually quite weird for him to just ignore a question. 

“Kenma?”

“Uh… yeah, there’s a few things, actually… I think I can pull something coherent together, but… so you have about seven hours of footage in the night, and most of it is really boring, it’s literally just you guys sleeping except…”

“Oh, God, what do you mean except…?”

Kenma scoots over, and Kuroo slides in to look at the screen as Kenma presses play. 

It is just them sleeping. They sleep for a while, until-

“Wait holy shit-”

Moving through their room - inside their room, the locked room - is a shadowy shape that is clearly a cat. A long-furred cat, with a long tail. It’s hard to make out details of it, it’s very dark and blends into the shadows, but Kuroo’s eyes widen slightly as he watches the very distinct, cat-like movements, as it picks its way through the tangle of legs and futons and finds itself sitting over Kuroo’s place, sniffing at him slightly and pacing around his head. The audio doesn’t pick up any clear noise, but it looks like something spooks the shadow, and then it turns and bolts off, no sound of its paws against the floor and disappearing off camera to, presumably, disappear out of the room. 

The locked room with four walls. 

“So…” Kenma starts slowly. “Did you… like… have a cat in the room?”

“No, we did not have a cat in the room!” Kuroo shrieks back. 

Notes:

gaaah, this chapter was a little bit challenging to write, since I was trying to balance two... maybe even three different main plots, which, maybe I won't do again, but either way thank you for sticking with it <3 and I will see you all in the next update.

Chapter 6: Lovely Normality

Notes:

you ever just write a chapter that's 100% pure self-indulgent fluff? Anyway thank you to all the continued support, it means a lot to get to share <3

xx

→ Totorogirl: okay I know realistically the door was probably ajar, or there was a hole in the wall but I am losing my mind over the cat just appearing like that!!!

→ MirrorMirror: lmao okay am I wrong or is it super crazy that the cat was clearly only showing itself to that one guy? someone should investigate HIM. 

→ bitemedaddy: god i want each and every one of them to sit on my face until i suffocate

     ↳ Kodzuken [replying to bitemedaddy]: um???

→ Don’tForgetMe: LMAO is that fucking Ushiwaka? Jesus Christ you miss one National’s competition and suddenly everyone’s hunting ghosts. 

→ Lulupop: my internet stalking has advised me that all five boys are part of highly acclaimed volleyball teams? What fucking lore. And they’re ALL captains!!! Is this a bit they’re doing??? I need to know!!!

→ Aliensin4k: WHEN’S THE NEXT VID BOYS? WHERE IS IT? WHERE???

 

---

 

Even though the winter season is far from over, February brought in a nice, clear sky and bright sun, so the cafe is pretty comfortable, even outdoors. Lunch is mostly finished with, with the exception of Oikawa, who had gotten distracted by something he was reading on his phone, and Daichi had become enraptured watching his chopsticks snap useless around the last few rolls of sushi he seemed to refuse to look at to find. 

Ushijima was leaning back in his seat, head tilted back to look up at the cloudless sky, but he hadn’t spoken in a while and Daichi wasn’t sure he wasn’t asleep. 

Oikawa gives up eventually and turns his head, looking irritated - as if it were his lunches’ fault that he hadn’t been able to see it with the back of his head - and grabbing one of the pieces to put in his mouth. 

“Okay,” Daichi says, after a moment, putting his own phone down. “In terms of next locations, Kuroo was saying there’s some really neat places in Tokyo. Apparently there’s this old farm that he might be able to get us into that’s got some ancient well, or whatever, but he also mentioned that there’s this office building that’s super haunted, that his dad works at, that could be fun to go to after hours. However, research for that one would be a lot harder because it’s a bit more obscure.” 

“Wow, Dai-chan, you’re really getting into this, for someone who thinks it’s stupid,” Oikawa purrs back. 

“Well, I don’t know if you were paying attention to the last video Kenma posted for it, but it hit twenty-four hundred views within the first week. And people love it. I might not believe in ghosts, but I’m not stupid , I like attention.”

“Oh I forgot,” Oikawa laughed. “You’re not used to attention.”

“Hey,” Daichi says, frowning. 

“Don’t mind it,” Oikawa replies, waving off his own insult. “Anyway, tell me about this farm, what’s the deal?”

“Well, it’s not actually in Tokyo, it’s about two hours west of Tokyo, and Kuroo said it’s sorta like a local legend? Like it was a really common thing for the Nekoma boys to spend a weekend on a dare going up to see if they could catch a ghost. Apparently there’s a very specific old man that haunts the place, but it’s got all the classics. Footsteps, whispers in the air, slamming doors, all of it.”

“Sounds ideal,” Oikawa agreed, nodding along and wiping his hands on his napkin before folding the garbage from his lunch away. “When are we thinking?”

“Well, I mean, no point in delaying, right? Assuming Kuroo can get us in, we can head up there this weekend,” Daichi replies. 

This, however, elicits a hiss of disagreement from Oikawa, and catches Ushijima’s attention, finally, as he sits up properly. 

“Oh, that’s no good for me unfortunately,” Oikawa says, clasping his hands together under his chin. “Sorry…”

Ushijima is shaking his head as if in agreement.

“What? No good - this whole thing is your schtick, what do you mean no good?”

This amuses Oikawa a little bit, before he realizes Daichi isn’t kidding, and he corrects to: “Uhm… this Sunday is Valentine’s Day?” he said, clearly surprised he had to remind Daichi and glancing at Ushijima - as if those two had ever been in cahoots about anything . Before Daichi can say anything, though, he perks up more enthusiastically and adds: “I promised Iwaizumi that we’d go out. They do this cute little movie marathon in the park, they project a series of cheesy romance movies up onto a white screen, everyone sits on blankets, it’s very cute - we’ve gone every year, actually even before we were dating, so… can’t… can’t cancel, so… weekends no good,” Oikawa says, shrugging. 

Daichi frowns, before glancing at Ushijima. “What about you?” he says. “Why do you look all weird about it?”

Ushijima points at Oikawa. “I am also doing that.”

“Oh well I don’t remember you being invited,” Oikawa scoffs back.

“No, I-” Ushijima cuts himself off with a frown, staring back at Oikawa and clearly working hard to decipher this particular response, before eventually settling on ignoring him and looking back at Daichi. “I will be attending the same event with Tendou.” 

“Really?” Oikawa cuts in, leaning on the table, before Daichi can reply. “I just… sorry, I literally cannot imagine you being on a date of any kind. It’s kinda messing with my head.” 

“I am not sure if your opinion on it matters in any capacity,” Ushijima replies. 

“Fair, fair, and of course it doesn’t, it’s just-” and here Oikawa leans his head in his hand, looking up at Ushijima. “Wow.” 

“Your confusion carries the tone of an insult,” Ushijima replies. “Do you not believe that me and Tendou are capable of a valid romantic relationship?” 

Oikawa gives a shrug, before sitting up. “No, of course not, you seem… great,” he says, before swaying over to Daichi to add: “but what I would give to be a fly on that wall…” as if Daichi has any fucking clue what Oikawa has ever meant about anything. 

“Oh!” Oikawa says, perking up as if remembering something and looking back to Ushijima and saying: “On the topic of your dearest Tendou Satori, I did want to revisit the full satori thing, because it feels like an insane oversight that none of us are addressing the fact that he’s clearly a-” and Oikawa cuts himself off, so abruptly that Daichi actually sits forward, waiting for an explanation. 

“If you say monster to finish that sentence, I am going to hit you,” Ushijima says. 

Oikawa nods. “Yeah. See, I figured that out, but technically I stopped before anyone told me to, so I have done nothing wrong,” he says, nodding politely before looking back over to Daichi and saying: “Anyway, all that’s to say, we’ll have to skip this weekend.”

Daichi let his breath out. “Well that’s lame. And to think, I was just getting used to having my weekends filled by ghostbusting. What am I gonna do now?”

“Uh, get yourself a date, it’s Valentine’s day, idiot,” Oikawa scoffed, before looking back at Ushijima with that same conspiratory glance, though Ushijima does not return it. It occurs to Daichi that Oikawa is putting in three times the effort that either of them are giving to making this a social lunch. 

“It’s not that easy to just get a date.”

Oikawa arches an eye at him. “Uh, yeah it is.”

“No it’s not. Maybe for someone like you, Mr… six-foot-one fucking model. But getting a date is actually kind of hard.” 

Oikawa stares at him for a second, before saying: “Dai, you are the captain of a nationally ranked sports team. Just… walk into your school’s cheerleading practice and hold out your hand. Someone will take you on a date. It’s practically science.”

Daichi stared at him in return. 

“Okay, well fine, if my goal is simply to do the concept of a date, it’s a little easier, but I don’t want to just take a stranger out on a date! I would want to have a reason to date them, or at least like them a little. Or even just at all. Also, Karasuno doesn’t have a cheerleading team.” 

“Karasuno doesn’t - shit, just how small is your stupid little school?”

“Hey!”

“Either way, you’re speaking like a man who’s got his eyes set on someone and isn’t just looking for a cute girl to hold his hand. So go ask her out!”

“Ah… right, like that’s any easier,” he snorts. “Just ask out someone? That you like? Like, that you have feelings for? Just tell them that? No thanks.”

“Why not?” Ushijima interrupts. “It’s what I did.”

“I’m sorry?” 

Oikawa’s attention is caught as well, and both boys focus on Ushijima, who seems confused by the argument they’d been having entirely. 

“You say it’s not easy to tell someone that you like them, but that was the first thing I did when I realized I had developed romantic feelings for Tendou,” he says. 

“Okay, so, wait, you’re telling me not only are you in a relationship, but that you confessed first?” 

"When it occurred to me that my feelings were more than platonic there was no reason to withhold that information from him. There was no benefit to keeping it a secret, since my desire was to advance the relationship further. So I told him as much. It was not a particularly challenging process, and the only reasonable step to take.” 

Oikawa sighs, looking at Ushijima a moment longer before looking at Daichi and saying: “Me and Iwaizumi got drunk and started making-out during a game of spin the bottle.”

“What-?”

“How we ended up confessing to each other,” he says. “In case you’re not a fucking robot. Variety of experience.” 

“Okay, so both of your personal anecdotes are useless,” Daichi says. "Do neither of you have normal advice on how to ask him out?"

“Him!” Oikawa says, throwing his hands in the air. “The boy’s gay! Another one!” 

Ushijima, confused, mimics Oikawa’s motion and also throws his hands in the air. 

“I am not,” Daichi scoffs. “I don’t like labels. I do like a boy. It’s not complicated.”

Oikawa snickers at that, before saying: “Look, all I’m saying is if you don’t want to spend Valentine’s alone, well, you’re gonna have to make a move. Or just mope around and miss out on what is a cute but bug-ridden movie experience. Your call.”

Daichi groaned, slouching forward to rest on the table. “Well I wasn’t even concerned about spending Valentine’s alone until you two idiots started making me think about it.”

“Well do something about it, then!” Oikawa replies, before straightening up slightly as he notices their waitress coming back over to their table. “Ooh, and you should definitely do me a favour and cover lunch for me.”

Daichi squints at him, sitting up again and reaching to pull out his wallet. “You’re getting awfully comfortable taking my money.”

Oikawa gives him a sweet smile back. 

“Mooch off Ushijima.”

Ushijima looks up, somewhat alarmed by that, waving a hand. “No, no. I do not have money to spare.”

“What? You literally attend like the most expensive school. Surely your family has money.”

“I am on a sports scholarship,” he replies. “And my mother disapproves of my lifestyle choices, so I do not receive any financial support.”

Daichi stares at them both for a moment, before sighing and catching the waitress’s attention. 

“Okay, but just for the record, it’s not like I’m some rich kid with unlimited money, I don’t just have my father’s credit card or whatever you seem to think of me. I get paid for work I do around the house, and watching my siblings.”

“And we are so grateful for your continued generosity,” Oikawa replies, clearly not really listening to him anyway.

“I’m not always okay to let you take advantage of me like this,” Daichi warns in response, but the message is somewhat diluted as he taps his card to pay as he does so. 

“...sure,” Oikawa replies. 

 

---

 

Even if Daichi had been okay with letting Valentine’s day pass by without so much as a second thought, Oikawa and Ushijima had gotten their stupid little love lives lodged into his brain, and now he was seriously considering making a drastic, potentially life-changing choice. More than he had been doing recently. 

He throws the green tennis ball as hard as he can, watching it arch up through the air in a long, slow path. Kumo has gone running after it, though he’s not as fast as he used to be, and doesn’t seem particularly interested in actually catching it. The dog settles for sniffing it out in the grass after it bounces instead, and it gives Daichi a good few minutes as they wait for him to find it and bring it back. 

“Yeah, so… I dunno, I’m probably gonna just go straight into university,” Suga is saying, half looking at his phone, hand bent to shield the screen from the sun. 

“I thought you were thinking about taking some time off to travel or something?” Daichi replies, watching Kumo struggle to find the ball for a moment, before he finally got it and started heading back. 

“I don’t know, my parents were weird about it, I don’t really feel like fighting them,” is the reply he gets back. Daichi glances over to him, to where Suga is barely paying any attention. It’s not like he needed rapt and excited attention to hang out - if anything, he liked the comfort of this friendship. How simple and understated it was, how little he needed to perform. 

Kumo is getting distracted, so before he replies - not that he had anything particularly enlightened to say - he turns to whistle for the dog, shouting: “Hier! Kumo, Hier!”

Kumo perks up at the call, and takes off back across the field towards them. 

When Daichi looks back over at Suga, he’s surprised to find his friend already looking up at him, a small smile across his face, as if something was amusing him. 

“What?”

Suga just shrugs. “No, nothing,” he says, and though Daichi doesn’t buy that for a second, Suga moves on quickly and adds: “Oh, Asahi wanted me to ask - are you doing anything this weekend? He had the idea that we could all like… go over to his place, have some snacks, play some games, just hang out. You know, ‘cause it’ll be Valentine’s… uhm… unless you’re planning on getting a confession and ditching us or whatever, but… I mean, it’s gonna be chill either way, so…”

“Oh, yeah,” Daichi says, at the same time Kumo reaches them and drops the tennis ball on his foot, panting happily at his accomplished fetch. “That sounds cool, we could definitely do that,” he adds, and he’s really not sure what’s come over him - perhaps it’s some combination of Ushijima telling him that you can, actually, just overtly address your feelings sometimes, or maybe it’s Oikawa saying it’s either do this or be lonely - but he keeps talking before he can even think it through, adding on: “Or, uh, if you wanted, we could go on a proper date.” 

Suga’s eyes widen, in something that approximates fear more than any kind of delight, and he looks genuinely shocked for a moment before managing to stammer out:

“I’m sorry, I think I misheard you, uh… Sorry, did you say - are you… did you… uhm…”

“Yeah,” Daichi answers, before deciding to distract himself by grabbing the tennis ball and stepping away for a second to give it another good toss, for Kumo to go trotting after. 

“You want… you’re asking me… to…”

Daichi wipes his hand on his pant leg, before looking back over to Suga. He knows that his own face has started to heat up, and he doesn’t want to push this as a hey let’s go on a date that is a purely romantic intentional date-date, but he also doesn’t want to give the impression that it’s a friend-date, and honestly, overall, he’d mostly like his stomach to stop fluttering with anxiety like it was. 

“Uh… Oikawa was talking about… this… movie-marathon for couples in the park, Sunday night,” Daichi says. 

Suga, finally, stops looking so damn terrified, and a small smile has started to appear on his face. 

“I’m familiar with it,” he replies, softly. 

“Oh, good… well, I dunno. He seemed to really like it, said he went every year… and… and Ushijima was going too, and… it sounded like it could be fun. But I can’t go alone, you know? So… if you… if you’re willing to ditch Asahi, we could go together? Just me and you, to be clear.”

“Right. Like a date.”

“Like a date,” Daichi confirms. 

“Me and you. On a date.”

“That would be the arrangement.”

“Okay,” Suga says, finally, breaking into a wider grin before suddenly forcing his face to be neutral and calm again, playing it off as if this meant nothing at all to him. “That sounds… chill. Cool. Great.”

“Great,” Daichi echoes back, not quite sure exactly how wide he himself is smiling but sure he looks like a dork. 

Suga nods along, and the silence lasts long enough that Kumo has returned again, proud of his fetching abilities. Daichi, not sure if he needs to wrap up this conversation with anything specifically formal or specific, awkwardly hovers for a second before stepping away to grab the ball again. 

“Should’ve had you hanging out with Oikawa much sooner,” he hears Suga mutter, under his breath. 

 

---

 

“Hey, I did it,” Daichi says, folding his phone between his ear and his shoulder, worried mostly about finding something suitable to wear for the evening. 

“What is it?” Oikawa replies, voice in more of a drawl, and Daichi got the impression he was barely listening. 

“Asked him out. Sugawara.”

“And who’s that?”

“Who’s - that’s- Suga. The guy I was telling you about.”

“You were telling me about no guy,” Oikawa replies. “I can’t bring his face to mind. Do I know him?”

“My team’s number two.”

“Oh! That fucker. I don’t like him.”

“Alright, well you don’t like anyone else who plays the setter position, so I don’t really think that’s my problem,” Daichi replies, frowning. 

Oikawa hummed an agreement on the other end of the phone, before saying: “So I’ll see you there?”

“I mean I’ll be there, we might not see each other, but… yeah, yeah.”

“Alright, and was there a point to this conversation then? Or has it really just been so long since you had a date that you had no idea what you were supposed to do and ended up calling me?” 

Daichi rolls his eyes, setting his phone on speaking for a moment so that he could focus on getting dressed. 

“Okay, yes, there’s a point to this,” he calls. “I just wanted to make sure I don’t look stupid. Is there some kind of dress code? What do you recommend?”

“Ah. Well, not really, but it gets very cold,” Oikawa replies. “Bundle up.” 

“Alright.”

“Movies might not end until after midnight, but stands selling food close at like ten-thirty, so come prepared. Oh, and if you’ve never been on a date with this guy before, bring chocolates for him.”

“Chocolates?”

“It’s Valentine’s, bitch, bring him chocolate.”

“I thought that was something girls did?”

“Welcome to same-sex dating, one of you has to buy the chocolates,” Oikawa replies, dryly, before saying: “You’re not good at this.”

“I am perfectly fine at this,” he scoffs back, before finishing dressing and stepping back to look in his mirror. He has never been a particularly self-conscious person, and he doesn’t think he really has any need to be a self-conscious person, but because of that, because of his lack of interest in his own appearance, he wasn’t really sure how to improve it either. 

He runs his hands through his hair, but he keeps it so short that there’s really only one way to brush it to make it look neat.

It occurs to him that Oikawa is talking - though Daichi hasn’t been listening - and he interrupts him anyway, with: “Hey, how do you get ready for a date? You always look so good.” 

“Don’t interrupt me like that. And I don’t understand the question. I shower, pick an outfit, and show up on time.” 

“I just think I look boring,” he says, playing with the collar of his jacket, flipping it up, and then back down, and then up again. “Do you use any kind of product or make-up or anything?”

“I do not,” Oikawa replies.

“What? Really? I always assumed you would have.”

“Mhm. Alas, I’m just cursed to look like this naturally.”

“Really? I actually find that hard to believe. No make-up or anything at all? Your eyelashes are just like that?”

He hears Oikawa sigh on the other end. “Okay, you’re clearly psyching yourself out of this. I’m sure you look fine , if this guy accepted a date with you, he did it knowing damn well what you look like, so you’re good. Just… don’t try anything new . Pre-date is not the time to go around trying new things. Stick to what he likes.”

“Yeah but I don’t know what he likes,” Daichi says. “And… I mean, you’ve seen him, he’s gorgeous, I can’t just-”

As Daichi’s speaking, he hears the door downstairs unlock, heavy footsteps stepping into the entrance way, a familiar gait that hadn’t been heard in a while. 

“Oh, shit,” Daichi says, hurrying over to grab his phone. “I think my dad just came in, I’ll call you later.”

“What? Tell me-”

Daichi hangs up on him, tucking his phone away before turning to hurrying out of his bedroom, taking the stairs two at a time before swinging into the entranceway and finding his dad still standing there, tugging his shoes off his feet. 

Daichi’s father, Sawamura Rion, had never seemed exceptional to him. He was a young man still, and Daichi had been told many times, especially as he’d grown older, that they bore a significant resemblance to each other. Rion, though, was a little bit more narrow in the face, and wore thin, wire glasses that perched on the edge of a nose that wasn’t quite the nose that Daichi had, but close enough. He glanced up as Daichi came skidding around the corner. 

“Oh, hey kid,” he replied. “Long time no see, come ‘ere-”

Daichi accepts the invitation on autopilot, stepping in to let his father wrap his arms around him tightly, squeezing for a moment before pulling back. 

“What are you doing here?” Daichi asks, before he can really think it through. “I thought you were in Tokyo.”

“It’s… Valentine’s day,” Rion replied, before lifting a hand up to pinch Daichi’s cheek, making him grimace. “Which means it’s me and your mom’s anniversary, too. So I’m taking her out to dinner tonight.”

Daichi tries to escape the hand, pulling himself back. 

“Ah, forgot, sorry-”

“Speaking of, you look like you’re going somewhere?”

“Yeah, I have a date,” he replied, eyes getting distracted slightly as he noticed his father stoop down to pick up a sleek, black briefcase. Now, Daichi was pretty sure he’d always carried a case like that around, in fact, it was one of the defining images of him in his mind. But now, it feels like he’s paying closer attention than ever. He notices that it’s not just snapped shut - it has a padlock keeping it closed, with a little slot for a little key that Daichi is sure he’s never seen. It’s discrete - probably easy to break into if you really wanted to, but perfect for keeping something like, say, five children, from getting into it. 

Maybe he’s just neurotic about his paperwork and files. Maybe he just wanted to play it safe. 

Daichi was pretty sure he hadn’t been working with any sensitive information. And he’s also pretty sure him nor his siblings had ever broken into his office or gotten into his stuff. Plus, he lived in Tokyo nowadays, and had for years. 

“A date?” his father echoes back. “How exciting. And who is this girl, do I know her?”

Ah, fuck, the gay thing.

“Uh… no, it’s… just… it’s no… no… it’s fine… uh… yeah, whatever, don’t worry, I actually have to get out… soon, so I’ll just go grab my-”

Daichi turns to flee the scene, but before he can go, he feels Rion’s hand grab his elbow, pulling him back a step. 

“Hang on, hang on there,” he chides, and Daichi stiffens slightly, slowly turning to face him again. 

“Yes? What-”

And Rion’s hand comes down flat against the top of Daichi’s head, surprising him. 

“Are you taller than me now?” Rion says, frowning. “That doesn’t seem right. You’re not supposed to be taller than me.”

“Well, I… uh… maybe,” he says, shifting his weight on his heels. “I did grow a bit since you last saw me.”

“You’re measuring yourself that regularly?”

“It’s for volleyball.”

“Ah, right. Of course.”

“Oh, and… sorry, this is such a random question,” Daichi says, waving a hand to try and look casual. “But me and some friends were debating it earlier, uh… what’s your take on aliens? Do you think they’re real?”

This seems to catch him off guard, and Rion looks back at him or a moment, nose scrunched in amusement before he shrugs and says:

“Honestly, kid, I don’t really think about it. I mean… sure? I guess it seems possible.”

Daichi nods along for a moment, before saying: “Ah, yeah, that’s kinda what I said… my friend was super… into conspiracies, though, I guess… kept saying, like… oh, the government’s covering up aliens, the PSIA knows about aliens, they’re hiding the truth from us, y’know? I don’t think I buy any of it, though.”

If his father is phased at all by the reference to government cover-ups or alien conspiracies, Daichi should never challenge him to a poker game because clearly the man can act. He seems amused, if not a little lost for what to say, before chuckling slightly and saying:

“Well, you’ve got some interesting friends, that’s for sure. Don’t let them induct you into a cult, okay?”

Daichi huffs, resisting the urge to roll his eyes. “Yeah, yeah, Suga already tried that so I think I’ll be fine. Anyway, I really do need to get going, don't want to keep… her… waiting…”

“Alright, alright, I’ll let you go,” Rion says, and Daichi is free to pull back a bit. “Just be safe, okay? And be polite! And I don’t care if her parents aren’t home, you don’t let yourself be invited up to her bedroom, okay?”

“Oh my God , dad, I’m not gonna-”

Daichi is trying to flee upstairs. 

“That’s how I ended up with you!” Rion shouts back, cackling in delight at Daichi’s discomfort. “Don’t make my mistakes!”

 

---

 

There was a very specific line Iwaizumi was never willing to cross, and it rested somewhere around ‘acknowledging how deeply he valued the stupid little cliche relationship moments he got to share with Oikawa.’ Luckily for him, whenever Iwaizumi found himself dissolving into sentimentality over how important these stupid little Valentine’s traditions were, or any of their shared history, Oikawa was right there with some weird new bullshit to put him in his place. 

This time, as he trying to talk himself down from doing something crazy like complimenting him (it’s not Iwaizumi’s fault he looks so cute bundled up with a scarf around his ears), he notices that Oikawa has begun weighing a handful of rocks in his hand, as if getting ready to weaponize them. 

“What’s this now?” Iwa says, joining him on the little blanket they had laid out. He’d stepped away to get some snacks from one of the stands and returned to the odd sight. 

Oikawa glances up to him as he sits down, before nodding over, a few spaces in front of them and diagonal to their position, to where Ushijima and Tendou were minding their own goddamn business. 

“I’m gonna throw a rock at Tendou and see what happens,” Oikawa replies. 

“...alright, what?”

“It’s part of the legend,” Oikawa says. Iwaizumi rubs a had over his eyes. “Satori are notoriously hard to escape, but if something is thrown at them, they’re easily spooked and will flee. It’s how you get them to leave you alone.”

“Alright, so here’s how this is gonna work,” Iwaizumi says. “You name any single animal that wouldn’t run away if being pelted by rocks and I’ll let you throw that.” 

Oikawa stares at him for a moment, slowly squinting before saying:

“That’s a good point… It could create a false-positive…”

“... yeah, because the scientific value was the problem with your plan,” Iwa scoffs. “Can you bring the crazy down like… thirty percent? Please?”

“Only thirty?” Oikawa replied, sounding surprised. 

“Well, unfortunately something in me is broken and I do find you kind of cute when you’re acting all unhinged and insane,” Iwa says. “So find a level of crazy somewhere below throwing rocks at other people but preferably above only talking about volleyball.”

“Ah, got it,” Oikawa agreed, nodding slowly before tossing his rocks into the grass. 

Iwa can’t help but laugh, reaching out to wrap an arm around him and tug him in a little closer, disguising the affection with aggression but sneaking a kiss into his hair anyway. Oikawa just sort of puts up with this rough display before more comfortably settling against his shoulder, up to where the first movie was beginning to play. 

He would never admit outloud how much he liked being able to say things like ‘me and my boyfriend have a cute Valentine’s tradition,’ but it certainly was true. Just them, the movies, the night, an atrocious amount of bugs and chocolate that he was banned from buying because he ‘never got the right kinds.’

Just them and a normal evening. 

 

---

 

“Did you read through the comments on the last video you guys posted?” Suga is saying, pausing in the conversation briefly to pay the stand selling caramel corn before moving along to find a spot to set up their stuff. 

“Wait - are you watching those?” Daichi says, which makes Suga laugh. 

“Yeah, of course I am,” he teased, reaching out to nudge him. “You can’t just expect me to ignore my best friend’s new ghost hunting career.”

“It’s not a career,” Daichi laughs. “We’re just messing around.”

“I know, I know - but the comments seem to indicate otherwise. I was having such a laugh, reading through them. People really like you.”

“Ah, whatever,” he says. 

Suga smiles back at that, clearly amused by his insistence that it wasn’t much but also, clearly, not buying it at all. Daichi wasn’t sure he wanted to admit that he had, indeed, been reading those comments. At least, no more than he wanted to admit he liked the attention. 

“And that’s not what this is about,” Daichi says. “So no… weird ghost hunting talk. Just… I just want to enjoy this evening with you.”

“Mhm,” Suga agreed, nodding. “And we better enjoy it. You know how mad Asahi was finding out we ditched him?”

Daichi laughed, and he isn’t quite confident enough to reach out and take Suga’s hand, so he waves him along instead to find their spot and set up their blanket. The big white screen was just beginning to flicker with the movie projection, playing the opening credits. 

A lot has been weird in his life recently. Daichi has been struggling to make heads or tails of what even matters to him anymore, but this is nice. This feels like he’s started slipping back into normality. 

Getting to spend an evening alone with Suga? Finally going on a proper date? This was exactly what he wanted. This was everything he wanted. 

“Oh, hey, uhm-” Daichi starts, hurrying to dig around his bag and pull out a neatly wrapped box of chocolates. “It’s nothing special, but- well, it is Valentine’s day, and… it is traditional, so-”

“You bought me chocolates?” Suga says, eyes widening slightly. 

“Ah, yeah,” he says. “I hope that’s… not too weird, but… I thought I made it clear that this was a date, so… uhm…”

Suga is happy to take the chocolates from him, grinning from ear to ear and only stopped from speaking as the movie begins to play. 

He’s still too afraid to reach out and hold his hand, but that’s okay. That’s normal. 

 

---

 

Tendou is distracted, head turned over his shoulder, not quite paying attention to the movie. 

“What is it?” Ushijima asks, distracted slightly by noticing the goosebumps that gather at Tendou’s hairline and down his neck. He had insisted that he wouldn’t be cold, but evidently he’d been wrong. 

“I think Seijoh was gonna throw a rock at me,” Tendou says, sounding almost as if he didn’t believe it himself. It was hard to tell, Ushijima had been informed, when his intuition was just noticing something weird or when it was flat-out wrong. 

“The entire school?”

“Don’t be dense, you know very well what I mean.”

“I am sure he was not planning any harm to you.”

“See, you say that now, but I think he’d very much like to dissect me. You know how he was- mhm?”

Tendou is silenced because Ushijima dropped his heavier jacket down over his shoulders. When Tendou turns to him in surprise, he takes the opportunity to settle it more over his arms, tugging it closed to try and keep him warm. 

“What’s this?”

“I do not like to know you are cold,” Ushijima replies. 

“I’m not cold, I promise-”

But Tendou shut his mouth, staring at him for a moment before a slight flush crosses his face and he corrects to:

“Well… thank you…”

“It is no problem.”

Tendou looks like he might want to keep saying something, but instead glances over his shoulder again, looking a little bit flustered before mumbling: “Sorry, I just… we’re bothering everyone else, we’re a little bit loud.”

Ushijima honestly would never have noticed anyone else, but Tendou, although frequently apathetic about his presence in a room, seemed perpetually aware of exactly what everyone else was thinking of him. For better or worse, it seemed. 

This time, maybe, he only cared because these were Shiratorizawa kids. They didn’t know about him, they weren’t used to him as one of their star athletes. He was just a weird kid talking too loudly. 

Ushijima, again, cannot figure out for the life of him what in the energy of the crowd tipped him off to this. 

But that’s normal for them. 

They’re almost at the end of the first movie. Ushjima notices a few of his - well, friends seems odd to say - scattered through the crowd. Oikawa and Iwaizumi - Daichi and that other guy. It’s very normal. He likes, for once, getting to be normal like the rest of them. 

Tendou isn’t particularly good with movies. As this one drags on, he gets more and more fidgety, trying to bide his time with the sweets that he had brought - Ushijima had quickly discovered one of the greatest benefits to dating Tendou had been the near constant stream of treats - and looking around at everyone else, picking at grass, or, when that ceases to entertain him, scooting in closer to Ushijima and putting his chin on his shoulder. 

Ushijima is afraid he’ll fall asleep like that. 

Finally, the credits of the first movie begin to roll. 

“If you are bored,” Ushijima begins. “We can leave.”

“What? No! This is our first Valentine’s together, I want to do it properly.”

“You are clearly bored.”

“I just need to stretch my legs,” Tendou says, and as if to prove it, sticking his legs out, and his arms above him. “Come on, take a walk with me.”

So Ushijima does, pushing himself to his feet slowly and letting Tendou take the lead, sneaking off through the rows of blankets and moviegoers and around the side of the projection screen, into the rows of trees that line the park. 

Once the shadows have swallowed them up properly, Tendou seems to relax a bit, out of the prying attention of everyone else, away from their thoughts. He turns around to skip backwards, reaching a hand out and wiggling his fingers. Ushijima complies, taking his hand and letting himself get pulled in. 

“Aren’t you cold, now that you’ve lost your jacket?” Tendou says, and he’s using a tone of voice Ushijima is familiar with, but not quite sure how it applies to being in the woods at night.

“I am okay,” he answers, making Tendou laugh. 

“‘Tosh, you’re supposed to say you’re cold so that I can suggest a way to warm you up.”

“But I am not cold?”

“Oh my God, I can’t believe how much I like you,” Tendou laughs in return, which is a non sequitur answer as far as Ushijima is concerned, but he cannot complain, as Tendou’s next move is to push himself in real close, arms up and wrapping around Ushijima’s neck to kiss him, forceful and rough and eager. 

Oh, yes, now he understands what is going on.

Now if Ushijima entertains, even for a second, of getting any normal teenage experience in the woods, he’s sorely mistaken. He does get approximately thirty seconds of enjoying the fervorish way Tendou kisses him, before something else reaches his senses. 

A low, deep sobbing noise, that seems to emanate from the trees, and echo around them. 

He pulls back almost immediately, and when Tendou opens his mouth to ask what the deal was, he clearly hears it too, frowning and turning around to look further into the dark woods, where the sobbing was coming from. 

He tightens an arm around Tendou instinctually, something crawling up his spine again to alarm. He was not someone who was easily spooked, but the way the crying seems to hang in the air and come from all directions sends a threat of danger into his body. 

“Is someone hurt?” Tendou asked, peering into the woods for a moment before turning his head back to look at Ushijima. “I can’t-”

“There.”

The clouds splattered haphazardly across the moon begin to drift away, and through the trees, darkness bisected by moonlight, a soft glow emanates off the flowing, white gown of a pale-faced, dark-haired young woman, as she wails to herself in her turmoil, a vision of spectral misery. 

He feels Tendou back up into him, and there’s something about the idea of seeing Tendou put off by a sight that puts an ungodly amount of anxiety into Ushijima’s stomach. 

Why was nothing ever normal?

Chapter 7: The Second Button Down

Honestly, Daichi was so excited for this date that very few things could have been able to take his attention off Sugawara. He was barely even paying attention to the movie, so wrapped up in his own thoughts about exactly when or how or if he was allowed to try and hold his hand. He’s too nervous to - his eyes fixed on where Suga’s hand is resting to prop himself up, focused on the movie, seeming to be enjoying it. Would it be well received? If he reached out to hold his hand, or would he find it annoying, inconvenient, and too much? 

But, yet, the universe finds a way to make the impossible possible. 

If there was one thing that would get Daichi’s attention, it was definitely Ushijima expressing what - for him - was an obscene amount of emotion, and acting especially erratically. 

He comes back from the shadows of the treeline, one hand on Tendou’s back and seeming to push him forward, pointing to where they’d been seated emphatically and eliciting a response from Tendou that, despite Daichi being too far away to hear, had enough body language to immediately convey an “okay okay okay-” sort of resignation at the order before heading to retake his seat. 

Ushijima, however, begins very apologetically but no less intently slipping between the crowd of attendees, carefully between the blankets and absolutely bee-lining it for where Oikawa and Iwaizumi had been minding their own business. 

Alright, what was happening?
“Daichi?”

He turns his head away, looking back to Suga, who’s smiling at him with an amused sort of look, eyes raised, waiting for something.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” Daichi says, stammering slightly as he tries to refocus. “Did you ask something?”

Suga laughs, nodding slightly before repeating: “I asked if you were having fun. You’ve barely been watching the movie, and clearly your head’s elsewhere.”

“Oh! Oh, yes, I am having so much fun,” Daichi says, leaning into him slightly to make his point. “There’s literally nowhere I’d rather be than here with you.”

Suga’s smile grows a little wider, and Daichi notices him shift in closer himself, hand moving to where Daichi had his own on the blanket, fingers tentatively reaching to try and make a delicate brush of contact. 

Daichi cannot help but glance over his shoulder, just in time to watch Ushijima dragging Oikawa up to his feet and both of them taking off towards the woods. A very annoyed looking Iwaizumi is left behind, sitting up on his knees as if trying to see where they’d gone but not bothering to chase after them. 

Oh my god what is happening?

He feels a soft, feather-light touch against his hands. 

“You know, there’s nowhere else I’d rather be either…” Suga says, and Daichi snaps his head around again to give him his full attention. 

There was something especially anxiety-inducing about the idea of Oikawa and Ushijima making a hasty retreat into the woods. 

“Yeah,” Daichi agrees, a little bit breathless. “I… I care… and value getting to spend time with you…”

Oh my god I can’t believe I’m going to do this.

“Really… I really hope you know that… You matter more to me than anything else…”

I hate them so much. I hate them so much…

“So please-” and Daichi, now, is starting to get his feet under him. “Please don’t read anything into this. I don’t want me to be doing this either, but I- I gotta-”

“I’m sorry?” Suga says, expression changing from one of sweet affection to alarm. “What’s happening?”

“I promise I’ll be back-” he manages to get out, before turning to book it across the park and towards where Oikawa and Ushijima had disappeared. 

If this is nothing, I’m going to kill them.

Might kill them anyway. 

Oh my god I can’t believe I’m doing this.

Suga doesn’t even bother to try and call after him, though Daichi decides that’s probably more a testament to the absolute absurdity of the situation and not his patience. 

Daichi makes it into the trees, zipping his jacket up against the cold shade and trying to make sense of where the other two had gone off to. Thankfully, since it’s the middle of the night, the glow of their phone lights tip him off pretty quickly, and he’s able to cut through the sparse undergrowth and make his way towards them. 

“Hey!” he hisses, keeping his voice down for God only knows why. “What are you two idiots doing?”

Oikawa turns around to face him, but before he can answer, Ushijima beats him to it:

“Someone was crying in the woods,” he explains. “I apologize for alarming you, I believe someone is injured or lost, that’s all.”

Daichi waves a hand at Oikawa. “And you kidnapped Oikawa for what?”

“Because what he’s describing sounds an awful lot like a yūrei,” Oikawa replies. “Long, white dress, long, dark black hair, wailing, sobbing… probably some kind of onryō, a classic-”

“No,” Ushijima says, frowning. “I don’t think she was a ghost.”

Oikawa arches an eye up. “You find a wailing ghostly woman in the woods at night and you don’t think it’s a ghost?”

“Ghosts are not real.”

“...so why am I here? Why would you have not tried to help her immediately?”

Ushijima shifts his weight, as if slightly uncomfortable. “I was with Tendou. As intuitive towards people as he is-”

“Mind reading, but go on,”

“-I… did not envision either me or him as being… particularly conducive to comforting someone who may be experiencing extensive emotional distress. I do not know what to do with a sobbing woman in the woods, and I didn’t think Tendo would… be the energy she may need to be comforted… but you are… you are quite social, and may be more capable of comforting someone in such a situation. Me and Tendou have both been known to… in Leon’s words… make things worse.”

Ushijima turns his attention to Daichi for a second. 

“You can be here too, I guess.”

Oikawa seems to be caught between being annoyed or flattered, eventually settling on just scoffing and saying: “Okay, so where is this woman, if she’s not a ghost? What, she just… cried for a few seconds, and then sprinted away?”

“... I don’t know,” Ushijima replied, as if annoyed by Oikawa’s question. “Were you not listening to me? I do not empathize well with people, I brought you here so that maybe you could explain why someone might cry and then run off into the woods.”

“Because they’re a soul trapped in this plane, and are suffering the consequences,” Oikawa replies. 

“We are not on an airplane,” Ushijima replies. 

Oikawa stares at him for a second before slowly turning his head to look at Daichi. 

“I mean, he’s not wrong,” Daichi replies, not at all helpfully, but he’s not trying to be. “We’re not.”

Oikawa blinks rapidly for a moment before saying: “Either way, if there is a ghost haunting these woods we need to find her.”

“No,” Ushijima says. “There is an upset woman in these woods we need to help.”

“Tomato, To-what fucking ever. We’re all in agreement, we need to find this lady,” Oikawa replies. 

Daichi wants to say no. No, we are not all in agreement, actually, I’d much rather go back to my date and not be out in the woods with you two assholes. 

But he doesn’t. 

Because Ushijima’s logic is sound - and Daichi trusts him enough to know that he did not misidentify a human woman. 

And for better or worse, (mostly for worse), Daichi has become relatively fascinated with this whole occult business, and kind of would like to see a real ghost. Not that he believes in ghosts, or any of it, but on a curiosity basis, he can’t help but agree that it would be rather incredible. 

And if Oikawa said this was a likely chance of that…

Well… he couldn’t not help a sobbing woman. 

And he did want to see a ghost. 

So…

Tomato, to-what fucking ever, he supposed. 

“Oh my god,” he groans, rubbing a hand over his eyes. “I hate you both. Do we know which direction she went?”

Oikawa breaks into a grin, and Ushijima nods, turning to point his phone light further into the woods. “I imagine this way, since that’s the direction me and Tendou had gone.”

“Alright, let’s go,” Oikawa says, and as Daichi brings up the rear of the trio traipsing through the thicket, he also pulls out his phone, because he’s in it now and may as well commit. 

These woods are nothing like the woods around his house, and their rocky, mountainous terrains. These are gentle and, although not extensively, somewhat maintained. There’s no snake-holes or fallen logs, there are no displaced stones and no overthrown thorn bushes. There’s mostly grass and some very determined clusters of green that Daichi cannot, and will not bother, to actually identify. The trees are spread apart enough that he doesn’t even have to consciously move around them, they can just cast their phone lights about and try and make sense of it all. 

“I don’t see any sign of anything,” Daichi calls after a minute, once they’d wandered far enough through the woods that the city lights have become visible on the other end. He pulls away from the group, skipping a few steps to pass over the threshold and find the clean, painted wooden fence separating the park from the roadside. He turns off his phone flashlight, and looks both ways, seeing nothing but dark city street. It’s a nice area, mostly shops. They’re all closed now. 

“Points for ghost,” Oikawa’s voice calls back. 

“What’s that?”

“I said,” Oikawa repeated, voice growing louder as he approached. “Points towards ghost. That she might just disappear.”

“Or she just went home,” Daichi replies, before pushing himself up to sit on the fence and swinging his legs over it. He hops clear on the other side, brushing himself down. “I mean, clearly she was having a bad day, right? Maybe Ushijima just caught the very beginning of whatever night she was having, and then she went home.”

Oikawa hummed, leaning on the fence and seeming to consider this for a moment, before sighing and saying: “Well, whether she went home, or the apparition disappeared, there’s no real way to just call her back, so I suppose we come to the same conclusion.”

“Your refusal to admit defeat is… actually rather inspiring,” Daichi replies, before movement catches his attention in the corner of his eye. It spooks him, as a few bushes rustle in the dark, but he realizes it’s just Ushijima appearing a handful of meters away. 

Behind him, a car races past, a gust of warm air riding up his back from its exhaust, a sharp contrast to the frigid, not-quite-spring air. It makes him shiver. He wishes he wasn’t out here.

“Find anything?”

Ushijima nods . 

And then he holds up his hand, as if to show them something. Whatever it is is far too small to be shown across a distance in the dark, so on either side of the fence, Daichi and Oikawa wander down towards him. 

“What’ve you got there?” Daichi calls. 

Ushijima holds his palm out for them. The object is quite small in his hand, a round, smooth brass… button? 

Oikawa leans forward to inspect it, before glancing up at him. 

“And what’s this supposed to be?”

“I was looking for anything unusual,” Ushijima replies. “It is unusual to find a button in the woods. It is clean, and was not buried, so it was dropped recently.”

“It’s a button.”

The object is oddly familiar. Daichi takes it from his hand, leaning in closer to look at it in the dark before saying:

“I think this is the same kind of button on the Karasuno school jacket,” he says. “Hard to tell the colour in the dark, but it has the same smooth front.”

“Okay,” Oikawa says, sighing. “Well… what does this mean?”

“I dunno,” is Daichi’s unhelpful reply. “Do ghosts usually drop buttons, or…?”

“Not explicitly,” Oikawa says, before turning his attention to the button again, staring at it for a moment before saying: “Well, ghosts are usually tied to an object. Maybe… maybe she… was a Karasuno student, and the button is… was hers, and… well if that were the case, there are purification rituals intended to be done on important objects that could free them from being a ghost.”

“I’m not doing a ritual on a button,” Daichi replies immediately, stuffing it back into Ushijima’s hand. 

“I second that,” is Ushijima’s contribution. 

“Well fine,” Oikawa mutters, snatching the button from him. “I’ll take it, and I’ll be the one to help the poor thing cross over to the other side.”

“Please, nobody is-”

Whatever Daichi might have been about to say dies quickly on his tongue as, down the road, stepping out from the park exit and onto the sidewalk, is a woman dressed in white. 

Now, Daichi is not inclined to believe in ghosts. But, if this woman were at a costume party on Halloween, she’d probably win first prize for her ghost costume. 

Wow, that looks like a ghost. 

It’s hard to tell how tall she is from a distance, but she’s not that tall. She’s very slim, small in the waist, the bust, the butt, it makes the white dress that hangs from her shoulders even more ethereal, as it billows and puffs in the soft wind amorphously around her. Tugged in the wind as well was her hair, the kind of hair Daichi had heard girls praying to get, slathering product after product in desperation for that kind of silky, perfect shine. It’s long, almost down past her waist, and wafts gently around in soft curls. 

That is all to say, in about half a second of looking at her, Daichi is able to realize that this woman isn’t just pretty , but gorgeous. She’s the kind of gorgeous that would make her peers hate her. She’s the kind of gorgeous she could weaponize. 

Daichi notices Oikawa and Ushijima both turn when his attention is caught, and it seems that both of them are transfixed in the same way he is. Maybe she is a ghost, or a spirit, or a goddess. Daichi would believe it all. 

“Woah,” Oikawa says, shifting slightly where he stood. “Uh…”

It’s funny that the ghost hunter has now caught a ghost, and yet has no idea what the hell to do with it. 

The woman stands in an odd way. It contributes to her otherworldly appearance, her shoulders are pulled back into good posture, but her head is tilted back to the sky. Not as if she’s looking at it, but at an angle that keeps her head supporting itself with no conscious effort, as if keeping her eyes open one second longer was impossible - let alone keeping her head up. Her hands are open and loose at her sides, and though her dress is pretty, it is not fit for a night like this. She must be freezing, and there are no pockets or pants, which means she likely doesn’t have any money, keys, ID, anything on her. 

Another car goes blazing past on the road, the sound of tires over asphalt echoing in his ears. This is the first thing she seems to respond to, head rolling to the side to watch it pass, before her head continues to roll and droops down entirely. 

“What do we… should we…?”

Ushijima doesn’t know what to say. He’s looking at Oikawa. 

Oikawa doesn’t know what to say, he’s not even sure this is a real person. 

Daichi doesn’t know anything, ever, at any point. He’s sort of made it his business to avoid getting involved in as much as possible.

But there’s a sinking feeling in his gut. Some kind of intuition that his brain must have picked up at some point, through all the mystery, and solved without actually telling him. He knows something. He knows this girl is not a ghost, even if she may look it. 

The most disturbing thing about her is that there is no crying in the air, no wailing sob, nothing. 

Headlights of a car turn the corner at the far end of the road. The woman looks towards it with pensive curiosity. 

Daichi takes off running. 

He hears Oikawa give half a shout, but Oikawa and Ushijima are on the other side of the fence, and they can’t respond fast enough to do anything or stop him. 

Something about a tradition of giving away buttons as a sign of love. Something about Valentine’s day. Something about the absence of tears. 

He thinks to shout right as she’s lifting a foot to step from the sidewalk. The sharp noise, as well as the fact that he’s crossed a lot of ground in a short amount of time, gets her attention, and in the most human way she is startled, looking at him with big, red eyes rubbed raw from her crying. 

She stopped moving at his appearance, one foot on the asphalt, one on the sidewalk. He grabs her arm and yanks her back up the curb, to the sound of the car roaring past without a care in the world. 

He takes a few deep breaths, bending over to recover, his heart in his throat and each pulse slamming against his skin, hot and high on adrenaline. 

When he can breathe again, he lifts his head to see her staring down at him with those sad, sad eyes, and behind her, he can see Oikawa and Ushijima catching up. 

She beats him to speaking:

“Where did you come from?”

Daichi tries to think of a good explanation for that, because “the woods,” seems odd, and “a date with my best friend,” seems worse, but honestly both would have been better than what he actually says when he opens his mouth, which is: “My friend thinks you’re a ghost and you need to tell him you’re not so that he’ll leave me alone about it.”

She stares at him for a moment longer, before slowly breathing in a grin - one that is not so genuine, but compulsive and uncontrollable - and then breaks into raucous laughter. 

“Your friend thinks I’m a ghost?” she says, and now that he’s caught his breath, he’s able to look at her again, and there’s something about her laughter that seems to have immediately lifted her whole appearance, no less beautiful but now less achingly sad. But the laughter seems to break her own spell, and though she continues to laugh it stops being funny, and she lifts a hand to cover her mouth in horror and looks back at the road, back at what she had wanted to do, and stumbles a step.

So Daichi steps forward, running on instinct and his own fading adrenaline rush, wrapping his arms around her and bringing her in against his chest, as her laughter dissolved into a horrified, gasping sob that cannot be contained. 

But that’s good. 

People should cry. 

He puts a hand on her head and holds her as tightly as he could, looking over her at where Oikawa was now caught up, Ushijima half a step behind, and making motions to indicate hey, gonna tell us what’s going on?

But Daichi doesn’t know. Not really. 

But he knows most of it. 

He doesn’t need to be told to know most of it. 

It takes her a considerable amount of time to catch her breath, but they don’t mind waiting. Daichi rubs her back gently, waiting for her to come around and pull herself together on her own time, which she eventually does do. 

When she pulls back, her cheeks are puffy and her eyes are still glossy with tears, but she wipes at her face and looks away bashfully, not quite interested in making eye-contact with Daichi anymore. 

They give her a little more time. They wait as long as she needs. 

“I’m sorry,” she says, eventually, staring at the ground. “I didn’t… I didn’t mean to make myself a bother…”

“You’ve done no such thing,” Daichi says, before adding it: “If you remember, I actually chased you down, so I’m pretty sure I’m the bother.”

She almost smiles at that, but doesn’t have a reply. 

She doesn’t need to have one, though, as the moment there’s a silence Oikawa swoops in, draping his jacket over her shoulders and making her stiffen in surprise, hiccuping slightly as she tries not to start crying again. 

“What’s this-?”

“Well you’re shaking like a damn leaf,” Oikawa says, brushing her arms down and trying to warm her in the coat. “Out here like that. It’s a pretty dress, I’ll give you that, but you’ll catch a cold, or freeze your toes off.”

She smiles a bit more, hugging his coat tighter around herself, clearly enjoying the added comfort. “Thank you…”

Ushijima slips around behind Oikawa, to grab Daichi’s sleeve and tug gently, to get his attention, mumbling softly under his breath. 

Daichi nods an agreement, before passing along the message and saying: “Hey, the dreary side of the road is not that place to be. Come on, there’s a cafe not a block away, let’s get you somewhere warm, I’ll buy you something to eat.”

“I’m not hungry,” she says. “Thank you, but-”

“Oh, no, no,” Oikawa says. “If you don’t want food, we’ll get you tea. But you look like you’ve been through a blender, let us take care of you for an hour, please?”

When she nods an agreement, she starts crying again. 

---

 

The little shop is open late probably to capitalize on the Valentine’s day events, a warm yellow glow in an otherwise blue and somewhat overcast evening. It’s not busy at all, the young woman running the shop is glad to see them, hovering around like she’s never been more eager to serve a customer in her life, and Daichi can imagine her night has been dull and long otherwise. Once they’re in the shop, the young woman seems to have recovered a little bit, and does let Oikawa bully her into letting Daichi buy her a slice of cake, and they settle in the corner of the shop under a hanging light. 

She mostly picks at the whipped cream on top of the cake slice, eyes cast down, only glancing up at them on occasion as they settle. Mostly in an effort to make themselves seem less like an interrogating party, Daichi had bought himself a slice of pie, a slice that Oikawa had immediately co-opted into his own without consent. 

Daichi wonders if it’s a character flaw on his part that he just sort of lets it happen. 

They get tea for all four of them, and Oikawa has done the heavy lifting of making small talk under these horrible conditions, managing to maintain a pleasant cheer to his tone as he talks about the temperature of water needed for different teas, lamenting how easy it was to mess up if you stopped paying attention for ten seconds. 

She seems to appreciate the casual chatter, not having to sit and stew in her own conditions as everyone settled and warmed up inside. She does, eventually, though, speak up, looking across at Daichi for a moment before saying:

“I… feel like I know you… do you go to Karasuno? Or… did you, at some point…?”

“Oh, yeah,” he says, nodding. “In my third year - you’re a student there too, right?”

She nods an agreement, running her hands together under the table. “Same, but… Ah… I don’t think we’ve ever shared a class…”

“I don’t think so either,” Daichi says. “I’m pretty good with faces, but… oh, sorry,” he adds, cutting himself off. “I’m… Sawamura Daichi - these are… my friends, I guess, Oikawa and Ushijima. They’re from other schools, so you probably don’t know them…”

She seemed to perk up a bit at that, but nods again to confirm that she didn’t recognize them. “That name makes sense - you always speak at the school assemblies, for the… uhm… sports… the boys’ sport… I wanna say… soccer… I don’t pay attention to those, I’m sorry…”

He laughed, waving it off. “Don’t worry about it, it’s fine. It’s… volleyball, but that is… besides the point.”

“Ah, volleyball,” she agrees, but clearly it means nothing to her. 

“And… sorry, what was your name?” 

“Oh, uhm… Sakurashima… Shiori,” she says, voice soft. Daichi searches through the recesses of his memory and cannot bring to mind having heard the name before. He feels almost bad about it, considering he was in his year and his school. 

“Well, it’s a pleasure to meet you,” Daichi says, at the same time Oikawa leans in again and says:

“So you are a Karasuno student - does that mean this was yours?” as he lifts up the button Ushijima had found, pinched between his fingers. Her eyes widen in shock, a sick look crossing her face before she quickly pulls herself together. 

“Yeah. No. I don’t know. Where did you find that? How did you find it?”

“It was in the forest,” Ushijima supplies. 

“We were… actually looking for you,” Daichi adds, more helpfully, and this seems to surprise her. “You… spooked this guy here, he saw you in the woods-” he says, waving to Ushijima. “And our mutual idiot friend decided you were a ghost, so we… thought we’d investigate, see if you needed help, or…”

“You… you mentioned ghosts before…” Shiori mumbles, before saying: “Are you… so you guys are… ghost hunters?”

“Yes.”

“No.”

Daichi turns to glare at Oikawa, who sticks his tongue out. 

“We’re amateurs,” Daichi settles on. “Hobbyists, if you will. We were mostly concerned for your wellbeing.”

She sniffs, seeming a little amused by the answer before saying: “Sorry to disappoint you…”

“Ah, we’ll find one another day,” Oikawa says, waving it off. “But, I am curious, is there… I mean… You…”

“What happened?” Daichi says, leaning forward. “If… if you don’t mind sharing, I…”

Shiori’s eyes flicker to the button Oikawa still held, lip quivering for a moment before she said: “It’s so stupid. It’s so stupid, you guys are going to make fun of me…”

“Never,” Daichi promises. “We’re just concerned.”

“But… it’s pathetic, I… I can’t believe I’ve made this big of a scene of myself over something so… childish. I hate it-”

“It’s a boy, then?” Oikawa cuts in, leaning his head in his hand. “Valentine’s day heartbreak?” 

She stares at him for a second, looking embarrassed for a moment before nodding. 

“But it’s not like I’m some… obsessed teenager who got rejected and couldn’t handle it…”

“I didn’t say you were,” Oikawa replied. “But… come on, tell us what happened.”

She sighs, looking down for a moment as she nods before starting, her voice soft:

“I… had been dating this guy… Uhm… since last year, we got together last year, when he… gave me that button,” she says, nodding to Oikawa’s hand. “He told me he’d never… met anyone as… sweet, as lovely, and perfect, and… I really did fall in love with him. I didn’t think I would, he… wasn’t really my type, on the outside, I… I know it’s so vain, but I tend to have crushes on guys who are a little more… tough, and strong… But he was always a bit of a nerd, wore these awful glasses and barely even brushed his hair in the morning. But he… was… special, to me, he was kind, and treated me well and… so many of my friends said I could do better but he’s the first boyfriend I had ever had that remembered my birthday, and bought me my favourite flowers and he told me he was going to take care of me forever. Y’know, he was the kind of boyfriend that made me plan out my whole life. He was going to get a degree, work in tech, make enough money that I could stay home, we’d get married…”

Daichi sits back as he listens, resisting the urge to cross his arms (Suga had informed him that it made him look wildly unapproachable), but trying to sit through the story without jumping to conclusions even if he had already jumped to conclusion. 

Shiori continues in a weak voice, one threatening to break as tears welled up in her eyes again. 

“I love him so much… I love him so much, and… but… y’know, a couple months ago he started acting weird, and he was still as sweet as always, and as kind, but just… distant. He didn’t want to go on as many dates, he didn’t want to come over in the evenings, and I thought… well, I thought that maybe he was going to break up with me. And that would have broken my heart, but… you know I think I could have survived that. But he didn’t break up… he didn’t break up with me, and I started to think, well… maybe I could fix it, maybe whatever I had done to drive him away could be undone but… And when I asked, he… told me his mom had been in an accident, and that’s why he’d been so… off. And… obviously that’s terrible but I was glad it wasn’t me, right, and I… we’d planned to go on a Valentine’s day date, but he canceled at the last minute, he said his mom was in the hospital and he had to go, and… I mean obviously you prioritize family… but I… this evening I got a text, from a friend of mine, who… she had gone to that Valentine’s movie event with her boyfriend, and she said he was… we was there, with another girl, and that I needed to get down there and confront him and figure it out and I… I was so angry, so I did, but… when… when I got there I just… chickened out. You know, the girl he was with was… really pretty, I can see why he’d like her. And I… so I stayed out of their view and I sent him a text, asking how his mom was, if he’d made it into the city okay, and he… he replied back saying yes, he was in the hospital, she’s fine… and he… he showed the text to the girl he was with and… and they laughed over it…”

There’s a chorus of scoffing and annoyed grumbles from the side of the three listeners. Daichi had always been informed that he had a quick temper compared to his peers, but the anger that pulses under his skin feels rather justified this time, especially considering the disgusted sort of sneer Oikawa wore, shaking his head. 

“I…” Shiori wipes at her eye, brushing away the tear. “I know I’m stupid, I’m being so dramatic, there’s nothing worth… being this upset about, it’s just a stupid boy, but… why didn’t he just break up with me? Why did he laugh like that, why did he like it? Am I that funny? I just-”

“Okay,” Ushijima says, before stretching his arms out and cracking the knuckles on his hands with one smooth motion. 

 

---

 

There were a lot of things in this world that Suga understood, and the absolute absurdity of Sawamura Daichi fleeing their date in the middle of the night to chase after Oikawa Tooru and Ushijima Wakatoshi simply did not fit into his understanding of the world. For one, Daichi wasn’t that kind of person, so he was pretty sure it wasn’t him leaving the date so much as him being taken away.

Two: why the fuck was he taken away?

Either way, Suga watched most of the second movie alone, until Iwaizumi Hajime suddenly intruded upon his blanket square, dropping his own stuff down and taking a seat. 

“Uhm… hello?”

Iwa glanced over to him. “Hey.”

“What are you doing?”

“Well, your boyfriend ran off with my boyfriend, so I figured we may as well stick together until they come back, we’ll want to hear the story, yeah?”

Suga nodded slightly, before flushing and saying: “Oh, wait, no, he’s not my boyfriend, we just-”

“I don’t care,” Iwa says, cutting him off. 

And it’s not long afterwards that Tendou notices them conspiring and slinks his way in like a curious wild animal, sniffing around for a moment before settling on the corner and offering them homemade chocolates from a container he’d brought over as a way to bribe them into letting him stay. 

“Oh, shit, these are incredible,” Suga says, quite gladly taking advantage of Tendou’s generosity with the chocolates. “Did you make these?”

He nods enthusiastically, smiling slightly with the compliment. “Aye aye,” he chirps. “I’ve been working on perfecting the perfect Valentine’s day chocolates. These ones turned out much better than the previous recipe I tried, of which I was reliably informed by Leon that they were probably ‘constituting biological warfare,’ and by Wakatoshi that they were ‘not good.’ So I’m glad you like this batch!”

Suga laughs at that. Tendou sits with his back to the movie and clearly doesn’t care about it, so they keep their voices down as they chat. 

Iwaizumi is, generally, a lot nicer than Suga might have anticipated. That is to say, he’s a lot more level-headed than previously expected based on everything else Suga had seen from him. They get along well. He doesn’t even mind Tendou, once he gets used to the odd way he inflects his words. 

They talk about movies, about chocolate, about volleyball. It’s all very surface level, until suddenly Tendou shifts up, as if receiving a radio signal directly into his brain, and turns around to look towards the forest, where the other boys had disappeared. 

There’s a solid fifteen seconds between Tendou noticing something and anything actually happening, which is rather impressive, but Suga’s appreciation for his intuition is immediately overshadowed by what does happen. 

“Oh, God-” Tendou starts, as Ushijima is the first to make it through the tree line and cuts directly through the crowd. Daichi and Oikawa are both just half a step behind him, and all three of them look possessed of a fury that actually made Suga recoil a bit, instinctually. 

“Oh, what in the sweet fuck is this?” Iwaizumi says, but he’s too slow to get to his feet and intervene, because the boys reach their target within a handful of seconds. 

Ushijima doesn’t even need to say anything. He’s found a young man, previously sitting and casually enjoying his date with his girlfriend, grabs him by the hoodie he wore and lifts him up to his feet. 

It’s not even fair, Suga thinks. Their victim appears to be 5’8”, 5’9” at most, and scrawny as anything. Ushijima could probably break him in half if he wanted to. 

“Oh my God,” Tendou is saying, and he’s also looking like he wants to get to his feet, but everything is happening so fast, and honestly, what would they even do?

The man is stammering a rapid, confused and desperate plea for an explanation, for mercy, for anything. 

Oikawa, meanwhile, is louder and angrier and does not listen, shouting something that amounts to:

“Oh, fuck off with that bullshit, you know exactly what you’ve done. You think you’re worth something here? You think you deserve to be treated kindly? No, fuck you, fuck your whoring side-piece and fuck any guy like you. Oh, oh, what, you thought nobody would ever find out? Think you’re so clever, such a clever boy? You’re pathetic. And everyone here should know it, know what a cheating, scummy bastard you are and probably always will be.”

Suga considers getting to his feet, but is rooted to the spot. 

“I don’t understand, what-” the man is stammering, and Ushijima’s knuckles turn white as he shakes him back, shoving him hard enough that he’s forced to stumble and catch his balance. 

“Sakurashima Shiori,” Ushijima growls. 

The man is staring at them, face paling slightly. 

“I… I don’t… I don’t understand,” he says. “She… I don’t know who you’re talking about.”

“Is that the story you’re going with?” Daichi cuts in, and he’s smaller than the other guys, slipping between them to stand in front of them now, but Suga had seen his anger in action before and this was something else. 

“What do you mean?” the man whimpers. 

“I’m going to give you another chance,” Daichi says. “Sakurashima Shiori.”

“I… I don’t know her…” he insists. 

Suga probably should have intervened sooner. One of them should have intervened sooner. 

Daichi punches the guy in the face. 

 

---

 

“Well,” Daichi says, flexing his hand slightly as he works through the discomfort left behind by the soon to be bruising on his knuckles. “That was a terrible first date, and I apologize for all of it.”

Suga laughs, shrugging it off and keeping his hands folded behind his back. “It… well it wasn’t great…”

Daichi groans, lifting his hands to cover his face. “I’m sorry. That got really carried away.”

“Yeah, the running-off-to-do-ghost-hunting part of it should have been the weirdest part of the night, but, look at you, always surpassing my expectations.”

Suga had, of course, been filled in on the full story once before, and had been left to wait for even longer as the boys tried to clean up the whole affair, insisting upon walking Shiori home and getting her there safely. 

To his credit, he did return as promised. He did offer to walk Suga home. 

As a date, though, spending most of the night with Iwaizumi and Tendou had not been what he was looking for. 

“Extenuating circumstances,” Suga replies, waving it off. Daichi nods along, before they both pull to a stop outside Suga’s home. 

“Sorry again,” Daichi says. 

“It’s okay,” is Suga’s repeated reply, smiling for him for a moment before saying: “Really.”

“I still feel bad.”

“I know you do.”

“I really wanted this date to go well.”

“As did I.”

Daichi nods, swallowing slightly and holding his breath for a moment. Suga decides to take mercy on him, adding on:

“Well, this was a pretty terrible first date, but I’ll let you make it up to me later, if you want. Unfortunately due to the current circumstances, H-R is not capable of approving any end-of-date kissing, but that may be back on the table if you’re able to provide a sufficient second date,” he says, swaying back on his heels. 

Daichi’s eyes widen for a second, before he leans forward in a hushed voice and saying: “Sorry, kissing you was on the table to begin with?”

Suga laughs, and lifts a hand up to roughly mess with Daichi’s hair, before pulling back to head up the path towards his front door. 

“I’ll see you at school tomorrow,” he calls. “Don’t punch out anyone else, ‘kay?”

“I- ah- yeah! I won’t! I promise!”

 

---

 

Daichi’s home is never really silent. But there’s a kind of silence that happens really late in the evening when his parents aren’t there. They recently started allowing the kids to stay home without what they called ‘adult’ supervision, since his oldest little sister had turned thirteen, and once you have that many kids, your benchmark for valid supervision shifted, apparently. 

And they were good kids - well trained, Daichi liked to say. They were tucked away in their rooms, and Daichi politely ignored the glow of the video-game screen from beneath his brother’s door, because that wasn’t his problem if he hadn’t been formally asked to get them to bed on time. 

His parents were still out. It was late in the evening - but they’d come home quite a bit earlier than anticipated, skipping the whole third movie. 

He spends a bit of time down on the floor with Kumo, quietly playing with the sleepy dog and scratching at his fur before realizing he was actually very tired when he was interrupted by a yawn. So he gets himself up and starts wandering off to bed. He’s halfway down the hallway when he passes his parents room, making him pause. 

He weighs his options for a moment, before turning and slipping through the door. 

Daichi had never broken any rules growing up. He’d always been so afraid of being reprimanded, and once his little siblings had started coming in, he’d become so frustrated by their rule breaking that his mode of rebelling was by overcompensating as the perfect eldest son. 

So it feels weird to be overtly sneaking around. 

But his dad’s briefcase is right there, sitting on the ground like it was nothing. 

He crouches by it, investigating the little lock that was attached to the clasp. It seems pretty standard… not like his dad just kept a bunch of keys laying around for him to try, though. 

He does look around, checking in drawers and trying to figure out if there was something that looked like a small set of keys. This is a futile effort. Part of Daichi is a little bit relieved. After all, if his father is going to be a secret government agent, Daichi doesn’t want him to be a shitty one that leaves his super secret keys laying around. 

Something low vibrates in the room. 

He freezes, looking around for a moment, before trying to track the sound through the room, and to the side dresser, where a nondescript black phone was flipped over and resting on the bedside table. 

Well that’s not suspicious. You don’t exactly leave a phone containing highly sensitive information sitting out where anyone could see it. It’s probably just his work phone. 

Daichi flips it over to check anyway. 

It’s locked, of course, and after he gambles on a couple of birth dates and sentimentalities, nothing works. So he’s left only with the preview of the message. 

[Confirmation was received. Will you be at S03 by Wednes…]

Daichi doesn’t even know what to do with that information. If this even is information. S03 didn’t mean anything to him, though he supposed if they’re speaking in some kind of code… Or a typo… god, it’s so hard to draw conclusions. He doesn’t want to assume anything… Could literally just be an office building somewhere…

He’s in the middle of his crisis when he hears the door opening downstairs, that familiar heavy gait followed by the loud, pitched laughter of his mother, which is quickly hushed. 

Daichi scrambles to put everything down and reorganize it before stumbling on frantic feet out of the bedroom and towards his own room, heart pounding against his chest as he shuts the door behind him and closes his eyes. He’s lucky, maybe, that his parents had been immediately distracted scolding his brother for staying up late on his game. 

Notes:

wow I had a lot of fun with this chapter. My god. <3

i've got this 'every three days' rhythm going but idk how long that'll continue. either way, thank you for continuing to read and I'll see you in the next one!!
xx

Chapter 8: Camera Angles

Notes:

for the purposes of clarity, any silly username in the 'comment sections' I write will be a rando, and if it's a real haikyuu canon character, I'm just going to use their actual name. (with the exception of Kodzuken for Kenma bc that's just canon??) It may be less 'realistic' but I don't wanna make you guys do a bunch of work just to understand what's going on. Anyway, enjoy this silly chapter!

[At the end of the video, after the sign-off screen that viewers had become accustomed to, an image suddenly reappears. Now, a few attentive watchers had noticed that the progress bar below had not reached the end and had been sitting in anticipatory excitement, wondering what the hell was coming after the credits. Most people were jumpscared. Half of them missed it entirely and had to, later, pretend like they hadn’t immediately clicked away at the faux ending. 

However, everyone who watches stares in puzzlement at a new face that pops up on the screen, someone they’d never seen before. He’s a young looking guy, though about the same age as the boys they were used to. A lot smaller. His hair is long and hangs around his face, dyed blonde maybe a year ago, judging by the roots. He seems to understand the camera well, and is making an intentional choice not to over-perform, smiling for a second before letting the smile drop as he starts to speak. 

“Hey,” he says, voice soft and shy. “Some of you know who I am, but for any of the viewers who didn’t migrate to the official channel off the Kodzuken one - well, I’m Kodzuken - ah, Kenma. I do the video editing and manage the channel for the guys… uhm…”

He seems a bit awkward, the seat he sits in rotating slightly as he kicks his legs.

“That’s unimportant, though. I… okay, s o the boys don’t know I’m filming this, but I thought you guys needed to see. Kuroo insists that it’s no big deal but it’s been several days of this and…”

The screen shakes slightly as Kenma moves around, pushing himself up and wandering through his bedroom, to push back heavy curtains that blocked most of the natural light from coming in.

Kenma’s face disappears as the camera is switched to the main view, looking out the window now and down onto the street. 

“Look at him…” Kenma’s voice mumbles, as he zooms in on the scene outside. 

Kuroo is there, familiar to everyone, crouched on the outside step of his property by the sidewalk, very happily scratching away at a long-furred black cat, the most notable feature of which was its long, white tail. The cat seemed very happy to be stretched out on the sidewalk in the cool morning light, and Kuroo was equally as happy to be smothering it in attention. 

“I mean, we never caught the cat on camera, from Yamaneko, except for that one scene in the bedroom, but… Well that’s the same cat Kuroo had described, right? And I haven’t seen anyone else petting that cat. It won’t even let me pet it. It just hangs out outside Kuroo’s house. Every morning. I see it at night. Kuroo says he believes in ghosts, but I think he has a harder time believing the yokai, monster side of things… and yet…”

The camera pulls away from the window, and Kenma turns it around again to film himself. “I don’t think I believe in monsters, but that’s one weird cat. And the fact that it’s just lurking outside his home now. It’s never been there before. We’ve lived here fifteen years and it’s never been here before. Anyway…”

Kenma is settling back down into the seat at his desk, giving one more awkward, uncommitted smile to the camera before saying: “This is the real end of the video. I just thought you all should see that. I’ll keep an eye on the cat saga, but if Kuroo goes missing I guess we can say the bakeneko ate him.”]

 

→ MirrorMirror: yeah Kuroo’s gonna get fucking wrecked bakenekos are bad news. 

→ Paisleypal: RIP to Kuroo ig it was good knowing you buddy that cat is going to kill you.

→ KurooT: invasion of privacy.

→ Hunting1293: you’re all so annoying it’s literally just a cat? That we can’t even prove was the same one from the ryokan? 

→ meerkat: oKAY BUT WHY IS NOBODY TALKING ABOUT HOW ADORABLE THEIR EDITOR IS WHO GAVE HIM THE RIGHT WHY IS HE NOT A SERIES REGULAR RIGHT NOW? 

 

---

 

[The video was progressing about how they usually do. After a rambling and lengthy explanation from Oikawa of the haunted farmlands and legends behind this particular family’s land, things had quickly dissolved from organized to chaotic. When Kuroo maintained control of their main, high quality camera things tended to stay relatively on track. Oikawa could stay in the center frame and provided a much needed air of comprehension to the whole affair, good at grounding their actions and making sure things stayed on track. However, sometimes Oikawa got ahold of that camera for himself, and then it was anyone’s guess as to how the night would progress.

“Hey, Kuroo, Kuroo-” Oikawa is singing, pushing in just a little too close to Kuroo’s face and making him sway back a step to avoid being crowded. They’re currently trekking up a winding hill on the large, somewhat abandoned property outside Tokyo. The sparse treeline to their left guided their path up, the small dirt trail lined with old stones. In the camera’s view, once Oikawa had stepped back to give Kuroo his space, the farmhouse could be seen, a dark smudge against the indigo night sky, covered in clouds. “Everyone’s wondering why Kenma doesn’t come out on these ghost hunts with us. They think he’s cute - I mean he is adorable, it would be so fun to put him through a haunted house.”

For whatever reason, this prompts Kuroo to scowl at him, but whatever his problem is, he holds his tongue, and instead replies with: “Kenma isn’t interested in spending six hours in the middle of the night walking through bug infested grass.”

“Not even for the joys of ghost hunting?”

“Under no conditions. I can’t even convince him to stay late after practice for ten minutes, let alone to stay outside for the whole night. He doesn’t like being scared, either. Or believe in ghosts. He’d hate this.”

“Ah, lame,” Oikawa says, before pulling away from Kuroo and swinging the camera around to center himself in it with a grin. “And for those of you wondering, that practice Kuroo refers to is volleyball, of course. Kenma’s his team’s setter. It’s a pity we never got to play each other in a proper match… or a practice match, for that matter, I’d have liked to crush him.”

“You couldn’t even if you tried,” Kuroo called, annoyed, but Oikawa was already skipping again, the camera bouncing slightly as he forgot to focus it until he had caught up to the other boys that had moved ahead. 

Daichi is a relatively common focal point of these videos, though given their recent switch to emphasizing him as who they were trying to convince, it made a sort of sense. On top of that, everyone watching had become increasingly aware of some underlying motivation. Although neither boy had ever mentioned anything specific, Daichi was always very quick to relay information back to Oikawa regarding things that he saw or new locations. Oikawa, now, drapes an arm across his shoulder and pulls him into the camera’s focus, already talking:

“Daichi! Rapid fire Q’n’A, will you? Our dearest darling fans have oh-so-many questions about you, won’t you indulge?” 

“Uh… okay?”

“First, I have seen a lot of people asking about why you get so afraid if you don’t believe in ghosts at all.”

“I don’t believe in ghosts, I do believe in my body’s ability to get injured and the malice of other human beings. Next question?” 

Oikawa stares at him for a moment, before muttering something under his breath that the camera does not pick up, and then more loudly adding: “Well alright, second question: how on earth did you get yourself mixed up with this loony group if you don’t even think ghosts are real?”

“I’m being held hostage by Oikawa,” Daichi replies. “Also, me and Kuroo have been friends for a while. Honestly if anyone’s getting ‘mixed up’ it’s gotta be Ushijima, I can’t for the life of me figure out what happened there.” 

“True… true… Okay, everyone’s been dying to know why your dog speaks German.”
Daichi frowned, before Oikawa pans down to where Kumo is padding along happily on his leash at Daichi’s side, oblivious to all unusual circumstances. He was getting very used to nighttime walks. 

“It's… really common,” Daichi says. “And I’m so tired of explaining myself. The point is to teach them commands not in your native language so that they don’t misinterpret casual conversation as an order. For example, I can tell you to stop being obnoxious, and he won’t hear the word ‘stop’ and try and follow the order.”

“Well jokes on you because I’ve never been obnoxious in my life and you wouldn’t have had that problem.”

“I have regular recurring dreams about strangling you nowadays.”

“Mhm. Well, Iwa-chan might be jealous but I’ll see what I can do-”

“Hey! No! That is not- uhm- no! No. Bad Oikawa. Stop it.”

“Oh, okay, no I see why the non-Japanese dog commands are helpful.”

Daichi is glaring at him for a moment longer, before he manages to pull himself together and look away. “Why don’t you just tell me about what we’re doing here? Why is this well haunted?”

“It’s a haunted well! What’s not to love!”

“Right,” Daichi says. “Naturally. How could I have missed that?”

“You’re so lame. Okay, okay, one more time from the top - a hundred years ago, this farm was a prosperous and fruitful piece of land that had two daughters. And the eldest daughter was betrothed to be married to a man from the city, but the younger sister was in love with him too. In her jealousy, she gets into a fight with her sister - down by this well. During the fight, she trips the elder sister and she hits her head. The younger believes that she’s killed her, and in her panic, throws her body down the well to hide the evidence. However, her sister hadn’t been dead, but certainly did die later from exposure to the elements or dehydration or whatever gets her first. People who visit this farm report hearing wails of anguish and desperation, and that you can still hear the elder sister calling for someone to find her.”

Daichi scoffs, nodding along for a moment before saying: “Nice story. What’s the ghost’s name, Sadako?” 

Oikawa tilts his head. “What?”

There’s a silence, only the crunching of their feet over the rocky dirt path filling the air. Daichi hesitates a second before saying: “It’s… a joke. The… evil spirit in the well, like… Sadako, from Ring.” 

Oikawa continues to return his blank stare. 

“The move Ring,” Daichi repeats more loudly, before gasping and adding: “Oh my god have you never seen Ring?” 

Oikawa looks a little sheepish, scratching at the back of his neck. “I dunno, guess I was never all that into horror movies…”
“You, Mr. Paranormal Everything, you’ve never seen fucking Ring. That’s insane.”

“Well it’s not like it’s based on a real legend! I watch stuff inspired by folklore but they made that story up, why should I care?” 

“Because-” and here Daichi pauses, putting his hands over his eyes. “Because understanding pop culture helps identify where interpretations of events come from. Because we’re easily fooled. Because how the fuck do you go through life not seeing Ring and then go on to tell people about well-ghosts?” 

“I don’t know, man! What do you want me to say?” 

“I just want you to-” 

And then Daichi is screaming, grabbing at Oikawa’s arm and dragging him to the side as something behind the camera apparently scares him blind. Everything stumbles and refocuses, and it’s before the camera has focused on the figure standing in the woods that Daichi has already started calming down, shouting:

“Oh my god, Ushijima! Why are you just standing there like that?”

And the camera focuses on Ushijima in the threshold of the forest, arms at his side and just one step back into the woods, casting him in shadow. The camera shakes slightly as Oikawa tries to get his own heart rate under control, and can’t get his hold steady. 

Ushijima doesn’t seem to have a good answer, stammering for a second before, somewhat helplessly, saying: 

“Bokuto fell down the well.”

There’s a bit of a silence, before the camera pans around back to where Kuroo was a few meters behind, climbing up the hill. 

It looks back to Ushijima. 

“What?”

“Bokuto fell down the well,” he repeats. 

“Oh my god-”

And the camera drops down, showing nothing but jittery grass and dirt as they take off running.]

 

[The camera focuses on Daichi, who’s giving a pained sort of smile for the film. Behind him, an old, mossy stone well takes center focus, with Kuroo, Oikawa, and Ushijima all leaning over it to look down into the depths. The scene begins to shrink as it gets further back, Daichi walking away from the group.

“Okay so he’s alive,” Daichi opens with. “He’s an idiot, and his thick skull survived the fall. It’s too wide for him to spider-climb up, but he’s trying. There’s only half a foot of water at the bottom and he’s wearing boots so we think it’ll be fine. Ushijima wants it to go on record that he thinks we should call the fire department… or… whoever is in charge of wells, but Oikawa doesn’t trust authorities so instead I’m walking back up to where the supply shed for the old farm was to see if there’s anything we can use to let him climb up.

Y’know, the good thing about doing this with a bunch of soon-to-be pro athletes is that getting Bokuto to grip-and-lock is way up a rope is actually a valid option,” he continues to muse, eyes deviating from the camera only for a few seconds to check where he’s walking. He’s not usually in charge of the camera, and the footage looks like it was filmed on his phone, the proper camera set aside in their concern for their fallen friend. 

“Well,” Daichi adds after a moment. “I don’t think Bokuto found a ghost down there, so… maybe we’ll get to go home early tonight.”

There’s a couple seconds of him walking in silence, mumbling under his breath and hopping over a fallen log before he’s out of the woods, across a field and heading towards the old wooden shed. He shifts the phone in his hands, trying to get the door unstuck. 

When he gets it open, he glances back to his camera to refocus the film, though the footage doesn’t scream ‘filming for the internet,’ and rather looks like something that otherwise would have been cut - as if he’s just making sure his phone wasn’t damaged in the scramble. 

But something catches his attention - a sound or a crack that the phone doesn’t pick up and he whips his head around to stare behind him, back down where he’d come. 

The stillness of the video takes over. It would be impossible to tell if maybe it had frozen, save for the slight breeze picking at the collar of his jacket, making it flutter lightly. 

Daichi stares. 

The phone camera remains steady - his hands are not shaken, but as frozen as the rest of him. 

In the night darkness, the phone can just pick up motion in his eyes as he blinks. It’s a solid twenty, thirty-five uninterrupted seconds of him staring back into the darkness. 

Eventually he slowly looks back to the camera, giving a weak smile to them and saying: “Sorry, thought I saw something.” 

And he ducks his way into the shed, tapping on a pull string to light up a dusty bulb that scatters yellow light around the cobwebbed room, a spider skittering up the wall behind him. 

He’s clearly mostly distracted in digging through the items on the shelf and looking for something that could work to pull Bokuto up. He speaks anyway, since he’s trying to get better at being entertaining. It’ll probably be edited out either way. 

“I know it wouldn’t seem like it,” he begins, mumbling under his breath to avoid breathing in the sawdust in the air. “But I’ve always had a pretty active imagination. At least, that’s how my mum put it. Had a ton of nightmares as a kid, and kinda still do. I don’t really ever have normal dreams. Super vivid, disturbing things, but… well, I think Kuroo already posted a whole long thing of him explaining pareidolia, right? Yeah, that. I do that a lot. So I don’t believe in ghosts, but you guys have been asking, why I’m not like Ushijma. And the reality is that Ushijima can trust his eyes, and my stupid eyes like to see ghosts that don’t exist. So… stop making fun of me.”

And then he pulls something into frame, holding up a dark blue extension cord, staring at it for a second before saying: “if it’s not plugged into anything, it can’t electrocute anyone if it touches water, right…? Yeah that sounds right…”

He tosses it over his shoulder and continues digging around for a bit, finding another white chord, and then a smaller green one. 

“Well, gang,” he says, hoisting them up. “This better be long enough, because I don’t see anything else we could use…”

And Daichi turns to hold the phone up, mumbling under his breath about his arm getting tired, and continuing with: 

“And before you ask, or… make jokes, a friend of mine has already informed me that I probably have a fear of the dark, and I do not. I don’t know how often I’ll have to say it. A fear of the dark implies the dark itself is scary. It’s not. It’s my stupid wrong eyes seeing scary things, that’s all.

Not that I think you guys are gonna make fun of me,” he adds dryly, and he’s retracting his steps back towards the well when the footsteps slow down, and he trails off again, staring into the distance behind the camera. His feet still entirely as he stares, eyes fixed. His hands are steady still, the camera doesn’t shake. 

“See the problem,” Daichi starts, voice barely just a whisper. “Is that… is that it’s probably just my eyes, right? But I don’t… I don’t believe in ghosts, and… I can see… a head, and… and shoulders, and a torso, and I can see that someone is right… right there. I can see it. And if it’s not just my eyes, that means someone is watching us. Someone is right there. And I’m not sure how I’m supposed to be sure if I’m just making it up in my head, or if I’m in real danger.”

He blinks, glancing down to the phone for a second, shifting just enough to switch the phone camera around to point back at the tree line. It’s almost impossible to make out individual trees, the quality of the phone and the darkness making it all one messy scene. But there’s light playing off the green leaves of the trees, and the shadows that dance in the wind that pulls them. 

The treeline is still, but it’s a forest - it’s very, very alive. 

A bat flits across the dark sky above, and Daichi’s voice, still hushed and inaudible, mumbles: 

“Can you see him? He’s right there.”

The darkness stretches further across the hill he stands on. 

A sharp, pitched trill makes Daichi shriek, and his steadiness is broken as he reflexively throws his phone up as he jumps, scrambling to catch it again and steady it. 

“Oh my god,” Daichi is laughing, pulling himself together. “That’s just a text notification, that’s my phone… oh my god… fucking… Oikawa just wants to know what’s taking so long, I’ll-”

Daichi glances back towards the trees, staring for a second before shaking his head out, as if trying to get over whatever was no longer visible in the treeline, before hurrying to finish the walk back.]

 

[They’d methodically tied the cords together so they couldn’t slip apart. The shot opens on Ushijima, with one foot planted on the edge of the well, whole body braced and tensed as he takes Bokuto’s weight and provides an anchor for the other to climb out of the well. 

Kuroo stands to the side, one hand over his mouth and looking miserably annoyed by this whole affair. 

Eventually, Bokuto’s hands grab over the edge of the stone, and everyone leaps forward to grab his arms and drag him upwards, hauling him off and throwing him to the ground. He’s wet, and dirty, but is still grinning, throwing up a peace sign for the camera. 

“I survived the well!” he declares.

“You have a leech on your elbow,” Kuroo replies.]

 

→ honk: I’m sorry, nothing has been more unnerving that Sawamura having a minute-long staring contest with a ghost. 

→ AkaashiK: I have no words. How???

→ Elysium33: SORRY WHO IS IWA-CHAN? 

→ MirrorMirror: I’m not even mad that there’s no ghost hunting at all in this one. Bokuto so quickly derailed this and it’s so worth it. 

→ Paisleypal: Iwachan???? I guess it makes sense that someone like Oikawa would have a girlfriend but somehow that’s still shocking. 

     ↳ IntotheWild [replying to Paisleypal]: I KNOW I WANT A GIRLFRIEND REVEAL NOW

→ SugawaraK: Daichi PLEASE get your eyes checked. Or a nightlight. I can’t believe this. 

     ↳ AshKetchup [replying to SugawaraK]: just so you know it’s not polite in Japanese culture to use someone’s given name if you’re not close friends or family so maybe don’t? 

     ↳ SugawaraK: [replying to AshKetchup]: OH MY GOD??????

 

---

 

[The camera is focused on Daichi, but they are far from a haunted location. Instead, the sun is bright and shiny, it’s the middle of the day. There’s chit-chat and laughter, and it looks like everyone’s just been hanging out casually. 

“Okay,” Daichi says. “So most of you know Oikawa is very crazy, and that’s fine, but what a lot of you probably don’t know is that he has become wholly convinced that Ushijima’s… uh, best friend is literally a monster, and- if you remember the guy from Shiratorizawa, who was in that video for a bit- Oikawa has not chilled out at all and he literally… like we’re just trying to meet up for lunch and he’s gone running off, anyway - just- look…”

And Daichi turns the camera around, pointing across the table and down the street. It looks like they’re in a little commercial area in the city, with cafes and shops and light foot traffic. It’s nice and brightly lit. In the corner of the frame you can see Kuroo’s shoulder, though he seems mostly preoccupied talking to someone offscreen. 

Down the sidewalk, away from the seat they have, Ushijima and a new person, one that most people recognized from that aforementioned video, with crazy red hair and odd eyes, a generally unnerving disposition. He seemed to be nodding along to whatever Oikawa was saying. 

The phone can’t pick up what any of them are saying, but Oikawa seems most pointedly focused on Tendou, reaching out at one point to tap his shoulder, as if making his point. 

Tendou dismisses it, but Oikawa dances back a few steps, waving his hands in bigger motions, giving him a wide, encouraging grin that only results in Ushijima putting a hand over his eyes. 

“He’s literally crazy…” Daichi’s voice, from behind the camera cuts in. 

After a second, the three split apart, Ushijima to let Tendou into the cafe to place their order, and Oikawa to return to the table they were sitting at, grinning widely still. 

“So?” Daichi asks. “Make any breakthroughs?” 

“Well, I wanted to see if he’d be able to predict what I had ordered, or who was coming or why Iwa-chan couldn’t be here today, and he did none of those things. But! He did teach me a new insult, so overall I’d consider it a productive conversation.”

“You’re gonna get slapped one of these days,” Daichi says, and as if to punctuate his point, Kumo, laying under the table, makes a soft boofing noise of agreement. 

“Don’t gang up on me,” Oikawa scolds, before scooting back to reach down and bribe the dog with affection. “I thought I was your favourite,” he adds to the dog. 

“You’re not his favourite.”

“I’m his favourite!” Bokuto shouts, from somewhere the camera couldn’t see. 

Oikawa glances over to where the sound comes from, grinning for a second before looking back to Daichi and saying: “Oh, by the way, can you spot me for lunch? I don’t have any money.”]

 

---

 

“But you are having fun, right?” Oikawa says, and it occurs to Daichi, just briefly, that this is the first time he’s been in Oikawa’s bedroom, but nobody’s making a deal of it, so he decides not to bring it up. It’s a nice room. A little bit bare, but pretty much what he’d expected. Mostly volleyball related stuff, a few hidden memorabilia that points to his paranormal obsession, but it’s well concealed. 

Daichi stops to investigate a picture of the Seijoh third-years, all wrapped up in each other’s arms and laughing at some outdoor festival, probably from last summer. 

His eyes move along to another image. Daichi can figure out who the people in the image are only because Oikawa has always had the same brown eyes, even when he’s ten. 

Little Oikawa is in the center - a woman that very much shares his features is to one side of him, and to the other side, is a man he’s never seen before. He looks about his sister's age, with black hair swept to the side. He’s not tall, but he looks young. Sixteen or seventeen years old. Just a little bit younger than Daichi is now. 

He doesn’t look like either Oikawa sibling. 

He glances over his shoulder at Oikawa, eyeing him for a second. “Having fun?”

Oikawa drops down onto the bed, kicking his feet up and stretching his arms above his head. “Mhm. With ghost hunting. You complain a lot, but-”

Daichi laughed, before nodding. “Yeah,” he says. “I’m having fun. Don’t worry.”

Oikawa nods a bit, before adding: “So are you just gonna stand there snooping around my room, or-”

“I was… just looking at-”

He waves a hand to the picture, and Oikawa raises his eyes, surprised for a second before sitting up. “Yeah, that was… a while ago. On one of our camping trips.”

“Is… the guy, then, is that your sister’s boyfriend?”

Oikawa hesitates there, before nodding slightly and saying: “His name was Jun. Takeru’s father. The… yeah,” he agrees. Daichi feels a little bad for bringing it up, heading back over to the bed and pulling his phone out. 

“Sorry. Were you two… close? I mean, was he like a brother, or…?”

Oikawa shrugged. “I actually don’t know.”

“You… huh?”

“I… I told you, most of it in my mind is this big… blank void. It’s empty. I… remember his face, and I remember going camping, but when I think about… what we did, it’s just… nothing specific. I know we knew each other, but… I don’t know if he was funny, I don’t know if he was smart, or sporty. And Saku never talks about him. I wonder if she’s able to remember him at all either.”

“And Saku’s your sister?”

“Yeah, that’s right.”

“That must be hard…” he mumbles, taking a seat on the bed as Oikawa rolls around to grab his laptop, pulling it over to open up. 

“Nevermind,” Oikawa dismisses. “That’s why we do this, right? To find out the truth? What wiped my memory, what killed Jun, what the government is hiding…”

“Right.”

And Oikawa scoots to the edge of the bed with him, pulling up the tabs he had open. 

“Okay,” he says. “I’ve been trying to look into S03 , from that text you saw, and there’s really nothing that matches that designation, but I assume based on what you said it’s somewhere someone can go , right? So I did some searching, some map-research too, looking at what a government might be using, and I found a few things… the most… likely, I thought, was in Sapporo in Hokkaido,” he reports. 

“Holy shit, dude, you’ve only had this for like a week, you’ve figured it out already?”

“That’s not what I said, but yes, I am very good at research,” Oikawa replies, before tilting his screen towards him. “Sapporo has a complex of government offices that are designated by number. Now, unfortunately, I couldn’t find any specific outline for what jargon or slang these people might use, but I figured it’s… relatively likely that it could be referencing one of these complexes. And considering we have nothing else to go on-”

“So… wait, is this a blind guess? It could be any building in any S-starting-city, you’ve just picked Sapporo because it’s the biggest?”

“... look, I didn’t say I had the answer , I said I had a starting point. I’ll look into it a bit more, see if I can figure anything else out. If you wanted to help, two sets of eyes would be better than one, we could look through some of the publicly available documentation, try and find a pattern…”

“Honestly,” Daichi says, after a minute. “I think the best bet is to try and get into my dad’s briefcase.”

Oikawa stares at him for a moment, before laughing, nodding.

“Ah, you make a good point. Why speculate when we can just steal information outright, yeah?”

“That’s the spirit,” Daichi agreed, before reaching over to minimize Oikawa’s tabs. “But not right now. Right now, I am correcting an egregious error in your life.”

“Oh my God I cannot believe you’re really going to make me watch that stupid horror movie-”

“You’ll thank me later,” Daichi says, before standing up to turn off the lights. 

Chapter 9: 3 Short Stories About Aliens

[The camera is a little bit unsteady, it swings around with the bounce in it’s operator’s step, taking in the bright, green foliage and the clear, almost glasslike river that ran just beyond the swell of the earth. There’s laughter from somewhere off camera, a lens flare temporarily ruining the footage as the operator tilts the camera slightly too high, and the pastel blue sky overwhelms the view, the sun hot and burning and far too bright. 

“Stop it, stop it,” the voice snickers, and the camera jerks around, settling, comfortably now, over Daichi’s face. Try as he might to maintain his dignity in a scowl, it’s clear that the effects of a sunny, warm spring day and the pleasant walk and cheery atmosphere are breaking him down into a smile. Kumo, down by his knee, is walking in a trot quite happily as well, sniffing all the new smells and looking at all the strangers passing by on the parkway. 

“This camera is amazing, by the way,” the speaker holding the camera - Oikawa - says, and as if to prove his point the settings are adjusted, and zoom in closer to Daichi’s face. Oikawa makes a soft noise of delight. “And it has features!” 

Daichi rolls his eyes, before swatting the camera away-]

 

“We’re not even filming an episode yet” Daichi complains, unconvincingly. “Can you not contain yourself for like an hour?”

“Please,” Oikawa says, lowering the camera to his chest to look at him properly. “The episode started the moment we woke up.”

“Yes,” Daichi agreed, dryly. “I remember you waking me up.”

“So come on!” and now Oikawa lifts the camera back up. “Tell the children watching what we’re doing. Where are we?”

Daichi sighs, clearly fighting against his own instincts for a second before saying: “We are in Iinomachi, in Fukushima prefecture,” he says, before really awkwardly waving his hands in the air to emphasize his point. He wasn’t a performer. 

“And why are we in Iinomachi?” Oikawa presses. 

“Because…” he trails off for a second before saying: “Because Fukushima is known for a disproportionate amount of UFO sightings compared to the rest of Japan. And they have the Iino UFO Museum here, which I… somehow got tricked into accompanying you to?”

“I didn’t trick you,” Oikawa scoffed. “You knew full well what I was doing when I tired you out and bullied you into submission. Anyway-” and here Oikawa seems to give up on making Daichi a joyful presence in the camera, flouncing away to film himself as he picks up the slack. 

“-We came in last night and stayed at an inn, since unfortunately we still have quite a few weeks left of school. I know. Awful. But, it’s a Saturday morning, and the Museum opens in about two hours. It’s been years since I’ve gone, but it’s a pretty cool place. Supposedly, they’re keeping all sorts of secret documents locked up there for analysis, but they publish lots of it for the public, too! It’s an international project, they say. Anyway-”

Daichi listens to him for a bit, before getting distracted by the light breeze in the air, and wandering down the path, away from Oikawa a bit and towards the grass at the river’s edge. He can’t get close enough to really look into the water, but he stops where he is anyway and enjoys the sight. 

They came from farm country, the mountains up north were relatively sparse and his school was mostly surrounded by local producers and families that had lived there forever. Fukushima was only a short drive south of them, but it felt more rural. It felt… relaxed, and quiet. When he looked up into the wide, pale blue sky it was impossible to imagine the people here as being plagued by aliens. 

But, that was, apparently, exactly what they were. 

He can still hear Oikawa’s voice, distantly, chatting away and not realizing he had lost Daichi in the process. He reaches a hand down to scratch behind Kumo’s ears, and the dog is very happy to lay down and stretch in the grass. 

He hears when Oikawa notices he’s gone, a soft noise of confusion followed by footsteps skipping over. He turns his head slightly as he approaches. 

“Abandonment,” Oikawa accuses. “Anyway, as I was saying, Fukushima is home to so many people with first hand alien encounters, and thanks to you lovely viewers of our wonderful content, we were able to get ahold of a few individuals in the area that were willing to let us interview them. So that’s what we’re gonna do. We’re not up at the ass crack of dawn for no reason, our first interviewee is just down the road some.”

Daichi gives him a bit of a smile, nodding along. “That’s right. Maybe someone that has a more reasonable head on their shoulders will be able to convince me.”

 

---

 

The house is low and a little bit rundown, but before Oikawa and Daichi can even reach its doorstep, the front door has swung open and a young woman has appeared, grinning widely as she sees them. 

“You’re on time!” she declares. 

“I try to be,” is Daichi’s response.

“You must be Miss Chiba,” Oikawa cuts in. 

“That’s right,” she says, before glancing inside the house for a moment and shutting the door behind her as she steps out. “Do you mind if we do this outside? My father’s sleeping.”

“Not at all,” Daichi says. She waves them along, to a little area around the back of the house, where there were old looking chairs on a small, makeshift sort of patio. It’s not extravagant, that’s for sure. She’s humming and hurriedly pointing Oikawa to where he can sit and balance the camera, and then directing Daichi to where he can sit, and taking her own across from them. 

“You seem excited,” Daichi comments, trying not to make his assessment of her too obvious. 

“I… well, of course I am,” she says. 

“You like telling this story?”

She nods firmly. “Plus, I’m a huge fan of your Ghost Captains content, so when Kodzuken put the call out for anyone in the Fukushima area that had had an alien encounter, I… leapt at the opportunity.”

Daichi stares at her for a second, before slowly leaning over to Oikawa to mumble: “I don’t know what that means-”

Oikawa tilts his head in return, whispering back: “Kodzuken is Kenma, Ghost Captains are us. That’s the name of the channel our stuff is being published on. Did you not know that?”

Daichi gives him a shrug, because if he’s being honest, he hadn’t really been watching their videos back, except for when the guys shared particularly exciting clips with him. Or when people found him on social media and sent him clips of it, which Daichi had thought was strange given the fact that he knew what was in the clips, he’d been there, why were they showing him? 

“Well, we were glad so many people responded,” Daichi chuckled. “Though, I’ll admit, you being a fan of our content makes it a little bit less easy to believe your story.”

She seemed surprised by that, before saying: “Did you think anyone who isn’t a fan would have responded to the post?”

Oikawa gives her a smile, though it’s not the one he uses to charm and trick everyone in his life, it’s far more sardonic. “We had more than one method of reaching out to people,” he assures her, before immediately brightening up and tapping the camera. “And film is rolling!” 

She perks up, and Daichi is immediately put off by her energy. He decides she’s lying immediately. 

“Okay, Miss Chiba,” Oikawa says. “Why don’t you start from the beginning?”

 

---

 

Chiba Himari was supposed to be in bed. But it was her fifteenth birthday, and her two best friends had slept over, and honestly, who seriously expected three teenage girls to be anything but awake at one in the morning on a birthday sleepover? 

Knowing that her father was just asleep in the other room, they kept their voices hushed and soft and tried so hard to manage their giggling from getting out of control. It was nearly impossible, though. 

They talk about boys, they talk about school, they talk about their futures and plan everything out together in the way that only teenagers can, assuming nothing will ever change and the three of them will be best friends forever. 

Chiba notices the light first. Her house is situated against a natural swell in the land, so the horizon is blocked by grassy hills out the window, but the strip of sky that is available washes over in a green light, momentarily, before disappearing. 

“Oh my god,” she’s laughing, pushing herself up to head to the window. “Did you guys see that?”

“See what?” one of her friends says, getting to her feet. 

“The green light! It was like someone waved a glow stick outside the window or something.”

“No? Do you see anything?”

Chiba peers into the darkness, and turns her eyes up, and for a moment, she thinks, maybe, that there is a faint, green glow. 

“Come on,” she says, and the girls grab their jackets and sneak through the house, glancing around at each other and keeping hushed. They find the front door, and quietly exit, trying to keep the door’s squeaky hinges from betraying them. 

“Oh, look!” one of the girls says, a little too loudly, but nobody scolds her. Out the front of the house, the green light is significantly more prevalent. Chiba casts her eyes up, breathlessly slightly as she spots them. Five glowing lights, a rich green in colour and triangular in shape, making a right angle. Her eyes struggle to adjust to the dimensions of the thing. She thinks they could be lights of a plane, high up above, though she’s never seen anything like it. She also wonders, maybe, if they’re more like orbs, and much closer to her than she first assumed. Maybe they’re small, and right over the house. It’s difficult to tell in the darkness. 

But they move slowly, whatever they are, in a straight line. 

“What kind of plane is that?” one of her friends asks.

“I don’t know if that’s a plane…” Chiba replies, and even though she had not put her shoes on, she heads out across the wet, early morning grass, peering after the lights as they make their way over the town. Her gut instinct tells her she’s being watched - that it’s slow movement is because it’s scanning then land beneath it. 

Maybe it’s a drone - some tech from the government she doesn’t know anything about. Or, maybe, sometimes airplanes just look like that. She’s not an airplane expert. Who knows. 

The lights blink out of existence suddenly, all at once. They don’t fly off, or pass the horizon. They just… stop. 

She stares at the sky for a minute longer. 

A warm hand is on her arm. “Come on,” one of her friends says. “Let’s get back inside, it’s cold out here.”

 

---

 

Daichi tries not to look overtly unimpressed with the story. He lets Oikawa handle the interview. 

“And you didn’t think to try and film it?” he’s asking. 

Chiba shakes her head. “No, it happened sort of quickly. Honestly if I’d taken my eyes off it long enough to get my phone and open the video app and start it rolling, it probably would have been gone. We probably only saw it for ten seconds or so.”

He nods along, thinking this over for a second before saying: “You didn’t hear anything?”

“No, completely silent. That was odd, actually.”

“And it was five green lights, in a triangular form - could you see any shadows, from the supposed UFO or an outline of its body or dimensions?”

“No,” she says. “It seemed more like the five lights were all separate, and just flying in that pattern. I think I could see stars between them.”
He nods again, then again, before saying: “Well, that was very interesting, I always love a good UFO story,” he says, before looking over to Daichi. “And what say you, O Doubter?” 

Daichi perks up, glancing at Oikawa and then back to Chiba.

“Yeah, it certainly was a UFO story.”

“You don’t believe me,” Chiba says. 

“No,” he answers, pushing himself to sit up a bit. “But it’s a good story. Creepy, if it was true. But… I mean… one am, tired, honestly I wouldn’t even be surprised if you were dreaming.”

“All my friends remember it!”

“Well,” Oikawa cuts in here. “Memory is notoriously untrustworthy, that’s why the lack of video evidence is disconcerting…”

“But… no, I remember it-”

“Yeah, it’s a scary fact,” Oikawa continues, cutting her off. “But sometimes what you do remember, the senses of smell, touch, the sights, the sounds, all of it are just made up in your head. You can trick anyone into believing they did or experienced something with enough time and pressure. Especially for something years ago. Even if it feels like you’ve always remembered the same thing.”

“So you don’t believe me either?” Chiba says, sighing. 

“What? Oh, no, of course I believe you,” he corrects, laughing. 

“But-”

“If you’re going to go around telling people you saw a UFO, you have to get familiar with the counterarguments,” he advises her, before getting to his feet. “It was lovely to meet you, Miss Chiba.”

She stands as well. “O-oh, okay, thank you. You too. I hope you guys enjoy your stay here in Iinomachi.”

“I’m sure we will,” Daichi agrees. 

 

---

 

He wasn’t so excited about going to this UFO museum. No matter how many times Oikawa tried to sell it to him, he just didn’t really care. But, Oikawa looked so beyond excited and Daichi wasn’t going to be the asshole the snuffs out his joy just because he was bored. 

And, the museum is situated on a beautiful little mountainside, with cherry blossom trees that weren’t quite yet ready to bloom lined up around it. The sign welcoming them has a goofy looking grey plaster alien attached to it. Daichi laughs, and Oikawa bullies him into taking a picture with the terrifying thing. 

He’s in the process of sending the image off to Suga with an attached SOS message when he realizes he was left alone. 

He’s standing outside the entrance to the museum, and when he lifts his head, Oikawa is just gone.

Abandonment, he thinks, before his second thought is. What if he got nabbed by aliens?

That would be pretty funny…

After turning in a circle like a lost dog (and getting several judgmental boofs from Kumo in the process), he decides that Oikawa probably just went inside and he should follow. He tells Kumo to stay, and the dog is well trained enough Daichi only loosely wraps the leash around a pole to keep up appearances.

The inside of the museum is rather odd. Daichi had mostly expected the building to be a collection of black and white photos, lots of placards reading stories of abductions and UFO sightings, lots of history and data. What he expects from a museum. 

Instead, it is mostly plastic dioramas. 

There are several colourful alien figures, many greys, (a term that Oikawa had taught him and Daichi was loath to admit was now permanently in his lexicon), several UFOs, the oddest examples of which were bisected and allowed for the viewer to look inside at their inner mechanisms. 

Daichi leans forward to peer into one of these, and when he straightens up, out of the corner of his eye, something tall and slender and inhuman catches his attention, sending a bolt of anxiety through him as he turns to face it. 

It’s just another model. Life-sized, probably meant to be greys but the artist of this one had made their bodies more… human. No little guys with big wobbly heads. Daichi could see the muscles of their chest and shoulders down to their stomachs, sickly grey and still splendy and skinny but jarringly realistic. Their heads are large, but less comical than the others. Their eyes, buggish and black and reminiscent of a fly. There’s one large one, and it’s surrounded by four or five more of these, smaller. 

It makes him sick to look at, and he can’t explain why. 

“Can I help you?”

Daichi jumps again, when the voice speaks to his left. He jerks his head around to see the woman standing there, smiling. She’s wearing a name badge that indicates she works here: Bushida.

“Oh, sorry, I-” he glances down to the UFO diorama he’d been standing in front of, swallowing to regain his composure before pointing at it. “How do you know what’s inside this if we’ve never found a UFO before?”

Bushida blinks, seeming surprised for a moment, before laughing and saying: “Well, it’s an interpretation of a theoretical design. A… speculation on how the inner workings of a flying saucer might look.”

Daichi blinked at her, before saying: “...okay, uh-”

“You don’t believe in aliens, do you,” she guesses. 

“Not at all.”

“You got dragged in here by the fanboy?”

“... I have this horrible suspicion that the answer to that question is yes. What is he doing?”

“Very excitedly looking at old pictures.”

“Alright. Which room? I’ll go… control him, I guess.”

“No, there’s no problem,” she laughs, before nodding to lead him through the museum. Daichi does not like having to wander closer to those odd grey men to pass through to what was, finally, a more standard museum experience. “We appreciate the enthusiasm, it’s a nice departure from your kind of tourist.”

Daichi frowned. “Sorry?”

“Ah, I kid - here we are.”

And Oikawa, sure enough, is there, blending in just fine with a mother and her three elementary and middle school aged children, reading the information beside a scroll of parchment with rapt attention. 

Daichi wanders over to him with the clerk, but before he can say anything, Oikawa looks up - and through Daichi, locking eyes with the staff member - pointing a finger down at the scroll he was looking at. 

“Is this the real one?” 

She smiles. “Ah, sorry, unfortunately not. It’s a very good replica though, is it not?”

Oikawa’s excitement visually deflated, and he shrugs. “Yeah, sure, whatever.”

He turns away to look at something else. 

Daichi casts an apologetic look to Bushida, before swooping in to see what the hell Oikawa had been looking at. It’s an odd image. He recognizes the style of artwork from a lot of Japanese History lessons, but he’s never seen this image. 

“What is this?” Daichi says, because he has to admit, it sure does look like the image of a spaceship. 

“Ah, that’s Utsuro-bune,” she says, stepping in beside him. 

“What now?”

“Utsuro-bune?” she repeats, seeming surprised. “Have you never heard the story?” 

“No, I-”

And suddenly, Oikawa is right beside him again, saying: “I’m sorry, you don’t know the story of the utsuro-bune?”

“Christ,” Daichi curses, jerking back away from him. “Wear a bell or something if you’re gonna do that.” 

Bushida giggles, before waving them off to get his attention. “Well,” she says. “Let me remedy that. As the story goes…”

 

---

 

In the old Hitachi Province, modern day Ibaraki Prefecture, only a few hours south of Fukushima, an odd hollow boat washed ashore. The year was 1803. 

There are several records, no primary sources, and countless discrepancies but the legend endures nonetheless as something like this:

An odd boat washes ashore in Hitachi. The locals gather to see what it is. It has odd, clear paneling, and is circular in design. They can see inside, to the inner workings that seem filled with containers and supplies but of stuff they had never seen before. And a woman. 

This woman looked human, but she did not look Japanese, there was something… wrong, about her. She was young, maybe no more than twenty years old, and she was short - surely less than five feet. She was slender, and had pink skin. She had red hair, like fire, flecked with white. She did not speak Japanese, but did her best to remain polite and nice. 

They brought her ashore. They fed her, they tried to talk to her. Her clothes were unlike anything they had ever seen before. Long and smooth and designed of fabrics they had never laid eyes on.

The woman held a box, of equal sides, and sealed shut. She did not let anyone touch it, nor did she put it down. And she never opened it. It seemed to be of great importance to her, but she either could not, or would not, tell them what it was. 

The villagers began to speculate. Some theorized she may be the princess of a foreign land, on the run. Or that maybe she had been put to death, sentenced to die of exposure out at sea but saved only by the tides. 

The villagers cast the woman out again. They pile her back into her hollow boat, the image seen there in the parchment, and they send her back out to see to meet her destiny as she would. They were afraid of her, they brought her great unease and they could not understand her. 

However, in some versions, they say the woman stayed in the village, to live her life there.

---

 

Daichi glances down at the image of the hollow boat, then back up to Bushida.

“So they think this mysterious stranger was an alien?”

Bushida shrugs. 

“Do you not?” Oikawa cuts in, leaning on his shoulder. “I mean, look at this image! Look at its shape, this is clearly not a boat , that’s a saucer! Come on!” 

Daichi hums about it for a moment, before Bushida cuts in with:

“Well, actually a lot of people think it’s most likely that this was a castaway of some kind, probably Russian. Pink skin could have been from sun exposure, and red hair is easily found in Russia… and, in some versions they talk about her having white flecks or streaks in her hair, which… although a little ahistorical, was common in Russia around that time, with a styling product that was popular. It explains the odd fabrics, since Japanese and Russian clothes were very, very different at the time… and the language barrier, they don’t share the same root languages, entirely different alphabet…”

Oikawa stares at her, before saying, accusingly: “You work in a UFO museum. Do not go around disproving UFOs.”

She puts her hands up in defense. “Sorry-”

“I personally love the usturo-bune story,” Oikawa replies, scowling at her. “So often all these non-believers go around talking about how oh, if aliens existed, why aren’t there any records of them, or if aliens existed, why do we only see them in the 21st century after pop culture, or whatever. And then! We get proof from before television and movies, and you all say oh, no, the Russians did it. Bullshit. Stop blaming things on the Russians.”

Daichi squints at him for a moment, before putting his hand on his arm and saying: “Alright. Why don’t you go outside and pet the dog for a bit?”

He huffs. “Yeah, good idea,” and turns to disappear in his annoyance. 

“Ah… sorry, that must be a sore spot,” Bushida chuckles, turning to watch him go. 

“He’s just… it’s a personal subject, to him,” Daichi explains. “He’s… probably just being dramatic, I’m sure he doesn’t mind.”

She nods a bit before saying: “Well, if you want to look at anything else, I’d be happy to tell you-”

“Oh, no-” Daichi puts his hand up. “I don’t believe in any of this. I’ll go with him.”

And he bids her a goodbye, leaving the poor woman alone. 

 

---

 

Oikawa calms down almost immediately, as Daichi sort of suspected he would, and with another quick look around the mountain and museum, they decide they need to get on their way if they’re going to make it to their next interviewee. 

They catch a bus that takes them back down the mountain and into Iinomachi, and then enjoy the short walk through the town, double checking their map as they went. 

As they’re walking, a message pings on his phone, so he slows his steps a bit as he reads to check. 

Suga, replying to his message:

I’m sorry what??? Where are you???

He replies: Fukushima prefecture.

Which, understandable, receives a reply from Suga that just says: WHY?

Daichi has to think about that answer for a moment, before eventually sending back: Apparently it has a high percentage of UFO sightings. We came out here to film for the channel.

And Suga replies: Oh, all of you went together?

No, Daichi sends back. It was too far for Bokuto and Kuroo to make it, and apparently the Stz exams are brutal, Ushijima wasn’t willing to miss yet another prep weekend.

So you’re just there with Oikawa?

Daichi’s alarm bells start ringing. 

Yeah, he dragged me out. It’s a really nice place but the museum was wacky.

Okay, Suga sends back. And before Daichi can type anything else, he gets another message, saying: When will you be back?

Tomorrow, mid-day. We’re staying overnight here again and then coming back in the morning. 

Suga’s next message takes a while to come back in, though the text bubble appears and disappears a few times and decides to crank Daichi’s anxiety up to 100% percent. 

Eventually, Suga replies: Text me when you’re back?

Of course, he sends back, immediately. We definitely need to hang out soon. I feel like I haven’t seen you in forever.

You see me everyday in class.

Daichi laughs, before replying: Whatever, you know what I mean.

He’s distracted from the conversation, though, as Oikawa whistles to catch his attention, waving him over. 

The house address they’d been sent was in a small, spread out farming community, but seemed nicer than your average hobby farm or local producer, it was a relatively new building with all the modern features. 

What catches his attention first, and immediately, is the person waiting on the porch for them. 

Unlike the last women, who’d probably been watching out the window in excitement, this person tilts their head up and eyes their approach with something that seemed to border on distrust. It’s a woman, Daichi notes, as they get closer, though her hair is shaved close on the sides and left to flop in a soft wave over her forehead, and with her rather baggy camouflage jacket and black jeans, he’d not been able to tell on the approach. 

She has her head resting in her palm, staring at them. 

Even Oikawa’s steps hesitate slightly as they turn up the path towards the house. Her boots, heavy and black, are caked with dirt. Her jacket is old and frayed, but her lipstick is crisp and her earrings catch the sun and glitter cold and Daichi is overwhelmed by the same sensation he got when he was looking at those awful grey men statues. 

His stomach twists. 

He wonders if Oikawa feels it. 

“And who must you be?” Oikawa calls. “We’re looking to speak to Tenkai Kokomi?”

“I figured,” she replies, staring at them a moment longer before saying: “I’m her daughter. Tenkai. Ryuusei. I’ll be sitting in on this little interview, if you don’t mind.”

“Oh, okay,” Oikawa chirps. “Ah, my name is Oikawa… Tooru - this is Sawamura Daichi, he’s sad and bitter so he’ll probably say little during this process.”

Daichi scowls at him. 

“It’s a pleasure to meet you,” he offers, to Ryuusei. “Thank you for giving us an opportunity-”

“Save it,” she says, cutting him off before adding: “Come on, mum’s inside.”

And she gets to her feet, before turning and heading through the main door, holding it open for them as she kicks off her shoes. Oikawa and Daichi exchange a slightly uncertain look, before following her inside and quietly letting her lead them through the house to the kitchen. 

Tenkai Kokomi seems surprisingly normal, considering her daughter had the disposition of a cactus. She’s short, with black hair cut just at her shoulders and is still remarkably young, considering her daughter was, at least, eighteen or so years. She smiles for them, and waves them in. 

“Oh, I hope Ryuchan hasn’t been giving you any trouble, she said she wanted to vet you before letting you into our house,” Kokomi laughs, swatting a hand playfully at her daughter as she passed by. 

Daichi chuckled. “It was no bother. But, ah - is there a reason for…?”

“She’s never liked this alien business, that’s all,” Kokomi replies. “Honestly, she’s almost convinced me myself that I must have been mistaken, and it was so long ago now…” 

“Don’t let her get in your head,” Oikawa laughs. “Just… tell us the story as you remember it, and as you believe it.”

Kokomi nods, smiling to them slightly before moving to take a seat and beckoning for them to do the same. Ryuusei moves around to settle beside her mother, and maintains a professional hatred of both Oikawa and Daichi. Daichi tries not to look at her. 

---

 

Her maiden name was Tsukinaga Kokomi, and she fell in love when she was fourteen years old. His name was Akihiro, he was in her grade, and she was sure, without a doubt, that he was the love of her life. She spent all day thinking about him. She conspired with her friends to make him fall in love with her. It didn’t really work. Not when she was fourteen. Or fifteen. 

Sixteen, though…

Akihiro’s attention was everything that she had hoped it would be. He was one of the smartest kids in her class, he was funny, and friendly and finally, finally getting to go out with him was like a dream come true. He was kind, he was generous. He made her feel special. He defended her in front of the rude boys that made fun of her hair and her noise and her shoes. He bought her gifts, he took her on dates. 

It was true love. 

Kokomi was not quite seventeen, then, when she got pregnant. 

Of course her world ended there and then, but Akihiro promised that everything was going to be okay. They’d figure it out together, if nothing else. They’d always be together. Him, her, and the baby.

It was in this interim period, while Kokomi was pregnant, and Akihiro was fighting with his father about how they were going to raise this child, and everything was chaotic and awful, that Kokomi remembers the lights that appeared in the sky. 

She had grown up in Fukushima - now always in Iinomachi, but a little bit northwest, in a town a little bit bigger than this one. The lights had been so dazzling, multiple colours but very pale and diluted, almost white. They spun, as if they were attached to the outside of a plate, and it felt heavy in the sky. Wide across, many meters, and thick. And it slowly moved. Like it was descending towards her, like it was landing.

She was terrified. More terrified than she had ever felt in her life. Akihiro was away, her mother was asleep, and this thing, this invader, this machine , kept descending. So close to her house.

She panicked. She recounts that she has not ever felt fear like that before, nor ever since. Kokomi left her home and ran, she ran down the street, barefoot, in her nightdress, she was overcome by the conviction that it was landing and it was landing for her.

And then she trips.

Maybe. 

She says it’s an odd memory. It was late at night when this had occurred. She was running, and then it was like she hadn’t been running, like she was still, and she fell forward because her legs started to run again from a standing position, tripping herself. 

She says, in the moment, it felt like something had picked her up, and then immediately dropped her again, redirecting her momentum. 

She was on the ground, and she was bleeding. 

Her mind was foggy, like everything was in a daze. She had rolled to her back, aching, feeling the dirt of the road dig into her back. Blood was beginning to soak through her dress, it was coming from her sides. Or…

Was she bleeding? 

It was hard to think. Above her, she remembers the sky, she remembers the lights getting higher and higher. When it had been descending it was over her house, now it was over her. Now they were retreating. They were done. 

The sun was rising. 

She started to cry. The sunlight came too late, and the object was gone before the sun could reveal it to her. 

They found her there. 

Her dress was covered in blood but she had no wounds. Well, she says she had no new wounds. There was one mark, on her waist, a circular sort of mark that seemed to have been stitched back together It must have bleed a lot while it was open, though, considering the stain on the dress. 

They took her statement, but of course they didn’t believe it. How could they believe it? Their main concern was the baby, and the stress they were under. 

The baby was okay. They did an ultrasound, they took the heart rate, everything was fine. They testing Kokomi for days, and everything was fine. 

Stress induced episode, probably. Their best guess was some kind of hormone, pregnancy, blood pressure, stress, exhaustion, something that sounded like it was made up on the spot. She had an episode. She was fine now. 

Kokomi had nightmares for days. 

But nothing else ever happened. 

She kept thinking something would happen. 

Her baby was fine. 

She was fine, healthy. 

Akihiro and her got married. They moved out here. They raised Ryuusei. 

Nothing else ever happened. 

She never say any aliens, she doesn’t think so. And when she was younger, she was insistent that’s what it was. Aliens, she’d say. They’re real, and they attacked me. 

But she’s not so sure anymore. She knows something happened. She doesn’t necessarily believe it’s extraterrestrial, though. Maybe it was some kind of stress induced psychotic break. Or, maybe it was a flying saucer that the government used to experiment on her. Maybe it was aliens. 

She says she used to think it was ridiculous that it could all just be from some kind of mental break. But, as she has grown up, started to realize that a mental break is entirely unbelievable. As is aliens. So she supposed they’re both equally as likely.

 

---

 

Kokomi lifts the edge of her shirt up to show them the scar. It’s on her side, maybe an inch below her ribcage. Maybe the size of a bottle cap, no more. It’s faded, almost gone now. 

Honestly, Daichi thinks. It could be anything . 

A burn, even, it looks like it could be from a hot iron, could be a rash, it’s not particularly scary looking. 

That isn’t what matters, though. Not really. 

Oikawa hasn’t asked any questions, yet. 

Daichi glances over to him, knowing exactly what he’s thinking  but not wanting to say it out loud. 

He looks back to Kokomi, awkwardly clearly his throat before saying:

“That… I mean, I’m not big on aliens, but I can see how that would be a terrifying experience. Ah - Tenkai,” he says, redirecting the conversation to her daughter. “You don’t think any of it’s real?”

“My dad is big into aliens,” Ryuusei replies. “And people have been in and out of this house for decades terrorizing my mother with their theories. Oh, you were abducted and experimented on. Oh, they’re going to come back for you one day. Oh, your daughter is a changeling, she got swapped out for an alien and the real one is on a ship somewhere being experimented on. It’s obscene. Nothing else has ever happened. And I-”

“Ryuchan,” Kokomi coos, putting a hand on her daughter’s arm. “Don’t be so hostile. They’re just curious. And I’ve told you before, I’m not bothered by telling the story a few times.”

“I just wish they’d leave it all alone,” she spits back. 

Daichi nods slightly, and glances over to Oikawa. 

“Any… uhm… any questions you might have?” Daichi asks, nudging him with his elbow. 

Oikawa lifts a hand up to stop the recording of the camera, looking back to Kokomi. 

“Not at this moment,” he says. “But… if you don’t mind, I might send you an email later, if I have anything to follow up on.” 

Kokomi nods. “Anything you can think of, just ask,” she says, smiling. 

“Please try and resist,” Ryuusei replies, more bitterly. 

Oikawa nods to both of them, before quietly beginning to pack up. Daichi hesitates for a while before doing the same. They got what they came for, he supposed. 

Ryuusei sees them out with a very annoyed wave. Oikawa doesn’t seem to really process it, hurrying down the front steps and towards the road. Daichi stops, though, turning back to Ryuusei. 

“You really hate this alien stuff, don’t you?” he asks. 

She stares at him. “So?”

“Don’t you want to know the truth?”

“Everyone says that,” she says. “But the truth they’re suggesting includes something malicious being after my mother, and it’s outlandish to expect me to want to find that out.”

“But…” he thinks about this for a moment, before saying: “If someone did something to you, say… the government, aliens, whoever… you really wouldn’t want to know?”

Ryuusei nodded over Daichi’s shoulder, to where Oikawa was leaving him behind as he hurried down the road, already pulling out the camera to start reviewing the footage, head tilted down. Daichi’s a little worried he’s going to be hit by a car, for how little he’s paying attention. 

“Doesn’t look like seeking the truth is doing anyone any good, does it?” she replies, scathingly. 

Daichi doesn’t have much of a response to that, and he is, partially, very concerned about Oikawa falling into a ditch, so he mumbles some kind of goodbye and ducks his head, taking off in a jog to catch up with him. 

“They’re too similar,” Oikawa says, the moment Daichi is settled at his shoulder on the side of the road. 

He lets his breath out. “What is?”

“The stories.”

“Mhm?”

“Tenkai’s story, and what happened to me and Saku,” he says, lifting his head to look at him. “Couldn’t you tell?”

“I… could, I just-”

“A young, teenage pregnancy, a mysterious event at night, missing time, someone getting injured, that’s…”

“Possible a coincidence-”

“It’s something , there’s something- ah, fuck-” he stops, looking back. “I should have asked about the PSIA. I didn’t even think to bring it up. Maybe I should go back-”

“What? No, no, just email,” he says, grabbing Oikawa’s arm in case he tried to run off. “Her daughter already hates us enough just… let’s go back to the hotel.”

Oikawa frowned, glancing back at him. “You think the daughter hates us?”

“I mean clearly. Didn’t you get like… a crazy weird vibe from her?”

Oikawa shrugs. “She was a bit… rough but I… I mean, I guess I’m not afraid of letting someone hair me.”

Daichi scoffed. “Please, you’d wither and die if even one person stopped liking you. But… come on, let’s just… you’re clearly… amped up. Let’s go. Come on.”

Oikawa stares at him for a moment, clearly still torn, so Daichi adds:

“I’ll let you show me all the UFO footage you have backlogged-”

And before he can even finish the bribe Oikawa has grabbed him by the arm to drag him off.

Daichi tries not to think too much about any of this. 

Aliens, after all, are not real. 

Chapter 10: Kitsunebi

It was odd, developing some modicum of fame. Daichi had, for most of his life, never really been that person. He’s not even sure he’s that person now, most of the comments on their videos are directed at the ghost-hunting of it all, and if someone does seem more focused on any one of them, Oikawa is their first interest. 

But around Karasuno, at least, Daichi had always been that guy that, somehow, is always speaking at pep rallies. Like, seriously, why doesn’t anyone else do it? Why is it always that one? 

So within a few weeks, the 1-2-3 hit of hey that guy from the pep rallies started hunting ghosts with Oikawa Tooru of Aoba Johsai, to hey that guy who hangs around with Oikawa Tooru of Aoba Johsai punched Eiji from class 3-2 on Valentine’s day to hey, did you watch the most recent video the Captains put out? Yeah, I can’t believe that’s our school’s volleyball captain. No, obviously not Michimiya the other one.

So he had a weird reputation now. 

And it was kind of fun, to be the center of attention, something he’d never really experienced before. To have people crowding around his desk before class to ask questions, or have them knowing his name before he’s introduced himself. 

The other boys on the team had started making fun of him for it, but it was in good spirits, he assumed. It was a peculiar situation, after all. 

He’s still running the volleyball practices when Ukai isn’t able to come right after school, but it’s been a lot of fun training Ennoshita and letting him take the lead as well. He really does-

A phone ringing interrupts the pre-practice meeting, and shocks everyone into silence for a second. Ennoshita seems to stumble a bit, glancing back to Daichi. 

Daichi laughs, calling: “Come on, guys, you know you should leave your phones in the clubroom, whose is that?”

The least expected answer possible occurs:

“Uh… me, sir, sorry,” Kageyama replies, shuffling back a step before turning and hurrying towards where his jacket was folded on the bench. “Pretty much everyone I know is in this room, I didn’t think it was possible to get a phone call during practice… unless my parents-”

He pulled his phone out, staring at the caller ID with a frown before answering it. 

Daichi would scold him on answering a phone during practice, but the concern across his face made it worry that it might be some kind of emergency situation, so he let it slide. 

“Yes, speaking,” Kageyama says, still looking very confused as he listens, and slowly turning back to look at the other boys. “Uh-huh. Right. Uh…” he pulls his phone away from his ear, pressing it to his chest to muffle it and nodding across to Daichi. “It’s for you?”

Daichi blinked. 

“I’m receiving a phone call on your personal cell phone?”

“...yes.”

“What?”

“I… don’t know!” Kageyama hisses back. “But he’s asking to speak to you!”

Daichi wasn’t going to argue that, and hurrying across the gym and accepting the phone as he was offered it. He lifts it to his ear. 

“Sawamura. Who’s this?”

“Sawamura! Excellent. This is Miya Atsumu, you know, from Inarizaki?”

Daichi thinks his brain is going to shut down. 

“I… yeah, I remember you. What’s happening?”

“Well, Tobio’s number is the only phone number I had that could contact anyone in your little ghost hunting platoon. Ideally I would have called Oikawa directly, but you were the closest I could get. Sorry.”

“I… I’m just gonna repeat my question. What’s happening?”

“What’s happening is that I would like to invite your squadron out here to do a little investigative work.”

“Out here being-”

“Hyogo.”

“Right, what - like is… Okay, so is your school haunted, or…?”

“Oh, no no no Inarizaki was built like eight years ago, we’re so far from being haunted. But, uh… Okay, so this is going to sound so much crazier than a haunting, but what do you know about kitsunes?”

 

---

 

The train takes about 6 hours to go from Sendai to Kobe, and Kuroo and Bokuto are both very lucky they get to jump one after it’s halfway done, and they don’t have to sit beside Oikawa and Ushijma at five in the morning as they drag themself through the public transit system. 

Actually, this is significantly more bearable than Daichi expects it to be. Ushijima immediately falls asleep, and Oikawa is happy to bide his time with his headphones in, laptop and notebook open as he saturates himself in kitsune research. At some point Daichi gets roped into paying attention, and he splits his headphones between them so that he could listen in on the monster-of-the-week podcast coverage of ancient kitsune lore. 

How Oikawa was reading a book, listening to a podcast, and writing notes at the same time absolutely baffled Daichi, but it was obvious that the man did not suffer from motion sickness. 

They have to transfer trains at the station in Tokyo, and it’s a mad scramble to meet up with Kuroo and Bokuto, find something to eat for breakfast, and figure out the right terminal. Kumo attracts quite a bit of attention from people who like dogs (and people who don’t like dogs, for different reasons), but he stays obediently by their side and winds through the crowd.

Kuroo spends the whole trip fawning over the camera Daichi had bought, the new one Oikawa was so fond of. It wasn’t quite as nice as the one Kuroo kept borrowing of Kenma, but it at least matched the video quality so their videos would stop being jarringly different depending on who’s point of view was being filmed. 

Bokuto keeps Ushijima awake the rest of the trip, and Daichi thinks, for a good while, that Ushijima looks mad at him, clearly still tired from the early wake-up and relatively introverted to begin with, but after about forty-five minutes of this, Daichi remembers that Ushijima wasn’t someone to withhold their opinion and would have told Bokuto to shut up if he’d wanted to. So it’s possible that he was genuinely engaged in the conversation Bokuto was one-sidedly holding. (It was about volleyball, so honestly, highly likely.)

Oikawa was laser-focused on his research for another hour or so, before Daichi noticed him get distracted by a text, and then he spends the next two hours texting and giggling to himself, notes forgotten. 

Kuroo’s camera work captures a little bit of this train journey as he plays with the new camera, shoving it in Daichi’s face and snickering before leaning across the seats to interrogate Oikawa about where they were going, and bothering everyone with his attention. 

It’s not until they arrive in Hyogo, though, transferring from the station in Kobe to a smaller line that takes them up into the countryside and are getting their bearing on the geography of the prefecture that they switch into performance-mode and start really paying attention.

 

---

 

“Kitsune legends date back centuries,” Oikawa is saying, talking half to the camera and half paying attention to the dirt road winding up through the grass towards the low farmhouse. “What’s interesting is that although kitsunes have a very unique Japanese origin and extremely identifiable folklore, the practice of foxes as being representative of mischief or trickery is relatively widespread and found in pretty much every culture. What makes a kitsune so distinctive is everything except for their behaviour.”
Daichi was sort of wishing that one day these videos could take them somewhere urban. It seems like each new trip just found them in increasingly rural environments, far from any safe community and out in the wilderness. Now, way out in the countryside they were trekking on a dike built between low lying rice fields, probably only a couple weeks out from being planted for the growing season. Right now, it was still a little bit too early, and the wide, flat fields were left barren and muddy.

“So what makes a kitsune special?” Kuroo asks, since he’s holding the camera and managing the interview with Oikawa. Daichi is aware that he’s in the shot on Oikawa’s far side, but tries not to pay attention to it, focusing on walking. 

“Well, kitsunes have a whole host of powers,” Oikawa starts. “Of course, everyone knows that the older a kitsune gets the more tails it has, so you can find them with anywhere from two to nine tails, but a lot of people miss out on the lore of the nine-tailed kitsunes. Some stories say that if a fox lives that long and gets its nine tails, they have near omniscient powers, being aware of everything going on in the world all at once. They’re often depicted as gold or pure white, but it’s exceedingly rare to see these kitsunes.”
Daichi is shoved aside suddenly as a new body pushes into the camera’s view, hanging off Oikawa’s shoulders and making himself a menace - Miya Atsumu. 

“They’re also messengers of Inari - the god of rice,” Atsumu supplied, pointedly. “The white Inari fox is our school mascot, actually. They’re nice foxes, they’re not the trickster types.”

“God of rice…” Daichi muses to himself staring out over the wide, seemingly endless rice fields. He knew Oikawa would eat up a coincidence like-

“Yeah, but Inari foxes aren’t kitsunes,” Oikawa scoffs back. “They’re totally separate beasts.”

“I mean, maybe in name,” Atsumu replies. “But I think we can agree that a magic fox is a magic fox.”

“No, because Inari foxes aren’t-” Oikawa stops himself from getting pulled down this path, taking a breath and continuing with: “Inari foxes have a very specific role to play as messengers of a kami, Inari. Kitsunes may be kami themselves, and are very different in nature. Kitsunes can shapeshift into people, often women, and it’s exceedingly common to hear stories of foxes shapeshifting and then falling in love with a human man, and starting families. Actually-”

Daichi turns his head to listen now, because Oikawa’s actually tone usually meant he was really getting into it, and it might be worth listening to. 

“-it’s really fascinating as folklore. See, there are a ton of mythos surrounding shapeshifters that trick people into marrying them or seducing them, and even outside of Japan you find this trend of not-quite-human wives or lovers… and it’s always treading this line of… coercion and non-consent. But in almost every kitsune-wife story, the fox and her lover genuinely love each other, and when the kitsune is discovered and has to flee from her family, often spends a great deal of energy trying to return to her husband and possible children. It’s incredibly unique in that way, and doesn’t echo a lot of the usual trickstery tropes.” 

“The fox-wife is a really common trope,” Kuroo agrees. “I’ve heard lots of those stories. Kitsunes in video games are always really sexy fox ladies.”

“Hated that sentence,” Oikawa replies, before saying: “But yes, the legend endures in many forms in the modern era, that’s for sure…

“And, out here,” Atsumu cuts in. “We're big fans of our foxes. I actually see foxes all the time, especially in the evenings. But, like, normal foxes. Not magic foxes.”

“Which,” Daichi cuts in, leaning around Atsumu so he could look at Oikawa. “Is an excellent segway into you telling our audience where the hell we’re actually going.”

“Oh!” Oikawa says, looking back to the camera. “We’re going to a genuine kitsune shrine.” 

“A genuine kitsune shrine?” Kuroo echoes back in fake dramatization. “Tell us all about it!”

Oikawa swats at him, before saying: “Well, kitsunes are often worshiped entirely separately that Inari or any specific kami, and shrines dedicated to them are not common , but definitely not unusual. In fact, some stories talk about families that are protected by specific powerful kitsunes and treat the fox like their household deity.”

“And what makes this one genuine?” Daichi says. “Are there fake shrines or something?”

“Well,” and this time it’s Atsumu that cuts in. “I guess not, but this one is still active . I didn’t even really know about it until half a year ago, but this is a shrine dedicated to a kitsune that is still being used as a shrine and isn’t just a fenced off tourist attraction from the Heian period.” 

“Oh? And who’s out here maintaining shrines to a kitsune?” 

Atsumu scratches the back of his neck. “Well, that would be my captain, Kita.”

“Oh?”

“I mean, his family has always been very traditional, so probably shouldn’t have been surprised, but we found out recently that apparently, and completely unironically, they believe that their family and farm is under the care of this kitsune creature. They have a shrine out in the farms they maintain and apparently it works for them, since they haven’t had a bad harvest in decades.”

“And what do you think of all this?” Oikawa cuts in. “Are you a kitsune kinda guy?”

“Honestly?” Atsumu says. “I honestly wouldn’t have said yes half a year ago. But Kita - my captain Kita - is… very straight-laced. He’s unlike anyone you’ve met before-” he pauses here to glance behind him. Bokuto, Ushijima and Osamu had fallen a few steps back, talking about something too low for the rest of them to hear. Osamu appears to be explaining something, waving a hand out over the fields. “-Well, I mean… okay, he’s not that weird, but he’s very weird, and… like… there’s something about him saying completely unironically that he believes in this kitsune spirit that makes me feel like it’s gotta be real, y’know? If it had been Osamu or Suna or Alan or anyone else, I’d have said no, no way it’s real. But Kita… Kita doesn’t fuck around with stuff they’re on the fence about, it’s all or nothing, so…”

“Interesting…” Oikawa muses, but it’s about now that they’re reaching the top of the long driveway up. 

“So… hang on, do they know we’re coming,” Daichi says. “This isn’t your home?”

“Oh, they know we’re coming,” Atsumu assures them, waving a hand. “He’s not thrilled about it, but I told them it was fine.”

Daichi tilts his head, but before he can say anything, movement at the farm attracts his attention, and he lifts his head to see the figure that stands in the doorway, watching the encroaching platoon of captains with a completely neutral face undoubtedly disguising dread. 

Kita Shinsuke is a relatively unassuming character, Daichi thinks. He remembers him from nationals. He remembers him picking up every goddamn spike and blocked ball like it was playtime with a child and he remembers being very frustrated. But he doesn’t know anything else about him. He has white hair, tipped black. The style must be difficult to maintain. He’s about Daichi’s own height, which is nice, since he’s sick of being surrounded by giants. He’s wearing blue overalls and heavy boots and a hat meant to keep the sun out of his eyes, and he stares. Oh God did he stare, just this blank look that could be disguising anything. 

Daichi makes a note to ask Ushijima later about the man. There’s a part of him curious to know if even someone like Tendou would have been able to read the blankness on his face. 

“Kita!” Atsumu declares, in an overly friendly tone that’s clearly making up for the fact that the captain was probably guilted and begged into doing this. “Long time no see.”

“It’s been less than twenty-four hours since we last saw each other,” Kita replies. “This is more people than I was expecting.”

“Oh, relax,” is the immediate response. “All they wanna do is take a look at your shrine and hear the stories about the kitsune.” 

Kita gives a slight nod, before glancing over them to where the last three were just reaching the house. 

“Okay,” Kita says, before stepping out of the doorway and onto the porch, shutting the door behind him. “My grandmother is sleeping, though, so we can’t go inside.” 

“No problem,” Oikawa replies, before adding: “Are you okay being on camera?”

“I have no issues with it.”

“Great,” Kuroo chirps, before pushing his way through to set up and center on the new subject. “So, give us the truth - you have a kitsune shrine, do you believe in it in a literal sense, or, like, a spiritual one?”

Kita takes a slow breath in, before saying: “My grandmother always taught it to me as a literal tale,” he replies. “My management of our shrine is literal. However, beyond the kitsunebi in the night, I don’t believe I have ever seen a kitsune, or interacted with one.” 

“Okay, okay, that’s… fair-”

“Woah, woah, woah,” Oikawa cuts in, silencing Kuroo, “are you saying you’ve seen kitsunebi?” 

Kita dips his head. “That’s right.”

“Tell the story!” 

Kita sighs, and Daichi backs off a bit to join Osamu and Ushijima, who were standing off to the side and watching. 

“Well…” Kita starts slowly. “Kitsunebi are these small glowing flames, they… don’t appear every night, but they do on occasion appear over the rice fields, or in the distance. They look like little flames.”

“Fireflies?” Ushijima cuts in, from where they stand. 

“Too big, and… not yellow,” Kita replies, immediately, though Daichi appreciates, at least, the fact that Kita takes the possibilities seriously and seems to have considered it. “But maybe. Anyway, they appear late, late at night, I’m usually sleeping. My grandmother says not to worry, it’s just a sign that the kitsune guardian is blessing our fields for whatever stage of the harvest we’re at. We take it as a good omen. The last I saw them was… probably last year, in the fall, right before we cut the fields.”

“Okay, we have to stay the night,” Oikawa says, turning away and nodding enthusiastically to the group. He looks back to Kita. “Can we?”

“I don’t even know who you are,” Kita replies. 

“Oh, come on, Kita,” Atsumu cuts in, moving around to grab Kita by the shoulders, shaking him playfully. “This is Oikawa Touya, he’s-”

“Tooru, but-”

“-like a big deal back in Miyagi, or something, I wouldn’t know, they never got to play at nationals, but you gotta treat these guests right-” and then Atsumu leans in to add in a whisper: “plus they’re like, famous, or something, this could be really cool.”
Oikawa looks mildly offended, and Daichi decides that’s the best reaction he could hope for. 

Beside him, Osamu says: “I want to put it out there that you don’t have to like Atsumu.”

“What?”

Osamu looks over to him. “You don’t have to like him. We won’t be offended.” 

Daichi tries not to laugh, keeping his face neutral and nodding. 

Kita groans, before saying: “Fine, fine, if you want to sit outside in the cold at night and watch the fields, I guess that’s fine, it’s not like that’s my problem…”

“Yes, thank you,” Oikawa says, clapping his hands together. “Now, though, first-things-first, you have to show us this shrine.” 

Kita nods, before beckoning around the house. “Okay. Then come along this way, I’ll show you.”

Daichi waits until everyone else is moving, following along at the back of the pack and letting Kita guide them around the house and back down another path to the side of one of the rice fields. It’s a narrow little dirt walking trail, to their right the world slopes down into woods and bushes, to their left, the empty paddy soon to be planted. Kita treks on ahead, and it’s not a short walk, not really, to the end of the long field. 

But eventually they’re leaving the path and heading on an even narrower one through the woods. It’s almost a surprise, actually, when through the trees and bushes Daichi suddenly finds himself passing under a torii. He tilts his head up in surprise, the dark wood having almost blended in, and it distracts him enough that he has to look back down, to where the group had split up around a clearing. There’s stone laid in the earth beneath his feet, and in the centre of the circle is a raised stone altar of sorts. It’s… not like any shrine Daichi had been to before. 

The stone altar has a carved stone fixture atop it, a sitting fox with its head bowed down. Around its paws, candles and vases and small tokens of other kinds, empty plates and bowls. Its tail, carved out of stone but long and curving, sweeps down the altar and almost touches the earth. 

“This is not…” Ushijima starts, but it’s odd to hear him second guess himself like that, glancing around the place with a curious expression, as if he were looking for something. 

“What’s that?” Kita prompts. 

“This is not a standard shrine,” he says, as his eyes scan over the torii, and back to the fox altar. 

“Well, no,” Kita says slowly. “My grandfather carved this, when he was young. It’s more of a family shrine than a proper one, I admit, but it functions for what it’s worth. It’s been in my family for eighty years now, at least.”

Ushijima hums a response but doesn’t say anything else, slowly moving around the circle. 

Oikawa paces around to the back of the statue, glancing down the stone for a moment before saying:

“The statue only has one tail. Are you sure your grandfather meant it to be a kitsune?” 

Kita nods. “He was quite explicit with it. 

“Huh…”

Daichi steps back a bit, towards the edge of the clearing, slowly looking around. There was certainly an odd feeling about the place. Not quite mystical or holy but certainly the place of great reverence and respect. Something loved and well maintained. 

“You said it functions?” Bokuto prompts. “The kitsune does… what for you?”

“Provides protection, good fortune,” Kita replies. “Watches over my family.”

“Is that… true?” Daichi cuts in. “What makes you believe that?”

Kita seems to think about this for a moment, before saying: “I don’t know if it’s true, but the kitsune that watches over us isn’t… meaningless, whether it’s true or not. Maintenance of this shrine has been part of my life since I could walk. On days where I feel overwhelmed, and everything is falling apart, when life was hard, when my parents passed away, I had to get up to maintain the shrine. Sweep the leaves away, clean the stone, leave out offerings, clear away what’s used up. I had to get up. The kitsune may not be real, it may not be a fox that I can touch or see or speak to, but it has kept me on track my whole life. Honouring it allowed me routine and meaning. It rooted my life into something stable even if it felt like I was in loose soil. Everything I am is because of this process, and this shrine has been a big part of that. So if I am successful at all, it will have been because of the kitsune.” 

Daichi smiles slightly, and even he cannot bear to disparage the reality of the kitsune after that. 

Kita’s eyes suddenly widen, and he lifts a hand as if embarrassed, waving himself off. “Oh, look at me go,” he says. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I don’t mean to preach, I just get ahead of myself and then I can’t stop…”

“No, no, don’t worry,” Oikawa says. “It’s no problem at all. I think it’s lovely.” 

 

---

 

[“Okay, okay, okay, I don’t think we’ve ever addressed this. Do we believe in monsters? Are they different from ghosts and aliens?” 

Daichi looks up, to where Kuroo is pointing the camera at him. It’s a dark screen, the only light really coming from a few phones that are lit up. The sun has long since set, and they’ve been camping out on a hill behind the farmhouse, with eyes out over the large, sprawling rice fields. They’re all tired - they’ve been out here a while. He’s biding his time scratching under Kumo’s collar and fluffing up his fur and playing with his ears. It helps keep his hands warm. 

“Uh… I don’t know,” Daichi says. “I don’t believe in any of it, really. So… I guess not…” 

“Really?”

“Yeah, I don’t know… I just can’t imagine magic foxes being a real thing, y’know?”

“You suck. I-” and here Kuroo spins the camera around to focus on the camera. “-think it’s very possible. I’m not sold that it is, but it’s definitely possible. I think kitsunes are more likely than something like dragons or demons, but I admit it’s a bit fantastical.”

And then he spins the camera around again, leaning around Daichi to find Oikawa. “We already know your opinion.”

Oikawa nods. “I’ll believe until there’s proof otherwise.”

“You can’t prove a negative, Oikawa,” Kuroo responds. 

This earns him a wink, and Oikawa replies: “You got it.”

There’s laughter from behind the camera, and Kuroo bids goodbye to them to push himself up and shuffle along the ridge to find where Ushijima and Bokuto are leaning together to look at something on Bokuto’s phone. They both glance up as they approach, and Bokuto reflexively closes his phone and gives Kuroo a smile and his attention. 

“Monster check-in,” Kuroo chirps. “Do you believe in monsters more or less than something like ghosts or aliens?”

Bokuto takes a slow breath in, thinking about this before saying: “About the same?”

“About the same? How so?”

“Well… I don’t know. So I wanna find out. And because I don’t know, how could I possibly decide before I’ve learned? Akaashi is always telling me to stop jumping to conclusions, so that’s what I’m doing. Not jumping to conclusions.”

“I hate when you say intelligent things,” Kuroo replies, before looking over to Ushijima. “What about you?”

“More.”

“That’s seems - wait, really? What do you mean?” 

“I believe monsters are more plausible than ghosts. I believe they are less plausible than aliens, but only in certain cases.” 

“Oh, shit,” Kuroo laughs. “I expected you to fully shut me down.”

Ushijima doesn’t reply. 

“That’s interesting, though. So you think there’s a chance this kitsune is real? That we’ll be seeing some kitsunebi tonight?” 

“Oh. No, not at all.”

“But you just-”

“Kitsune are not one of the creatures I believe may be real. Anything that involves magic, immortality or omniscience is impossible,” Ushijima explains. “However, I am quite compelled by stories of the yeti. Monsters like that, I believe, carry some merit. The Himalayan Mountains are vast and dangerous and to be inhabited by an undiscovered primate seems particularly plausible. If they tried to tell me that that primate was magic and had wings and spit fire I may change my opinion.”

“You’re an odd duck,” Kuroo says. 

“I am not a duck.”

“...alright.”

Before Kuroo can say anything else, there’s an excited shouting and he spins the camera around, but by the time he’s refocused everyone has already calmed down. 

“What, what was it?”

“Oikawa saw Kita’s flashlight and got excited.”

“I… overreacted, maybe, but shut up,” Oikawa mutters back. 

The camera bounces as Kuroo comes back over to the two, zooming in and pointing down to where Kita was slowly making his way out around the back of the house, and heading up towards them. Kuroo admits, the bobbing of his flashlight is a pretty convincing glowing orb. 

He keeps the camera focused on Kita as Kita reaches them. 

“Are we being too loud?” Daichi asks, sounding very concerned with being a good guest. 

“No, no,” Kita assures him. “My grandma wants to know if you want any tea.”]

 

---

 

[“Dai-chan,” Oikawa drawls, focusing the camera on the other very tired ghost hunter, who’s basically swaying where he sat, staring off over the rice fields. “Tell the people what we’re doing.”

“We’re torturing ourselves by not letting ourselves sleep,” he replies.

“What time is it?”

“Two in the morning? I don’t fucking know- oh, sorry, I don’t mean to swear-” and Daichi is cut off with a yawn. 

“Are you gonna give up, go to sleep?” Oikawa snickers. 

“No, no, I can do it,” Daichi says. “We’re… looking for foxlights, so… gotta be awake.”

Oikawa’s camera swivels around, to where the other boys are starting to tap out. Ushijima had fallen asleep first, quite quickly giving up. Kuroo had tried his best, but had given up an hour ago and made the mistake of ‘resting his eyes,’ and never woke up again, laying his head down in Bokuto’s lap. Bokuto was still away, but had been bleary-eyed staring at his phone for a while, and not really paying attention to the fields anymore. Kumo was sleeping beside him, and Bokuto mindlessly kept one hand scratching around his ears. 

“Everyone’s nodding off,” Oikawa snickers. “It’s hard to believe they’re all such assholes when they’re awake, they look adorable.”

Daichi laughs, reaching over to shove him. “Oh, whatever,” he says. “I don’t even think I could sleep, it’s so cold out here…”]

 

---

 

[“Update,” Oikawa’s whispery voice cuts in. “Daichi fell asleep.”

The camera focuses on Daichi, curled up against the cold and laying on the blanket they’d been sitting on. Behind him, they can see Bokuto sleeping with his head on Kumo. 

“I’m the last one left…” Oikawa continues to whisper, lifting the camera to pan around over the rice fields. “No kitsunebi left… but… I did see an earth-grazing meteor,” he adds, voice sounding a little bit more chipper. “They’re always so gorgeous… I wish the other guys had been awake for it… Oh, right, sorry. An earth-grazing meteor, or fireball, is a meteor that actually enters the earth’s atmosphere. It either burns up entirely in the sky, or leaves again without falling to earth. But they turn into these… bright… vibrant red burning balls, and they leave a glow in the sky… they’re rare, actually. But… you know… I always think there’s something special about getting to see it. Like… this… chunk of rock, from a planet or moon an inconceivable distance away from us has been traveling through the cosmos, and has reached out planet and gets sucked into our orbit, and I’m sitting here, just one guy, one… nobody, and I get to see it’s very last moments of existence, as it burns up in our atmosphere and turns to ash and dust. A little piece of space tried to touch us.”

He’s quiet for a moment, the camera focused on the horizon, the stillness of the night sky, twinkling with stars and wispy clouds. 

“You know,” he says after a minute. “Maybe I’ll tap out too and get some rest. Kita said it wasn’t often that the kitsunebi appeared, so I may as well get a few hours of rest… Yeah… well, I’ll… see you all in the morning, then… goodnight.”]

 

---

 

A night terror is not a nightmare. 

It’s freezing cold at night, but Daichi wakes up covered in sweat, hair slicked to his forehead and clothes damp. When he reaches a hand to touch his shoulder, it feels like he’s come out of the shower, practically dripping. He’s not warm , not really, but his body is sweating, having been fighting something in the night, something that did not let him remember the moment he opened his eyes. 

He doesn’t remember falling asleep. He stares across the blanket at where Oikawa has fallen asleep, looking peaceful and undisturbed, so he must not have been screaming or kicking. 

He doesn’t know what his brain does at night, to work itself up so much, but he figures it’s probably better that way. The nightmares he has, the ones he can remember, have made him nauseous just to think about, so it’s good to be safe from remembering these. 

He lifts his head slowly, pushing himself to sit up. It’s still pitch dark, the night cloying form all angles and not yet a hint of sunrise. He doesn’t want to reach for his phone and wake anyone up, but falling asleep under the sky seems… dangerous. What if it started raining? 

Well, there wasn’t a cloud in the sky, so that was fine…

Kita had said they were invited inside at any point, if it got too cold or wet, but he didn’t want to leave everyone up here… 

He pinches his shirt and tries to get some air under it, feeling the sweat cooling on his skin and starting to freeze him. Geez. It was bad enough doing this shit in his own bed, but waking up with the dark, looming forest on one side, and the dark void of the rice fields on the other…

He yawns. He’s still so tired… 

He’s about to lay back, when something catches his attention. There, not quite on the other side of the rice field, but in a little bit, over the dirt, is… something. He’d most accurately describe it as a glowing white light, but he doesn’t want to do that. 

There’s… no way…

There’s no way…

It just kind of stays there, bouncing for a bit, flickering in the cold air. Like it was nothing. Like it…

No…

He pushes himself up a little bit, carefully slipping off from the group and taking his phone, heading down the hill towards it. He’d only gotten a few meters down towards it when it suddenly blinks out, and everything goes dark. 

He stops, staring off into the dark field. 

It’s a mistake. 

He thinks, maybe, he can see the odd silhouette of a person, so maybe a farmer had seen them up on the hill and gone out to make sure they weren’t trespassers, but he can’t tell for sure. But the more he looks, the more he tries to focus his eyes on the darkness, the more it pushes in on his senses.

He is deeply aware of someone watching him. Like a hundred pairs of eyes were leering in. 

If he focuses too hard, there are bodies littering the rice fields, limp and motionless. And there are people standing to the edges, moving in slowly, there are faces in his periphery, as if a mindless monster had leaned in, and pressed it’s nose right into his cheek, and-

“Dai-”

He shrieks, stumbling back over the earth and tripping himself backwards, hitting the ground with a heavy thud that hurts his tailbone. He blinks up at whoever it was that had scared him, and is only a little bit surprised to find that it’s Kuroo standing there, phone lighting his way. 

“Woah, dude,” Kuroo laughs, before stepping forward to offer a hand down to him. Daichi feels his heart rate beginning to slow down, and reaches up to take the hand and let Kuroo haul him to his feet. When he’s up, Kuroo lets go of his hand, shaking it. “Why are you wet, my guy?”

“Uh… sorry, ah… I… had a… night terror, I think, or something…”

“Oh, shit. I’m sorry-”

“No, no, it’s not your fault, don’t worry,” he says, quickly, before crossing his arms and hurrying past him, back up to the little campsite they’d set up. “I’m tired. Starting to hallucinate.”

“You’re still having trouble with that?”

“Eh?” Daichi turns around to look at him again, raising his eyes. “What do you mean?” 

“The… nightmare stuff. You’ve mentioned it a few times, now. It’s… not normal, you know that?”

“What… what do you mean?”

“Chronic nightmares. It’s not normal.”

“It’s a symptom of stress, or whatever, yeah, I know-”

Kuroo puts his hands up in surrender, immediately backing off the subject. “Sorry, sorry, I just mean… I just want you to take care of yourself, that’s all.”

“I’m doing my best, trust me,” he laughs. “It is not my fault doing this bullshit in the middle of the night is like… gasoline for the fire.”

“If it’s that bad, maybe you shouldn’t…” Kuroo cuts himself off, biting on the inside of his cheek before saying: “Don’t keep doing something that’s hurting you.”

“No,” he says, immediately.

“I mean-”

“No,” he repeats, more firmly. “I’ll have nightmares whether I do or not, and… I don’t know, at this point, I don’t think I could give it up. This… you guys… this is special to me. I’m having more fun than I’ve had in a long time. I haven’t had this much fun with something outside of volleyball… ever. Even if it’s… stupid.”

Kuroo smiles slightly. “I feel the same. You know, for a long time I thought volleyball was all I had, and… not going competitive after high school felt like… it was scary, the idea of losing it. I don’t have anything… but this… is good.”

“This is good,” Daichi agreed, before glancing back to the hill, where the others slept. “Don’t tell Oikawa I said that.”

“My lips are sealed.”

Daichi nods, staring for a moment before looking back to Kuroo. 

“Are we going to lose them, when we graduate?”

“I’m sorry?”

“They all… they all have professional careers, waiting for them. What happens when they move on? Does this matter to them in the same way? Or is this just… a side hobby that they’ll grow out of? I know Oikawa… I know it’s personal to Oikawa, but I’m not talking about the aliens, I mean the videos. What happens when they’re moving across the country and we can’t get together anymore?”

“I don’t know,” Kuroo says. “But… maybe it’s not about what happens in the future. Maybe it’s about what’s happening now.”

“You sound like Kita,” Daichi teases, but decides to agree with him, at least for now, because he’s only just found this family, and looking ahead to when it’ll end would just bring that end about sooner. 

A sudden, high pitched yipping breaks the air, and he practically jumps out of his skin, stumbling backwards and making Kuroo laugh, reaching out to stabilize him. 

“You are so jumpy,” Kuroo snickers. 

“Well! It was startling!”

“Dude, calm down, it’s just a fox.”

 

---

 

 The boys left sore and cold the next morning. Honestly, Kita was just impressed that they’d stayed outside the whole night. That seemed absolutely crazy to him, but to each his own. 

Kitsunes, kitsunes, kitsunes, that was all they had cared about, and he figured that was probably okay. Not like there was much else interesting about this farm. He knew how people talked about it, about him. He knew he was odd. He finishes seeing them off, and wanders back into his home, puttering about in the morning and getting ready for the day. He stops to look at himself in the mirror, lifting a hand up to fluff through the hair that was growing just a tad longer than he liked to keep it, hanging around his ears. He’d have to cut it soon. 

It would be weird, to lose the black tips, but his hair always just seemed to… return to this. He’d never really cared much about it, but had considered just dying his hair black so people stopped asking. 

Kitsunes, kitsunes, kitsunes. 

Kita had always thought the question odd. Are kitsunes real? Well. Who knows. 

They say a kitsune in human form has trouble hiding its tails. That you can reveal them for what they are by figuring out where they had hidden their tail, or noticing it, in a shadow, or in a mirror. He’d caught himself, out of curiosity, sometimes, trying to check, trying to see. 

Sometimes, when the angle was right and the lighting just perfect, he could have sworn he saw the tail swish behind his grandmother’s legs. 

Sometimes, ever since she’d had her centennial birthday, he could have sworn he’d seen two. 

Sometimes he wondered, when he turned around quick enough, if his eyes were just playing tricks on him, or if there really was a motion of something behind him , something that he wasn’t familiar with as part of his body. 

Sometimes he wondered if he really did have an odd form of albinism, as he’d grown used to believing, or if there was a reason his hair had never taken a proper colour. 

Sometimes, but not always. 

Most of the time, he just woke up and went out to tend the shrine his grandfather had put together to honour the foxes he loved so much. 

Notes:

aghhh back to our regularly scheduled monster of the week chapters. a little sneak peek of next time, it's gonna be a little side adventure for some of the supporting cast boys, so- *puts on announcer voice* -stay tuned to find out what happens next!

Chapter 11: Cucumber Water

[The camera quality certainly isn’t as good as it is in their official edited videos, this one filmed off the camera of a laptop, set on a desk and angled into a bedroom that was neat and very well kept, everything having its place and quite the opposite of what one would expect of an eighteen year old boy. On a chair at the desk, offset just slightly from the center of the camera, Daichi is leaning forward enough to read off the laptop, eyes scanning over a rapidly moving live chat and trying to desperately get ahold of any single question he could identify.

“Oh… uh… I think I saw someone ask about Kuroo’s cat thing,” Daichi says, hesitating slightly before sitting back again. “Yeah, I don’t know. I feel like they’re both lying by omission by not telling you all that they live in a neighbourhood that’s well known to have a stray cat problem. Like they find cats everywhere, it’s basically their thing. I mean, apparently the white tail is like… straight out of folklore, but still. It’s just a cat guys.”

He eyes the chat for a moment before reading out: “Are you not at all concerned about the cat being a clear omen of bad fortune? Uh- no, I’m typically not afraid of cats.”

“I am!” 

Oikawa makes his loud entrance through the bedroom door - visible just on the edge of the frame, with his bag over his shoulder and a white bun of bread Daichi is fairly certain was stolen from his kitchen. Daichi turns to face him, saying: “Who the hell let you in here?”

“Your sister. She didn’t even ask questions, she just let me into the house.”

“...alright. Sorry, you said you’re concerned about the cat?”

“Of course!”

Oikawa throws his stuff onto the bed in the background. “Kuroo described an almost textbook definition of not just a bakeneko, but one that is harbouring ill intent. The long tail, the white tail, both individual features often convey power and bad luck. Even the fact that the first thing he saw was it licking the oil of a lantern. They say if you see a cat licking the oil of a lantern, it’s a very bad omen. Kuroo might actually be cursed now.”

Daichi still has his back to the camera, staring at Oikawa for a moment before saying: “what are you eating?”

“Milk bread,” he said, showing it off towards Daichi as if maybe he was just stupid and couldn’t identify it.

“Yes I know, I meant - nevermind. Come say hello to everyone. I’ve been floundering here, I can’t believe Kenma made me start this alone.”

“I know, me either.”

“Don’t agree, you’re the late one. You were supposed to be here. I asked to delay it-” Daichi turns around, back to address the watching audience. “Sorry, not that I don’t respect your time but it’s not like the last twenty-five minutes have been an enlightened conversation.” 

“Whatever, whatever, where do I sit?” 

Daichi glances around, realizing he had not, in fact, considered where a second person would be in this event. “Uh… Good question?”

“Woefully underprepared…” Oikawa muses, before coming in beside him and leaning over to look at the camera. “Oh, holy shit that’s a lot of people-”

“I know!” Daichi says. “And I’ve been alone! And it’s very overwhelming. Just… answer a question or something.”

“Well right now there are no questions, just a bunch of people spamming hello,” Oikawa replies, before reading from the fast scrolling chat: “Are you guys dating?”

“No~” Daichi sings, before frowning and adding: “Someone just asked if we’re sure.”

“I’m fairly positive,” Oikawa replies, then reading: “How long have you known each other?

“Like… I dunno, six weeks?” Daichi says, glancing up to him for a second. When he looks back, clear shock crosses his face as he watches the already rapidly moving public chat grow even crazier as people express an understanding level of shock to this reveal. “What! It’s true!”

“Well, we’ve known each other since last year.”

“We’ve known about each other since last year. Very different.”

“I suppose that’s true. Has it really only been that long?”

“I know, time flies, doesn’t it?” Daichi laughs, looking back down to the chat and letting them calm down a bit, having to wait for a moment to catch another, real, question. “Oh, this person asks when the next video will be coming out.”

“It’s actually getting filmed tomorrow,” Oikawa chirps. “But it’s gonna be a little different. Daichi and I, unfortunately, have curricular obligations to attend to, but we didn’t want to delay getting a video put out for you, so the Tokyo boys are coming up to meet with Ushijima and they’ll be taking on a little adventure. No spoilers, but it is… relatively local, I think the site is only an hour or so north of here. It’ll be a lot of fun… no, to the person who asked, I’m not worried about them doing it wrong. Kuroo will be there. Oh! And a few special guests, too, so… that’ll be fun for you.”

Daichi nods along to that, before reading from the chat: “Why do you use Daichi’s first name when he doesn’t use yours?” Daichi opens his mouth, to give some answer from his perspective, but Oikawa is already leaning into the camera. 

“Because I don’t respect him,” Oikawa sings, giggling, before adding: “And nobody uses my first name. Iwa-chan doesn’t even use my first name.” 

There’s a beat of silence, as the chat briefly loses its mind again and speeds up, and they both spend a moment watching it before Daichi reaches over to point at the scrolling chatroom. 

“Girlfriend,” he reads, eyes lifting to watch for Oikawa’s reaction. 

Oikawa hums, face neutral. “Yes,” he says, nodding. “I see that.”]

 

---

 

There were lots of things that Tendou had, briefly, written off as impossible in his life. He sometimes made jokes, about growing up like he had, about the childhood he’d lived, about all of it, because making jokes was easier than admitting it had left any kind of lasting impression on him. It was easy to scoff and leer at people and make himself the freak, to cackle at this discomfort and lean into the reputation he’d grown comfortable wearing because it gave him power over it. To admit, out loud, that between the ages of thirteen and sixteen, a meager three years, but formative ones nonetheless, he had genuinely believed that there was nowhere he belonged, that there was noone who would like him, that there was no way for him to be a person like everyone else got to be a person, was simply impossible. He hated Washijo, most days, and he wasn’t even sure he liked volleyball, but when he remembered his interview, having been personally scouted from his shitty, public highschool in Gifu off reputation alone, he gets this small flutter inside him that hinges entirely on one specific footnote: Washijo had seen him, and wanted him.

Finding the place had been a miracle, finding the people had been… A series of increasingly unlikely and improbable events. What do you mean they’re going to cheer when he makes a block, what do you mean they’re going to remember his birthday, what do you mean they send him soup and tylenol when he comes down with a cold. 

I’m a monster, haven’t you heard? he wants to shout it at the team, remind them that he is uncomfortable to be around, snarky and unpredictable and mean, that he was not someone that had a life that would be filled with friends and good memories and fun. 

He had entirely written off the possibility of being someone who has memories of laying in the sun, of riding trains northwards for day trips, for fishing and friends and to be listening to music and sharing meals. He had, more firmly than anything else, believed that he would never be anyone’s boyfriend - even if he had thought himself attractive, they’d still need to stomach his personality.

And yet, and yet, all of that was what was happening right now. 

Something about trains puts Ushijima to sleep. Maybe it’s the rumbling over the railways, or the warm spring sun that was magnified through the window, but he’d almost immediately closed his eyes. Tendou wouldn’t even consider complaining about it - even if it meant he had to go through the ride watching his most recent anime obsession on his phone alone - because feeling the weight of Ushijima’s head on his shoulder was like getting to go back in time and tell that thirteen year old Tendou that everyone, everyone was wrong. 

Why can’t I have that? I’m so jealous of you.

The train is coming to a stop. Tendou lifts his head up, turning to try and identify exactly who on the train was looking at him - Tendou Satori - and seeing anything worth being jealous of. His intuition must have picked up on something the last time he looked around the train car. It was like that sometimes, catching up to him, hitting him later. He can’t see anyone looking at him, but he makes a rapid assessment and quick guesswork of everyone else. 

He’s on his way to visit family, probably hasn’t seen them in a while. 

She’s going in for a job interview. 

He’s being dragged along by his girlfriend. 

None of these people are jealous of me, they haven’t even-

His eyes lock on the seats directly behind him. 

Oh, that makes sense.

Kuroo and Kenma are sharing the row behind them - and one seat across, Bokuto is making himself the problem of the kindly lady that was sat next to him. 

Tendou locks eyes on Kenma, who had been staring very discreetly through the slot between the seats. Tendou gets that look, the one that everyone always gets, when they’d been thinking something personal and Tendou calls them out on it. Eyes widen, face flushes slightly. 

He knows if he focuses and looks for clues to the situation, he can drag out more information, make better guesses, but the poor little kitty looks petrified just to be under his monster gaze, so he takes pity on him and just looks away again. 

The train is stopping anyway. 

He gently nudges Ushijima awake, deciding to forget everyone else and just enjoy what they were doing. 

Ushijima wakes up, seeming surprised that he had fallen asleep at all. 

“Ah, there’s Sleepy,” Tendou teases, which gets a blank look back, nothing at all crosses Ushijima’s face. He was hard to read - (Tendou liked that) - but not impossible. Just simple. Tendou often found himself searching for complexity, for double meanings, for the absurd logical gymnastics most people put themselves through, and it was simply never there. 

“Sorry,” Ushijima replies, sitting up properly and starting to get his stuff together. I hope that wasn’t irritating for him, is the only other thought he seems to be having. Tendou smiles. 

“No worries,” he replied. “It’s kinda fun getting to be a pillow. And you’re so cute when you’re sleeping.” 

Ushijima’s face remains unbothered and impassive. Tendou smiles a little bit more, because he knows Ushijima is very concerned with making sure it stays that way, and that’s why he’s not risking replying to him. 

Ugh.

It’s an intrusive thought, not in his own voice. He knows what he’s picked up on, what guess his brain is making without warning him. Kenma - if he was jealous before, he won’t like this now. 

He decides to ignore it. It’s not his problem, after all.

 

---

 

It was a beautiful little park and hiking trail, not very big but intercut with a long river that weaved its way through thick green foliage and rocky river banks. It flowed fast, on a slight downhill incline, connecting eventually, somewhere, to the ocean but they were far closer to the lake it came from than the coast. The trees were tall and spread around them, but here off, the main parking lot and trailhead, they had been cleared back and grassy fields left behind. There are other people here, Kenma feels very awkward about filming where people can watch, but he supposes that it’s better than being filmed where people can watch, because at least now he doesn’t have to speak. 

It’s a nice day. The clouds are cleared off and the springtime sun seems to have started to make an appearance. Enough so that the backs of Kenma’s hands are warm, when they stand in the sunlight, though he wouldn’t dare take off his jacket. 

He feels a hand on his back, stiffening slightly at the contact, until he notices it’s just Kuroo, leaning over his shoulder at the camera. 

“Almost ready?” he asks, and his voice is warm and familial and it makes Kenma want to scream, because he’s always so close, and yet still, somehow, Kenma is always too far away to make any use of it. 

“Yeah, I guess…” he mumbles, shocking even himself with how plain and boring his voice sounds. “Are you guys gonna do it together, or…?”

“Yeah,” Kuroo says, resting his weight on Kenma’s shoulder for just a moment before pulling away to head down the trail a little bit further. Kenma watches him go, wondering if he could just be more enthusiastic, more playful, more exciting, if Kuroo wouldn’t look so damn disappointed with every interaction they had. 

He feels eyes on him. Kenma always feels eyes on him, and when he turns his head, it is to notice Tendou watching him, with those awful, prying eyes and knowing gaze. He jerks his head back down to the camera and tries to ignore it. 

The boys - well, the three that people actually wanted to see on camera - lead them down the trail a bit, and Kuroo turns around to take centre stage on the camera. Kenma fiddles with the settings to make sure it was picking up a good quality image, and Kuroo starts speaking before he can even give him the go ahead. 

“Alright, so we’re in a little public park about an hour up from Sendai, about to embark on a… short? Medium length hiking trail along a river up towards a lake that has been joking and not-so-jokingly referred to as the home of many kappas over the year. If anyone is not familiar with kappas, I am not Oikawa and cannot help you with that.” 

“Kappas are river creatures,” Ushijima supplies. 

“Riveting description, good work,” Kuroo claps his hands together to move on. “Ushiwaka there is correct, basically they live in rivers, they have turtle shells, they reach up your anus and steal your soul-”

“Wait what?” Bokuto interrupts.

“And they love cucumbers, playing games, drowning and eating children-”

“Please slow down-” Bokuto tries.

“And they have these little pools of water on their head that, if it gets empty, the kappa will just shut down and needs someone else to refill it,” Kuroo finished. 

“I thought these were like… friendly turtle men,” Bokuto complains. “Why are they doing anything to my anus?”

Out of the corner of his eye, Kenma can see Tendou trying so hard not to absolutely lose his shit. 

“Just stay out of the water, buddy,” Kuroo says, patting his shoulder. “But, far from friendly river creatures they are, I mean, just look at these signs!” 

And Kenma is impressed, because Kuroo’s timing is impeccable - well, it always is - and he’s able to dance around and skip down a small gravel curve towards where a white sign is set up, somewhat jokingly showing the simplified image of a kappa grabbing for a kid. 

Kuroo leans on the sign post. “These signs are put up all over this place! Beware the kappa!”

“I believe the kappa is a general metaphor for dangerous waters. The river here runs much deeper than most visitors expect, so if you slip or jump in, you may be caught underwater in a current and unable to resurface. Whirlpool and riptide deaths are often attributed to kappas for lack of a better explanation, and it appears the park services have had a little fun with it.”

Ushijima is a boring and painfully rational counterweight to the high energy Kuroo and Bokuto bring. Necessary information, but less entertaining for sure. 

“I’m taking that to mean you don’t believe we’re finding any kappas today?”

“I would be significantly surprised should we find any kappas today,” Ushijima replies. 

Kuroo grinned, before looking back to the camera. Kenma tries not to think about how much he likes his smile. 

“Well, that’s what we’re going to do today, take a walk along this river, do some fishing, see if we can spot ourselves a kappa,” Kuroo chirped, before pulling away from the sign to bounce up and onto the main path. “Oh! But, as you may have noticed, our dearest darling Daichi and the bastard king have abandoned us for today, so we brought along some surrogate friends, say hello surrogate friends.”

Kenma hesitates for a second, before slowly turning the camera around to film himself, and Tendou, much taller, leans down over his shoulder. 

“‘Tis us, the surrogate friends, apparently,” Tendou chirps, waving for the camera. Kenma doesn’t want to admit that it’s a little unnerving, the way he looks into the camera without blinking. Or, maybe he was just sensitive because it had felt like he’d been watching him the whole trip. 

“Hi…” Kenma says. 

“In case you’ve forgotten, Kenma there is our lovely editor and hard-working social media expert, and Mr. Tendou is the kid that Oikawa won’t leave the fuck alone,” Kuroo finishes, and Kenma turns the camera around to point back at the group. 

“Now come on,” Bokuto says, waving them along. “Quit wasting time, let’s catch ourselves a kappa!”

After just a couple minutes of walking, Kenma stops filming and lowers the camera. It would be a while before they’d gotten to the parts of the river they wanted to play around with and stay near, so there was no point wasting the battery now. The boys up ahead seem to be having a good time. Of course, Kenma was quite familiar with the power couple that Bokuto and Kuroo could be when they were alone together, but Ushijima doesn’t seem to bring them down at all, and they’re having fun quite a few meters ahead, fighting about what may or may not live in the river. 

Kenma is just about to start filming again, because Bokuto shouting: “Why do either of you think you’re experts on what can be in water?” was a fascinating argument he wanted to capture, when it crosses his mind that Tendou has stayed at his shoulder the entire time. 

He glances at him, then glances away, then glances at him, then back to the group ahead of them, and then asks: 

“You don’t want to catch up with them?”

Unfortunately for Kenma, Tendou must have predicted his question, because he says it at the same time, matching Kenma word for word and then looking back at him rather smugly. 

It sends some kind of instinctual alarm up his spine, but that wasn’t new. Honestly, pretty much everyone unnerved Kenma if they made this much direct eye contact. He looks away. 

“Sorry,” Tendou says, waving a hand, followed by: “And… I could, if you don’t want me hanging around. But I figured if our boyfriends are gonna go running off chasing monsters together, we may as well learn to like each other.”

“What?” Kenma snaps, whipping his head up to him in alarm. “Excuse you?”

“I said-”

“I know what you said, I just -  uh… who do you think is my boyfriend? I’m not dating anyone. Kuroo and I are not a couple. We’re not. What are you even talking about? Stop.”

Tendou blinked rapidly at this, before a look of mild confusion crossed his face.

“Really? You’re not?”

“No! And don’t go around saying that out loud, I- Why do you look like that?”

Tendou still seems baffled, looking back to the group walking ahead of them. “Odd. I’m not usually wrong.”

“Well you are today…” Kenma mutters, pointedly looking away from him and investigating some trees that hold no value to him. 

And then, still, Tendou does not move on, hanging back with him even as they others drew further ahead. The three boys, the actual monster hunters, not just the surrogates, seemed completely wrapped up in whatever they were doing, laughing and fighting as they made their way down their path and to the river. Kenma feels a stab of something in his stomach, and he’s sure that it’s not jealousy, because jealousy would imply that he wanted something. Wanted what? 

He was Kuroo’s best friend. There was no reason to care if Kuroo was then having other friends, who made him laugh like that, who pushed him around and were oh-so-confident in their relationship. Friends that didn’t shy away from touching him, friends that he probably should like more than him. He knew he was Kuroo’s best friend - he’d been told that more than enough times - so it couldn’t possibly have been jealousy that ate away at his stomach. He’d been invited along, hadn’t he? He was-

Ushijima had fallen behind in the group, not accidentally, but he’d watched Kuroo and Bokuto begin some kind of playful fighting match, shoving each other around, and taken a few steps back, turning to let Kenma and Tendou catch up. 

Ushijima offers a hand out towards them, fluttering his fingers slightly in prompt, and making Tendou smile before he reaches out to link their hands together. 

That’s it. That’s it. That’s it.

Kenma tries not to care. 

Not for the relationship - God, neither of them interested him in the least, they were so goddamn weird - but for the action. 

Why didn’t Kuroo notice that I had fallen behind?

Why didn’t he want to come back and make sure I stayed with the group?

Did he not care? Or did he not even notice? Which would be worse? 

Why can’t I have that? 

Tendou is looking at him again. 

Kenma tries not to look back, but the gaze is so nauseatingly intense it makes him shudder. Tendou was… weird, and this was no less weird than normal. Eventually, after enough refusal to look back at him, Tendou seems content to refocus his attention on Ushijima and let Kenma go back to sulking. 

 

---

 

“Okay, so my grandpa was really big on fishing,” Bokuto says, and his face is too large in the frame, as he’s leaning forwards, but Kenma thinks it’s kind of funny so he lets it continue like this. “And he always said, most important part, past patience, which I don’t have, is making sure you got the right bait. Not fishy is gonna bite if they don’t like the bait. So-”

And here, Bokuto is pulling a cellophane wrapped bag of cucumber pieces out of his bag. 

“-here is the right kappa bait. I cut it up myself!”

“Is that why you have bandaids on your fingers?” Ushijima’s voice says, from off screen. Kenma stiffles his laughter at Bokuto’s offended expression. 

“Maybe. Anyway, Kenma, show them the place-”

Kenma does as told, scanning the camera around. The path was up the hill a bit, and the river had cut through a clearing. On either side, short, reedy grass and rocks. The river itself is deep and quick moving, but relatively clear of rocks or debris. It faded away into the woodlands, as the clearing sealed up again, but here in this patch the sun was nice and bright above them, and it looked near idyllic. 

“Technically fishing here is illegal,” Kuroo chirps in, and Kenma hears Tendou mutter:

“...and other sentences that shouldn’t start with technically…”

“But,” Kuroo goes on, glaring at him. “If we’re not technically fishing , it’s fine. So we’ve gotten a little crafty-”

“Fishing line, hook, cucumber!” Bokuto says, holding up his little string. “Let’s get that kappa!”

While the boys set up to cast into the water, Kenma spends some time getting some pretty shots of the river and the forest, then sets up the camera for a wide angle where all the boys could be seen and decides to just sit back here and wait. 

The water in the river beside him bubbles. 

Kenma looks down into it, at the dark, muddy water that zipped by so fast, leaning over until he could see his reflection. And it is his reflection, it is… it… is something in the water? Why does his reflection look… like something is behind-

“Kozume!” 

Kenma jerks back from the water, turning to see Tendou heading over to him. “Come on, come fish with us,” he says. 

“Ah… yeah, sorry…”

He doesn’t know how Tendou does it. How he’s so loud and social despite everything people say about him. If Kenma had heard half the rumours Tendou has to put up with, he’d never show his face anywhere again. It would drive him crazy. 

He drags himself back over to the group, and settles beside Kuroo. It looks like they’ve gotten the line into the water, and it’s dragging its little cucumber slice through the waves quite eagerly, the rapid current pulling at it. 

He’s quiet for a moment, before looking over to where Tendou had settled closer to Ushijima. Almost as if sensing him, Tendou glanced back and met his gaze. He raises an eye, as if to prompt him along. 

“Does it bother you?” 

“The satori thing?” Tendou answered, without needing the clarification. Kenma swallows. 

“... yeah.”

“No.”

Kenma knows he’s lying. 

And Tendou looks away, returning to his previous activity of trying to strip Ushijima of his jacket to steal for himself, as he had underprepared. Kenma supposed he couldn’t always guess right - he wasn’t a monster, after all, and it’s not like the weather had a mind to read even if he was.

 

---

 

I’m not jealous, I just don’t understand you.

What an odd sentiment. Tendou would be worried about it, or concerned, or bothered, but instead he just turns his brain off of it and focuses on what they’re doing. Kenma was clearly having a rough time with his own issues. If asked to guess, Tendou would say the kid’s thoughts were rapidly fluctuating between why does Tendou keep looking at me and oh my god I’m so in love with Kuroo.

So Tendou tried to stop looking at him. It was an easy enough task, since he had three other perfectly good people to bother.

“It really doesn’t bother you?”

He’s surprised by the comment from Ushijima, and lifts his head up to look at him. 

“The… the thing Kenma asked?”

“Yeah. Oikawa’s whole… crusade, does it really not bother you?”

Tendou would never really wrap his head around how little Ushijima was capable of reading people - even him. He believed him. One word and he believed him. 

“It’s stupid,” Tendou replied. “Oikawa’s an idiot. Honestly,” he adds, and he knows that in most cases more details into a lie would make it less believable, but Ushijima isn’t like that, and will take the greater information and hold it as being more true. “If anything, it’s a step up from just calling me one. At least this is… not personal, y’know?”
He gets a hummed response, and that’s about it, looking back over to where the river is, watching the little cucumber get tugged song in the stream. 

Tendou hugs the successfully stolen jacket around himself. He wonders if Ushijima is cold, if he minds, if he’s sitting there loathing the fact that Tendou is still staring at him, still sitting this close, still making himself a problem. But when he tries, when he really tries to guess, the only thing he can get is-

The river is really pretty in this lighting.

So Tendou looks away, and decides not to ask if, theoretically, he were a monster, if this would be a dealbreaker for him or not. Ushijima does not believe in monsters so he’s sure he thinks this whole affair is ridiculous, but if it weren’t - would he even want to know? Would he want to know if Ushijima would care, or if he’d start looking at him the same way everyone else has always looked at him? As something less than human?

Cucumber, cucumber…. Mhm… cucumber…

It’s an invasive noise in his head, and it’s so unusual, so out of his normal intuitive guessing, that he sits up a bit and turns to see who the fuck might be so focused on cucumber. Bokuto? Maybe… It had to be, right? Or maybe it was Tendou’s own thought, and-

He wonders if it’s just his eyes playing tricks on him, that see the movement under the surface of the river, and then-

“Oh! Hey!”

Bokuto had started to zone out, but he jolts up now and drags in the fishing line. The cucumber is gone. 

“Something snatched the cucumber!” 

“It probably got washed away by the river,” Ushijima replies. 

Tendou looks between them. What the hell was that?

There’s this ugly part of Tendou’s brain that starts screaming no, no, no, no, in protest to his own guesswork. 

Stop knowing things. Stop guessing.

He hated turning his guesses inwards. He hated being right about himself. 

Oikawa is wrong. You’re just a guy, you couldn’t-

Oh but you know that voice didn’t come from one of the guys here. You know it. Who the fuck would have been thinking that?

And even if it did… even if it was them, there’s no reason for you to have known that. 

It’s impossible. You’d rather believe impossible things than admit that you might just not belong here. 

He scrunched his nose up, shaking his head and trying to ignore it. 

It wasn’t a monster. It wasn’t a kappa, the cucumber just got washed away in the river. 

Why is it so hard to believe in that obvious rational explanation? 

His gut instinct was telling him otherwise. 

 

---

 

Kenma is sure the boys play it up for the camera, their excitement and shock and surprise. He’s sure Kuroo has never been this excited about anything related to cucumbers in his life, so it seems a bit odd that he’d care now, but it’s funny to watch anyway.
They attach another piece and talk about how the kappa are finally coming out, and Bokuto throws it into the water. 

Out of the corner of his eye, Kenma can tell something is bothering Tendou. He’s pushed himself up to his feet, carefully skittering down to the water’s edge. 

Ushijima doesn’t seem concerned, watching him boredly, or… not, honestly Kenma couldn’t tell what the guy was thinking. 

“Stay clear of the water, Tendou!” Kuroo calls, jokingly, from Kenma’s otherwise. “The kappa are biting today!”

Tendou scoffs, glancing back at him. “Please,” He says, as he couches down by the water’s edge, resting his weight back on his heels. He has long arms, Kenma notes. And there’s something about the way he sits that is too comfortable - should his fingers be able to reach the water like that? Maybe it’s a trick of the perspective- “I’m not afraid of any turtlemen,” he says.

Tendou turns his attention back towards the river. “I just wanna take a look…” he muses, as if something is bothering him and the answer is beneath the current. 

Kenma glances back to Kuroo, who’s also watching him, for a moment, before getting distracted by Bokuto who’s playing with the fishing line and trying to entice the kappa in. Kenma’s pretty sure if something did take the slice off the hook, it was called a ‘fish.’

Tendou jerks suddenly, foot slipping in the muddy bank and almost sending him tumbling into the water. 

He catches his balance, laughing it off at the same time Ushijima calls: “Be careful!” in a very unimpressed, almost annoyed tone. 

Tendou turns back to look at him, sticking his tongue out. “Oh, please, it’s just a little bit slick,” he says, before he looks back to the water. “Besides, I think someone dropped something-”

And Kenma is only passively interested. It’s a nice day, the water is beautiful, the sky is clear, Kuroo is laughing and, for a second, it feels like maybe they really are just five friends hanging out. 

 Tendou reaches his hand in the water, hissing slightly. 

“God, it’s freezing,” he laughs, and then before anyone can reply, his whole body jerks forward and he is gone, into the river. 

 

---

 

He’s not sure what he was reaching for, sunglasses or a make-up mirror or something reflective that had been dropped by the water’s edge. In hindsight, maybe it had been a warning, that someone else had left their belongings suddenly and without warning in the water and not come back for them. They were certainly within reach. 

Everything is so cold. In fact, it’s so cold that Tendou has a lot of trouble even trying to think about anything else. 

Something tight grips his arm. And when he thinks he’s managed to thrash his way free, there’s something tight gripping his ankle. 

He hasn’t resurfaced for air yet. 

He twists around, but the grip on his ankle won’t break. 

His arms lash out, and he finds his fingers scraping over algae covered rocks and mud, desperately trying to find something he could grip but coming up with nothing. His chest is starting to hurt. The water is so dark and they kick up so much mud that it turns an every darker shade. 

This current is strong. 

Current? 

He can’t make any guesses underwater like this. He needs at least one of his senses to do that. 

Something is pulling him, very fast , underwater. 

Oh, holy fuck I’m going to drown-

It occurs to him, way too late, that he does, in fact, need oxygen, and he’s been underwater way too long, and that pain in his chest is his body telling him it’s about to fucking die.

He tries to break away from the thing again and-

His side cracks into something very hard, something like a rock, though he cannot see what it was, and the pain makes him gasp, which is a horrible mistake for being underwater, and then it really sinks in that he is about to die, caught beneath the current of a river renown for its drownings, downstream god only knows how far, lost to the world-

It hurts so much. 

All he wants to do is take-

 

---

-his head is aching, but he feels cold air on his face as he’s pulled out from the river from under his arms. His whole body is heavy, he couldn’t move even if he wanted to. His back hits mud and grass, and he turns around slowly to begin the equally painful process of vomiting up river water. 

“There there,” a deeply unfamiliar voice croaks. “You’re alright.”

What in the fuck?

He’s still throwing up water, so he decides to not ask any questions. 

Another break of air into his lungs practically burns, his whole head pounding against his skull, and he almost wishes it would break open to relieve the pressure. 

His vision is still swimming, but after a minute of laying in the mud and the filth, he’s able to turn his head and try and see who was speaking. 

There’s an old man, sitting by the river’s edge. He’s short, Tendou thinks, but it’s hard to tell how short. He’s bald, and his head is… long, he’s got a long forehead, long face, long nose, long chin, long neck. Normal, but… just… odd. He seems completely unbothered by having both pulled a drowning boy out of a river and also having just saved a life, but he’s also oddly not super wet, so unless Tendou was way closer to the surface than he’d thought… this man definitely didn’t leap in to pull him out. 

“Thanks,” he manages to croak, his voice sounding raw. 

“Oh, no trouble at all,” he replies, and it’s then that Tendou notices what he’s doing - he’s got a knife, and a basket of cucumbers, and he’s sitting there slicing them into little slivers and letting the pieces hit the water and get sucked away. 

Tendou eyes him for a minute, before saying: “What are you doing?”

“I’m making sure the kappas have something to munch on,” the man replies, cheerfully. “They get so… carnivorous if they’re not fat and happy. So-” and here he makes his point by dropping another slice of cucumber into the river. 

“So… that… you-” he turns back to look at the river, then tilts his head up to the river bank. They’re in the forested area now, the trees are tight overhead, it does not look like where they’d been sitting. “That was a kappa that pulled me in? That’s real? It was going to eat me?”

“Oh, no, dearie, not at all,” the man says, and Tendou is only comforted for a couple of seconds before he adds: “Kappa don’t eat yokai meat.” 

He feels his body freeze, blood like lead under his skin, weighing him down. 

“What did you say?”

“I said,” the man repeats, looking over to him. “Kappa don’t eat yokai meat. He took a little nibble and realized you weren’t any good. Spit you out here to apologize.”

“Who the- huh? I’m not a monster-”

“Oh, dearie, I did not say monster,” the man says, stilling his hands and resting them on his lap as he turned to look at Tendou again. “I said yokai, very different. It’s an important distinction.”

“Well I’m not a yokai either,” Tendou spits. “And you’re just a crazy only man sitting here, doing… an insane task-”

Tendou tries to push himself up to his feet to leave, stumbling slightly and immediately feeling his head go woozy, so he hits his knees in the mud and is forced to stay. 

“Why are you so disbelieving? Even of the things you have experienced in your own head? Most people would do anything to escape the drudgery of humanity and join me in the Hyakki Yagyō. And yet you seem to run from it.”

“I don’t want to be a monster.”

“Yokai.”

“Same thing.”

“No it’s not.”

Tendou shakes his head, slowly pushing himself back to his knees to try and get up again. 

“I can’t read minds, I can’t predict the future, I can’t do any of that shit. You’re just a crazy only man who’s sitting by a river throwing cucumber to fictional creatures!”

“Of course you can’t read minds,” the old man laughs, ignoring the rest of the insult and waving him off. “You’ve never even tried.”

Tendou stops at that, managing to stay swaying on his feet without falling over again. He feels like he needs to say something, or do something… get the last word in, prove once and for all that this crazy bastard was just that - crazy. 

But the soft plinking noise of the cucumber hitting the river is the only other noise that breaks the silence, and Tendou wants to ask question, wants to ask so much more, say more, demand answers because deep in his gut he knows that this man might actually know something, and also, that he might not ever see him again. 

“Who are you?” Tendou asks. 

“Nurarihyon.”

“And what do you-”

“Tendou!”

There’s a loud, somewhat distant shout from upstream. He jerks his head around listening for a moment and slowly becoming aware of himself as being a part of the world again. This little patch of the river had felt out of touch with time, with everything - he’d almost forgotten that people would be wondering what had happened to him. 

“Do you really think I’m-”

When Tendou looks back around, there’s nobody there. 

He blinks, trying to clear the pounding headache in his skull, trying to make sense of it all. 

Had I made it up?

Maybe he was dead. 

Maybe he’d drowned in the river and this is all just a dream now and-

“Tendou!”

The next shout is accompanied with bushed cracking, and Tendou realizes that the reason he hadn’t been able to recognize the voice the first time was because he’d never heard Ushijima sounds that scared of anything before. 

He turns on numb feet to stumble towards the sound, but he only gets a few steps before he spots him, running along the river’s edge, with Kuroo and Bokuto only a little bit behind. 

“Waka-”

Tendou doesn’t even get to finish the word before Ushijima is crashing into him, sending him stumbling back and almost taking him to the ground again. 

“Oh my god,” he gasped, as the breath squeezed out of him as Ushijima wrapped his arms around him in a painfully tight hug. “Oh, god… please…”

Tendou would make a joke, about how Ushijima was going to crush the life out of him, but when Ushijima does pull back, Tendou notices not just the terror written across his face, but the fact that he is shaking violently.  

Ushijima seems to notice this as well, but doesn’t have anything he can do to stop it. Tendou uses his own hands, muddy as they are, to cover Ushijima’s, and it looks like physical pain crosses his face as he starts coming down from whatever insane adrenaline rush had gotten him from there to here without losing his mind. 

“Hey, it’s okay,” Tendou says, he realizes that Ushijima isn’t going to be able to speak, and might not be able to for a while. But the moment he says that, Ushijima is shaking his head no, and Tendou doesn’t need to try to read that one:

Nothing about that was okay.

“I’m okay,” he tries again, and then Tendou is being crushed in another hug, but he doesn’t mind it this time.

He’s not a monster. 

He tells himself this over and over and over again, even as he tries. He tries to read Ushijima’s mind, not just guess based on expression and posture and tone, he really tries. 

He is not a monster. 

It feels different in his head than it does when he guesses.

He’s alive. He’s alive. He’s alive. He’s alive. He’s alive. He’s alive-

He hugs Ushijima back as tightly as he can. 

“I’m alive,” he whispers back, and though it’s never happened before, Ushijima shakes against his chest and Tendou is sure that he has started crying.  

I’m a monster.

 

---

 

Oikawa lifts up another flashcard. Tendou only sees the back of it, flat white. 

An Elephant.

“Elephant,” Tendou says. 

Oikawa stares at him for a moment, before putting the flashcard down. He lifts another one to look at. 

A Honeybee.

“Honeybee,” Tendou says. 

Oikawa drops the card again. “And you’re one hundred percent positive you cannot see through the cards?”

“No, I can’t,” Tendou insists. “I promise. Why would you have any reason to doubt me.”

“Because you’re Tendou Satori,” Oikawa replied. “Why in the world would I trust you?”

“Valid point.”

“Let’s just- here…”

Oikawa picks another card up to read. 

Un Ciervo.

“Un Ciervo,” Tendou echoes back. “You tried to trick me by doing that one in Spanish.”

Oikawa scoffs, putting the cards down again. 

“I wasn’t trying to trick you, it was a test.”

“... that’s the same thing.”

“... that’s shockingly true. Okay, well-”

There’s a nudge at the door, and Tendou lifts his head to see who was coming in, unsurprised to find Daichi there. It was, after all, his house.

He’s holding a plate of cookies, which immediately distracts Oikawa as he gets up to check out, stealing one of them before Daichi could even put the plate down between them. 

“So?” Daichi prompts, after a minute. “How goes it?”

“I mean he’s absolutely acing it. I don’t think he’s missed yet, and we’ve done like thirty. I keep expecting him to, but…”

Daichi hums, seemingly impressed. It was odd, Tendou thought, for someone to be so passive when it came to these things. Like he didn’t believe it was real, so he didn’t even really care if it turned out to be real. 

“Let me try,” Daichi says, taking the top card of the pile to read, before glancing up to Tendou expectantly. 

Tendou tries. He really does try. 

There’s radio static in his ears. 

He blinks rapidly, and stops trying, staring at Daichi. 

Nothing comes to him. 

Daichi waits. 

Tendou tries again. He tries again, and again, and he’s not sure how , because his mysterious yokai-senpai that had dragged him out of a river in the woods hadn’t exactly left instructions on how to navigate this terrifying potential future, but he really does try. 

“I… I have nothing,” Tendou says, looking back to Oikawa haplessly. 

Oikawa looks genuinely shocked. “Wait, really?”

Daichi scoffs, that annoying, non-believer sound, rolling his eyes and tossing the card down, clearly unimpressed. 

“Cool,” he says, before turning away. 

Tendou and Oikawa both scramble to flip over the card and see what it was. 

(An Eagle.)

Notes:

oh gosh I had so so so so much fun with this one <3 really thank you to everyone for reading and I hope you enjoyed this silly little adventure as much as I did... gosh... okay thank you love you byebye

xx

Chapter 12: Restful Terrors

“I can’t believe this will be the last training camp the third years join us on,” Hinata is complaining, making a big show about swinging his arms around and expressing his sadness physically. “It sucks.”

“Ah, it won’t be so bad,” Suga chimes in, skipping forward to hang off Hinata’s shoulder and nudge him playfully. “You’ll be under the expert guidance of Mr. Ennoshita for the next year, you’ll have new third years!”

“I don’t want new third years, I want you guys,” Hinata went on, looking up at him with big, sad eyes. “Why can’t we all just never age and play volleyball forever?”

“Because there’s more to life than volleyball, Hinata,” Suga chides. 

Hinata stares at him like he’d started speaking French. 

“What?”

Suga blinks. “What?”

Daichi is only listening with half his attention, focused mainly on slipping his volleyball shoes on once they were in the entrance to the wide gymnasium. It was a little sad, he thought. He really loved volleyball. And he supposed there’d be times to play in the future, but he’d never play again like this. 

But I did what we came here for.

He’d taken the team to nationals. 

So he could leave it behind happily. 

He can still hear the team whining and groaning behind him, egged on by Hinata’s Great Malaise and finding the pessimism contagious. It’s flattering to be cared about so much, but that’s not the kind of leader he was trying to be. 

He claps his hands together, turning around to face the team and get their attention. They perk up immediately, waiting to hear what he had to say. 

“Guys,” he laughs. “I appreciate the funeral procession but let’s stay focused. Just because this is the last time doesn’t mean we can throw it away just because we’re all a little melancholy.”

“Oh, come on,” Asahi complains. “It is sad, I’m getting all emotional just… just thinking about all the years we had with you guys…”

“Yeah, boss,” Tanaka interrupts. “We didn’t even get to do any practice matches or training camps until this year anyway! We’ve come so far-”

“Oh my god you guys-” Daichi laughs, taking a breath and trying to force his own eyes dry as everyone else got all teary and emotional. “Let’s make the most of it then, yeah? We don’t want our last training camp to be another one where we get humiliated because we’re not paying attention.”

“Yes sir!” they all chime, mostly in unison but a little bit sniffly. Daichi can’t help but smile as he watches them pass by into the gym. Hinata is almost immediately distracted from his sadness by spotting Kogane and bouncing over to greet him enthusiastically. Kageyama has given the Seijoh team a wide berth, eyeing them suspiciously despite them just sitting in a circle stretching. Noya and Tanaka have spotted Johzenji’s new first-year manager and Daichi is pretty sure he needs to intervene, but-

“I mean, it is a little sad,” Suga says.

He turns to look at him, seeming surprised and not having heard Suga slip in beside him. 

“Yeah? Already missing our feral beasts?” 

“A little bit, maybe,” Suga says with a slight smile, linking his hands in front of himself. “This was our whole lives, for a little bit, at least…”

“But we did what we came to do,” he says. “We can take at least partial credit for making this team something exceptional.” 

“I know,” Suga agrees, and they’re falling behind, so after Suga gets his shoes on, they head inside and around to the corner of the gym Karasuno was piling their stuff. For everyone who wasn’t a third year, this was just one of many training camps to come. Takeda is working his ass off, flattering the other coaches and squirming his way into their field of vision to make sure they stay on track, to make sure they stay connected and keep having these opportunities. Ennoshita and Ukai are looking over a magnetic whiteboard, having been rather concerned with plotting out the new starting rotation for the last week or so. 

Daichi puts his stuff down. 

“I got into that university,” Suga says. 

Daichi lifts his head. 

“Oh? What happened to the gap year?”

“I told you, my parents-”

“You’ve never given a shit about what your parents want you to do.”

“...fair. I dunno, I just… It’s not like… there’s anything I want to do, so why waste time? And it’s a great school, it’s in Tokyo.”

“Tokyo?”

He stares at him for a moment, and Daichi doesn’t even need to speak to convey exactly what he was thinking. 

“I know it’s not local,” Suga replied. “But… more to life than volleyball, yeah? I couldn’t pass up the opportunity.”

“No, of course not.”

“What about you?”

“Me?” Daichi says. 

“Yeah, you, what are you gonna do? I mean… I know… you’d been… considering, maybe… also trying to get into a school in Tokyo, so… you know, if… you did… ”

“I…” he looks away for a moment, trying really hard to think about what his plan actually was . 

It was crazy, how so quickly so much of his life had become wrapped up in ghost hunting and aliens and travel and videos and camera quality and livestreams. He hadn’t seriously considered his future for a while now, but… 

“Are you still considering the police academy?” Suga prompts, as if trying to remind him who he was. 

“Oh, uh… yeah, I guess,” he says, followed by: “But… I’d want to do that here, in Miyagi, sorry…”

“Oh, don’t worry about it,” Suga says quickly, looking away and adding in a mumble: “It was just a… thought…”

Daichi smiled, reaching over to nudge him playfully, but before he can start making fun of him, he hears a whistle blow and the coaches are calling them all to gather. It was time to start the matches. 

 

---

 

Daichi, of course, had always liked volleyball. He finds it especially fun, now, at least, with Oikawa on the other side of the net, making faces at him whenever he has the chance. It’s easy to want to put in even more effort, make himself a nuisance, miss even less receives or spikes or whatever comes his way. 

He had loved playing to prove an enemy wrong about them. 

He likes playing to beat his friends even more. 

When he gets what should have been an impossible ball up in the air, and Kageyama is able to set a quick attack over to Asahi that blows through their blocker’s attempts to stop it, he catches Oikawa giving him a scandalized, playfully annoyed look that makes him laugh and return it with a middle finger. 

Oikawa had always been a sore loser, and it’s not like he’s not playing with 180% of his energy, he always does, but in the same way Daichi finds winning far more enjoyable when it’s done in good fun, the sting of losing to the Karasuno team - to Kageyama across the net, seems to have been taken out of it for Oikawa, too.

Daichi hopes he has something to do with that. It’s a nice thought, that whatever odd friendship they’d formed might have been able to depower the resentment between the two teams. 

Of course, partly why Karasuno is even winning is because Oikawa seems to be handing them balls - that is to say, he’s targeting Daichi with his nasty serves, instead of the edges or more challenging parts of the court. For the first set they play this means Oikawa fails to get even a single service ace. 

However, when the serve comes in even more ferociously than they normally do and it cracks into Daichi’s arms with a force so severe it almost knocks him backwards (and the ball goes irretrievably sideways) he hears a cackling laugh of victory. 

Oikawa blows him a kiss - and his next serve is no less powerful but it goes straight towards Hinata and the poor bastard was not prepared for that at all and gets sent flying. 

It’s a good day. 

They don’t win every game, because they keep swapping out their usual regular players and everyone’s trying out new positions. He hears Ennoshita lamenting, quietly, about how he hadn’t realized his stamina needed so much work, and how was he expected to do three full sets during competitions from now on? It just makes him laugh because he remembers having the exact same concern. 

They take water breaks, and they play more volleyball. 

Daichi times their team chant to interrupt Oikawa’s pre-game ritual.

They - the third years - sit out the next time their team plays Johzenji. Johzenji doesn’t have any of their third years, they’re not even coming along just to have fun and help out like most of the schools did - or like Date Tech’s third years, who didn’t want to play but were here anyways making a nuisance of themselves. So they figured it was a good school to let the second and first years focus on. They were, after all, closest to what they’d be in competition next year. 

He catches Suga looking at him a few times, but he always looks away before Daichi can make any motion for him to explain himself. He tries not to overthink it. 

“Looks like Karasuno’s gonna have to evolve again.”

The voice scares him, having snuck up behind him. It’s just Oikawa, who steps over the bench he was sitting on to take a seat beside him, fiddling with the broken cap of his water bottle and trying to get it to click into place. 

“What now?”

Oikawa nods to where the teams are playing. They’re down about four points against Johzenji. 

“You and the tall kid, with the man bun,” he says. “Filled two huge gaps in your team's roster.”

“Ennoshita’s great on defense, Tanaka’s got an insane spike-”

“But not as good as you two.”

“They’re a year younger, they’ll figure it out.”

“That’s what I said,” Oikawa replies, glancing at him. “As much as I hate your team, it’s not a dig against you - check out Yahaba over there.”

Daichi follows his pointing finger to where the Seijoh team was halfway through their own match. Daichi knew the second-year setter was quite talented, they’d played with him on the court before, but it was also obvious that the pressure of needing to replace Oikawa had started to get to him. They’re not playing badly - Seijoh would never play badly - but there’s more than one occasion where a spike gets blocked and Yahaba looks so frustrated Daichi thinks he’s going to start screaming.

He smiles slightly. “They’ll get the hang of it,” he says. 

“I’m sure they will. Funny to watch now, though.”

“Little bit, yeah.”

“Are you busy this evening?”

Daichi looks back over to him, unsure why he felt surprised by the question. 

“Uh… not as far as I’m aware, why? Got some kind of lead on something haunted you want to check out?”

And now it’s Oikawa’s turn to look surprised, blinking back at him for a moment before looking a little more bashful, lifting a hand up to scratch at the back of his neck. 

“Ah… no, not specifically, I guess, I just… don’t have any plans…”

Daichi scoffs. “You can’t keep using me as a replacement every time Iwaizumi’s busy,” he scolds. 

“I didn’t ask Iwa-chan,” Oikawa replies. 

They stare at each other for a moment. 

“Oh,” Daichi says, stupidly, before more awkwardly adding: “Well… yeah, I guess I’m free, I can come over.”

“Nah, let’s do your place, your internet is so much faster than mine.”

 

---

 

“Asahi invited us over, after the debrief,” Suga says, as they step off the bus to head back into Karasuno’s gym. “Just to watch some movies, hang out… I think he’s getting all emotional because of it being our last training camp.”

“Ah, sorry,” Daichi says, and Suga looks up at him, seeming genuinely surprised. “I already agreed to let Oikawa come over to hang out.”

“...oh,” Suga says, caught off guard. “Right, okay… Yeah, that’s cool.”

“Is something wrong?”

“I just… feel like you’ve missed the last twelve times we’ve hung out. You’re not trying to dodge us, are you?”

“Uh, no, of course not,” Daichi laughs. “I… Yeah, I guess I’ve just been a little busy.”

“I mean, I know that,” he teased. “I see the videos you have coming out every week, it feels like you never stop moving around. But take care of yourself too, yeah? Don’t push yourself just because they move at the speed of light.”

“I’m not,” he assured him. “I’m actually having a lot of fun. I… really… I actually really like doing this. And I think against all odds I actually like Oikawa too. They’re… good guys, good friends. And, like you said, it’s okay to… do something a little different now, right? I mean, we’re done with practices, and after tests are done I… I mean, I don’t even know if I’ll be going to university, so… what’s the harm in giving my attention to this?”

Suga is smiling a little more now, that sort of concerned look washed away from his expression. 

“Okay,” he says. “As jealous as I am to not have you complete undivided attention anymore, I suppose I can share you,” he adds, lifting a hand up to play with the collar of Daichi’s jacket. “Especially since you look so happy.”

“Of course I’m happy,” he says. “I’ve always been happy.”

“You’ve always been a cheery guy,” Suga agrees. “But this is different. I think after nationals you were a bit… aimless. You always look your best when you’ve got something to throw yourself into, and this suits you well.”

Daichi cannot help but smile back at him, knowing he looks stupid doing so but unable to think of anything else he could do. After a second, he says:

“I still owe you a second date.”

“You do,” Suga agrees. 

“I’ll think of something good.”

“You better. No ghosts though.”

“No ghosts.”

 

---

 

“Okay, so Ushijima is a no-go,” Daichi says, reading off his phone as he heads into his bedroom. Oikawa is already quite comfortably set up on his bed, laptop open. “He said - and this is the exact message I received back when I asked if he wanted to hang out - No.”

“Man of few words,” Oikawa replies. “Efficient. But expected. He and Tendou have regularly scheduled evenings on Fridays. He wouldn’t have found it pertinent for you to know that explicitly since you didn’t ask, but that’s probably why.”

Daichi stares at him for a second, before saying: “Why do you know that?”

“I know everything,” Oikawa replied, as if the very question offended him. When Daichi stared at him for a moment, Oikawa gave in and corrected to: “We bonded over the fact that we’re both managing long-term relationships. Happy?”

“Mildly offended, actually.”

“It’s not our fault you three can’t get your shit together,” Oikawa said, sighing and scooting back to invite Daichi to sit beside him. “Now, come on, I want to show you something cool.” 

“Actually cool, or is this going to be an alien video?”

Oikawa looks at him for a moment, almost with a guilty expression, before saying: “will the answer I give affect whether or not you watch it?”

Daichi has to think about this for a moment. 

“Fair point, alright, proceed.”

 

---

 

“Here, here here-” Daichi is saying, cackling in delight as he sits up on his knees, adjusting his laptop and making Oikawa perk up. They’ve been reading off the funniest or most obscene comments from the comment section on their videos, and trying to one-up each other with their finds. Daichi was pretty sure he was winning, but they weren’t keeping score. “Off topic,” he reads, from the comment. “But I’d pay good money to watch the big muscular one rail the tall twink.”

Oikawa gasps, in an offended sort of noise, and throws one of the bed’s pillows at Daichi’s head. 

“We have to do something about them!” he says. “Who are they even talking about? Muscular one?”

Daichi is still snickering, scanning through the comments. “Based on the replies, I’m pretty sure it’s an all applicable situation.”

“That’s awful. These people are awful and they must be stopped.”

“Be nice! These are our lovely fans that are willing to, apparently, spend good money on us.” 

Daichi finds himself being repeatedly hit by a pillow. 

 

---

 

“So did anything actually end up happening, with that boy you liked?”

“Eh?”

Daichi is surprised that it’s Oikawa interrupting the video they’re watching, considering the videos are usually when he’s most likely to shut up and stay focused. 

“That guy, that you went to the movies with,” he says. “You haven’t… updated us, really, about that.”

“Updated you?”

“Are you being intentionally dense or is this just your natural state of being?”

“...what?”

“Oh my god.”

Oikawa pauses the video, some documentary about aliens in South America that he’d pulled off some sketchy site and that was published in 1998, or probably further back. Daichi looks at him as he looks back, waiting for further clarification. 

“The boy. The guy. Your number two. What happened?”

“Oh! Sugawara?”

“Holy shit, yes,” Oikawa says, and Daichi is pretty sure he’s about to be assaulted by a pillow again, so he hurries to start talking:

“Uh, yeah, no, we’re… still planning the second date. It’s just.. You know, things have been crazy, with… the ghost hunting, and the videos, and all this, we haven’t gotten around to it… I mean, surely you understand, I thought Iwaizumi was your go-to alien conspirator buddy, so surely you must have… lost some hang-out time with him since he’s not tagging along anymore?”

Oikawa scoffs. “Please, I practically live with Iwaizumi. Half my stuff is in his bedroom, I go there even when he’s out doing something else. He’s probably relieved to be getting more than two hours a day away from me.”

“What? Really?”

“Yeah,” he replied, and Daichi relaxes a bit, since Oikawa seems less likely to begin whacking him again now. “I dunno. I guess… a little bit, I miss getting to run around at night with him, but… you know, he was always weird about it, he doesn’t… like it, he just liked me, and tolerated it. It’s a lot more fun to get to tell him all the stories and keep him up until one am against his will.” 

Daichi smiled slightly. “That’s… good, I guess.  It’s good that you have that kind of relationship. Something… established.”

“Well if you actually made a move you might also get something established,” Oikawa teased, nudging him. “But, you’ll need about a decade before you even get close to me and Iwa’s level. Sorry, no way to skip to the end.”

Daichi snorts, shaking his head for a moment before saying: “You said Iwa doesn’t… like this alien stuff?”

“Not really. He… Well, I think he just worries I’ll go down the way of the crazy conspiracy theories-”

“Oh I wonder why he would think that-”

Daichi gets a pillow whacked into the back of his head. 

“Okay,” he grumbles. “I deserved that one.”

“You did,” Oikawa agreed, putting the pillow down. “And I was just going to say, he just seems… wary of it. Like… I don’t even really know if he believes in aliens, I think he’s just really caught up in the fact that I do. And he worries I’m gonna do something stupid and put too much into this and just… I don’t know, he’s always been a worrywart, it’s no big deal.”

“But you said… ten years,” Daichi says. 

“What?”

“You’ve known him for a decade?”

“Twelve years,” Oikawa agreed. “We met in our first year of school.”

“So he…” Daichi struggles for a way to articulate this thought. “So he knew you, then, when Jun died?”

Oikawa blinks at him for a moment, before slowly sitting up to look at him. 

“What do you mean?”

Daichi isn’t even sure what he means, but eventually says: “I just… You know what you saw that night, and you said… your sister doesn’t like to talk about it, and also Iwaizumi doesn’t like that you’re pursuing it this much either?”

“Well, they’ve had to put up with me for so long…” Oikawa says, dismissively. “And… Saku… something happened to her, she’s not who she used to be. And… Iwa-chan is… you know he’s…” he thinks about this for a moment longer, before saying: “I think he just doesn’t believe me. If you’re trying to insinuate that he knows something-”

“No, no, not at all,” Daichi said quickly. “Just that… Did he know Jun? Did he talk to your sister when you weren’t around? Does he know something , even if not something big, that could help you… remember?”

“No,” Oikawa replied, before swallowing a little nervously and adding with a dismissive scoff: “Unless it was something he was intentionally keeping from me.”

“It would have come up naturally, right,” Daichi agreed, but he can tell there’s a sort of discontentment settling in Oikawa’s stomach. 

He wondered if he’d ever actually asked , directly, before. 

Do you remember Jun?

Daichi watches him for a second, before noticing the clock over Oikawa’s shoulder. 

“Come on,” he says, to change the topic. “You can berate me about my sorry love-life another time, it’s almost eleven.”

This snaps Oikawa out of his reverie, and he looks back at Daichi with a frown. 

“What? So what?”

“Well, it’s late, we should get to bed. You don’t want to be walking home after midnight.”

“... and? My God, are you ninety years old? Play the movie, grandpa.”

---

 

Oikawa does not, as it turns out, want to walk home after midnight, so with a well perfected puppy look he convinces Daichi to let him stay the night and happily settles into a spare futon laid out beside his bed. The room is laid out in such a way that Oikawa can’t see to the window that’s letting in trace amounts of moonlight, but he can see the rest of the room from where he lays. He can’t hear Daichi above him, so he’d probably fallen asleep sometime ago.

He’s not tired, though. Or maybe he’s too tired. 

His brain is still wired. 

After a few minutes of tossing and turning and trying to convince himself to go to sleep he reaches to grab his phone. The clock on the screen says it’s just after one in the morning, but he ignores it as he pulls up his messages and finds Iwaizumi’s contact. 

Are you still awake?

He sends the message off without that much expectation. Iwaizumi was hit or miss on whether he’d be awake in the middle of the night. Sometimes, he started watching a show and just kept clicking through to the next episode and would show up at school with less than an hour of actual sleep. Othertimes, he was asleep by ten and there was nothing Oikawa could do to wake him. 

He stares at the message for a minute, before slowly scrolling back up through their chat history from the last few days. 

Iwaizumi: Sorry, your majesty. You’ll be missed terribly and I will not know peace until you return. Is that better for you?

Oikawa: Don’t you dare ‘k’ me.

Iwaizumi: k

Oikawa: No sir! Going over to Daichi’s, sorry. You’re on your own tonight. 

Iwaizumi: where are u? mum wants to know if you’re going to be eating our food tonight.

Before he can read too much further up, his phone dings a notification and it forces him down to the most recently received message. 

Iwaizumi: Unfortunately I am. What’s up?

Oikawa isn’t even sure what he had wanted to say, he hadn’t really expected a text:

What do you mean unfortunately? He sends eventually, because it’s very unlike Iwa to add any extraneous details to his messages. 

Well I wanted to be asleep three hours ago, is the message he gets back from Iwaizumi.

Aww, poor Iwa-chan. Something on your mind?

Iwaizumi’s message types and types and types but it seems like it’s never going to send, and Oikawa thinks he might actually manage to fall asleep before it does. However, when it does come in, all he gets back is:

I guess. 

Tell me what’s on your mind, Oikawa replies immediately. He’s treated to another long waiting period before once again getting the shortest text in the world: 

You.

Oikawa feels a heavy beat in his chest, his whole body lighting up at the message, making him want to kick his feet like a preteen with a crush and not someone who had been dating this man for years. 

Oh? He replies, because being too direct would chase Iwaizumi away. 

Shut up.

Oikawa has to stifle any laugh he might make, cautious about waking anyone else in the very packed house. 

I’ll stop by on my way home in the morning, Oikawa says, being extra careful not to misspell anything before he hits send. He adds a follow-up message, with: Make it up to you for having to go through a night without me.

Iwaizumi’s text comes in pretty quickly this time: That’s unnecessary.

Of course it’s unnecessary. The unnecessary stuff is the fun bit ;)

When Iwaizumi doesn’t immediately respond, Oikawa adds: Well, I guess I should go home first, change, shower… and I think Saku needs me to babysit, so maybe I should wait and come over some other time.

And now Iwa is texting quickly, sending back: no no no you can shower here you idiot.

Oikawa laughs, but he’s distracted by any further response by movement from up top. He’s concerned, briefly, that he had woken Daichi somehow, and hurriedly flips his phone over to mask the light from the screen. 

There’s no voice, no question, though, but Oikawa does become aware, after a moment, of the sound of breathing, and then another shifting motion, as if Daichi was rolling over and over and over again, unable to settle. 

He has an instinctual tug in his stomach, like he knew what was about to happen before it started. 

“Daichi-?” he starts to say, sitting up slightly, but almost as if his voice cut the cord holding him, a breathy gasp turned into:

“- no- no, no, stop it, get away from me-”

“Daichi,” Oikawa repeated, more firmly, and as the movement got louder he pushed himself to his knees to see up over the bed. 

Daichi is sitting up now, chest heaving in a panicked breathing as he stares off, over Oikawa’s head towards the corner of the room where - and Oikawa checks - nothing is. 

“No, stop it,” Daichi repeats, loudly, in a desperate sort of noise, like he’d been begging for three days and nobody had listened yet. “Leave me alone, leave me alone, I-”

“What is it?” Oikawa says, getting up and heading over to the edge of the bed. “Daichi, what-”

“Can’t you see it? It’s right there, it’s right there, please, no-” and then Daichi is shrieking, shoving himself backwards as if trying to escape but hitting the back of his bed, swinging an arm out haphazardly. “Stop it! Get away from me!”

“Daichi!”

Daichi’s eyes are open, Oikawa is sure, but it looks like he’s seeing right through him, jittery and unfocused and overwhelmed in a panic, shaking his head and not listening at all. 

He doesn’t know if touching him will do any good, trying to calm him down. 

“No! No, please, no-”

Oikawa knows that kind of screaming. He’s not talking to someone, he’s talking to some thing, talking to the scary thing he sees and reaching a point of pure dread where the only rational thing to do is begging the universe for mercy because there is no conversation to be had, no problem to solve. 

Oikawa doesn’t know what he’s seeing. 

“Daichi, please-” he tries to put a hand on his shoulder, scooting in closer but the contact seems jarring to him, and he lashes out defensively, screaming more, screaming against something that did not exist. Oikawa tries to catch his hands to stop himself from being in the line of fire, but Daichi is so much stronger than he looks and keeping a hold on his wrists is nearly impossible. 

“No, no, no, keep it away from me, please, please, it’s right there, I don’t like this, stop it, stop it, please, no, no, no, no, no-”

Oikawa hadn’t even heard footsteps approaching, but Daichi’s bedroom door opens, and the light from the hallway cut through the darkness and makes him jump. He turns around to see a woman standing in the doorway, looking a little haggard and obviously having just woken up. 

“I’m sorry, I didn’t-” Oikawa starts to defend himself, maybe, though he’s not sure what he would be accused of. 

Daichi is still screaming and lifting his arms up to cover his head, as if to hide, and the women - Daichi’s mother, Oikawa is sure, though she looks too young to be a mother of five - crosses the room quickly, chiding Oikawa gently and shooing him away so that she could slide in. 

“Daichi, honey-”

Daichi is still fighting. 

“It’s okay baby,” she continues, in a low and soothing voice, seemingly unconcerned with the screaming and thrashing as her son thinks he’s fighting for his life. She gets his arms around him, rocking him gently and continuing to coo soft assurances against his head, after just a few minutes, Daichi does seem to start calming down, though Oikawa notices his eyes are fixed, resolutely, at the foot of his bed, as if something were sitting there that only he could see. 

“I’m sorry,” Oikawa says, weakly, still feeling like, somehow, this was his fault. 

She lifts her head to look over at him, seeming exhausted, and surprised by his presence. “You did nothing wrong,” she replies, still in her soft, motherly voice. Daichi, finally, dissolved from panic into weak, shaking tears as he rests his head down against her arm, and she coaxes him back to sleep. “You shouldn’t wake someone sleepwalking like that,” she adds, quietly. “I wouldn’t have expected you to be able to calm him down… though… he hasn’t had a fit like this since he was ten years old…” 

“That was sleepwalking?” Oikawa replies. “No no, that’s not sleepwalking. Sleepwalking is… not that.”

She presses a kiss to the top of Daichi’s head, and Oikawa has noticed that his eyes have closed again. She slowly lays him back down on the bed, settling him in before pulling away. Daichi is left as still and quiet as one would expect of someone sleeping. 

She stays there, though, watching him sleep. 

“Well… Sleepwalking and a night terror I suppose… Either way, it’s nothing to apologize for…”

Oikawa watches them for a minute, the way she draws her fingers through his hair with the utmost level of concern, seemingly genuinely thrown off by this night. It must be jarring, he thinks, to think someone over something, for almost a decade to pass without an issue and suddenly be thrown back into the past. Was she even seeing her eighteen year old son, or was Daichi still, functionally, six years old for her? 

Surely not, he thinks. Daichi had always talked about how quickly he’d grown up, about having to help raise his younger siblings…

“I’m going to go check on Chiyo,” she says, and Oikawa doesn’t know who that is but he assumes it’s one of the little kids. “She’s a little freaked out by the screaming… Can you keep an eye on him? Call me if there are any issues.”

“Yes, yes, of course,” Oikawa says, stumbling forward slightly and trying to regain his sense of self. “No problem.”

She gives him a smile, and drags herself out of the room to go attend to the rest of her children. No wonder Daichi called himself a third parent - how did she manage raising five children if her husband with in Tokyo? Was the money worth it, or would she rather have the companionship and assistance? Or maybe she didn’t have to choose, because Daichi was here…

And he hadn’t been this…

Why now?

Oikawa moves slowly over to the bed. Daichi is sleeping again, so he’s now concerned about waking him up. There’s sweat coating his forehead, and his back, and he doesn’t look restful, but he is quiet. 

He hadn’t had a fit like this he was ten.

That, Oikawa decides, he felt guilty for. 

Is it because of me? Because I’m making him walk through haunted buildings, watch scary videos, talk about monsters that might be in the shadows? Did I do this to him?

Oikawa sits on the bed, leaning over him slightly and trying to discern if there was a way for him to not be at fault here. 

Daichi wanted to be there, right? If it actually bothered him, he wouldn’t have gone along with it. He’s a grown man, he can make his own choices. 

But even so, even as Oikawa tells himself that, he feels a very familiar swirl of protectiveness well up in the pit of his stomach. The same feeling he got when Takeru fell or got sick or needed help. 

And it’s now, when Oikawa wants nothing more in the world than to stay awake and watch over him, that he feels sleep come quickly, dragging him down into unconsciousness. 

 

---

 

Daichi doesn’t have any idea what happened last night. They wake up and go about their morning business - Daichi has a very specific question as to why Oikawa was in his bed - but other than that it’s normal. 

“You really really really don’t remember?” Oikawa says, as Daichi is picking over his breakfast on the other side of the table. 

“No,” Daichi replies. “I never remember. Well, I sometimes remember, but it’s really rare. I remember normal nightmares. Not the… night time screaming matches. Sorry, by the way, if I woke you up, or…”

Oikawa shakes his head. “Not at all. I was already up. Speaking of, I’ll need to get going soon, I promised Iwaizumi I’d pay attention to him this morning.”

Daichi laughed, nodding along with it, but Oikawa realizes he’s far more concerned with the food in front of him. No wonder the guy seemed to put on muscle like he was trying to win some kind of award, he had the appetite of a dragon. 

Oikawa finishes his own meal quickly, and helps Daichi clean up dishes from their cooking. Four little children, all under the age of thirteen, are bumbling about their legs and demanding food as well. 

So they feed the children too, working together to keep everyone calm and happy in the morning. Oikawa is good with children - or, he’s good enough. The kids seem to respect Daichi like he’s their father, and Oikawa has enough experience with Takeru, the pickiest eater on the planet, that navigating getting everyone something for breakfast comes second nature. 

Everyone is at the table and eating by the time Daichi’s mom - Himari, her name was - comes downstairs there’s nothing left to do for breakfast. 

“Oh, gosh, look at you two!” she laughs, pressing a kiss to Daichi’s cheek as she passes before heading over to greet the children. “Everyone’s up and dressed and already having breakfast… Gosh, I have to invite you over more often,” she adds teasingly to Oikawa. 

“Happy to help,” he says, before glancing over to Daichi. He expects, maybe, someone to comment on the night terror the night before but nobody says anything, and instead Daichi finishes cleaning up and then takes another bun from the counter to chew on, apparently still not satisfied. 

Maybe that’s just how it was. 

They just moved on. Nothing new to see here. 

There’s the sound of a key in the door. 

Kumo, sleeping by the back entrance, perks up with a boof and sits up, staring at the door. Daichi frowns, swallowing his bite of food and looking back to his mom. 

“Is that dad?”

“Must be,” she says, heading over to the door. “Nobody else has a key…”

Oikawa can’t help but feel a little jolt of excitement, finally getting to meet this elusive and secretive father. He slides over to take up a position beside Daichi, ready to do his best ‘meet the parents’ performance and make sure he leaves here the favourite child. It was an artform. 

“Daddy!”

One of the little children sees him first, however, and shrieks before leaping from her seat and rushing away to the door, followed shortly by her siblings. Daichi stays behind, though, watching from the kitchen. 

Sawamura Rion looks a lot like Daichi does. That’s Oikawa’s first impression of him. He laughs and bends down to scoop up the smaller of his children, plastering them with over-dramatic kisses and swinging them around. He greets his wife with a kiss on the cheek and ruffles the hair of one of the younger boys. 

He can hear Himari ask why he’s back, she wasn’t expecting him until next month, and he replies something about something local he needed to attend to, and that perks up Oikawa’s interest. Was something local happening? Something they wanted the PSIA involved in? 

He glances over to Daichi, about to mumble something about this, when Rion notices them there. His first sentence is:

“Why is my eldest withholding a hug from me? Get over-” and then he cuts himself off, as his eyes fall on Oikawa. 

Daichi had been about to reply, but clearly noticed the sudden change in his attitude and stopped, frowning. When Rion doesn’t say anything, Daichi says: “Ah, sorry, this is my friend, Oikawa,” he says. 

“Uh-huh,” Rion replies, still eyeing Oikawa as if there was something on his face that he really didn’t like. “And how did you two become friends, you don’t go to Karasuno, do you?”

“Oh… no sir,” Oikawa says, a little caught off guard. 

“We met through volleyball,” Daichi replies, and it’s not really a lie, he supposed. “Oikawa is the captain of Seijoh’s team, so we competed against each other.” 

“Right,” Rion says. 

Why is he being so weird?

“They’ve also become internet memes!” Himari says, trying her best. 

“Youtubers,” Daichi corrects, before flinching back and saying: “Actually I didn’t like that one either. 

“What?” Rion says, and now he sounds a little more normal, looking to his wife in confusion. “Since when, what?”

“Oh, a few months now!” Himari says. “They run off every weekend, a whole group of them, making cute little videos exploring places. Mostly haunted locations.”

“Haunted locations?” Rion echoes, turning his attention back to Daichi, as if wanting an explanation. “Why hadn’t I been informed about this new hobby?”

“Well it’s not like you’re ever home,” Daichi replies, and Oikawa is shocked by the tenseness in his tone. Perhaps he was just wary about letting his father know what they were up to exactly. “When would I have told you?”

“Fair enough. But haunted locations? I didn’t think you believed in any of that.”

“I don’t.”

“It’s… mostly my deal,” Oikawa cuts in, hating the tension that, once again, he was pretty sure he had caused. “I’m a big alien buff, I dragged him into this.”

“I imagine you did,” Rion mutters, and even Himari seems baffled by that particular comment, staring at him for a moment before nudging him and adding: 

“He’s having fun,” she says. “It’s just some harmless fun.”

Oikawa doesn’t like the tone she’s taking. Like she’s warning him.  Wait what the fuck is going on in this household?

Rion stares at his wife for a moment before giving just the slightest of nods and looking back at Daichi. 

“I need to go put my stuff down,” he says, shaking his head and starting towards the hallway. “I’ll come out to catch up properly in a minute.”

“And I should get going,” Oikawa says, half under his breath. Daichi gives him a nod, but Oikawa waits, fully, until Rion is out of the room to add: “But I think we should maybe have a discussion about what this local thing is… and that briefcase is back in town…”

“I know,” Daichi hisses back. “I’ll text you later.”

Notes:

the balance between me wanting to write the plot and me wanting to spend 100k writing them filming videos and going to conventions and being domestic is terrible. I want so badly to go on with the meat of this story and yet.... if I do.... I'll have to tone down the bants and filler episodes....

Chapter 13: Her Brother's Keeper

If you were brave enough, the fence that blocked off the schoolyard playground was actually about six feet further into the trees than most people realized. A bordering bush of thorns and weeds and tree roots kept most people from actually using the full length of the yard, but technically one was allowed to go right up to that fence. Iwaizumi knew this, because he successfully argued this point many times to the teachers. ‘You can’t go in the bushes like that,’ they’d say, to which he’d reply: ‘but it’s still in the yard.’

They’d try and tell him, again and again, that it wasn’t about where the fence technically was, but that the bushes were filled with thorns and bugs that could bite him and he didn’t want to get an infection, did he? To which he replied he was in there precisely because there were bugs, and to that they had no good rebuttal. So instead the teachers stood at the far end of the yard and watched the rather odd six year old crawl on his hands and knees through dense, thorny bushes, cutting up his hands and his face and his arms and muddying his clothes, all in pursuit of a particularly odd looking inchworm or a beetle with a horn he’d never seen before. 

To Iwaizumi, this narrow strip of bushes and bug life was more fascinating than anywhere else in the yard. The classroom bored him, the swingset was a battleground, and the trimmed, neat grass of the field was good only for the occasional ladybug or spider. If you wanted to find anything interesting, you had to get dirty. 

He has a bug gripped firmly, but carefully, in the palm of one of his hands, and he needs good light to actually get a look at it, so he begins to wiggle backwards, streaking his jeans up with mud and filth - he feels the branches of the bush he was crawling under claw at his scalp and tug up his shirt, rocks digging into his palm and forcing their way under his nails. He scrunches up his nose as he tugs himself free of the cloying bushes, unconcerned with the berating he’d get if he’d ripped another shirt. 

Finally, he was free. He shook leaves from his head and turned around to get more sunlight, and-

“Aah-!”

The round face that’s leaning down towards him, blocking out the sun and the light startles him when he turns around, and he ends up falling back and landing on his butt in the grass. 

“What are you doing?” the kid asks, blinking innocently at him as if he hadn’t just scared the daylights out of him. Iwaizumi has to take a few breaths, concerned he might have lost the bug, but a quick check in his palms indicates that the little thing is still curled into a defensive ball. 

He looks back up to get a look at the kid. 

All he gets back is a pleasant smile and almost vacant look, clearly content to wait for a response. Iwaizumi isn’t even sure what to do - normally if someone asks what he’s doing, it’s to berate him for doing it. However, he’s pretty sure some other six year old can’t do anything but make fun of him for it. Not like he could stop him. 

“Looking for bugs,” Iwaizumi replied. 

“Why?”

“Why?”

“Yeah, why? Do you have a bug collection?”

“No, my mom doesn’t let me bring them in the house.”

The kid nods seriously, thinking this over very seriously. After a moment, he says: “Did you find anything?”

“Yeah,” and he holds out his palm, the little bug still curled up in the center of it. 

The kid recoils slightly, a look of disgust crossing his face, before he crouches down to get a better look at it anyway, as if his disgust was far from a good enough reason not to participate. He leans in to look at it, blinking his big, round eyes as if he’d never seen a bug in the world. 

“What is it?” he asks. 

“I dunno,” Iwaizumi replied. 

“Oh.”

There’s a bit of a silence, and then the kid seems to lose interest in the bug and looks back at Iwaizumi. 

“Do you wanna be friends?”

“Not really.”

“Oh…”

Iwaizumi is shocked by how genuinely sad he looks, sitting back on his heels and looking away with a pout. Iwaizumi stares at him, and he stares at the grass. Is he… is he not going to leave? Does Iwaizumi need to tell him to leave? Why does he look so sad? That’s not fair! Now he felt bad, he hadn’t meant to hurt his feelings, he just didn’t need any friends. 

Iwaizumi sighs after a second, before turning around to put the little bug back into the bushes, wiping muddy hands off on muddy pants before slowly getting to his feet. Was he allowed to just walk away? But the stupid kid looked so sad… 

“Okay fine, we can be friends,” Iwaizumi says after a minute. 

The kid perks up, breaking into a wide grin and standing up with him. Iwaizumi steps back, surprised to realize the kid is a good inch taller than he was. 

“Really?”

“Yeah, sure-”

“You wanna play soccer with us? We need a goalie.” 

“...what?”

“Me and my friends are playing soccer, and they always make me play goalie and I’m tired of doing that, I wanna score points, so come on, come play soccer with us-” and the kid has grabbed his arm, and is already dragging him off to a much larger group of kids, set up in front of plastic soccer nets and waiting for their friend to return. 

He tricked me! Iwaizumi wants to complain about it, but the stupid kid looks so happy, pulling him along, so he doesn’t. 

 

---

 

Oikawa had previously held a perfect attendance record, so when he doesn’t show up for school it’s immediately everyone’s favourite gossip topic for the day. Maybe he was sick - or, maybe he was skipping class! Maybe he’s moved away without warning? Oh, maybe he got hurt! He could have had a family emergency, or appendicitis, or broken his arm! 

Oikawa was popular with everyone in the class, so curiosity is boundless. Especially once he fails to show up the following day as well. 

“Where’s Oikawa?” one of their friends asks, once their recess has started and they’re freed from the middle school classroom. 

“How the hell should I know?” Iwaizumi replies, stopping outside the class to retie his shoes tighter. 

“I dunno, you’re his best friend, aren’t you?”

Iwaizumi scoffed. “Well I don’t know where he is.”

“I hope he’s okay,” the friend replies, but they’re eleven years old, and very quick the conversation moves on, because they don’t really care that much about anything that doesn’t immediately affect them. 

It lingers in Iwaizumi’s mind, though. 

He is Oikawa’s best friend, after all. He doesn’t like to say it out loud, but now that it was mentioned, it is a little odd that Oikawa didn’t at least try and tell him what was wrong. But he was probably just sick… 

The third day that Oikawa doesn’t show up for classes starts to get to him. Where could he be? What was he doing that was so important he missed half a week?

“My older brother says there was a big accident over the weekend,” one of the other kids is gossiping, voice low and giggly with excitement, happy to be the only person with information. “He said the family is keeping it really quiet to avoid the shame, but he heard that they got taken in by the police.”

“Right, didn’t his sister get pregnant? She’s only in high school!” the second kid lets out a gasp. “Oh my god, what if she had the baby and they’re trying to get rid of it now?”

“Maybe!” the first agreed. “My brother said she hasn’t been back to school either. But neither has her boyfriend.” 

“What a family. Why wouldn’t Oikawa come to school, though? Oh! Maybe they’re so embarrassed they’re moving away so they can pretend her baby is the mom’s-”
Iwaizumi can’t take it any longer, and throws the soccer ball at them. 

After his detention, he gets on his bike and skips heading home, instead taking the much longer ride through the city to find the now familiar home address for Oikawa. It certainly looks like it always had, clean and well kept, very proper. 

He leaves his bike just inside the garden and heads up to knock on the door. 

It only takes a minute for footsteps to answer. 

Oikawa’s mother looks down at him, seeming surprised. 

“Oh, Hajime-”

“Is Oikawa there? He hasn’t been at school for a few days and I wanted to know if he was sick or what,” Iwaizumi interrupts, not exactly a paragon of social grace. 

“Oh, Oikawa is…” she trails off, seeming to think through her words carefully, before crouching down to be at eye-level with Iwaizumi. 

Iwaizumi hates when people do this, but he knows better than to try and scold an adult for doing anything. He stares back at her. 

“Oikawa was involved in a little bit of an accident,” she says. “He was hurt - he’s okay, he’s okay-” she corrected quickly, when she saw his eyes widening. “But he just needs some time to relax, okay? He’ll be back at school soon.” 

“Can I see him?” 

“Uh…” she seems to think about this for a moment, before saying: “I’ll… go see if he wants to talk to anyone, okay? Stay here…”

And Iwaizumi finds himself sitting on the porch, drawing patterns with his finger on the cement step, watching a small bug scuttle across the path. It only takes a few minutes, before the door cracks open again, and when he turns around, it’s to watch Oikawa shuffling out, as if embarrassed to be seen. 

The first thing he notices is that there are bruises up his arm, but they’ve almost faded away now. 

“Hey,” Iwaizumi says, and before he can stand up, Oikawa has started to take a seat beside him, so he stays put. “Are you okay? You’ve missed like, a whole week of school.”

“I’m fine…” Oikawa mumbles. 

“You’re…” he didn’t sound fine, that was for sure. He kept his eyes focused ahead of him, not looking around. He rested his hands on his knees, fingers picking at the fabric as if trying to keep himself grounded. “What happened? Everyone at school is worried about you.”

“I’m fine,” he repeats. “My… sister…. My sister’s boyfriend was… uhm… he died.”

Iwaizumi could have guessed a thousand times and never gotten to that. 

“He - what? How, what happened?”

Oikawa is sullen and quiet for a moment, before he whispers:

“I don’t know. I don’t know what happened.”

“You don’t know?”

Oikawa shakes his head, and immediately Iwaizumi can see his face beginning to screw up as he fought back tears, both his hands lifting up to rub at his face. Iwaizumi has no idea what to do. Touching him seemed wrong, but surely if any situation called for a hug, it would be this one. But… 

Oikawa manages to pull himself together, taking a shaking breath before turning his big, brown eyes over to him, all sincerity and terror. 

“Do you believe in aliens, Iwa-chan?” 

 

---

 

There came a point when aliens turned into volleyball. Iwaizumi wouldn’t have been able to pick a day or a month, but he's around fourteen years old. Perhaps it’s because of that new kid, that prodigy, that rubs Oikawa the wrong way. A little first year middle schooler that’s poised to pull the rug out from under them all. Oikawa had loved volleyball before, but it was an obsession after that. He needed to be better at volleyball, so the late-night conspiracy videos and strange unexplained photo analysis moved into game-play footage and reviewing techniques. Stargazing became staying late in the gym, the future came clear. I’m going to Argentina, he would say, that’s where all the best people play volleyball and I’m going to be the best. 

Iwaizumi doesn’t know what to do with that, so he supports him. Okay, he says. Okay, okay, whatever you want. 

He seems happier. 

Iwaizumi likes that he likes volleyball. It takes the haunted look out of his eyes, it takes the anger out of his movement. Maybe, Iwaizumi would wonder, maybe simply fighting for something was what helped. Win or lose, it had an ending. His search for extraterrestrial proof was never so neatly wrapped up. 

He never stopped, though. Iwaizumi would still be recruited for late night investigative trips, into the woods, into the abandoned buildings, into places they had no reason to be. 

Iwaizumi agrees to go, because it’s rather impossible to say no to him. 

When they start their first year of high school, Oikawa sinks even further into volleyball. Iwaizumi thinks it’s so that nobody asks him any questions. Matsukawa and Hanamaki are fun new friends for them, and it’s about time Oikawa branched out. He’d been rather isolated despite his previously social nature, ever since Jun had died. But now he had a whole new team to impress, a new fight to win, and the aliens… well, the aliens could be on the sidelines. Iwaizumi didn’t mind listening to him ramble and tell stories at night, because in the morning they got up and they went to school, and when Oikawa was working on mastering his serve he wasn’t talking about alien conspiracies. 

But it didn’t make everything better. 

Iwaizumi is shocked to find Oikawa already in his bedroom when he comes from the dentist on a Saturday afternoon. 

He glances around, as if maybe he had forgotten his own birthday and this was some kind of surprise, before eventually saying: 

“What are you doing here?” 

Oikawa was on his bed, legs drawn up, and had been reading a book taken off his shelf, truly at home in the space he did not belong. Well, that’s not true. Iwaizumi doesn’t like the heaviness that settled in his gut, thinking maybe, actually, Oikawa did look like he belonged there. Maybe Iwaizumi would quite like to say that Oikawa belonged in his room. 

“I was fighting with mum,” he replied. “Had to get out of the house.” 

“You didn’t go to your sister’s?” 

“She’s at work, and Takeru’s in daycare. And I wanted to see you. I didn’t know you were out.” 

“So you let yourself in?”

“Is that a problem?”

“Uh… no… I guess not.”

He puts his bag down by the door and heads over to the bed, sitting down beside him. “What were you fighting about?” 

“Saku.”

“She’s still not budging on that, huh?” 

Oikawa shakes his head, a miserable little motion he made only when he was trying very hard not to cry, when even opening his mouth to speak would be too much. Iwaizumi wants to hug him, but he’s pretty sure he’s not supposed to. Would that be too much? 

Instead, he looks down to his hands, and then stares off at the wall. 

“Do you think your mom will let me stay over tonight?” 

Iwaizumi glances over his shoulder at him, thinking about it before returning his attention to his hands.

“Probably. She likes you. Won’t your mom be mad, if you don’t go home?” 

“Probably.” 

“... you should go home, Oikawa.” 

He feels a weight on his back, and Oikawa has leaned over and pressed his cheek into Iwaizumi’s shoulder, resting on him from behind. He feels his heart in his chest beating heavier, the warmth from Oikawa seeping through his shirt and into his skin and making his head fuzzy. 

“Can’t I just stay here?” Oikawa says, barely an audible whisper. 

Iwaizumi closes his eyes, focusing on keeping his breathing steady. 

 

---

 

They could blame it on the captain of Seijoh’s volleyball team, when they were in their first year. See, their captain had a crush on the girl’s team captain, so when Christmas rolled around and he had an opportunity to host a party while his parents were out of town, and break into a liquor cabinet, he took it. Iwaizumi would find him and their vice-captain mumbling under their breath about how they should have found a better excuse to get the girls here rather than just having it be a volleyball party. Now they were, accidentally, directly responsible for getting a bunch of first years absolutely plastered, and none of them were getting any action from any of the girls. 

Oikawa had dressed up for the party. It was the start of what would become a long series of Oikawa dressing up and making the rest of them look like absolute dorks by comparison, but right now Iwaizumi is content to appreciate it, appreciate when his friend looks comfortable and happy and put together. The blue and gold shirt he wore is glittery enough that the Christmas tree lights flicker around him and reflect back. 

He’s standing off to the side, quite unlike him to not be the center of attention, looking down at the glasses he held in his hands, playing with the arms of it. 

“What are you doing?”

He looked up as Iwaizumi approached. 

“I hate these,” he replies, swinging the glasses around. “Do you think if I just refuse to wear them, my eyes will just fix themself?” 

Iwaizumi snorts. “No,” he replies. “They look fine, you look great, don’t worry.”

He sighs, staring down at them for a moment before saying: 

“What if this is part of what the aliens did to me?”

Iwaizumi has to do a double take. “Excuse me?”

“What if… what if they had done an experiment on my eyes, and that’s why my vision is failing. What if I go completely blind because of it? I can’t play volleyball if I’m blind!”

“Sorry, I’m still - I’m a little hung up on the alien part of this,” Iwaizumi says. “There are no aliens involved in you needing glasses, that just happens sometimes, it’s super common. Also, since when do you believe you’ve been abducted and experimented on?”

“Well it seems plausible,” Oikawa mumbles. 

“...does it?”

“Whatever.”

Iwaizumi opens his mouth to try and deal with this drunk, sad version of Oikawa, when that aforementioned captain comes sauntering over to them, pushing past Iwaizumi to wrap an arm around Oikawa. 

“Hey, buddy…” he says, dropping another cup into Oikawa’s empty one to refill his drink. “You should come play a game with us.”
Oikawa looks a little startled, but nods slowly. “Yeah? What kind of game?” 

“Little bit of spin the bottle. See, we wanna play with some of the girls, but most of the girls team said they aren’t interested if you’re not in the pool, so come do us a favour, yeah?”

“Hey, hey, hey-” Iwaizumi starts, a certain level of panic rising in him. “That’s not, we don’t need to be doing that, why are you- why are-”

“Relax,” the captain says, waving a hand. “You can come too, I guess.”

Already this was the worst party Iwaizumi had ever been to. He didn’t like people like this. He didn’t like groups, he didn’t like loud music, he didn’t like the way the first and second year girls leered at Oikawa from around the circle. 

But it seems to distract him enough. Oikawa is happy to down the drink he was given much too quickly and reach to play the game, spinning the blue glass bottle around and around and around. 

All the girls are cheering in excitement and anticipation, a noise that is sharply cut off when the bottle comes to a halt and is pointing across the circle at Matsukawa. The silence is immediately broken by barking laughter and everyone squealing, half of them shouting for him to just spin again, half of them shouting for him to just do it, it’ll be funny. 

Oikawa pushes himself up to his knees and immediately Mattsun starts shrieking, causing an uproar of laughter from Hanamaki, who’d been settled beside him and just narrowly missed being the victim. 

“You stay away from me!” Mattsun is demanding, holding a hand out to keep Oikawa at minimum an arm’s length away, his face slowly burning a bright red. “No! No way!” 

Oikawa breaks into a hiccuping laughter, eventually relenting and backing off with a wave of his hands. 

“Spin it again! Spin it again!” one of the girls is shouting, clearly hoping she herself will be the next chosen one. 

Oikawa gives a playful concession to their demands and reaches to give the bottle another dramatic spin with a flick of his wrist. 

Everyone watches it spin around with rapt and eager attention, and Iwaizumi braces himself to watch his best friend lock-lips with some stranger from the girls team they didn’t even know. Instead, watching that bottle spin, it slowly comes to a half with the neck angled almost directly at Iwaizumi himself. 

Oh, shit. 

“Is that me?” the girl next to him says, trying to take it for herself. 

“No, no, that’s Iwaizumi!” one of the other girls squeals, laughing hard. “You boys need to get out of here! This is no fun!” 

Iwaizumi thinks the blood has evaporated out of his body. He might pass out. Trying not to let his whole body shake apart into atoms, he turns slowly to look at Oikawa, and finds him already looking back at him, face blushed pink probably from the alcohol, but possibly from the circumstance. Iwaizumi is sure his face is no better. 

Unlike with Mattsun, Oikawa makes no move to tease him. 

“Kiss him!” one of the second year boys jeer, giving a playful whistle. “It’s just a kiss, you’ll survive.”
Oikawa is staring at him. 

Iwaizumi wants nothing more in the world than to kiss him, but he’s terrified that if he lets himself, and he never gets to again, knowing what he tastes like will be unbearable knowledge. He hesitates again. 

Then again, he might never be gifted an opportunity like this again. 

He leans forward ever so slightly. The motion, jerky and uncoordinated, is almost immediately matched by Oikawa, who takes that tiny sign of acceptance and runs with it, pushing into him with an eagerness born of confidence earned through the plastic cups they were drinking out of. 

His lips are soft - actually, every part of him is soft. Iwaizumi feels like his brain has been cracked open, and he throws rationality out the window. If this is the last time he’ll kiss Oikawa, he’s going to make the most of it. He lifts his hands to his hair, then down to his shoulders, then to his arms. He feels Oikawa’s hands on his cheeks, at his neck, down to his chest, he’s pushing in closer, and closer, and Iwaizumi is leaning back until his back is resting against the leg of the couch behind him and the girl that had so eagerly tried to take this kiss from him is scrambling to get away with a burning red face.

Oikawa pulls away first with a hiccup and a giggle, but he keeps himself so intoxicatingly close that Iwaizumi thinks the whole world has become Oikawa’s eyes and the weight of his body leaning into him.

 

---

 

“Iwaizumi!” 

They’d left the party after midnight, and although Iwaizumi’s own brain was swimming with fuzziness, he was fairing better than his nearly blacked out friend - boyfriend? Conversations would be needed - and had dragged an almost unwalkable Oikawa down the streets and towards Saku’s little, rundown basement suite. 

“Hey…” Iwaizumi greets, once Saku answers the door. She looks tired, clearly having been woken up by their knocking. 

“What the hell is going on? What-”

Oikawa is slumped over, almost his entire weight resting on Iwaizumi’s shoulder now, and he doesn’t look good, that’s for sure. 

“We ah… uhm…” Iwaizumi tries, trying to figure out the correct words he’d wanted. “We… partied… with the… the third year kids, and they… well, I couldn’t take him home, you know what your parents are like…”

Saku winces slightly. “Ah, yeah, good call,” she says, before hurrying around to help take the weight of her brother that, recently, had overshot her for height, so what might have been easy a year ago now required two people to do. 

“I’m fine…” Oikawa slurs, before tripping over his own feet. Saku stumbles, but manages to roll him over to lay him down on her couch. 

“Christ, how much did you two drink?”

“Not a lot!” Iwaizumi complained. “He was fine an hour ago when we stopped drinking!”

This makes Saku laugh, shaking her head in amusement and looking over at him. 

“Ah, to be young,” she teased. “Yeah, you continue to metabolize the alcohol even after you stop drinking it.”

“...well… uhm…”

“Don’t worry, I won’t tattle on your mother. Can you get his shoes off?”

Saku turns to head to the kitchen, and Iwaizumi does as asked, working through his own double vision to tug Oikawa’s shoes off and return them to the front door. 

It occurs to him then that Oikawa hadn’t made any other noises, and he’s suddenly overwhelmed with the concern that he might just be straight up dead. 

“Hey, idiot-” he starts, smacking at his cheek. Oikawa rouses slightly, eyes blurry and unclear, flicking open to look at him. 

“..Mhm…?”

“...just checking you were still breathing.”

“I’m… swell..”

“...okay.”

Oikawa closes his eyes again, and Iwaizumi moves a hand down to brush slightly sweaty hair back from his eyes, carefully running his fingers down the curve of his cheek. Iwaizumi likes the way his face relaxes, when he’s not performing confidence for everyone and their dog. He likes the way he looks sleeping. 

“Here.”

He looks up, to see Saku handing a glass of water down to him. 

“What’s this?”

“You don’t look as bad as him, but if this is gonna be your first hangover, you may as well try and stay hydrated and minimize the damage. It’s gonna be rough, kid.” 

Iwaizumi chuckles softly, then takes the glass. 

“Thanks…”

“So you two were out partying…” she muses, taking a seat on the arm of the couch, one hand reaching down to ruffle through her brother's hair. “How interesting.”

“Mhm?”

“Well, normally it’s all volleyball all the time, isn’t it? I wasn’t even aware you two knew how to illegally underage drink.”

“Ah, well… We were invited by the volleyball club, so…” 

“That explains it…” 

Iwaizumi is quiet for a moment, watching Oikawa sleep, and it’s Saku who speaks next, voice soft and pensive. 

“Thanks for taking care of him…”

“Oh… I mean, I wasn’t gonna let him fall asleep in a bush somewhere, so…”

She laughed, nodding. “I know, I know, you’re a good kid, I just… worry about him. He’s… You know, he has so much potential, he’s so skilled in so many things, and yet… I just can’t help but think he needs someone there for him. That he’ll… burn up, if he tries to do it on his own.” 

Iwaizumi crosses his arms across his stomach, a seed of discontent settling in his gut.

“I know,” he says. “Has he told you about Argentina?”

She laughs. “Oh, yes, he has. Honestly at first I thought it was absurd, but… you know, the more I thought about it, the more I liked the idea. I’m just glad he’s finally got something on his mind that isn’t… aliens, or whatever. He’s got his eyes on a lofty goal for sure, but… something real.”

“You don’t believe in them?”

“I’m sorry?”

“In aliens, you don’t think they’re real?”

Saku looks surprised, looking over to him with a bit of a curious expression before saying: “I… think aliens are real,” she says. “In some capacity, on some planet, somewhere, for sure. As microorganisms, as tiny plants or primitive animals… I don’t believe in Oikawa’s aliens.” 

“You - He always… He always told me you’d seen them too,” Iwa says. “He said you… that night, the… when… when Jun died, he said you both saw-”

She’s shaking her head. 

He shuts his mouth. 

“I can’t speak for what Tooru saw,” she mumbles, looking back down to her brother as he slept. “But I can promise you now, there were no aliens that night.”

“You remember it then?” 

“I try not to.”

“What-”

And if Iwaizumi wanted to ask what had really happened, the opportunity was taken from him when that seed of discontentment turned out to be regular drunken nausea, and he sprinted to the bathroom to avoid throwing up on the floor. 

 

---

 

“None of your clothes fit me!” Oikawa is complaining loudly, from where he’s buttoning one of Iwaizumi’s shirts up and checking himself out in the mirror. 

“That’s what you get for being a fucking giraffe,” Iwaizumi calls back, coming back into his room to find Oikawa rolling up the sleeves of the button down so it wasn’t quite so obvious they weren’t long enough. “Why are you getting dressed?”

“I’m going out,” he says. 

“You’re going out?”  

“Daichi’s father is back in town, he says there’s something local his work wants him on, so we’re gonna go tail him and see if we can get any clues to what might be going on with them.” 

Iwaizumi watches him through the reflection of the mirror, and eventually notices Oikawa looking back at him the same way. 

“What?” Oikawa says. 

“Nothing,” he replies, quickly. “Just… We’re… kinda close to graduating, don’t you think?”

“Close to graduating? What’s that got to do with anything?” 

“Well… you’re planning an international move in less than half a year, right? You should be focused on that, keeping your grades up, making sure you have everything in order…” 

Oikawa turns around to look at him, giving him that playfully annoyed look only he could really pull off. 

“Please, Iwa, my grades are excellent, and I am awesome at multitasking. Besides, you weren’t there, this guy is totally hiding something, yeah? Like, for real. First of all, Daichi’s whole deal is fucked up, like he’s either got some serious repressed memories that sneak out in his dreams or he’s just legit haunted, it could go either way, and… his father came home this morning, and looked at me like he knew me. He was all weird about it, and I thought he was gonna start grilling Daichi on why he was friends with me and how long I’d been in his house, it was insane. Something… There's something wrong with that family. And… that… Sawamura knows, he’s in the PSIA, he knows me, or at least my family… he could have answers.”

Iwaizumi crosses his arms. 

“Don’t look at me like that,” Oikawa pouts back. “I’m being serious. I think… for once, I actually have a chance to find the truth. I think this could be it. And wouldn’t that be incredible? Finally getting answers just in time to move on with the rest of my life? I could go to Argentina, happy and with no unfinished business.”

“Come here,” Iwaizumi says, because he doesn’t know what’s going on with this Sawamura family, but he knows Oikawa has decided there’s something, so that’s the end of the conversation. 

Oikawa obeys, stepping forward to take Iwaizumi’s offered hand. 

He tilts his head up, to press a soft peck to his lips and brush his thumb across his cheek, turning Oikawa’s slightly manic demeanor into a far more sweet one, gazing back at him with a grin. 

“I love you,” Iwaizumi says. 

“I love you too,” Oikawa replies, as if this is obvious and he doesn’t understand why they’re saying it. 

“I want you to be safe. Tailing an adult man with a job is borderline a crime. You understand that, right? If you’re right, and he’s a PSIA agent-”

“We know he is, we saw him-”

“If you’re right, then what you’re doing is a crime. You need to be safe. You need to think rationally. Be smart. Don’t… throw away your sanity just to chase after some possible suspicious activity.”

Oikawa pouts back at him, before leaning in to kiss Iwaizumi’s forehead, lifting both arms up to wrap around his neck and pull him in, squeezing him tightly. 

“I have this under control,” he says. 

Iwaizumi is happy to press his nose down into his shoulder, closing his eyes and trying to soak up the warmth from the hug.

“Do you want me to come with?” he asked. “You used to demand I come with you.” 

“Three might be a crowd,” Oikawa replied. “Besides, me and Daichi have been planning all evening, I think we’ve got this sorted.”

Iwaizumi takes a slow breath, trying to convince himself that this was all okay. 

“Don’t get arrested, okay? I won’t be bailing you out if you do.”

“Okay.”

“Seriously, if you call me from a jail cell I will beat your ass.”

“Promise?”

Iwaizumi laughed, before remembering he was supposed to be giving a serious warning and forcing his face neutral again. 

 

---

 

Oikawa waits outside Daichi’s house in a dark, parked car for two and a half hours. Daichi actually feels a little bit bad, but there’s not much he can do about it. They didn’t know exactly when his father would be leaving, but Oikawa had to be there already for this to be even remotely doable. 

Actually, the more he thought about it, the more nervous he got. This was crazy, they were doing such a crazy thing. 

His phone buzzes, as he sits at the kitchen table, with an eye on the door. 

Suga: Haven’t heard from you all day. You free tonight?

He stares at the message for a moment. What is a normal way to respond to this message that didn’t include any information on what he was actually doing and wouldn’t incite further questions? 

Eventually he just sends back: Sorry, going out with Oikawa.

It doesn’t take long to get a message back: 

Figures. You must be having a lot of fun, to have spent a full twenty-four hours together.

Well he went home for a bit, Daichi replies, not sure why that’s what he wants to defend. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees his father reach the front door and begin packing up. Although Suga is already typing a message, Daichi doesn’t wait for it to come in and instead sends: Sorry, I have to go. Won’t be able to text.

He gives his dad a halfhearted wave goodbye, pretending like he was more interested in whatever he was doing on his phone, and the moment the door shuts he’s up on his feet and across the room, watching out of the glass in the door as discreetly as he could. 

Someone has come to pick him up. It’s a sleek black car that pulls up at the end of their driveway. His father gets into the backseat without a word, and the headlights fade off as it pulls away. 

He pulls on his shoes and slips out of the house as quickly as he can, hastily crossing the street and finding the car Oikawa has been losing his mind in boredom in and getting into the passenger side. 

“Finally,” Oikawa says. 

“Did they see you?”

“I don’t think they cared if they did.”

“Good, okay… okay, let’s do this - quick, before they’re gone.”

Oikawa nods and turns the ignition of the car as Daichi clicks his seatbelt in. It’s a little bit rough, pulling out from the side of the road and picking up speed down the quiet country roads. Thankfully they don’t live too far out from the city, but far enough that the roads were rather empty, and that even if his father’s car had turned a corner far ahead, they’re able to catch up before they can lose track of them. 

“What if they figure out we’re following them?” Daichi hisses. 

“Why are you whispering? They can’t hear us.”

“I… I don’t know! It just feels appropriate. I feel sick, man, this is horrible.”

“Just relax. They won’t figure it out. We have every right to be on the road as them -ah, shit, that’s a stop sign,” The car jerks awkwardly, stopping at a stop sign just as the other car was pulling away and heading down the road towards the highway on-ramp. 

Daichi feels himself jerk against the seatbelt, looking over to Oikawa with considerable alarm. 

“Remind me how long you’ve had your license?” 

Oikawa doesn’t reply, as he pulls through the intersection and turns down the road to follow the black car to the highway. 

“Oikawa. How long have you had your license?”

“Okay, so maybe technically I don’t,” Oikawa says, once Daichi doesn’t let the subject drop.

“Wait-”

“I mean, I should have, but the person who did my driving test was awful, and mean, and they failed me for no good reason. I have a retake scheduled in the summer. I can drive-”

“Oh my god we’re breaking so many laws,” Daichi groaned, sinking down lower into his seat. He sees Oikawa’s jaw tense, as he bites the inside of his cheek. He finds himself mimicking the motion, trying to resist smiling. 

“We’re only breaking one law,” he replies back, after a minute, a giggle in his voice.

“We’re tailing my father after sundown with an illegal driver because we think he’s hiding aliens,” Daichi replies, and saying it outloud makes him break into a fit of laughter that he has to muffle with his hand.

“Don’t say it like that!” Oikawa laughs, and takes his eyes off the road for only a second, which results in the car veering suddenly and without warning, and then both of them are shrieking as he jerks the wheel to get back on course. 

Daichi is laughing even harder now. It might be a fear response, but he’s trying so hard to muffle himself he’s starting to cry. 

Oikawa does, to his credit, successfully get onto the highway without killing them, and now that they know they have some distance between them and the next exit, they give a bit more space between themselves and the tail lights of the car they were following. 

Daichi is still struggling to breathe. 

Oikawa reaches over to hit him. “Stop laughing!”

“I can’t help it,” he wails, softly. “This is so dumb, what are we even doing right now?”

“We are… investigating!”

Daichi just shakes his head, not able to put up with this right now. 

Oikawa puts his attention back on the road, eyes fixed on the tail lights ahead of them to make sure they don’t lose track of them. Daichi eventually does manage to pull himself together, though it might only be a temporary fix, his face flushed red and a little breathless. He sits up, clearly his throat and fanning himself off before saying:

“You know, it is rather suspicious that he’s going out this late,” Daichi says. “What kind of accounts manager or legal secretary would need to work at-” he glances at the clock. “Eight pm?” 

“Mhm, true…” Oikawa mumbles. “All the sketchy shit happens at night. Oh! Oh, look-”

And up ahead, the car is turning off, not an exit into the city, but an exit into a small parking lot and greenspace. 

“Don’t take the exit,” Daichi says, before Oikawa can start to turn. 

“Eh?” 

“I know this park,” he explains. “There’s only one way in and one way out, they’ll see us immediately. Drive past it and pull over on the shoulder, we can walk in.”

“Got it, boss,” Oikawa chirps, and they do just that. Daichi can see the lights of the car pulling up to the closed park sign, the driver getting out to unlock it despite it being after hours. Then they’re gone, and Oikawa drives just far enough that hopefully their lights can’t be seen from the park and he slows down to pull over onto the shoulder. 

They shut the car off, hurrying to scramble out and get their stuff together. 

Daichi flips his hood up, and he sees Oikawa checking the settings on his phone, and thinks to do the same. 

Mute, please.

“Let’s go,” Oikawa whispers, and Daichi nods for him to lead the way. It’s chilly at night, and he keeps his hands in his pockets as they hurry along the shoulder of the highway. A few cars pass them, but hopefully nothing that isn’t just a normal citizen out at night. 

The car they were following is gone by the time they’re walking down the dirt path towards the little park, but the entrance gate is locked again. No matter, they hop over it easily and slink along the edge, going slow and carefully, waiting to see where they had gone. 

The parking lot is almost entirely empty, with the exception of the car they’d been following, and a large bluish black van, both parked at the far end. There are flashlights zipping around in the distance. It’s hard to predict where they’re going or coming from, and with a glance at Oikawa, Daichi sees his same concern reflected back at him: 

There’s no way to get closer.

They make their way against the bushes to the far end of the parking lot, and there are two garbage cans set against a cracked wooden fence that Oikawa eagerly beckons him over to. 

Daichi crouches down behind one, peering out as discreetly as he could and trying to see what they were doing. 

There are no good places to go next. The lights from whatever they’re doing are off in a distance and bordered by a massive, empty field, so there’s nowhere to hide, and to their left, there’s rocky, untended trees and forest. They could try and climb through there, but it might not get them anywhere useful. 

“What do we do?” Daichi asks under his breath. 

Oikawa is quiet for a second, squinting as he tried to peer through the darkness and towards where the lights were. 

“Just wait,” he says, after a while. 

“For how long?”

“...Just wait.”

Daichi grumbles to himself, but settles back on his heels to do exactly that. They were already here, they may as well wait. 

It’s a surprisingly short time, actually. Much longer than he would want to wait in the dark crouched behind a smelly garbage can, but shorter than it could have been. 

He cracks his head into Oikawa’s as they both jerk back behind the garbage cans when the flashlights are suddenly pointing back at him, and he has to put in so much effort not to start laughing again, especially once Oikawa is rubbing his head and glaring at him. 

“Thanks for coming out here on such short notice,” a voice he’s never heard before is saying. Daichi resists the urge to look around the garbage can, and instead leans down to peer through the crack between the two barrels. He feels Oikawa stretching on top of him to do the same thing. 

Through the little crack, he can see a host of people he’s never seen before all in unmarked windbreakers and flanking the people - and now that dark van - like it was radioactive. His father comes around from the side of the van as well, and instead of the usual blank briefcase he carries around, he’s carefully holding a metal one in his hands, as if it’s precious cargo. Daichi holds his breath. 

“No problem,” Rion replies, as one of the others opens the back of the van. Unfortunately, it’s still completely dark, and Daichi has to really squint to try and make anything out. It looks… empty, like a very expensive utility truck, with space to put tools or boxes. He puts the silver case in, and clearly spends an extra minute hooking it up to the wall to keep it stable. 

“Do you think this one’s anything special?” the other guy asks. 

“You never know,” is Rions reply. “But I can’t believe we missed it the first time. Whoever did the mapping for this event needs to be fired.” 

The guy chuckles, nodding. “I’m sure he already has been. Are you taking it to Shima Three?”

Rion sends a glare the man’s way that makes Daichi shudder, sinking back slightly. 

“Sorry, sorry,” is the immediate correction, and Daichi gets the suspicion he said something he’s not supposed to say. 

“Just get this back to the office,” Rion said. “They’ll process it and decide where it goes.”

“Right. Yes sir,” the man says, more demure, and shuts the back of the van. 

When everyone splits up, the lights of the two cars make the park unbearably bright, and Daichi and Oikawa both flinch back, terrified the light would expose them and their hiding place. Thankfully, if anything it does the opposite, and the long, dark shadows are lengthened and conceal them better. Tires roll over gravel and dirt, and they both turn to watch the two cars leave, one after the other. 

Daichi is suddenly able to breathe again, gasping for breath.

“Holy shit, what was that?”

“I don’t know!” Daichi replies, swatting at him. “What the fuck were they talking about?”

“Shima Three,” Oikawa echoes back, thinking it over. 

“Do you know what that is? Have you heard it before?” 

Oikawa shakes his head, quiet for a minute as he digs back through the depths of his brain and tries to come up with something. “I don’t know…” he mumbles, and it’s about now that Daichi realizes they don’t have to still be hiding in the garbage.

He gets to his feet, feeling his back pop in protest and stretching his arms out. 

“Shima Three…” he repeats, mulling the words over. “Code for-”

“Oh my god!” Oikawa shouts, before immediately shushing himself with an apology. “Oh my god,” he repeats, quieter. “Shima Three, S-oh-three, like the code you found in that text.”

“Oh, shit,” Daichi agrees. “Do you think?” 

“It has to be, right? Shima Three… S-oh-three… that’s…”

“That has to be the same thing… But… wait, shit, that means… that means we didn’t learn anything,” Daichi says. 

“What do you mean?”

“Well… we already knew about the secret location, it’s not like they gave away where it was… And we don’t know what was in that case, and we don’t know who any of those people were, or… or where this office is…”

“We could… shit, it’s probably too late to catch up and keep following them…” Oikawa muses, and they slowly turn their feet towards the path out of the park. 

“And it’s not like we were especially good at that,” Daichi says. “Maybe there’s something in the news? About something that happened in this park recently?” 

“I’ll look into it, see if I can did anything up… ” Oikawa mumbles. “You know what would help?” 

“What?”

“If we could just… track your father.” 

Daichi blinks at him. “Well, geez, it sure would. What are you thinking?” 

Oikawa stares at him a moment, as if trying to decide if he should say this or not, and eventually settling on: “That Kenma kid is really good with tech, right?”
“...right.”

“Do you think he’d know how to install a phone tracking app? If we just… got a tracker on your father’s phone, we could probably find out where Shima Three is. I mean, we know he goes there. Let that run for a month or two and we’d probably have, at least, a few very solid location leads…”

“Right,” Daichi says, and they take a break from the conversation to jump the gate again and head up the slope to the highway. “But that would require… I mean, let’s assume that Kenma can install a program onto a government phone that can do that for us. We’d still… we’d still need to get into the cell phone. We’d need to get my dad away from the phone long enough to set it up, we’d… and… the whole time, if he discovered it…”

“Well how good is your dad with technology?” 

“... honestly, we might be able to get away with it, as long as it didn’t have any kind of notification, or affect the performance of the phone in any way…” 

Oikawa nods along. 

“But… still, getting into the phone itself is the problem. When I found it on Valentine’s, I tried all the birthdays and anniversaries I knew, but I couldn't get in. He’s clearly using a random password. We have no way of figuring that out.”

Oikawa thinks about this for a moment, before turning to look at him, a large van rushing past them and kicking up a waft of warm exhaust air. 

“Do you think Tendou could do it?”

Daichi blinked. “Like-”

“Look, I know he… couldn’t read your mind, but he was reading mine. He was correctly guessing the animals I was thinking of. If we could get your dad to think of his password, for whatever reason, Tendou might be able to guess it.” 

Daichi chews on the inside of his cheek, before saying: “Look, this is a line,” he says. “If we… If we cross this line, we’re not playing games anymore, this is… real interference with law enforcement, real criminal activity. Installing a tracking app on a government issued phone, even if my dad’s job was exactly as he said it was… incredibly risky. We could get in serious trouble. There’s no going back from this.”

“If you want to back out, that’s okay,” Oikawa replies. 

“That’s not what I said. You just need to promise me that you’ve got my back, that you’re not gonna jump ship and leave me to take the fall.” 

Oikawa lifts a hand to him. “For better or worse.” 

Daichi meets his fist bump. “Together.”

Notes:

maybe end of act 2 lmao??? look when I said this was going to be a LONG one, I meant it, okay? buckle up chucklefucks. (affectionately.)

Chapter 14: Plan and Execute

[The camera quality is much, much better than the last livestream this channel had done. Kenma’s well reinforced gaming computer certainly pulled its weight. It’s late in the evening, the curtains behind them pulled shut tight. Kuroo leans back in the swiveling chair, one ankle crossed over his knee, pen twirling around his fingers. 

“The cat,” he reads, from the chat. “Everyone just wants me to talk about the cat. It’s just a cat guys, I swear. It’s never even scratched me. It did bite Kenma, but cats tend to be like that. Relax. No, I don’t think it’s a bakeneko. I do think it’s a weird-ass cat, it’s definitely super smart, but it’s not some yokai spirit.”

He chuckles softly as he watches the chat protest his disbelief in the potentially magic cat, waiting until he caught sight of something unrelated to speak again:

“Where are the others,” he reads, followed by him scooting his chair closer to lean into the computer. “Uh… around,” he says. “Daichi and Oikawa are actually coming up tomorrow, I think we’re planning on filming some… something, honestly I don’t usually find out until Oikawa decides to grace me with his attention. But them and Ushiwaka are all hours away in Miyagi, and unlike me apparently they need to study for exams.”

He glances through the chat. “Where’s Bokuto? Only God can answer that question. Well, actually he’s with some friends of his. Yeah, I know, shocker, we have friends outside of each other. I mean, we all go to different schools, play on different teams. Sometimes people make plans without us.”

The chat is a mess for a bit, of people asking all sorts of questions on this subject. Kuroo watches it all passively for a moment before saying: “Someone in the chat asked me if Kenma and Tendou were going to be returning as regulars. I actually don’t know. Those are some of the aforementioned other friends that take up so much time. I don’t mind Tendou so much, but honestly after the last time, I think he’s a little… put off this whole thing. I know Ushijima doesn’t like it, I mean… I don’t know. I think if Kenma had fallen into the river I’d probably draw a line too-” he hesitates over his words, before his face slowly starts to grow a more prominent red. “Not that… not that Kenma is an equivalent- I mean-” and then he really starts to panic, when someone in the chat asks why he’s being weird and he realizes none of them had known Tendou and Ushijima was dating and now it just looks like he’s defending himself from being considered Kenma’s friend. 

“Ah…” he stammers out for a moment, before reaching for the keyboard and starting to type and move around, to look through the chat properly. “Let’s talk about the cat, yeah? Everyone likes the spooky cat.”]

 

---

 

“I don’t think I can track his phone,” Kenma says, from where he’s leaning against his desk. Daichi and Oikawa are awkwardly perched on his bed, looking back at him like school children with their hands on their knees. “I could do a data download, though. Take everything off of it for ourselves, then we don’t need to keep going back.”

Oikawa is nodding along for a moment, before saying: “Which would be a step forward, but if S03 is anything to go by, it’s going to be in code and untranslatable. Plus, what if he doesn’t keep any important information on a cell phone?”

“He will,” Kenma replied. “It’s the twenty-first century. You’d be surprised at how much you can get off a phone - how much it stores even if you don’t ask for it too.”

“Okay, well… we can go ahead with that, then,” Daichi says. “What do you need to do that?”

Kenma thinks about it for a moment, before saying: “I can… get most of it as long as I have the phone unlocked and I can plug it into my laptop.”

“Okay, so… we’ll… just have to get you down to Miyagi as well. Can you?”

Kenma stares at him for a moment, before sighing and saying: “Sure. Fine.”

“This is all fine and dandy, but what if the phone doesn’t conveniently outline the location of Shima Three and also what it’s for?” Oikawa cuts in. “Are you sure there’s no way to track the phone?”

“No way that wouldn’t immediately get found out,” Kenma replies. “Or… at least no way that I’m capable of that wouldn’t get found out.”

“Shit-”

“Well,” Kuroo says, cutting in from where he stood against the wall, playing with the tab on a can of soda. “Wouldn’t it be way easier to just track him anyway?”

“... what?” 

“You kids are all too reliant on your phones and your comp-u-tors,” he says. 

“I’m older than you,” Oikawa says. 

“I just mean, get a little tracking do-hicky and sew it into his shoes,” Kuroo finishes, ignoring Oikawa. “A man can put his phone down a thousand times a day, leave it anywhere, technology can fail, the phone can die, but if he has a good pair of shoes that fit him well that he wears to work, that shit ain’t leaving his side until he has to… like… go swimming or something stupid.”

Kenma nods. “That’s a good point. Unfortunately, Kuroo, I don’t own any tracking devices.”

“Well, how much would that cost?” Oikawa says. “Actually, that doesn’t matter, does it?” he corrects, reaching over to nudge Daichi. 

 

---

 

“Are you sure you want to do this?”

The question catches Tendou off guard, as does Ushijima’s hand clutching his wrist, pulling him back. It’s a bit dramatic, he thinks, he was only going to leave to grab his laptop, he’d have been back in a few minutes. But Ushijima doesn’t deal in subtleties, and that’s not what this is about. 

Tendou lets himself be pulled back, turning to face Ushijima, looking down at him sat on the edge of the bed. He makes an intentional effort not to read anything from his mind, but even so, his intuition is sparking with guesses of all kinds, and if it was something he was capable of turning off, he’d have done it years ago. 

“Yeah,” he says, giving a halfhearted shrug. “It’ll be fun, like a game.”

“I was under the impression that you didn’t… like people talking about you this way,” he replies, gliding his hands down to hold both of Tendou’s. “Why are you playing their games?”

Tendou had not, actually, told Ushijima what had happened. 

After they’d left the river, he’d only said what he’d known to be the absolute truth. That he’d fallen into the river, and something - probably the current - had dragged him too quickly to swim. He’d washed ashore on the muddy bank in a streak of luck, he supposed. He’d even played it up as a kappa. Made a joke about not being very tasty - he figured if kappa’s liked cucumber, they liked mild flavours. And obviously Tendou would be like peppercorn. 

That was the best way to convince someone nothing was real. Really believe in it. 

Ushijima, of course, had not believed it was a kappa, and Tendou wasn’t sure he wanted to test the mettle of their relationship by insisting it was a kappa, insisting upon the odd man Tendou had met, insisting it was real. Ushijima could let anything roll off him without a second thought, as long as it didn’t persist. Then he would fight back, it would become a concern. 

I am worried that you believe these things, he would say, because to him it would be a sign of failing rational thought, failing critical thinking, failing logic. And Tendou was worried that could break them more than Tendou being a literal yokai would. 

“Satori,” Ushijima repeats, leaning in to look up at him, expression softening considerably from the harsh edges he wore usually. It tugs on Tendou’s heartstrings, to hear him use his given name like that, but he’s been in his own thoughts for too long. 

I don’t want him to be unhappy.

That’s the only concern in Ushijima’s mind. There’s no worry about why Tendou might want to do this, no concern over whether or not he even could , Ushijima had always assumed Tendou’s ability was something fantastic, in the way that he thought it was fantastic when someone explained to him why the metaphorical curtains were blue. 

“I don’t like being a circus act,” Tendou says, after a moment. “But that’s not what this is. Oikawa isn’t… Shirabu trying to convince me to get him Semi’s locker number so he can fill it with confetti, this is someone who… gen-”

“What… What is Shirabu trying to do?”

“You don’t need to worry about that,” Tendou coos, patting his cheek. It makes Ushijima smile slightly, before concern crosses his features again. 

“No, seriously, what is Shirabu doing?”

“Scouts honour, I can’t say.”

“You were never a boy scout.”

“You can’t prove that. Maybe I lied to you. Maybe I’ve secretly been a boy scout this whole time and just now have chosen to reveal my true nature,” Tendou says, and he cringes internally, slightly, at himself, for being so loud and stupid and on the nose, but it’s almost impossible to ignore when Ushijima’s one track mind switches, in amusement, to:

I love him so much. 

I love him so much. 

I love him so much.

He swallows, swaying back slightly and feeling his face grow hot. (Always a risk, with his red hair - he had to be careful, lest he start looking like a fluorescent traffic cone.)

“Anyway…” Tendou says, trying not to let his voice crack over the word. “Just think of it like a game. We’re gonna go see how good I am at guessing things.”

“We already know you’re very good at guessing things.”

“True. But we’re going to test it. And do a favour to your boys, who knows, maybe they’ll pay us.”

Ushijima nods solemnly. 

Sports scholarships were not easy.

 

---

 

The video they put out, that week, to tide over the rabidly curious fanbase they were developing, isn’t a proper investigation, but a quickly thrown together piece where Oikawa talks about and discusses some of his favourite alien abduction stories, the most compelling evidence, different folktales. This culminates with him telling a story from Brazil in 1946 that’s so disturbing both Daichi and Kuroo, who’d been gladly playing the roles of hecklers, shut up and listen. 

“Christ,” Daichi says, once the tale of the man has been spun, a horribly long-winded way to say a man had melted into nothing and lost his skin. “What in the hell?”

“It’s a fascinating story,” Oikawa agrees.

“No, what in the hell is right,” Kuroo replies. “What the hell - is that true?”

“Yes!” Oikawa replies. “The facts as I’ve presented it are true. There are official medical records from the hospital he went to, there are records from the official investigation the Brazilian police conducted, it’s all true.”

“I… no, Oikawa,” Daichi says, shaking his head. “No. No melting people. Don’t tell me about melting people. Is this an alien thing? What do they think happened?”

“Well, it could be an alien thing,” Oikawa agreed. “In fact, multiple - now dead - people have experienced very similar circumstances, all with the same modus operandi- that is, a flash of light and then a person screaming about fiery pain as their skin melts down to the bone. So…”

“The same- what…?”

“Weapons testing?” Kuroo says. 

“Maybe,” Oikawa agrees, enthusiastically. 

“Not the aliens,” Kuroo replies, quickly, making Oikawa’s face fall. “The… Brazilian government. If aliens wanted to melt our faces I don’t think they’d draw the line at fucking Tropic of Capricorn.” 

“Tropical what-now?” Daichi says. 

“Fine, you’re right. But the geography of it does actually provide another very cool explanation,” Oikawa goes on. “ Boi-tatá is a fiery snake said to spit fire at people, and turn them mad with just their gaze. It’s found dominantly in Brazil, but there are stories of it from Uruguay, Argentina, and other places. It’s a really unique piece of folklore, typically it only attacks those that try and harm the forests, loggers or trappers…”

“Fire… fire snakes?” Daichi says. This, finally, catches Oikawa’s attention. 

“Do you need to leave? You seem like you’re having a bad time,” Oikawa replies. 

“I just… this is all so much…”

Oikawa, condescendingly, pats his knee, before looking up to Kuroo as the latter speaks again:
“You know a lot about legends from - apparently not just Japan?”

“Personal interest,” Oikawa replies, with a shrug. “And it’s a good way to practice my Spanish, finding something I like and reading it in another language. Plus you learn so much, reading original source material, compared to translations.”

“Ah,” Kuroo says. 

And the video continues from there. 

 

---

 

→ plonkmakonk: something about Oikawa spending his evenings reading obscure horror tales from south america doesn’t surprise me. 

→ SammyKay: EYYYY BRAZIL SHOUTOUT

→ Lanchester4000: nobody’s talking about Oikawa casually dropping he apparently speaks spanish fluently enough to read original folklore? You know how fluent you need to read stuff like that? I thought these were volleyball players??????????? Why are they smart???????

     ↳ BeanBoy [replying to Lanchester4000]: well Daichi clearly isn’t 

     ↳ SawamuraD [replying to BeanBoy]: hey :(

     ↳ BeanBoy [replying to SawamuraD]: OH MY GOD I’M SO SORRY I DIDN’T KNOW YOU READ THESE

→ MainstreetKiller: okay obligatory comment talking about how fucking hot Oikawa looks in this video. Please I want him so badly. 

     ↳ IwaizumiH [replying to MainstreetKiller]: not worth it

     ↳ MainstreetKiller [replying to IwaizumiH]: haha I could probably make it worth his time ;)

     ↳  IwaizumiH [replying to MainstreetKiller]: i had meant that it wouldn’t be worth it to you, but you’ve changed my mind. You’d be lucky. You probably couldn’t get a date with a lizard if you bought it from the pet store. 

     ↳ Fantastical [replying to IwaizumiH]: i don’t think anyone’s getting lucky, he has a girlfriend remember?

     ↳ IwaizumiH [replying to Fantastical]: hmm

→ Myleciumshrooms: please make this a regular series!!! I love the ghost hunting, but I could listen to Oikawa getting heckled trying to tell abduction stories for ten hours straight I sweat

 

---

 

They share a computer screen and scroll through a series of websites that range from cheap and unreliable to terrifyingly sketchy. Finding tracking devices is apparently, you know, potentially a red flag for some vendors. 

“It might be easier to repurpose something from, like, a dog tracking device,” Oikawa suggests. He’s laying on his stomach beside Daichi, and has been alternating between controlling the search engine on the computer and kicking Daichi in the ribs with his swinging feet. “Or… cat… gerbil. Do people track gerbils?”

“Hopefully,” Daichi says. “Usually dog trackers come in their collars, I’m not sure how we’d get that into my dad’s shoe.”

“True… I have no idea how shoes work… We’d probably want something flat… Or… maybe we could… it would probably be a lot easier to get it into something like a jacket, yeah?”

“Oh, for sure… but doesn’t that defeat Kuroo’s point,” Daichi says. “A jacket could be left behind, or swapped - I mean, we saw him wearing the PSIA windbreaker that one time, so who knows when or if he’d take off the one we track…”

Oikawa hums, before kicking his feet up again and thudding his heel into Daichi’s side. He grunts, rubbing at his ribs. 

“Why are you so violent?”

Oikawa doesn’t reply, flipping through an electronic’s company catalog and eventually pointing at the computer. “Well… Something like this is small enough, but it’s a square. If we put it in his shoe, surely he’d feel it? I mean, I can feel even the tiniest little rocks that get into my shoe.”

“That’s because you’re a delicate little flower,” Daichi says, leaninging down to look at the dimensions of the device. “Maybe… maybe it’ll be worth figuring out if it’s even possible to discreetly sew something like this into a shoe. Where would we even put it?”

“Right… also… how do you sew something into a shoe?” 

“That’s a good- ngh-”

Daichi gets kicked in the back. 

 

---

 

[The livestream is centered on the inside of a dorm room, the lights on and clearly depicting the small, narrow shared space. Neat bunk beds can be seen against the far wall, but there’s almost nothing else on the walls or the window sill that indicate people might live there. Ushijima is sitting, polite and completely still, in front of the camera. The light of the computer can be seen reflecting off his face and eyes, but he doesn’t seem to be processing it. 

Occasionally his eyes might move, to the constantly flickering chat, or he’ll adjust how he’s sitting, but nothing else happens. 

Eventually there’s a slight squeaking noise, as the door to the dorm room opens, and Ushijima’s attention is taken off the camera as he turns to look over. 

“Hello,” he says. 

“Hello, hello,” Tendou’s voice sings back, and there’s a loud thud as he drops his stuff by the doorway and heads on over. He swings himself around and leans down in front of the desk, appearing in the shot like a rather uninvited sort of presence, all limbs and joints. He’s dressed for the chilly weather, having evidently just come in from outside. 

Ushijima looks back to the camera.

Tendou has a moment to take in everything that’s happening, and the rapidly scrolling chat that’s sort of just screaming their amused confusion, before eventually he says: 

“Wakatoshi, what are you doing?” 

“Kenma advised that it was my turn to live stream, people were interested in seeing me do so,” he replies. 

“Uh-huh. And… how long has this been going?”

“About thirteen minutes.”

“Have you… actually, let me address your- shit, your shockingly high number of viewers. Has he done anything in these thirteen minutes?”

There’s a rapid increase in responses of people just shouting “no” and “literally no,” and various other exclamations, and Tendou reads in all for a bit before glancing back at Ushijima and saying:

“You’re supposed to talk to them.”

“...yes,” Ushijima agrees, awkwardly, shifting to sit on his hands. “I know.”

“Waka-” Tendou starts, before just closing his eyes in exhaustion and pulling away to pull out his phone. Ushijima turns around to look at him. 

“Who are you texting?”

“Oikawa. I’m telling him to never let you do this alone again.” 

Ushijima nods slightly, before turning back around to stare at the camera again. 

“Read something from the chat that’s on the right, there. Any question they ask, just pick one.”

Ushijima nods along at the orders, scooting in slightly to lean forward and try and find just one question, though the chat was moving so fast it was hard to read. 

Eventually he does manage to pick one out, reading: “Do you prefer top or bottom bunk?”
Without missing a beat Tendou snaps his head up, calling: “No, don’t answer that question.”

“Wh-” Ushijima glances back at him, looking startled by the sudden interruption. “You said any question-”

“Not that one-” Tendou moves back into the foreground, leaning on Ushijima’s shoulder to point at the camera. “Shame on you lot, for asking.”

“...About the bunk beds?” Ushijima says, confused, looking behind himself.]

 

---

 

Honestly, when all’s said and done, it’s a proper party. Kenma and Tendou were vital players in this whole affair, so they needed to be there for sure, but neither Kenma nor Tendou were exactly stand-alone acts, and for continuity’s sake, Kuroo and Ushijima were both participating because it made the most sense that they would be. Oikawa, too, then, wasn’t going to be left out, and by the time all this had gotten back to Bokuto, there was no way in hell he was going to be the only one not in attendance. 

Truthfully, it was probably a good thing. The more people, the less suspicious it would seem that the few who’d be sneaking around were there. Daichi had carefully extracted the day's schedule from his mom (he’d ask her politely,) and then parroted back the details to the group. 

“Leave it to me,” Tendou assured him, over and over and over again. “I’m very good at getting information out of people. This’ll be a breeze.” 

But Daichi wasn’t so sure. 

They play up the party, they arrange food on the table and they take pictures and chat and wait for the clock to tick to the time his mother had said they’d be coming back from dinner. Daichi’s father, as far as he’d been informed, was only going to be in town one more night. He’d been in and out of Miyagi for a couple of weeks, working on something or another, but he’d told his family a few days earlier that he was going to be working with some pretty important clients, and would probably be in Tokyo for a couple months at least, and wouldn’t be able to visit as often. 

So it was now or never. 

Daichi’s phone rings. He glances at the clock, and then reasons that even if his dad did come home while he was on the phone, Tendou and the others could manage the first part just fine. They all had their lines. 

He wasn’t even really relevant to it. 

So he excuses himself and answers the phone, chirping a soft hello. 

“Daichi? Hey! It’s Suga.”

“Yes,” Daichi echoed back, smiling slightly as he slipped through the back door and into the yard. “I saw. What’s up?” 

“What’s up?” Suga echoes back, sounding slightly amused. “I was wondering the same thing! I saw on Instagram you’re having some kind of party?”

“What?” Daichi says. “No, I didn’t - I didn’t post anything. Why would you think that?”

“Uh… not on your account, Dai, the Ghost Captains one, that Kenma runs? He posted a photo of you guys - it’s really cute, actually, you look great.”

“We have an instagram account?” Daichi replies back. 

“You - uh, yes? Did you not know that?”

“...I guess not. I don’t really have a hand in the accounts management thing, Kenma and Kuroo handle that…”

“Clearly,” Suga says, laughing. “What do you do over there?”

Prepare to use my supposedly psychic friend to read my dad’s mind. 

Covertly follow my father and his government agency into the woods at night. 

Buy tracking chips online to follow said father. 

Oh and sometimes we hunt ghosts. 

“I mostly just show up where I’m told to show up,” he says, awkwardly, since he’s not sure exactly what the best answer here would be. 

“And host parties,” Suga adds. 

“And host parties, apparently, well, it’s not a real party, it’s-”

“Not a real party?”

“It wasn’t supposed to be, just… a bunch of these guys come pre-equipped with plus-ones, and Bokuto’s like an ancient curse, I let him in once and now he’s here forever, so…”
Suga laughs, on the other end, and Daichi is immediately struck by the desire to know exactly what he was doing, if he was sitting in his bedroom, wandering around mid-chore, almost done with his homework, getting ready for bed. 

He tenses his jaw slightly, and can’t quite put a finger on the feeling in his chest. 

“Aw, I wish you’d invited me,” Suga says, still teasing. “It sounds like you’re gonna have a lot of fun at your not-party.”

Daichi shakes his head slightly. “Ah, you wouldn’t like it, it’s… different, it’s…”

“Different?”

“It’s not a party,” he repeats, and that feeling in his chest has morphed from something nebulous but fond, and into something decidedly ugly and upset. Suga didn’t know anything about his father. He couldn’t know, could he? He was still so… normal, living such a normal life, and Daichi was… Daichi was about to… 

Suga would hate me for doing this, wouldn’t he? Not just for lying to him, or keeping things from him, but leaning so heavily into it, breaking the law, tracking my father- have I gone crazy? Have I actually lost my mind now? What am I even thinking? 

“Daichi?”

“What?”

Suga is quiet on the other end for a moment, before saying, softly: “You know, yeah, it’s probably a ghost-hunters only thing, yeah? I mean, Iwaizumi’s not there either, so… I probably wouldn’t have fit in…”

I should tell him. I should tell him the truth, tell him everything. 

What would that even look like? 

Hey Suga, I know this sounds crazy, and it definitely is crazy, but Oikawa thinks he had a close encounter and my dad is secretly in the PSIA and everyone thinks Tendou is an actual yokai and there’s this weird cat that’s following Kuroo and I sometimes hallucinate, and I hallucinate a lot more when we’re hunting ghosts and it’s terrifying and I used to just think I might be afraid of the dark but now I’m worried there’s a reason to be afraid of the dark and everything is bad and I love you.

“We’ll hang out soon,” is an empty promise he makes out loud, because he knows his schedule is packed, and he’s not sure what that will even look like. He wants it to be true so badly. “I promise,” he continues. “I promise, I owe you that second date, right?” 

“Yeah,” Suga agrees, on the other end. 

“Do you believe in aliens, Suga?” Daichi says, suddenly, without warning. 

The question seems to catch him off guard, and Daichi can hear Sugawara thinking about it, quiet on the other end as he took the question seriously for a minute, and then answered:

“I think… broadly, yes,” he replies. “Generally. But… I don’t think they’ve ever visited earth, if they’re real, if that’s what you’re asking.” 

Daichi nods along with that. “That’s a good position to take. Rational. Believable.”

“What about you? Has all this paranormal stuff changed your mind?”

“No,” he says, before he can think it through. “No, I don’t believe in aliens.”

“Okay,” Suga replies, and Daichi can hear his smile. “Well, I’ll let you get back to your not-party. Tell Kenma to upload tons more photos, I feel like that’s the only way I’m going to see you this week.”

I miss you. I wish I could tell you the truth.

He hears the front door open, and turns around at the noise. He can see through the house, to where his father was coming in. 

“Okay. I’ll see you soon. Promise.”

Suga mumbles another bit of a goodbye, and Daichi hangs up the call quickly to turn around and hurry inside. 

 

---

 

Kuroo breaks into laughter as the front door is opened, clapping his hands together and shifting forward to lean towards Tendou, shaking his head. 

“No, no, no, you’re fucking with me,” he says, loudly and in amusement, staring at Tendou in bafflement. “Someone must have told you, right? Kenma?”

He jerks his head around, to where Kenma puts his hands up in surrender, immediately. 

“Not me,” he replies, in his usual soft voice. 

“Someone must have, there’s no way-”

“Face it, Kuroo!” Oikawa interrupts, even louder. “Tendou can read your mind, no other explanation-”

“There’s gotta be at least one other explanation!” Kuroo snickers, before nodding to Ushijima. “Come on, you don’t believe in all this, do you? How’s he doing it? It’s a trick, right?”

Tendou turns his head to the side, eyeing Ushijima, who he was pretty sure only barely understood what the plan was, but hopefully would be able to play along. Even if he fumbles it, he was so weird normally it probably wouldn’t scan as anything unusual. 

“Yes,” Ushijima agrees. “But if it is a trick, I do not know how it’s done, sorry.” 

Kuroo throws his hands in the air, and it’s about now that their ruckus has attracted the attention of Daichi’s parents as they return from their night out. As they enter the living room space, Daichi’s mother seems pleasantly amused by the boys in her living room, and his father hesitates slightly. 

Tendou swivels his attention to the man, focusing on him as intently as he can. Try, try to read his mind…

It’s hard to do. Not just because Tendou is not particularly good at targeting his mindreading, but because there are so many other people, and the moment he tries his brain feels like he’s being attacked from all different angles, each individual mind shrieking its own string of words or ideas. 

He blinks rapidly, shutting down his own thoughts to pull back and stop the flood of information.

It’s never had an issue with crowds before, but before he was always just… getting extra information, making guesses. Trying is so loud. 

Daichi’s father has stopped in the entrance to the living room, watching them all with amusement for a moment before Daichi himself comes back through the glass door to the backyard, waving a hello. 

“There he is,” his father said. “The teenage boy that I did create. I was beginning to wonder where these others came from.” 

“Ah, sorry,” Daichi chuckled. “Mum said it was fine.”

“Leave them alone!” Daichi’s mother shouts, from down the hall. “Let them have their fun.”

“Okay, okay,” he starts, but before he can turn away, Kuroo calls:

“Wait! Wait, come back here-”

Rion turns around in confused, frowning slightly as he looked down at him. “Uh… yes, how can I help you?”

“Tendou is claiming that he’s psychic,” Kuroo starts. “But he’s clearly tricking us and got the information elsewhere, but - come on, let him try it on you. There’s no way he knows you enough to just guess it or whatever.”

“Oh?” Rion seems genuinely curious about this, before nodding slightly and crossing his arms, nodding to the group. “Which one of you is that?” 

Tendou puts his hand up, waving playfully before adding: “I swear, I’m the real deal, sir - now, all you have to do is think of your phone password, and I can guess it, 100% of the time.” 

He seems a little skeptical at that, but nods. 

“Okay, done-”

“No, no,” Tendou interrupts. “Your personal phone is too easy, it’s obviously your anniversary date. Do something more challenging, do you have a work phone?”

This does elicit what looks like shock from Rion, but he nods quickly. That was a guess, and Tendou is pleased, somewhat, to know that he is still intuitive, even with the added mind reading capacity… or, maybe, he was still reading minds without knowing it. 

He tries to open his mind again and really focus on Rion this time, locking into his mind. It’s so hard, and it feels like a great pressure is beginning to build behind his ears, like a plane descending too fast. 

I wonder if he’s really psychic.

Uh-oh. 

Well. 

Tendou supposes it’s a good thing he can read his mind at all, since Daichi was so infuriatingly impossible to read. It’s clearly not a family trait - not great that he clearly 100% believes in psychics. Also not great that he actually wasn’t thinking of his phone password. 

“You have to think of your phone code,” Tendou says. 

“I am,” Rion replies. 

It’s very hard to not think of something. Not once you’re, well, thinking of it. 

 800--

08--0

0--30

0100

--308

It’s like he’s trying to keep it out of his mind. 

Like he thinks this might be legit.

“Got it!” Tendou says, loudly. Because of a reflex, Rion has no say in the matter and his brain flicks heavily into one direction, only for a third of a second. 

It’s too slow to evade Tendou - he’s already in his head. 

1803

“Is that so?” Rion says. 

“Uh-huh,” Tendou nods, confidently, before adding: “1223!” 

Rion smiles. 

Not psychic, then.

Funny kid, though.

“No, sorry,” Rion says. 

“Ah, you’re lying! He’s lying!” Tendou declares, pouting. “Is it really not?”

“Nope.”

“Hah!” Kuroo says, clapping his hands together. “I told you!” 

“I’m a little disappointed, actually,” Oikawa agrees, leaning back in his seat. 

“Well… I just made a mistake!” Tendou says, putting on his most annoyed, playful voice. “I’ll get the next one! I’ll get the next one I swear! 

Daichi has moved around the room to where his father is, jokingly apologizing on their behalf for the hassle. 

Tendou can feel everyone’s curiosity. 

Did he get it?

Does he have the password?

Did it work?

Is he just acting? 

Does he know it?

His head feels heavy, and when he tries to shut his mind down and stop trying, he can’t. Everything just gets louder, like the dam had been cracked and the water was coming through now . 

His lips are wet. 

Reflex kicks in and he jerks a hand up to his face, immediately pulling it away covered in blood, but it wasn’t just one drip from his nose and he feels it grow heavier, down his chin. 

“Satori-”

Ushijima’s hand is covering his own, and thankfully Ushijima always carries around tissue and hand cloths, because Tendou’s mind had short-circuited and he had frozen in place, until Ushijima guides his hand back up to press against his nose, tipping his head back and reminding him that he needed to take action. 

Everyone is looking at him. 

Daichi had been just about to lead his dad down the hall, undoubtedly about to set in motion the plan to nab his phone, but they stood in the hall now and stared back at them, shock across their faces. 

“Ah, sorry, sorry,” he says, waving them off with a slightly nasally voice. “I’ll just-”

Ushijima is already standing up, tugging him to his feet as well. 

“Just a nosebleed, happens all the time,” Tendou laughs, lying, as he stands up, and lets Ushijima lead him through the house to wherever the bathroom was. 

 

---

 

It’s actually really easy to steal his dad’s phone. It’s really easy, because Daichi has four younger siblings, and his eldest sister is very easy to bribe into pretty much any assortment of tasks. “I need you to distract dad,” he says, because Kenma says he only needs a couple of minutes, and she’s more than happy to demand a favour in return to be cashed in at a later date. 

His mother goes downstairs to fawn over Tendou in the bathroom, who’s nosebleed had been rather suspiciously ferocious. He’d seen so many people take spikes directly to the face and walk away with significantly less blood loss. Chiyo calls for her dad’s attention and pulls him into her room. Daichi slips into their parents room, digs through their stuff until he finds his work phone, and slips away into his bedroom. 

“Got it,” Oikawa says, about the same time Daichi is shutting his bedroom door. 

“Tendou got the password?”

“Ushijima just texted me,” Oikawa confirmed. 

Daichi hands the phone off to Kenma, who’s opening his laptop and already ready with a cord to plug in. 

When the password works, and the phone unlocks, there’s a small thrill of victory that’s immediately overshadowed by the chattering noises from everyone else in a busy house.

Kenma’s fingers work quickly for a few minutes as he gets the program started, before saying:

“Downloading.”

“How long is that gonna take?” Kuroo replies, taking a seat beside him and leaning in to watch the program blink. 

“I dunno, a few minutes,” Kenma says. “The internet connection is good, my computer has enough space, we should be fine. How long can your sister keep your dad distracted?”

“I don’t know. I told her as long as possible…”

“Is there any way to make the download go faster?” Oikawa says, dancing on his feet. 

“Sure, if we only download half of it, we can cut the time by fifty percent,” Kenma replies. 

“Okay, don’t sass me-”

“Everyone just-” Daichi pinches the bridge of his nose, pulling away from the small group and heading to the door of his bedroom to look down the hall. He can see his father standing in Chiyo’s doorway - it’s late at night. He’s probably trying to get her to settle for the night, he’s probably exhausted and just wants to go to bed. 

He looks back to Kenma. 

“How much longer?”

“Uh… a few minutes? I don’t know, it’s going as fast as it can,” Kenma muttered. 

He can see his father moving away from the doorway. 

“Shit,” Daichi says, pulling back. “Shit, shit-”

“What?”

“He’s leaving Chiyo’s room, he’s gonna realize the phone is gone, we need a distraction…”

Kuroo pulls out his phone, fingers typing rapidly over text. 

“Who’s that?” Daichi asks. 

“Bokuto,” Kuroo replies. “I’m asking for a distraction.”

“Distract-”

Only a few seconds after Kuroo has sent the text message off, there’s a loud bang from downstairs, and Daichi hears Bokuto let out a wail of pain, convincing enough that Daichi isn’t completely sure that’s related to Kuroo’s text. 

He heads to his bedroom door, just in time to see his father passing down the hallway and trotting downstairs to see what had happened, instead of heading into his room. 

“Done,” Kenma says, and after a few seconds has the phone unplugged. He tosses it across the room, and Daichi grabs it from the air before slipping out and back into his parents room to replace it where it had been taken from. 

 

---

 

The last challenge was something that Daichi had to do alone. They disbanded quickly after that. His father has a few amused, choice words to say about Daichi’s new circle of friends, but it’s all relatively lighthearted. He apologizes for the chaos, and sees off his friends, patting their backs and promising to get together soon. Tendou and Ushijima leave to Shiratorizawa - Kuroo and Kenma leave to Oikawa’s place, undoubtedly unaware that they were not going to be allowed to sleep tonight, not with Kenma’s computer tucked against his side. 

Bokuto stayed here, since it was too late to see them off to Tokyo. They had plenty of space anyway, so after everyone is settled and comfortable, and the house is still, Daichi slips out of his bed and over Bokuto on the floor, taking the small, electronic tracker and heading downstairs as silently as he could. 

The house is eerie in the night. He can see Kumo sleeping by the back door, stretched out and peaceful, but the blue glue of the moonlight scatters shadows across the living room and kitchen, and the swaying of tree branches make them dance. 

He had tried and tried and tried to find a way to put a tracker into his father’s shoe, but try as he might he just couldn’t make it work. His father would notice something in the toe, and every instructional video he watched about taking the heel off and reattaching it seemed obscenely complicated. 

He’s even called up Asahi to ask, since his friend had always been good with home economics and knew how to repair clothes, but even he had advised messing around with shoe leather was very different than sewing fabrics. 

He had provided an alternative option, though. 

Daichi found his jacket - the nice one his father wore most of the time and would never leave here in Miyagi - and dug around in the pocket to confirm what Asahi had suggested might be the case - yes, the pocket was located between the outer layer and the lining, which means… 

He uses a small knife to stab a hole in the pocket of the jacket, too small for his phone or keys or anything to get lost, but big enough that he could push the tracker through and have it fall into the lining. 

Technically, Daichi thought it would be easily felt, but that was assuming his father was in the habit of squeezing the hemline of his coat throughout the day. Daichi was willing to assume he was not. 

When he’s comfortable with the set up, he investigates it himself and finds that while he could feel it, on occasion, it was small enough that it really didn’t concern him. It would be fine. 

He pulled out his phone, and connected the app from the tracking device to record, and that was that. 

They’d done it. 

Okay. 

He turns around, and glances back through the dark house, eyes scanning over those dancing shadows. 

There is something in the room with him. 

It’s very tall - Daichi thinks maybe eight, nine feet tall, its head cocked at an angle against the roof because it could not fit any other way. Its arms hang down, with one too many elbow joints. Its body is mostly shadowy, thin and like reeds. It’s half visible, illuminated by the moonlight. 

Daichi swallows, a slow sense of dread creeping into his chest. 

He looks down, away from it, the instincts of a child taking over as his only thought is to not look at it, not acknowledge it, pretend it is not there and if he can’t see it, it can’t see him. 

He runs up the stairs to escape to his bedroom, and does not look back. 

Notes:

this chapter was weirdly challenging to write, the lack of motivation can be so difficult to drag myself through, so I'm here to remind anyone who hasn't read one of my longform fics before that I do have very inconsistent updates, and you don't need to worry if I disappear, even for an extended period of time. I will be back. Tho I am excited about the next few chapters, so maybe we won't have to deal with that...

as always, thank you to everyone who's reading xx it really means a lot :)

Chapter 15: Teke Teke

 

“Sleep after we go through all the data!” Oikawa says, grabbing Kenma’s laptop from him, after he had tried to put his stuff down in the corner and go to bed. This is a mistake, because before Oikawa can do anything else, Kenma’s nails have dug into his hands, harshly enough to leave red marks behind as the laptop is wrestled away and Kenma is left glaring violence across at Oikawa. 

“God...” Oikawa replies, rubbing at the damaged skin on his hands. 

“Do not touch my stuff,” Kenma replies, in a way that indicates it’s not the animal’s fault if you get rabies after touching it. 

“Okay, okay, my… wow, okay,” Oikawa repeats, putting his hands up in surrender and moving to sit down on his bed. “Geez…”

Kenma continues to glare at him, only softening once Kuroo steps in to shift his attention. 

“I mean, I’m kinda excited to see what we got, can’t we take a peek?” he says, leaning in over Kenma’s shoulder. 

Kenma, actively fighting back yawns and regretting ever agreeing to this, groans and eventually relents with a nod. 

“Fine,” he says. “But I am not staying up until two in the morning.”

 

---

 

It’s about four in the morning, when Kenma loses his mind and shuts his laptop. 

“That’s it!” he says. “I’m going to bed.”

“But - we were-”

“We have been reading the most inane test message conversation for hours ,” he replies. “There are no images on this phone, there are no emails, there’s no video, there’s nothing - nothing. The only… If you let me go to bed, I promise I can scrub through this more properly and decode some of the more complex data files - that’s location, that’s phone calls, that’s… whatever, that’s… but I am-”

“Oh, come on…” Kuroo says, his head resting heavily on Kenma’s shoulder, having essentially started to fall asleep anyway. “That last text conversation was really interesting.”

“That last text conversation was about boxes! They spent three days talking about the size of boxes!” 

“Exactly,” Oikawa says, pushing himself up to sit on one of his knees. “What does the government need such specific boxes for-”

“Boxing things,” Kenma replies, turning to him in exasperation. Oikawa looks exhausted, and the look is not helped by the fact that he was clearly supposed to take his contacts out hours ago and hadn’t, and yet, he hadn’t slowed down for even a second. “Boxing things is not suspicious activity.”

Oikawa glares at him for a moment, before sitting back and rubbing at one of his eyes. It makes Kenma wince - please for the love of god go take out your contacts- you’re gonna damage yourself-

“Maybe…”

Kenma decides to just get to his feet, starting the process of going to bed and hoping these two idiots followed his example. “Now,” he says, after a minute. “Thank you for letting us sleep in your home, now please… Please let us sleep in your home.” 

Oikawa eventually relents with a grumble to himself, and Kuroo drags himself up too. 

---

 

Oikawa’s mother was an odd woman. That is to say, she was actually incredibly nice, and had greeted the boys with open arms and told them they were welcome to stay the night and they had futons they could set up for them, and if you need anything just ask , but that whole interaction had been prefaced by her expressing genuinely shock when her son walked through the door. 

“You’re not sleeping at Iwaizumi’s?” she had said, as if being told a celebrity would be sleeping at her house. 

“Nah,” Oikawa had replied, casually, as if completely unaware of the very different emotional experience his mother was having. “Iwa puts up with so much, and these two needed a place to crash.” 

Kuroo cannot stop thinking about it. 

He also has an older sister, a sister that should be approximately the same age as Oikawa’s, who was still living at home with them. He can’t imagine coming home and it not being home. Being filled with his mother and sister, supposedly ‘affectionately’ screaming at each other through the house, filled with his father laughing at their antics and making dinner, filled with the movement and life and joy he associated with his family. 

He’d always thought he was the distant one, considering how often he slept over at Kenma’s, but… his mother still panicked if he forgot to tell her that’s what he was doing. 

He tosses and turns and cannot stop thinking about it. 

“Kenma,” he says, after a minute, when he rolls back around to face his friend. 

He sees Kenma’s brow scrunch together, eyes squeezing shut, resisting Kuroo’s voice for a minute before he whines out:

“What could you possibly need?”

“Does your mother care, how much time you spend at my place?”

This seems to confuse Kenma more, and squeezes his eyes for a moment longer before peeling them open to look at him. Kenma is quiet for a moment, thinking, before he says:

“No? She trusts you, so…”

“I just mean… I haven’t been able to get how weird Oikawa’s mum was, when we showed up, out of my head,” he explains, scooting in closer until they were almost nose-to-nose, so that he could speak with a barely audible whisper. 

Kenma shrugs. “Why?”

“Well… I dunno… it’s kinda sad, isn’t it? I wouldn’t want to be like that with my mum…”

Kenma shrugs again, before saying: “Some families are just… like that. It’s not worth speculating about, you could just ask…”

“No I can’t,” Kuroo scoffs. “Are you crazy? I barely know the guy.”

“You spend every weekend with him,” Kenma replied. “We’re sleeping on his floor.”

Kuroo sighs, relenting a little bit to the fact that, okay, maybe he does actually know the guy, but… 

“I don’t want to pry.”

“Then you don’t get to know, simple as that.”

“I hate your cold, calculating logic,” Kuroo replies, before Kenma says:

“Good. Let me go to sleep now.”

Kuroo hums an acknowledgement and rolls over onto his back, staring at the ceiling for a moment, before a shadow that flits across it catches his attention. He turns his eyes to the window. The glossy, blackish-blue sky reflected through the glass was marred slightly by the silhouette of a cat’s ears ducking down and away. 

Kuroo stares at the window for a second, trying not to remember all the things Oikawa had told him about the bakeneko. Something about seeing them being an omen of ill fortune. 

 

---

 

Because they stayed up so late, they slept in very late. And because they slept in so late, they missed the morning trains. I mean, they had to stay for lunch, and then they met up in town and explored some of the parks and trails there, and Oikawa kept losing his mind about everyone needing to pay more attention to the phone data, but Kenma assured him through no less than eight sharp snaps that he would properly sift through everything at home, and that the data that came through is mostly unformatted and, for lack of a better word, raw. 

“If there are images, they may have come through as files my computer can’t open. The program I used is imperfect, and had to copy everything, so I don’t know what wasn’t copied correctly yet,” he says, and Kuroo is genuinely impressed by his patience, even though he looks about thirty seconds away from tearing Oikawa’s face off. 

So they have lunch and hang out and by the time Kuroo and Kenma are on the train back to Tokyo with a Bokuto shaped third wheel, it’s already starting to get dark. 

They have to switch lines, to go up to Saitama, and although it’s not late late, it is dark , the sun not quite in the habit of staying out late at this part of the year. Kenma is shivering, adjusting his jacket tighter around him and muttering under his breath. Bokuto is immune to the cold and isn’t even wearing a jacket, but has thankfully managed to quiet down and seems mostly occupied by something on his phone. 

They stand in the dark, waiting for their next train to come by. Kuroo puts his hands in his pockets to try and warm them up, half watching a group of teenagers off to the side fighting over how to read the map they had. 

“Mrrw?”

Kuroo turns around, only slightly surprised to see the cat sitting on the back of a bench, its white tail hanging down and swaying hypnotically. It looks like it’s watching him. It always looks like it’s watching him, but this is on another level. It blinks slowly, and its tail flicks again, and for a brief moment in the wavering light at the dark station, Kuroo thinks he’s seeing double. 

“Hey, it’s the cat,” Kenma says, and Kuroo realizes others can see the cat too, and he’s not crazy,  it actually is following him. Kenma fumbles around to pull out his phone. 

“What are you doing?” Kuroo asks. 

“Filming it, people love the cat…”

“He is a cutie,” Kuroo agrees. 

“Can you call him over?”

“Mhm?”

“Well he hates me, can you get his attention? He always lets you pet him.”

Kuroo nods slightly, before crouching down and sticking his hand out, making a soft whispering noise to get its attention. The cat moves as if having been impatiently waiting for the opportunity, happily trotting down the bench and over to him. His nose is soft and gentle, sniffing at his hand before rubbing his face into it and purring quietly. 

Kuroo scratches his cheek and under his chin and chuckles softly at how happy the cat looks to be receiving attention. 

“I wish he liked me,” Kenma mumbles, crouching down beside him. 

The cat had, for some reason, consistently refused to let Kenma pet him. 

“He’s just… very particular,” Kuroo assures him, before the cat slips away from his hand to bump against his legs and nuzzle against his side. “But he’s such a good boy… Ah, I can’t believe I keep freaking myself out with that bakeneko nonsense. Look at him! He’s a darling.”

Kenma chuckled slightly. “It’s odd that he’s following you around, isn’t it?”

“I dunno. Maybe I just smell good,” Kuroo says, looking over to him. 

“That can’t be it,” Kenma replies, and Kuroo sways slightly, leaning into him. 

“What, you’re saying I smell?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“You do! You think I smell!’

“No!” Kenma laughed, shoving at him playfully, a redness creeping over his cheeks. “I didn’t. You smell fine…”

“Oh, well that’s a relief.”

“I just mean… why would a cat be this obsessed with you…”

Kuroo shrugged. “I don’t know. But what’s the other option? What do you think of all this bakeneko stuff?”

“I don’t know,” Kenma says, looking a little distracted as he looked back at Kuroo. Kuroo cannot help but wonder what was occupying his mind. Kenma was so perceptive, he was always thinking, and Kuroo could tell he was now, eyes fluttering across Kuroo’s face, holding eye contact just for a second before tilting his head down again. “I don’t think it’s… I think a few months ago I would have said no way. But…”

“Recent events?” Kuroo says. 

“Yeah, recent events.”

Kuroo swallows, to try and deal with the dryness in his mouth as he watched Kenma watch the floor, before pulling himself together quickly, and turning to look behind him. 

“What about you, Bo? Have the ghost adventures started-”

He cuts himself off. 

Bokuto was gone. 

Kuroo stands up quickly, so quickly, actually, that the cat is scared a few feet off, turning to look at him in betrayal. 

“Bokuto?”

Kenma gets up slowly as well. 

“Did you see him go anywhere?” Kuroo asks. 

“No… I was looking at- the cat,” Kenma replies, before looking around the train platform. It was… quiet. And empty. 

The teenagers were gone, and for a train stop just outside actual Tokyo, it was suspiciously empty. Kuroo can see someone, not Bokuto, way down at the other end, staring at their phone, but there should be more people. 

“I’ll text him,” Kenma says. 

Maybe it’s just listening to Oikawa talk that gets his head spinning like this, but Kuroo has to actively work to remind himself that it’s not possible that the entire train station suddenly got nabbed by aliens or disappeared. Unlikely is not impossible, and for every impossible-odds event, there’s a chance it’ll happen. It’s just a freaky coincidence, a moment between trains and buses and day plans that has emptied the station. In four minutes, when the trains arrive, when foot traffic appears, the unusual random event will disappear, and nobody but them will ever notice it. 

“Did he reply?”

“No,” Kenma says. 

“He was basically glued to- Bokuto!” Kuroo shouts, and he can’t help but feel an anxious stab of panic run through him. “Dude! Bo!”

“Mrrw?”

Kuroo whips around to look back down at the cat, but its long white tail is receding down the platform, as if bored of them and their travels. 

“Hey-” Kuroo starts, before realizing that he had been about to accuse the cat of leaving them, as if it had any knowledge of what was going on. He shuts his mouth, hoping Kenma had not caught the weird instinct. 

“He’s typing!” Kenma interrupts anyway, one hand reaching out to tug on Kuroo’s sleeve. “He’s-” and Kenma points, at the same time Kuroo lifts his head, and both are just in time to see Bokuto appearing around the far end of the train station, waving at them to greet them before making a motion to his phone and disappearing around the far end again. 

“What’s he doing?” Kuroo mutters, but can’t deny the wave of relief that overtakes him. 

“I don’t… he just said he was…”

“Let’s go,” Kuroo agrees, putting a hand on Kenma’s to push him ahead and make sure he walks in front. It’s some deeply set instinct that kicks up in him, to keep Kenma where he could see him ni this moment. “If we leave him alone too long he might actually disappear.”

Kenma nods, and they head across the cement train station, to the far end. Above them, a crackling noise comes to life from the speakers, announcing the arrival of the next train.

Bokuto has stepped off the train platform, onto a small patch of dried grass and packed earth on the outside edge, and when Kuroo and Kenma approach, he turns around with surprise, phone pressed to his ear. 

“Oh, hey- no, sorry, K’n’K caught up with me, one sec,” he says, before pulling the phone away from his ear. “Did you need something?”

“Ah- you - you disappeared-”

“Oh, sorry, you guys were playing with the demon cat, I assumed I wasn’t needed for that,” he says, before pointing to the phone. “Akaashi just needed some help so I stepped away.”

Kuroo stares at him for a moment, feeling a little bit foolish about how quickly he had leapt to the conclusion of ghost-demon-hell-monsters, but chuckles softly and puts up his hands. 

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to interrupt - our train will be arriving soon, though, so-”

“Yeah, I’ll-” Bokuto nods, putting up a hand to assure Kuroo that he was on top of it, before putting the phone back to his ear. “Hey, hey, sorry, I’m back. Kuroo’s fine, he's just an idiot.”

“Hey-”

“I’ll have to get on the train soon, though. Are you going to be okay? I don’t wanna leave if-”
Kuroo turns away from the conversation slowly, as the rumbling of the approaching train catches his attention, coming down the line. He can see the tracks stretching out across the grass, away from the city. They’re sandwiched here between multiple rails, but the space between the tracks stretches for quite a distance before closing up again. 

There’s… 

He heads off towards one of the tracks, trying to figure out if his eyes are just playing tricks on him or if it’s the lighting… After a quick check to make sure the train is on the other set of tracks and not the one he was about to lean over, he pulls out his phone and turns the torch on, fully expecting to light up the tracks and find nothing. 

The metal rails are covered with blood. 

He jumps slightly, scaring himself with the fact that he hadn’t been hallucinating it, staring down at the red-smeared metal and trying to process this in his head. 

“Woah-”

He yelps again, jumping properly this time as he turns to find Kenma, having snuck up on him. 

“Is that blood?” Kenma continues, without acknowledging his scare. 

“It… uh… looks like it…” Kuroo agrees, clearing his voice. He crouches down, hesitating slightly before reaching out to scratch at the metal. 

“Don’t touch it!” Kenma scolds, at the same time Kuroo says:

“It’s dried. Actually, sorry, no, it’s stained, it must be super old, it’s not like this happened last week.” 

“That’s no excuse for touching the blood rails,” Kenma mutters, and before Kuroo can say anything else, there’s a sudden blaring whistling, and a burst of hot, dusty air is kicked up as the train, on the opposite rails, goes blasting by a few feet away from his face. 

He coughs, stumbling back and standing up. He pulls Kenma back a few steps with him, eyes watering slightly. 

“Do you think-”

He cuts himself off, looking through the fast moving train. Between carts, flashes of the other side can be seen in rapid succession, just a blip in the darkness. But Kuroo is sure , he is sure there is something - someone? - on the other side. 

Low down. 

Like they were laying in the dirt, but propped up on their elbows. 

He can see them-

Or… no, no, he can’t, the train is- it’s just the flickering of the train lights-

And then the train has stopped, at the station, and Kuroo can look through to the other side, and there’s nothing there. 

Shit. 

“Did you see that?” 

He turns around to speak to Kenma, but his attention is immediately, once again, caught by the other side of the tracks, where that cat is standing. Standing. It’s raised up on its hindlegs, paws tucked against its soft fur, staring at him.

His skin feels cold, separate from the chill in the night air. 

He can still hear Bokuto speaking, seeming unbothered by everything a few meters away. 

“Kuroo?” 

He feels a hand on his elbow, and tries to snap himself out of his growing unease and look back down to Kenma. 

“...yeah?” he says, mouth dry. 

“We’re gonna miss the train, we should-”

“We can catch the next one. They run every eight minutes, we’ll be fine,” Kuroo replies, before he can even think about it. He looks back to where the cat had been standing, but it’s back on all four paws and trotting happily along the edge of a chain link fence, sniffing around as if it didn’t even know they were standing there. 

“...are you okay?”

“Yeah, I’m fine.” 

“You just look…”

“I’m fine.”

Kuroo turns around again, to look back where he had thought he’d seen the person, trying not to overthink this. What are the chances of it being anything but light and shadows? It’s not likely, is it? That it’s, what - what? - a ghost? Whose ghost? A monster?

Kenma is staring at him with some kind of concern, and it’s not until the train is whistling and moving off down the tracks further, leaving the station, that Kuroo manages to refocus properly. 

Bokuto is standing by the train platform, hands on his hips, staring at him. 

“Dude,” Bokuto called. “What was that about? I thought you cared about catching the next train? I wouldn’t have hung up on Akaashi if we weren’t getting on the train.” 

“Sorry,” Kuroo says, before turning to point across to where he had thought he’d seen the figure. “I… saw something.”

“Saw something?” Kenma says, softly. Bokuto cocks his head to the side, looking at him for a moment before heading over to them to join the group. 

“What do you mean?”

Kuroo has to think about it for a moment. “Just… between the carts, while the train was passing, I… saw… it looked like someone… laying down… or… it looked like a body, I swear, it was over on the other side and just gone once the train had passed.”

Bokuto gives a sharp laugh, clapping him on the shoulder. “Who are you, Daichi? You don’t normally get tricked by shadows.”

“No, I don’t,” Kuroo agrees, nodding. “But the cat-”

“The cat?” Kenma says, skeptically. 

“It was… doing that thing, where it stands up…” Kuroo says, trying awkwardly to explain and finding himself trying to show them by unconsciously folding his hands against his stomach like that cat held its paws. “It was freaky-”

Kenma stares at him for a second, before looking behind him to the tracks. “Uh… well… what do we do, then?”

“Oh, oh, Oikawa would kill was if we didn’t at least pretend to investigate,” Bokuto says. “What if it’s a ghost? Oh, ghosts definitely haunt train stations, obviously. Train ghosts! Train ghosts.”

Bokuto is already pulling out his phone to catch these apparently train ghosts, though he immediately gets distracted by something on his phone again and doesn’t complete the goal of opening his camera. 

Kuroo gets his phone out instead. 

“I’ll just go across the tracks and see if there’s any… rock or shadow or something…” Kuroo mumbles. “Might be a short video…”

“People will like it anyway,” Kenma replies. “They like your face.”

Kuroo chuckles, scratching at his chin. “I do have a good face, eh?”

“No comment.”

“Sourpuss.”

“Just go… film the rocks or whatever… I’m gonna see if I can get that cat to come back…” and Kenma has turned away, clearly spotting the animal watching them from the sidelines and fully distracting himself. Kuroo can’t help but smile slightly, because if there was one thing that never changes about Kenma it’s that he would never stop trying to make a cat like him.

“How many trains are we gonna miss?” Bokuto says. 

“Just… it’ll be five minutes, don’t worry…” Kuroo says, hopping over the tracks carefully to get to the other side. Heavy boot steps indicate that Bokuto is following behind him, having finally pulled out his phone to start filming. 

Kuroo presses record as well, still a little rattled and not sure exactly how to be entertaining in this moment as he swivels his camera around the rocks and dry grasses. There wasn’t anything immediately obvious that could cause a shadow or the kind of image Kuroo had seen, but…

A heavy weight lands on his shoulders, and Kuroo squawks slights as Bokuto hangs off him. 

“Hey, everyone!” Bokuto is shouting. “We’re out here in some old-ass train station and Kuroo’s seein’ ghosts. So we thought we’d take you along for the ride.”

“Ah… yep-”

Bokuto is already pulling away, speaking to the camera. “All I see is rocks, though. And some grass. And litter. Whoops, you don’t belong there,” he goes on, bending down to pick up a crumpled soda can. He swivels around to look at Kuroo again. 

“Kuroo, tell the people what you saw!”

“Ah… well… I don’t know. Just… as the train passed, it looked like I could see someone laying on the ground, between the carts. And - well, and the train tracks have blood one them-”

“Hold up, the tracks have blood on them?” Bokuto interrupts, looking baffled. “Why didn’t you say?”

“You were talking to Akaashi!”

“Even so, bloody railroads are a bit of an interruption-worthy event, yeah?”

“It’s old , it might… it could even be old red paint stains, or something. Who knows.”

“Oh,” Bokuto adds. “Plus, that evil demon cat is here- Kenma’s here too, by the way, he went off to pet the kitty…” Bokuto takes a moment, clearly zooming in on Kenma across the station trying to coax the cat into being his friend. “It does not look successful. Cat remains Kuroo’s bitch and Kuroo’s bitch alone.”

Kuroo rolls his eyes, turning to film himself kicking at rocks. 

Stupid train ghosts. 

Apparently, when Kuroo thinks it, everyone else also begins to think it.

“Kuroo,” Bokuto calls, as the lights of the next train have started to appear, the rumbling of its wheels shaking the earth. “Are we gonna catch that train?” 

“Sure,” he calls, and Bokuto hops the tracks to head back to the station. “Kenma!” he adds, in a slightly louder call, turning to see where he had gone. Kenma is already returning, though, rubbing at a newly scratched hand with a miserable expression. “Oh, good. We should catch this-”

Something is dragging itself towards Kenma. 

Not a cat - not a ghost . 

Kuroo is sure . He is sure . The body - half a body, really, as it’s the torso of a person, bloodied and torn in half, entrails dripping and dragging through the dirt and grass - drags itself on bent arms, nails digging into the earth to claw it’s way to-

Towards Kenma.

Panic like nothing Kuroo has ever felt overtakes him, a surge of fight that threatens to overwhelm every other sense he has, knowing, completely, that should that thing manage to get to Kenma it would only be causing harm. 

He’s running, and he opens his mouth to shout a warning, when Kenma beats him to it-

“Kuroo!” Kenma screams, lurching forward himself, eyes wide in horror, and it’s only then that Kuroo realizes that he has thrown himself in front of the rapidly approaching light of the train in his haste to close the distance. The whistle of the train screams.

He stumbles back, trying to reverse his speed, not even bothering to fall gracefully and concerned only with avoiding the full force of that train crushing him into the earth. He hits the ground, ears ringing and vision swimming with darkness, overwhelmed by what felt like one adrenaline spike after another. 

He takes in a breath that smells like grease and dirt, coughing and rolling over. He can hear Kenma’s voice, still screaming for him, desperate to figure out if he had escaped death or if it had been as bad as it looked. 

The thing-

He rolls to his knees, rocks and dirt digging into his palms, and he stares through the wheels of the train, through the narrow flashes between each cart, looking . 

Nothing. 

Nothing!

Nothing.

The train suddenly leaves with a puff of air behind it, and Kuroo is left on the ground, shaken and rattled but everything is still.

There’s no body - he’s not sure there ever was - and his own is in tact, save for a few bruises. 

“Oh my god-!”

Kenma’s screech pulls his attention from his thoughts, and he looks up in time to see Kenma leaping the tracks and stumbling over to him, dropping to his knees in front of him, both hands reaching to take Kuroo’s face in his palms, as if disbelieving he was actually still in one piece. 

“Oh my god, you’re okay-” Kenma is saying, in a shaking voice that is threatening to turn into tears. 

“Yeah…” Kuroo says, coughing again. “It didn’t hit me, I’m okay…”

“Too close,” Kenma replies, before pulling Kuroo into a hug, tight and crushing and startling irregular for Kenma, who scoffed at most forms of affection wholeheartedly. “That was too close, I thought it had got you, I thought-”

“I’m fine,” he mumbles, into Kenma’s shoulder, before squeezing his eyes shut and deciding to just relax and enjoy being coddled, especially after all that

“Why did you do something so stupid?” Kenma mumbles after a moment, pulling back to look down at him. “Didn’t you see the train? What the hell, Kuroo!’

“I… I did, but you-” Kuroo cuts himself off, trying to think through what he had seen. “I thought something was coming for you.”

“What?”

“I saw… I swear , I saw something coming for you, I thought it… I thought it was going to hurt you-” he leans forward again, to thump his forehead down against Kenma’s chest. “I just panicked, I didn’t think, I’m sorry…”

“Well… don’t,” Kenma mumbles. “Don’t ever be so stupid again, okay? No matter what.”

“No, no, nevermind, he’s fine-” Kuroo hears the other voice, and lifts his head up to see Bokuto hurriedly hanging up the phone. “Sorry for the false alarm- yes, I know, goodbye, thank you-”

“Who-”

“The fucking paramedics you-” and now Kenma is swatting at him. “We thought you’d be… you’d be mush! Do you know how much damage a train can do to a person? I thought you’d been killed.”

Bokuto very gingerly crosses the tracks, saying: “Paramedics do not like false alarms, as it turns out.”

“Sorry, I’m sorry-” Kuroo repeats, squeezing his eyes shut. “Let’s just-”

“Let’s go home,” Kenma finishes. “Now.”

---

 

“Oh yeah, those are super common ghosts,” Oikawa is saying, over the phone, the next morning. Kuroo is eating a bowl of cereal and Kenma’s family breakfast table, the phone set on speaker phone, face up, so both could listen. Kenma, however, has neglected his breakfast in favour of a game he’s playing. 

“Excuse me?” Kuroo says.

“Yeah, they call it a teke teke,” Oikawa goes on. “It’s a… Well, traditionally she’s a schoolgirl who fell on the tracks and got bisected by the train. She drags herself around, and if she catches you, she cuts you in half like she was. But you said it looked like an adult?”

“Yeah, like a man,” Kuroo says. “I thought it was… but… he wasn’t carrying any weapons, how could he have cut Kenma in half?”

“Well…” Oikawa is quiet for a moment, and Kuroo can hear him moving around in his space, probably getting ready for his own day, a cabinet shutting, someone in the house shouting a question Kuroo can’t make out. “Who knows. Folktales like the teke teke are not exactly… meant to be taken as gospel. Perhaps the legend came from a more normal vengeful spirit.”

“Mhm?”

“Like the man got killed by a train and now he’s trying to cut other people in half. Same legend, but not so… specific, y’know? Just a regular vengeful ghost. Hold on one minute.” 

“Okay-?”

Kuroo can hear Oikawa pull the phone away from his mouth, shouting in the distance: 

“Iwaizumi if you don’t get out of that shower soon I’m gonna break the door down!”

And then Oikawa has returned to the phone and says: “Sorry, he has a habit of using up all the hot water to spite me. Anyway, where were we? Oh, yeah, you almost got killed by a ghost. Are you sure it was trying to hurt Kenma?”

Kuroo has to shake his head to orient himself back into the conversation after the interruption, eventually stammering: “Uh… yes, yeah, why else would it have been dragging itself towards Kenma?”

“Well,” Oikawa says, and Kuroo can hear him drop down to lay on his bed. “You’re right, it doesn’t have a weapon. And, I dunno… from the sounds of things, it did a pretty damn good job of almost getting you cut in half, didn’t it?”

 

---

 

→ Queenfucker69: jesus christ. I click on a video called “kuroo almost got hit by a train” expecting some kind of clickbait nonsense with toy trains or terrible editing or whatever not THIS. 

→ Bugsy: only video title in the world to not be an overt lie. Lmao man clearly had an angel watching out for him oh my god. 

→ Aliensin4k: lmao okay but the 4 minutes of Oikawa explaining the lore of these train ghosts in the comfort of his bedroom and then hard-cutting to Kuroo almost getting fucked by a train is iconic these boys don’t give any shits. 

→ Lulupop: noooo KUROOOOOOO!!!!! PLEASE DON’T DIE OH MY GODDDDDD

→ PaisleyPal: i’ve been mostly here hoping that oikawa and sawamura were secretly fucking but now I nEED to know what’s going on between those two that hug looked PERSONAL. 

→ UshijimaW: Don’t stand in front of trains? 

     ↳ KurooT [replying to UshijimaW]: ASJHKFJL- DUDE I DIDN’T TRY TO WHAT THE HELL. 

     ↳ UshijimaW [replying to KurooT]: Just a suggestion. 

     ↳ KurooT [replying to UshijimaW]: STOP IT 

     ↳ TendouS [replying to UshijimaW]: iysm pls never stop being a terror on the general public. 

     ↳ UshijimaW [replying to TendouS]: :) 

     ↳ KurooT [replying to UshijimaW] WHY ARE YOUR SMILEY FACES SO THREATENING FUCK OFF 

→ Blaine’sWorld: haha oh nooooo!!! Kuroo be careful! Another great video tho. Was this real? Or staged? 

→ Microgasm: jesus Kuroo looks even hotter when he’s panicked and covered in dirt. I think I’m learning something about myself. 

Chapter 16: Excerpts

Excerpt taken from: “Overnight on a Haunted Campground”

 

[“Holy fucking shit-!” 

The camera is almost entirely unviewable as Daichi goes sprinting through the forest and has stopped caring about what he’s filming. Everything is dark and only the occasional streak of blurry light indicates anything is happening at all. His footsteps crunch of sticks and bushes, and this flight of panic lasts a good twenty, thirty seconds before he’s suddenly swiveling the camera up and panning frantically around the woods. The trees are dark and smudgy against each other, and the only sound audible to the viewer is Daichi breathing heavily behind the camera.

The camera doesn’t shake at all, making the moments when he chooses to suddenly pan and focus on a new patch of dark woods even more jarring. 

Nothing is there.

Eventually Daichi seems to realize that too, and a breathy chuckle is heard from behind the camera. 

“Guess I spooked myself, eh?” he says, sounding somewhat amused by the whole affair. The camera tilts up, to peer at glossy stars from between the dark shadows of the tree tops, before it turns around to focus on his face again. He’s breathing a little more normally now, catching his breath quickly. “I suppose that’s what I get, coming out here alone. I wonder what that was… raccoon? Nah, maybe something bigger like a dog. Could have been one of the other guys trying to freak me out…”

As he’s talking he slowly begins walking again. 

“Funny, though, like… I could have sworn I could see it, moving between the trees… Probably just an animal. Honestly, though, that doesn’t comfort me so much. An angry enough dog could probably do more damage than the ghost of some camp children. It’ll be fun to review the footage later. I wonder what the other guys have found.”-

-The camera is unsteady slightly, as it zooms in on Ushijima, who’s standing so, so exceptionally still, not quite naturally, one arm slightly out. The camera focuses on that arm, that has now become the resting place of a brownish black spider. It’s not a massive spider, but it’s big enough that the camera can pick up the gap between its legs as it tentatively explores the new land it’s on. 

“Guys,” Kuroo whispers behind the camera. “I think this is Ushijima’s first time experiencing fear.”

The completely-devoid-of-emotion expression he wore was somehow more emotive than if he’d been screaming. 

Bokuto is visible just off to the side of the frame, leaning in with a wide-eyed expression to watch the spider, hands flexing slightly as if weighing the pros and cons of trying to grab it. 

“Dude are you even breathing?” Kuroo says after a moment, and Ushijima flicks his eyes over to him.

“Alright, let me at it-”

Kuroo swivels the camera to where Oikawa had been watching in baffled silence from behind him, just in time to catch him taking his shoe off. 

“What are you gonna do?”

“Uh - Not waste an opportunity to hit Ushiwaka with a shoe?”]

 

Excerpt taken from: “Oikawa talks about aliens for 3h 47m uncut”

 

[“Here’s the thing,” Oikawa says, adjusting how he’s sitting to fold a leg under him and lean forward, looking into the camera much more intently, hands folded together. “Alien abductions are a very uniquely American thing. And I’m using that correctly, I mean from the tip of Alaska down to Punta Arenas in Argentina. People make jokes, all the time, about the odd propensity for sightings of UFO’s and abduction stories coming out of the United States area, compared to the rest of the world, and that’s true, and they will point - see, no… okay, so it’s not like… okay, so it’s way more complicated than that - listen, okay, listen-”

He shifts closer to the camera. 

“In 1961, Betty and Barney Hill publicized what will widely be known as the first abduction story in America. It's a classic, it’s got everything, weird medical tests, little grey men, a ship, missing time, hypnosis, the whole list, right? And this goes… insane viral - well… sorry, I guess viral isn’t the right word… what the hell was viral before the internet… talked about a lot… mass… mass consumption? Ach, it doesn’t matter. Okay, the point is that pretty much every single abduction story that happens after that one is basically copying it. The whole world read their description of aliens and now we have Greys- Except!”

And Oikawa bounces back again, as if cutting some other person off who was about to object to him, folding a knee up to lean on as he almost tipped off the bed “That’s not true! There are cases in South America that contain a lot, though not all, of the very same traits, small, bulbous headed aliens, medical experimentation, egg pods - they do happen before the Hills’ story comes out, it just wasn’t ever as popular. And sure a couple stray examples can’t completely override the… admittedly slightly rational theory of… inspiration and popular culture that could be responsible for the English-speaking world specifically getting fucked by little grey men, but maybe the other alternative answer is that all the stories line up because that’s what’s fucking happening! Why the hell would anyone expect all the aliens to look different if it’s one race doing all the abductions. Could you imagine if someone tried to pull that bullshit off on humans? Oh, sorry, all these stories of humans can’t be true, where’s the variation? Why don’t some have wings and third eyes or why aren’t some twelve feet tall? You don’t criticize a species for having traits! That’s ridiculous! And then, it's basically like a bunch of random non-believers saying aliens can’t be real because there’s not enough aliens? What’s that even about! Sure, I-”

“Baby,” a soft voice from behind the camera interrupts, barely more than a mumble clearly not meant to be performative. “You know I love when you go full crazy, but this video was supposed to be about the most credible abduction stories.”

Oikawa cuts himself off with a breathy sort of laugh, looking up, behind the camera with a soft smile on his face, seeming incredibly amused. 

“You know this is supposed to be an uncut video, right? I’m gonna have to keep that in,” he says, one hand vaguely waving towards the camera. 

“So what? I’d rather keep you on track than be here for fourteen straight hours.”

Oikawa laughs again, looking a little bit bemused before side-eyeing the camera and saying: “No, I mean that you- whatever… where was I…”

Now the voice on the other end of camera sounds more annoyed and embarrassed, muttering back: “Your notes just say Lonnie Za-”

“Lonnie Zamora!” Oikawa interrupts, shouting, and bouncing back into high energy. “Oh my god-”]

 

Excerpt taken from: “A Day in the Life: Fukurodani”

 

[“Yo, Kuroo gave me his sickass camera and told me to make a movie,” Bokuto is saying, loud and a little bit too close to the camera. “It’s awesome. Apparently everyone’s too busy to get together for a while, so he said I should just make something funny that you guys will like. Now, I don’t know what any of you guys like. Well, except for ghosts obviously, but like I don’t have any ghosts in my school or my house so you’re out of luck. Anyway. What I do have is an Akaashi, and I like Akaashi, so I assume you all will too. But that means we have to go on an Akaashi-hunting mission to find him. Hopefully it won’t be too hard.”

Bokuto mostly films himself as he walks, nodding to people the camera doesn’t pick up until they’ve passed and can be seen behind him. It’s evident that he’s rather popular, from the assortment of shouts and laughter that accompany his greetings and fistbumps. 

“Seen Akaashi?” Bokuto calls, to someone off camera. “We’re looking for Akaashi.”

“Who’s we?”

“Me and the internet.”

“Oh dear. Well, you know he’ll be down in the gym, or on his way there.” 

“Of course, of course! He’s still got volleyball - ugh-” and here Bokuto looks back to the camera, looking annoyed. “I, unfortunately, was pressured by my counselors into retiring from high school volleyball. Which sucks,  but it’s okay because I already have a scholarship lined up to play in a division one university team. So. All I have to do is take a few classes or something. I’m sure it’ll be fine. Anyway, Akaashi’s a year below me, so he’s still got regular practice. Let’s go see if he’s warming up.” 

The camera continues to bounce and jolt as Bokuto jogs through the hallways of the academy, eventually stopping when he has to adjust his hold to open the gym doors. 

“Hey hey hey!” he shouts, muffled slightly off camera. 

“Oh, Bokuto,” a softer voice says. “You’re not supposed to be here. I thought we told you-”

“I know, I know, I’m technically retired. That’s not what I’m here for,” Bokuto replies, adjusting the camera again and lifting it up to center on the new figure - he’s tall, with relaxed posture and a calm energy, eyes moving slowly as he glances Bokuto up and down. 

“What- what are you here for, then?” 

“Filming for the channel,” Bokuto says. “I wanted to show them the ‘ole gym and all my best friends, so naturally I had to come find the brand new captain of Fukurodani’s amazing volleyball team-”

“Aaaaah- no Bokuto-” and Akaashi’s face is turning red, so on impulse he turns away, lifting up his hands to hide his face. “I don’t want to be on camera, especially not in gym clothes after warming up, get that out of here-”

The camera turns around to face Bokuto again, though he keeps his attention behind it on Akaashi. 

“Aww, you look great though! And there’s no better look for anyone but after a volleyball warm-up, you can quote me on that.”

“...that’s not helping…”

“Oh, come on! Just say hi to the people!”

“No! I don’t want to do it, you can’t make me do it!”

“Even Kenma gets on camera sometimes!” Bokuto teases. “You’re not shier than him, are you?” 

“I don’t know! I’m whatever doesn’t like being on camera!” 

Bokuto laughs. “Fine, fine. Text me after practice, okay? And let me know if you want any help with-”

“No! You’re banned! Just go, get you and your camera out of here!”

“Okay, okay, geez,” he says, continuing to laugh as he turned around to head back the way he had come. Because he continues to point the camera at himself, this, momentarily, results in Akaashi appearing back in frame over his shoulder, which results in the man panicking and covering his face again until Bokuto had left the gym. 

“Isn’t he awesome?” Bokuto says, sighing, before saying: “I’ll see if I can find Konoha. He’ll help me tour the school-”]

 

Excerpt taken from: “Liveshow: Garbage Dump Duo”

 

[“Every comment for the last twenty minutes has just been ‘pussycat,’ why did you say that?” Kuroo says, leaning on the desk to read the chatroom closer. “This is a nightmare.”
Daichi shrugs, leaning back in his own chair and spinning it back and forth with his foot. He spun a pencil around his fingers, fidgeting to pass the time. 

“It’s what you are.”

“I hate that.”

“That’s not my problem.” 

“They’re not asking questions anymore!” Kuroo complains, before looking back to the camera. “Come on guys, we’re running out of stories to tell. Stop sending -  stop sending pussycat in the chat!”

Daichi snickers for a moment, before Kuroo scoffs, saying:

“Okay, okay, here - oh, okay, this person says the other boys have all publicly spoken about continuing their volleyball careers, but you guys haven’t mentioned anything, what are your plans for the future?”

Daichi lifts his head, giving a shrug. “Pass my exams?”

“Nothing more long term than that?”

“Long term hasn’t really been on my mind for a while,” Daichi replies. “I don’t… have much planned. Maybe I’ll apply to the police academy here in Miyagi.” 

“Ew,” Kuroo says, before saying: “No, the reason you guys haven’t heard us talk about the future is because we’re the two losers that are gonna go on to have a normal life. The other boys are all gonna become sports stars, we’ll just… still be here, I guess.” 

“Which is crazy,” Daichi says. “Objectively crazy. The idea that both Oikawa and Ushijima are probably going to be crazy famous nationally ranked athletes and I’ll be able to say I beat them in competition? Fantastic. I’m gonna make up a bunch of fake stories about them.”

Kuroo laughed, shaking his head for a second, before looking back at the chat and reading off: “Will the ghost hunting stop after you all graduate? Honestly, I don’t know. We haven’t really talked about it, but… I don’t think anyone wants to stop, so… Hey, Daichi-” he turns to look back at Daichi, who’s scooted in a bit now to read the chat himself. “If the other guys do ditch us, we should get a place together. Sure, we’re not Oikawa, but we could probably make it work to keep the channel going while they head off to be famous.” 

Daichi chuckled. “That’s… definitely doable. Does that mean I’ll have to move to Tokyo?” 

“Probably, you’d have to kill me to get me to move to Miyagi. And I’ve already been accepted into a business program at a pretty good university, so…”

“Damn you smart boys and your life aspirations. Fine. Deal. I think Suga’s moving to a university in Tokyo anyway, so I actually really don’t mind the excuse.” 

Kuroo grinned wider for a moment, before looking back to the chat that’s scrolling and reading the first thing that caught his eye, which was:
“If you had to have sex with one of the other guys to stay alive, who would it be? Dear god you people, take a cold shower.”

“Eh, that one’s easy,” Daichi replies, instantly, pointing at Kuroo. “Him.” 

“Oh, nice,” Kuroo replies. “Honestly? Same dude.” 

“Sweet.”

Before they can stop the action, Daichi has already offered his hand forward and Kuroo has met the fist bump. 

“That felt weird,” Kuroo said. 

“Yeah, I didn’t like that one…”]

 

Excerpt taken from: “Cue Card Q&A”

 

[“Why hasn’t everyone gotten together to do a video in a while?” Oikawa reads off his cue card. 

“Because it’s final exams, and we’re all trying to graduate,” Daichi replies back, before rolling over on the bed - he’s in the background, Oikawa has taken up a seat on the floor in front of the computer - to grab his own cue cards to read the next one. 

“Uhhh - How old were you when you started believing in aliens?” 

“I’ve always believed in aliens,” Oikawa replied, shifting forward. “I don’t remember not believing in aliens at any point.”

Oikawa flips his cue cards. 

“Be honest - is there any inter-relationship drama among the boys? Any hook-ups? Stolen girlfriends?”

“I don’t think so,” Daichi says. “Nothing I know about. All of my closest friends hate Ushijima and Oikawa, does that count?”

“Yes, and I’ll gladly take it,” Oikawa replies, before adding: “Truthfully, nothing is going on between any of us. But I am in a relationship, so… that’s probably why. If I was single-”

“Don’t start rumours,” Daichi warns, before lifting up his next cue card. “Cats or dogs?” 

“Mhm. Cats.”

“Dogs.”

“Figures.” 

Oikawa lifts up his card, yawning in the process and squinting at the writing for a moment before reading: “Who do you think would die in an apocalypse first?”

“Bokuto,” Daichi says. 

“I’m voting Daichi,” Oikawa replies, and before Daichi can protest, he adds: “Sorry, but- I mean…”

Daichi rolls his eyes, and pulls up his next cue card. “Biggest fear that isn’t paranormal?”

“That there’s always going to be someone better than me no matter what I do,” Oikawa says, without missing a beat. 

“Christ,” Daichi says. “I was going to say something terrible happened to my family, but you beat me to being weird and dark.”

“Hey, I beat someone,” he replies, which prompts Daichi to put his face into the bed. While he pulls himself together, Oikawa reads his next card: “Do you use any kind of mount for filming? I’ve noticed Sawamura’s camera is incredibly still, even when he’s screaming in fear.”

“Oh-” and Daichi lifts his head again, before holding out his hand, as if to check if it was steady or not. “No, we don’t use any kind of tool, I’ve just always had really steady hands. Can I blame that on volleyball-” he reaches over, nudging the back of Oikawa’s head. “-you don’t receive serves from this one if your hands shake every time you’re nervous.”

“I mean,” Oikawa laughs, letting himself be knocked forward a bit. “Cool under pressure and completely stone-cold still while terrified are too different things. I mean, even my hands shake when I think I’m being chased by a demon.”

Daichi just shrugs. “I dunno. I’ve just always been that way. Doesn’t mean I’m not scared, I’ve just always been really good with adrenaline, I guess.”

“Freak of nature,” Oikawa responds, before adding: “What’s the next question?”

“Mhm…” Daichi flips his cue card, snickering slightly before saying: “Who was that voice calling Oikawa baby in the Oikawa talks video?”

Oikawa jerks his head around. “Who wrote these cards?”

“Kenma.”

“...brat-”]

 

Excerpt taken from: “There were stray kittens behind Shiratorizawa (Substitute Friends Adventure)”

 

[An effect is overlaid on the film so that the footage crackles to life, jiggling around slightly until Kenma has the camera pointed at his face. He seems mostly concerned with adjusting the settings and exposure for a moment, before pulling back, smiling at the camera for exactly two seconds before dropping the look and starting to speak. 

“Okay, so you’re probably wondering where we are,” he says, the backdrop behind him a mostly grassy, occasionally tree-dotted greenspace. “Which… good question. Well…”

The camera flips around, to show off the long, sloping grassy hill that led down towards a patch of sparse woodlands. Centre of the hill, swinging his arms energetically, is Tendou. He skips around to look back at the camera, waving. 

Kenma’s voice, quiet, comes from behind the camera, mumbling: “There’s Tendou.” 

“Come on!” Tendou shouts. “Catch up!” 

“I don’t wanna… ugh… I hate…” and Kenma starts to jog down the hill, just for long enough to catch up to Tendou and point the camera up at him. Being much, much taller, Tendou decides to just take the camera and stretch his longer arm out, to film the both walking at the same time. 

“Did you tell them what we’re doing?” 

“No.”

“Oh! Well, we are on a little adventure this morning. This is - sorry, this is the greenspace behind Shiratorizawa. See, the boys were out overnight in some cabin or whatever, and Kenma was going to go hang out with his Karasuno friends, but I mentioned I’d been hearing some crying from the woods at night-”

“Not crying-crying,” Kenma cuts in quickly. “He said, like… kitten crying.”

“I think a stray cat gave birth somewhere in the little woods here, before the fence,” Tendou explains. “So, since our boys are gone and left us with nothing to do, we thought we should go see if we can get them out of the woods and somewhere nice and warm and safe.” 

“But it’s a pretty big space… we might be here all morning…” 

“Eh, don’t worry about it,” Tendou says, tapping his temple. “I’m pretty lucky with finding things. And they were makin’ a lot of noise earlier, so it shouldn’t be an issue. Besides-”

And here, Kenma holds up a plastic bag. “We brought treats and food,” he finishes.]

[Kenma is setting the camera nearly into the earth, making sure it was stable before backing away and clearing the frame so that Tendou, a little bit in the distance, could show off carefully moving the bushes of a plant aside, to where, in the darkness, a blurry bundle of fluff can be seen. 

“We found the kittens,” Kenma says, from behind the camera. “Their momma is clearly someone’s pet - collared and all. She probably got pregnant and either ran off to find somewhere to have the babies, or… got abandoned because the owners didn’t wanna deal with it.” 

The mother cat hisses slightly, as Tendou puts his hands closer to her. 

“Chill out, little lady,” Tendou says. “We’re here to help - here, Kenma, bring some of those treats-”

Kenma scurries away from the camera to do as asked.]

[The camera is pointed at Kenma again, awkwardly, since his arms are mostly filled with a big off-white cat, who seems to have become very docile after what was a long, extended sequence of Kenma and Tendou getting to know her and slowly coaxing her into trusting them. 

“We’re lucky she’s a housecat,” Kenma says, grunting slightly as he adjusts the big cat in his arms. “Otherwise she probably wouldn’t have let her take the babies. But she’s such a darling, look at her!”

“Her babies are a little wiggly-” Tendou’s voice calls back, complaining. “Normally a basket of kittens sounds delightful but honestly the kittens without the basket are just a hassle.” 

“Tendou didn’t think to bring anything to carry the babies in,” Kenma explains.]

[They’re back inside the dorm room, a sharp cut from the previous shot of them talking about how to go about getting them taken care of and what the next steps would be. Sitting on the bottom bed of the bunk beds at Shiratorizawa, Ushijima has three kittens wrangled into his arms, each in a slightly different state of sleep, one of them trying to get up his chest. He maintains a perfectly flat expression.

“The boys got back from their little sleepover,” Tendou’s voice says, behind the camera. “So ‘Tosh is gonna help me get them to a vet or shelter or wherever they need to go, since Kenma and Kuroo have to head out soon. Hey, you doing alright? What’s on your mind?” 

Ushijima glances up at him. “This is excellent,” he says.]

 

Excerpt taken from: “Staying at a Haunted Cabin.”

 

[“-oh shit-fucking - oh my god-” 

Daichi is sprinting through the woods again. “Why the hell does this keep happening? Why the-” the camera drops, and it’s a blurry mess of streaks of green and darkness. He runs for a few more seconds, before lifting his camera again to pan around rapidly. “Okay… okay, I think… I think…”

His breathing comes in rough, but his hands are still. After a minute or two he turns the camera around to look at himself again as he starts walking through the woods. 

“Okay, that time, I swear, there really was something there. And I’m not saying, like, oh, I saw shadow people, I know everyone thinks I’m hallucinating - I don’t do auditory hallucinations, okay? The bushing was crunching and moving, something was there.”

There’s a bit of a pause, before distantly, from somewhere else in the forest, a voice calls:

“Dai? Is that you shrieking or…?”

Daichi laughs, halfheartedly, before calling back: “Yeah, that was me! Something’s in these woods, man-”

“You always think something is in the woods-”

“Not that kinda something. Like a real something-” as he’s speaking, the camera picks up a rustling noise, and Daichi stumbles around, frantically turning to try and see what was following him. Silence. 

He slowly starts approaching where the bushes had been moving, crouching down and trying to peer through the leaves, to get eyes on whatever might have been making all the noise.

“God, why do I keep agreeing to this…” he groans, reaching a hand out to oh-so-slowly push some of the branches aside and-

The camera jerks suddenly and falls to the ground as Daichi shrieks-

-The shot opens up suddenly with Daichi sitting on a bed in what sounds like a very busy and loud emergency room.

“You gonna tell them what we’re doing here?” Oikawa’s voice comes from behind the camera. Daichi glares at him. 

“I’m getting a rabies shot,” Daichi replies, with the most fake politeness he’s ever performed, sweet smiles across his face entirely fake. 

“And why’s that?”

“...because I got bit by a rat.” 

Oikawa turns the camera around to point at himself, adding: “What’s crazy is that the woman asked how he got close enough to a rat to get bitten by it in the middle of the woods, and unironically he told her that he assumed he was hallucinating a ghost.”

“Given the context it was a reasonable assumption!” Daichi shouts.]

Excerpt taken from: “Oikawa talks: Sino-Japanese readings of Folklore”

 

[“-look, I’m not saying everyone needs to be aware of every folklore ever, but there’s significant reasons to believe that like any animal, cryptids and monsters would be able to cross borders, right? And the Chinese Fenghuang is a literal bird, so the idea that there are a dozen different firebirds, phoenix and Hō-ō and everything else, like… why wouldn’t it be one creature with a wide habitat? Just because they have different names from different languages doesn’t mean a bird didn’t fucking fly over the Sea of Japan. Sure, the legends vary and have different… origins, supposedly, but honestly, if you were playing a game of telephone across a thousand years through three different languages, you might get some of the details wrong too, y’know? So… it’s not so hard to believe that there’s one undiscovered bird species, is it?”
He stares at the camera for a moment, before his attention is caught by something behind the camera. 

“Sorry,” Oikawa says. “My… filming assistant is holding up a sign that says ‘get to the fucking point,’ so…”]

 

Excerpt taken from: “Nightmare Sleepover Study Session.”

 

[The camera opens up, clearly a phone’s camera, pointing up at Oikawa who’s glancing down at it, as if trying to get it ready without alerting anyone to what was going on. Over the footage, text appears to fill in the information that Oikawa hadn’t felt capable of saying out loud in the moment. He looks… uncomfortable, but not outright afraid. 

Yellow text reads: “Daichi and I both have exams in the morning, so we’d gotten together for a last minute study session.”

The camera moves around, as Oikawa flips it to point outwards. The room is lit with a lamp, and both boys had been sitting on the ground, textbooks and papers scattered about in haphazard panic for the upcoming exam. Daichi is sitting, leaning back on his hands, and is staring towards something to the side of the room, absolutely statue-still and unblinking. 

Yellow text reads: “Something caught his attention and he just froze.”

The audio of the actual film has Oikawa saying: “Uh - Daichan?” 

“Mhm?”

It’s an uncommitted noise as he doesn’t take his eyes off whatever he’s looking at. Oikawa moves the camera slowly, to show the doorway to the bedroom, though the way it’s angled, he can’t see the gap in the door that’s propped open just an inch - where Daichi must be looking. 

Yellow text reads: “Sorry for the camera work, I didn’t want him to know I was filming in case he started performing or changing it for the audience.”

“What are you looking at?” Oikawa laughs, though in the real footage there’s a tone of anxiety. 

“You can’t see it?”

The camera is shaking slightly. It jolts suddenly, as Oikawa clearly adjusts his hold on the camera. 

“No, dude, I-”

And then suddenly Daichi is shaking his head, blinking rapidly and seeming to snap back to normal. He gives Oikawa a pleasant, sort of apologetic smile, before saying: “Sorry, dude, The shadows are just playing tricks on me-” and now Daichi is getting to his feet, wandering over to the door as if nothing had happened, and shutting it firmly. “Where were we?”

“Uhhh-”

“Chapter four?”

“Chapter four, right.”]

 

Excerpt taken from: “Liveshow: Bird Brains”

 

[Bokuto is dancing in the chair he sits in, music playing loudly enough to be heard by the camera, but not quite being picked up clearly. He seems to be having a good time, half distracted by the chat, clearly having trouble sitting still. 

Contrasting him, beside him, is Ushijima, who’s leaning forward on his elbows and staring at the chat, still not quite quick enough to really catch most of what they send. He’s trying his best. 

Bokuto starts singing along with the song that’s playing, getting really into the dancing. 

“Someone says…” Ushijima starts, slowly. “Where are you?” 

“Mhm… Tokyo,” Bokuto replies, before pointing a thumb at himself. “My place. We don’t always film in Miyagi, you know.” 

Ushijima nods an agreement, before Bokuto seems to pull himself together and scoots forward to read at the chat. 

“Do any of you have any hidden talents?” he reads. 

“I do not hide anything,” Ushijima replies. 

“Uh - well, maybe not intentionally, but these guys don’t know anything about us, so…” Bokuto prompts, still bobbing his head with the music. “Any skill or talent they might not be aware of?” 

Ushijima has to think about this for a moment, before saying: “I… have found that I am usually better at drawing than people expect me to be.”

“Oh, no shit?” Bokuto says, a sentence that sends a baffled expression across Ushijima’s face as he cannot figure out how to respond. When Bokuto doesn’t get an answer, he eventually turns back to the chat. “Well, you heard it here first, folks. I’ll try and verify that later. Anyway - oh, someone asks where Daichi is, he was supposed to be a part of this liveshow.” 

“Daichi went out to-”

It’s subtle, but clear that Bokuto has smacked him under the desk they’re sitting at. 

“The other boys just… had a…” and now Bokuto is realizing he doesn’t have a good end to the sentence. 

Ushijima is staring at him, rapidly trying to keep up with the social cue here, on what he was supposed to not be saying. 

“Yes… he…”

“They’re… just out,” Bokuto settles on eventually. “Oikawa and Kuroo went with him. Just… for friendship purposes.”

An expression crosses Ushijima’s face, indicating that even he knew that wasn’t great. 

“It’s normal,” Ushijima adds, unhelpfully, eventually. 

“Everything is fine,” Bokuto agrees, nodding. “And normal.”

“Yep.”

“Right.”

They sit there awkwardly in silence for fifteen seconds before Ushijima nods to the chatroom and says: “That person asked if we killed them.”]

Notes:

tryna find a creative way to timeskip without actually timeskipping? a challenge. I hope you didn't mind the format for this particular chapter, I had fun playing around with the camera's pov. As always thank you for reading and I'll see you in the next one xx

Chapter 17: Ocular Cytology

Approximately 25 days before “Live Show: Bird Brains,” would be hosted, Sawamura Daichi finds himself telling his mother that he was going over to Sugawara’s place for the night, and then scurrying across town to Oikawa’s sister’s rundown little basement suite. It is the first time that he has overtly and intentionally misdirected her about where he was going. He’s pretty sure she wouldn’t care, about him being over with Oikawa, but he’s got this gut instinct that’s telling him they’ve entered territory they’re no longer allowed to walk carelessly through. 

The days are getting longer but the sun has still set, and Oikawa answers the door quickly when Daichi texts that he was there. 

He shrugs his jacket off, shivering slightly from the damp chill in the air, glancing around the little living room for a second before focusing on Oikawa. 

“Why not Iwaizumi’s?” he says. 

“I…” an explanation dies on his tongue. “Iwaizumi is used to my antics but even this is a little bit beyond… I don’t want him to freak out.”

Daichi nods slightly, slipping his shoes off before heading further into the house. “Is your sister home?”

“No, she’s out with Takeru. But they’ll be back shortly.”

Daichi nods again, trying to still the anxiety in his stomach. He’s not used to feeling anxious, certainly not like this. He carries his bag over to set on the kitchen table, before taking out his phone to unlock and set up. Oikawa settles on one of the chairs, and Daichi puts his phone down in front of him. 

It’s open to a map - the app that came to connect to the tracker he had put into his father’s jacket - and it's a rather detailed report on his movement throughout the last two weeks. It’s a little hard to read, since every move is overlaid on itself for every day, but it gives a pretty clear indication of usual habits. 

“We can ignore these-” Daichi says, waving a finger over some of the outskirt locations or one-off stops that appear. “I already looked into these locations, they’re restaurants, stores, businesses that literally anyone might choose to enter, they don’t matter.”

“Okay,” Oikawa says, pointing to the biggest cluster of movement. “What’s that?”

“That is… what I assume is my father’s work, wherever his office is. Like eighty percent of the time I checked his location he was here. But over the last two weeks-” he uses his fingers to zoom out of the map of Tokyo to show off the whole of Japan, where there are further outlying dots and paths that clearly indicate airline travel. “-He visited a tiny town in Shimane, over here, and then almost immediately after that-” he moves the map down. “-Went to Okinawa. After that, he goes back to Tokyo for a bit, and then takes a trip-” more map movement. “-to Toyama Bay, and then, again, immediately after it returns to Okinawa. He returned last night, and he’s back in Tokyo now.” 

“He went to Okinawa after both unexplained trips?” Oikawa says, frowning at the map. 

“Mhm. The tracker pinged him in Naha for a lot of the time. I actually think he had left his jacket in the hotel room he was staying in, because apart from the occasional movement into the city, normal movement, he stayed still. And the inn was just… normal, nothing I could find on it indicated anything suspicious, and there was nothing around the area I thought was weird…”

“What about - Shimane, and Toyama Bay?”

“It… nothing overly suspicious. Every location the tracker picked up seemed… public, or… at the very least empty. He spent a lot of time on the waterfront in Toyama, but… I mean, it’s a bay, and…”

“And then he… went to Okinawa…” Oikawa muses, sitting back in his chair and thinking this through. “Do you have… any idea of what he might have been doing down there?”

Daichi feels a stab of awkwardness here, hesitating a moment before saying:

“Well… uh… yes. Not exactly, no, but… I mean, we are from Okinawa, my grandparents live there in Naha.” 

Oikawa pauses, before leaning forward to put his face in his hands. “Excuse me?”

“I mean, I double checked the tracker, if he was visiting them, he wasn’t wearing the jacket, it doesn’t look like he ever went,” Daichi hurries. “And it’s still crazy weird to be secretly visiting your own parents. Plus, that doesn’t account for why he only goes after a visit somewhere else in Japan, I don’t know anyone in the other places.”

Oikawa pulls himself together a bit, before saying: “Why does every interesting new clue come with this massive asterisk of your family just being fucking weird?”

Daichi hesitates for a second before saying: “Honestly, I… don’t have an answer for that one.”

Oikawa looks back down to the map, staring at the patterns for a minute before frowning and saying: 

“When did they move to Miyagi?”

Daichi has to do the math in his head. “Fifteen or so years ago? I think I was, like, three or four. I don’t really have any memory of anything before moving.”

Oikawa lifts a hand, as if to begin chewing on the nail of his thumb before immediately catching himself and stopping, sitting on his hand. 

“I guess it’s not common for people to have memories that young,” Oikawa says after a moment, chewing on the inside of his cheek. “Ryukyuan?”

“Mhm.”

Oikawa thinks for a moment, and Daichi can tell that there’s something in his brain that’s swirling around that he is choosing not to share. 

“Why did they leave? Why move to Miyagi, of all places?”

Daichi opens his mouth to reply, but immediately catches himself as he thinks over what he’s about to say. Huh… 

“My dad got a job,” Daichi said, after a moment, slowly. “The… his job, the job he has now. My mother always said she didn’t like living in the city, so they moved me and her out here. What are you thinking?” 

“That if your dad’s job was going to require him to travel to and from Okinawa every single week, moving to Tokyo seems like a stupid choice,” Oikawa replied. “Especially if his wife didn’t even like the city.”

Daichi sniffs, nodding slightly even if it sounded like Oikawa was only sharing half his thoughts on the matter. 

“Right,” he agreed. 

Oikawa points at the Tokyo office. “What about this place? What do we know?”

“Oh, well-” and Daichi pulls back, leaning against the table. “Quite a bit, actually. That just so happens to be the same corporate building that Kuroo’s father works in. Albeit, probably on a different floor, but same building.”

Oikawa arches an eye, before looking back up to him. “Is that so?”

“Mhm.”

“So what are we thinking?”

“I’m thinking… If we can already get into the building, why not go snoop around, see what goes on in a building like that? We can’t… fly out to Okinawa, we have exams and graduation and… well, parents to worry about, so unfortunately that’s a bit off the schedule, but Kuroo already broached the subject of getting an in into the office there as a potential video, so it wouldn’t raise any alarms with his father if we cashed it in, right?” 

Oikawa breaks into a grin. “I like when you’re a little bit schemey. You should do this more often.”

“I wouldn’t want to take your brand, though,” Daichi snickers, but before he can reply, the front door opens. Oikawa locks Daichi’s phone, and they both look up in time to see first a very uninterested in them Takeru go sprinting away towards his bedroom, followed by Oikawa’s sister, Saku, come around the corner looking exhausted and ruffled. 

She spies them, breaking into a smile. 

“Oh, hello boys,” she says, putting her hands on her hips. Despite her real unkempt appearance, she seemed full of a very friend kind of energy, as if genuinely excited to have company in her house from these two teenage boys. 

She looks a lot like Oikawa, Daichi decides - or, rather, maybe Oikawa looks like her. Same eyes, same face shape, same tall, willowy sort of build. Her hair is cut just above shoulder length, black in colour. She smiles the same way he does - Daichi realizes exactly how young she was when she had her son. She looks like she could still be in high school, even though he knows she’s twenty-two, or something close to it.

“Hey, Saku,” Oikawa drawls. “Welcome home.”

“I’m gonna be honest,” she chirps. “When you said you and a friend would be here, I had fully assumed it was Iwaizumi. Who’s this?”

“Oh, sorry-” and Oikawa stands up, to step out from between her and Daichi, waving a hand lazily between them. “Daichi, this is my sister, Saku - Saku, this is Sawamura Daichi, one of my ghost hunting compatriots.”

Saku had been smiling as she listens, and the look drops immediately when Daichi is introduced. 

“It’s a pleasure to meet you,” Daichi says, trying to push through the awkwardness. “I’ve heard a lot about you, Oikawa-” he cuts himself off, panicking slightly as he realizes there are now two Oikawas, and finishes with”-never shuts up. Glad to put a face to the name.”

“Uh-huh,” she says, before seeming to pull herself together and return to her easy smile. “Yeah, I… Oikawa mentioned the… videos. It’s a pleasure, really, you seem great- uh, Tooru?”

“Mhm?”

“Are you spending the night here?” 

“That was the plan,” Oikawa replies. 

“Is he spending the night here?”

Daichi doesn’t need to be a genius to suddenly feel uninvited, so he says: “Oh, I - no, I’ve got other arrangements,” before Oikawa can say anything on his behalf. This earns him a look of confusion from Oikawa, and a nod of understanding from Saku. 

“Well, if you don’t mind the floor, we don’t have an extra futon but you’re welcome to stay,” she says, and Daichi assumes she’s lying.

“It’s fine, we-” he glances at Oikawa, who looks absolutely baffled. “-were pretty much done for the night anyway…” and he starts to grab his stuff and tuck his phone away. “I’ll text you tomorrow.”

“Oh, okay,” Oikawa agrees, clearly deciding this was not something to fight against at the moment. Daichi has never been more grateful towards his interpersonal communication skills. Thank god.

Daichi gives Saku a nod, and both of them one more goodbye, before exiting the little house and finding himself alone on a dark street corner, having already told his mother he’d be gone for the night. Shit. 

After staring for a minute at the darkness down past one of the streetlamps, he pulls out his phone to scroll through his contacts. 

Who in the hell could he possibly call right now? He might just have to go home and pretend like Suga suddenly… canceled? Had to go?

Ushijima was out - they’d already learned that Shiratorizawa required advanced notice for all overnight guests. 

And…

He hovers over Suga’s contact. He… would, probably let him stay the night on such short notice. Actually, had the context of this issue been absolutely anything else, he wouldn’t hesitate at all to call and see if he could stay over. The problem was… the explanation. 

If he was clever, he could use his words right and imply it’s a spontaneous fun adventure, hey, let’s hang out tonight at your place. But Daichi wasn’t confident in his wit, and was confident in the fact that he had never done anything spontaneous in his life, ever, and Suga would see right through him. 

He’d ask questions. 

Why can’t you go home? What were you doing at Oikawa’s? What was the plan? Why did things change suddenly?

Of course he’d let Daichi stay, but…

I can’t tell him all this.

And Suga could always tell when he was being evasive or untrue. He didn’t trust himself not to make Sugaware hate him by overtly lying about what he had been doing and why he needed a place to sleep.

Asahi?

No… Asahi was so prone to overthinking he’d probably independently manage to decide that Daichi was on the run from his father’s alien conspiracy without him actually having to give any information. 

He slowly turns to start walking down the street towards his own house, expecting that he might have to bite the bullet and pretend him and Suga had gotten in a fight or something, scrolling through his contacts. 

Kiyoko is absolutely off limits, plus her house is so far away…

He passes under one of the street lamps, which flickers above him as he does. 

Coach Ukai? No, no… I’m sure he’d give me a place to crash but he’d probably also assume he needed to call CPS…

He leaves the light of the street lamp, the glow of his phone suddenly that much brighter in his eyes. He glances up, looking around the dark and empty street and realizing he was otherwise alone, the houses dark. There’s an empty bus stop ahead of him, and an intersection past that, quiet and still. It’s not that late, though…

He looks behind him, at the glow of the light of Saku’s house, before looking back ahead down the road.

There’s a man sitting at the bus stop. 

Daichi blinks, surprised slightly by the man’s appearance - he was very sure that the bus stop had been empty a second ago. He is immediately overwhelmed by the same sensation he gets when he’s peering between shadows and trying to decide if his eyes are playing tricks on him. But the man looks real, he’s just… a guy.

He sits on the bench, looking out over the street and staying very still. He doesn’t look this way, he doesn’t shuffle around. He just sits. 

Daichi slowly starts walking again. It’s an older man, with a long sort of face and big forehead. He could be forty, he could be ninety, it’s hard to tell. He’s dressed very traditionally, in a way that Daichi rarely associates with street bus stops at night. 

It’s just a man. 

Or, he’s fully hallucinating now. 

Either way, he has to pass the bus stop to get on his way and he’s not going to be deterred by this. 

He keeps his head down and takes a grip on the strap of his bag that’s a little tighter than necessary, and quickened his pace. The man doesn’t move or adjust where he holds his gaze, doesn’t look to him as he approaches. He stares straight. 

Daichi passes into his line of sight. It should have only been for a third of a second that he has to walk in front of him. 

“Sawamura-kun.” 

His feet stop, his back to the man. He closes his eyes for a moment to get himself together, then turns around with the most normal expression he can muster. The man isn’t looking at him, still staring straight ahead. 

“Do I know you?” 

“I wouldn’t be able to answer that question for you.” 

Daichi can feel his body flooding with a fight-or-flight instinct, but his hands stay still as he grips the strap of his bag tighter, adjusting it over his shoulder as he takes a breath and focuses on the man in front of him. 

“Do you know me?”

“Nope.”

“You know my name.”

“You look a lot like your father.” 

Daichi isn’t sure why the overwhelming feeling he gets is danger. It’s just one old man. Not that he spent any time thinking about it, but Daichi was pretty sure he could beat up one old man. 

“Who are you?”

“To you? Nobody.”

You know what? No, I don’t have to fucking do this.

“Have a good night,” he says, turning around to head off down the street. He gets a few steps away, and he hears the man speak again. It is not loud - the man does not raise his voice to speak to him, but rather talks as if Daichi had stayed put. 

“If you seek monsters, you will find them.”

He stops walking again. His heart is beating so heavily in his chest he thinks he’s at risk of a cardiac event. Even with the pounding in his chest, though, his voice comes out steady and clear. 

“Are you trying to tell me monsters are real?”

“I’m telling you that demons have as much power as you choose to give them. When you seek evil, you tend to find evil. If you tell a halfbreed satori that he is psychic, and he suddenly learns how to read minds, is it not a case of practice, rather than nature? Does a bakeneko bring ill fortune upon those around it, or does it merely orbit those already in the habit of making choices and seeking out destructive paths. If you choose to stare into the darkness, are the faces you see not of your own creation?”

Daichi whips his head around, half expecting to see a monster or a shadow or something obscene and horrible, but it’s just a little old man, looking at him. 

“Are you starting to reap the consequences of using those eyes of yours?”

“Who the hell are you?”

“Me?”

Not the old man speaking!

Daichi stumbles around, wide-eyed and frantic as he locks eyes on a woman who had come up behind him. She looks… normal. Middle-aged and neatly put together, carrying a bag. She looks startled by him - actually, she looks afraid of him, so he makes a conscious effort to try and de-escalate the stoked anger in his chest and relax his face. 

“Oh, god, sorry, no, no, I was just yelling at-”

He glances back to the man sitting on the bench. 

‘ I was just yelling at that old man’ seems like an inadvisable thing to admit to. 

“...who?” she says. 

He looks back at her. “The-” he shuts his mouth. The old man. He’s right there. Tell me you can see him.

But she looks around, and when he’s doing nothing but staring dumbly at her, she moves away from him, disquieted and clearly uncomfortable as she heads towards the bus stop, and takes a seat beside the man, completely unresponsive to his presence there. 

“I’m sorry,” he calls. “Uh- I’m sorry- about - yelling-” and before he can really sort out his brain or his body or his tongue he turns and runs. 

 

---

 

Approximately 2 days before “Overnight in a Haunted Cabin” is uploaded, Daichi is sitting with Oikawa in a hospital emergency room, staring at the bandaged hand he now has, rubbing his wrist. Apparently it takes a long time to get a doctor authorized to administer a rabies vaccine, but nurses just kept half-heartedly telling them they were working on it.

It’s probably eight am now - they’d been here six hours.

They’ve moved him from one of the beds to make space for more urgent patients, so him and Oikawa are now just hallway drifters. 

Oikawa is basically asleep where he sits, eyes fluttering and struggling to maintain focus on his phone screen as he scrolls through updates. 

“Tendou and Kenma found kittens,” he says, at some point. Daichi squints, looking over at him. 

“What?”

“They found… kittens.”

“...okay…”

They sit for another hour. It’s nine in the morning. Daichi is so hungry, and wondering if he’ll get in any trouble if he leaves to find food. With his luck, the moment he leaves they’ll come back to find him. He doesn’t want to be gone when they need him, and be bumped back to the back of the line.

It’s nine-thirty.

“You can go home,” Daichi says, when Oikawa looks like he’s about to pass out, staring forlornly at his phone and clearly wishing to be anywhere but here. “It’s just waiting.”

“No, no, it’s fine,” he says, sniffing and sitting up straighter. He had gone to remove his contacts in the bathroom a few hours ago, but hadn’t had his glasses on him to replace them with and now was doing what Daichi considered to be the funniest mole impersonation whenever he moved his head. 

“Seriously, dude, go home, get some rest.”

“I don’t want to leave you sitting in a hospital alone.”

“I’m a big boy, I think I can handle it,” Daichi says, and then immediately, before Oikawa has even opened his mouth to speak, lifts his hand and covers Oikawa’s mouth to keep it shut. “I heard what I said. Don’t make a dirty joke. I’m too tired for this.”

Oikawa blinks at him from over thumb, before nodding his understanding. 

Daichi pulls his hand away. 

“Yeah, I bet you can,” Oikawa says, immediately.  

Daichi curls over and presses his face to his knees, groaning. “Oh my god I hate you so-”

“Sawamura?”

They both lift their heads, turning to look up at the nurse that had approached them. She’s a nice lady that had just gotten on shift about an hour ago, and taken over their file from the night shift, so she’s still full of energy and life.

“Yes?”

“I apologize for the delay, if you don’t mind coming with me now, we’ll be able to administer the vaccine.”

“Ah, no worries,” he says, groaning as he gets up and absolutely ignoring the fact he’d been mentally cursing her just minutes before. “Let’s get this over with.”

---

 

The rabies vaccine fucking hurts. He thought it would be like any other shot, but it’s not, and they also expect him to come back to get it again. There’s also, apparently, something called rat bite fever, that he has to monitor the wound for any signs of infection and come back immediately if there are, because that can also kill him. 

Rats, apparently, are just filled with ways to kill him.

And then him and Oikawa are banished again to return to their hallway drifting lifestyle, being told that the doctor just needs to sign and complete the discharge papers and they’re good to go.

They sit on the floor this time, because an elderly woman and her son have taken the chairs they were in. 

He should probably call his parents. But there’s this seed of distrust that’s been nestling in his stomach for the last little while and he just can’t bring himself to do it. They think he’s out with friends, and that’s technically, in a way, the truth. So he leaves it at that. 

Oikawa, at about ten thirty, gives up and falls asleep. He does so dramatically, as he does everything, and lays his head down in Daichi’s lap. Daichi pushes him off once, gets a hard punch in the stomach with a very strong elbow in retaliation, and decides to let him do what he wants.  

Daichi is trying very hard not to fall asleep himself, head tilted back against the cold wall of the emergency room overflow hallway, distantly hearing the sound of sobbing coming from the actual emergency room. The lights are so bright, everywhere, it feels like he’s sitting under direct sunlight.

And then his direct sunlight is blocked by a storm cloud. 

Daichi blinks his sleep-deprived brain into functionality, opening his eyes as the light disappears, finding himself staring up at a shadowed Iwaizumi, the overhead light behind him silhouetting his features. 

“Heard you lost a fight with a rat,” he says.

Daichi feels like this could be another hallucination. He rubs at his eye and looks away from him, yawning. “Yeah.”

This gets him a snort from Iwaizumi, who turns his attention to Oikawa, staring down at him for a moment before using the toe of his boot to not-quite-gently shove him in the stomach and wake him up. 

“Ey, dick,” he says. “Wake up.”

Oikawa groans, probably in pain, swatting at his foot and putting a hand to his stomach as he pushed himself up. 

“No…” he complains, voice low and interrupted by a yawn. 

Iwaizumi shuffles around to take a seat on the floor in front of them, as Oikawa stretches and yawns and complains about being alive. 

“Here,” Iwa says after a moment, pulling a hard plastic case out from his jacket’s inside pocket to hand over to Oikawa. “Figured you’d need these.” 

Oikawa is just grumbling about this, reaching and taking the glasses case with incoherent complaints, eventually resuming intelligible speech again with: “did you at least also bring me food?”

“Of course I brought you food,” Iwaizumi mutters, as if offended by the mere suggestion that he might not have. He pulls a foil-wrapped bundle out of the bag he carried, handing it over to Oikawa to descended on it like he was a feral animal. And then, to Daichi’s great surprise, follows it up by handing a similar bundle over to him. 

“Oh,” he says, reaching to take it. “Uh - thank you.”

“Don’t mention it.”

“You really didn’t have-”

“Shut up and eat.”

Daichi frowns, before just nodding his understanding and deciding that eating was better than getting yelled at by Iwaizumi, so he does that. He is very hungry, after all. 

Getting something to eat really helps to drastically increase his mood, though he’s still getting exceptionally pissed off by the length of time it’s taking them to apparently just sign some paperwork and release him.

He’s in the middle of complaining about this to Iwaizumi, and it’s just after noon, when the nurse finally reappears.

“Please tell me we can go,” Daichi says, looking up at her hopefully. 

The nurse smiles. “Yes, I am so sorry about the delay there, but you are all good to go now. Thank you for being so patient.” 

“No problem,” he replies reflexively, regardless of how he feels. “But - what did take so long, is everything alright…?”

“Uh…” the nurses hesitates for a bit - never a good thing for a nurse to do - before saying: “I wasn’t personally handling your paperwork, but as I was told, our charge nurse had difficulties authorizing your discharge due to a flag on your I-N preventing us from accessing your medical history. It was… almost certainly a technical error, but unfortunately we can’t assume that that is the case, so we had to call your P-C-P and get authorization to access your medical information but it was very hard to get ahold of her on a weekend, and… there was a whole bunch of questions we had to fill out regarding your visit, and… the point is, I apologize for the delay, but we have sorted it out now and you are free to go.” 

Daichi blinks at her. When he looked over to Oikawa, Oikawa is also giving her a very baffled look, though if he’s being honest, he’s so fucking tired right now he can’t even remember why this might be concerning, and can only think about going home to go to bed. 

“Okay,” he says eventually, rubbing at one of his eyes. “As long as everything is sorted now.”

---

 

About 2 days before “Live Show: Bird Brains,” would be hosted, Sawamura Daichi is packing an overnight bag and getting ready to hop a train to Tokyo. They’ve been scheduling a liveshow from Tokyo every weekend to build up a habit of being out of town, so it’s less suspicious when they suddenly pull the trigger on their plan. Of course, their plan is barely a plan - after all, they’ll only have approximately a day's warning before his father is out of town. 

The GPS will ping him in somewhere that isn’t Tokyo, and they’ll cross their fingers and hope that he takes his usual 24-hour excursion over to Okinawa. 

Essentially - they have probably little more than 24 hours from the moment they notice him leave Tokyo to get into and investigate this office building, and they don’t get any warning ahead of time on when this is going to happen. 

Last week, his father disappeared to Hyogo without warning, but it was a Wednesday, they had exams and school, and they weren’t able to do anything about it as he followed the pattern and took a trip down to Okinawa. 

They were in Tokyo that weekend, for his and Kuroo’s livestream, but his father hadn’t left the city at all. 

His mother is cooking dinner by the time he comes downstairs. She smiles at him as if nothing is weird at all, though he supposes from her perspective nothing is.

“Hey sweetie,” she says. “Are you gonna be home for dinner tonight? It’s almost done.”

“Ah, yeah,” he says. “No plans this evening. Though, I am going to Tokyo with Oikawa and Ushijima tomorrow evening, so you won’t have to worry about me over the weekend.” 

“Again?” she laughs. “Geez, don’t tell me you’re becoming a city boy,” she adds teasingly, before turning away from him to go back to the stove top. He bites his tongue for a moment, before saying: 

“Well, actually, after graduation I was thinking… about maybe - Kuroo had just mentioned he might be looking for a roommate, so… maybe this summer…”
She doesn’t seem to give any outward reaction to this idea, thinking over it for a moment before saying: “Kuroo’s a good kid… But Tokyo is… You know, it’s Tokyo. I thought you were planning on staying here, joining the police academy…?”

“Maybe,” he agrees quickly, not wanting to have this conversation. “Yeah, maybe, I don’t know. Again, it was… just a thought…”

“Mhm…”

“You… never liked the city, though, so I guess moving anywhere isn’t going to be your favourite idea,” he says, slowly. 

His mother frowns for a second, before glancing over her shoulder at him. 

“What do you mean?”

“Just… I mean, you chose to live out here, instead of in Tokyo, with dad, so… He always told me you just didn’t like the city.” 

“Tokyo is expensive,” she replies, shrugging. “And… dirty. And… yeah, I guess you’re right. I grew up in a little town, I wanted to live in a little town. I like the space out here.”

He’s quiet for a moment, leaning on the kitchen table as he watched her cook, before saying: 

“Did you and dad ever consider moving back to Okinawa?”

“Not seriously,” she replies. “His work was in Tokyo, so there weren't a ton of options for us.”

“He couldn’t find other work?”

“Not that paid as well, that’s for sure. And we… liked it here. I mean… I miss my home, of course I do, but…” she just cuts herself off with a shrug, leaving whatever she has on the stove to simmer and turning around to head over to him. “What’s got you thinking about Okinawa?”

“Just… haven’t seen grandad in a while,” he replies, halfheartedly. “We don’t… really visit.”

“You’ve been busy with school,” she chuckled, crossing her arms. “And if you don’t remember, I’ll remind you that last year we suggested going back to visit family, and you almost went into a panic attack due to the dates overlapping with some… preliminary whatevers for your volleyball team. You haven’t exactly been easy to plan with.”
He scratches at the back of his neck, chuckling awkwardly. “Ah… right…”

“Plus with the Saturday practices, the after school, the extra student-whatnots you’ve been doing, and then this spring suddenly - I mean, you just said you’re going to Tokyo for the weekend. You’re a busy young man!” 

“I… okay, fair enough… I get your point… but you and dad could go, right? When was the last time either of you saw your parents?”
His mother raises an eye for a moment, before saying: “I… honestly Daichi, maybe we’ve all just been busy… your dad’s work keeps him occupied seven days a week, your grandparents don’t… really do air travel and they’re getting old, they don’t want to sit on boats and trains and busses for that long to get here… We’ll go back eventually. Of course I want to go back. But…”

Daichi nods slightly, understanding that he had pushed the subject to a place that his mother was no longer comfortable joking around in. But he can’t help but mistrust everything she says. Just looking around the kitchen, and the house, with its polished countertops and expensive equipment and they had so much money, and yet no way to work out going home to visit family? 

Geez, if push came to shove, his mother could pay a 24/7 nanny to watch the kids and house and go alone.

Unless she just didn’t want to.  

Couldn’t?

He wishes he had thought to push Oikawa on the matter. He wishes he had thought to ask what his brain had started picking apart, but he hadn’t and now the moment was gone and he wasn’t sure he could get it out of him if he tried.

“Oh,” Daichi says, after a second. “By the way, I… had an incident with a rat, and had to check into the hospital for a day to get… that taken care of, and… the nurse said my patient information was inaccessible to them, or something? Is there anything I can do about that-”

His mother is staring at him, wide eyes, concerned. 

“You went to a hospital?” she says. 

“Uh - just… the emerg, I got bitten by a rat-”

“You got bitten by a rat?”

“...I’m okay, everything’s fine-”

“Daichi!” she scolds, voice pitching up. “What are you doing that’s getting you bitten by rats?”

Running through the forest at night hunting ghosts.

“Nothing! I’m not… it was an accident! I swear!” he says, putting his hands up in defense. “And it healed up just fine, nothing to worry about! I just - was curious-”

She pinches the bridge of her nose, groaning for a second before saying: “Next time you end up in a hospital emergency room, consider giving your poor mother a call, okay?” 

He swallows, feeling a flush of embarrassment. “Yes. Sorry…”

“Now… go get your siblings, dinner’s pretty much ready,” she grumbles, turning away and shaking her head as if fending off a headache. Daichi scrambles to do as asked, hurrying to head back upstairs. 

It’s not until after he’s called his siblings for dinner and he’s following them back down the steps that he realizes not that his mother hadn’t answered his question about his medical history being locked, but that she was completely unfazed by it.

 

---

 

The day before they’re set to do the “Bird Brains” livestream, named so due to the three bird-themed schools that would be participating, was set to air, Daichi checks his tracker app and realizes his dad is up in Sapporo. 

“Hey, hey, hey-” Daichi almost trips himself getting to his feet, hurrying over to where Oikawa and Kuroo had been looking over analytics from their channel, mumbling in soft voices. “Guys, my dad’s on the move, he’s in Hokkaido right now-”

“Oh shit,” Oikawa interrupts, brain clicking the pieces together before Daichi even finishes. “That means-”

“Oh, god, this is happening so much quicker than I thought it would,” Daichi says. 

“I’ll call my dad,” Kuroo agrees, shoving to his feet. “See if I can arrange something for tomorrow…”

Daichi feels his heart beating in his chest, a spike of adrenaline hitting merely at the thought of taking action now. It had been a month of waiting and planning and pulling information together. A month of things being weird, a month of discomfort. 

Kuroo leaves the room with his phone in his hand. 

Daichi flexes his hands, excitement burning under his skin as nervous energy floods his system. It feels familiar, though, it feels good. He likes that things are happening, and they’re no longer in waiting mode.

“You’re smiling,” Oikawa says, looking up at him from where he sat. 

Daichi hums, nodding along slightly before saying: “I’m gonna see if there’s anything available online about the layout of this office,” and turning to head back to where he’d been sitting. Even through the excitement, he can feel a wave of calm coming in second. He always performed his best in stressful situations - better than anyone else he knows. Sugawara had often teased him for it, calling him a workaholic or saying that he didn’t know how to relax. Why would he ever want to relax? 

This feels so much better. 

If you seek monsters, you will find them.

He’s not seeking monsters, he tells himself. He’s seeking objective truth - he’s seeking answers, explanations, reality. He is not seeking monsters.

There is an explanation for all of this, and there is nothing wrong with him. 

Notes:

Can you believe that we're finally getting into the parts of the story that had initially inspired me to write this whole piece? Fascinating. Only took me 100k.

Chapter 18: Observation Will Continue

The night is light and airy, swirling between streetlights and over rainy cement sidewalks. The window of the second floor room is cracked open just a tad, to let some of the cool air in, a slight ruffle to the curtains that covered it. It is all the creature needs, clawing its way up the side of the house effortlessly, and using one big claw to push back the window. It squeaks, grinding slightly, until a space wide enough for its body is made and it is able to squirm through. Not an easy task - it is not a small creature. 

It picks its way carefully over the desk clutter beneath the window, before dropping down on silent feet to the floor of the bedroom, sniffling along the floor. It looked something like an ant-eater, something like a badger, something like a dog and something like a monster, and its squat body is covered in a bristly, rough fur, it’s claws long and powerful, though not especially sharp. 

More comes in behind it. Another, a smaller one, makes no noise and pays him no mind. A third and a fourth. The first is bigger than all of them, it’s brawnier and tougher and under normal conditions it might snap and claw and force them back, to defend its meal as its own. But this meal was set to be plentiful, and it was more than willing to share. 

It winds between its kin and around the bed at the center of the room, to where two other figures are laid out on the floor. The baku only have interest in one of them. 

He’s shifting and thrashing about in his sleep, falling still for a few minutes and then turning over again. His skin is coated in a sheen of sweat - the night terror has been stewing for a while. The first that had entered has first pick, slinking forward between the boy and the bed, to situate himself looking down. The nightmare smells like saltwater and iodine, chemical and clean and harsh. The baku takes a breath, and bites down on the terror. 

It takes only a few seconds, of swallowing the dream, before the boy begins to still. As the nightmare is consumed it’s lifted from his mind, and his body goes back to rest. The baku feasts, and it can feel its kin getting impatient. They want to eat. 

The other boy on the floor - the one they had ignored, due to a quiet mind - suddenly starts and sits up. The other baku freeze, and the one with its teeth sunk into the nightmare pulls back as well, cautious. The boy stretched, rubbing at his eyes and groaning in their mumbled, guttural language to himself as he slowly got to his feet. 

The first watches as the other baku scramble out of the way. The boy gets to his feet and crosses the room, narrowly missing kicking one of the creatures in his way, but he was just quick enough. He does pause, though, rubbing the top of his foot against his ankle, as if having felt a brush of fur that he could not see. 

The baku stay quiet, they watch. 

This boy, the pleasant dreamer, must be an idiot, or blind, because he proceeds to shuffle forward and crack into the door frame. 

Hissing to himself, he then makes a proper exit. 

A light is turned on down the hall. The baku sniff and grumble, shuffling their feet and waiting. The first is pretty sure it’s safe to continue the feast - after all, this human boy was not able to see them, and could do nothing to stop them. But he is old and wise and trusts his instincts. He feels unsafe, so he waits. 

The night terror begins to overtake the boy beneath him again. His breathing changes, and he shifts and rolls over. It is such a rich nightmare, within its mind. Recurring and countless - he had been following this meal for many years and never once had he encountered a night that he ran dry. Whatever was causing the nightmares ran deeper than the parts of his psyche that the baku was capable of biting into. 

There’s a noise from down the hall, the lights are turned off. The other boy returns, shuffling his feet and yawning. The first sinks back a bit, against the bed. His body is not material enough to disturb it, or cause it to shift or make noise, but he is too physical to disappear into it. 

The boy settles back onto his bed, yawning again and searching around for a moment before locking his attention on the boy with the nightmares. 

He’s saying something. It’s in a tone more pleasant than naught, but the baku knows what that means. He knew his instincts had been right. 

He slinks away from the boy at the same time the other reaches over to grab his shoulder, seeming concerned now. The baku wishes he could tell him - I am here, I will consume it, I will let him rest, do not disturb him - but he cannot.

So the pleasant dreamer insists upon waking the nightmare boy, and the baku watches in joint displeasure as their meal is disturbed. They can smell it in the air, getting shaken and disturbed, before disappearing as the boy opens his eyes. 

He wakes with a start, sitting up and shoving the other off him. The first agrees - he too would be displeased at having his slumber disturbed. But after a moment, he just shakes his head and rubs his hands over his silly flat face and makes loud, displeased noises. The other boy rubs his back, and the baku get the sense that this will be a long wait, if they expect the boy to sleep and dream again. 

When he moves his hands off his face, he’s staring at them. 

He had been speaking, but he’s not anymore. He’s just staring. At them. 

The first shuffles its feet and slinks down, testing the waters. He moves forward, towards him, and sees the boy’s whole body tense and jolt, as he begins to push himself backwards. The other boy, alarmed, is saying something, and they speak back and forth in rapid replies but for all the other’s head waving and eye scanning, he does not seem to notice the creatures that litter the floor of this room. 

The boy had seen them before, when his devouring dug too deep and brought him into a waking terror. He had looked at them then, too, screaming and horrified, but that was to be expected. His brain was still within the realm of dreaming and that was where the baku came from. 

But now, he is properly awake. He should not see them - the baku cannot be seen, light does not reflect off them correctly to be seen by the eyes of human mortals, nor most animals.

The baku shakes himself out, and refreshes the dreamer’s magic that coats its fur and body. He makes sure that the light refracts around it, and does not allow for eyes to pick up on its form. It is a yokai, after all. Yokai shadows are not the same as mortal shadows. 

It seems to work. Whatever the boy had been seeing of them, a silhouette or a shadow or a reflection from their eyes, is gone. 

The baku can see it relax, looking around the room in confusion. 

The other boy is still talking - he’s talking a lot. Concern or confusion, who knows. After a second, he turns and grabs something for his face, and then is standing up again. He pulls the other boy up to his feet, and with a shared glance at the third occupant in the room - the one sleeping soundly, undisturbed, in the bed - they slip from the room to occupy their night elsewhere. 

He can feel his kin hissing with displeasure. It will be a long while before they can feast. 

 

---

 

They leave Ushijima in Bokuto’s bedroom, set up to host a livestream. Daichi spends about ten minutes afterwards trying to decide if this was more of a punishment for Ushijima or Bokuto, before deciding they were both going to suffer for being alone together and that was that. It was too short notice to get anybody regular out to mediate, and Kenma had absolutely refused to stay for even an hour in a locked room with them. 

Kuroo’s father meets them outside the fancy office building. Daichi is trying not to be distracted by his own thoughts, staring up at the glossy exterior and wondering which floor, which room, which desk his father had been lying to them from. 

Kuroo is given a guest ID card, to get through the main doors. Apparently this building never closed, not really, some floors being involved in international communications or trade, and therefore having staff available twenty-four seven. But after sundown the front doors were still locked for security purposes. 

Kuroo also receives a brief tour. There’s an element of fatherly appreciation here, clearly excited to have any excuse to have his son in his place of work. Kuroo Senior is very much like his son in every way - he’s a little bit taller, even, but has the same dark, untamable black hair, same sort of shape to his face, same shoulders. He’s dressed in a suit, wearing a lanyard. He pats Daichi on the back a total of eight times on the trip from the front doors up to the twelfth floor, an amount of times Daichi decides is too many. 

Kuroo’s father, of course, thinks they’ll be staying on his haunted twelfth floor office space. So they pretend they will. They talk a lot about the ghost sightings and experiences here, Kuroo films them. Daichi himself even gets caught up in the moment and finds himself a little too interested in what his father says. Oikawa doesn’t even have to act, he just starts wandering around looking for signs of ghosts, as per normal for him. 

Eventually his father does bid them all a goodnight, reminding them to check out with the front desk clerk when they’re leaving, and if they happen to stay very late, the cleaners start at about four in the morning, so don’t freak out if the elevator starts moving. 

Kuroo’s father leaves, they wave him off until the elevator doors have closed. 

“Your dad’s kinda hot,” Oikawa says, once they’re all standing in silence. “How old is he?”

“Married,” Kuroo says, immediately. “Do not-”

“I won’t,” Oikawa replies, putting his hands up, before turning to wander down the hall a bit. “So… are filming a full fake episode, or…?”

“No,” Daichi says. “I don’t want to waste time. Let’s just… let’s go. We have a lot of ground to cover.”

“Aye-aye,” Kuroo chirps, and then they shut down all their ghost hunting gear and head to the elevators. 

The process is simple. They think. It could go wrong at any time, but they had talked it through time and time and time again, and it shouldn’t go wrong, but it hinged on two very… nebulous facts.

1. Daichi being Rion’s son. 
2. Kenma’s camera knowledge. 

“The cameras in the office are not live-feeds, so you don’t need to worry about security seeing you somewhere you’re not supposed to be. However, this does mean that you will be recorded sneaking around. So it is vitally important - look at me, guys, look, listen. It is so incredibly important that you do not give them a reason to check that camera footage. That means don’t break anything, don’t move anything, don’t let anyone see you going anywhere you shouldn’t, do not… don’t even breath wrong, okay? Make sure that nobody will ever have a reason to think of this night as odd and check the cameras.”

Kenma was scary when he was intense. 

The first point was-

“Hi…” Daichi drawls, leaning on the counter of the receptionist’s desk, smiling at her. “I was hoping you could do me a really big favour…” 

The receptionist blinks at him. “Oh? What’s going on?”

“Okay, see, my dad works here, and I’m trying to surprise him for his birthday and leave a gift in his office, but I just can’t remember what floor he said he was on. I… are you able to let me know? Sorry to bother you-”

The woman blinks, seeming surprised slightly before laughing. “Sure, what company is he with?”

“Oh, thank you. Uh… I think it’s… oh I think it’s an accounting firm… Mori and co? Something like that?” 

The woman hums, tapping at her computer for a moment before saying: “Alright, yeah, it looks like they have offices on the nineteenth and twentieth floors - but they’re closed now, and I’m not able to provide the door codes to anyone outside of staff.”

“Oh, no worries,” Daichi says, waving a hand. “I’ve got that sorted, thank- ah, actually, wait-” he had feigned leaving the desk, before swinging back and tapping on the desk gently. “Is it the front door or the office door that requires the ID swipe?”

“The elevator requires an employee ID,” she clarified. “And I’m not sure what you mean about the office door…?”

“The individual offices,” he replies. “My - okay, so it’s technically a birthday surprise, but obviously I had to get his approval to break into his office, and he mentioned a code that was needed, is that…?”

“Office doors shouldn’t have coded locks on them,” the receptionist replies, sounding a little bit confused. 

“Oh, geez,” Daichi laughs, running a hand through his hair. “What did he tell me I’d need a password for then…?”

The receptionist seems just as confused as him, before saying: “Well, if your father is in a managerial position it’s possible he has a private office that could be locked separately from the way the regular offices are designed. That would be either an employee or company number, or a personalized one, it would be impossible for me to know.” 

“Ah, you know what, that makes sense,” Daichi says. “That’s probably what he meant, sorry. Okay, well, thank you for your time!”

As he turns to leave, the receptionist calls: “oh, wait, can I just grab your name?”

“Mhm?”

“Just policy, anyone coming in or out after hours needs to be recorded, can’t allow just anyone walking through the offices, y’know.”
Daichi smiles. “Sure, sorry - ah, Sawamura.”

This seems to perk the receptionist up, who looks up at him more fully for the first time the entire conversation. 

“You’re Rion’s son?”

“Oh, you know him?”

“Of course I do,” she laughed. “I’ve been working here almost as long as he has. I didn’t know his birthday was coming up.”

“Ah, well… unfortunately it’s not… like.. It’s a bit of an early surprise,” Daichi replied. “I’m graduating this year, and won’t have a lot of time next month to see him, so I decided to come in early, that’s all.”

“Ah, okay, okay, you got it.”

Daichi hesitates slightly, almost pulling away before saying: “Sorry, just… you said you’ve worked here almost as long as he has - maybe… god, he got this job when I was so young, and I’m gonna be honest accounting is so boring, I barely listen when he talks, but… has he always worked in this building? The company, I mean, I feel like I remember him talking about the company… offices moving, or having to relocate, something like that…”

The receptionist shrugs, looking a little lost. “I think Mori has been renting spaces up there at least since I’ve been here, so I couldn’t say before that… I haven’t seen any changes to their contract, or anything…”

“Right, of course… sorry, I think I’m just… oh, you know what, I’m just confused because of the traveling he does, Mori has a secondary office in Okinawa that he has to visit.”

“I…” and here she frowns, looking down to her computer and typing something in rapidly, scanning the screen before saying: “I’m sorry, I… have not heard of anything of the like, I wasn’t aware Mori had secondary offices.”

Daichi fakes a confused laugh. “Then why the hell does my dad complain about having to go to Okinawa so often? He’s there now.”

The receptionist seems to be curious herself now, easily placated by the family connection and her fond impression of Rion and not second guessing herself at all as she opened up her database. 

She shakes her head for a moment, before saying: “Sorry, can’t answer that one for you. All I can see on my end is the email sent out advising he’ll be out of office. He doesn’t mention Okinawa, and if I don’t have a papertrail, that means he’s not paying for it on any company cards, so…” 

“Ah, nevermind,” he says, waving a hand. “I’m sure-”

“Oh, here we go,” she interrupts, having evidently continued trying to track down a record of these trips. “It looks like Mori and Co. has authorized an Oksana Novikova for privileges in and out of the building, her address is listed in Okinawa. Though-” the receptionist laughs. “It looks like her authorization predates your father’s employment, so it might just be old data that was never cleared.”

“Huh,” Daichi says, absolutely at a loss for what to do with this. “I’ll… okay, so…”

The receptionist shrugs again. “Doesn’t answer what he’s doing down there but maybe they’ve got admin or company connections that require in person meetings.You know how accountants can be.”

Daichi frowns slightly. 

Sure, yeah, ‘how accountants can be,’ what a normal fucking sentence.

“Sure,” he says, aloud, holding the rest of it back. “Anyway, I’m gonna hurry up to set up this surprise so I can go home - oh, and if you don’t mind… not telling my father I was here? Obviously-”

“You want whatever’s up there to be a surprise, no worries,” she replies. 

Daichi smiles again before pulling away completely this time, and hurrying around the lobby and towards the hallway the elevators were in. Oikawa and Kuroo are hanging back, looking a little impatient as they wait. 

“Well that sure took you a minute,” Oikawa huffs. 

“Have you heard the name Oksana Novikova before?” Daichi says, not bothering to address his irritation as Kuroo taps the ID card to call the elevator. 

“I- uh-” Oikawa has to rapidly refocus his brain and figure out what that question was even asking. “Is that even… is that a name? I’ve never heard-”
“Sounds Russian,” Kuroo replies, before Daichi can say anything. “Alisa Ivanovna Haiba,” he adds, almost distractedly as the doors open. 

Oikawa turns to look at him, surprised for a moment but they’re all shuffling into the elevator soon enough. 

“Alright, so why’d you return from the reception desk asking about a Russian lady?”

“Well… ah, so the reception was super chatty and asked no questions which was… good, but I decided to ask, just… on the off chance she knew what was in Okinawa, and she said the only thing my father’s company is connected to related to that at all is a woman with an Okinawan address and a Russian name.” 

Oikawa leans against the back of the elevator, and Daichi reaches to press the nineteenth floor. 

“I’ve never heard the name,” Oikawa replies. “Did you get the information we actually needed?”

“Uh - yes, I think. There’s two floors, we’ll have to decide how we go about this. And - Kuroo, did Kenma get my dad’s employee information off his phone?”

“Just the bare bones,” Kuroo replies. “Why?”

“Text him and see if he has anything like an employee number, we might need it to enter is office.”

“On it…”

The elevator comes to a stop at the nineteenth floor. 

“This it?” Oikawa prompts, stepping off the elevator and putting a hand out to keep the doors open. 

“One of the floors,” Daichi agreed, peering into the dark, unlit office. It looks like cubicles and computers and not a lot of interest, so he says: “Let’s… just take a look at the next one.”

“Mhm.”

It’s just a brief hop up to the twentieth floor, which looks similar to the one below, but with more space. He could see a long table with an arrangement of chairs, an unlit TV screen, long windows, and on either end, rooms behind closed doors, blinds shuttered. 

“Closed offices,” Daichi said. “The receptionist said those are probably supervisors or managers, so…?”

“Start there?” Oikawa replies, stepping off the elevator. Daichi and Kuroo follow behind, moving quietly as if they might trigger an invisible alarm at any moment. 

“What are the stairwells like?” 

“Eh?”

Daichi glances over to Oikawa, then to Kuroo. 

“Stairwells are open from this end, obviously, but they look from the inside, so we can leave, but won’t be able to jump to any other floor without-” and he waves the temporary pass he has. 

“Alright, let’s…”

Daichi turns slowly, taking in the cool, unlit room, its weird, eerie stillness. It doesn’t set him on edge, like the darkness of the forests or the streets outside did, and there doesn’t appear to be anything peering from the shadows. He can see the small red glow of a camera, watching them. 

“Be careful, don’t break anything,” Daichi reminded them, before turning to head towards the door at the far end of the office. 

Oikawa splits away from them, to start looking around at what was set up in the main body of the office, but Daichi is focused on tracking down where exactly his father pretended to work. One of the offices is unlocked, and when Daichi peers inside it looks like someone’s personal office, though there’s no indication of personalization at all. In fact, Daichi thinks it could be completely empty, for how much was there. The only indication it was used at all was a small stack of papers in a folder by the computer. Before he can enter, he hears Kuroo call:

“Eh! Daichi-” only to be immediately shushed by Oikawa and more quietly repeat: “Eh! Daichi! What did you say the code was gonna be?”

Daichi pulls back from the doorway, turning to head across the floor to where Kuroo was at the second office. 

“You wanna check out-”

“I’ll check it out,” Oikawa confirms as he passes, currently crouched in front of a cabinet looking through drawers of office supplies. 

Kuroo is waiting by the other door.

“Ta-da~” he sings, tapping on the glass of the door’s window. Daichi peers through it, and even though it is dark and shadowy, he’s able to discern the placard resting on the desk, embossed with Sawamura Rion.

“Ah, and-” Daichi glances down, to the door, and the pin pad lock blocking entry. “They said it would be personal to the company, like the employee ID, or… personalized by the occupant, so…”

“Eighteen-oh-three?” Kuroo says. 

“Worth a shot, I guess…” he mumbles, quietly pressing the numbers into the pad. It buzzes a red light, indicating an incorrect guess. “Hey, do you think… door codes don’t usually have, like… a limit on how many times you can get it wrong, right?”

“Not usually,” Kuroo replies, pulling out his phone. “I don’t know.”

“...great. Alright, so let’s minimize incorrect guesses to be safe.”

“Right, okay, Kenma says your dad’s employee number was zero-zero, three-six-eight-six-nine.”

Daichi thinks about this for a moment, before just pressing in the last five digits - he gets a negative red light on the fourth.

“Shit,” he says. “It’s a four digit code.”

“If it’s personalized… anniversaries?” 

Daichi has to sift through his memory to remember his parent’s anniversary, before pressing in the date and getting another red light. 

“Mhm…”

“Having trouble over there?” Oikawa calls. “I’m checking out this other office, ‘kay?”

“‘Kay,” Daichi called back, keeping his voice low. He stares down at the pin. 

He puts in his mother’s birthday. 

Red light. No Entry. 

“What if he just has, like, a random code he uses? Or one-two-three-four?” Kuroo says. 

“That’s stupid,” Daichi says. 

“It’s worth a try-”

“Not if we only have limited tries… We don’t know if this will suddenly seize and trigger an alarm or something…”

“Well what else can we do? Give up on what we came here to do?”

Daichi shakes his head, thinking for a moment, and almost feeling like an egotist entering 3112.

The light flashes green, letting them in - Daichi opens the door quickly, feeling an overwhelming wave of guilt wash up in his gut. He wished the passcode had been 1803. 

 

---

 

People don’t check when Rion enters a room - he’s Sawamura Rion, they should be worried about being questioned by him, not the other way around. This makes the tracking device placed on him shockingly efficient. Nobody asked him to step through a metal detector for over a month - it might have even been protocol, but the staff that worked the entrances and security checks took a look at his badge and didn’t ask questions when he walked through. So the tracking device that should have been caught four and a half days after placement, the first time someone did not ask him to check his stuff, remains on him for much longer. 

It is, of course, eventually found. 

It’s an odd little device, cheaply made but efficient in its design. It only has one job to do - if Rion had not accidentally sat on it, felt it dig into his leg, and then proceeded to spend and evening confused as to how something was in his jacket (he was not, previously, aware of how jacket linings worked), he probably wouldn’t have found it. They would have kept waving him through security. 

He inspects it, contemplating his options here. Where did this come from? That was what was important. 

It’s not a toy - he did a quick search and found an identical product listed for sale online. It’s not an expensive item, but it’s certainly not a toy. He does not deactivate it. He just thinks about it. 

There’s an intense discomfort boiling in his stomach. The plane he’s riding in lands, jolting slightly and skidding as it’s pulled to a stop on the small runway in Naha. He closes is fist over the device, feeling the metal dig into his palm roughly before tucking it into his pocket and standing up as the hostess had come to fetch him. 

His concern was not with who or how. In fact these things seemed obvious to him, given it’s placement and what it was - The who was Daichi, the how was a credit card and online marketplace and a hole in a pocket of his jacket that he never used. He had been home more often than usual the last few weeks, he would have had numerous chances to do so. He didn’t think any of the younger kids would have the presence of mind to follow through on something like this - not something they didn’t immediately begin giggling and blowing their cover over - and nobody else in his life had predictable access to his jacket to plan something like this. 

Nobody else in his life had suddenly taken up an interest in paranormal and extraterrestrial life, either. 

He wonders if he can blame the Oikawa kid for this, too. For suggesting something so conniving as to chip and track his own father. He wants to, he thinks it’s likely - Oikawa had always had such a strong conviction for what he believed, he wouldn’t be surprised if he’d gone so far as to instigate a tracking operation.

The issue is that he didn’t know exactly how long they had been doing this. 

He also could not figure out why.

When on earth had either of them gotten it in their head that he was involved in something worth tracking? What did they expect to find? Even if - even if Oikawa or Daichi had, for whatever reason, developed complete confidence that Rion was involved in something paranormal - what did they expect to accomplish simply knowing where he went? What did they want to know?

If he knew what it was, what they were after, he might be able to tell them, get them to back off, find a way out of this before either of them did something stupid that he wouldn’t be able to scratch off the record. 

“Sawamura!” a voice greets, perhaps too energetically for meeting someone just getting off a plane, as he’s stepping down the stairs of the small place, onto the runway. 

She’s a pretty woman, Rion had always thought. Very small, barely five feet if that, with pinched features, big eyes, delicate looking. Her hair was a bright orange, so much so that it caught the sunlight in an almost unpleasant way. 

“Novikova,” he replies, dipping his head politely. He doesn’t stop walking, and she falls into step beside him. She’s already pulled a tablet up into the crook of her arm, tapping away at it with lightning proficiency. She took to technology like a twelve year old boy, Rion had noticed, never without something in her hands. 

“You’re thirty-eight minutes late,” she replies, after a moment, when she looks up from the tablet. “What held you up?”

“Thirty-eight minutes is a rounding error when it comes to air travel,” he replies, glancing over his shoulder at her. 

“Thirty-eight minutes is thirty-eight minutes. What was your assessment of the site in Sapporo?” 

“I sent you the report.”

“I prefer a verbal debriefing.”

Rion resists sighing, waiting until they have passed under the overhang of the entrance to the little private airport and into the dim interior before speaking again. 

“Sapporo is null,” he replied. “I pulled a handful of eye-witness accounts and some phone footage but none of it looked legitimate. Weather balloons, military aircraft, honestly just some kid’s drone, it’s not like it was a sighting with a lot of detail, and there were no patients admitted into any facility within that day indicative of an abduction event. I’ll try and verify what they did see soon.”

“Very well. Good work.”

His hands moved to his pocket, squeezing on the tracking device for a moment, before saying:

“In the interest of transparency, I feel like I need to inform you that my son has taken an interest in the paranormal, recently,” he says, stopping walking. He likes Oksana. He’s always liked Oksana. He’d trust her with anything but the reason he’d trust her with anything is because he knows she is consistent. He knows what her priorities are, and he is not sure where this will land on the list of things she’s willing to tolerate - so he doesn’t tell her how far it has actually gone.

“Oh?” she replies, looking back to him with raised eyes. “Daichi, or one of the boring ones?” 

“...Daichi.”

“And what sparked this?”

“I… I think a friendship with the Oikawa kid,” he says. “The brother.”

“...who?”

“...Oikawa Tooru? Him and his sister Saku were - nevermind, it’s not important,” he says, waving a hand. “I just… I’m worried that he’s… showing such a keen interest in this… subject, given… you know…”

Oksana seems unbothered by this, getting distracted by something popping up on her tablet and making Rion wait for an answer. 

“I wouldn’t be worried,” she says after a moment, turning blue eyes back on him with a pleasant smile and unreadable expression. “What about this has caused you worry?”

He bites the inside of his cheek. “Just… not good to have him sniffing around, is it?”

“Not at all,” she agrees, still with that chipper faux cheer. “I would trust you would handle him appropriately and ensure there’s no compromise to his or your circumstances. This… interest in the paranormal, as you say… Do you think it’s due to his genotype? Or is it perhaps just due to the fact that he is a fifteen year old boy and aliens are cool?” 

Rion blinks. “He’s… eighteen. He turned eighteen a few months ago.”

“Christ almighty, is he really?” she replies immediately, putting a hand on her hip. “Well, happy birthday three times over, send him my best. Time sure does fly when you’re having fun, doesn’t it?”

“...sure,” Rion agrees. “Yeah. Uh… sorry, my point was just - I don’t… I don’t want him… figuring it out on his own. Are you really not concerned about this? What if he… realizes what we do, what my job is, what if he figures it all out?”

Oksana laughed. “Why, Riri, then you clean up the mess. That’s what you’re paid for, isn’t it?”

Rion swallowed, giving her his best smile back. “Of course,” he says. “I understand that.”

 

---

 

His father’s office is clean, but far more worked in than the empty one he'd briefly checked. Kuroo and him split to opposite ends, looking through the desk and being careful not to disturb or move anything that can’t be put back exactly. There’s several locked filing cabinets, and quite a bit of their time is spent just trying to find something that can open. Luckily, offices are predictable. 

“Keys!” 

Kuroo produces a set of tiny metal keys from one of the desk drawers, and they eagerly begin trying them against all the cabinet locks. It takes an annoyingly long time to open the first, and they’re presented with rows and rows and rows of manila file folders and white paper. 

Accounts. 

Kuroo looks at the first, checking the label. 

“Bhatti, Surinderjit,” he reads, frowning slightly, before flipping to the next. “Chinen, Akane.”

Daichi stares for a second,before reaching into grab the first folder, taking it out and over to the desk to open it up. 

He pulls his phone out to use as better light, and to take pictures if necessary - obviously they couldn’t stay here long enough to read every file in every cabinet, but they could do their best to get as much as they could, and look over it later. 

He can hear Kuroo muttering and flipping through files behind him, opening a second cabinet after a minute. 

He tries to scan through the document as quickly as he can, to catch any obvious red flags or important info. 

Bhatti reported feeling a sense of dread about 20:00 on July 6th, 2002 --

-- massive object in the sky --

-- glowing lights --

-- sensation of falling --

-- wound to the lower right abdomen --

-- bruising along the spine --

-- Bhatti was taken to emergency at 00:50 am on July 7th -- 

-- subject was 5 months pregnant at the time --

-- 15 years old --

-- interviews conducted indicate complete amnesia regarding the experience --

-- Bhatti gave birth to a baby girl on November 13th, 2001 --

-- observation will continue for the duration of life. 

“Oh my god,” Kuroo says, interrupting his reading. 

“What?”

And Kuroo is appearing beside him, tossing a file down on top of the one he was currently looking at. Daichi glances at the name. 

Oikawa, Saku.

“Shit…”

He can feel his heartbeat in his chest, carefully flipping open the folder, Kuroo hanging over his shoulder. It is not especially long.

“Oh-” Kuroo’s voice comes out in a cracked noise of horror. “Oh my god-”

“Holy shit-” Daichi says, lifting a hand up to cover his mouth. He glances at Kuroo, and Kuroo is already looking back at him. 

“Does Oikawa know about this?” Kuroo says. 

“He… he can’t know, can he?” Daichi replies, voice caught in a hushed whisper. 

Chapter 19: There's Something About Tooru

Notes:

me, after posting a chapter: I'm gonna take a break and not post so rapidly anymore
me, immediately, having nothing else to do and no other hobbies: fck that

There’s a one-way mirror that separates the interrogation room from the rest of the station halls. They stood outside of it now - they’d stood outside of it for a while, looking inwards at the lone figure sitting at the table, hands between her knees, looking miserable and exhausted. She’s young, too young to be put into this kind of position, but unfortunately life didn’t always work out in a way that was just and fair. 

“There’s nothing here,” Oksana says, reading over a file report from the previous interviews they’d done. “The kid had a fun story but it doesn’t check out, it’s probably just your standard case of misidentification and manslaughter. I don’t even want to bother interviewing the girl.” 

Rion stares through the glass, then back over Oksana’s shoulder to glance at the transcript of the interview they’d conducted just a few hours before.

“But we don’t know what actually did happen,” he comments. “None of the stories or the timelines line up.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Oksana replies, shutting the folder and handing it over to him. “The police will handle a criminal investigation. I admit, this was a good catch, but there’s just too many irregularities for it to be genuine.”

He looks up, through the one-way glass, to the young woman sitting there in her misery. 

“Can I… can I at least… talk to her? I know it’s not an abduction case, I know I can’t… there’s no reason to interfere, but… I mean… She…”

“What do you think you can do for her?” Oksana asks. 

“...I don’t know. But… I mean look at her, she’s all alone, this must be terrifying…” 

“If you insist. But I remind you, our branch of operations doesn’t do criminal cases, we don’t have any authority over what happens next for her.” 

“I know. I just…”

Oksana rolls her eyes. “You and your sentimentalities, Ri. They’ll be the end of you. Meet me outside once you’re done, okay?” 

He gives her a nod, and waits until she’s turned to head down the hallway before quietly heading to the door to the interrogation room. He’s surprised by how cold it is inside, and immediately feels bad for leaving her here for this long. 

She looks up as he enters. She’s… what, sixteen years old? With choppy black hair and tear-streaked cheeks and a black eye. She’s pregnant - very pregnant, actually, probably close to her due date.

She stares at him with distrust and hatred and disgust and everything evil she can summon inside herself. 

“Where’s Tooru? Why won’t anyone let me see him?” 

Rion pulls the chair out from the desk, taking a seat across from her slowly, and really thinking about what he was going to say. 

“Ms. Oikawa-” he starts. 

“Answer my fucking question,” she spits back, leaning forward on the desk. “Where’s my brother? Where did you take him-”

He holds up a hand, hardening his gaze for a moment and waiting until she had chosen to calm down on her own, sitting back in her chair, before he tried speaking again. 

“Ms. Oikawa,” he repeats. “Your brother is fine, he’s perfectly fine, I assure you. He’s with some of my colleagues right now. My name is Sawamura Rion, I was actually just coming to talk to you about him, and the story he’s presented for us-”

Saku is staring at him. Rion sets the folder down on the table in front of them, slowly flipping it open. 

“-according to your brother, you three were camping together, went on a hike at night, when it suddenly started to rain, and then a big spaceship landed, a dozen tiny grey men came out, started attacking everyone, prompting him to run into the forest to hide. He doesn’t know what happened to you or Mr. Sato, but he assumes they’re responsible for his death,” Rion reports. 

Saku continues to stare at him. 

After a moment, Rion taps his knuckles on the table, saying: “Okay, so I think we can both agree that didn’t happen.” 

“If Tooru says it was aliens it must have been aliens,” Saku replies, without hesitation, looking down. “I don’t remember… aliens do that, right? They can wipe your memory? Makes sense to me.”

“Well, okay, we can start with the fact that it didn’t rain last night, so that’s wrong, and nobody else in the very public campground and popular hiking trail saw anything even close to a flying saucer or UFO, and also this doesn’t fit the typical abduction model we would expect to see.”

“Aren’t I entitled to a lawyer or something?”

“You would be, except I’m not law enforcement, so nothing we say is on public record anyway,” he explains. 

“You’re not-” She’s eyeing his windbreaker, labeled from the PSIA.  “...are you sure you’re not?”

“Mhm? Oh, this, this is a formality,” he says, tapping at his chest. “The branch of the PSIA that I work for is far removed from law enforcement of any kind, we’re… researchers, and accountants. We manage complicated problems and provide potential solutions, and most importantly, we follow up with unusual circumstances and unfamiliar objects and make sure that public safety is always top priority. Which is why it is very important to me that you tell me what actually happened.”

She doesn’t like him, or trust him. She puts one hand on her stomach, thinking for a moment before saying: “I don’t know. If Tooru remembers aliens, it must be aliens.”

“It wasn’t aliens,” he replies.

“I don’t know what happened then.”

“I’m going to need you to do better than that.”

She’s staring at him. He can see her eyes beginning to well up with tears again, he can see the stress and anxiety piling on, he can see how close she is to breaking. How much all of this was weighing down on her. His heart goes out to her, he wants to help, he can only see Himari when he looks at her, but this is not the same. He tries to tell himself it’s not the same. 

“I… I don’t want anything to happen to Tooru,” she replies, after a long pause, voice cracking. “I’m not telling anyone anything.”

“See… Here's the problem,” Rion says, leaning forward on the table. “Because this isn’t aliens, when I sign this document-” he pauses to tap the folder he still has open. “-our agency is going to step away from the case and hand it over to criminal law enforcement, and it will be up to them to decide how to handle the investigation. Which means you will need a lawyer, you will be under oath and the records will be permanent, so don’t let me sign this document that hands your case back to the prefectural police force without actually having all the details. Because right now what I’m handing back is a twelve year old boy who won’t stop talking about aliens, a sixteen year old pregnant girl who won’t talk at all, and a dead seventeen year old. And they will be less forgiving about your brother’s alien conspiracies and your uncooperation.”

“...He’s twelve,” she says. “They can’t do anything to him, he’s a kid.”

“A common misconception,” Rion informs her. “Being underage doesn’t guarantee protection, especially not in cases with murder.”

“There was no murder!” Saku shrieks, and she almost moves to stand up, before thinking better of it and sitting down again. “Nobody… it was… an accident… Maybe… I-”

He reaches across the table, not quite far enough to touch her, lowering his voice. 

“It’s okay, Saku, I’m here to help. Tell me what happened last night.” 

She sniffs, tears overflowing in her eyes and hastily lifting a hand to wipe them away, before saying: “Jun- he… He… He was under a lot of stress, because of… of the pregnancy, and the pressure from our families, and the expectations… my mother… My mother had… basically cut me off, when she found out, so I had been living with him and his family, and… I think having me around just… really pushed him to his limits, and he seemed to… hate me more the more pregnant I got, and with gossip at school, and… It was just… I… I know it’s not something you should forgive, but… it was so stressful, and so scary, and I thought… well… you know maybe it’s okay if he yells at me, a little bit, or makes demands, or pushes me around, at least he was still there, he was telling me he was going to marry me, he was going to get a job and support us. I didn’t think it was a big deal, but I… I also didn’t think Tooru even noticed. I knew they didn’t get along, they never had, I don’t think Jun liked children at all, but… He - Tooru - was always so uncomfortable, when Jun came along on our camping trips.”

“And it was brought to a boiling point, last night?” 

Saku nods slightly. “We… usually just me and Tooru would stay out, we’d go up to the lookout and set up our telescope… since… well, since I’m due in a few weeks, we’d decided this would be the last trip for a while, and Jun said he’d come up with us. Tooru was… he didn’t like that, but there wasn’t much we could do, so we all went up together, and… I don’t know, it was… it was something stupid, Jun broke the microscope, and Tooru started yelling at him, and… I… I was… okay with him… hitting me, but he grabbed Tooru by the arm and started screaming at him to shut up and I just… I lost it, and I went to separate them, and…” she pauses to swallow. “He turned around and hit me, and… I guess Tooru had never seen… I guess maybe there was… I don’t know what he thought, maybe the same thing I did when I saw Jun grabbing him, but he started… screaming and grabbing at him and cursing and he - I don’t… it was an accident…. I… I think it was an accident, that he dragged him back and Jun went over the lookout edge. I don’t… I don’t think… I don’t think he meant to do that… I think he just wanted him to stop, or… maybe he thought the drop of the lookout wasn’t that steep, or maybe he… He-”

Saku’s voice cracks, and she lifts a hand to cover her mouth, tears streaming down her cheeks despite no sob or noise escaping her. 

“He just started freaking out, he said he didn’t mean to, but… I was… I just couldn’t process, if I should try and climb down, but… I… started yelling at him, I panicked, and he turned and ran. Into the woods. And then I had to choose between going to see if Jun was okay, or making sure Tooru didn’t get lost in the woods and I chose to go after Tooru. I… it… they can’t… they can’t do anything to us, it was just an accident. It was all a stupid accident, they can’t - can they? Can they- can they… can you… surely any… any officer or judge would… agree it was all some stupid-”

Rion has to take a slow, deep breath to stop himself from getting overly emotional, moving his hand to Saku’s to signal that it was okay, that she could relax a bit. 

“I’m going to be honest with you, it doesn’t look good. Even accidents require a trial and even accidents can have consequences-”

“But he’s twelve, how can they-”

“But there’s very little evidence for everything they just said,” he goes on. “Despite your story sounding more plausible, in the court of law, you have about as much evidence as your brother and his aliens story does. So what they’re going to do is autopsy the body, conduct long and stressful interviews, and they’ll decide what happens. And if they decide that it wasn’t an accident, that he was pushed, then age probably won’t play a huge factor in deciding the punishment-”

“No-”

“Ms. Oikawa-”

“No, please, please, he’s - he’s just a kid, what if - I’ll say it was my fault, I’ll say I pushed him, I did! I definitely pushed him. Tooru is too small to be throwing around someone Jun’s size anyway. I definitely pushed him off the edge.” 

Rion is shaking his head. 

“He’s all I’ve got,” Saku says, and now her voice cracks into a sob. “My parents already hate me, Jun’s parents are going to hate me even more, if anything happens to him-”

Fuck. 

Fuck fuck fuck-

Fuck this job and this world and his-

“Okay,” Rion says, closing his eyes. “Okay, okay, okay, I… Just… promise me, okay, promise me that you do genuinely believe that it’s an accident, that all of this happened because of some… fucked up karmic humour from the universe, promise me that you and Tooru had no harm in mind when Jun got hurt-”

“We didn’t, I swear we didn’t-”

“Then… it was aliens,” he says. 

Saku blinked rapidly, trying to get her head on straight.

“...what?”

“The cases my agency works on are of highest security, and when we do find a genuine case, an actual abduction or sighting or something falling to worth, the records are sealed, and can only be accessed by those with certain clearances - law enforcement is never allowed to weigh in. So… There’s no evidence for your story, and there’s… no evidence for Tooru’s either, but I can’t just pick one over the other, so to play it safe I’m going to classify your case as potential alien activity and… that will be that.”

“...I don’t understand.”

“Everything is going to be okay,” he clarifies. “I’m going to keep your case active. And as long as it is, the law won’t be able to take effect. Because our clearance is higher than that, so… you… nobody…”

Saku puts a hand over her mouth. “But what do I do, then?”

Rion shuts the folder in front of him, brain already reeling with potential consequences. What if Oksana doesn’t let him keep the case? What if she demands he hand it over? Should he even tell her? What if he doesn’t tell her, and then she finds out? Would he get fired? Would they come after Saku and her brother with the added weight of interference with an investigation? 

“Just live your life,” he says, starting to stand up. “But… you can’t tell anyone what happened, okay? This is.. Vitally important that nobody knows what happened last night. Let Tooru believe it was aliens, but… don’t tell anyone, don’t sniff around, don’t even joke about it, because the only loophole I have is that nobody can prove it doesn’t belong on my desk. So… just… take care of him, take care of yourself-”

“Why?”

“Mhm?”

“Why are you doing this? I don’t even know who you are-”

Saku cuts herself off, staring at him helplessly. 

She makes a good point. This would probably be more confusing for her in the long run. Not only had he indirectly told her aliens were real, but he was threatening her with potential criminal charges if she spoke out, she was hurt, about to have a baby-

“My… uh… my… eldest son,” he says. “Is about Tooru’s age. I would burn the city down to keep him safe, so… If that’s what you felt, when Jun grabbed at him, then I don’t hold any ill will towards you or him.”

“Your- Tooru’s age, but… I mean, you look - you look young-”
He nods. “Yeah. We probably had him when we were about your age,” he says, nodding to her. “Maybe that’s a part of the ‘why’ too. I know how hard it’s going to be, doing what you’re about to try and do, raising a kid before you’ve stopped being one yourself… Maybe it’s immoral, not to hold you accountable for whatever happened, but I can’t bring myself to do it. Go raise your baby.”

She’s crying again, but nods. He picks his folder up, heading for the door with shaking hands. 

Twelve years of doing this job and he had never broken protocol. He’d never risked lying like this, to one of the most powerful government bodies in the country. But it wasn’t really a lie, was it? Barely more than an administrative blip. If push came to shove, it was little more than a clerical error, he could claim he just never filed it correctly, that a checkbox was never pressed, that an email was never sent. 

An accident occured last night, a tragic, horrible accident. His heart goes out to the family of Sato Jun and anyone who had known him. He’s sorry that he’s stopping his family from getting justice. But he just can’t do it. 

---

 

With a slightly shaky hand, Kuroo reaches to flip over the pages of the file, on to where there was an old, printed copy of a coroner’s report. Daichi doesn’t even know if oxygen exists anymore, his brain is scrambling to put together any coherent thought on this matter. 

“Oikawa must… why…” he pinches the bridge of his nose for a moment, before pulling a thought together. “Does Oikawa really not remember any of this? Or is he just… lying?”

“That… I mean, that can happen, with kids,” Kuroo replies. “Throw something traumatic enough at them and their brain will rewire however it needs to to survive. Oikawa might genuinely believe there were aliens that night.” 

“The story my dad reported from him doesn’t match the one he told us, at Yamaneko,” Daichi says. “It’s different.”

“I imagine it would be,” Kuroo agrees. “We-”

“Hey! Guys!” Oikawa’s very excited voice breaks through, and Daichi has just enough warning to throw the folder closed and glance to the doorway before he appears. “Come here, I think I found something - oh, what’s all that?”

Kuroo opens his mouth to speak, but Daichi beats him to it. 

“We don’t know,” he says. “I’ve been taking pictures, we’ll need to go over it properly once we’re not, you know, actively breaking into an office.”

“Oh, good idea,” Oikawa replies, then: “I think I found Shima Three, come on-” and he turns to leave the room, heading back across the room to the second off. 

“He found-”

“Dude!” Kuroo interrupts, in a furious hiss. “What the fuck? We’ve gotta show him what we found-”

“Excuse me?” Daichi replies, rounding on him. “In what universe is this the correct time and place to drop something like this on him? We barely know the full story - we… we have to take our time with this, there’s a reason nobody told him-”

“The whole reason we’re here is because we’re trying to find the truth, and this is it!” 

“Kuroo, we-” and here Daichi beckons aggressively between them, “Cannot be the ones that tell Oikawa this, we have to at least talk to Saku first, or - even just Iwaizumi, someone who might have a bit of a better grasp on all this-”

“I don’t feel great about keeping this a secret-”

“It’s a not a secret,” Daichi hisses, grabbing the folders and moving past him to the filing cabinet to put them away. “It’s… we’re just… delaying the reveal. Just… Please, don’t say anything until we have a chance to… you know what he’s like, he’ll… I mean, he might not even believe the file, he might think it’s part of the cover-up. It might be. Who knows what’s true, right? We need to talk to Saku before we risk blowing his life up-”

Bhatti’s file is easy to put away - it’s right at the front. He has to flick through to find the correct place for Oikawa’s. 

“Fine,” Kuroo hisses, in a voice that indicates he feels it’s anything but. “But only because you’re right about him being a fucking maniac and I promised Kenma we wouldn’t give them a reason to check the cameras.”

“Exactly,” Daichi says, finding the place and slotting the folder in. “Now-”

Sawamura H. 

He can see, just a few places past Oikawa’s, the name on the file slotted there. 

There’s a pain in his chest, like ten years worth of anxiety crushing him all at once, and he wants to reach forward to grab it-

“Are you guys coming or not?” Oikawa whisper-yells, and Daichi panics, slamming the cabinet door shut and standing up quickly. 

“Sorry! Just cleaning up!” he calls back, stumbling out of the office and giving one more warning glance to Kuroo before following Oikawa across to the other office. 

There wasn’t much in this office, but Oikawa has laid out the papers from that folder and opened a few draws, and has put together a map of crazy that clearly makes sense to him. 

“You said you found Shima Three?”

“Yeah,” Oikawa replies, tapping the paper. “These are transport documents. Took me a while to figure out what the hell it was, but it’s… insurance documents, fuel cards, shipment orders, stuff like that. The important thing is they’re almost all connected to something going to an address in Okinawa - the same address in Okinawa. Which - well, that makes sense - and then poor Mr. Office Worker clearly messed up because while none of the documents have a big glaring here’s a secret base! sign, there’s this hand-written note on one of the transfer requests that says-” and he stops to show the note to Daichi directly. 

Reconfirm S03 address - shipment request denied?

“Oh, Hell,” Daichi chuckled. 

“You’re not stoked enough,” Oikawa says, using his hands to emphasize that Daichi should be more excited. “Get excited. Be excited.” 

“I am! I am… just… thinking…”

“About?”

“...uh, what all this means…”

“Well, so this company is moving things to an address in Okinawa, but it’s not moving stuff away, ” Kuroo says. “It’s all going in.”

“Exactly,” Oikawa says. “It must be a storage facility, or some kind of compound. Which is probably why your dad moved you guys away from it - maybe it’s not safe… Could be dangerous stuff, like-”

“Let me guess, extraterrestrial life forms?”

“You got it, baby,” Oikawa says, clicking his tongue. “Now we just… I need a pen-”

Kuroo is quick to reach around the desk and hand Oikawa a pen, and Oikawa grabs Daichi’s arm, prompting him to help as he’s pulled forward over the desk and used as a notepad.

“Dude!” Daichi complains, as Oikawa marks up his skin with pen to make a note of the address. “What the hell?”

“Change nothing, right? I can’t use any of their stuff, and we didn’t bring paper,” Oikawa replies. 

“And you didn’t think to take a picture?”

“I guess I could have done that,” Oikawa agrees, shrugging. “But it’s dark in here and I don’t wanna risk a blurry photo or glare or anything, y’know, this is safer.”

“Then use your own arm next time!” he replies, yanking his arm back and shaking himself out.

“I have sensitive skin,” Oikawa replies with a shrug. “I don’t want the ink to give me a rash or something.”

“Oh, but infecting my skin is fine?”

“...Yes?”

Daichi glares at him, before Kuroo interrupts with: “Is there anything else? Anywhere we should check-”

“This room seems relatively unoccupied otherwise,” Oikawa says. “It looks like it’s just storage for the transport shit - what about yours, it looked like those filing cabinets were full of shit.”

“Yeah,” Daichi agrees. “We… it looks like you might be right, about the alien conspiracy thing,” he says. 

Oikawa’s eyes shoot up. “You’re saying that?”

“The files in there, a lot of them were… pregnant women - young, teens, and… the language… used didn’t… confirm anything, but-”

“Oh my god we have to go read all of them-”

Daichi grabs Oikawa before he can rush out the door, pulling him back. “No no-” he stammers. “Just… we took photos, we can go over them when we get back somewhere secure, okay? I don’t wanna push our luck, let’s go-”

“Did you- but-”

“None of it confirmed aliens,” he says, to calm him down. “Like, no alien autopsies or pictures or anything like that, just a bunch of… records of sightings, and abductions, so to speak. Like… they’re definitely investigating.”

Oikawa is looking down at him, seeming a little surprised before nodding slowly. “Ah, okay… are you sure you saw everything, though? Did you see anything about Saku? Or - or Tenkai? Any of them?” 

“I… no,” he says.

He can see Oikawa’s face pinch up, and Kuroo turns to leave the room, which was probably safer for him than trying to hold his tongue.

“That doesn’t mean… that doesn’t mean anything, we have no idea what qualifies a file for storage here versus somewhere else. Maybe my dad just wasn’t involved… in any of your stuff.”

“Maybe…” Oikawa agrees, before sighing, and saying: “I guess you’re right. We’ve been up here a while, we need to go.”

“Let’s clean up, and go,” Daichi agreed. “You… put all this shit back, and I’ll make sure my dad’s office is cleaned up and locked.” 

“Mhm… fine, okay, yes, good-” and Oikawa is dancing back around the desk, hurriedly starting to put all the papers away. 

Daichi leaves the office, trying hard to feel any kind of thrill or excitement, but discovery after discovery is starting to dull his senses, and his brain is just screaming at him to slow down. But they can’t - they didn’t have that option. 

Hurriedly, to avoid questions later, he pulls a few of the folders at random from his dad’s cabinet, and takes photos of their pages, quietly and repetitively. He does find a Tenkai K, though it feels like so long ago that they’d been down interviewing the woman. He takes a few photos of her file, pausing to peruse the words and try and decide if these were horrible alien abduction stories or a miscellaneous pile of alien encounter reports.  

He tries to avoid looking at the file with his mother’s name on it. 

He should look, right? 

He needs to look. If he doesn’t-

“Daichi?”

Daichi slams the cabinet shut so fast he forgets to move his left hand, pinching his thumb between the metal. He yelps, falling back and cursing, shaking his hand out with a grimace. 

He tilts his head back to look at Kuroo. 

“What?”

“Oikawa’s ready to go, come on.”

Should I tell him? 

Should I tell any of them? Should I look at the file? What will I find? Will it be like Bhatti’s, a story with no verification saved by this agency for an unknown reason, or like Saku’s, filled with misery and discomfort? What if it changes things? What if-

“...Daichi?”
Kuroo is looking down at him with greater concern now, and Daichi chooses to shove all his panic away. 

“I just… hurt my hand,” he says, shutting the cabinet properly and hurrying to clean up. “Sorry. Yeah, I’m coming.”

What does this mean? What am I supposed to do? What could any possible expect me to do?

Why wouldn’t my dad have told me if it was something important? 

He would have told me if it was something important, right?

He follows Kuroo and Oikawa to the elevator.

 

---

 

“All set?”

Daichi pauses in the lobby, turning to look back to the receptionist. “Oh, yeah,” he chuckles, scratching at his arm. “Don’t spoil the surprise for him, okay?”

She gives him a thumbs up, and Daichi turns to follow Oikawa and Kuroo out the front door and into the night air.

 

---

 

Oikawa stretches his arms up to the dark sky, dancing on light feet down the street and turning around to walk backwards. 

“I can’t believe we just pulled that off,” he’s laughing, looking over the moon over their little espionage experience. “Holy shit, that was amazing.”

“It was… pretty cool,” Kuroo agreed, hands in his pockets. “I can’t believe it worked.”

“Of course it worked, we’re awesome.”

Daichi gives him a smile, nodding along. “I guess we are. Should we go check in with Bo and Ushijima?” 

Oikawa hummed. “Probably for the best. We can compile our notes, see what we have.”

“Right,” Kuroo says. “Like…”

“Like what we do next with this Shima Three place,” Daichi offers, earning himself a scowl from Kuroo. “If they’re moving things there, it’s definitely storage, right? Or… monitoring? Research? It could be worth exploring.” 

“Could be,” Kuroo replies, flatly. 

“Ugh, why can’t the government be doing everything in Tokyo?” Oikawa mutters. “It's so much easier to get to Tokyo. How are we going to get to Okinawa?”

Daichi shrugs. “Carefully?”

“Obviously. But… I mean…”

“Well… maybe we don’t go right now,” Kuroo says, and Daichi is glad he’s not too annoyed to completely avoid helping. “We’re almost graduated, right? Let’s… we can’t possibly go anywhere, or do anything, while we’re still in school. So let’s just… buckle down, get out of high school, and then we’ll have summer break to take a trip-”

“We can use the channel as an excuse,” Daichi offers. “There’s gotta be tons of Okinawan haunted… whatevers we could go film, so nobody would question us going down there. And then we can just… pop around and check out that address. See what’s there.”

“Oh,” Oikawa says, snapping his fingers. “Plus, we gotta look into this Oksana Novikova character. I’ll see if there’s anything online, or references to her anywhere else.”

“She might not matter,” Daichi reminds him. “The receptionist said it was real old authorization, since before my dad was even working here.”

“Mhm… Right… but, hey, if push comes to shove, we can see if Tendou will swing by to do some more mind reading. We might be able to get more out of your father’s brain than just numbers.”

“Right…”

“Though,” Oikawa says, turning around to walk normally again, after almost walking into a pole. “Tendou’s not entirely trustworthy for long strings of things… I mean, he can’t even read your brain, and you’re not exactly an example of exemplary brainpower.”

“...I remember why I didn’t like you.”

“Mhm.”

Daichi lets the conversation drop, paying more attention to the cracks in the sidewalk as they made their way back to the train stop that would get them into the suburbs where Bokuto’s place was. 

 

---

 

“You’ve been weird since coming back from the office,” Bokuto says, from where he’s laid out on Kuroo’s bed, typing away at his phone. Kuroo looks up from the physics textbook he’d been trying to read, regretting every choice he’d ever made to take advanced courses, and puts his attention on Bokuto. 

“Mhm?”

“I mean, the aliens thing is freaky, but… We kinda already knew all that, right? It’s just confirmation… I-”

“Your genuine lack of concern regarding the aliens is shocking.”

“Eh, if we catch an alien, then I’ll care,” he says, followed by: “But you’ve been a little weird. Did you find anything else?”

Kuroo is quiet for a moment, tapping his pencil against his desk. 

“Okay, if I tell you, you have to promise not to tell anyone else, okay? Daichi is… he’s looking into it now, and I promised I’d let him… talk to some people, so… you have to keep it a secret.” 

Bokuto sits up more. “Oh? Sure.”

“No, Bo, I mean like a real secret, that includes all your friends and family, you can’t tell anyone else.”

“Okay,” Bokuto agreed. 

“I’m gonna repeat myself,” Kuroo says. “All people. That means Akaashi too. Okay? Akaashi is people, so you can’t tell him either.”

“...fine. Whatever. I promise, I won’t tell a soul.”

Kuroo nods. “Okay… Okay, so-”

Before he can open his mouth, footsteps storming up the stairs and towards the bedroom catches his attention, and both Kuroo and Bokuto whip their heads around to the bedroom door just in time to see Kenma burst through the door, looking crazy and frazzled.

“Holy shit,” Kuroo says, sitting forward. “Are you okay? What-”

“How did you even get in here?” Bokuto adds. “Nobody else is home-”

“I have a key,” Kenma replies, practically panting as he caught his breath, before looking over to Kuroo. “And that’s not important. What is important is that you guys - all of you, the captains, the ghost hunters, just got invited to Utsukushii Airi’s birthday next month.”

Kuroo blinked. “Who?” he asks, at the same time Bokuto goes: 

“Holy shit, really?”

“Utsukushii is… like… she has eighteen million subscribers on Youtube and recently launched a relatively successful music career, she… and her people just fucking emailed me saying it’s always a big internet party of famous influencers and vloggers and shit, and they’d love to see you guys there.” 

Kuroo tries to get his head around this, but it just doesn’t compute in his brain. 

“Are we…”

“Yes,” Kenma says, as if mad Kuroo would even begin to question it. “You’re going, you’re all going, that’s… not in discussion, you don’t turn down an invitation like this.”

Chapter 20: Kegare

Notes:

aaaaaa I wanted to say thank you to everyone who was leaving such nice comments on the last chapter <3 I feel bad that I don't reply super consistently but that's just my own anxiety about bothering someone or coming across as overbearing so I'll try and be better, but know that I really really really do appreciate all you reading along, it means so much xx

Daichi immediately feels weird about going to talk to Saku without Oikawa knowing about it, and it occurs to him just a little bit too late that there was a not insignificant chance he’d already be there. So he had to scramble to think of a valid explanation should it be Oikawa himself that answers the door. 

He knocks, fidgeting with his shoe against the worn wood of the little porch. 

The door swings open. 

Saku blinks at him, before saying: “Oh, uh… Tooru’s not here.”

“I wasn’t looking for him,” Daichi replies. 

He can see Saku deflate, shoulders slouching down, eyes narrowed as she stares back at him. 

“Yeah,” she says. “That’s what I was worried about.”

Daichi chews on the inside of his cheek, trying to think up something sensitive and sensible to say to open the conversation, but she beats him to it with:

“Your dad tell you what happened?”

“Oh, not at all,” Daichi replies. “There was significantly more lawbreaking involved in getting this information.”

She arches an eye. 

“Can I come in?”

“... fine,” she says, and holds the door open for him. He steps over the threshold, and slips his shoes off, and Saku follows him through the house towards the kitchen table. 

“You can sit,” she says. “Tea?”

“Oh, uh, that’s okay, thank you.”

She hums an acknowledgement and when Daichi takes a seat, she takes the seat beside him, turning it to face him. She has a lot of the same intimidating mannerisms as Oikawa - tilting her head in the same way, keeping her face neutral, that cutting glance over. And unlike Oikawa, Daichi didn’t know her well enough to confidently say she didn’t mean every nasty thought it looked like she might be thinking.

After a second though, she sighs and leans on the table, saying: 

“So? What did you break the law to find out?”

“What… what happened that night with Sato,” Daichi replied, feeling a little bit sick even saying it out loud. “Or… what my dad did for you. What… Oikawa apparently doesn’t know, or… is trying really hard to forget.”

He watches Saku cycle through a litany of emotions, rubbing a hand over her face for a moment before she says:

“Did you tell him?”

“...not yet, but… I… he… he should know. I’m going to-”

“No.”

“I… I can’t keep it from him. The whole… the whole point of… the whole reason we… even know each other is because of this thing, if I don’t… follow through-”

“You can’t,” she replies, in a dry and serious way that makes Daichi worried that if he tries to, she'll kill him to keep him quiet. 

“I… why…? You can’t have planned to keep this from him forever- you’ve seen how much it’s eating away at him, he’s going crazy chasing aliens-”

“Well, I planned to tell him when he was twenty-seven, but they changed the statute of limitations for accidental manslaughter to thirty years recently so I guess he’s waiting until he’s forty-two.”

“Forty- what in the hell are you talking about?” Daichi says, shifting forward in his seat. “Why- he was a kid, I’m sure any judge would rule-”

“We don’t know that,” she says. “And even in the best case scenario, it’s possible he still ends up with prison time - maybe not life behind bars, but even just twelve fucking months would ruin his life. You know how challenging things become once you don’t have a clear criminal record? And I’m not… I’m not letting them put my baby brother away for even a second-”

“But why can’t he know,” Daichi says. “I’m sure he understands-”

“Do you know how much worse the conviction becomes if he knows and doesn’t turn himself in? I’m willing to take on aiding and abetting charges if need be, but I won’t force him to go through his life actively lying to… to the police, to the government, to Jun’s family. I… your father gave us an incredible chance, that night, one that we surely didn’t deserve but if you even consider tearing my family apart because you think it’s not morally right, I’m going to return the favour, and that’s a promise.”

Daichi folds his hands between his knees, digging his nails into his palm to force himself to focus, not fly off the handle. 

“I don’t want to lie to him,” Daichi says. “He can’t be in that much danger-”

“He might not be,” she says. “A court might rule him not at fault, but I’m not going to let you gamble my brother’s life on the benevolence of a public judge and jury.”

“So… what… what do you… what do we do?” he says, after a minute. “Is your grand plan really to just… never tell him?”

She has the sense to look a little guilty now, looking away for a moment before sighing and saying: “I don’t know. I… wanted so badly for him to just… care less. I love how much he adores volleyball, and he has all these plans for the future, playing professionally, moving to Argentina, I… the aliens obsession was-”

“Hang on-” Daichi says, putting a hand up. “Moving what?”

“Argentina,” Saku replies, blinking at him. “His… volleyball hero is Argentinian, and he’s got an offer to play for a team down there, but he’s holding out on accepting it hoping for an offer from… some other team he says is much better.”

Daichi feels like his brain is short-circuiting. 

“Did… did he never mention that?” Saku says after a minute. “I feel like he’s always talking about it…”

“No, he hadn’t mentioned it,” Daichi manages to reply, after a minute. Maybe it’s just because he’s eighteen, but suddenly the whole potentially-devastating-criminal-record-lie was dwarfed and immediately replaced by a far greater concern, which was that one of my best friends is moving away?

And then he has to reckon with that thought, that emotion, because up until this exact second he would have gone around and cheered at the idea of getting Oikawa out of his hair, being done with him. But being faced with a true fact turned it bitter and sour in his stomach, and… well, yeah, after everything they’d been through, Oikawa was one of his best friends (whether or not Daichi’s pride would ever admit it.)

Oikawa hadn’t told him?

They had… this whole… channel, they had a whole… thing going. He’d known that most of them had professional careers in the works but there was a huge difference between hey we can only meet up once every month because you’re a six hour drive away and you’re on the other side of the planet, twelve hours behind us and requiring a full day of travel to get to you.

“Sawamura?”

He jerks his head up, staring at Saku for a moment, who looks fractionally less angry and significantly more concerned. 

“So you’ve known aliens are real this whole time and you didn’t say anything?” he says, voice cracking. 

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“My father,” he says. “He interviewed you. From a secret alien government agency. He interviewed you because you fit the profile but you didn’t because it wasn’t aliens for you but the fact that he was there - he told you, he’s- did-”

“Holy shit, you’re having a meltdown,” she says, moving to scoot in closer to him and put a hand on his knee. “Hey, it’s okay-”

He wants to reflexively shove her hand off him, the touch feeling far too much for his brain to compute in the moment, but he can’t figure out how to move his hands. 

“No, I… I came here to get answers, I just need you to answer the question, did you know aliens are real? Is that what my dad said? Is that what he’s hiding?”

“Okay, I… I can’t tell you if aliens are real…” she says, leaning towards him. “...And you’re starting to actively cry, are you okay-?”

He rubs at traitorous eyes, shaking his head. “No, I’m not okay,” he spits back, when he can take a breath. “Tendou’s psychic and Oikawa killed a man and my mom was probably abducted by aliens and my dad is hiding it for some reason and there’s a Russian lady involved somehow but I haven’t even begun to touch whatever that’s about but I keep seeing horrible monsters in the dark and a scary old man told me it’s my fault for looking at all and I just found out that one of my best friends is moving to fucking Argentina! Nothing about this is okay!” 

She blinks at him, but before she can even try and say something, Daichi’s phone rings. 

The sound feels far too loud, like clanging bells in his ears, but it spurs him into motion and he fumbles to get his phone out and check the caller ID - Suga. 

He does what he’s always done best, and that’s pull his shit together incredibly fast, sucking in a breath and rolling his shoulders back before answering the phone. 

“Hey,” he says, surprising himself - though not more than he surprises Saku - with how even his voice comes out. “What’s up?”

“What’s up?” Suga chimes on the other end, laughing. “No, I’m the one calling to ask you that. I just had to hear through a Hinata-based grapevine that you apparently got invited to some big internet social event?”

Daichi feels the hysteria melt out of his body. 

How could anything be less than okay when Suga was laughing? 

“Yeah,” he says, closing his eyes slightly so he didn’t have to look at Saku or her house, or anything around him, and could just focus on the sound of Suga’s voice, just slightly distorted through the phone but still so wonderfully him. “Yeah, I… I haven’t even had a chance to look into it, yet. Kenma kinda sprung it on us, and… I’ve… I’ve been… really busy, I guess.”

“Well, I had never heard of it, though Yamaguchi and Tanaka and Noya all took separate turns screaming at me about it-”

“They were screaming at you? Wh- what was this grapevine?”

“Well, Kenma told Hinata, and then Hinata was telling everyone else. It really was a Hinata-based grapevine-”

“No, you guys were… all hanging out together?”

“Ah,” Suga chuckled, before saying: “Well… Yeah, just… me and Asahi didn’t have anything to do, so we decided to crash their practice. Ukai had to work at the shop, so they were without a coach and Ennoshita’s been… well, it’s entertaining to watch, that’s for sure.”

Daichi, quite literally, does not have the emotional capacity left to internalize the idea that they hadn’t even tried to invite him. He thinks for a moment he’s going to care, and then his brain is saying well yeah dingus you just broke into a private office building to steal data, in what fucking world are you making time to go audit a volleyball practice?

“Ah,” he says, nodding, slowlying opening his eyes again. Saku is staring at him with intense concern and confusion. “Well… I was gonna look into it later, it’s not for a few more weeks, so…”

“Mhm. I’ve been watching people’s videos online, from last year’s party,” Suga replies, and Daichi can hear the smile in his voice. “It does not look like your scene. Are all the other guys going?”

“Uh - Suga…” Daichi starts, still eyeing Saku. “Can I… just… like… put you on hold for a second? I need to… I’m in a… I’m not somewhere I can chat.”

“You’re not somewhere you can chat?”

“Just… visiting with a friend, but I’m on my way out-”

Suga is quiet for a moment, before he says: “Sure - will it take long?”

“No, not at all. Just gonna put my shoes on and go.”

“Okay. I’ll wait.”

Daichi nods, fumbles to try and figure out how to mute the call on his phone, then looks up at Saku again.

She’s staring back at him, but he can tell that she’s at a loss for what to say just as much as he is. 

“Are you going to tell him?” she says, eventually.

“I think you should do it,” he replies. “I don’t think it’s something he can hear from me, and I certainly don’t think it’s something he should find out reading an interview transcript. You need to tell him.”

“I…” she trails off, and Daichi slowly stands up. He doesn’t actually expect her to speak again, so it surprises him when she does, adding: “I’ve spent the last seven years desperately wishing that he’s just… stop caring, about aliens, about this so-called truth, about whatever conspiracies he’s come across. I don’t know if aliens are real, but my life got better when I stopped chasing them, so…”

“Are you trying to tell me to back off?”

She closes her eyes, and for a moment Daichi feels bad, as she’s overcome with a haggard look of exhaustion and desperation, from seven years of survival. 

“I’m…” she cuts herself off to shake her head, squeezing her eyes tighter for a moment before looking up at him. “I’m trying to tell you that… life is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Are you familiar - is your family…" She's clearly trying to pick her words correctly, so Daichi turns to face her properly, letting her take her time. “Do you… understand the concept of kegare?”

He frowns slightly having not expected that turn.

“Sure,” he says. “Impurity of one’s soul that has to be cleansed through… specific rituals.”

She nods slightly, before saying: “There are a lot of religions that tie a concept of purity to a concept of morality, but kegare was different, in Shintoism. It’s not… a sin, it’s not an action you take, it’s not something you did. Kegare attaches to you simply by proximity to impurity. Being near someone sick, attending a funeral, hell, women just having their periods, exposure to that blood - any blood - creates kegare. But it’s not… it’s not just… something unpleasant that brings bad luck around. A person steeped in kegare brings ill fortune down upon themselves, their family, their community at large. It… sullies the natural order of things, and you don’t have to even do anything wrong, you just… you just have to be careful what you surround yourself with.”

“If you seek monsters, you shall find them,” Daichi says, turning to look back at her. 

“Exactly,” Saku says, giving him a soft, sad smile. “When I was a little girl, and afraid of the dark, my mother used to tell me that demons only had power in my mind. So the more I believed in them, the more I gave them power over me.”

You’re still a little girl now, he wants to say, but he doesn’t. 

 

---

 

“Okay, I am back, sorry for the delay. Things got… complicated trying to leave the house,” Daichi says, pressing the phone to his ear. 

There’s a muffled thump from the other end, and footsteps, and then shuffling and grabbing as Suga undoubtedly scrambles across his bedroom to pick up the phone he had left somewhere.

“Daichi!” Suga greets, when he’s got the phone back to his ear. “Hey, you’re back, all good?”

“All good,” he agrees. “Walking home now, I apologize for any city-noise.”

“No worries, no worries - where were you? Oikawa’s?”

“Uh - well…” Daichi has to think about that one. “Not in the way you’re asking.”

“... excuse me?”

“I… I’d gone to talk to uh… his sister, actually. About… channel… stuff…”

“Oh, uh… sure, okay,” Suga says, before following up with: “Alone? Just… alone with his sister?”

“...uh-huh.”

 “Is she like… helping with… with content, or…?”

“I… no… It’s not worth getting into right now, I’d rather talk about something else if I’m being honest.”

There’s a soft chuckle from the other end of the phone, before Suga says: “You’ve gotten so cagey recently. You’re making me worried you’re running around breaking the law or something.”

“Hah!” Daichi says, and then stops talking. 

Suga is quiet. 

Daichi is quiet. 

“Well okay,” Suga says after a moment, when it’s clear Daichi isn’t going to add anything. “Uhm… oh, right, I had called to talk to you about this party you’re going to. I’ve been watching videos from last year’s online, and it’s absolutely crazy looking. They had, like… circus performers there last year or something. Actually as far as I can tell it was just a pair of contortionist twins who’d gotten big on Youtube that year but either way they’re in glittery bodysuits and I don’t think legs are supposed to bend that way.”

“Oh, shit,” he says. “Is this big?”

“Is this big?” Suga scoffs. “Dai, you’ve basically been invited to a princess’s party, she’s like royalty. I doubt you’ll even see her. You’ll definitely need to bring a gift, though.” 

“Oh, I know,” Daichi cut in. “I know that because none of my friends have money and they all unanimously decided I’d be in charge of getting something as a group gift.”

“... you gotta stop letting people do this to you.”

“I know, I know…”

“But what are you gonna get? Oh! It’s gotta be on theme, right?”

“... theme?”

“Yeah, she has a theme every year, and decorates accordingly. Last year was… uh… I didn’t find the official title but it was like a psychedelic circus explosion. Insanity. You’re gonna die.”

“I’m aware. Honestly banking on just tucking in beside Oikawa and following his lead. Or Bokuto, actually… Kuroo I’m not sure if I trust in a crowd and I’m considering telling Ushijima he doesn’t have to go.”

He laughs on the other end, and Daichi smiles a response, listening for a moment before saying:

“Oh, hey, by the way, so… uhm… speaking of… this party, not sure if you’re interested, but… Kenma did tell us it’s like… so… it’s not like a closed private event, so… if you wanted to… say, come along as my date, that would be-”

“You’re inviting me to the crazy princess birthday party?”

“I… wouldn’t have used those words, but… yes, if you’d… feel inclined-”

“I would love to accompany you to the crazy princess birthday party,” Suga replies, and Daichi can hear him shuffle around, dropping down to lay on his bed. 

“Really?”

“Really,” he confirms. “I’m surprised you’d even want me there, though. You know, a party full of rich, influencer girls getting drunk off neon coloured punch sounds like a lot of fun for a guy to go alone.”

Daichi laughs. “Do you think that of me?”

“Nah, just fishing for compliments.” 

“Ah, right, of course. Well, absolutely not then. Doesn’t sound like it would be any fun at all if you weren’t there.” 

Suga laughs on the other end, and Daichi can hear him moving around again, rolling over or getting up, he can’t tell. 

“Very good. Well,” Suga says after a moment. “I guess you’ll need to keep me updated on whatever theme they announce. I’ll have to pick a party outfit. Which… is something I don’t think I currently own. Have we ever been to a real party?”

“We’ve barely been to a real birthday, last year for yours we fell asleep at nine.”

 

---

 

Oikawa seems to be having a pleasant lunch, sunglasses on his nose, drink straw in his mouth, minding his own business. 

Daichi throws a rock at him. 

“Oh, fuck- what-” Oikawa says flinching forward and choking on his drink slightly, before turning to look up as Daichi approached. “What the hell!”

“When were you going to tell me you’re moving to Argentina?”

Oikawa is still staring at him, baffled, before eventually recovering and saying: “Honestly I didn’t know you didn’t know. I thought everyone knew.”

Daichi huffed, dragging a metal chair out to sit down, and looking over to where Ushijima was, as per usual, pretending he wasn’t there and just leaning back in his chair. Daichi knows better than to assume he was actually asleep, though. 

“What about you? Did you know this?”

“Yes,” Ushijima replies, entirely unbothered. He doesn’t even open his eyes. 

“Well… fine, okay,” he says, leaning on the table and looking back to Oikawa. “Still. We’ve been sitting here planning the future of our… fucking ghost hunting careers, and you’re planning to move around the world! That should have been mentioned sooner.” 

“Relax,” Oikawa says, waving a hand at him. “You’re so high strung. It’s not that serious.”

“It… very much is,” Daichi says. “That’s… literally the whole planet away. They’re almost exact opposites - it’s a twelve hour difference!”

“And?” Oikawa replies. “It’s the twenty-first century, Daichan, that’s why they invented skype and texting.” 

“Okay, so you’re not at all concerned about the fact that Kuroo asked us in or out and we all unanimously agreed in and you never thought to mention that your in was on a temporary basis until you left - apparently soon since we graduate in a couple weeks-”

“First of all,” Oikawa says, and now he’s tilting his sunglasses down to look at him and make his point. “You’ve gotta stop tweaking. Second of all, I’m not leaving that soon, that’s like… six months away. At least.”

“I just… I feel like I should have… I mean I knew you were all going to do the professional volleyball thing, but…”

“A big change, I know. This country will be weaker for losing me. But this has been on the books for years, and I’m not pulling out now. Even if I do kinda love the attention online.”

“Sure, sure, fair enough, and… yeah, of course it’s cool that you get to go and play, but - doesn’t it… consider… did you not consider that, like… okay, so we’ve started doing this whole… uh… tracking my father and breaking into government buildings thing, and I’m a little worried that you’re going to leave and I’m going to have to just… reckon with that. Deal with those consequences while you go off doing god knows what.”

“Well, god knows what is dramatic,” Oikawa says. “I’ll be playing volleyball. Also, I’m not - look, I know it’s… you’re not going to lose me, I may… be physically gone, but like I said, it’s the twenty-first century. I’ll have your back, even if we don’t get to the bottom of things this summer.”

Daichi groans for a minute, before pulling himself together and nodding. 

“Fine, fine. Fine. Whatever. It doesn’t bother me at all. Actually, I’ll be glad when you’re gone. Maybe then I’ll go back to having a peaceful existence.” 

Oikawa stares at him for a moment, before saying: “Okay. Well, we should probably get walking if we’re gonna make the twelve o’clock train.” 

“Ugh, right,” Daichi says, glancing at the time. “Did Kuroo say that their train was on time?” 

“Bokuto texted,” Ushijima replies, even if Daichi hadn’t been looking at him. “They’re set to arrive on time.”

Oikawa and Daichi both stare at him for a moment, before looking back to each other. 

“I honestly didn’t even know those two had exchanged numbers,” Daichi says. 

“Me either,” Oikawa agrees. “But given Ushijima’s track record for previous choice of friends I suppose it makes a certain amount of sense.”

“How so?”

“Loud and insane.”

---

 

“So tell me more about this… straight forward declaration of intent thing you do,” Daichi says, as they’re getting off their second train of the day, eyeing up the old cemetery on a rolling hill of dry dead grass. 

Ushijima is digging through a backpack, pulling out their secondary camera and trying to go through the process of setting up. He looks up from where he’s crouched, frowning for a second before saying:

“I don’t understand what you’re asking me.”

“So… some weeks ago, before Valentine’s, we were all talking about… like… how you and Oikawa got together with your current partners, and you… said you just realized you had feelings so you immediately acted on them, which sounds crazy to me, but… We’ve been sorta stuck in this limbo, and I need to do something to just… clear the air and make it right, but… I mean, it’s terrifying just coming out and saying something like that, weren’t you anxious at all when you did?”

Ushijima stands up, taking the lens cap off the camera and setting it back in the bag. 

“What should I have felt anxious about?”

“...rejection?”

Ushijima squints at him, clearly still confused. 

Daichi sighs. “Okay, look, I mean, like… what if you’d told him, and then he’d said he didn’t feel the same way, and then your friendship was… weird, or… changed. I don’t want to change anything about the friendship I have, and… you know… If I just… declare that I’d like to make our relationship official, I’m scared that he’ll… pull back, or… think I’m coming on too strong… I just feel like I’m always saying the wrong things, and he’s started to notice how much lying I’m doing which is not his fault, that's the… fault of the law breaking we’re doing, but…”

After a moment of digesting this, Ushijima says: “The reason I was not concerned with potential rejection is because Tendou’s friendship to me had always been unconditional. He had already proven himself to accept every unfixable flaw of my personality, should he have seen my affection as yet another I have faith that he would have accepted that too. Perhaps there would be something to lose in intimacy, but I don’t believe that is necessary for friendship. We do not touch or share secrets, but I would consider you a friend.” 

Daichi stares at him for a moment, before grabbing his bag from between his feet. 

“Alright, I’m gonna go talk to Oikawa. His method seems more applicable to my situation.”

“Did I say something wrong?”

“No and I hate you.”

“Oh. Okay.” 

“... okay now I’m worried you took that literally. I don't actually hate you.”

“That’s a relief. That would have been very uncomfortable after calling you a friend.”

 

---

 

“So what’s this story of you and Iwaizumi getting together? You were friends for like, forever, right? And then… drunk at a party? How’d you know he was-”

“Daichi,” Oikawa says, looking up at him from where he’s sitting cross legged on the grass, looking a little bit crazy in the waning dusk. “We got ghost hunting equipment to play with for the first time ever, and you’re gonna try and hold a conversation with me about dating?”

“I just… I’m so worried about saying the wrong thing, all the time, especially to him, but… I am so tired of things being in this weird… unlabelled-”

Oikawa presses a button on the little machine he held, and the noise is so loud Daichi jumps back on reflex, and trips himself. 

 

---

 

Kuroo is finishing setting up a little camera they had pointing out towards one of the dark mausoleums, covered in weeds and spiderwebs, where activity, for whatever it was worth, had always been reported in greater amounts. 

Daichi is still rubbing the ringing out of his ears, and the mud off his elbows, when he wanders up. 

“That stupid little box is working just fine,” Daichi reports. 

“Excellent. Excellent, excellent. This is gonna be such a cool night,” Kuroo is mumbling, fiddling with the settings on the camera. “You know what we should get next? Trail cameras. Those ones that catch movement. Oh, we could do a whole video hunting… whatever’s in the mountains. Ask Oikawa what cryptids are in the mountains, will you?”

Daichi glances over his shoulder, to where Oikawa was still playing with ghost hunting toys. 

“...he’s not interested in talking right now.”

“Mhm.”

Kuroo glances over at him, frowning slightly before saying: “What’s the sour look for?”

“I don’t have a sour look.”

“Yes you do. Your face is all-” and Kuroo just waves a hand at him. “What’s up? Not digging the cemetery vibes?”

“Not super digging it,” Daichi agrees, crossing his arms. “But if we’re being honest, you’re probably the last person who can help, so I wasn’t even going to bother asking.”

“Oh? Ah, come on, give your old pal Kuroo a shot, I’ll do my best to help,” he said. 

Daichi stares at him for a moment, before saying: “I’m looking for advice on how to get myself out of friendship-dating limbo hell with my best friend.”

Kuroo barks a laugh, then laughs some more, then shakes his head and says: “Yeah, sorry, no, my tactic is to just- shove those feelings down real deep. Hope it kills you.”

“You’re a pillar of enlightenment,” Daichi replies. 

Kuroo gives him a grin, before turning to call over his shoulder: “Eh! Bo! You got any dating advice for Daichi?”

Bokuto wheels around, from where he had been avoiding doing actual prep work and was instead just wandering around trying to catch frogs they could hear in the bushes. 

“What?” he calls. 

“Dating advice!”

“Oh, I don’t date,” Bokuto replies, waving a hand as if to back out of the conversation entirely. 

Kuroo and Daichi exchange a glance, the same look of confusion, before looking back to him. 

“What do you mean you don’t date?” Kuroo asked.

“I’m waiting for Akaashi,” he explains. This offers no explanation. 

“You’re doing what?” is Kuroo’s response, and Daichi decides he knows these two much better than him and it’s probably good he take the lead in this conversation. 

“Yeah,” Bokuto replies, casually. “His parents say he can’t date until after high school, so there’s not much I can do about that.” 

“Does… does Akaashi know about this?”

“I mean… I asked him out about a year ago and he told me his parents had banned him from dating, so I… I think he knows…”

Daichi takes a slow breath, at the same time Kuroo turns to put a hand on his shoulder, leaning in. 

“Well there you have it. Us two idiots aren’t going to be any help, I recommend talking to Ushijima, he seems to have that shit under control.”

“I tried that,” Daichi said. “And then he said a bunch of stuff that just made me feel bad about my personality.” 

“Mhm, yeah, he’ll do that to you,” Kuroo mused.

Before Daichi can say anything else, Oikawa, behind them, claps his hands together and leaps to his feet, catching their attention. They all turn around to face him, and Bokuto comes wandering back over, hands suspiciously clasped together. As if he were, saying, holding a frog he didn’t want anyone else to notice. 

“Alright, team,” Oikawa says. “I have got everything working, it looks like we got the cameras set up, I think we can officially declare this ghost hunting session on.”

“Whoo,” Ushijima says.

Oikawa glares at him. 

“Hey, by the way,” Kuroo adds, leaning in slightly to nudge Daichi. “Did you… talk to Saku yet?”

“I did.”

“And?”

“She threatened to tear my family apart if I told him.” 

“... and what did you say?”

“Well actually I just sort of starting crying and freaking out, it-”

“You- huh?”

“It has been… an incredibly hard month, okay?” Daichi says, hissed under his breath. “So much is going on.”

He feels Kuroo’s hand on his back. “Well,” Kuroo says after a minute. “Not that I don’t fear anyone in Oikawa’s family equally, but we… we cannot keep this secret, just, what, indefinitely?”

“I know, I know,” he replies. “But… okay, I told Saku she should tell him, and maybe… maybe she will. Maybe we just… let it simmer for… just… like… a couple weeks. She made a very compelling case about why we don’t want to tell him, so… I mean, like…”

“Like what?”

“Like the statute of limitations being thirty years and the fact that we know this means we could be arrested for aiding and abetting-”

“Oh, wait, fuck, really? But- it’s not, like, it’s not like a real crime, it’s a thing a kid did by accident-”

Daichi puts his hands in the air. “That’s the problem. Maybe it’s not a real crime. But Saku pointed out that we do not get to decide how a judge would interpret the law, and… so… you know, maybe we just… hold off until… like… at least after graduation? What if he flies off the handle and fucks up his graduation? Oh! Maybe, maybe we wait until he’s moved to Argentina, and then tell him, once he’s away from all Japanese police stations.”

Kuroo stares at him for a second, before saying: “You’re losing your goddamn mind-”

“I told you,” he hissed. “It has been a bad month. And you do not look nearly surprised enough about learning that Oikawa is planning to move to Argentina. Did you already know?”

“Did I- yeah, I already know, Daichi, dude, the man speaks nearly fluent Spanish. I asked a few questions last time it came up.”

Daichi pulls back. “He speaks Spanish?”

“Oh my god,” Kuroo said, grabbing Daichi’s face. “For someone with eyes that can apparently see the goddamned devil Himself you are the least observant fucker on the planet.”

Chapter 21: The Rules of the Game

The cemetery isn’t too far outside the borders of Miyagi, but Daichi had never been to this part of Japan before. The rolling hills it’s tombstones stand in are a pale sort of green, illuminated by the moonlight that came filtered through grey clouds and the dancing shadows of thin trees at the threshold. They had gotten permission to film here, something the groundskeepers were relatively familiar with, as the haunted location had played host to many an avid ghost hunter before them. 

It’s really, really hard for Daichi to get into the mood for ghost hunting. 

Part of him thinks he’s just regular tired. It’s not like he was a paragon of healthy sleep to begin with, so maybe he’d just had a bad rest and was running on fumes now. But more rationally his brain tells him that it’s not regular tired that’s causing his stomach to sink, his breathing to be shaky, his head to hurt. 

It’s not quite fear, either. It’s more like… 

He no longer feels as safe as he once did, staring out into the shadows, what he was so blindly confident that every spooky thing he saw was just his imagination. When he thought it was a game, when it was a game. 

Oikawa has one of his new toys, something playing loud and annoying radio static that sometimes burped out vaguely comprehensive words that he got way too excited about. 

Daichi wants to just enjoy being here with his friends, enjoy doing this silly thing the way he used to, but looking at Oikawa just makes him sad.  

“Potato,” the radio device says, and everyone goes up in raucous laughter. 

He catches Kuroo looking at him, from the other side of Oikawa, and makes a motion as if to indicate hey, you don’t look so good, should we go address any of your current issues so we can maybe help you feel better? And Daichi is not about to do that, so he just waves it off and puts his hands in his pockets and makes a motion to say nah, gonna go wander around in the dark until some new weird problem distracts me.

“Anyone wanna come check out the south end with me?” is what he says out loud, and Kuroo squints at him. 

“I will,” Ushijima replies, shocking Daichi for a moment before he realizes Ushijima is just deeply annoyed by the noise of Oikawa’s machine and wants to leave. 

“Sure,” he replies, before nodding the way and splitting off to head down the rows of tombstones and towards the south end of the cemetery, one of the ‘less haunted’ locations and therefore lower on their list of priorities. 

Behind them, Daichi hears Oikawa shout: “remember to film shit!” before the radio immediately blurps “rabbit!” and makes everyone laugh. 

So with Ushijima tailing him, Daichi heads through the dark, trying to avoid scanning the treeline, and the gap between the rows of tombstones, and everything else dark and horrible. If he was lucky, really lucky, he might get out of this without seeing ghosts. 

He films what he’s sure will just be stock footage, of the stones, the trees, the hills, and eventually they’ve wandered all the way down to the wrought iron fence that encircles the cemetery grounds. He awkwardly shakes the iron bars for a moment, before turning back to Ushijima. 

“We should probably head back to the others, there’s not even ghosts down here.”

Ushijima looks like he really doesn’t want to do that, but nods an agreement, glancing over his shoulder. 

Daichi stops filming on his phone. 

“Can I ask you a question?” Daichi says, after a second. “Like… a real question, that I want you to take seriously.”

“I take all questions seriously. Go ahead.”

Daichi isn’t sure that’s true, but decides to forge a path onwards: “What do you think about… all this monster stuff, with Tendou? Because you’ve never wavered in your convictions, at all, even… even though even I am, now, and everything that’s happened.”

Ushijima thinks about this for a moment, before saying: “I don’t think I understand the question, I’m sorry.”

“Uh… okay, I mean… you don’t think Tendou is a yokai - or, part yokai, or any of that?”

“No, I do not.”

“But… he did… like… okay, so I know he’s not perfect, but you saw him read my dad’s mind, he got the right password.”

Ushijima has to think about this again for a bit, before settling on: “Tendou’s intuition has always been a part of him that has surpassed most people’s understanding. And this would not be the first time his general disposition has led someone to assume him a monster because of it. I don’t see a reason why this so-called evidence would suggest magic over him simply being clever.”

It’s Daichi’s turn to be quiet for a moment. 

“Okay, but… maybe the reason he’s always come across as a monster is… is because of what he is? Sure, he’s always had this intuition, but he’s also always been himself, so…”

“My objection is not that he isn’t different from other people, anybody with eyes can identify that he is not the same as other people,” Ushijima replies, and it’s here that Daichi can see he’s a little more agitated then usual, that he’s stumbled into a conversation he doesn’t love. “The objection is with the conclusion that this makes him magic.”

“Elaborate,” Daichi says, a command that really only ever worked on Ushijima, who was prone to assuming minimal context was needed in any given situation. 

Ushijima puts a hand on his chest, as if to beckon to himself. “If I am someone who exists, verifiably, with a low capacity for interpersonal communication, why would you, someone average, assume that you’re the pinnacle of communicative capacity? In the same way that my brain was wired to misunderstand what people say, why can some people be born wired to comprehend vastly more than the average person? Why does Tendou’s rather incredible ability have to be prescribed to magic and impossibility as opposed to simply being an understudied aspect of the human experience?”

Daichi thinks about this for a moment, folding his hands together under his chin. 

“So it’s not that you don’t believe it,” Daichi says, slowly. “It’s that you dislike the idea of monsters?”

“I believe what I can see. I will not fight you on the fact that yes, Tendou did appear to successfully guess your father’s phone password after having minimal time with him. It’s phenomenal. But I’d like you to explain to me how you think that qualifies as proof of him being a descendant of a mountainous psychic ape people.”

“You make a compelling argument,” Daichi says. “But what if there isn’t an explanation? What if it is just… monsters, and ghosts, and aliens?”

Ushijima shrugs. “Then I’m sure the science will catch up to explain it eventually.”

Daichi almost smiles at that, but an earsplitting scream rips through the air and both him and Ushijima are sprinting back towards the others before they’d even finished processing it. 

The ground is rough and slopes, and Daichi stumbles a few times, frantically trying to push himself faster, faster , please, please-

They get within sight of the others, Ushijima right behind him, and immediately realize their panic had probably been misplaced. 

Bokuto is howling with laughter, and Oikawa, the screamer, was thrashing about still and cursing shaking himself out like he was trying to shed his very skin. 

“What the hell happened?” Daichi says, voice cracking slightly, alarm coursing through his body, making his chest tight and lighting his skin on fire. 

“He put a fucking frog down my shirt,” Oikawa shrieks, at the same time Bokuto laughs:

“I put a frog down his shirt!” in pure delight. 

Kuroo, holding the camera, is doing his best to avoid laughing, and subsequently avoid being a target of Oikawa’s wrath.

Daichi doesn’t even know what to say to that. 

Ushijima does. 

“We thought someone was dying!” he shouts, shutting Bokuto up quite effectively. Oikawa stands there, bristling still and shaking his jacket off, eyes surveying the grass to see if the frog was still at his feet. 

“Someone’s about to be,” Oikawa says eventually, turning his attention to Bokuto, who immediately recovers from his fear of Ushijima and breaks into a grin, before turning to sprint away. 

“Oh come here you little-” Oikawa starts, slipping in the damp grass and turning to take off after him. 

 

---

 

Oikawa tries to explain the science of the little static radio to him, and it comes out sounding a lot like every other pseudo-science Oikawa has ever tried to explain to him. 

“So what do you mean the ghosts can manipulate the radio waves?” Daichi tries, as Oikawa leads him down the grass towards the mausoleum. They’d already investigated it once, as a group, but as the hours crept closer and closer to dawn, they’d decided to split up and go back for another pass through, just the two of them. Or, rather, Oikawa had, and then promptly grabbed Daichi by the collar and said something to the effect of ‘your haunted ass is coming with me to see the ghosts,’ and honestly he wasn’t really in a position to either refute or dissuade him. 

“Like… because it’s flipping through all the stations so fast,” Oikawa says. “They’re able to manipulate where it stops, or use the radio stations as tools to find words they want to communicate.”

“Right but… who decided ghosts can do that? Why can they do that?”

“What… what do you mean?”

“Like… why does being a ghost give you the power to manipulate radio waves? Or… the electric stuff or whatever.”

“I don’t know, man, stop asking stupid questions.”

“Oh this is the stupid question?” Daichi says, having to raise his voice above the static of the box. 

“Bath,” the radio says, in it’s robotic voice. 

“Ha!” Oikawa replies. “The ghosts called you stinky.”

“You are eight years old,” Daichi replies. “And turn that stupid thing off , it is so loud!” 

“No! I want you to talk to the ghosts!” 

Daichi rolls his eyes, resisting the urge to cross his arms. “I’m not talking to the stupid ghosts, I don’t want to talk to the ghosts, the ghosts should be left alone!”

“Aw, come on, please?” Oikawa is whining, pouting at him from behind the camera. “The ghosts love you! Please?”

Daichi groaned, clenching his fists for a second before saying: “ Fine, what do I say?”

“Anything! Call out for them! Introduce yourself!”

Daichi makes sure to glare at him for an extra minute longer, before turning his attention towards the mausoleum. It was a beautiful piece of stonework, carved with latin and english engravings - some Christian missionary’s tomb from the eighteenth century, he’d been informed. He stares at it for a moment before saying:

“Dude probably doesn’t even understand Japanese-”

“Just talk to the ghosts!”

Daichi throws his hands in the air, before taking a step back and saying: “Okay, okay - uh… hi, ghost of the dead guy-”

“Albert Hingston.”

“A… okay, uh… hi, Mr. Hingston… I’m… Sawamura Daichi, I’m… you don’t know me, but I’m here with my crazy friend to bother you in your eternal rest, so… nice to meet you…”

“Tell him about the spirit box-”

Daichi puts a hand on Oikawa’s shoulder. “Oikawa here, said crazy person, has a little radio he thinks you can use to-”

“Mug.”

Daichi looks down to the device. “Yeah, you can make it say fascinating words just like that. So if there’s anything you want to say, about… us, or… yourself, or-”

“Bluff.”

“No,” Oikawa says, lifting his head. “We’re not lying to you.”

“Do you think that’s what that meant?”

“You gotta be willing to interpret for them, Dai-chan,” Oikawa replies, in the most condescending way possible.

“Uh-huh.”

“Keep talking to them.”

“You’re a little bit insufferable, you know that?”

“I’m aware. Keep talking to them. Try and get them to say a name. Our name. Or theirs.”

“Uh… okay,” Daichi starts again, speaking louder for, he supposed, the ghosts’ benefit. “If you’re listening, and able, why don’t you tell us your name? Are we talking to Albert Hingston?”

“Peanut.”

“Albert Hingston,” Daichi repeats, louder. “Can you make the stupid box say your name?”

Silence. Well, not silence, it’s actually an incredibly loud static, but the box doesn’t produce any words.

“Can you make it say my name? Daichi? Or Oikawa’s?”

“Bigger.”

“Alright,” Oikawa says, shutting the box off. The silence leaves a ringing behind in his ears. “Clearly the ghosts don’t wanna chat.”

“I dunno,” Daichi says. “I think we were really starting to get somewhere with that. Next time we’ll bring bigger jars of peanut butter.”

Oikawa scowls at him, before nodding back the way they’d come. “Let’s head back. I’m sure the other guys are exhausted by now.”

“Mhm-”

Daichi turns with him, to head back towards the central part of the cemetery, where they’d left the others, but something catches in the corner of his eye. Movement, or a shape, it’s hard to tell. 

He stops, turning to look and see what it was, and Oikawa takes a good few more paces away before he realizes Daichi isn’t following him anymore. 

The trees here aren’t so dense as they’ve been before, the shadows aren’t quite so long, as the moon is full and the clouds are sparse, the whole cemetery is actually pretty well lit, all things considered.

Maybe that’s why the human face is so disconcerting. 

No, nothing’s there. 

He shakes his head, and he can’t even remember what he had been looking at. Like… there had been a face there, just… floating? He can’t remember the outline of a body or anything like it… maybe… He rubs at his eyes for a second, but as he’s doing so something grazes against his back, and his whole body jerks around in response, hands coming up as if expecting a fight, but relaxing the moment he sees that it was just Oikawa rejoining him. He can feel the adrenaline spike under his skin get eaten up quickly, and his heart rate decelerates almost instantly, and he can breathe again. 

 “What do you see?”

“Nothing,” Daichi says, turning slowly to look back towards the trees. “I don’t know, it was… it was so odd. Not at all like the shadows I usually see.” 

“How so?”

“Looked real. Looked like a face. But… it’s not there anymore.”

Oikawa seems to think about this for a moment, before he lifts the camera back up and starts skipping towards the treeline like getting murked by a ghost was his top priority. Daichi curses, muttering under his breath as he hurried to follow after him. 

“I don’t know if investigating is such a good idea- what if it was, like, an actual guy? A dangerous guy?”

“Did it look like a guy?”

“Well it looked like a woman, actually-”

“A woman? Did it look like a dangerous woman?”

“I don’t think it had a body, actually - it was just my eyes playing tricks on me, it’s my imagination because you had me hunting spooky ghosts all evening, this always-”

Oikawa rounds on him, looking rather annoyed now. “Daichi,” he says. “Are you still really trying to use the just my imagination excuse? After everything?”

Daichi shuts his mouth, not even sure what a valid argument to that would be. 

“I think we’re a little bit beyond pretending like you’re not… absolutely haunted, or whatever the hell is going on, you are… I find it fascinating - I’d actually be willing to put you into the same camp as Tendou at this point - your… you talked about that odd old man giving you sage and terrifying advice, I’ve seen you stare off, not afraid, but comprehending, of something nobody else can see, and sure, the ghosts don’t speak to you, but-”

Daichi likes the feeling of adrenaline, he likes the nerves, the fear, the stress, cortisol is like fuel and he’s used to burning it at length but the feeling welling in his chest now is just plain anxiety - it’s not a fight or flight instinct his body can thrive on, but a sudden and desperate attempt to escape the conversation, refuse what Oikawa was saying. 

No, no, no, I’m not weird or different or anything. You’re the guy obsessed with the paranormal. I’m just Daichi, I’m just normal. Why are things never normal anymore?

“Why does that make it ghosts? Or magic?” Daichi says, hearing his own voice crack. He can hear Ushijima’s voice in the back of his skull. “Why does me… even if I am seeing things that nobody else can, why does that make it haunted, or paranormal, why can’t it just be normal? Pareidolia is a studied phenomenon, you can’t discount that.”

“Why can’t it be both?” Oikawa says, and Daichi hates the way he says it. 

“Why can’t it be both?”

“Why can’t it? Why can’t you be a studiable phenomenon and why can’t that be because you can clearly see what others can’t?” 

Are you starting to reap the consequences of using those eyes of yours?

“Because I don’t want to be that way!” Daichi shouts. “I want to-”

There’s movement behind Oikawa that Oikawa does not respond to. 

There’s a woman’s face behind Oikawa that Oikawa does not feel breathing down his neck. 

Horror unlike anything Daichi has ever experienced wells up in his stomach and shocks his system. It’s just pure, unfiltered fear that makes him sick to the stomach and forces him to stumble back, unsteady on his feet. 

“Dai?”

Oikawa’s voice had gone from demanding to concerned without hesitation, but it sounds like it’s being filtered through ten feet of water. 

“Oikawa, you have to turn around,” Daichi rasps out, barely preventing himself from tripping when his heel hits a root. 

Oikawa whips around fast, Daichi expects to hear him scream, expects him to bolt, but nothing happens. 

He’s staring face-to-face, close enough that one step forward and their noses would be touching, but he doesn’t react at all. His head pivots, his eyes flick around. He doesn’t see the woman’s face. 

Or her… or her neck. 

The head of the woman might be considered pretty, but her neck morphs down, pinched like worn leather and stretched, and stretched, and stretchered, twisting into wrinkles and folds, until it’s barely thicker than a finger, so distorted it barely looks like skin. Her head floats, and that neck coils and twists through the the sparse trees, floating in open air. No matter how much he flits his eyes around he cannot find where it might have a body. 

“There’s nothing here,” Oikawa says. 

“No…” Daichi replies, feeling his back hit a tree. The woman’s head bobs in the air, swooping down to coil around Oikawa and get a better look at him, as Oikawa turns back in confusion, concern evident on his face. 

“What is it you’re seeing?” 

The face is creeping closer to him. It doesn’t matter that it’s a normal woman’s face, that it doesn’t look evil, that it doesn’t have fangs or claws or horns. 

Panic overtakes him. 

“Daichi, what is it?”

The woman’s head moves up - so Daichi slips down against the tree, to curl up at it’s roots in the moss and the mud. 

“Daichi-”

He does the only thing that has ever worked, when the crack in his closet door had held too many shadows and the trees at the window of his bedroom had made shadow puppet monsters across his ceiling.

He pulls up the collar of his jacket, to cover his face, and he closes his eyes. 

It’s not real. It’s not real. I’m hallucinating - or this is a nightmare, and any second I’ll wake up in my bedroom. 

It can’t hurt me. 

It’s not real. 

It’s not real. 

It’s not real.

It’s not a fight response. Daichi had a lot of fight in him, when it came to instinct, but this was something else. This had transcended that. 

He keeps expecting something-

Something touches him. 

He almost gets sick - it’s such a moment of revulsion, the idea of that head and it’s contorted neck brushing up against him, breaking the rules of the game, surpassing mere visual horror and becoming tangible, becoming real, he cannot let it-

Daichi jerks around, pulling his jacket down and expecting to come face to face with the grotesque ghostly woman but instead, the only thing there is Oikawa. He looks afraid, genuinely afraid, but not of the ghosts and the woods and the night, but for Daichi, the hand that touches him rubbing his shoulder gently. 

“Hey,” he says, when he sees Daichi slowly beginning to refocus. “Hey, what’s happened? What’s happening? What did you see-”

“A woman-” he tries, but his mouth is bone dry and his voice cracks into silence. He turns his head slowly, and there is no figure. No woman, no head, no horrible, stretched and twisted neck. He scans the trees and the grass and the shadows and he does not see anything. 

Was that all in my head?

“A woman?” Oikawa says, sounding surprised. 

“You didn’t see it?” Daichi whispers. 

“I… no, man,” he replies, before slowly back up and offering a hand down to him. After a moment of hesitation, Daichi lets him haul him up to his feet. His whole body feels numb, but almost as soon as the fear had set in, he began to feel his body regain control of itself, sort out the serge of adrenaline and return to its baseline. 

He hates it, for the first time. 

He’s sick of his body recovering. He’s sick of moving on, he’s tired of just waking up and being expected to continue. For once, just once, he’d like to be afraid. He’d like his body to allow him to be afraid longer than a few minutes. 

“It was right in front of you,” Daichi says, softly. “Looking at you, it was so close, you could have reached out and touched it-”

Oikawa looks sick as well, listening to him mumble, but has the good sense not to linger on it, wrapping an arm around Daichi’s shoulders and swiftly turning him away to head back up to where the main group was. 

“Let’s go home.”

Daichi can almost guess what Oikawa is thinking. 

See? I told you. There’s something wrong with you. 

Ushijima’s harsh pragmatism no longer feels very comforting. 

 

---

 

It’s just after eight in the morning when Daichi comes bursting through into his own home. He has about two hours of sleep in him and hasn’t showered or eaten yet, but that’s beside the point. 

Kumo bounces up immediately, boofing softly and slipping over the hardwood floors to come greet him. Daichi crouches, just briefly, to scratch his face and mumble stupid apologizes for being gone all night, though the dog doesn’t seem very concerned with this and is mostly interesting in licking every patch of Daichi’s face that’s available. He doesn’t love this, but he feels bad and lets him do it anyway. 

“Daichi!”

He lifts his head, surprised to see his mother popping his head out of the kitchen, and even more surprised by her surprise. 

“Hi, sorry,” he says. “I am… absolutely on it, yes, piano for Kenzo and then to tutoring for Hiro, I am on it, don’t worry-”

“You’ll need to hurry to get out the door on time,” she replies, sounding amused. “Though Kenchan is already packed and ready to go, it’s Hiro you’re gonna need to kick in the butt.”

“I know,” he says. “Sorry, I… I was out so late, and then Oikawa wanted to debrief until four am, and then it was really hard to-”

“Baby, it’s fine,” she interrupts. “But for real, you gotta get going.”

“I know, I know,” he replies, before kissing Kumo on the forehead and getting up to hurry upstairs. 

He throws his stuff in his bedroom, pausing for twenty seconds to throw his shirt across the room and grab a new one. His phone is at like eight percent battery life, but would have to do for now. He hurries from one room to the next, knocking on the shared room of his brothers. 

“Small brats,” he calls. “We’re leaving in two minutes, be at the door!”

There’s a mingle of shouts from inside, Kenzo chirping an understanding, and Hiro whining something about not wanting to go and also not being a brat and that Daichi should be nicer to them, but he’s already moving and heading back downstairs. 

He passes his mother again as he slips into the kitchen, rummaging around to find something he can shove into his mouth and go. He does end up finding a bag of baby carrots, which seems like it’ll do the trick short term, so he steals a handful of them and turns around, just in time to see his mother standing in the entrance to the kitchen, watching him with amusement. 

“What,” he says, around a mouthful of carrot, which he then decides he should focus on swallowing. It takes him a second, before he repeats the question: “Why are you looking at me like that?”

“Just… thinking about what you said, about moving to Tokyo,” she replies, smiling a bit more melancholically. “I’ll miss my little baby boy. No idea what I’m gonna do without you here.”

“You produced four more, I think you’ll find you’re good on little babies for a while,” he replies, before leaning to look around her and to the stairs, immediately raising his voice to shout: “Kenzo! Hiro! I will be dragging you out of this house in one minute if you do not walk out of it yourselves!”

This makes his mother laugh more, shaking her head. 

“I know,” she replies, before heading over to him, hands outstretched, and there’s nothing he can do but let her grab his face to kiss his forehead. “But you were my first! I’m not ready for my babies to start leaving the nest yet. I really do wish you’d consider staying in Miyagi.”

“Trust me, I’m considering it, don’t worry,” he replies, and there’s a moment, where she’s holding his cheeks and gazing at him in her pouty, motherly way, that he realizes she could probably answer all his questions better than his father could. Sure, his dad had the government job, and the security clearance and the suspicious activity, but his mother gave birth to him. She was there - she was the name on the file, that his dad had merely just signed. 

He feels her thumb brush across his cheek.

He really doesn’t want his mother to be involved. 

She smiles for him, but before she can say anything else, movement and shouting from behind them catches both their attention and he turns, to see Kenzo and Hiroto squabbling and pulling on shoes. 

“I have to go,” Daichi says, giving her an apologetic smile. 

She nods, patting his shoulder and letting him pull away to hurry towards the door. 

“Okay,” he says, clapping his hands together. “Coats, shoes, piano book, school bag, which has your schoolwork in it, yes? Okay, good, let’s go-”

He shoves open the front door, before sparing a glance back over his shoulder, to where his mother was busying herself in the kitchen now. She’d always been a tall woman - taller than he was now, even - so she doesn’t really have to stretch that much to reach the top cabinet she was pulling a dish down from, but it’s enough that her shirt rides up a bit. 

Daichi had already known about the circular scar on her abdomen, he’d seen it a hundred times over his life. He’d never really cared or thought about it before. 

He wonders if he closes his eyes really tight, if he can make all this go away too. 

Chapter 22: Communication Techniques

Kuroo T. has started a new chat with Kozume K.

Kuroo T. has changed the chat name to Party Goers

Kuroo T. has added Bokuto K. to the chat. 

Kuroo T. has added Oikawa T. to the chat. 

Kuroo T. has added Sawamura D. to the chat. 

Bokuto K: HEY HEY WHAT’S ALL THIS???

Kuroo T. has added Ushijima W. to the chat. 

Kuroo T: Hey! Kenma has the final party details so I’m just going to get everyone together so we’re all on the same page. 

Bokuto K: NICE

Ushijima W. has left the chat. 

Kuroo T: WHY DID HE LEAVE?

Kuroo T. has added Ushijima W. to the chat.

Kuroo T: STAY. 

Ushijima W: I do not like group chats. 

Kuroo T: NOT MY PROBLEM. STAY.

Bokuto K: group chats aren’t ALL that bad, are they?

Ushijima W: I do not like group chats. 

Kuroo T: ANYWAY I need to know who else is going? Does anyone know if Oikawa’s invited Iwaizumi? 

Bokuto K: prolly

Kuroo T: What about you? Did Akaashi agree to go? 

Bokuto K: akaashi said he didn’t wanna go. 
Bokuto K: apparently it’s “too much” or whatever. he doesn’t like crowds or loud music or bad decisions

Kuroo T: That’s too bad, man. 
Kuroo T: What about Tendou? 

Bokuto K: I don’t know???

Kuroo T: I am obviously not talking to you. 

Ushijima W: Yes, he has expressed interest. 

Kuroo T: GREAT. 

Kuroo T. has added Tendou S. to the chat.

Kuroo T: OKAY we just need Oikawa and someone needs to confirm with Mr. Daichi. 

Oikawa T: Yes! Iwaizumi said he wasn’t going to let me go without ‘proper’ supervision, and Daichi said he actually got his shit together to ask Sugawara to be his date. 

Kuroo T: You already spoke to Daichi?

Tendou S: They’re in the same room. 

Oikawa T: mr. psychic strikes again

Kuroo T: So you DON’T need to be in the same room as someone to read their minds it seems.

Tendou S: Oh come on, that’s barely a leap to make anyone could have guessed it. 

Kuroo T: whatever.

Kuroo T. has added Iwaizumi H. to the chat. 

Ushijima W. has left the chat. 

Kuroo T. has added Sugawara K. to the chat.

Kuroo T: Alright that should be everyone. 
Kuroo T: wait

 

Kuroo T. has added Ushijima W. to the chat.

Kuroo T: DUDE STOP LEAVING.

Ushijima W: Why? 

Kuroo T: WHY?
Kuroo T: because I’m trying to make sure everyone has the same information! We have to coordinate!

Ushijima W: Tendou is in the chat now. He can pass along anything important. 

Kuroo T: I want to make sure EVERYONE has the same information. 

Tendou S: Wakatoshi would like me to inform you that we’re in the same room and he’s pretty sure communication between us will not be a concern. 

Kuroo T: AT LEAST WAIT UNTIL I SAY WHAT I NEED TO SAY

Iwaizumi H. has left the chat.

Kuroo T: NO WHAT THE FUCK

Oikawa T: :’)
Oikawa T: Sorry

Kuroo T. has added Iwaizumi H. to the chat.

Kuroo T: HEY PLEASE STAY

Iwaizumi H: getting a notification for being added to this group chat triggered fight or flight 

Kuroo T: oh my god
Kuroo T: Okay that’s everyone. everyone is here. 

Sugawara K: Oh! Hello everyone! 

Bokuto K: HELLO SUGA!!!!!!!!
Bokuto K: I didn’t know you were also a K initial that’s very cool we’re like twins!!!!

Sugawara K: oh! Sure!

Bokuto K: What’s it stand for?

Sugawara K: none of your business!!

Bokuto K: !!!!!!
Bokuto K: I’m sorry I didn’t mean to upset you!!

Kuroo T: Okay so Kenma received official details for Utsukushii’s party. The address is in Yokohama, so me and Bokuto shouldn’t have an issue, but you Miyagi boys are going to have to work something out.
Kuroo T: I can probably host some of you but my place isn’t so big. 

Bokuto K: Yeah!!!! I can take some people too!! I’ll have to run it by my parents but I’m sure it’ll be fine!

Kozume K: We also need to make sure we have a gift. Or multiple, since there’s quite a few of us. 

Oikawa T: Yeah we stuck Daichi on that didn’t we? 
Oikawa T: he says he’s on it but would appreciate ideas. 

Ushijima W. has left the chat. 

Sugawara K: what, have you got him locked in your basement? let him speak for himself. 

Tendou S: aa

Kuroo T: Unfortunately I don’t have any ideas for you, I’m sure anything will be good. 

Oikawa T: sorry Daichi can’t come to the phone right now, I have him chained up and am currently removing his tongue. Will update how that goes.

Kuroo T. has added Ushijima W. to the chat.

Kozume K: Ustukushii likes cute things, novelty things, pretty much anything that looks good on camera, since she’s definitely going to be posting a post-birthday video.  

Bokuto K: we should buy her a dog

Kuroo T: NOPE 
Kuroo T: moving on, we do have our official theme for this year, and I don’t think you guys are ready for this. 

Sawamura D: I am here, sorry. 

Oikawa T: Yes, he did go sprinting upstairs to get his phone the moment Suga commented on it. 

Sugawara K: good

Sawamura D: Hey, don’t TELL them that oh my god

Sugawara K: what are you two even doing?

Oikawa T: He’s making me watch that fucking Ring movie

Sawamura D: “making you watch” you’re so dramatic YOU showed up uninvited.

Iwaizumi H: oh my GOD is that where you went?
Iwaizumi H: I told you I needed 2 hours to prepare for a phone interview and you replace me? 

Sugawara K: In no capacity is he replacing you. 

Sawamura D: IN NO CAPACITY AM I REPLACING YOU. 

Oikawa T: gonna be honest, nothing is worth leaving me for 2 hours. Clearly your priorities are wrong and your punishment is that I’m replacing you. 

Sawamura D: NO. 

Iwaizumi H: well then I’ll just replace YOU then, if that’s how you’re gonna be.

Oikawa T: HAH. Good luck. 

Tendou S: Wakatoshi wants me to let you all know that this is exactly why he doesn’t like group chats.

Iwaizumi H: what, you think I can’t find another egotistical prettyboy to follow me around? 

Oikawa T: RUDE. 
Oikawa T: and you’ll always be trading down don’t kid yourself

Kuroo T: Glitter Glam Disco Death

Ushijima W. has left the chat. 

Kuroo T. has added Ushijima W. to the chat.

Tendou S: Wakatoshi wants to know what the hell you’re talking about. 

Sawamura D: yeah what

Kuroo T: The party theme. 

Sawamura D: That's a THEME?

Kuroo T: Apparently it is. So dress appropriately and don’t embarrass us. 

Sawamura D: I don’t own any piece of clothing that can be described by even one of those words.

Oikawa T: easy. 

Bokuto K: what happens if we can’t match the theme?

Kuroo T: idk they just shoot you I guess. 

Bokuto K: WHAT?

Kuroo T: sarcasm. 

Tendou S: I think I can make this work… 

Sugawara K: yeah I mean, glitter, glam, disco, those have strong energies, we can probably make it work. 
Sugawara K: on the fence about death but we’ll see.

Kuroo T: She also advised that the colour scheme is “silver” and then didn’t add anything else. 

Sugawara K: fuck yeah

Bokuto K: eheheh

Sawamura D: Well I guess I’m already going shopping for the gift this weekend, I’ll try and pick up… something that can fit into that description. 

Sugawara K: I can come with you and help if you want? I have some ideas

Oikawa T: Oh I can definitely help you out with that if you need. 
Oikawa T: WHOOPS same idea ig

Sugawara K: …

Tendou S: you are insane for choosing to type out your passive aggression like that. 

Sawamura D: nothing about his aggression is passive. 

Sugawara K: I know exactly what I’m doing. 

Iwaizumi H: baby I think your life is in danger.

Bokuto K: baby

Kuroo T: baby

Tendou S: baby

Ushijima W: baby

Iwaizumi H. has left the chat.

Oikawa T: k, are we done here?

Sugawara K: What, having something important you need to get back to? 

Oikawa T: yeah, getting it on with your boyfriend.

Sugawara K: EXCUSE ME?

Tendou S: a-level insanity right here, why would you have put this chat together?

Kozume K: I told you this was a bad idea

Sugawara K: GET BACK HERE

Bokuto K: oMG WAIT KENMA YOU’RE ALSO A K INITIAL I DIDN’T REALIZE

Kuroo T: I was just so tired of texting everyone individually!!! This should have been easier!!!

Tendou S: “kenma” I didn’t realize you’re “also a K initial” I’m starting to realize why you’re all so easily impressed when I make basic inferences

Sugawara K: OIKAWA TOORU GET BACK HERE.

Bokuto K: is that a type of cookie?

Ushijima W. has left the chat. 

Kuroo T. has added Ushijima W. to the chat.

Kuroo T: BO my man
Kuroo T: Are you asking if an inference is a type of cookie?

Bokuto K: is he not a baker? 

Sugawara K: OIKAWA I SWEAR TO GOD IF YOU DON’T GET BACK ON YOUR PHONE I’M COMING OVER THERE MYSELF

Kuroo T: oh my god dude

Oikawa T: Okay I would continue being a bitch but I want everyone to know that Daichi came downstairs again to shout at me so loudly that his sister came down the stairs to shout at HIM and now they’re just shouting at each other. 

Sugawara K: HAH serves you right.

Oikawa T: your capacity to take a joke is abysmal

Sugawara K: It’s really not my fault that you’re not funny. 

Kuroo T. has added Iwaizumi H to the chat.

Kuroo T: DO SOMETHING ABOUT OIKAWA

Iwaizumi H: Is that really my responsibility?

Ushijima W: I believe part of the contract of agreeing to be one’s boyfriend is to aid or support in any conflicts, or if necessary, to minimize conflict if you cannot, for whatever reason, support them. 

Iwaizumi H: Jesus fuck did you read a book or something?

Ushijima W: Yes. Do you not put effort into learning how to best support the people you love?

Bokuto K: oh burnnnnnnn

Oikawa T: babe we’re gonna need to stand down they’ve got us surrounded

Tendou S: :P
Tendou S: get wrecked 

Kuroo T: I hate all of you.

Kuroo T. has changed the chat name to BASTARDS

Kuroo T: All I wanted was ONE group chat where we could just… dump train booking info and decide on which station we’re meeting at and plan our weekend and LOOK WHAT I GOT INSTEAD. 

Kozume K: shoot for the stars and land among the vast void of space where you suffocate and die instantly. 

Sugawara K: yeah you were aiming a little high there. 
Sugawara K: but I’m excited for the party!! It’ll be nice to see most of you in person again :) 

 

---

 

The countdown to graduation was crazy. Not simply because of how rapidly it seemed to approach, but because it was happening at all, and if Tendou were honest, he hadn’t actually ever really thought time would pass. About mid-year this year, everything had felt like it had hit a stasis. They’d been blocked out of nationals and exams had taken top priority and even Ushijima had taken half a step back from volleyball, which gave them more free time to spend together, and talk about the future and talk about plans. They still helped out, with the underclassmen’s training, which kept the nice burn in his muscles, and the sweat on his skin. The days were short, the sun set early, but the skies were clear and the nights long.  

And then, suddenly, his life was being hit with events. Not only due to the sudden explosion of this youtube channel, of which he found himself helping out with more weekends then not, but tests, and interviews and applications. Penciling into his calender to tell Ushijima he’d applied for a culinary program in Europe, penciling into his calender to find a place to live until he could move abroad - his parents were many prefectures away, but he didn’t have the greatest rapport with them anyway… plus… well, it would only be for a few months, and it would have required him to leave Ushijima those few months early. But Shiratorizawa had put down a hammer. 

They all had to be gone, within a week after graduation.

There was no room for exceptions, there was no grace period. Well, there was, he supposed. It was about seven days. 

Third year dorms had to be vacated, they had to deep clean everything over the summer and start moving the second years up, rearranging the dormitories, construction, progress. No room for the way they’d had things before. 

And the days had gotten longer, and hotter, and summer was fast approaching but Tendou no longer saw the long, hot summer days as a respite from school and an opportunity for play - it was merely another deadline, the heat on the back of his neck reminding him that he hadn’t yet heard back from that program he applied to, and if he didn’t by the end of this month he’d probably been passed over. And therefore, those few months he needed a place to live would have rapidly become the rest of his life -  or, at least, another year until he could apply again. 

Going back to Gifu used to be an option. 

His phone dings in his pocket, so he shrugs his backpack over to his other shoulder and pulls it from his back pocket, leaning over to hide the screen from the sun and be able to read it. 

Sawamura: HEY POP QUIZ WHAT DO YOU BUY A 22 YEAR OLD RICH GIRL FOR HER BIRTHDAY?

Tendou blinked at the message for a bit, before shutting his phone again and putting it back in his pocket, lifting his eyes to the stoplight and pressing the walk button, before settling in to wait and returning to his musings. 

Oikawa had gotten in his head. Now, that wasn’t exactly unusual for Oikawa, over the handful of official games they’d played against each other, Oikawa had always been one of the most irritating opponents. Not because he was especially hard to read - if anything, Tendou had found him incredibly easy to read, his face and his eyes and the way he moved his lips, it was like he painted his emotions on under a very thin layer of disguise - though, Tendou reasoned, that was what he thought of everyone, with a few notable exceptions. Either way, Oikawa hadn’t needed to avoid being read, because he wasn’t hiding what he was doing during a game. He’d been good at throwing Tendou off balance and getting him to overthink his intuition - and then, and then -

Ding!

He pulls out his phone as he’s crossing the street, up towards Shiratorizawa’s gate. 

Sawamura: YOU HAVE YOUR READ RECEIPTS ON.

Ding!

Sawamura: I KNOW YOU’RE LOOKING AT THIS. HELP ME. 

Tendou puts his phone away again, pulling out his student ID to beep the gate on the Saturday afternoon, as it was always locked, and heads back inside and up to the front entrances. 

Where was he? 

Oh, yes, Oikawa surpassing his own personal record for tomfoolery and managing to convince Tendou that he was a goddamn yokai. A title that had tormented him for years, since long before they’d met, but now suddenly it was an entirely new problem. Oikawa had waltz in, past volleyball, past championships, nationals, competition, and thrown him into the deep end of a wave pool and Tendou had never been a strong swimmer. 

It really wasn’t all that fair, he thought. 

And that old man, that old man who’d been so… Well… 

Daichi had said he’d seen him before, too, that he’d approached. But… 

Tendou didn’t want to be a monster. He didn’t want to be a satori in the way that they all called him. He’d spent hours, searching folklore and history, reading up on this odd, psychic monster from the Gifu mountains. Mountains he’d grown up in, mountains he’d felt safe in, mountains that had been home.

Satori didn’t have a lot of traits, they weren’t complicated.

But they weren’t nice.  

Cannibal. Rapists. 

He doesn’t want to think, of the fact that if he is this so-called monster - as Daichi had said his encounter with the old man had called him a halfbreed - there’s probably a very specific reason why he was left at a police station at the ripe age of freshly born by a woman who’d never wanted to be identified. 

Ding!

He pulls out his phone again, the screen easier to read in the halls of the dorm. Dorms that had been the best home he’d ever had, for the last few years, and he was now about fifteen days out from being kicked out of. 

Sawamura: Just say ANYTHING. Your random guess is gonna be better than my best effort.

Tendou chuckles, then tucks his phone away again, and finishes climbing the stairs up to their floor. He hears laughter from the common room, and can’t help but smile as he sees some of the old team gathered around. 

Since volleyball practice has officially ended, for them, and even Ushijima and Reon were now free from structured practice regardless of their professional aspirations, it left a lot more room for just hanging out, relaxing. Of course, with graduation looming, and all that preparation in place, they’d been packing and signing papers and studying more often than not, but here it seemed, on their penultimate Saturday evening they’d ever spend in the dorms, they’d decided to relax for a bit. 

Semi is playing on an acoustic guitar, seeming to be the center of attention, with Reon beside him, laughing and trying to get in the way of his chords, wiggling his fingers in and generally being an irritant. Semi tugs the neck of the guitar away, rolling his eyes. 

“I’m trying to show off!” Semi is saying, as Reon snickers and leans back on the purple couch. “Let me show off for once!” 

Reon glances up as Tendou enters, giving him half a nod of greeting, which prompts Semi to look over and do the same. 

Across from them, and the only person without the situational awareness needed to hear or notice Tendou enter, was Ushijima, sitting with his back to the entrance, focused almost entirely down on the manga Tendou had handed off to him. Even with all of Tendou’s intuition, he’d never been able to quite figure out if Ushijima actually enjoyed them, or just read them because Tendou had asked him to. 

Coming up behind him, Tendou reaches around to press his fingers gently beneath his chin and tilt his head up - Ushijima’s first reaction is to jump, surprised by the sudden touch, before relaxing when he recognizes who it was, tilting his head back fully for him to look up at him. 

“You’re back,” he says, mostly a statement of greeting and nothing else. 

Tendou smiles, leaning down to kiss him, somewhat awkwardly at this angle, but it gives him an excellent excuse to put his hand in Ushijima’s hair and mess it up before he pulls away. 

“I am,” he says, before saying: “Why is Sawamura texting me?”

“Because he tried to text me and I informed him that I’m not particularly well known for giving good gifts. I recommended you for the job. You are excellent with gifts.” 

Tendou scrunches his nose up. “Figures. Alright.”

“Are you going to join us?”

“Let me go put my stuff down,” Tendou says, swinging his plastic shopping bag around. “I’ll be back in a minute.” 

Ushijima nods, but as he tries to sit up and lift his head away, Tendou assists by using the opportunity to continue to rake his fingers through his hair and completely demolish the usually perfectly neat style he kept. Once he’s satisfied he’s met his nuisance quota, he lets him go and heads towards his room. 

He can hear them all as he leaves. He’s noticed it’s easier to read some people over others - Reon, for example, was shockingly cohesive in his own mind. 

Wakatoshi really does let him get away with anything, huh? 

Whereas Semi seemed way more abstract, it was hard to get an exact read on him. He seemed to think with his emotions and worry about putting words to them second. 

I wish I had someone -

Or something akin to it. Tendou isn’t quite sure if Semi is thinking about a specific someone or a general lonely malaise, but he doesn’t structure his thoughts in a way that allows him to pry. 

And of course, even from here, Tendou could still feel the radiating thoughts from Ushijima, clear and concise and very, very one track. 

I hope he comes back quickly. 

I hope he comes back quickly. 

I hope he comes back quickly. 

He unlocks his dorm door - reaches a hand to the wall to flick on the lights, and decides not to kick off his shoes, since he’s just going to be turning right around again. 

“You’ve been practicing.”

Tendou doesn’t get jumpscared easily - he’s generally very good at guessing when they’re coming in movies and shows, and people have never really been able to sneak up on him. So when it does happen - his heart rate spikes and his skin flushes hot and everything is overwhelming and unfamiliar, as he thumps into the door in surprise, and whips around to stare at the intruder  - Semi was out in the common room. The dorm should be empty. 

That old man is sitting there, politely, on the floor. Tendou is, thankfully now, not quite so consumed by the irrationality of his appearance. Monster leaps to his brain, ghost, too, though he thinks it’s not quite so applicable to this man. 

Nurarihyon.

“What are you doing here? How did you-”

He gives Tendou a look that is almost entirely pity and amusement, before spreading his arms and saying: “What am I doing here? Why, I’m the master of this house. I can come and go as I please.”

Tendou glances around the little dorm room, before saying: “This is barely a house, I- sorry, uhm… what do you need? What’s happening? What do you mean practicing?”

“I have simply come to check in on you. You seem to have taken my advice, you’ve started exploring your limitations.”

“...uh-huh, yep, yes, oh, god, right, yes, I… can you tell me what I am? Or… how to better use this power? I… It feels like it come and goes, and some days - well, some days it feels like it’s still all just guesswork and intuition, and-”

Nurarihyon beckoned in front of himself, and Tendou hurries to comply, kneeling down to sit in front of him, folding his hands on his lap. He had not been adopted my parents that had been particularly strict or traditional, and everything about Nurarihyon seemed to scream propriety and poise, from the posture he sat with to the draping folds of his old but well kept yukata. Tendou feels incredibly misplaced by comparison, a mess of limbs he never bothered to control, slouched posture, effort needed in every movement just to pretend he was worthy of sitting across from him. He finds himself, instinctually, mimicking the way Ushijima sat, trying to approximate even a quarter of the respectable aura he exuded. 

That is all to say, Tendou finds himself compulsively and uncontrollably desperately trying to make sure this man liked him. 

Nurarihyon seems to see through him like glass, and Tendou doesn’t need to be able to read his mind to assess the appraising, amused but somewhat unimpressed look he uses to tear over Tendou’s self. 

He swallows nervously. 

He stays quiet. 

After a moment, Nurarihyon says: “I would not usually spend this much time on a singular wayward yokai, but my concern for you grows by the hour it seems. You’ve entangled yourself among undesirable types.”

Tendou doesn’t love the feeling of speaking to someone this impossible to read. It feels like someone’s amputated one of his limbs. He’s forced to ask:

“What are you talking about?”

“The alien enthusiasts, monster hunters, the bigener. They are sticking their hands into the business of men and women that would gladly do harm to you and our kind, so consider this my official plea to you to be careful.”

Tendou’s brain feels like it’s about to start leaking. 

“Do harm to me? Our kind?”  

“Yokai.”

“But I’m… I… I understand that I’m a little different but I’m a legal citizen,” Tendou says. “And I’m not… running around breaking the law, that’s… their shit, that’s their problem. I have… sure, sure, this yokai business is crazy but I still have a legal birth certificate, I haven’t - contrary to popular belief I’m not actually that much of… like why would… why would they hurt me?”

“What do you think happens if your friends continue messing about where they don’t belong? If they stumble across proof of what we are, if they make us more real than we are supposed to be?”

Tendou swallows, but his mouth is dry. “I’m just a guy. I… I wasn’t even psychic until you told me to start trying-”

“You do not get to pick and choose what parts of your ancestry you inherit. If you wish to fulfill your psychic capacity, you’ll have to accept everything else, too.”

“You told me to-” he starts, before catching his tongue and preventing himself from saying something he would regret - he did not feel safe antagonizing this man. So he tries again, quieter: “You told me to do this.”

“Because I believe that you’ll be better off. But if you keep learning you’ll keep changing. And if you keep changing, you’ll reach a point where you are no longer suited for this life. You should come with me, in that case.”

Tendou shakes his head, before starting with: “is this why you reached out to Daichi? To try and convince him to go with you?”

“No,” Nurarihyon says, shaking his head. “Sawamura is not one of mine.”

Tendou closes his eyes for a moment, taking a steadying breath. He tries to refocus, to orient himself to the situation, to figure out exactly what was going on. If Nurarihyon would stop speaking in riddles, this would be easy. If he could be read like anyone else, this would be easy. But he can’t. 

“Are you trying to tell me that… that I’m putting myself in danger? That you think there’s a reason for me to pull back, to stay-” he’s opened his eyes again. 

The old man is gone. 

Tendou, actually, is not sure if he was ever there at all. He turns slowly, where he sits, to survey the room. It’s quiet, the yellow overhead light flickering slightly above him. It had never quite worked right after an incident Semi had refused to elaborate upon. (Tendou had always imagined it had probably involved a volleyball.)

He shifts from his knees to rest on the floor more, looking down to the carpet. It’s rough against his palms. 

 

---

 

The shopping centre isn’t that busy on a random weekday after school, close to most people’s dinner time. There is a row of businesses, people wandering in and out and tugging little kids along. Daichi has been here for three hours. 

He has made zero progress. 

Considering this Utsukushii Airi was rich enough to buy his soul twice over and was absolutely smothered in free merchandise and gifts at all times, buying something from his small town mall seemed absolutely not the right thing to do. But, alas, it was all he had access to. 

He’s scrolling through an article online listing the best gifts for women, which he then immediately realized meant “women you know” and/or “women you’d like to have sex with,” neither of which applied to him in any capacity. 

His phone buzzes while he’s trying to find a “good gifts for women you haven’t meant and may never meet again but will publicize your gift to millions of people” article. 

Tendou: jewelry? 

Daichi stares at the message for a bit and decides antagonizing Tendou over his overt avoidance of him was not going to be beneficial, and replies: Really? Isn’t that a little bit forward for someone I don’t know? 

Almost immediately he gets a reply from Tendou that says: do you earnestly think I can tell you what a girl considers forward?

And then he follows it up with: also yokai-senpai disowned you. Not sure if this is a good or bad update but he def. didn’t want me thinking you were like me so. 

This, of course, is a comparably terrifying follow-up to a question about birthday gifts. 

Before Daichi can even begin to reply, though-

“Dai?”

He pushes himself away from the post he was leaning against, swiveling his head around in time to lock eyes on Sugawara as he came shuffling down the road, waving slightly in greeting. 

Oh, god, okay-

“Suga!” he greets, as normally as he can given the circumstances. “Thank you so much for helping, everyone else is dodging my calls or trying to redirect me.”

Sugawara smiles, giving him a shrug. “Well, I guess that’s why I’m better than other people. Now come on, let’s get this done so we can get home, it’s chilly out tonight.”

Daichi hums an agreement, before glancing down to his phone and tapping out: Wait so you spoke to him again? When?

“Tendou is helping me with gift ideas,” Daichi says, waving his phone slightly. “Sorry.”

“Oh, don’t apologize,” Suga says quickly, waving a hand. “That seems like a smart choice. He’s probably great at guessing what people want, right?”

Daichi gives him a nod. “Yeah,” he chuckles. “But… uh, so- let’s walk, sorry-”

And he turns to head down the street, Suga falling in comfortably behind him. His phone buzzes again, and on reflex he’s pulling it out to check. 

“So, did you have any ideas?” Daichi asks, glancing back to Suga before reading the message from his phone. 

Tendou: he just APPEARED in my fucking dorm. I think he was trying to warn me, about being a yokai. Talked about you guys a lot. He obviously has an agenda but god forbid he stop speaking in riddles long enough to let me figure it out.

“Ideas? I’m not sure… I mean, I was stalking her instagram, just now, she’s… very beautiful, very girly… honestly, making something cute, like… a bag with some kind of animal design, or… shoes…?”

Daichi glances up at him, smiling for a second before saying: “Yeah, that was my instinct too, but I’m a bit worried about quality… ”

“Well it’s the thought that counts?” Suga offers. 

“Is it, though?” Daichi asks. “When she’s almost guaranteed to post some kind of haul video for all her gifts?”

“Mhm…”

While Suga retreated to his thoughts to ponder this, Daichi sends back to Tendou: Do you know what he wanted? Or do you think he’ll come back?

“What did Tendou suggest?”

“Huh?”

Suga beckons to his phone. “What did Tendou say? What’s his guess?”

“Oh, uh-” and Daichi glances back down to the phone, where Tendou’s next message had come in. 

I think he wants me to abandon human life. He made some odd comments about powers and changing and bullshit but also seemed concerned about my involvement with you.

Daichi sends back: why would he care who you’re friends with?

“Tendou says jewelry, but I’m not sure… isn’t that… like… reserved for romance?”

“Well, not necessarily,” Suga offers, before stretching a hand out towards him, wiggling black-gloved fingers. “Come, let’s see if there’s anything that catches our eye.”

Daichi nods, quite happily reaching out to take his hand, and in an instant Suga is taking the lead, clearly on a mission to find a specific shop. Daichi can’t really text while he’s being tugged along, but does read Tendou’s next message. 

Oh, you know, just the miscellaneous threat of being a monster with monster-hunting friends. That I might not be able to sustain a human life with monster abilities.

And because Daichi can’t text, it gives Tendou enough time to stew in his thoughts and type out: little bit worried he’s implied I may develop a taste for human flesh.

“Tendou have any other ideas?”

Daichi jerks his head up. “What?”

Suga is staring at him. They’ve stopped walking. He’s backlit by the lights of a jewelry store, and there’s an expression across his face that Daichi isn’t so familiar with. 

“Just… you seem to be very interested in your phone.”

“Oh, ah… sorry, no… Tendou’s having… well, you know him,” Daichi says, trying to decide how the fuck to not have to explain what Tendou was saying. “He just texts a lot.”

“Don’t… don’t answer, then,” Suga replies. 

“I… that feels rude…”

And thankfully Suga gives him half a smile, looking a little more amused than anything else now, and nodding. 

“Well that does sound like you,” he teased, before nodding to the store. “Now come on, let’s go.”

Daichi nods an agreement, and as Suga turns away to head into the store, Daichi glances back down to his phone. Another message has come in from Tendou: but yes he was very explicit about you not being a yokai. 

So Daichi sends back: okay well we’re running out of things I can be. And these hallucinations are getting a little bit fucked. Like more than usual.

Tendou’s reply is almost immediate: I don’t know!! But mr. yokai did tell me that I ‘can’t pick and choose what parts of your ancestry you inherit’ and basically implied if I keep trying to learn this psychic bullshit I’m gonna go full monster. Maybe the same applies to you?

Daichi walks into the glass door of the jewelry shop, not paying attention. He rubs at his nose and slips inside. Suga has already started politely moving around the space, peering into glass cases and taking a look. To give himself some time, he heads the opposite direction. 

Horrifying. But I’m not psychic? And it’s not like I can practice it, it's just happening. Daichi sends back, followed by: so what’s the plan? What do we do?

“Oh, Daichi!”

He turns around, seeing Suga waving him over and hurrying to join him on the other side of the store, trying to see what he’s looking at. He’s pointing down into a case, where there are several rows of sets of earrings, each more glittery than the last. 

“Find something good?” Daichi prompts. 

“Maybe. Not sure. But these are certainly pretty. You could just get her something simple like this, earrings are pretty neutral, I think. Or bracelets. Necklaces and rings and stuff are more… I don’t know. I don’t really do girls.” 

Daichi chuckles, leaning in to take a look at the rings. He feels his phone vibrate, and says: “Is there any specifically that you think look nice?” and then turns away to pull his phone out. 

Tendou: I don’t know!! I really don’t! But he said something like ‘making us more real than we’re supposed to be’ which was fcking nonsense in the moment but now I’m freaking out about????

Tendou: I think we’re going to unleash something on the world.

“I don’t know. I’m not sure how much you’re willing to spend, but… all these over here, with the more neutral colours… probably safer, right?”

Daichi feels his stomach drop, because Tendou was known to text in a haphazard and wild way, but this had the same cadence as any of his uncanny guesses - a sudden intuition based on little to no data, but terrifyingly accurate nonetheless. 

It’s Tendou’s choice to use the word unleash that bothers him the most.

What do you mean? he sends back, at the same time there’s a sudden squealing noise. His brain can’t keep up with everything that’s going on, and he lifts his head in great confusion, only to make eye-contact with a young woman - well, he says young woman, she’s probably older than him - and her friend outside the glass window of the shop. She’s standing on the street, and they’re both bouncing slightly as they stare at him, waving excitedly. 

Daichi stares back at them, frozen for what to do before looking over to Suga. 

Suga is already looking at him, and Daichi realized he’d missed his reply. 

“Uh…”

He looks back to the girls outside. He looks back to his phone. 

Tendou: I mean that every single fucking piece of evidence we get seems to come with a big red caution sign. You’re getting horrifying waking nightmares, I’m being propositioned to be a yokai the more psychic I try and be, and maybe the reason your dad’s evil government bullshit exists is because knowledge of these things is just flat out dangerous. Maybe knowing about it makes it real.

Daichi swallows, looking up at the girls outside. 

“Who are they?” Daichi says. 

“Are you feeling okay?” Suga replies. 

“The girls outside, can you see them?” he says. 

This causes Suga’s irritation to go from ‘not getting enough attention’ to genuine concern, closing the distance between them to put a hand on his arm. He jumps slightly, at the contact, looking down to Suga as he says:

“Yes, Dai, I can see them, obviously, what-”

“Oh,” he replies, and the two girls have started to look embarrassed. 

“I think they wanted to talk to you,” Suga says, and Daichi can feel him squeezing his arm. “Should we go outside, say hi?”

He nods. “Right. Sure. Who are they?”

“Based on how they’re looking at you, probably fans,” he replies in a teasing sort of tone, before giving a wave to the girls to assure him they would come out, and taking Daichi’s elbow to tug him around back outside.

“Uhm, one moment-” Daichi starts, pulling away from him at the entrance, looking back to his phone. “I need… to just tell…”

“What is it?”

Daichi looks back up, meeting Suga’s warm, lovely brown eyes and finding himself absolutely incapable of enjoying it. 

“Tendou’s… I’m going to text Ushijima and just get him to deal with Tendou,” Daichi replies. “So that I don’t have to keep checking my phone.”

This makes Suga smile a bit, nodding. “Okay,” he says, then: “But don’t take too long. Those girls are probably so excited to see you, you wouldn’t want to disappoint them.”

Daichi nods, before flipping through his contacts. 

To Ushijima, he sends: Find Tendou. I don’t think he’s doing okay, something’s happened.

And then immediately he sends to Oikawa: Heads up - I’m calling you tonight.

And then he’s moving on autopilot, putting his phone away and following Suga across to where the two girls were waiting. He feels his phone buzz with a response, and it takes all his energy not to immediately check it again. 

Fuck. 

Did Tendou’s theory make any sense? His father’s secret activities seemed isolated to alien abductions, right? Stuff that falls from the sky. UFOs. 

His stomach is in knots - he actually worries he’s going to be sick for a minute. 

“Oh my god, I’m so sorry for pulling you outside, this is so embarrassing, I just - Ah, I’m such a big fan of you guys, this is so exciting-”

Daichi tries to smile for her. “Ah, that’s so sweet of you. Honestly, as long as someone’s enjoying it, it’s all worth it. No matter how cold those nights gets.”

They both giggle and laugh, and he can see them both glancing around. 

“Ah, I’m alone, unfortunately. None of the other guys are here.”

His phone buzzes in his pocket again. It feels like it’s going to burn through him, rattling his brain and making him forget his train of thought. 

“No, sorry, not alone - I’m here with a friend of mine - I don’t think he’s… no, you’ve never appeared on the channel, have you?” Daichi says, reaching a hand out to Suge, inviting him to step closer. The girls do not seem to care. 

“Never been invited,” Suga replies, giving him a shrug. He gives an awkward wave to the girls. “You were probably hoping to see Oikawa or Ushiwaka hanging around too, yeah? Sorry to disappoint.”

“No, no, it’s… I guess it’s just hard to imagine them with friends outside of each other,” one of the girls teased. 

“Camera magic,” the other replies. “Can’t believe everything you see on the internet.”

This earns her a pout, and Daichi wonders if you can die from just anxiety. 

His phone buzzes again. 

“It’s so nice to meet you,” Daichi said, the buzzing spurring him into action. It feels like his vision is darkening, but when he blinks and tries to clear his brain, he realizes it’s just because the sun has finished setting. “Uhm… yeah, super nice, sorry, that you caught us at a bad time-”

Bzzzzt-

He turns away, unable to take it, pulling out his phone again to see the messages. 

Tendou: I don’t know what I’m going to do. It doesn't making any sense, I'm probably just overthinking.

Tendou: I’m just exhausted, and freaked out. 

Oikawa: Oh, about what? 

Tendou: did you tell Ushijima on me? What the fuck?

He takes a breath, and hears Suga apologizing on his behalf behind him. He turns around to smile again, heading back over to the group. 

“Sorry,” he says, waving his phone awkwardly. “Business, you know?”

The phone buzzes in his hand, he almost drops it. He sort of wants to break it. 

Suga is looking at him with nothing except concern. Actually, if Daichi didn’t know better, he’d say Suga was looking at him with fear.

“Of course,” one of the girls says. “Well, we won’t hold you up any longer. Have a good evening!”

“You too!” he calls, as they both wave again and slowly turn to head off down the street. 

He feels Suga grab his arm. 

“Do you need to sit down? You look so pale.”

“No, I’m fine,” he replies, before he can think it through. Almost immediately Suga is forcing him to turn and face him properly,peeling a glove off one hand to lift up to his forehead. 

“Dude, you - actually, wait, you’re… so cold-” Suga says, before pulling his own hand away. “Are you sure you feel okay?”

He nods. “I think…”

“I mean picking out a gift is stressful, but… you… are you sick, or…?”

Sick works. 

“Maybe,” he says, and it’s a lie that rolls off his tongue so easily he wonders why he hasn’t tried to use it before. “Yeah, my head is just…” Maybe I am sick. Maybe all this is just a sickness. 

Does that make it contagious?

It feels like his chest will burst if he doesn’t tell Sugawara everything, but try as he might he doesn’t even know where to start. 

What if knowing about it makes it real?

Fuck. 

I can’t tell him. I can’t tell him that something is wrong with me.

Suga is staring at him still. “Should we go?”

“No,” he says after a minute, taking a deep breath. “No, no, I’m just… I’m fine. I’ll be fine. I can be fine. I just need to… sit for a moment-”

“How about…” Suga says, softly, though that note of concern has returned in earnest - the voice he uses when he is very aware that Daichi isn’t telling him the whole truth. A voice that Daichi has become uncomfortably familiar with these last few months. “We take a break, and go get dinner, and we’ll re-assess this gift thing once you… feel a bit better.”

He feels Suga squeeze his hand - he hadn’t even felt him hold it. 

“Okay,” he says. And Suga nods again, accepting of his acceptance. 

His phone buzzes in his hand. He hears Suga sigh as he turns away to check it.

Notes:

honestly I'd probably be obsessed with chat fics if people stopped giving them insane usernames that make it incomprehensible to read. anyway I probably wrote this chapter thrice over before actually finishing it, deleted more words than it ended up being. the bitch took my brain for a spin.
hope you enjoy and as always, thank you so so so much for reading <3

Chapter 23: Glitter Glam

Notes:

*presses play on whatever your favourite 2010's dance music is*

Suga would not, actually, describe the story as one of “friends falling in love and becoming something more.” That, of course, would require there to have been a point in which friendship was the exclusive relationship. There would need to have been slumber parties or birthdays or movie nights that had not been heavy with potential and confused intentions. That would require him to slot Daichi into the same slot as Asahi and that, simply, was not true. 

Sure, sure, his friendship with Daichi was something he valued above all else, it was irreplaceable, even by something potentially romantic. He wouldn’t like Daichi if he wasn’t also a good friend. That could all still be true, at the same time it was true that there had never been a point in the friendship in which Daichi’s hand against his arm had felt platonic.

It was special, whatever it was, in a three-year limbo state of what if and could we… Something that Suga had always felt would be theirs. Daichi was Daichi - Suga was Suga. It was like two puzzle pieces clicking together.

If you had asked him months ago, the day after Valentine’s day, if Sawamura Daichi was his, he’d have answered with an unequivocal yes he sure is.

He was not so sure anymore. And he wasn’t sure what to do with the brand new feeling of not being sure. 

Daichi is still Daichi in a lot of ways, so it feels improper to accuse him of having changed…

“I thought the colours palette was just silver?” Daichi is saying, finishing buttoning up the black shirt. “I’m wearing very little silver.”

“No, the colours are silver. The colour palette is monochromatic from silver. So you got the entire black-to-white spectrum to work with,” Suga reminds him as he moves behind him, stopping to smooth out the collar of the shirt he wore, letting his hands linger and brush down his shoulders, until the touch had caught his attention enough that he turned around to look at him. 

“Then the least I could do is match the shades of black. Aren’t you supposed to match the shades of black together?” 

Suga holds him at an arm’s length, stepping back a bit to cast his eyes down and appraise the outfit, before settling on. “You’re not wrong, but you’re also already matching, so…”

Daichi just frowns, a very sort of pouty look that makes Suga laugh, which appears to be the point as he immediately drops it the moment he does. 

He feels Daichi pulling him in, and lets it happen, caught with his heart in his chest and wondering why why why had they never managed to escape this limbo? Holding each other like friends should certainly never do, but with so much distance between them anyway. 

Suga should just say it. Out loud. 

I mean, they already had right? 

Oikawa had said it out loud. Texted it out loud? 

Getting it on with your boyfriend.

Boyfriend. 

Suga had actually managed to convince himself that Daichi hadn’t seen that message, considering he didn’t actually address it. He didn’t deny it. But that wasn’t a confirmation either. 

“I mean, I guess I don’t have anything to worry about,” Daichi says. “Who’s gonna be looking at me if I’m walking in beside you?”

Suga smiles slightly. 

Just say it. Just say it. Just goddamn say it, Sugawara, what are you afraid of? You’re not afraid of anything. Just say it. Oh my god-

“Exactly,” he agrees, lifting a hand up to pat Daichi’s cheek. 

You bitch. You absolutely scaredy cat. You know he likes you! You’ve already been asked out by him once! Just say it. Make a joke. “Can’t wait to show off my boyfriend!” Do it! Do it! Oh my god Sugawara why are you like this what is happening to you you’re supposed to be better than this say it do it-

A phone is ringing. 

Daichi pulls away from him to cross the room and grab his phone, and Suga is left, standing alone, screaming internally. 

“I’m gonna head downstairs,” Suga calls, earning himself a nod of acknowledgement from Daichi before he answers the phone. 

He’s familiar with the Sawamura house, quite so, actually, and follows the path down through the living room and towards the front door to start getting his shoes on. He liked this house. He likes the way Daichi’s mom kept it decorated, he liked the mess all the younger kids made, he likes how much pride Daichi had in helping maintain it. It was a stark contrast to his own home, small and neat and always so quiet.

Suga sits down to lace up the shoes he was wearing and is almost immediately covered in dog fur, and Kumo nuzzles in under his arm to put his nose on his lap. 

“Oh, are you feeling neglected, buddy?” Suga teases, running his hands over the dogs ears. “I haven’t seen you in so long!”

Kumo seems to agree with him, nuzzling more and more in, huffing softly. 

Suga used to see this dog every weekend, if not two or three times a week. Daichi maintained great pride over being a good dog owner - Suga had found great pleasure in joining him on long walks, through the little countryside roads. 

He hadn’t really done any of that recently. Normally Suga would just invite himself, or Daichi would let him know what park he’d be at, or when he was leaving. But… Well, Daichi hadn’t been around really. Half the time now he was off in Tokyo, or uptown into the city, or a few very confusing times, at Shiratorizawa of all places. He just…

Suga wraps his arms around the dog, and in response the dog flops over and demands more scratches. 

“Men are only after one thing,” Suga laments, before reaching over to enthusiastically scratch his belly. 

“Alright, ready to go?” Daichi calls, and no matter Suga’s current emotional state, when he turns around to see Daichi, he says:

“Nope! Not wearing that jacket. Ruins the outfit. What is wrong with you?”

Daichi stops where he’s walking, freezing like a man caught mid-burglary and staring at him with wide eyes. Then, comically slowly, he looks down as if to check what jacket he’s wearing. 

“This is just my jacket,” he says, looking back to Suga.

“Yeah, and it ruins the outfit. It’s green. Don’t you have anything better?”

“Uh…”

“You’re helpless,” Suga scoffs, pushing himself up to his feet (much to the great distress of Kumo) and turning to look at him properly. “If you want Asahi to stop making fun of how you dress, you gotta stop doing stuff like this.”

“I… wait what does Asahi do?”

But Suga has already crossed the little entrance way and opened up the closet by the front door. 

“I don’t keep any of my stuff here-” Daichi tries to say. 

“Please, I know,” Suga says, followed by: “But literally anything will be better than that. Take it off.”

Daichi does not wait to be told twice, taking his jacket off and hanging it over his arm, before bending down to pat Kumo’s head and undoubtedly share the pain of how bossy Sugawara was. 

None of Daichi’s mom’s stuff would work for several reasons not least of which was that her and Daichi shared identical fashion sense and everything was sporty. The jacket in there that was obviously his younger sisters was also out. 

But-

“Woah, holy shit,” Suga says, pulling out a jacket that was very nice, sleek black leather and silver zippers. “Where the hell did this come from?”

Daichi lifts his head from where he was focusing on the dog, and Suga is surprised to see a confusing kind of guard go up over Daichi’s expression, as if Suga were touching something he shouldn’t be. 

“That’s my dad’s, from… whenever. It’s been in that closet my whole life.”

“I’m sorry, at what stage in his life was your dad cool?”

Daichi looks hapless once again, giving him an uncomfortable sort of shrug. “I... dunno, probably pre-me. Maybe. I can’t wear that-”

“Oh, you absolutely can,” Suga replies, tossing the jacket and forcing Daichi to catch it. “Put on the cool-guy jacket and let me appreciate you.”

Daichi had always been Daichi, which is why it’s so weird, the way he holds the jacket as if nauseated by it, shivering at the mere idea of wearing it. 

“Come on,” Suga pressed. “Your dad’s in Tokyo, you’re not gonna get in trouble for borrowing it for one weekend.”

“Right,” Daichi replies, before seeming to move on instinct to shrug the jacket on, settling it over his shoulders. It suits him well - well, that’s a lie. It’s very un-Daichi, but not in a bad way. Like a window into a reality that swapped Daichi and Tanaka’s lives. Daichi opens his arms, as if to prompt Sugawara. So? he’s saying. 

“You look great,” he assures him. “Your dad’s weirdly cool jacket suits you well.”

Daichi gives him a nod, though Suga cannot shake the feeling that he’s done something wrong -  no, scratch that, that Daichi is hiding the fact that he’s done something wrong. 

If you feel a certain way, just tell me. 

I’m drowning out here. 

“Come on,” Suga says, stepping forward to take Daichi’s hand. He still feels that little thrill of contact, his heart skipping a beat, the butterflies in his stomach at just the mere touch, of their fingers lacing together. “We don’t want to miss our train.”

It’s just that he’s not so sure that Daichi feels it anymore. 

 

---

 

You ever… get invited to a mansion? 

There’s a brief moment in time, when they’re walking up the driveway towards this Utsukushii’s home that even Oikawa stops and just sort of looks at it, feeling entirely overwhelmed. 

Big is… probably the best word for it. 

Yeah. It’s… big. 

It’s also not in Yokohama proper, it’s nestled in the mountains to the west, which works well in their favour because it puts them closer to Saitama, but makes it a little harder to access. It’s long driveway twists through the hills to where the mansion rests proudly on top, blue and white lights flashing already from rows and rows of windows, the party seemingly already well alive before they had even set foot on the property. 

“I guess we just… we just walk… we walk up?” Oikawa manages to say eventually, staring up at it. 

“I don’t know if we should be here,” Bokuto replies, a note of something not unlike terror in his voice. 

“I mean, we already RSVP’d, it would be rude to not show up,” Daichi agreed, at the same time there’s a holler from behind them, and someone loud is and heavy is barrelling through. They knock into his shoulder, and he stumbles fully forward, catching himself and feeling Suga help stabilize him with a hand on his elbow. 

He lifts his eyes to see what the hell that was, and finds himself facing a energetic young man, with fluffy hair and wild, camera in his hands. 

“Yo, what up!” the man is damn near roaring. “Only been here five minutes and I’ve already caught myself some ghosts! Look who it is!”

Ah, oh, shit, right, this is-

“Oh my god this is an influencer party,” Suga says from beside, as if reading his mind. 

Ushijima already seems to be prickling, looking around as if suddenly aware that literally everyone was going to be holding a camera. That this house itself was probably a goddamn camera. 

“Ah, how delightful,” Oikawa says, and Daichi is thankful he’s not so weird in front of the lens, and lets him take the lead. “Now if only we could be so lucky. Having fun?”

“Just got here,” the man repeats, grinning at them over the camera. “Hell yeah! Love you boys. Shit’s fucking scary - we should totally collab sometime though, yeah?”

“Oh! Well-” Oikawa, Daichi decides, clearly has no idea who this man is. “I mean, we’re… always looking for opportunities to hunt ghosts, uh-”

“Oh fuck yeah, we could totally, like, go see if we can speak to my crazy uncle-” and then as an aside, to god knows who, he adds: “he died years ago, so right up your alley-” and then back to Oikawa.

“Or, I was thinking one or two of you could come out to my place and we could eat hot tacos.” 

Oikawa blinks, his brain clearly just reeling with that one. “What?”

“Oh, it’s this challenge I do. Fans send me their hottest home-made sauces, I drench a taco in it, and then try and eat the whole thing,” the man says, sounding absolutely overjoyed. 

“You are going to be poisoned,” Ushijima says, and Tendou whacks him in the chest. 

The man laughs. “One time I did get super ill and threw up,” he agrees, nodding as if it were a fond memory. “So? What do you think?”

Iwaizumi, beside Oikawa, has had to turn around to not be overtly losing his shit laughing. 

“I… think… uh- Kenma!”

Kenma, who’d immediately tried to stay hidden behind Kuroo, makes a cutting motion, as if to tell Oikawa to shut up. Oikawa will not, though, and reaches behind him, groping around until he could grab Kenma by the collar and drag him out. 

“This is our social media manager,” Oikawa says. “He’ll take your number, we’ll be in touch.”

“Oh, rad!” the man laughs, before looking down at Kenma in a friendly but absolutely terrifying way, grin too wide, energy too high. “I’ll give you my work email - it’s fuckrockstar69-”

Daichi feels Suga break, and he’s joined Iwaizumi in walking away. 

Almost as soon as the man has finished speaking, and Kenma is holding his phone and his new email with nervous terror, there’s another shout, and a bigger group is coming running down the hill. 

Two guys and a girl, all of which seem to have really gone in to the theme, in silver suits and a tight sequined dress, all three of them with glittery silver eyeshadow, and the girls lips painted in silver too. It’s a lot. 

“Is that the Rockstar?” one of the guys shouts, and the odd man has turned around, sticking his hands in the air.

“Oh, fuck yeah! It’s been so long, bro!”

The group convenes, and one of the guys, with his arm handing around the girl, leans over to look at them. 

“Who’ve we got here?”

“We’re not even inside the building yet,” Daichi hears Kuroo say, mostly just to himself it seems, as he puts out an arm to let Kenma dance back and hide in his shadow. 

“Oh, these are the captain ghost hunters. Captains of ghosts. Ghost… what is your channel name?”

“Uh… Ghost Captains, it’s not… if I gave you the context it would make sense-” Oikawa tries, but-

“Oh, yeah! You’re the…” the new guy is saying, waving a hand vaguely at them. “Funny shit, bro, super funny, yeah… How do you make all that stuff happen?” 

“Wh… what do you mean?” Oikawa says, tilting his head. 

“All the weird paranormal shit, like… how do you make it look so good on camera?”

“We don’t… stage anything,” Oikawa laughs, scratching at the back of his neck. “Do people think that?”

This makes all of the guys there take a pause, as if reevaluating their initial opinion of them. 

“You don’t?” the girl says, and her voice is a little higher pitched than Daichi is expecting, but she seems the calmest, so he appreciates her taking the lead. 

“No,” Oikawa says. “We’ve never staged anything. Well, except - so the Shiratorizawa episode the doors locking is faked but that wasn’t our fault and we told everyone very clearly what happened.”

“So… you’re saying it’s all-” and she waves a hand between them. “This whole schtick is supposed to be real?”

“Supposed?”

She seems amused by this, and the boy hanging off her offers:
“I just mean, you’re expecting us to honestly believe one of you is psychic, and that one can see demons?” he said, jerking his head towards Daichi. 

Oikawa blinked, seemingly caught off guard by this, floundering a bit and clearly having not expected that people would just assume they were frauds. Daichi cuts in to try and help, since he was half of the problem it seemed, to say:

“Well… I haven’t lied about my experiences,” Daichi says. “And… believe me, I’m the first to admit it’s most likely just coincidence, or… self-fulfilling prophecies that lead to the footage we capture. But… we’ve never intentionally tried to fabricate anything…”

They’re still seeming skeptical, but before the girl can speak, as she opens her mouth, Tendou cuts in with: 

“Eighty-three.”

She jerks her head around to him, eyes widening slightly. 

“What did you say?”

“The number you’re going to pick after you ask me to prove that I’m psychic. It’s eighty-three.”

Her friends, the two boys, laugh and seem to enjoy the joke - after all, it would be a very easy joke to make, and one of them says: “You guys are a riot, okay, come on, I don’t wanna stand around out here in the cold.”

Daichi, however, does not miss the look of genuine horror across the young woman’s face before she’s turned away, and everyone is heading up towards the mansion. 

Through the massive front doors and into a room lit by the fractured, scattered diamond light of a hanging disco ball, the party is already on, so on, actually, that their little group of guides that hadn’t even introduced themselves are gone and lost to the party before Daichi can even finish adjusting to the inside atmosphere. 

He turns in place, the reflection of white light off glass and mirror and silver is almost overwhelming, the music vibrates through the ground and up into his skull, the melodies in his ears drowned out by the pounding of the bass in his bones. He feels Suga loop an arm through his, mimicking his own fear of being swept away by the party and never being found again. 

Oikawa has leaned over to say something to Iwaizumi, and the two start off into the crowd. 

“Ah - wait, shouldn’t we-” Kuroo starts to say, but stick together seems to die on his tongue, because, really, should they? 

What were they even here for? 

“It’s a party!” Oikawa calls back, turning around to look at them. “Don’t be losers, go have fun!” 

 

---

 

It takes thirty-three minutes for things to get out of hand. 

Daichi knows that because that’s the exact moment he turns around and realizes he’s lost Suga. 

 

---

 

Bokuto has also lost everyone. It’s a little unfair, he thinks, to be the only person entering a party without a de-facto partner, as everyone else seems to split up and go their own ways together, or get pulled away somehow, and Bokuto is left without much direction and an ever-growing sense of dread. He liked people and he liked parties but he had never been very good at controlling his reaction to things, and this whole situation is starting to feel entirely overwhelming. 

He’s slipping between people, who are dancing and jumping to the deep, bouncing music that rattles the building. He’s trying to get into it, and it’s sort of working, but it works even better when he turns around and two women seem to catch his attention, giggling softly as they wave him over. 

“You look a little lost there, cutie,” one of them says, leaning back against the table she was standing by, biting on her lip. “Looking for someone?”

“Kinda, I guess?” he says. “My friends sorta just abandoned me.”

“Oh, poor thing,” the other says. “Well, why don’t you come with us? We’ll treat you better.”

“Sure!” he says, because he likes people and wants to socialize, even if he’s not sure exactly what they’re expecting from him. “What are you guys doing?”

“Oh, we’re just hanging out in the other room,” she says, and both of them move in tandem to take his arms, turning him around. “This way~” she sings. 

---

 

Drinks are in the kitchen, his goal of getting a cup in his hands is derailed when he’s moving down one of these long hallways, and he finds a game room filled with drunk young adults and influences, braced around a table and seeming to have absolutely the time of their life roasting each other and their terrible attempts at beer pong. 

“Oh, come on, prettyboy,” one of the guys is saying, a shaved head and body full of tattoos pushing him as a rebel, but his expensive clothes saying otherwise. “Play a round.”

“No, no, I couldn’t,” Oikawa says. “Just waiting for my friend to come back with a drink.”

The guy arches an eye. “Why wait for a drink when you can just lose and get them now?”

Oikawa chuckled. “Well I can’t get that drunk,” he teased. “What would I do drinking all that? I’d be a mess. No way.”

“Ah, it’s not that hard,” the guy says, waving him over. “Come on, you can play on my team. These girls aren’t so good, we can take ‘em.”

There’s a round of scoffs of annoyance from the girls. 

“Where’s the fun in that?” Oikawa says, pushing himself up to head around to the other end of the table. 

“Me and you?” the guy laughs, crossing his arms. One of the other girls has finished refilling the plastic cups. “I mean, if you insist. But probably not your best bet if you don’t wanna get plastered. It ain’t water in those cups.”

“I got it, I got it,” Oikawa says, waving him off. “Now just tell me the rules.”

“Ah, I’ll explain as we go. Basically, just make your shot, and if it lands in the cup, I gotta drink. You win if you make me drink all my cups. I’ll even let you go first.”

Oikawa takes a step back, giving the light little ping pong ball a toss in his hand to get a feel for its weight, then turning and tosses the ball in a delicate arch over, to let it plunk nice and neatly into the very front cup. 

“Like that?” he says, giving this arrogant man the best, naive expression he could muster. 

 

---

 

Iwaizumi has lost Oikawa. He was, indeed, trying to retrieve drinks for them, since neither of them were against underage drinking nor particularly worried about consequences, though his attempts to find the kitchen had been terribly ineffective. So he’s moving now between the crowds and trying to avoid having anything spilled on him when he spins around and almost crashes directly into a familiar face. 

“Oh! Hey man,” he calls, as Daichi awkwardly shuffles around to give him some space. 

“Hey,” he echoes back, shouting above the music. “Sorry, I just-”

“We shouldn’t have split up,” Iwaizumi agreed, then: “Have you seen Oikawa? He just disappeared.”

“Nah. Have you seen Suga?”

“Last I saw he’d wandered out to the backyard with Kuroo and Kenma, check there?” 

“Ah, great, thanks,” Daichi says, giving him an awkward sort of salute before slipping around him and heading to attempt to navigate this maze mansion and find an exit to the backyard. 

---

 

Bokuto, in many circumstances, probably wouldn’t mind having so many objective hot girls fawning over him. He’s actually quite enjoying the attention, he really does love attention, but it’s so overwhelming, and they all have cameras, and-

“Aren’t you having fun?” one of the girls purrs - she’s half on his lap. 

“It’s just… so much,” he says. “It’s hard to…”

“Mhm… mhm… well, here…” she says, before turning around to snap her fingers towards her friend, who hastens to pull something out of her purse. It’s an orange and green prescription bottle. Her friend takes one of the capsules, offering it over to him. “This’ll help you relax.”

“What’s that? I don’t take-”

“Relax,” she coos. “It’s prescription, it’s not made in some addicts backyard set-up,” she adds teasingly, rolling the pill between her fingers. “It’s just uppers, it’ll help you have fun and make this party memorable.”

Bokuto opens his mouth to ask further questions, but she gives him a giggle and before he can decide if this is a good or bad idea, she’s putting it on his tongue. He may as well swallow it. 

 

---

 

Oikawa sinks the last ball, playing a perfect game, and the asshole with the tattoos has to drink his last cup. Everyone, by this point, had been absolutely enthralled by the accuracy of his tosses, and his willingness to absolutely hustle the shit out of this game. It’s not their fault they didn’t know who they were talking to. 

“Okay, okay, good game,” the man says, hiccuping slightly. Oikawa, actually, has had to drink quite a bit, this guy wasn’t so bad either, and although this was far from his first rodeo with alcohol, the absolutely insane mix of shit that was filling these cups left an awful taste in his mouth. 

He stumbles a little bit as he moves away from around the table, giving a mocking, playful dramatic bow. 

“Well they don’t call me the great king for no reason,” he teases. 

“Who is they?” the man laughs, grabbing one of the used cups and a bottle from under the table to fill it. 

“Some fourteen year old asshole, thank you for asking,” Oikawa replies, stumbling towards him. “Are you really gonna drink more?”

“No, this is for you,” he teases. Oikawa raises his eyes, but before he can take the cup the man pulls it out of his reach. “Not done yet, let me make you a special, viper juice.”

“Eh?”

He looks around, the room trashed already only an hour or so into the party, and hurries over to find what looks like an abandoned bottle of beer, back to Oikawa as he poured the bottle in to mix with whatever had been put in before. Oikawa does not, at this angle, notice him slip the quickly dissolving white pill in alongside it. 

“It’ll get you real fucked up,” he says, turning around to to hand the drink over to him. “Doesn’t taste great, but you just gotta fight through it. Better than drinking a million bottles otherwise to get a buzz.”

“You do seem to hold your liquor well,” Oikawa says, poking his chest before taking the cup. “Okay, thanks-” and then he turns to saunter off. 

“Oh, wait-” the man starts. 

“What?”

“Aren’t you gonna stay, play some games-”

“What? No, you guys are boring,” he says, before raising the cup. “Thanks for the drink~” he sings, before turning and leaving the room. 

 

---

 

Tendou had sort of expected to be ignored during this party, not only because he was certifiably not an influencer, nor even really one of the ghost hunters, but rather just an odd spare friend that sometimes made appearance, but mostly because he simply did not have the vibe of someone approachable, he’d been informed. So Tendou had assumed he’d cling to his friends' sides and just bide his time like he normally did in crowds, and that would be that. 

Everyone here thought - knew? - that he was psychic. 

That, apparently, changes how people approach you. 

He’s considering faking getting one wrong so they’ll all leave us alone. 

“Okay, okay, I’m thinking of a new one, uhm…” 

75,839,644

Honestly the hardest part about this is trying to know what number that is. 

“Seventy-five million, eight-hundred and thirty-nine thousand, six hundred and forty-four,” he says, after mentally mapping it out in his brain because she thought in images and didn’t think it for him to repeat. 

She squeals in delight and claps her hands together. “Oh my god! That is just so amazing, how do you keep doing that?”

“I… just a little parlor trick, I guess,” Tendou says, shrugging. 

Her friend, another girl, says: “Okay, okay, I’ll figure it out eventually. Show me again. What am I thinking of…”

14,234. Yellow.

“Fourteen thousand, two hundred and thirty-four, and the colour yellow for some reason,” Tendou replies, wondering why he was in this position at all. 

Honestly, Tendou wished he was the kind of guy that could appreciate the crowd of pretty young girls around him, squealing in delight when he spoke. (Surely there were better people for them to spend their time on, could they not read the room?)

He’s trying to find a way out, when over one of the girls shoulders, he catches sight of Oikawa sidling up to Ushijima and a little alarm goes off in his head. 

“Alright,” he chuckles. “I promised my friend I’d be back, so… I should…”

“Aww, you have to go? But this is so fun!” the girl says. 

“Wait, wait, just do it one more time-” another says, pulling her phone out. “I wanna get this on camera, it’s amazing!”

Tendou tries not to sigh on camera. 

 

---

 

“Wanna drink?” Oikawa purrs, holding the little plastic cup up to Ushijima. 

“That’s illegal,” he replies. 

“Uh, only if you get caught.”

“That is certainly not how it works, still illegal.”

He snorts, putting the cup down on a shelf behind them and turning around to look out at the crowd. 

“Still the same old Ushiwaka. I wish you’d had any other personality.”

Ushijima tilts his head slightly, at the same time Oikawa goes ahead and lifts Ushijima’s hand up, using his own to open his palm and press their hands together. 

Oikawa sighs. “Yeah, see?” he says, once he’s satisfied with whatever he was looking for. “You could have been perfect, like- your whole thing-” he waves a hand at him, generally indicating Ushijima.

“Absolutely perfect - and then! You open your mouth. God, just… horrible.”

“How…” Ushijima wants to ask how much Oikawa has had to drink, and… it can’t be that much, they haven’t even been here that long. But his confusion at the situation finds him unable to form the question properly. 

“Just an atrocious personality. Truly horrible.”

“...alright.”

“But…” Oikawa says, hiccuping slightly and looking down to his drink, as if also realizing that he’s a little more drunk than he was probably supposed to be. He puts the cup down distrustingly. “If you’d been any other person, I would have had a lot of fun with you. That’s a promise.” 

Before Ushijima can even try and think of how to approach that one, Tendou has appeared behind Oikawa, tapping his shoulder to get his attention

“Leave, or I spay you,” Tendou says, loud enough to be heard over the music. 

“Got it,” Oikawa chirps, giving him a salute of acknowledgement and pushing himself away from the wall and following orders to stumble off. 

Ushijima watches him go for a minute, before reaching around to grab the cup he’d been drinking, sniffing it. “For the record, I had no influence in that conversation.”

“Uh-huh. Don’t drink that.” Tendou says, handing one of the cups he carried over to him. “Here’s something non-alcoholic for you.”

“Oikawa was acting very odd,” Ushijima says. 

“I’m not mad at you, you don’t need to defend yourself.”

“I mean - Is there something in this?” Ushijima clarifies, holding up the cup Oikawa had been drinking. “It smells terrible.” 

“It’s alcohol, he’s probably just drunk and off his leash - we should find Iwaizumi,” Tendou scoffs, taking the cup from him to sniff at it. Well… It certainly didn’t smell like anything he was familiar with. He decides to just try it, taking a sip from the cup and immediately feeling his face screw up in response, and he really seems to struggle to swallow it, putting the back of his hand to his mouth before eventually giving up and just spitting it back into the cup. “Fuck.”

“Why did you drink it?” Ushijima says, taking the cup away from him. “That’s illegal.”

“Oh, everything about that should be illegal,” Tendou says, voice cracking as he tries to recover. He snatches the cup he had previously handed to Ushijima, the non-alcoholic one he’d worked so hard to source, and takes a sip to try and recover and clear the taste from his mouth. “It’s gotta be… what, vodka mixed with lime flavoured beer? I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a third thing in there. Why the hell is Oikawa drinking that?” 

 

---

 

“Oh my god! Is that Sawamura? Everyone! Look who I’ve found!” 

Daichi finds himself stumbling around, confused at the very specific callout, as if he’d been lost or hiding. Instead, what he comes face to face with is a young woman of outstanding beauty, dolled up in a way that actually felt improbably, with an hourglass figure hugged by a dress so tight Daichi was immediately overwhelmed by the inability to look at her anywhere that felt appropriate, and his first instinct upon seeing her is to look away, face heating up. Maybe if he just turned and ran, he could escape this situation. 

“Oh, uh-”

“I was hoping I’d bump into one of you! Where are the rest of your friends? All alone?” and as she’s talking, either oblivious to or uncaring of his disconcertment, she comes around to wrap an arm around his shoulders and turn him to face the camera she held up to record them. She’s his height, actually - though he notes she’s in quite severe heels. This, of course, is Utsukushii. 

“Uhm… just… split up for a bit,” Daichi says, performing what is probably his most impressive feat of eye-contact with himself on the screen of her camera. “Hap…. Happy birthday, by the way.”

She giggles, giving him a look of amusement before saying: “Ah, too bad! I’ll see if I can track them down later. But! You’re certainly enough for me right now~ How’ve you been enjoying the party?”

“It’s… great,” he says. “Never been to a party this big before.”

She’s giggling again. She is very giggly. Bouncy and bubbly and generally seeming like she’s in a good mood. 

“Aw, glad I could be your first time.”

Daichi wonders if killing himself is an option. 

“Okay, okay, okay, to keep it on theme, give me your best ghost-hunter’s guess, do you think there’s any spirits here in this mansion?”

“Excuse me?”

She giggles, yet again, and turns more properly to look at him. “This mansion’s pretty old, and you seem to have a keen eye for the paranormal. You think there are any ghosts here enjoying my birthday with me?”

Daichi laughs in response, since it’s such an absurd question, before glancing back to the camera and putting on his best performative tone, saying: “Oh, for sure. What ghost wouldn’t want to come celebrate?” 

And this makes her laugh, and she lets go of him to walk away, talking to the camera and saying: “Well you’ve heard it here first, folks. My birthday is officially ghost-approved!” 

Her hair, tied up in a high, silky ponytail, reveals the back of her neck, and just under her hairline, Daichi can see the sharp-toothed, grinning mouth that giggles as she does. 

She shuts her camera down and pivots a 180 to trot back over to him. 

“Hope you don’t mind!” she sings. “About being on camera, I mean.”

Her personality now feels like it may have been taken down a notch, but she’s still got the same bubbly energy. His brain is mostly still processing the mouth on her head. 

“You… you’re…”

She stares at him, all wide-eyed and innocent. “Me?”

He puts a hand on the back of his own head. 

She mimics the movement, before her eyes light up in delight. “Oh, you can see it, can you?”

“You know about it?” 

She laughs, as if this comment entertains her extensively, and she nods. “That I do, you don’t grow a second mouth and not exactly notice.”

“That grew?”

“Of course,” she says, before making a show of running her hands down her body to squeeze her waist. “How do you think I stay this skinny?”

Daichi feels his brain shut down a bit. 

She seems amused by his bafflement, before she presses a finger to her lips, to make a shushing motion. “I will admit, I am thrilled to find out that you are apparently the real deal, I’ve been taking bets on whether or not your little all-seeing-eye performance was staged or not…”

“Yeah we don’t… stage anything…” he says. “So you’re…”

She repeats the shushing motion. 

He nods slightly. “So what-”

She re-emphasizes the finger to her lips. 

“Right, but… so how did you-”

She moves to press her finger against his lips, giving him a pointed look. “Don’t ask questions, cutie. Just go with the flow.” 

He’s being shushed at this moment, so he stays silent until she pulls her hand away. 

When he thinks it’s clear to talk, he asks: 

“So… what do we do now?”

She thinks about this for a moment, before gasping in delight and grabbing his arm. “Oh, my god, okay, you absolutely need to come join us on the couch for birthday-cameos!”

“...what?” 

“Well, every yeah, during my party, I host a livestream as well, where we accept fans and other supporters to come video chat with us live for five, ten minutes each. We try and keep rotating who’s there to chat with - Of course, I wanted to come down and take a break for the party, but you need to come hang out with us for a bit! It’ll be awesome!” 

“Uh…”

But she’s already taking his arm and pulling him towards a stairwell. “You’ll be such a great addition, everyone already loves you!” 

“Oh- okay-”

He tries not to look at the mouth on the back of her head as she pulls him off. 

 

---

 

Sugawara had ended up following Kuroo and Kenma out the backdoor and onto the lawn, where a handful of people were dancing and spinning to loud music, that was disorientingly not the same music that was being played inside, the rest were just talking and playing games. 

Kenma had immediately recognized some big-game gamer youtuber and gotten starstruck, and was now following him around in a way Suga envisioned to be much reminiscent of the cats they were mascotted by - that is to say, overtly staring and following him, and then immediately turning way and pretending he didn’t want to talk the moment he actually got his attention. 

Kuroo, bored with watching this go down, had found a somewhat empty table that had been used for drinks and cups and had set up an arm wrestling competition, seemingly not to play himself but merely to take people’s money for bets. With everyone already quite drunk, it seemed this was quite profitable for him. 

So after a while of all this, it’s Suga’s turn to grow bored, and cold, so he slinks away and back up to the house, quietly slipping in through the back door, and finding himself heading towards the kitchen, where-

Bokuto is cleaning? 

Bokuto is cleaning.

Sugawara stops in the doorway to the kitchen, having to step aside briefly to let a group out before he got in, watching Bokuto putter around and stack used cups and wipe up spills, as if suddenly possessed. 

“Hey Bokuto?” Suga called, after a second, and Bokuto lifts his head to look at him. 

“Oh, hey Suga,” he replies. “What’s up, having fun?”

“...sure, hey - so, what are you doing?”

“Just tidying this place up, it’s a disaster.” 

“... yeah, no, I see that, so - why?”

“Well it occurred to me there were so many used cups all mixed with the unused ones, and it’s probably gonna get people sick, if they accidentally drink out of a used cup, so… You know, you don’t wanna spread germs, so…” 

Suga opens his mouth to say something, before frowning and leaning against the counter of the kitchen. “Huh. Are you feeling alright?” 

“Funny you say that,” Bokuto replies. “This really hot chick was sitting on my lap and she gave me a pill and I don’t think it was a real pill, because nothing happened and now I feel very tired. I’d actually kinda like to go home, but I don’t really wanna be a bummer, you know? Everyone else is having so much fun. Well… I think they’re having fun. I saw Tendou spit up a drink he was having so maybe some people aren’t having fun.”

Suga stares at him for a little bit longer, really trying to process this. “Right… So… You just… took a pill a stranger offered you?”

“She was pretty persuasive.”

“You shouldn’t do that.”

“I’m well aware of that now… oh, did you want a drink?”

“Oh, sure-”

And Bokuto grabs one of the clean cups, hesitating a second before saying: “Lots of options. You probably don’t want anything alcoholic, right? It is… as Ushijima keeps telling people, a crime.” 

“You know what? Fuck it. Based on the month I’ve been having, maybe - what do they call it, liquid courage? - maybe it wouldn’t be so bad.”

He laughs, amused, and this new, oddly sane Bokuto grabs a glass bottle and twists off the cap, handing it over to him. “Alright, well, give that a shot then.”
Suga chuckles, before saying: “Well, if you wanna go home you’re totally welcome to, but… just make sure to tell us if you’re gonna leave, otherwise we’ll have to start a search.”

He grins, nodding. “Got it.”

 

---

 

Iwaizumi notices Suga slipping out of the kitchen, and lifts a hand up to catch his attention. 

“Oh, hey,” Suga says, moving around a couple people to close the distance. “What up?”

“I have been looking for Oikawa for like… forty minutes… wait, what time is it?” 

“Oh, buddy, I have no idea. But I can assure you I haven’t seen him. Oh, I did see Bokuto, though, who is…” Suga seems to think about this for a moment before saying: “I’m gonna worry about it later, but apparently he took a pill from a stranger and now he’s cleaning the kitchen to prevent the spread of germs, so… not sure what’s up there.”

“Oh, okay… uh-”

“Mhm, have you seen Daichi? I got distracted with Kuroo for a bit and lost him.” 

“I have not seen Daichi for a while… He was looking for you, you, and I sent him outside - did he not reach you?” 

“No…”

“Shit, well-” 

“It’s so hard to think in here, like… it’s so loud-”

Iwaizumi hummed. “I’m gonna head back where I came from, I’ll send Daichi your way if I see him.”

“Same,” Suga says, before they bid goodbye and Iwaizumi moves off towards the kitchen. Oikawa was probably where the people were, playing games… he likes to be the centre of the attention… so he knew there were games down the halls, in a few of the further rooms, and outside-

He almost walks into a tall man, a stranger, coming down one of the hallways and looking around. 

“Uh… sorry, dude,” Iwaizumi says, backing up. 

“Oh, you’re good,” he replies. Getting a good look at him, he sort of looked like every mediocre punk Iwaizumi had met before - shaved head, full of tattoos, black tank top to show them off. 

“You haven’t happened to see a-” the tattooed man lifts a hand up to just an inch taller than him. “About this high, very pretty-boy clean, brown hair, he was wearing a silver shirt-”

Iwaizumi tilts his head. “Oikawa?”

“Oh! You know him!” 

“Uh - I sure do. Why are you looking for him?”

“...uh-”

Iwaizumi squints. 

“No reason! I just, he was really good at beer pong, I was looking for a rematch, that’s all.” 

“Uh-huh. Alright. Well, I take it to mean he’s not down that way?” 

He shook his head.

“Well, then neither of us know where he is. I recommend you stop searching for him, though, if you value unbroken fingers.”

“Holy shit what the-”
Well, if Oikawa wasn’t down that way, Iwaizumi may as well go double check outside, even though he was fairly sure he’d already checked there…

 

---

 

“Daichi!” 

Daichi is almost at the top of the stairs when the voice stops him, and he looks back down to see Suga at the base of them, looking up at him. Utsukushii hesitates, looking between them. 

“Who’s that?” she says. 

“Uh - my friend, sorry, I was looking for him-”

“Oh! I don’t recognize him, I thought-”

“He’s not… on the channel, yeah…”

Daichi pulls out of her grip, hurrying down the stairs. “I’ll… catch up, just give me a second.”

Sugawara smiles slightly as he reaches the last step. 

“I’ve been looking everywhere for you-”

“Yes, me too, I am so sorry,” Daichi says, putting his hands on Suga’s arms. 

There has always been something about Sugawara that Daichi had never been able to articulate. He liked all of his friends, he found great joy with all of his friends, they mattered to him, but Sugawara was different - had always been different. He was like a calming balm on every loud, stressed part of his brain. Daichi wants so badly to sweep him up into a hug, or hold his hand, or just take him away, to a party that’s more their speed, to enjoy being with him, but that’s not why they’re here.

“Where were you-” Suga’s eyes flick up to Utsukushii, and Daichi can see his own moment of brief self-conscious panic reflected back as he took in her outfit for a minute, before looking back at him. “Where were you going?” 

“I am going to… join a livestream, I think?” he says, chuckling. “It sounds absurd, I know, but-”

“I mean, sounds fun…”

“You should come.”

“Really?”

“Yes, I’m sure-” but when Daichi looks up to where Utsukushii is waiting, she’s shaking her head slightly. “Well…”

Suga seems to have noticed it too. 

“I don’t want to intrude,” he says, quietly. “I’m not… uh… nobody would know who I am, there’s no point in doing that…”

“I… I’m sorry-”

“I know, it’s fine-” and Suga steps back to pull his arm out of his hold. “Just… don’t stay too long, okay? I mean, this party’s gonna be going until, like… four am I imagine, so… just come find me when you’re done and we’ll make up for lost time.” 

Daichi reaches forward to take Suga’s hand, squeezing it gently. “I will,” he says. “Don’t worry - god, your hand is freezing, here-”

And he pulls back, instinctually shrugging off the jacket that had been hanging heavy on his shoulders for the last day. It felt a little more unnatural, to do this, he’d rather have liked the look of Sugawara wearing his jacket, but as he tosses the old leather jacket from his father out, to drape over Suga’s shoulders, it doesn’t feel quite right.

Suga takes it either way, giving him a bit of a smile and pulling it tighter around his shoulders. 

“Thank you,” he says, softly. 

“Half an hour, I’m sure,” Daichi replies, before starting back up the stairs. As Utsukushii sees him follow, she turns away to lead the way towards the room they were live streaming in, and the mouth on the back of her neck licks across its razor teeth.

Suga, of course, watches him go without seeing any of it. 

Chapter 24: Disco Death

Notes:

sorry about the google-translate german. unfortunately I don't even have a shadow of a working knowledge of it, so I normally would try and do the bare minimum edit for gender/formality/conjugation but alas, this is not a language I can do that in.

Daichi feels, a little bit, like he might be an impostor. Fish out of water felt painfully inadequate to properly encapsulate what was going on here. It had nothing to do with the fans, however - although some of them in the livestream chat room had expression general confusion over who the hell this odd teenager was that their Utsukushii was dragging onto the coach, for the most part, people did know who he was, which was an odd feeling. There was an explosion of ghost-emojis in the chat, interspersed by cats, alien heads and UFOs, and well-wishes and greetings and the general sentiment of “oh this is so cool!” or “it feels weird to see Daichi sitting beside Airi, not the crossover I was expecting!” but ultimately positive. 

The issue Daichi has is with the others helping with this livestream. 

The room Utsukushii takes him to is a long, narrow one, clearly designed for live streaming and other filming productions - the couch is a nice, pale blue and the wall behind it is overly saturated with drawings and posters probably gifted to her by fans over the years, or old promotional merchandise. The other wall, the one behind the frankly absurd amount of cameras and large screen TV playing back a muted version of this exact livestream, was barren and filled with poked holes from fixtures that had been moved and changed around constantly. 

Utsukushii drags him into the room with his hand in the air, leading him like he was a fun new playtoy for her and her audience. He keeps his eyes on the mouth at the back of her neck, nervously watching it grin and giggle with her own words and actions. He wished it would close, but it seemed to need to keep its mouth open to - what, breathe? Horrible. 

Where the fuck is her spinal cord?

The mouth opens a gaping wound through her neck - should her head not be falling off? Her body not crumbling? 

What the fuck?

But he doesn’t say anything, because nobody else seems to see it, and he already seems to have the insane reputation as the guy who thinks he sees ghosts.

He doesn’t recognize the others sitting on the couch. 

There’s a young girl, likely older than him though it didn’t look like it, fully committed to her silver aesthetic with stars and hearts freckling her cheeks and dyed-blue hair tied up in space buns, and then a man, on the other end of the couch, that absolutely breaks Daichi’s brain to look at. Pretty much exclusively because the moment he does his brain is screaming Disco Cowboy!!! really loudly and it’s honestly incredibly distracting. 

But it’s a fair assessment - the man isn’t Japanese, first of all, and he’s probably about 6’4”, broad across the chest, wearing nothing but an open black leather vest and what must be leather pants, cowboy boots, and the thing that’s absolutely taking Daichi aback - the sequined, disco-ball-esq stetson resting over his dark hair. Honestly Daichi thinks this might be the peak of the party. Disco cowboy. Incredible. If only he wasn’t following around a woman with a mouth on the back of her neck. 

The woman on the other side of the disco cowboy was disappointingly normal in comparison, leaning around him to take a look at Daichi as Utsukushii drags him into the spotlight and sits him down. 

The issue, the reason he felt like an impostor, was because it was evidently clear to him that while he knew none of these faces, none of these guys knew who he was either.

They smile for Utsukushii, because they like her, and then they turn their attention judgmentally and confusingly to where he’s now awkwardly pressed in between her and Space-buns, hands folded on his lap. 

“I’m back~” Utsukushii sings, blowing a kiss to the camera before wrapping her arms around Daichi. “And look who I found! The internet's newest ghoulie adventurer!”

He can hear the girl sitting beside him roll her eyes. 

“Ah, I guess that’s me,” Daichi chuckles, and his reflex when she’s leaning this close is to put a hand on her shoulder, but then he remembers the mouth and he doesn’t, so now his hand is just in the air like an idiot. “I am the… wait what did you call me?”

She giggles, pulling away from him and reaching to pick up what looked like a game controller, that was being used to navigate the livestream chat. 

“Okay, okay okay, everyone seems really excited to see you. Before we take our next birthday-guest, let’s see if anyone has any pressing questions for my new best friend here…” Utsukushii says, eyes flitting over the rapid moving chat and seeming much more attuned to it that Daichi had ever felt. “Mhm… oh! Of course, the question on everyone’s mind - how are you enjoying the party? Playing any games? Kiss any girls?” 

“Me?” he says, before realizing that sounding so incredulous at the concept of himself either playing games or kissing girls was probably not the right move. “Uh - not… not yet? It’s been fun, so far. I’ve never been to a party this big.”

She laughs, leaning back on the couch. “Ah, of course, of course. Still a little green sapling. I was surprised, and honoured, that I was the first to reach out to you. I couldn’t find any collaborations on your channel or anything.” 

“Yeah, no, that’s not really… that’s not really our… energy, I guess…”

“What, too good for other people?” the girl on his other side says, nudging him. 

“What? No, that’s not it at all, it’s just… it was started in a really… kinda personal way, I guess. Plus we’re all so busy, and-”

“Right, right, you haven’t graduated yet, have you? My little sister is just finishing up her last exams-” the girl says, at the same time Daichi feels Utsukushii’s hands leave his shoulders. 

“I’m sorry,” she says, sounding far less bubbly and performative than she had been so far. “You’re still in high school?”

Daichi looks back at her. “Graduating on Wednesday.”

She narrows her eyes at him. “How old are you?”

“...eighteen.”

“Ah, that’s fine,” she says, waving a hand and immediately returning to her bubbly self as she looks back to the screen. “Now, let’s see who we have waiting in the cue to chat with us… come on, come on… oh! Here we go-”

 

---

 

Bokuto is having a hard time convincing these drunk teens to stop behaving like drunk teens. In the back of his mind he wonders if he owes an apology to Akaashi. Or the entire Fukurodani team. His head feels weird. He’s tired in a way he’s never been tired before, like someone had flicked a switch and turned him off, but his body was still physically energized and ready to go. 

He doesn’t love it, that’s for sure. He remembers what Sugawara had said, about making sure someone knows he’s leaving if he chooses to leave, and then remembers that his home is so far away, and it’s late now, and he doesn’t want to bother anyone, so-

He’s moving between rooms, halfheartedly looking for anyone he recognizes, when he finally succeeds and finds a familiar face. 

Oikawa is stretched out, arms up over the back of a couch, legs extended, chatting idly with a young woman who seems like she’s three seconds away from ripping his clothes off. Oikawa doesn’t seem to be returning the sentiment, but he’s making no real moves to say or do anything, eyes heavy lidded, words coming out in soft mumbles as if his tongue didn’t want to obey him.

On instinct Bokuto turns around to try and find Iwaizumi, who he reasons is probably supposed to be responsible for him, but can’t find him anywhere in the immediate vicinity. 

Bokuto is a creature of instinct, and nothing about this feels good to him, so he heads through the room towards the couple on the couch, flinching internally at the way her hand has moved to rub his chest. His shadow falling over them is the first thing to alert them to his presence. 

“Hey, Oi,” he says, using his foot to nudge one of Oikawa’s legs. “You look terrible, man.”

“Rude,” Oikawa slurs, looking back at him. “Don’t bully me. Rude.”

“Not - I mean, how much have you had to drink.”

“Not that much,” he scoffs, though he sort of sounds like he’s choking on the words. “I’m fine - this pretty lady is keeping me company.”

“I’m taking good care of him,” the woman replies, in a tone Bokuto understands to be a direct order for him to shove out of the conversation. 

It triggers a level of fight in Bokuto he rarely has to experience. 

“No,” he says, moving to shove the girl away. “Don’t like you, don’t like this, bad vibes all around.”

“Hey-!”

“I’m taking my friend-”

“Hey!” Oikawa agrees, sitting up slightly now as Bokuto grabbed one of his wrists. “You can’t just demand I go with-” he cuts himself off to hiccup, before immediately looking sick. 

“I absolutely can, my dude,” Bokuto says. “You’re clearly drunk or… high, and I know some girls were stickin’ pills in mouths earlier, so-”

“Well I don’t want to go with you-”

“Well too bad, because you’re really not any bigger than Akaashi, so-” and with a sharp movement he tugs Oikawa forward, and it is remarkably easy for him to just haul him over over his shoulder. 

Oikawa screeches, kicking slightly before suddenly and immediately changing his opinion on the situation, breaking into loud laughter as he hangs over his shoulder. 

“You’re fucking… strong …” Oikawa mutters. 

The girl there opens her mouth, but Bokuto finds it easy enough to shut her up with a sharp glare before he heads out of this particular room, a handful of other party guests staring at him in confusion as he - what, kidnaps? - this young drunk man. 

Bokuto had been making rounds earlier, checking out rooms and trying to find some of his friends, and he knows he’d seen a few… mostly empty spare rooms or bedrooms a floor upwards. 

“I’m not gonna lie, this is kinda working for me,” Oikawa says, barely more than a hiccup from behind him. 

“What are you on about?”

Oikawa doesn’t answer the question, shoving against Bokuto’s back to half push himself upwards. “Where are you taking- where- are you taking me?”

“Uh… hopefully to a quiet bedroom I can lock you in so that I can go find Iwaizumi? You’re fucked up, dude.”

Oikawa just giggles at that, and seems to grow tired, slumping down against his shoulder again. 

“I am,” he agrees after a moment. “I actually feel great, though. Sleepy. Really sleepy. But good. Like… fucking awesome. I love parties. I wanna - I… I love parties. Did I say that already?”

“Sure did. Okay…”

He finds one of the doors, shut now, and twists the handle to shove it open. 

Probably should have knocked, because what greets him are two girls mid very passionate make-out session, pulling away from each other frantically and looking over to him with scandalized expressions and wide eyes. 

“Oh, god, I’m sorry,” Bokuto shouts, fumbling slightly to try and find the door behind him. “I’m just… looking for a place to lay my friend down, he’s- uh… sorry, I didn’t mean… this… uh-”

“Oh mein Gott, was machst du?” one of the girls asks, looking confused. 

Bokuto feels a wash of fear. 

“No, I’m sorry,” he says, waving a hand. “Only the dog speaks German, I’m sorry-”

“Der Hund?”

“Warum sollten wir mit einem Hund reden?” the second says, but they’re both starting to pack up, one of them buttoning her shirt up properly, the other getting to her feet and grabbing a purse from the floor. 

“I’m… no, I-”

“Lerne das nächste Mal zu klopfen,” one of them says, before she takes her girlfriend’s hand and brushes past him to head through the hall in a hurry.

“No, I’m sorry!” Bokuto calls, turning around and trying to call after them. “I’m sorry German lesbians!” 

Oikawa is laughing, though it’s muffled and tired sounding. 

With those poor girls sufficient scared off by the loud, shouting Japanese man who apparently stole another man, Bokuto figures with no reason to not use the room as he’d planned, and heads over to the side of the bed to heft Oikawa back over his shoulder and drop him down. 

Oikawa breaks into another fit of giggles, interrupted only by his own yawning as he pushed himself up to rest on his elbows, face red from a duration behind held upside down. 

“God, Iwa-chan can’t even throw me around like that. Where do I buy one of you?” 

“No - stop-” Bokuto sits on the bed, reaching out to put his hand over Oikawa’s mouth. “Stop flirting with me.”

Oikawa bites his hand. 

“Ah- shit, what? Why is that your reaction?”

Oikawa is just laughing again, before flopping backwards to lay properly on the bed, closing his eyes. “I dunno. Why not, yeah? I feel great. My head is… like… made of clouds. Cloud-brain. Mhm…”

Bokuto groaned, pinching the bridge of his nose for a second before saying. “This isn’t good, Oikawa, you can’t - do you remember if you took anything? What happened?”

He just shrugs, seeming far too happy to just lay there. 

“Oikawa, please,” Bokuto says, scooting in closer to try and prompt him to sit up again. “I’m worried about you. What did you take?”

“I didn’t take anything,” Oikawa mumbles. “Just alcohol.”

“This can’t be just alcohol,” Bokuto says, groaning. “God, and everyone’s split up… If I leave to go find Iwaizumi, are you gonna stay put? I need to be certain that you’re gonna stay put.”

Oikawa thinks about this for a moment, before saying: “I’ll tell you this right now, if you bring Iwaizumi into this room, you’re not gonna wanna stay to watch. Or… maybe you would…”

Bokuto feels his face burning, but he resists the urge to cover his mouth again. (He doesn’t want to endure another bite.)

“I said stop flirting with me. Why are you always flirting with everyone?” 

Oikawa scoffed, slowly pushing himself up, heading rolling heavily to one side. “I’m not always flirting with everyone.”

“You kinda do…”

He just scoffs, shrugging for a moment before seeming a little more thoughtful on the matter, frowning, before saying: “I… I dunno… I just… it’s easy.”

“Easy?”

“Easy to make people like me. I know people like me if they’re drooling over me. Or if they’re blushing and thinking about me naked… or… you know it’s attention. I mean, you of all people must know what it’s like to want attention.”

Bokuto did, actually, know what it was like to want attention. He’d wanted attention his whole life - actually, he’d needed it. There were days that he felt like he would suffocate if someone didn’t tell him he was doing a good job, or that everything was okay. It made him feel like a bad friend, to text Akaashi at two in the morning asking if he’d done something to upset him because he hadn’t heard from him all weekend and he just couldn’t wait until the next school day. 

And he knew what lack of attention had been like, when someone dismissed him or looked away, or if he took one wrong step and suddenly it felt like the world was ending and there was no point in doing anything else ever again. 

A mood so volatile he sometimes wondered if he was just broken, because he knows the things that upset him are irrelevant but that doesn’t stop them from being upsetting. 

Oikawa surely didn’t live the same way, though - Bokuto hadn’t known him years or anything, but the months they’ve been hanging out… he’d seemed relatively normal, relatively put together. 

“I do,” Bokuto says, because it’s the truth. “But is this really the kind of attention you want?”

“I don’t wanna have this conversation,” Oikawa decides, pouting. “This is dumb, can’t we just talk about aliens? I much prefer that.”

“Oikawa, I can barely handle talking to you about aliens when you’re behaving normally, I can’t do this now.”

“Lame! Lame Bo-chan. Nobody ever wants to talk to me about aliens.” 

Bokuto feels a pit in his stomach that he can’t ignore. A sense of unease that he’d been able to ignore when everything was exam prep and studying and long distance, but-

“Why do you… care, about the aliens? Why do you always want to talk about them?” Bokuto says. “Wouldn’t it be better to just… move on. I mean, volleyball is way cooler than aliens, and we both have that in common-”

“Well if you had had a close encounter and lived to tell the tale, it’s all you’d think about too!’

“But you didn’t,” Bokuto says. He feels like he’s going to be sick. 

Oikawa gasps in betrayal. “Who’s side are you on? Why have you switched sides? I thought you believed in aliens!”

“I do, but you didn’t have an encounter with them, you made it up-”

“You sound like my psychiatrist-”

“I mean it, Oikawa,” Bokuto says, feeling the air deflate from his lungs. “God, I hate keeping - Kuroo shouldn’t have ever told me, I… I know why they wanted to hide it from you but it feels bad, it feels so bad inside me and you definitely count as people but I just can’t bear it, you should know…”

Oikawa is staring at him. “Kuroo shouldn’t have told you what?”

Bokuto swallows, shaking his head. “Look, Oikawa-”

 

---

 

“Alright alright alright-” Ushijima is assaulted by a man coming in and practically leaping on his back, as he suddenly finds a camera in his face. “Look who I’ve found- it’s the weird one from the ghost hunting boys- well…” the guy - looking rather plastered and barely maintaining balance - takes a moment to reflect on this statement. “Actually you’re all kinda fucking bonkers, so maybe you’re not the weird one. You though, you’re fuckin’ weird,” he adds, tilting around Ushijima to nod towards Tendou. 

“This conversation is off to a fantastic start,” Tendou says. 

The man adjusts the camera in his hands. “Alright, boys, uh - yeah, freaky one, you play too- Okay, okay-”

“I do not like games,” Ushijima says. 

This stops the man in his tracks, and he turns to look at him, slowly sliding his arm down from around his shoulders. 

“What?”

“You said play. I do not like games. Except if it’s volleyball. Or hagoita.”

The man stares at him a moment longer, pulling back slightly in his confusion. Tendou bites on the knuckle of his finger to stop himself from laughing. 

“Uh… okay, well, not so much a game as a question-”

“Hmm…”

“Just… I’m gonna cut all this intro stuff out in editing anyway, I always make compilation clips of asking smash-or-pass questions to a bunch of influencers, so…”

“Alright. You may ask a question.”

“...right, okay, so…” the man seems to think about this for a moment, before saying: “Okay, so… smash-or-pass, Evolette Breanne.”

“I do not know who that is.”

“Oh, uh… okay, how about… Amaya May?”

“... I do not know who that is.”

The guy stares at him for a moment, before saying: “Okay, let’s try… Carrie Kane?”

“I do not know who that is.”

“Okay, let me-” the man fumbles around to pull out his phone, struggling for a second before holding out the phone to him, to show a picture of a young woman, all pretty features and big hair, posing for what must have been a professional photoshoot. “She’s gorgeous. Big time actress. Smash-or-pass?”

“I must pass, I do not feel inclined to hit this woman.”

“Excuse me?”

“The question, there is no reason to hit this woman. That would be incredibly mean.”

“No, I… smash as in… sex, like, have sex with. Smash-or-pass.”

“Oh,” Ushijima says, nodding seriously as if he’s just clued into the joke. “I see, yes, sorry. Pass.” 

“Pass? On her?”

“I am not inclined towards women.” 

The man just stares at him for a second, trying to ignore Tendou, who, just on the other side of him, has been reduced to silent tears in his attempts to stop himself from laughing. 

“Okay,” the guy says, recovering eventually. “Uhm… who the… uh… a more appropriate question, then… uhm… Diego Flores? I’d seen him around here, maybe you did to, the guy with the insane cowboy hat? He’s… hot. I think.”

Ushijima seems to consider this question for a moment before saying: “Pass.” 

“What? Really? The fucking ripped cowboy, what’s not to like? Ah-hah, not to insinuate I’d smash a guy, but - I just-”

“Not my type. Pass.”

“This conversation is taking years off my life.”

“Imagine how I feel.”

This seems to catch the guy off guard, and he pulls back to stare at Ushijima for a moment before eventually saying: “Alright, well, this has been… I’d say great but I think I’m somehow too drunk and not drunk enough to talk to you, so…”

Ushijima hums a response, and with an exaggerated intake of breath, the man turns around, lifts his camera, and returns to his incredibly outgoing, cheery persona. 

“Oh my god,” Tendou is wheezing, behind him. Ushijima turns around at the noise, watching him trying to recover his breath, face red. “Why did you do that to that poor man? I mean, incredible performance, but I know you knew what he was asking from you. Why did you decide he needed to suffer?”

“I did not like the way that man entered the conversation,” Ushijima says. “He did that badly, you should not touch a person before you say hello, he did not introduce himself, and he was mean to you. I had no reason to want him to like me, he did not seem like he would make a valuable friend.”

“Hah! And people think I’m the bitch,” Tendou snickers, at the same time both of their attentions are caught by a young woman staring at them, fingers twisting together. They stare back for a moment, before Ushijima says: 

“Should we… does she wish to speak with us…?”

“I think she’s gonna ask me to prove I’m psychic,” Tendou replies, squinting at her. “But it’s hard to tell, she’s - oh! She’s approaching!”

And sure enough, the young woman has made her way across to them, nervously fiddling with the empty cup she held. She says hello, but her voice is all but lost among the noise of the party. 

“Speak up,” Tendou shouts.

“Hi!” she calls, a little louder. “You’re uh… you’re part of the captains squad, is that right?”

“What in the sweet hell did you just call us?” Tendou replies. 

“The ghost hunting captains, there was like a whole community post Kodzuken put out about the name so that people would stop asking if you guys were sailors. People online have been calling you the captain squad. Also the sailor squad but that’s more for the meme.”

“Why are you saying these words?” Ushijima says, leaning over Tendou’s shoulder to look at her. She doesn’t seem to love this new angle of being leered at and backed up. 

“Also, we aren’t all captains, also I get that neither me nor Kenma technically count but- it’s a little exclusionary.” 

“Actually I heard Kenma was going to be vice-captain next year,” Ushijima cuts in, before he can stop himself. “And Iwaizumi was vice-captain, even Sugawara was technically also vice-captain, though I don’t believe he’s made an official appearance on the channel under that branding. So it’s only you.”

Tendou turns to look at him slowly, blinking rapidly for a moment before saying: 

“Well who’s fucking fault was that, ‘Toshi?” 

“Mmmm… I do not like the way you said my name.”

Tendou smiles for a moment longer, before looking back to the woman. “Did you come here for a reason? Why are you saying these words, as my socially inept best friend has so bluntly put it?” 

She giggles slightly, clearly entertained by what she must have assumed was some kind of performative act, before saying: “I… well,  I wanted… okay, it’s so stupid, but I wanted to know if you really were psychic, or if it was all played up for the… the show.”

Tendou sighs. “Look, nothing we do is faked, I’ve told half the people at the party this. But… okay, okay, fine, go ahead, think of something for me to guess.”

The girl nods for a moment, thinking about what to think about for a couple of seconds, before saying: “Okay! Got it!” 

“Your cat, Tolstoy,” Tendou says, followed immediately by: “Why do you have three cats named after famous Russian authors?” 

She gasps in delight, clapping her hands together for a second, before saying: “That’s incredible! Like you actually read my mind, you shouldn’t be able to do that - I mean… like… you don’t… How, how, you have to tell me how you did that?” 

“I didn’t… it’s just… I’m good at guessing,” Tendou replies, trying to let the situation wash away. The opposite seems to happen, and once more he finds himself slowly surrounded by people pulling out their phones and calling questions, fascinated by his special little monster’s talent.

 

---

 

It’s not that much longer than half an hour, Daichi thinks, by the time two young women are coming into the livestreaming room, and Daichi realizes there’s not enough room on the couch. He volunteers to get up, and Utsukushii gives him a pouty sort of goodbye, but ultimately her attention stays locked on the situation immediately in front of her. 

He says goodbye to everyone watching, politely excusing himself and slipping from the room, shutting the door behind him. There’s a handful of people loitering in the hallway outside the door, chatting and drinking and seeming to be in good spirits. A few of them try to stop him, but he politely passes by, heading towards the stairs. 

He hoped it wasn’t going to be too hard to find Sugawara again. Down the stairs, he immediately stumbles across Ushijima and Tendou, who seem to have amassed quite a little following around themselves, neither looking like this is their favourite thing in the world, but making do with it. 

He waves a hand to catch their attention, and when Tendou looks up at him, calls: 

“Hey, have either of you seen Suga?” 

Tendou gives him a smile, then with a dramatic swing of his fingers, points him off to the next room. 

Daichi moves himself along, peering through the crowds and looking around, hoping to-

Aha!

He calls out, and at the sound of his name, Sugawara turns around, eyes raising slightly in surprise. He puts down whatever drink he’d been holding, shuffling through the crowd to meet him halfway. 

“You’ve actually returned,” Suga says. “I was beginning to think I’d spend the whole night alone.”

“I’m… sorry I got held up,” he chuckled, before putting his hands on Suga’s shoulders. “But I am all yours now.”

“I’m sure,” Suga replies, in a tone that does not sit well with Daichi. 

“No, I mean it,” Daichi says, more firmly. “I’m completely here for you now.”

Suga seems to put some level of effort into softening, nodding. “I know, I know,” he says. “It just sucks, I barely get to see you even when we literally go out together… you know, we’re graduating in a few days… if we can’t even find time for each other now, what are we going to do when I move to Tokyo?”

“Oh!” Daichi says, perking up. “Between everything, it slipped my mind to tell you - I’m actually, probably, going to be moving to Tokyo too.”

Suga has a physical reaction, pulling back from him in confusion, brow stitching together. 

“Wait, really? Why?”

“Kuroo’s going to be in the city for university, and since I don’t… have anything going on, he suggested if I’m just going to be working we may as well find a place together, so… I mean, you won’t have to worry about-”

“You have got to be fucking kidding me-”

Daichi doesn’t think he’s ever seen Suga become that angry that quickly. 

 

---

 

Bokuto could have heard a pin drop - even with the thrumming baseline of the music and the screams and shouts and laughter from every other room of the party, time seems to have stopped in this one. 

Oikawa is half sitting, caught between standing up and staying put, skin suddenly looking far too pale, eyes wide. Bokuto can hear him breathing, a soft, shaking noise that’s barely coming in and out of his lungs. 

“It’s okay,” Bokuto says, having a feeling that he probably shouldn’t have said what he said. 

“It’s… okay?” Oikawa replies back, voice cracking over the word. “ Okay? You’re going to tell me it’s okay?”

“Y…yeah,” he tries, and when Oikawa stands up, he reflexively takes a step back. 

“Say it again.”

“...what?”

“Look me in the eye and tell me it’s okay.”

“...Oikawa, just lay down, you’re not in the right headspace-”

“The right headspace!” Oikawa says, voice breaking into a screech as he lifts his hands up to grab at his hair. “Of course I’m not in the right headspace! None of it was real! None of it is real! I have memories, I have memories of aliens and none of it was real, I- you… I…”

Bokuto is worried he’s going to hurt himself, with his nails digging into his scalp, but the feverish laughter that breaks from him does enough to stop him from reaching out. 

“My god, Bokuto, nothing is okay, none of this is okay-”

“It doesn’t change-”

“It changes everything! What if I told you massive parts - no, no, I saw what happened that day. I remember it, I know it, I saw it, it… it happened- Jun - Jun was there… Saku was shouting, and- I-”

Bokuto can see the denial in his face melting away into horror. 

“Oh my god,” Oikawa breathes, stumbling back towards the bedroom door. “Oh my god it was all in my head.” 

 

---

 

“Do me! Do me!” 

Elephant seal. 

“Elephant Seal.”

“Ah! And what am I thinking about?”

Cheese pizza - oh my god his friend is so hot I bet it would feel so incredible if he was-

“Cheese pizza. Also you’re imagining Ushijima railing you against a wall, so - stop.” 

“Oh my god, that is - so specific, holy- is he right?”

“What? No! No, of course he’s not right. Shut up!” 

“Ignore them, okay? Do me! What number am I thinking of?” 

Tendou drags his attention off the young woman he’d been trying to figure out how to psychically neuter to look at a man who was getting his attention. What number? Easy. 

It’s easy. 

It’s. 

He blinks, rapidly. There’s no voice in his head. 

Normally he can hear their voices, he just has to focus on them and he can hear their voices. Normally… 

“Six,” Tendou says. 

The man breaks into incredulous laughter. “Oh my god,” he says, clapping his hands together. “That’s brilliant, how do you do that?”

I got it right anyway.

He’d always been good at guessing. But… 

“Okay, okay, now me, what-”

“No,” Tendou says, quickly, taking a step back from them. He lifts a hand up to wipe under his nose, half expecting to pull it away covered in blood, but there’s nothing there. “No,” he repeats. 

What happened? Did I use it all up? What the fuck?

There’s silence. 

In his head, there’s silence. Movement catches his attention, and he ignores the confused voices of the onlookers as he notices Oikawa come stumbling down the stairs, looking like he was on a mission, slipping around the corner and taking off through the house. 

Ushijima’s head turns as well, confused, before one of the audience says:

“Oh, come on dude, don’t be a bummer. It’s just hard to believe if you don’t experience it yourself-”

“No, no more, I’m done-”

“Come on!”

“That’s so lame, it was just getting interesting!”

“Just do one-”

“No.”

This time it’s Ushijima’s voice that interrupts, putting an arm out in front of him, as if to physically block off the crowd from having access to him. 

“Geez, you don’t have to be such a bitch about it-”

“We just want to see it one more time-”

“I believe he has already said no,” Ushijima repeats, lowering his voice. “The game is over. Please leave.” 

Tendou wants to feel grateful, and he does, somewhere, but he’s more distracted, trying to peer into Ushijima’s brain. He knows what Ushijima is thinking - he’s concerned that Tendou has become overwhelmed, he’s worried about his comfort, he wants to make sure he’s cared for, but-

The more he tries to push, there’s just… 

Nothing he can do but guess. 

 

---

 

“Woah, woah, what-” 

“I cannot believe you,” Suga says, voice raising. “When the hell did you decide to move to Tokyo? I thought you were staying in Miyagi to join the police academy!” 

“I was… considering it, but Kuroo suggested it, and… it wasn’t like this was ten months ago, like a couple weeks-”

“So around the time that I suggested we move in together after graduation?”

“...when did you do that?”

“At our last training camp!” Suga shouts, really struggling to keep his voice below a genuine shriek. “You said you didn’t have plans and then dismissed me when I tried to suggest you come to Tokyo with me-”

“I have no memory of that-”

“No, of course you don’t,” Suga says, throwing his hands in the air and turning away. “Because you’d rather chase ghosts with your new fucking friends than even pretend you care about what I say or do-”

“What are you talking about-?”

Before Daichi can finish the question, something heavy bumps into him, and he stumbles a step forward, lifting his head and turning around, just in time to watch Oikawa, barely sparing a red-eyed glance back at him, go stumbling through the party, looking for all the world like he was trying to escape. 

“Go on,” Suga spits.

“Wh-huh? What-”

“Go on, go chase him down, see what’s wrong. That’s what you want to do, right? Make sure he’s all okay, because that’s all you ever fucking do nowadays-”

“No,” Daichi snaps, having to work hard himself not to outwardly shout. “I told you you had my full attention now and I fucking meant it.”

“Well great,” Suga says, turning away again and forcing Daichi to follow after him. “Just what I always wanted, your pity-attention.”

“What are you mad about?” Daichi calls, chasing him through the party as Suga heads towards the front doors. “Are you mad that I’m hanging out with the other guys? Mad about-”

 

---

 

Iwaizumi was a great ringer. Kuroo was making absolute bank off these drunk idiots. 

Iwaizumi shoves the last contender's hand down onto the table, standing up with a shout of victory. He also, it seemed, greatly enjoyed winning. 

“Anyone who beats Iwa wins the pot,” Kuroo goads, to try and drum up another contestant. “Just five dollars to enter, come on-”

He’s turning in place, trying to find someone willing to try again, not even realizing how unfairly it was structured, when-

Across the lawn, past all the people and through their legs, he sees his cat. The cat. 

All thick fur and that long, lashing white tail, eyes glimmering bright and reflective in the light of the party. It looks… aggitated. 

Its tail continues to whip, back and forth, the motion tensed right from the base of its tail, ears back, eyes focused, locked, on Kuroo. 

Oh… no.

“Hey, Kuroo,” Iwaizumi says, sounding just a little out of breath from the constant competition. “What are you looking at.”

“The cat is here,” Kuroo says, voice barely more than a cracked whisper. “No, no, no-”

“What?”

“No, the cat only appears- it only appears when something is- last time- Kenma!”

His shout is unnecessary, as Kenma is just a few feet away staring at a man he has still yet to actually approach. Kenma jerks around, looking started by the sudden call. 

“What is-”

But Kuroo has already grabbed his arm, dragging him over. 

“What is it - Kuroo-”

“That cat is here,” Kuroo says. “The cat, it… fuck-”

“It’s just a cat, Kuroo-”

“No, no, it’s not, it - fuck, fuck, something is happening, something bad is going to happen, it’s an ill omen-”

“Nothing bad is-”

Kuroo’s eyes swivel up, just in time to see Bokuto come flailing down the hill, arms up and waving to get their attention. 

“What, what is it?” Kuroo shouts, before Bokuto can even start. “What’s happened? What’s wrong?”

Bokuto sucks in a breath, grabbing Iwaizumi’s arm. “I may have accidentally told Oikawa what his aliens weren’t real and he’s really fucked up and high or something and he ran off and I need someone to tell me what to do because I don’t know-”

“Hang on, hang on-” Iwaizumi says. “What did you tell him?”

“The thing about the aliens, about him-” he lowers his voice to a hush, glancing around at all the party goers staring at them. “Uhm… the thing about what happened with Jun-”

“You told him what?” Kuroo shrieks, at the same time Iwaizumi, alarmed, says:

“Wait, what? What happened with Jun?”

“Do you not know?” Bokuto wails. “I was really counting on you knowing what to do-”

“How would I know what I don’t know?” Iwaizumi snapped. “What did you tell him?”

“And why? Why here-?”

“Well he’s super fucked up and was really flirty and we were talking and I felt bad and you know I’m bad at secrets, Kuroo, it’s been eating me up inside and it all just came out at once and-”

“Hey!” Iwaizumi grabs Bokuto’s face. “Look at him, what did you say happened?”

“I told him… he… he got really angry and started freaking out and I tried to calm him down and it didn’t work and then he ran off and I’m really worried - he’s really not in the right mind to be running around alone I think he’s on some kind of drug, like he was minutes away from passing out when I found him, but now he’s all panicked and I don’t know what’s gonna - what if he passes out on the side of the road or something? I don’t-”

Iwaizumi has already let go of him, and is sprinting up the hill back to the house. 

Bokuto is quick to follow, and with a horrified glance behind to the bakeneko, Kuroo-

The cat is gone. 

He wonders if it was ever there at all. 

---

 

The air is a blast of cold to his senses, shocking him into focus as he follows Sugawara outfront, and onto the first few steps of that long, winding driveway from the mansion. Suga has to keep looking over his shoulder to shout at him, slowing him down slightly and giving Daichi a chance to catch up. 

“Where are you going?”

“Somewhere else! I’ll catch an overnight train home, I don’t know-”

“Are you really that mad that I agreed to move in with Kuroo? You’re just going to leave?”

“It’s not about Kuroo, it’s about all of it! It’s about… this, this whole thing, I never thought you were the type of guy to go chasing fame and fortune but here we are-”

“What the hell are you talking about-”

“It’s all you do nowadays!” Suga says, turning on his heel to look at him properly. “It’s all you do, every single time I speak to you, every time you post a picture, every text you send you’re always working on the channel, you’re always out doing some bullshit video project as if this is the only passion you’ve ever known-”

“You encouraged me!” Daichi shouts, unable to hold back the volume rising. “For fuck’s sake, Suga, I asked if you thought I was doing the right thing over and over and over again, and every single time you said it was a good idea, you said it-”

“Because of course I did!” he cried. “Of course I did I always would, but-”

“But what, you were just lying to me? I asked-”

“I wasn’t lying, I meant it-”

“You don’t get to decide who I’m friends with, you don’t get to decide how I spend my free time or what I’m into - and do you really think I’m chasing fame and fortune? I’d hope you’d know me better than that, it’s bigger than that, it’s-”

“I don’t care!” Suga shrieks, cutting him off now. “It’s not about what, or who, it’s-”

“What is it-”

“I encouraged you because I didn’t give a fuck when it was just Karasuno you were abandoning!” 

“-excuse me?”

Daichi can see the tears spilling over Suga’s cheeks, but the argument has already gotten out of hand, and there is nothing he can do to prevent it. 

“Call me selfish or greedy, I don’t care,” Suga says. “I didn’t care when you basically walked away from Karasuno the moment you had something better, I didn’t care when it was just Asahi thinking you were mad at him because you hadn’t spoken in weeks or when it was Ennoshita drowning in his new role because he really could have used your help, I didn’t care when you were putting all that away and moving on to something new, I didn’t care because never in a million fucking years did I think that I was going to be one of the things that you walked away from!”

Daichi feels the air dissipate from his lungs, the night suddenly too cold against his skin, shivers traveling up under his shirt. Sugawara is sobbing, fully, but he knows that to follow his instincts and step forward to wrap his arms around him would be the wrong move. 

“I… I’m not walking away from you,” he says. “Why… no, no, no, never, it’s just - things are… are complicated right now-”

“You keep saying that, but you never- you never- I know you well enough to know when something is hurting you, and I just don’t know why you wouldn’t let me in. Take me with you, wherever you’re going, don’t-”

“I…”

He feels everything he could say die on his tongue. What, tell him the truth? Spill it all here and now and just hope that it doesn’t drive him as mad as it drove Daichi? What if it gets him hurt? They barely even knew what they were doing and what the consequences were going to be-

“You wouldn’t believe me if I did,” Daichi says, because it’s the most honest thing he can say. “You… you wouldn’t believe me.”

“Let me make that call,” Sugawara says. “Don’t just cut me out because you’ve decided I can’t handle it.” 

Daichi tries hard to break through the anxiety in his chest, to just find the right words, say the right thing, to make this all better, to make him understand that it was never intentional, it was never about him, it was… 

“I… things are weird, for me, right now,” Daichi says. “Life is weird, and… I… I’m sorting it out, and eventually, eventually, I’m… I’ll figure it out, and everything will go back to normal, and then we-”

Suga just shakes his head, pinching between his eyes for a second before waving a hand and moving to turn away. 

“I’m going home,” he repeats. 

“No, wait-”

To his relief, Suga lets him take his elbow, turning him back around. 

“Just… just… just give me a chance, to get everything sorted out. Please, just… I need… I just need a bit of time-”

“I have given you so many chances,” Suga says, taking his elbow back with a jerk of his arm. “And it is incredibly cruel of you to continually ask for chance after chance after chance knowing full well that I would bend heaven and hell to make you happy.”

“Please, just-”

“Daichi!”

They both look around, lifting their heads just in time to watch Iwaizumi come sprinting down the hill towards them, practically slamming into Daichi as he grabs his arm. 

“Have you seen Oikawa? We-”

“Huh?”

“Oikawa, he ran off-”

“He was in the house-”

“We can’t find him, please - we need to find him, Bokuto says he told him some secret about Jun and-”

There’s no room under his skin for more panic and fear, but out of the corner of his eye he sees Suga turning around and walking away. 

“Hey, wait- no-”

He tries to grab for him, but misses - Suga turns around anyway, walking backwards. 

“Just go,” Suga says. “Go run to be the hero, find Oikawa, I don’t fucking care, anymore. I am done with this-”

“No, Suga- That’s not what-”

But Sugawara has turned away, and doesn’t turn back around again. Daichi feels a level of hysteria rising in his chest, and he leans over, lifting his hands to dig into his hair, tension in his jaw so painful he’s worried he’s going to crack a tooth. 

He left. He left. He left. He left. 

He hates me. 

He thinks I don’t care about him. 

He left. 

I can’t get him back. I-

The pressure in his body is so immense he’s worried he’s going to black out. 

This isn’t useful. There’s no point in screaming and crying and throwing a fit. It won’t change anything. 

With great effort, he manages to suck in a shaking, heavy breath, straighten up and run his hands through his hair. His vision is spotty and freckled, slowly clearing as his mind recenters itself. 

He feels the rage and stress flood out of his body. 

There was nothing he could do about that now. 

He turns back to Iwaizumi. “What did you say happened to Oikawa?”

Iwaizumi is staring at him, mouth slightly open. 

“Dude,” he says. “If you need to go after him, I - you should- I didn’t mean to-”

“It’s fine,” Daichi says, shaking his head just a fraction. “It’s over. That’s over. I’m going to focus on what’s still in front of me, what I can still control. Where do you think Oikawa might have gone?”

Chapter 25: The Believer

Notes:

was not expecting to do another chapter this week but wowie we're on a roll looks like <3

“Any team that Oikawa is put into is made better simply by having him there,” Ukai says, pinching the bridge of his nose and trying to push the tiredness from his brain. “While I have faith in Kageyama as a setter, I don’t think anyone can match his ability to draw out the individual strengths of his teammates.”

Daichi stares down at the rotation they’d been planning, trying to decide how they could adjust the lineup for the best possible match-up without removing Daichi and Noya from the back row when the bastard king was serving. 

 

---

 

Oikawa tilts his head back, a charming sneer of a grin gracing his features, eyes narrowed into a taunt. 

“I believe in all of you,” he purrs, spinning the volleyball in his hands. “Don’t let me down, boys.”
Iwaizumi feels his lips crack into a grin. 

“Wouldn’t dare.” 

 

---

 

“I believe in all of you,” Oikawa says, voice cracking slightly over the words, hands shaking as he clutches the volleyball, forty-five seconds out from stepping onto the court in his first ever high school competition. The team stops, turning to look at them. Their current captain raises an eye. “I believe in all of you,” he repeats, more firmly. “And I know you all took a risk putting me in as the starting setter, so I’ll promise I’ll be doing my best. I expect you to do the same. Don’t let me down.” 

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” their captain replies, before turning around with a satisfied sort of toothy grin. “Now let’s show this stadium who rules the court.” 

 

---

 

Oikawa feels his knees hit the ground, exhaustion bleeding out of his body, into the floor, sweat dripping from his brow to his cheek. He closes his eyes, each breath feeling like fire in his lungs. 

When he opens his eyes again, it takes him a second to focus blurry vision across the net, at where Ushijima was staring down at him, a look across his face that bordered on disappointment, a concept so infuriating that Oikawa considered standing up to scream at him about it. Don’t you dare look at me like that, don’t you dare act like I didn’t try my best, like you’re so high above me. 

But he’s too tired to move quickly, and before he can’t Ushijima’s attention is taken away from him, and he’s turning to rejoin the others. 

He feels a hand on his shoulder. 

“I’m sorry,” Oikawa manages to choke out. “I really thought we could do it this year.” 

“No, you didn’t,” Iwaizumi replies. 

“What?” 

“You don’t fail at things you know you can do. You’ve always thought Ushiwaka is a better ace than me, and Shiratorizawa a better team than us.”

“That didn’t mean I didn’t think we could win.”

Iwaizumi crouches down beside him, and Oikawa wants to lean into him so badly, draw comfort from his weight, but he can’t. He doesn’t dare, not with the entire stadium still crowding around to look down at them. 

“Let’s just go home,” Iwaizumi says, putting a hand on his head. “Rest, recover, and try again next-”

 

---

 

Oikawa feels the breath coming into his lungs like fire, staring across at Karasuno’s jubilant celebration. They didn’t even make it to the finals this time. 

Was it possible that they’d become worse? 

They leave the stadium on broken egos, piling into the bus without a word. Kindaichi and Kunimi pretend to be asleep so they don’t have to talk. Kyoutani leans forward with his arms wrapped over the back of his head. Hanamaki rubs at red eyes. 

Oikawa sits beside Iwaizumi, and presses his forehead into the back of the bus seat in front of him. He closes his eyes, he tries to visualize exactly where he went wrong. He wants to say they’ll try again next time, they’ll be better next time, but there is no longer a next time. This was the last time. 

“You shouldn’t have said Kageyama was a better setter than you,” Iwaizumi says, from where he’s gazing out the window at the receding arena. 

“He is,” Oikawa replies, voice barely a mumble. 

He feels Iwaizumi’s hand land on the back of his hair, fingers drawing through slightly sweaty strands. 

“No, he’s not.”

“He is.”

“I wish you didn’t believe in him so much.”

 

---

 

The redheaded middle blocker from Shiratorizawa had never been more than an odd nuisance in his life, but the coincidences were just too much. Ushijima calls him ‘Satori,’ and Oikawa pulls out his phone to open a Japanese folklore webpage with the same title. His brain is whirling. That would explain it. That would explain how he’d always known what Oikawa was planning, how he’s stopped so many Iwaizumi’s spikes despite their best efforts. He was psychic. He was literally reading their minds-

“You are not allowed to suggest Tendou is a mythical monster from folklore,” Daichi hisses under his breath. 

But what else could he be? 

Tendou turns his attention to them, as if hearing the thought from Oikawa’s head. 

---

The walk back from school is rather long, but they like spending the time together. Oikawa kicks at a rock on the sidewalk, watching it bounce onto the road. “If you want to be the best, you should go to Shiratorizawa next year. Of course I’ll miss you, but-”

“No,” Oikawa mutters. “I’d rather quit volleyball. We’ve planned to go to Aoba Johsai for years.”

“Your potential-”

“There’s no point in going if I wouldn’t be able to go with you,” Oikawa replies, stopping where he was walking. Iwaizumi takes a few more steps, before turning back to look at him. 

“And what if I’m not good enough?” Iwaizumi says. “What if I can’t help you reach your full potential?” 

“You are good enough,” Oikawa says. “You’ve always been good enough.”

“No matter how much you believe that, it doesn’t mean it’ll be true,” Iwaizumi sighs. “You can’t willpower your way into being the best.”

Oikawa thinks about this for a moment, before saying: “I know.”

“Sometimes it doesn’t feel like you do.”

---

 

“You realize you’re the reason they got as far as they did,” his Coach says, when he finds Oikawa with his face pressed into his locker, tears making puddles on the floor. He jerks back in surprise, turning to face him with wide, red eyes. 

“What?”

“I told you when you came to this school, that you were not exceptional in the way everyone else was. And I’ve watched you for three years, try and try and try to willpower yourself into being better than you were and it never worked out for you, and for that I apologize. I wish I could have done more to help you polish your talent. But… I’d be amiss as a coach if I let you leave here without making sure you understood that the reason everyone else was so exceptional, the reason they all reached their full potential, was because you gave them the faith needed to make them believe that they could. And that’s not a skill I could have taught you. That’s special, and never let someone tell you it doesn’t have an impact.” 

 

---

 

“I’ve always seen things in the dark,” Daichi says, paying most of his attention to his lunch, which Oikawa had started to realize was his baseline experience. Put food in front of the man, and you’d only ever have twenty-percent of his attention until it was done. “It’s not special, it happens to everyone. I just… have a really active imagination.” 

Oikawa nods slightly. He doesn’t think it’s just his imagination. 

“Have you ever considered that it might not just be your imagination?” 

“Well, of course,” Daichi chuckled. “When I was a kid, I was so afraid of the dark. I thought there were monsters in my closet, under my bed, outside the window, in the hallway…”

“And what happened? Why’d you stop believing?”

“I grew up.” 

“That’s it?”

Daichi shrugged. “The monsters never hurt me. You know, after enough scary nights hiding under the covers, you begin to realize that they’re never going to be more than shadows lurking at the edge of your vision. So whether they’re real or not doesn’t matter, they’re not a threat, and then they’re not scary. So… yeah, I just grew up.”

“I’ve never met someone like you,” Oikawa says. “I think you’re special. I don’t know… why, or how, but I think you’re special.” 

“Me? Special?” Daichi echoes, amusement in his voice. “No, you must have me confused for someone else.” 

“Why don’t you believe it?”

---

 

Daichi is screaming. Oikawa doesn’t know what to do - two minutes ago they were standing in the woods because he’s seen something in the shadows, and the next, he’s stammering about bodiless women and faces and being oh-so-close to Oikawa and now he’s screaming, curled like a child against the roots of the tree, cowering under his jacket to hide it from view. 

Like you would in the night, to hide under the blankets, to make it go away. 

Oikawa wants so badly to be better than he is. He turns around again, desperately seeking the woman Daichi had been so afraid of. 

I know it’s here. I believe. I know it’s here. I believe. 

I believe, I believe, I believe, this isn’t fair. 

Why can’t I see it? I believe it more than anyone else, why can’t I see it? 

---

 

Oikawa hesitates at the tree line. The spaceship hangs heavily in the air, lights glimmering and swirling around, green and blue and yellow, a harsh mechanical whirling whipping wind up around them. Jun stares up at the craft with horror across his face, one arm out, protectively, to where Saku is screaming, sobbing, knees in the earth. 

She reaches out a hand, voice cracking as she cries out: “Tooru, please! Calm down! Come back!” 

And he turns and runs. 

 

---

 

“He’s not anywhere inside,” Bokuto calls, coming running out of the front entrance, Kuroo and Kenma hot on his heels. “We checked, we checked everywhere, nobody’s even seen him recently, or-”

“One girl said she say him heading out the back, but he’s nowhere in the yard-”

“Well where would he have gone? Why would he leave?” Iwaizumi growls, still furiously smacking at his phone, repeatedly hitting call on Oikawa’s contact number as if enough tries would change the outcome. He presses the phone to his ear again as it rings, over and over and over again. “Come on, Tooru, come on… come on…”

Daichi looks around the front, not seeing anything immediately obvious, and trying to put himself in the mindset of someone trying to escape- what’s the easiest route? Where do you go? 

With another failed call, Iwaizumi groans, loudly, lifting his hands up to claw at his hair. “Fuck. Fuck. What the hell did you even say to him?” he snaps, turning on Bokuto. 

“I… uh… told him… uhm… what-”

“Now is not the time to be telling any stories,” Daichi interrupts, before turning his glare on Kuroo. “Though I would be curious to know why Bokuto knew at all-”
Rough hands grab Daichi by the shirt, and he yelps as he’s shoved backyards, feet scrambling in the gravel as Iwaizumi shoves him back. 

“Woah-woah-woah-”

“I’m gonna need someone to start giving me answers because there’s no fucking reason this should have happened,” Iwaizumi spits. “What the Hell did you tell him?”

“Me?” Daichi coughs. “Why are you targeting me, Bokuto-”

“Because it’s always fucking you!” Iwaizumi shrieks, cutting him off. “Since the beginning, since he met you, everything has been about you! You and your fucking vision, you and your insane family, you and your secrets, just - tell me what the hell you did!” 

“I didn’t do anything!” 

“We found out the truth about what happened the night Jun died,” Kuroo interrupts, and Iwaizumi’s attention is dragged off of Daichi, over his shoulder to where Kuroo is. 

“What truth?” Iwa says, breathless. 

Daichi swallows. 

“Oikawa pushed him off the ridge they were on,” he says, when he can speak again, and Iwaizumi turns back to him, eyes widening slightly. “He was hurting Saku so he pushed him off the edge. My dad was investigating the case and helped them cover it up. Tooru… invented the aliens to cope, I guess, we don’t know, but…”

Iwaizumi’s chest rises and falls with short, hurried breaths, before eventually his white-knuckled grip on Daichi’s shirt relaxes, and he takes a step back. 

“We have to find him,” Iwaizumi says, hands shaking as he runs it over his eyes, before fumbling to pull out his phone again. 

“I’m surprised you didn’t know,” Bokuto said. “I assumed you would know.”

“And why would I know? I… I didn’t think it was aliens but I didn’t know-”

“Hey!” 

Kuroo’s shout gets everyone’s attention, and they all turn around to see him waving to where Ushijima and Tendou were coming down the path, having likely noticed their frantic convening. 

“Maybe Tendou can find out where he is,” Bokuto says, snapping his fingers. “With his magic psychic powers.”

Iwaizumi stares at him for a moment, before saying: “Wait, can he?” 

“Maybe?” Daichi says, and the group shuffles up the ridge to meet them halfway. 

“What’s going-”

“Tendou, do you know where Oikawa is?” 

“I saw him like… twenty minutes ago, but-”

“No, I mean-” Iwaizumi stumbles forward, to take the lead of the group and grab Tendou’s shoulders. “With your freaky psychic thing, can you, like, hear his thoughts?”

Tendou swallows, a nervous look crossing his face. “Ah, about that-”

“About what?”

“I can’t - We were actually coming out here to ask if something was happening, my brain went dark. Like proper empty-”

“Then guess.”

Tendou blinked. “Eh?”

“Isn’t that what you’re fucking good for? You were reading our minds before you could fucking read our minds so just think about it for half a second, and try and figure out where Oikawa might have gone?” 

“Hey,” Ushijima growls, but Iwaizumi shoves at the hand Ushijima tries to use to push him back a step. 

“I’ll calm down when Tooru’s safe,” Iwaizumi spits back, before Ushijima can escalate the conversation. 

Tendou shakes himself free of the hold. “I… don’t know,” he says. “If I were to take a guess I’d say he runs home, isn’t that what you do when you’re upset? You go to where you’re safe.”

“But we’re in fucking Yokohama,” Iwaizumi says. “I already know that, if we were in Miyagi I wouldn’t be half as worried, I know where he’d run to there-”

“Plus,” Bokuto cuts in. “He’s… kinda fucked up right now. Even if he tried to get on a train, I’m not sure if he’ll be able to stay awake much longer, he was already half passed out…”

“I… sorry,” Tendou squeaks. “I don’t know Yokohama either. I can’t exactly guess a location I don’t know exists-”
Iwaizumi shoves him away, hard enough that he stumbles and has to bounce to regain his footing, but Iwa has already turned away and started walking down the long driveway. 

“Where are you going?” Daichi calls, starting to chase after him. 

“To find Tooru!” he shouts back. “Bokuto’s right, if he’s that fucked up he’ll probably end up in a ditch somewhere, he might not get far.”

 

---

 

Sugawara had gone his entire life without crying over a boy, so this was a new low for him. He tries not to think about it, but it’s like his brain has become a broken record player, and all he can hear is his own voice, his own words. 

Is that what I meant to say? Did that convey why I was angry properly or did he misunderstand me? Does he think I hate him? Or does he understand I’m just exhausted. Jealous. I don’t want to sound jealous but I know I am. Should I have admitted to being selfish, or will he think that absolves him? Should I have stayed and let him speak more? Should I have told him earlier, given him more warning? Does this come out of the blue for him, or did he see it coming the way I did? Should I have shouted louder? Or been quieter? What does he think of me now? If he’d fallen out of love with me months ago, did this whole thing come across like some pathetic teen crush? Why did I accuse him of not caring? I know he cares, I should have accused him of… no, no, I did the right thing. I did the right thing. I had to say it. But maybe I should have…

He rubs at his eye, trying to stop the tears from flooding down his cheeks. 

I don’t hate him. I don’t want him to think I hate him, but…

He lifts his head, glancing at the street sign and mentally mapping out his location, before turning to cross the street at the next clear light. There’s no traffic here anywhere, but he waits to avoid jaywalking. 

The wind is a little bit cold, and he tugs the jacket he wore tighter around him. Daichi’s jacket. Well, Daichi’s dad’s jacket. 

It’s nice, it’s warm. 

What did he mean that it’s bigger than this?

He was right, that I know him better than to assume he’s chasing fame. 

He can’t be chasing fame. 

But I just can’t understand what might be more important than the life he had been living before. Than me. Than everything… 

It sure looks like he’s chasing fame. I mean, who wouldn’t? Fame is a beautiful, sexy woman with boobs that defy gravity, apparently. 

Fuck-

He’s pulled from his thoughts when he stumbles across a fluffy, rather large mottled black cat sitting on the sidewalk, it’s white tail sweeping back and forth over the pavement. Suga stares at it for a moment. 

That looks like Kuroo’s cat, from the videos…

But that would be ridiculous, how could that cat have gotten to Yokohama…?

It meows, once, loudly, before rising up onto its hindlegs. 

What the fuck?

After maintaining eye contact, luminous eyes reflecting moonlight, it bounds forward, slipping past Sugawara’s feet quick enough to brush against his feet, but he can’t bend to catch it. He turns with it, and it stops a few feet back the direction he had been walking. 

“What, do you want me to follow you?” Suga laughs. “I don’t have any food-”

The cat meows again, before turning and trotting across the narrow road, onto the otherside, down the other street.

“Where are you-”

Sugawara’s attention is taken off the cat, as it disappears through a narrow grate in a fence outside a little building, but he notices back a ways the bus stop that was lit by a white-light streetlamp, and the figure that was slumped over, still, across it’s bench.

Hey. That’s Oikawa.

Suga’s brain is a little bit fuzzy. He had wondered if his anger was even just in part a reflection of the fact that he’d never had alcohol before, and he maybe shouldn’t have agreed to it. But he’s not tipsy enough to not know what he’s doing, and that pretty face could only belong to Oikawa. 

Suga wanders over to the bus stop, glancing both ways and finding nobody in either direction, before looking back down at him. 

There are so many emotions he feels, looking at him. It’s so hard to pinpoint which are his emotions, and which he’s borrowing from other people. 

Would I have cared about Daichi being his friend if Kageyama hadn’t hated him so much? 

Do I actually think Daichi is into him or am I just used to being replaced and benched? 

I guess it doesn’t matter either way, I can’t leave him here.

He crouches down, trying to figure out if he’s just asleep or actually dead. He puts a hand on his forehead to take his temperature, then gently shakes his shoulder. 

“Hey, Oikawa,” he says, softly, before a little louder, shaking him more fully. “Oikawa!”

“Mhpm-”

Oikawa jerks up, brown eyes blinking open, dark lashes fluttering and silver glitter smeared under the waterline of his eyes. 

Fuck. Of course Daichi was into him. Look at him. I’m into him and I don't even like him.

“Wh- Sugawara?” 

“Hey,” he says, crossing his arms. “Why are you sleeping on a bench?”

“I… wasn’t-” he lies, rubbing at his eyes and smearing that glitter around more fully. “I was waiting for a bus.”

“...to where?”

“...home?”

Suga glances up at the bus timetable. “...yeah, this bus stop won’t take you home.”

“...oh.”

“Everyone’s looking for you, you should text them.”

“No.”

“What?”

“No.”

“...why not?”

“Don’t wanna talk about it.”

Suga sighed, before turning around to thump down onto the bench beside him, resting his face in his hands. “Why not?”

“You don’t even like me, I’m not gonna tell you anything,” Oikawa mutters, swaying slightly where he sits. Suga can hear the slur in his voice. 

“Okay, fine,” he replies, rolling his eyes. “But you have to text Iwaizumi. He’s absolutely freaking out that you’re gone. Even if you’re angry at people, it’s not nice to let them think that you might be in danger.”

“Iwaizumi can deal for an evening. I don’t wanna talk to anyone. I wanna be alone.”

“Regardless of what you want, you’re not exactly in a position to be alone right now, you’re way too fucked up.”

“Who cares?”

“Iwaizumi does. Text him.”

“No.”

“Fine!” Sugawara snaps, digging around in his back pocket to pull out his phone. “I’ll text him then-”

“What?” Oikawa squeaks. “Why do you have Iwaizumi’s phone number?” 

“Oh, hoho, does another man having your boyfriend’s phone number bother you? Fuck off.”

“Oh my god, you can’t actually think me and Daichi had something going on, do you?”

“Well you explicitly stated that you did-”

“As a joke. Geez. You’re so sensitive.”

“I’m actually not-”

“Can you just leave me alone?” Oikawa snaps after a minute, leaning down to wrap his arms around his knees. “I want to be alone.” 

Sugawara hovers with his fingers over the send button of the text, staring at the back of Oikawa’s head for a moment before saying:

“What… what happened tonight?”

Oikawa is quiet, before tilting his head to the side to look at him. “You don’t care.”

“I do. I don’t know you very well, and I might not be the smartest person in the world, but I know when someone is struggling, and… you don’t look good.”

“...I… I learned some information. About myself. I just want to be alone.” 

“You learned something about yourself?”

“Yeah.”

“...what did you learn?”

“I can’t tell you.”

“I promise I won’t-”

“No, I mean-” and Oikawa’s voice gets caught in his throat, as he sits up again, fanning his face. “I can’t. If I try and say it I’m going to start crying again and I’m so tired and I don’t want-” and he’s crying again anyway, putting a hand over his mouth to try and stifle himself. 

“Oh, shit-”

On instinct, Sugawara moves to put an arm around him, rubbing his shoulder. 

“I’m sorry,” Oikawa says, voice cracking out in practically a whimper. “I’m sorry, you don’t even like me, you shouldn’t have to put up with all this.”

“No, it’s… it’s okay,” Suga says, keeping his voice soft, as Oikawa thumped over and put his head down on his shoulder. “It’s fine. If you don’t want to talk about it, you don’t have to, okay? It’s fine.”

They sit in silence for a minute, for Oikawa, quietly, says: 

“I really hope you know that I didn’t… I didn’t have anything with Daichi. I mean, there’s a list of reasons why not but I’m… the top being that I wouldn’t do that to Iwaizumi, so… you don’t have to worry.”

Sugawara nods slightly, taking a moment to think through his words for a minute before saying: “Well, it’s fine either way. I never had anything with him either, so even if you did, it’s not like I’d have a reason to be mad. He can do what he wants with whoever he wants.”

“Are you two not dating?” Oikawa says, frowning. 

“...No, why would you think that?”

“Because you’re all he talks about. It was actually kinda annoying, the amount of phone calls I had to take that was just him gushing with anxiety about you.”

Suga feels his face heat up, trying to shake off the betraying nerves of affection. No. He was still mad at him. 

“Well, you’re all he talks about to me, so… clearly I wasn’t that big of a deal-”

Oikawa laughs at that, wiping at his eye again before pushing himself to a seated position, looking over to him. “Of course.”

“...of course?”

“Well, how was he supposed to talk about you to you? Of course it looks like he never talks about you from your perspective.” 

Suga smiles slightly. “Ah, I guess that’s true. But still, you have the aliens and the ghost hunting and this channel, he loves spending time with you guys, I’ve never… I’ve never seen him this involved in anything, well, except for volleyball.”

And Oikawa does a weird thing, which is get a really somber expression across his face, as if soured by the mere thought of their exploits. 

“Wh-what? What did I say?” Suga starts. 

“Nothing, just… I forgot, that he didn’t tell you anything,” Oikawa laughs. “Then again, I wasn’t keeping Iwa in the loop either, I guess, so… whatever… it’s over now anyway.”

“It’s over?”

“Yeah, I’m not… I can’t do it anymore. Aliens. Fuck that. I have a life to live.”

“Wait, but-”

But Oikawa has this dead-eyed set to his expression, pure conviction. 

“So you guys… you’re done? With the filming? The channel?”

“I guess,” Oikawa says. “They can do it without me. But… I… I don’t want to know any more truths.”

Sugawara is going to say something, but cuts himself off when he notices how off balance Oikawa is, blinking exhaustion from his expression. He’d been sleeping on the bench five minutes ago, he clearly was in no position to be making decisions - or telling stories. 

“Hey,” he says, after a second. “How about I take you somewhere… that is not a random bus bench, and we get some rest? I think we’ve both run our engines dry for the day.”

“That sounds great, but if you don’t remember-” Oikawa cuts himself off with a yawn. “-we’re in Yokohama, and… Were supposed to be sleeping at Kuroo’s. And I’m not going there.” 

“Well… let’s just… see if we can find a motel then, for the night.”

“I don’t have money.”

“Neither do I… oh, wait-” And Sugawara sits straight, patting himself down. “I do have Daichi’s jacket, and if I know him-” he digs around to the inside pocket, before victoriously producing his sleek, black wallet. “Ah-hah! There we go. We can use Daichi’s card.”

“...isn’t that a little… stealy, without his permission?”

“No, I’m mad at him right now, so that’s not my problem,” Suga replies, before saying: “He probably will struggle without his ID, though…” 

“You’re mad at him?”

Suga glances to Oikawa, hesitating over what to say, knowing the poor man was clearly already going through it, before eventually just settling on: 

“Yeah, we had a bit of a fight, but that’s over now.”

Oikawa stares at him for a moment, before saying: “Is that why you don’t want to go back to Kuroo’s either?”

Suga feels the flush of his cheeks deepen, and he nods slightly. “I could use a night away too.”

“Are you gonna be okay?” Oikawa asks after a minute. 

“You’re asking me that?”

“...well yeah, ‘cause… like… I mean, if I had a fight with Iwaizumi, I… it’s entirely different, that kind of pain, than… other stresses. Iwaizumi is my… just my everything. Fighting with him makes me sick.” 

Suga nods slightly, staring down at the credit card he had pulled out of Daichi’s wallet. 

“I’m mad at him,” he repeats. “But… As mad as I am, I’d hope he knows that that doesn’t change the fact he’s my best friend. I’m gonna make him sweat a bit for it, but… at the end of the day I’ll have his back. And I know he’d have mine if it really mattered-”

He glances over at Oikawa and finds him with his face pressed to the plastic of the bus stop shelter. 

Suga smiles slightly, before sending that text, finally, off to Iwaizumi, and reaching over to shake Oikawa awake again so they could start walking. 

 

---

 

“Ah - wait wait wait-”

Iwaizumi stumbles to a stop, pulling his phone from his pocket. 

“I - I got a message from Sugawara-” he says. 

Daichi turns around. “What? Why?”

“He - uh, let me read it, dude - okay, he… oh, holy shit, he found Oikawa,” Iwaizumi reports, and Daichi can see the anxiety leave his body. “Shit… okay, okay… good… uh…” and Iwaizumi is tapping away at the phone. 

Daichi feels something curdling in his stomach, a distrust of the situation, glancing over to where Kuroo was sending off a text to Ushijima to tell them that Iwaizumi had heard back about Oikawa - Ushijima, Tendou and Bokuto had headed into the city the other direction. 

“Suga says they’re gonna stay at a motel nearby for the night - he very politely asks that only I come to collect him in the morning,” Iwaizumi adds, glancing up at Daichi somewhat apologetically. It’s actually funny, considering now that everything was confirmed okay, Iwaizumi seems to have forgotten ten minutes ago when he was willing to punch Daichi’s lights out for saying the wrong thing. 

“That’s… good, that’s good,” Daichi replies, trying not to overthink the exact requirements of that statement. “As long as he’s okay.” 

“He’s okay,” Iwaizumi confirmed, closing his eyes and taking another slow breath. “Everything’s okay.”
Is it?

Daichi steps, before, turning his attention over to Kuroo, and noticing that the other had gotten distracted slightly. He’s staring off, through the darkness, and Daichi then puts his attention into doing the same. It doesn’t feel as eerie as it usually does, but whether or not there are ghosts haunting the corners of his eyes, he does see what Kuroo was staring at. 

That cat, with its long white tail, reflecting moonlight, swishing in slow, curved movements. 

“It’s just a cat, isn’t it?”

Kuroo turns to look at him. “Do you believe that?”

Daichi opens his mouth to reply, but he doesn’t have an answer. 

 

---

 

The next morning, Sugawara is surprised that he wakes up feeling relatively normal. Maybe he hadn’t had as much to drink as he thought… or people were being dramatic about hangovers… 

Either way, Oikawa wakes up like a zombie being forced out of paradise, groaning and complaining and grabbing at his head. Suga takes a walk to a gas station on the corner to head him medication and breakfast, before returning to the motel room. He sent a text off to Iwaizumi, telling him he was up and could come by - alone - whenever. 

Oikawa looks a little better when he returns, sitting on the edge of his bed, head in his hands. 

“How are you feeling?”

Oikawa jerks his head up, staring at him for a moment before saying:

“Gonna be honest, I kinda thought you were a fever dream from last night.”

“Nope, very real.”

Oikawa nods slightly, before very gratefully taking the headache pills Suga offered to him, swallowing it back dry. 

“Thanks, by the way.”

“Oh?”

“For taking care of me,” Oikawa clarifies. “You didn’t have to do that.”

“Yes, I did. I wouldn’t have been able to live with myself if something had happened to you and I’d just walked away.”

Oikawa gives him a bit of a smile, before looking back down to his hands, fidgeting nervously. 

“Oh, uh… Iwaizumi says he’ll be here shortly,” Suga reports. “So… if you… if that’s not okay-”

“No, that’s… that’s fine,” Oikawa says. “I shouldn’t have run off anyway. Thanks for… again, thank you, for… fixing it for me, I guess.”

Suga nods, before taking a seat down beside him, swinging his legs for a moment, before saying: 

“Hey, can I… ask a question?” 

“Sure,” Oikawa says. “Full disclosure, though, my brain is liquid and I don’t know if I can answer anything complex.”

“No, nothing complex, just…” he pauses for a moment, sighing, before saying: “Daichi’s hiding something from me. Did he… tell you anything? Like… is something happening at home, or are you planning something big? Like… the channel, with everything… I just want to be included, I want to know what’s going on with his life, but he just… won’t tell me.”

Oikawa glances over to him, looking contemplative for a moment before shrugging. 

“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.” 

“I fucking hate that answer. People need to stop saying it.” 

“It’s true.”

Suga frowns. “Why?”

“Because I… Because Daichi’s mom was probably abducted by aliens, and I don’t know what-”

“Hang on, Jesus - what?”

Oikawa pulls away, raising his eyes. “You wanna reconsider that response, or are you gonna prove me right that fast?”
Suga shuts his mouth. “Ah, sorry, just - huh?”

“I don’t know, Sugawara,” Oikawa says. “I don’t know what I can trust anymore. I just found out that my entire childhood was… made up in my head. I found out that I killed a man-”

“Excuse me?”

“-and Daichi… His… I don’t know what he believes, but I… And I don’t know what I think either. Maybe it’s all fake, y’know? Maybe it’s all just… false memories, like my aliens are. Maybe Tendou is just really good at guessing, maybe a cat is just a cat.”

A cat-

There’s a knocking at the door. Suga wishes he hadn’t texted Iwaizumi, but the knocking continues, fast and loud and aggressive. No pauses. 

“I’m coming!” Suga shouts, annoyed by the noise as he pushes himself to his feet. 

What the hell was Oikawa talking about?

He remembers Daichi telling him it’s bigger than that, it’s bigger, it’s too complicated, you won’t believe me.

What the hell did you tangle yourself in?

Suga is almost thrown to the side as Iwaizumi forces his way inside as soon as the door is opened, hurtling across the hotel room to basically tackle Oikawa, who just barely managed to stand up in time to receive the crushing hug properly. 

“Oh my god, you can’t run off like that, not when we’re in the middle of fucking Yokohama-” Iwaizumi is stuttering, hands gripping into his shoulders with a desperation Sugawara had never seen anyone exhibit. 

Oikawa, almost immediately, is sobbing in his arms, holding just as tightly in return. 

Suga takes a glance down either direction of the hallway, confirming nobody else has come. 

He tries to remind himself that he’s not allowed to be disappointed that someone did as he asked them too. 

Chapter 26: Who's Afraid of Virgina Woolf?

“Everyone’s asking about you.”

It’s a statement that’s also a question that’s also a command. 

Everyone is asking about you. 

Why are you ignoring them? 

You should text them back.

Oikawa doesn’t move from where he’s sitting, criss-cross on the bed, laptop illuminating blue light across his face. The light reflects off his glasses as he lifts his head to move, but it’s not quite enough to hide the miserable look he had worn for the last few days. 

Iwaizumi waits, and when he doesn’t immediately get a response, heads across his bedroom to find a shirt to wear to bed, hair still dripping slightly from his shower. 

“Who’s everyone?” Oikawa asks after a second, when Iwaizumi is finished, and heading back towards the bed. 

“Everyone,” he replies, sitting down on the edge of the bed beside him. “Daichi, Kuroo, Bokuto, Ushijima, Kenma, Tendou, Saku, your Mother, I even have texts from Mattsun asking about you and he doesn’t even know what’s going on.”

“How kind of them,” he replies, before looking back down to his laptop. 

Iwaizumi stares at him for a moment, before scooting in closer. 

“Are you mad that they hid it from you?”

This seems to snap whatever faux calm Oikawa had been maintaining, and he looked over to Iwaizumi with a more annoyed look now. 

“You know what? I haven’t even begun to process the fact that they lied to me, I don’t even know if that matters to me - hell, I lied to me about it. I’m just trying to… to get my head around the fact that I…. literally killed a guy.”

Iwaizumi bites the inside of his cheek for a second, before saying: “Yeah, I don’t think that’s the right phrasing for it. I’ve been thinking over that story and I really don’t think you get to claim responsibility for it. It was barely your fault-”

“Oh, okay, because directly causing the accidental death of a man is so so much better, Iwa.”

Iwaizumi stares at him for a moment before sighing and saying: “Yeah I got nothing for that one.”

Oikawa rolls his eyes, looking back down at his screen. “I just… I just need to process this on my own. Without anybody contributing.”

“Mhm. I guess I should probably shut up, then, yeah?”

Oikawa scoffs, elbowing him roughly. “Obviously you don’t count.”

“What? I’m not anybody to you? And here I thought we were something special-”

Oikawa swats at him again. “Stop it, stop being such a nerd, you’re unbearable.”

Iwaizumi catches his hand, stilling its attack and instead shifting to hold it gently, pulling it to hold against his chest. 

“Just… don’t… pull back from everyone too much, okay?” he says, rubbing his fingers gently over Oikawa’s palm. “They’re worried. You should text them back sooner rather than later.”

Oikawa nods slightly, before mumbling: “I need to decide what I even… I need to decide what I’m even going to do, before I can do that.”

“What you’re going to do?” Iwaizumi echoes, frowning slightly. 

Oikawa gently pulls back his hand, adjusting the computer on his lap to let Iwaizumi lean in against him, to look at the screens. 

“I don’t know why I wasted so much of my life chasing false memories, but I do have a future, and one I’ve been planning for almost as long,” he mumbles, resting his head down against Iwaizumi’s shoulders. 

Iwaizumi glances over the screen - apartment listings.

“Oh,” he says. 

“I… I want my life to go back to normal. I sacrificed a lot of time in favour of ghost hunting but I think it’s time to go back to the real world.”

Iwaizumi isn’t sure Oikawa means what he says, but he can’t think of anything better to say or do, so he just presses a kiss into his hair and closes his eyes and decides maybe he does count as somebody, and should just let him be for a bit. 

 

---

 

The last day of classes drags on in an unfairly long way. Daichi slouches forward on his desk feeling more miserable than he’s ever felt in his life, waiting for the bell to dismiss them so he could check his phone again. This wasn’t great. This was a bad feeling. 

He turns his head to the side, to where two desks over Sugawara was sitting, but he’s playing model student and keeping his attention on the teacher. 

Eventually, finally, the bell rings. 

Daichi scrambles to get his stuff together and head across the classroom, but much quicker on the draw, Suga is up and out of his seat and out of the classroom before he even has a chance to get his attention. 

Fuck. 

Well okay. 

He heads out as well, taking his phone out as he walks to check his messages. 

Their little group chat has been absolutely bursting with notifications, as both Fukurodani and Shiratorizawa had formally ended classes two days previous, and Kuroo’s school had gotten out early, but there’s no update from Oikawa. 

Iwaizumi sends a few messages, but it’s barely more than a confirmation that he’s still technically alive. 

I don’t want to speak on his behalf, Iwa sends, over and over and over again, when Bokuto and Kuroo and himself prompt and prompt and prompt. 

Maybe he should go see Saku again, she might have a better idea about how he’s holding up…

“Daichi! Daichi!”

He stops where he’s walking, tugged from his musings and forced to turn around, surprised slightly to find that it was Michimiya running down the hall towards him, waving for his attention. 

“Oh, good,” she says, when she catches up, taking a second to catch her breath. “You are a hard fellow to get a hold of these days, I was worried I’d miss you again.”

“Again?”

“Yeah, I’ve just been needing to confirm that you’re still okay to speak at convocation on Friday.”

Daichi blinks, trying to figure out if this sentence is a riddle or not. 

“Wh… what do you mean…?”

She looks surprised, before laughing and saying: “You agreed months ago, when you got back from nationals,” she says. “At the time we thought it would be good because you were the captain of the team that got Karasuno back on the national stage, and you were in our year, and it was just great, and that was before you went and got all famous on the internet. You didn’t forget about it, did you?”

“...no, of course not,” he replies, lifting a hand up to scratch at the back of his neck. “Yeah, no, that’s fine, that’s… that’ll be fine. Uh…”

“Okay, so you’re gonna be going after the Student Council President, but before the Principal, so you’ll walk in with all the others, and then shortly before the ceremony starts, you’ll follow the prez out around back, and then will be able to retake your seat while the principal is going on and on-”

“Okay, yeah, sure…” he says, as his phone buzzes in his hand. “That’s no problem, Uh… okay, great…Yeah, okay-”

“You’re sure agreeing a lot.”

“Sorry, just-”

“You’re busy, I get it,” she laughs off, waving a hand. “You’ve always been a little worker bee. Just don’t work too hard, yeah?” 

“Ahah… okay…” 

And with another goodbye she has turned to rush off and undoubtedly find someone else to relay incredibly stressful additions to their schedule, because surely Daichi can’t be her only target. He sways slightly as he turns to trudge down the hallway and outside. 

He takes a glance around, and can’t see either Suga or Asahi by where they usually met up, so he figures they’ve gone on without him, which, as if the last three days, was to be expected. He tries to tell himself that he can’t be upset over them returning the favour - the last two months he’d barely waited for them , after all. He does, however, give himself a minute to grouch over the fact that he at least, had texted them and told them that he’d gone off to meet someone else or had to catch a specific bus or whatever he was doing that day. His phone - except for the conversation Bokuto and Kuroo are having in their group chat- remains silent. 

So he walks home, and he texts Oikawa again, because there’s a growing sense of dread in his stomach that he cannot get rid of. Oikawa wasn’t really someone to avoid attention, so dodging calls and ignoring texts was exceedingly out of character. At the very least, Daichi expected him to reply back with an irritatingly vague emoji he was incapable of deciphering the meaning of. 

He walks fast - fast enough that he almost catches up to Suga and Asahi, but they’ve already split their ways at the intersection, so Daichi just turns down his. 

He considers texting Suga. What would he even say? 

Sorry.

That would be it, wouldn’t it be? 

Because he couldn’t say anything else. He couldn’t promise things would be different, he couldn’t promise an explanation, he couldn’t even really apologize properly, because there was a lot that he wasn’t sorry for. If Suga wanted him to apologize for putting his attention into the channel, for committing to a project, for enjoying his time with the other captains, he’d have nothing to say to him. 

Until he had sorted everything out - until he’d figured out what was going on with his parents, what the PSIA was hiding, what was going on with him - things were never going to be back to normal.

Sugawara wanted him to promise him that things would go back to normal, and he couldn’t do that yet. 

There’s a black car in his driveway. 

He stops at the edge of the property, staring at it. 

Is dad home?

He must be, right?

He’s not sure why his instincts are to tread carefully, but there’s suddenly an air of disquiet and he doesn’t trust this - his father, although frequently in and out and mostly out - rarely surprised them. He usually, at least, texted his mom, and she’d let Daichi know, mostly so that he wouldn’t make after school plans and could be home for dinner. Daichi had been told he was coming in for Friday, for their graduation ceremony, so it made sense that he might be a little bit early…

He’s been checking his phone so neurotically these last few days, he’s sure that he hadn’t been told anything. 

Eventually he has to bite the bullet, drag himself up the driveway and nudge open the door. 

“Hello-hello,” he sings, wondering if he’s even close to sounding like his normal self or if his anxiety and stress is bleeding from his vocal chords. 

“Oh! You’re home!” 

He looks up from where he’s putting his shoes away, in time to see his mother appear in the entrance to the living room, smiling at him. 

“Is dad here?” he asks, glancing past her to see if he would be following shortly. 

“He is,” she agrees, clapping her hands together. “He decided to stop by for a surprise visit, apparently he’s just passing through, but-”

“Where is he?”

“Oh, he’s just out back in the garden, taking a look at the hinges on that little shed, it’s been acting up for months,” she replies. “You should go out and say hi after you put your stuff away.”

“I will,” he agrees, before grabbing his school bag and hauling it off towards his bedroom. 

He throws his stuff into his room, and spends a minute digging around to change out of his school uniform and hurriedly pull himself together. Even though he’s received no responses back from anyone, he sends a text to Oikawa telling him that his father stopped by for a ‘surprise visit,’ and that he’d update him if anything suspicious was going down - and then while his fingers are moving and his anxious energy is being spent, he sends a text to Suga apologizing again for everything before he puts his phone on mute and slides it into his pocket, and heads downstairs. 

His mother is wiping down the table in the dining room, and maybe doesn’t even notice him pass behind her and towards the glass doors to the back garden. 

And sure enough, though Daichi isn’t sure why he might have thought he’d see anything else, his father is in the garden, door to the little, sort of rundown shed half open, tugging on it and kicking at it’s base and doing what Daichi could only describe as “pretending to investigate what might be the problem.”

“Hey,” he calls, to announce his arrival. “Didn’t know you’d be stopping by.”

Rion jumps slightly, turning to look at him with surprise, before giving him a nod. “Last minute thing. I’m actually gonna be gone tomorrow morning, probably before you’re even awake - I’m driving through up to Aomori to meet with a client.”

“Sure. Does that mean you won’t be coming to my graduation?”

“Ah, well - hopefully I’ll be quick, you know I wanna be there. I should be able to make it back by Friday evening.”

“Afternoon.”

“Right, right. Sorry.”

“No worries, it’s not a huge deal either way.”

Rion stares at him for a moment, but Daichi is no longer confident in reading his expressions, it’s become abundantly clear that he is exceptionally good at acting, or at least lying, and he’s not sure what he can trust. 

“Do you know what the problem is with this thing?” he says after a minute, turning to swing the door, which screeches an unholy noise on its hinges, making Daichi flinch. 

“Apart from the noise it’s making, nothing’s wrong with it. Just grease it and it’ll be fixed.” 

Rion chuckles, stepping back to put his hands on his hips, appraising the shed. “That’s only a temporary fix. It’ll be back to squealing real fast if the only thing we do is grease it. We’ve had this shed almost as long as we’ve lived here, and two, three times a year your mother asks me to fix it, and I always just grease it, and then sure enough, it comes back. And then, she’s always mad at me for not actually fixing it, and then I’m in trouble, and the door is still squeaky.”

Daichi feels like he’s listening to radio static.

“You have to replace the hinges, then,” Daichi offers, when he can. Rion looks back to him. 

“You think?”

“Mhm,” he says, before vaguely pointing at the hinges of the door. “The noise is caused by the weight of the door, so it’s squeaking because the hinges have worn down so much it’s grinding against each other instead of gliding smoothly. You could either find a way to permanently lift the door to take the weight off the hinges, or, probably more easy, just replace the hinges. Though admittedly over time it’ll just wear down again.” 

Rion chuckles, nodding slightly. “Smart kid. Sure as hell didn’t get that from me, I was never that good at-” and then he just waves his hand around, in a signal that Daichi is pretty sure indicates “everything.” 

Rion seems to contemplate the shed a moment longer before looking back to Daichi and saying: 

“Where’s the nearest, like, hardware store, or whatever, around here?” he says. 

“Probably in town.” 

“Alright, great. Why don’t you run off and find something that’ll work for this door here, and I’ll work on getting these ones taken off.” 

Daichi nods slightly. “Sure,” he says, slowly backing up before turning to head back inside, slipping through the house and back to the front door. 

“Oh, honey! Where are you going?” his mother calls. 

“To get hinges, I guess,” he says. 

“Hinges?”

“For the door. I’ll be back soon, don’t worry,” he says, before slipping out the front door and hurrying down the porch steps. It takes him a second to get his bike out from around the side of the house, but he’s on the road shortly after, heading off towards town. 

He knows this town well. It’s easy to navigate through, slowing down once he’s on busier streets and getting lucky on the timing of walk signals and red lights. The entire process is easy, actually, and he turns his brain to autopilot. 

It’s only once he’s leaving the store does he think to check his phone again. 

Nothing. 

Mhm. 

He opens the text threads on his phone, just to make sure his phone didn’t just forget to give him the notifications, and it’s now when he’s scrolling backwards through his many unanswered replies that he hears a voice go: 

“Ah! Oh my god, Sawamura?”

He lifts his head, frowning slightly and glancing around himself, trying to find the source of the noise, but eventually landing on a pair of young women walking towards him. 

He doesn’t immediately identify either - one of them is quite tall, with shorter hair, the other a little bit shorter in height but making up for it in heeled boots. They both approach cautiously, hands folded in front of them. 

He looks behind himself, to confirm this is about him, before looking back to the girls. 

“Hey,” he says, before: “Ah, sorry, you are-?”

“Oh! Uh… My name is Miyu, and this is Nanami,” the taller girl says. “Sorry to interrupt, if you’re in a rush, I just… we’re big fans, that’s all.” 

Daichi blinked, before trying to remember how to smile genuinely to do that for them, kicking the stand of his bike out. 

“Oh, well, it’s a pleasure to meet you girls. Are you from the area?”

“Yeah,” Miyu says, bouncing slightly on her heels. “We’re actually Seijoh girls, so we’re not on this side of town often-”

“Oh, you’re Seijoh,” he says. “So you already, like, you would’ve already known-”

They both giggle, before one of them says: “We actually, sorry to be honest we didn’t really care about volleyball, so it was more of a weird surprise to learn than our new favourite thing was kinda close to home.”

“Ah, yes, I see,” he replies. “That’s… it’s so nice to meet you-”

“It’s nice to meet you,” Nanami counters. 

“Ah, haha… okay…”

“Oh, by the way, and… sorry if I’m not allowed to ask this, but… are you guys going to be releasing a video from Utsukushii’s party? A ton of other creators have already put theirs out. And you guys look like you had so much fun, but…”

“What she means to say,” Nanami interrupts. “Is that you guys usually post once a week or more, and we’re at the two week mark without an update, so… I guess we’re just wondering- well, really everyone is wondering.”

“Eh? Everyone is wondering?”

“Like, on the forums and stuff, in the comments, people are just… wondering. A lot of people expect that poor Kodzuken is just really taking his time to polish the video, but… if you have any hints…?”

Daichi has to first remember that Kodzuken is Kenma and that they’re not speaking in riddles, before actually being able to address their question. They’re well meaning, and both girls sound friendly, he doesn’t feel like they’re causing trouble, but…

“Uh… I don’t… know,” he says eventually, followed by: “Have we really not put anything out this week?”

This seems to confuse them both, as they tilt their heads. 

“No…?”

“Uh - sorry, just, Kenma has typically handled the scheduling and videos and stuff like that, I just show up… uh… I haven’t heard anything, then, but… we didn’t actually… like… well… maybe Kenma did film something… I didn’t film anything, except for whatever other people filmed of me-”

This makes them both pout, but thankfully Daichi recognizes that it’s more in playful disappointment than anything serious.

“Aww, that sucks,” Miyu says. “But, either way, we greatly look forward to your next video. Personally I’m a big fan of the more cozy videos you guys do-”

“...cozy?”

“Yeah, like… the late night ones that are story based, or when you’re just hanging out-”

“I,” Nanami interrupts. “Like when the shit is scary as all hell. The video Kuroo filmed at the train station was so good, even though there weren’t any jumpscares and nothing really happened, it kept me on the edge of my seat.”

“Uh-huh,” Daichi agrees, before looking at his watch. “Look, I gotta go build a door with my dad or… something that sounds equally fake but I swear is legit, so, not to cut this short-”

“Oh! Oh, no worries, for sure, go ahead,” one says, and right as Daichi is saying goodbye, and he turns to leave, he hears another girl call his name, from somewhere else. 

---

 

“Hey! That took you a while, forget how to ride a bike or something?” Rion calls, when Daichi’s finally heading out into the backyard again. 

“I… ran into some fans,” he says. “It… took a while.”

“Fans?”

“Uh… of my… of the… youtube channel,” he replies, as he wanders over to shed. His father had managed to get the door off the hinges, and had it laid out and ready to go, though considering there’s now three bandaids on his right hand, Daichi is pretty sure the extra time he took was probably needed. 

“Oh! So has that really taken off for you?” 

“Kinda? Yeah, it… it’s going good I think…”

“Your mom mentioned you get to a party recently, some big deal in Tokyo?”

“Yokohama, technically, yeah,” Daichi says, wandering off to where the old wooden shed door was, and crouching down in the grass to help on getting the new hinges on. “Her name is Utsukushii, she’s… this massive star, apparently, it was… I’ve never-”

“Utsukushii Airi?”

Daichi snaps his head up. “Ooh, I’m afraid to ask why you know that.”

This earns him a glare, followed by: “I… just… one of my coworkers is a fan, that’s all. I recognized the name. Big name, she’s everywhere. Did you get to meet her.”

“Yeah, I did, actually, it… I guess it was really cool, I just… Was so overwhelmed I never really got to appreciate it.” 

“Ah, that’s to be expected,” Rion replies, sitting fully in the grass to try and get better leverage and get the screw in properly, looking like a man who’s never held a screwdriver in his life. Which, in hindsight, would explain the bandaids. “So… this youtube-internet-thing, you’re… committing to it, then?”

“...I guess, I don’t know. Yeah.”

“Is that why you didn’t apply to any colleges?” 

Daichi freezes slightly, but thankfully the animosity obviously present in the line of questioning is not reflected in the way his father looks, still mostly paying attention to the screws. When he finishes on his end of the door, he passes the screwdriver to Daichi, and he makes quick work of the next hinge. 

“I… guess,” he says. “I… I mean, you know I wasn’t one for academics, so… I don’t know. I still might go to the police academy, there’s still time for that.” 

Rion scrunches his nose up in obvious distaste as he pushes himself up to his feet. “I’d rather you be one of those influencers, to be honest.”

Daichi doesn’t have too much time to unpack that sentence, because almost immediately Rion waves a hand at the door and adds: “Pick that up.”

Daichi gets to his feet to lift the door, turning it around to line up in the doorway of the shed, lifting it and carefully keeping it steady in place. Now it’s up to Rion to get the screws in, and Daichi realizes he’s going to be holding this thing for a while. Fuck. 

He adjusts his hold on it, trying to mind-over-matter himself out of the situation or the weight of the door as his father works. 

“Well… I don’t know what we’re gonna be doing yet. I might be moving to Tokyo, with Kuroo, or… maybe I’ll stay here, mum wants me to stay here.” 

“Of course she does. If she had her way she’d have everyone sleeping in the same room and eating every meal together. Who the hell is Kuroo?” 

“You met him, that one time, he’d come over to hang out with a bunch of others - dark hair, tall, he’s the captain over at Nekoma.” 

“Nekoma?”

“School in Tokyo.”

“Ah.”

“Hey, quick question, you almost done with those screws or am I going to just have to suffer holding this forever?”

“Calm down Atlas, it’s a door, you’re fine.”

“Says you. I don’t see you lifting the door.”

“I’m not the one that decided to make lifting weights a priority.”

“Priority is stretching it.” 

“Right because what else do you call your transition from middle-to-highschool if not a sudden obsession with physical fitness?”

“Working out feels good! It’s good for your body and for your mind!”

“You sound like your mother.”

“Good.”

This makes Rion laugh, and then he declares that he’s done and Daichi is very relieved to let his arms drop. Letting his breath out. 

“You’re right about that,” Rion says, reaching forward to test the door, letting it swing silently on nice, new hinges. “You’d do well to be more like your mother.”

Daichi hums an acknowledgement, before Rion pats his shoulder and nods towards the door. 

“Speaking of,” Rion starts. “Let’s go brag about our accomplishments here today and see if she’ll give us extra dessert.”

“What are you, twelve?”

“What are you, forty?”

---

 

Dinner is fine, it almost feels like his family is normal again. Maybe it lulls Daichi into a falls sense of security. He cleans up with his mother in the kitchen, gets the dishes dried and then excuses himself with a mumble about needing to write a speech. Rion seems normal, he seems like his father, completely untouched by the circumstances of their lives right now. 

And then-

Daichi shuts the door to his room, and grabs some paper and a pencil from his bag, and is just about to settle down at his desk when he sees it. 

The tracking chip, set on the desk, neat and deliberate. 

There’s no note. There’s no indication of how long it had been there, except for Daichi’s vague awareness that it hadn’t been there when he’d come home from school today. Or… maybe it was? He hadn’t really looked around, and he wasn’t known for his quick observance… 

He picks it up, looking over the device and finding it otherwise undamaged, just… sitting there.

When did he discover it? 

Is that why he came by early? 

Why didn’t he mention it. 

Daichi stares at it for a moment longer, before fumbling around to pull out his phone. He still hasn’t received any new messages, but that can’t be helped. To Oikawa, he sends:
SOS MY DAD FOUND THE TRACKING DEVICE.

He hasn’t mentioned anything yet and honestly that’s so much worse!!!

He knows we were tracking him. How did he even figure out it was me???

PLEASE get back to me this is serious. 

But he can’t sit there staring at his phone forever, so eventually he has to put it down on his desk, putting his notifications on as loud as he can, and staring at his paper and ultimately finding that he was incapable of dragging his mind off what his dad was planning. Why he didn’t say anything. 

Is this a threat?

It’s a threat, isn’t it? Vague and impossible. 

Don’t shatter our family with this bullshit, Rion is saying. I found it. I got rid of it. Don’t fuck up my work.

Daichi’s foot taps nervously against the ground, rapid and uncontrollable. 

Fuck.

“I know,” his dad is saying. That’s it. “I know. I can watch you as well as you can watch me, if that’s the game you want to play.”

He puts his head in his hands, rubbing his palms into his eyes hard enough that he sees starbursts behind closed eyelids, and then-

Bzzt!

He basically jumps out of his skin in his haste to grab his phone, heart in his chest as he checks what had come in. 

Suga: Okay.

He stares at it for a moment, before turning around and throwing his phone at the bed. 

 

---

 

Daichi: OIKAWA PLEASE I NEED TO TALK TO YOU

Daichi: SHIT IS GOING DOWN MY DAD FOUND THE TRACKER

Daichi: PLEASE REPLY

 

---

 

Daichi: Oh my goooooooooddddddddd Oikawa

Daichi: Now I’m starting to worried you’re fucking dead, this isn’t like you to just go dark for so long

 

---

 

Daichi: If you’re mad at me at least tell me to stop texting. 

Daichi: I know we need to talk but we need to talk about a LOT

Daichi: You gotta tell me what’s wrong if I’m gonna fix it

Daichi: I don’t know what to do

 

---

 

Daichi: please. 

Daichi: This isn’t fair, you promised me you wouldn’t do this.

 

---

 

Thursday passes in terrifying slow motion. Daichi spends the whole day locked in his room, scratching his nails through his hair and staring at his phone, pacing in circles. He leaves only when his mother pressures him into watching the kids or cooking lunch and he does that in a daze, barely aware of what’s going on. His father is gone, for now, but that tracking device sits like a beacon of ill intent. 

What does it mean? What do we do? 

He texts Suga again. 

I really am sorry. I know you don’t have a reason to believe me but I never wanted you to feel that way. I never wanted to make you think I didn’t care.

And Suga ignored him for the most part, until Daichi got back, finally:

Understood.

And that doesn’t help at all.

 

---

 

Friday he leaves the house early in the morning. He lays out his clothes for graduation and gets everything ready, and then hops on his bike and strikes out across town, hurrying through the little village and off towards the far side of the city. He knows better than to try and go to Oikawa’s actual house, so he heads straight to Iwaizumi’s first. He’ll try Saku next if he can’t find him. 

He doesn’t have to wonder for long, though, because by the time he’s arriving on the right street, he can see Iwaizumi and Oikawa leaving the house, dressed neatly and talking together. They both look up as he comes down the sidewalk, and he watches their expressions grow more guarded. 

The bike comes to a halt and he jumps off, not bothering with wasting time on the stand and just letting it fall over. 

“Why are you ignoring me!” Daichi starts, surprised by the immediacy of the anger in his voice. “What the hell, man!” 

Oikawa blinks at him for a second, before saying: “Oh, sorry. I’ve been a little distracted.”

“Yeah, I noticed, I texted you like a billion times-”

“Yeah, I noticed. You’re very persistent.”

Daichi throws his hands in the air. “Well what the hell, dude? I’m kinda dying out here, you could at least tell me you were busy or… or… I… this is major, man, we need to talk about this and figure out what we’re going to do next-”

“Do next?”

“Yes, yes, my father found the fucking tracking device, he knows we were following him and god only knows what else he knows, and… and on top of that, Tendou’s psychic thing apparently went away, which we don’t know why, and… and we still haven’t even figured out what was going on with me, and… and we were- I…” he trailed off, realizing Oikawa was staring at him with a look Daichi hadn’t seen in a very long time. The same kind of look he’d use to regard Kageyama from the sidelines, a sort of down-tilt to his head that disguised all notions of what might actually be in his head. 

Daichi swallows, finding his mouth suddenly dry. 

“I… look, I’m really sorry I didn’t tell you, when we found out, I just… I wanted… I didn’t think it would come out like it did, I thought we could… convince Saku to do it more gently, or… I don’t know, we fully intended to-”

“I’m gonna stop you right there,” Oikawa says, putting a hand up. “I’m not mad about that. Actually, I’m not mad at all. You’re fine, everything’s fine. Don’t worry.” 

“But… then why-”

“Daichi… I don’t know if you noticed, or like… really stopped to think about all this, but we spent three months chasing ghosts and the end result was an old murder coverup. I… I can’t go around doing this anymore. What if the next thing we find out is even worse? What if - look, even if I didn’t just make it all up in my head, right? Which, right now-” he cuts himself off, shaking his head for a moment before finishing with: “What if the truth just makes things more unbearable. Knowing the truth won’t change it, right? And… like… if your father is working for a secret government agency, do you… really want to know what they’re doing? What if you can’t unknow it? What if it ruins everything for you?”

“Oikawa,” he says, breath coming out in a short gasp. “It already has, can’t you see that? I… ghosts or yokai or aliens are real, something is real and it’s probably inside me if not at least my mom and I can… and… and my dad is hiding something, and you- I don't know what to do-”

“I’ve got… I’m putting it down,” Oikawa says. “I wasted my whole life chasing a truth that only hurt me, so… I’m… I’m moving to Argentina in a few months and I need to focus on that now. I need to focus on the rest of my life. Who the fuck cares if aliens are-”

“You… when we started this-” Daichi says, and he can feel the burn in his eyes. “You promised me that we would be in this together, whatever happened, you gave me your word-”

“Well congratulations,” Oikawa spits. “You’re the last fucking person in Karasuno to realize that I can’t be trusted. You should have listened to the first thousand times Tobio told you.”

“No,” Daichi says, firmly. 

“No?”

“No, this is not like you, I know you better than this-”

“You’ve only known me a few weeks,” Oikawa replies, before taking a long stride forward and brushing past him. “Now we have to go, Seijoh’s graduation starts in a few hours, and I have to give a speech I didn’t write.” 

Daichi turns around to watch him leave, but there’s nothing on his tongue for a long minute. It takes him a second to find the words and all he can do is shout:

“This isn’t like you! You care about this stuff, you care about the truth! We have almost irrefutable proof of alien life and you’re just going to walk away?”

“And I recommend you do too. God only knows what you’ll discover about yourself if you keep digging. You don’t want to end up like me.” 

He’s breathless, and jumps slightly when he feels a hand on his shoulder. 

Daichi glances up to Iwaizumi. 

“You’re just going to let him do this?” 

Iwaizumi looks a little uncomfortable for a moment, before saying: “Look, man, I’ve been trying to convince Oikawa to put down the alien stuff for a long time. I knew… eventually it would burn him out, one way or another, especially once he met you, once he got all… real about it.”

“So you’re happy, then, that he’s just leaving me behind. My father doesn’t trust me, Suga hates me now, we have a channel together that’s dying because our ringleader won’t talk to us, and I… I’m…” Daichi just beckons to his face. I’m an alien, he wants to say, but he hasn’t said it out loud yet, and he can’t bear to speak it into existence. There’s still time for it to not be true. 

“You’re right,” Iwaizumi says. “About him. He does care about the truth and he will regret walking away from you. But you know how he is. You think I could change his mind? He’ll have to come around on his own time.”

“But I don’t have time,” Daichi says. “This is happening now.”

Iwaizumi looks down the road - Oikawa is already a fair distance away. 

“Look, let’s talk later - I’ll text the other guys, we’ll sort something out-”

“Don’t-”

But even as he starts to speak, Iwaizumi turns with a sympathetic smile, before hurrying off to catch up with Oikawa. 

Daichi is left standing alone. 

Chapter 27: Convocation

[Posted Friday morning, to the personal instagram account of Ushijima Wakatoshi - a selfie picture taken probably by Leon, based on the angles, surrounded by boxes in a little dorm room. Semi is on the floor in the background covered in packing tape, Tendou is tucked under Ushijima’s arm, helping wrangle him to face the camera he clearly was not aware was about to take a photo. Leon is laughing. 

The caption reads: “Moving day. Packing to go is a lot harder than it was packing to come. There’s more to take now.”

→ SemiE: Why did you post this picture I look crazy :,)

→ OohiraL: I’m gonna miss everyone SO MUCH you guys have NO IDEA!!!!!

→ honk: @UshijimaW when are you guys going to be releasing the next video? Or are you on a hiatus? 

     ↳ TendouS [replying to honk]: We don’t have a set date for the next upload. Things have just been crazy with graduation and moving!

→ tribunisplebis: @UshijimaW it’s been like two weeks since anyone’s even posted a community message? What’s going on?

     ↳ TendouS [replying to tribunisplebis]: Everyone’s just a little bit busy! Try not to worry your little heads off about it. 

→ GoshikiT: Hope the moving went smoothly!! Next time you see me I’ll prove I was a worthy choice for ace I promise!!!!

→ killmeplease: What’s going on @UshijimaW? Is everything okay?

     ↳ TendouS [replying to killmeplease]: Everything is fine, please stop @ replying him we’re busy <3

→ BigToeFucker: @UshijimaW everyone’s been dark on social media, what’s going on? Kodzuken says he’s not able to say anything??? 

     ↳ TendouS [replying to BigToeFucker]: Please just be patient

→ Merrily: where are you @UshijimaW

     ↳ TendouS [replying to Merrily]: stop it

→ VivAlmighty: any updates???? @Ushijima W

     ↳ TendouS [replying to VivAlmighty]: stop

→ ShirabuK: @TendouS what the hell is going on here??? This is insane!

→ downwithvegetables: @UshijimaW @UshijimaW Hello?????

     ↳ TendouS [replying to downwithvegetables]: STOP

→ IntotheWild: @UshijimaW why are you ignoring us?????

     ↳ TendouS [replying to IntotheWild]: I’m gonna start blocking people

     ↳ IntotheWild: [replying to TendouS]: literally you need to CHILL. People are just curious, it's not that big of a deal. Plus you literally can’t??? 

     ↳ TendouS [replying to IntotheWild]:*I* need to chill? ME? You’re all the ones spamming someone who clearly doesn’t want to talk. Also, i ABSOLUTELY can get access to his account, you’re first on the kill list.

     ↳ IntotheWild: [replying to TendouS]: who even are you? 

     ↳ TendouS [replying to IntotheWild]: LOOK UP AT THE FUCKING PICTURE.

→ Paisleypal: Tendou going off in the comments is crazy. We’re literally just wondering if everything is okay. @UshijimaW can you at least let us know what happened? Did something happen at the party?

     ↳ TendouS [replying to Paisleypal]: STOP IT.

 

---

 

“Okay, give me your phone,” Tendou says as his greeting as he throws open the dorm door and shocks Ushijima, who was sitting against the wall on the now bare, spartan mattress of the lower bunk bed. 

“What?” Ushijima says, at the same time his phone vibrates against the mattress, from where it rested by his hip. 

“Oh my god, at least put your phone on silent!” Tendou snaps back, hurrying over to grab the phone from the bed before Ushijima could. 

“I can’t,” he replies. 

“You can’t?”

“What if-” he cuts himself off, looking a little miserable for a second before finishing with: “What if one of the others needs to get ahold of me?”

Tendou sighed, staring at him for a moment, before saying: “Just mute the app, then?”

“Oh, I don’t know how to do that.”

Tendou stares a little longer, before sighing and just opening his phone to do it himself. 

“You changed your password again,” Tendou comments, absently, as he flicks through the settings and endures three more buzzing notifications in the process. 

“I do not understand how you keep getting into it.”

“I don’t understand why you feel the need to keep me out,” Tendou replied, before tossing the phone back at him. “There. Nice and quiet. But if they don’t shut up soon I am going to be blocking every single one of them.”

“Don’t do that, they’re not doing anything wrong.”

“They absolutely are,” Tendou replies, exasperated for a moment before trying to calm himself down, heading over to sit beside him on the bed. “And even if it’s not technically hurting anyone, they should know better.”

Ushijima shrugged. “It’s fair to want to know. I… I want to know, but…”

“People still ghosting you?”

“Well… No, but… Oikawa sent this morning that he was quitting to focus on his move to Argentina, and since then nobody’s been able to get ahold of Daichi, though Kuroo mentioned it was his grad convocation today, so… hopefully he will… tell us what the plan is afterwards. Kenma doesn’t know what to post, if he should put out a formal hiatus announcement, or…”

“Right…” Tendou starts slowly. “Well… I mean, maybe it’s for the best if you guys… take a break from it all - after all, you’ll be moving halfway across the prefecture, and then you’ve got fall tryouts and you’ll be on a professional team - we all know you will, and-”

“That’s not…” Ushijima closes his eyes for a moment, before mumbling: “That wasn’t supposed to matter.”

“How could that not matter?”

“We knew Oikawa would be moving to Argentina, we knew people would be getting jobs and leaving - you are leaving. But that… I didn’t think… I didn’t think…”

Tendou lifts a hand up slowly, to gently rub between his shoulder blades, finding himself, for once, at a loss for what to say. 

“Can you explain to me what happened?” Ushijima says, a little more earnestly, looking over to him. It puts him on the spot, but Tendou shifts closer slightly, shrugging. 

“It depends on what you don’t understand. I can’t answer for why people are making these choices, but-”

“Were you lying, about being able to read minds?”

Tendou freezes. He didn’t pick making it up, or playing a game, he didn’t even suggest it was some complex social rule he didn’t understand. He chose to use the word lying.

Tendou doesn’t know what to do, so he doesn’t really answer. He just shrugs, and mumbles: “I don’t know, ‘tosh, some things are hard to describe-”

“That’s not good enough.”

Tendou stills his hand, wondering if he should withdraw from the contact, wondering if this were the end of everything, if this was the moment he feared when he ceased to be an interesting anomaly and overstepped into absurd distraction. What could he tell him? Yes, I was actually psychic for a bit, I don’t know why it’s gone now. I think I’m a monster, I am a monster. I think it’s all real, and you’re probably going to look at me like you’ve never seen me before.

“What do you mean?” Tendou manages to ask eventually. 

“You know the answer. You know if you were lying, if it were all just guesswork. Just tell me.”

“Why… why does it matter-”

“Because I don’t understand why I’m losing my friends. And the only thing that makes sense - the only reason why our relationships would have been so fragile, is if they were all playing some elaborate hoax and I was the idiot who thought we were friends. So tell me you were lying.” 

Tendou hates the way Ushijima’s voice rises, he hates the pitched sort of hysteria that almost manages to escape him, a single thread worn down on an otherwise perfectly woven disposition. He hates the way he sees his eyes beginning to shine, the longer Tendou stays silent, the longer he withheld information. 

“I wasn’t lying,” Tendou says, as softly as he can.

“Then why would it have stopped?”

“What do you mean?”

“If you are psychic, and as Oikawa says, it is due to genetics from your ancestry, that is not something that goes away. If you are not lying then… you must be wrong about it going away. And I still do not understand why everyone is acting like this.”

“I don’t know what to tell you,” Tendou replies, shrugging. “It’s just… gone. Something… Something happened that night, I don’t know, but…” he shakes his head. “It’s probably for the best, anyway, right?”

Ushijima cocks his head to the side. 

“That I’m not psychic,” Tendou explains, after a second. “That I’m not a monster. I’d rather be human, if we’re being honest-” and he reaches out to take Ushijima’s hand, squeezing gently. “It’s less complicated, we can stay together, and-”

“I am not afraid of complicated things,” Ushijima says, frowning slightly. “And to have it on record, my affection for you has no clause attached, for anything.” 

Tendou blinked, and now it’s his turn to feel his eyes watering hot. 

“Even if I am the progeny of a cannibalistic, violent monster? Even if I were a monster? If I were contrary to every rational thing you could understand?”

Ushijima blinks at him, silent for a moment before Tendou was graced by one of those rare, soft smiles of his, and Ushijima has leaned forward to kiss him, gentle and sweet and steeped in an adoration Tendou did not think anyone was capable of holding for a monster. 

What a silly question. 

I love him so much.

 

---

 

“You know, I thought you would have been more excited about graduating,” Akaashi comments, from where he’s standing in the middle of the room, tilted forward just slightly to where Bokuto has decided to curl up under his desk. “I admit, this is odd even for you.”

“Oikawa said he’s quitting the channel,” Bokuto mumbles, face pressed into the wall. “I don’t know what to do. I was having a lot of fun with them.”

“That… is a bummer,” Akaashi agrees, running his hands together. “But… don’t you have… tryouts to prepare for? I know you got offers from a few teams but you still have to show up and prove you can perform, so…”

“It’s just not fair.”

“No, no, it isn’t you’re right… but you… your passion has been volleyball, your whole life, why now… Aren’t you at least a little excited to get on with your future, fulfill your dreams?”

Bokuto just sighs again. “Yeah, I guess I am,” he mutters, closing his eyes. “I guess… I just… I hate letting everyone down. We have fans. Lots of fans. And they’re all messaging me, like… Bo, tell us what’s happening next, where’s the next video, what’s going on, why’s everyone gone silent… and I just… I hate letting people down like this. And I feel like it’s my fault.”

Akaashi slowly moves across the room, to fold his legs under him and take a seat on the floor. 

“None of this is your fault.”

“It kinda is. If I’d done as told and not told Oikawa what had happened, he’d probably still be talking to us.”

“Which… I’m actually still hazy on the details of-”

“I can’t tell you!” Bokuto wailed. “Kuroo explicitly told me you count as people! I don’t want to make things worse…”

“I’m sure nobody’s blaming you,” Akaashi says, softly. 

“Well who knows! Nobody’s talking, Ushijima’s in the middle of moving, Oikawa’s flat out ghosting everyone now, Daichi went silent…”

 

---

 

Kenma’s phone buzzes, for the ten thousandth time, and he warily checks the notification. 

Oh - Akaashi?

“Kuroo,” he calls, after a second, glancing behind him to where Kuroo was laying with his face pressed into the bed. 

Kuroo doesn’t reply. 

“...Kuroo?”

“...what?”

“Akaashi asked if you would be able to call Bokuto, he’s in a doom spiral, apparently. He thinks you can snap him out of it.”

Kuroo pushes himself up on his elbows to look over at him, face flushed and hair messed far more than usual, looking pouty and irritated. 

“What am I gonna do about it? I don’t know anything - and fucking Daichi is being a bitch and won’t even text me back-”

“Well, his convocation was… now, so give him some time,” Kenma says. 

“Oh… well, now I look like the bitch, I shouldn’t have sent him so many messages. Did you know that Ushijima is leaving the city? Yeah, apparently his mom is like… an hour and a half away from his school, so he’s not even, like-” Kuroo just thrashes his arms about. 

“Yeah, totally,” Kenma tries, frowning, before saying: “So can you call Bokuto? And try and get on the same page as everyone else, the fans are rabid, I need to tell them something.”

“Well you can’t tell them the truth!” Kuroo says, but he’s sitting up properly now and looking for his phone. 

“I’m well aware of that! But talk to him, please- You need to decide if Oikawa leaving is a dealbreaker for the rest of you.”

“What?”

“Well, everyone’s acting like it’s the end of the world,” Kenma says. “But Oikawa is just one of you. I’m not gonna say you have to stick around, but… maybe this is the right time to decide, properly, if you even… care about this.”

Kuroo is quiet, staring at his phone for a second before mumbling:

“I think I do. I know we all just… fell into it, I know it wasn’t what anyone was planning, but I think I really do care about it. Us, this.”

“Good,” Kenma says. “Then if nothing else, me and you can keep the fort down. But you need to call -”

Kenma’s phone buzzes. He checks the message quickly-

“-Bokuto, and then also call Ushijima, Tendou says they are not having a good time about it.”

“...okay, okay, I’ll… okay-”

 

---

 

“Ladies and gentlemen, friends and family, Teachers, and Professors and all esteemed guests that may have come, it is with great joy that I am given the privilege of speaking at this milestone occasion,” Oikawa says, standing in front of a small microphone, feeling little and inadequate but so used to the spotlights and the hushed attention that he’s able to speak based on instinct alone. He didn’t write a speech, he didn’t need to. He can’t see anyone’s face, but he knows they’re watching. 

They barely know who he is. 

They think they do, but-

“Those of you who know me will know that this school means the world to me, and the chance to be honoured by all of you and given the privilege of speaking on your behalf is something I could not cherish more, but for those of you who are not as familiar with me, let me introduce myself. My name is-”

 

---

 

“-Sawamura Daichi, and for three years, I have worked beside all of you here today towards the same goal - Graduation. But it’s only in hindsight that you can see where that work was taking you. Beyond graduation, beyond an A on a test or a gold star sticker from Mrs. Minato, what was all the work for?”

Daichi has never been nervous speaking in front of crowds, but now, less so than ever. 

He feels numb, actually, like his whole body has shut down. The lights in his eyes are blinding, words in his head swirling around and he’s terrified he’s going to slip up and say something he doesn’t mean. 

He can’t see any of his friends in the crowd - well, he can’t really see the crowd. 

He’s not used to looking out into harsh, blinding darkness and not at least seeing something.

“For most of you, this will be a fun speech, for the rest of you who already know me, I’m sorry, I am going to start talking about-”

 

---

 

“-volleyball again. I know, I know, most of you are tired of hearing me talk about how much I adore the game, but if you ask me to speak about the lessons I’ve learned growing up in these halls, or the most memorable moments, it’s going to come from there. The support this school showed for our team, for our people… was genuinely inspirational. Game after game, we pulled together not just on the court or behind the scenes, but publically, and with pride, over who we are and what we represented. I learned pride, going to school here, being a part of this student body taught me to be proud of who I was and what I could accomplish regardless of what that was, and that is something I cannot ever repay to the students and staff at this wonderful school. It also taught me-”

 

---

 

“-that you cannot go far without going together. Our school motto is Fly. It is printed across our banners, and above the facility room, and in the front lobby, and… I always… wondered how that was applicable to some of the other sports teams, but it was always an apt descriptor of the game that I was playing, it was emboldening and inspirational and confident. Fly. We were not able to fly, for the longest time, people mocked us, and called us names and told us that we couldn’t do it, and whether it was in basketball or soccer or fine arts, the students of this graduating class have been fiercely defensive of our school and part of the reason I stand before you today is due to my accolades as the captain of a team that had the privilege of going to nationals. But I didn’t go alone. I didn’t have nearly the power, or the drive, or the skill to do that alone. I had a team filled with talented, passionate individuals, I had friends that stood beside me and held me up, I had… a vice-captain that never waved in his belief in me, not even once. I had teachers that saw potential where the outside world saw hopelessness, and I had a coach that taught me not only that to fly you need to keep your eyes up, at the sky, and ahead of you, but that… it really doesn’t matter how good friends you are with him, he is not going to discount you at his store. Really-”

He pauses, because there is a ripple of laughter that rolls through the crowd, and it’s when Daichi takes a breath to chuckle himself, and it’s in doing this that he realizes he’s crying. 

“So it’s an honour, and I say that from the bottom of my heart, to be given the privilege of representing you today and speaking to you, because I have loved every minute of my time here. I have loved every mistake, every horrible math class, every… unmentionable event that I work hard to repress and every laugh, every spilled drink, every spike taken to the face, it is okay, Asahi, it’s been two years, you can stop apologizing - I’ve loved every one of you. And I know that if you’ve had half the experience that I’ve had, each and every one of you is going to fly off into the great new world and be something magnificent.”

 

---

 

“So let us celebrate this day,” Oikawa says, voice cracking. “Let us take a minute to indulge in our victory, in our future. We have made it through to the other side and charge onwards to glory like only we know how to do, and though we might not have made every mark we hoped to make before we leave this school, I know without a doubt that the legacy we carve into the future will more than make up for whatever mistakes we’d made before. To us-”

And although it is against typical protocol, the roar goes up from the crowd. 

“To us!”

Oikawa smiles. Some part of him, maybe, wishes he could stay in high school forever. How lovely that would be, to be this person forever. 

“To us,” Oikawa echoes. “I believe in all of you. So don’t let this school down.”

 

---

 

The sun hasn’t yet set, but it’s hanging low in the sky now. The air is warm - spring has truly arrived. Daichi files out with the rest of the students and has to find his family. He still feels like he’s shaking, like his body is on the verge of collapse, but he forces himself to look around with relative vigor. 

They see him before he sees them. 

“Daichi! Daichi, here!”

He turns around just in time to greet his mother before she’s wrapping him up in a big hug, almost lifting him off his feet - she’s still a couple inches taller than him, and had no issues showing it in heels. 

“Oh, okay…” he grunts, but accepts the hug and wraps his arms around her.

“Oh, my little baby boy…” she’s cooing, pressing a kiss to his forehead. “All grown up and graduated now… oh, and your speech was amazing, you were amazing, you always are.”

“Thanks…”

“Well, congratulations,” Chiyo says, who mostly just seems annoyed that she's here at all and forced to wear a dress. 

“Thanks,” Daichi replies, before glancing around them. “Dad didn’t make it back?”

His mother gives him a sort of look, clasping her hands together. “Oh, I’m sorry baby. But he sent a message saying his work in Aomori was more complicated than they’d expected, he wasn’t able to come back so soon-”

“Sure,” Daichi says, mostly to spare his mother the headache of trying to justify it. 

“Oh, baby, you know he would have given anything to be here, but his work is-”

“Complicated, I’m sure. Look, I actually really don’t want to talk about it, so let’s just… let’s just go home, okay, and-”

His youngest sister, only about four years old still, shrieks in joy rather suddenly and turns and runs away. 

“Oh-”

“I’ll get-”

Daichi turns around to chase after her, assuming she’d just seen a butterfly or literally anything, the child was easily excitable, but instead is greeted by the fact that was she saw was Sugawara, and she was now making herself his problem. 

Daichi wonders if he can just shoot himself right here. 

But Suga seems happy enough to indulge the little girl, turning around with a gasp of delight, and crouching down to be at eye level with her, too far away for Daichi to hear what he’s saying with the crowd. 

“Oh, she has always been so fond of Suga,” his mother laughs, and Daichi only manages an awkward chuckle in return before he’s following her across the space and towards where Suga was standing with his own parents. 

Suga scoops the little girl up under the arms to lift her as he turned to see where they were, clearly surprised himself by the proximity when he saw them approaching. 

He’s a better actor than Daichi is, all smiles and joy. 

“Ah, the entire clan is here. I was wondering if we were going to need to go on a hunt,” Suga says, as his mother steps forward to take the little girl from him. 

“Oh, I’m sorry about that, so sorry to interrupt, to, just-”

“No, it’s no worry, she’s adorable,” Suga replies, waving a hand. 

Daichi feels a sudden smack on his back, and Sugawara’s rather gruff father has decided to hit him. 

“Eh, congratulations, kid,” Suga’s dad is saying. “You made it out alive.”

Daichi, now without air in his lungs, wonders if he’s trying to falsify that statement. 

“Ah, thanks…” he wheezes.

“Oh, and your speech was incredible, so sweet,” Suga’s mom cuts in. “I didn’t even know you were giving a speech, it was such a nice surprise.” 

Daichi tries to laugh again, as their parents begin immediately swapping comments and congratulations and vague allusions to “oh, remember when-”

He looks across to where Suga is standing, listening politely. 

He’s probably just staring, and after a second Suga moves his attention over to look back at him. 

Suga gives a little nod - a sort of sneak away with me look, before mumbling something to his mother and slipping backwards into the crowd. 

Daichi is much less discrete, and after stammering something about a friend he sees, stumbles around to chase after him, feeling the desperation in his own movements. 

He finds Suga just a little ways away, standing with his hands behind his back, almost as if looking embarrassed. 

“Hi,” Daichi says, ungracefully. “Hello, did you want to talk? Or, if you just want me to shut up and listen, I’ll… do literally anything, just tell me what you want.”

This does succeed in making Suga chuckle, but he just waves it off. “No, no, calm down-”

“I just… it’s… you’ve been ignoring me for a week, I… really… I…”

“I know,” Suga says, followed by: ‘I just… I was so annoyed with you, and… maybe it wasn’t right to want you to feel bad about it, but… anyway, I… I was so mad, and I was thinking it over, and I realized… I realized I made a mistake, in… what I was mad about, so… I owe you exactly one apology, okay?”

Daichi blinked. “No, you don’t - you don’t have to apologize, you had every right to-”

“Just… shush, okay?” Suga laughs, before saying: “I… What… made me mad was the fact that you told me you were planning on moving in with Kuroo, and… I said that it wasn’t fair that you’d reject me and just go with him, but… I… spent a lot of time thinking over that conversation we’d had, at the training camp, and… that was technically wrong. I… sometimes forget that you’re incredibly dense, and I… never actually asked you to be my roommate, and… I… feel really bad about yelling at you for it, since… I should know better than to think you would have picked up on subtext.”

“...alright, mean apology, but, again, you don’t need to, I-”

“I just… I feel bad, if I’m gonna be mad I have to be justified.”

“You are justified-”

“No I’m not, I feel selfish and mean and confused and Oikawa said this thing about your mom being an alien and I don’t know what the fuck that means and I can’t stop thinking about it and I’m tired of being mad at you so just accept my apology and stop telling me that I’m allowed to continue being mad because I don’t want to I want you to ask me to stop.”

Daichi stares at him for a moment, before saying: “Okay, I don’t know what’s going on anymore.”

Suga throws his hands in the air. “See? This is what I was talking about. How could I have assumed you knew that I had asked you to move in with me?”

Daichi looks behind him, before focusing back on him. “Okay, so…? You’re… sorry, you’ve been almost completely ignoring me for seven days, I’m… just… I assumed you didn’t want to talk to me at all.”

“Of course I want to talk to you,” Suga groaned. “I want to talk to you so badly. But more than that, I want you to want to talk to me-”

“I do want to talk to you!”

“Then why didn’t you?”

“I sent you tons of messages!”

“I didn’t want a text, I… wanted you to put the effort in and show up and grovel a bit or something, I don’t know, just… prove that you cared.”

“I will get on my knees right now-”

“No, don’t, it’ll look weird standing in this corner here-”

“Fair enough. Look, Suga, I… I just want to make this right for you. But things are… weird, I’ve said before I know, and I’m… I’m in a bad… I… this isn’t something… look-”

Daichi shuts his eyes, trying to reset his brain. 

“I don’t want you to have the worst version of me,” he says, after a second. “But right now, I’m afraid that’s all I have to offer.”

With his eyes closed it surprises him, but he feels Suga’s cool, dry hand reach out to take his fingers, thumb rubbing gently over his knuckles, in a soothing, circular motion. He opens his eyes slowly, to face him, and there’s a moment, looking at the sad, but genuine, smile across Suga’s face, that a piece of everything else clicks back into place in his brain, and he’s able to take in a breath that reaches all the way down his lungs.

“You’re an idiot if you think that I don’t know when something is weighing on you,” Suga says, after a second. “And it has been for a while. And… you keep saying that you’ll… tell me about it when things are back to normal, but-”

“Things have just been so weird lately, and I don’t want to drag you into it-”

“Please do,” Suga says, cutting him off. “That’s… that’s what I was so mad about, Daichi, I wasn’t mad about you… moving in with Kuroo or… wanting to fuck Oikawa-”

“Okay woah-”

“-I was mad that you’ve been cutting me out of your life, please drag me into it, drag me into your new normal, please-”

“Nothing about this is normal-”

“Yes it is! Oh my god, Daichi, you keep saying that - when things are back to normal, whatever - it’s been months. And there is no such thing as normal abnormality - paranormality, that’s not a thing, that doesn’t exist. If you life has gotten as weird as you keep alluding to, then - sorry, buddy, that’s your new baseline! That’s your new normal! And I want to be a part of your normal, okay? So no more excuses, no more pretending like you’re doing me a favour, if you want me in your life, you have to make that choice now because for my own sanity, I cannot ask again. Tell me what’s going on with you.”

There’s a million different sparking thoughts in his head, so much he thinks he needs to be paying attention to, so much he should ignore or skip. 

A part of him wants to scream and cry and shake Suga and tell him no, no, no, none of this is normal, I don’t want this to be my normal, but he knows that he’s right. 

If the clues and the secrets and the casefiles were evidence enough, if something was wrong with him, if he really was an alien as he was beginning to fear he was, then Suga was right. There was never going to be a time in which he got to return to normalcy - sorry, to the way life was before things changed. 

Suga is staring at him, waiting, pleading with his eyes. Give me a chance. Put me in the game. 

Daichi tightens his grip on his hand. 

“So it started in January,” he says. “Oikawa was hunting down a meteorite in the woods behind my house, and we saw… my dad… is working for the PSIA. Or… with them, at least. He was there in the woods, and he lied, to me, and said he was still in Tokyo when I asked-”

 

---

 

“-So we uncovered this… file, it had my mom’s name on it-”

“With all the other abductees?”

“Presumably. We didn’t actually look through all of them, so it may have been that not all of them were abductions, but… it looked like it.”

“Christ. I cannot believe you snuck into a goddamn office building.”

“It was kinda easy, actually- wait, oh my god, I didn’t even begin to touch on the fucking monster stuff - shit, okay, so Tendou got attacked by… kappas…”

“No, what?”

“I know it’s hard to believe, but… please, just… okay, so-”

“Okay, keep going, say more-”

 

---

 

“So, wait- no, the guess monster is psychic? Like- he’s a- he’s an actual yokai?”

“Well.. half? This old scary yokai guy keeps appearing and speaking in riddles, he’s actually kinda… I hate him, but he’s more helpful than not-”

“Old scary guy?”

“Nari…Naruie…Nar…”

“Nurarihyon?”

“Yes! Wait, how did you do that?”

“You forget how much I lived and breathed this stuff in first year, okay? Wait, holy fuck did you just say you’ve spoken to Nurarihyon?”

“...yes, unpleasantly - wait, shit - I just… I fully skipped over the… my eyes, my fucking eyes, I’ve got this third-eye bullshit going on, and-”

 

---

 

“Anyway, I… it-” Daichi squeezes his eyes shut, before saying: “One of the things that we… came across was this… persistent idea of… fucking… manifestation, or some bullshit. That evil, that the scary things, that they can… strengthen, or… exist only when you look for them, it’s… it’s terrifying. Just… just you knowing about it could put you in danger, if that’s how it works, so-”

“Dai, it’s okay,” Suga says, lifting a hand up to quiet him. “It’s fine, I’m sure I’ll be okay.”

“I just… So much has been going on, and… now that Oikawa’s quit-”

“Oikawa’s quit?”

“He’s quit, and… he was our source of… of everything. He was the epicenter of it all, and his… story didn’t have a happy ending, but… I mean… my dad knows… what I was doing and I’m terrified about what he’s going to do, and… and we have to… to live our lives, also? Somehow? And I don’t know who to-”

Suga puts a hand over his mouth. “Stop talking.”

Daichi has no choice but to stop talking. 

Suga takes his hand off his mouth. “Why don’t you just ask?”

“Ask? Ask what to who?”

“Ask your dad?”

“I… okay, maybe we need to go back to the beginning, my dad is lying about his job and covering up an alien conspiracy of pregnant teens being abducted and possibly alien children-”

“Wait, run it by me again, why do you think you’re an alien again?”

“Oh, did I not make that clear? My mother was abducted while pregnant with me - probably - my medical records are sealed, and I can see things nobody else can see. Well, nobody else except for occasionally Tendou, which at this point, is not comforting. Oh, also, I’m immune to mind reading, fun fact about your old pal there… can’t… can’t get mind-read because of the alien superpowers…”

“You sound… exhausted.”

Daichi whines, leaning forward to hang his head. “I don’t think I’ve slept more than an hour a night in like two weeks.”

“Dude! You need to get some rest-”

“How? How am I supposed to do that? Everything is horrible and life is evil now.”

“...right, okay, solid, but- I mean… What do you want? Like do you just want the truth, or… do you want to reveal the conspiracy to the world, or-”

I kinda just want to go back to having fun with my friends.

“I’d… I just need to know who or - what I am, now. And… based on the conversation Nurarihyon has with Tendou, we need to know if we’re in any kind of danger because of who or what I am.”

Suga nods, thinking this over for a moment before saying: “Alright, so… you don’t wanna ask your parents in case they… I don’t know, kill you, I guess, still not clear on your concerns there, but just… you were the baby of a teen girl who started crying alien mid-trimester. Go back to Okinawa. Ask what happened.”

“...What?”

“I mean, small town scandal, your grandparents are still alive, right-?”

“I think?”

“Just go ask. Surely if anyone knows what was up with little baby you, it’ll be the mother of the girl giving birth, right?”

“Oh my god,” Daichi said. 

“Yeah, you’re a little embarrassed you didn’t think about that, right?”

“Don’t call me out like that.”

And Suga laughs in response, a genuine, rolling sound that makes his stomach flutter and head feel light, and he can’t help but lose his train of thought in the sound. 

 

---

 

They celebrate all evening, just him and Iwaizumi and Saku and Takeru. Oikawa’s mother spends a considerable amount of time trying to get his attention through his phone, but he’s long since learned to ignore that. They play games and he loses at Jenga over and over and over again. 

The night wears on. 

“Oh, did you hear?” Saku says, once they’re in the kitchen alone, and Iwaizumi is chasing Takeru around like a monster to entertain him. 

Oikawa pours himself a drink from the fridge, glancing over to her. “Hear what?”

“There was a supposed abduction in Aomori a day ago,” she says. “Figured you’d be all over that.” 

Oikawa sighs. “Not interested. What is interesting is how challenging it is to find an apartment that doesn’t make me concerned for my physical safety and is also something I can afford. At this rate it looks like moving won’t even be an option.”

“Okay, so… you are going to try and redirect me to a conversation about how challenging it is to make rent?”

“Uh…”

This makes Saku laugh, and she reaches a hand up to mess with his hair. “You’re so stupid. Go make sure Takeru isn’t biting Iwaizumi too hard, okay?”

“Oh, he can take it, don’t worry,” Oikawa replies, which earns him a smack. 

But he does as asked, and leaves her in the kitchen, but pauses just outside the little, sparse living room. He watches Iwaizumi pretend to not be strong enough to just lift Takeru up as they roll around on the floor a bit, before his fingers twitch, and he almost reflexively reaches for his phone. 

Someone was abducted. Recently.

He really wants to text Daichi about it. 

It’s almost an instinct, to immediately leap to grab him and run off to the next thing, the next paranormal adventure. He wants to so badly. 

But I quit. This is why I quit, because I want to move on. Houses. Renting. Planes. Packing. That’s what matters to me. 

I wonder if the person abducted was a teen girl?

No, stop it. 

Maybe it’s just a hoax, but…

He forces himself to keep his phone in his pocket and head over to sit on the couch and watch Takeru bite Iwaizumi. 

It didn’t matter. He was not interested. 

Chapter 28: Naha, Okinawa

“Well it’s not like we thought raising a baby was going to be easy.”

“I know, but he just doesn’t stop crying. Is he is hungry? In pain? Nothing I do works.”

“Maybe he’s just tired-”

“Well he can’t seem to sleep longer than twenty seconds at a time, it’s a miracle he’s able to keep his eyes open!” 

“Well maybe we should take him back to Oksana, she said he might be difficult to raise-”

“I don’t want that woman anywhere near my baby, you know what she’ll do to him-”

“Help him? Explain what the hell is going on? Maybe fix him?”

“Please, you know as well as I do there’s no damn explanation, and there’s no fixing what happened! We’re stuck with this, with him, as he is-”

Daichi knows his parents don’t like it when he cries. It’s one of the only things he knows. They shush and pat his back and hold him and beg, and beg, and beg, please, please, please, stop crying, but he doesn’t know what else to do. 

The world swirls around in shades of grey and black and the light that cuts through it is jarring sharp and painful to look at - and through it, dragging it’s bony claws, face twisted into a malicious grin, multiple rows of teeth splitting back down it’s mouth, something moves towards him, something peers down into his cradle with bugged eyes, and his parents are not paying attention, they are never paying attention, and he doesn’t know what else to do but cry.

So he cries, and they come running, and they pick him up and they fight with each other and they pat him on the back and beg him to stop crying but they do not acknowledge the monster that skitters out and away from his cradle, that claws its way up the corner of the room, to cling in the corner and twist it’s head around backwards and watch him from above. 

He doesn’t understand why they don’t care about it. 

He’s beginning to think it’s not real at all. 

His mother begs him to stop crying. 

Daichi doesn’t often remember his nightmares when he wakes up. His worst night terrors, the hallucinatory, horrible screaming fits that wake everyone else up in the house, those don’t stick in his mind. 

But he wakes up this time to the sound of his alarm, six am, trilling in his ear, and he remembers the nightmare. He remembers being prone, being little, he remembers the way that thing had looked down at him. Nightmares can be horrid in their simplicity, just the image of the contorted not-yet-human face, cocking to the side and peering down at him from where it perches on the tall bed rail is enough to keep him shaking for a minute, thanking the heavens that the alarm had gone off and gotten him out of that situation. 

He pushes himself up slowly, taking a cautious glance around the bedroom. 

He feels like he remembers someone mentioning that Oksana name in his dream, but… it could have been his father or his grandfather or himself or the dog, his brain won’t let him hear it again, clearly. Maybe he was just making it up - and either way, it was probably just because he was stressed about not yet having any answers for what her roll even was in all this. It probably didn’t mean anything. 

There’s nothing in his room. Maybe it’s because his brain knows it's morning now, and the dark isn’t so scary. Even if it still seems to swirl in patchwork grays and blacks, the moonlight from the windows dancing like needles across the bed and floor where it could reach. 

It’s just normal. 

He swings his feet over the edge of the bed, pressing his soles down onto the cold floor and hesitating for a moment, a vision of the things that might be lurking under his bed frame that could reach out and grab him. 

He hesitates longer than he cares to admit, before pushing himself to stand up and dropping down onto his knees, tilting his head down to press his cheek to the floor and peer under his bed. His eyes flick up, the down the length of the shadows - they’re different from the shadows dappling his wall and across the ceiling, the blackness under here is a different colour, though he reflexively scolds himself for even thinking that. 

He pushes himself up to his feet again, once the moment of childish concern has been comforted. Nothing to worry about, nothing is there. No reason to freak out if he didn’t have to. 

Getting dressed is quick and easy, he’d packed his bag the night before, and he spends a bit of time adjusting his jacket and looking in the mirror. It might just be his eyes playing tricks on him, but he was sure he looked older than he had just a few months ago. 

He rubs at the darkness under his eye and promises himself that he’d sleep better once he was out of this house, even if only temporarily. Then he slips from his bedroom and heads down the stairs on light feet, stopping in the kitchen just briefly to scribble a note for his mother in the morning, and then he was out the door. 

 

---

 

It only takes a second after he sends the text before the front door of Suga’s house is opening, and he comes skipping out, clearly buzzing with excitement but trying to remain appropriately chill for the early morning atmosphere. 

“Ready to go?” Daichi says, as he turns to start heading down the sidewalk, letting Suga catch up to walk beside him. 

“Ready to go?” Suga echoes back, laughing as he adjusts his bag over his shoulder. “I could hardly sleep last night, I was so ready to go!”

Daichi chuckled, bumping him with his shoulder as they made their way towards the bus stop - which would take them to a train stop, which would take them to an airport, which would take them to Okinawa. 

“You’re really that excited?”

“Of course I am!” Suga says. “First off, we’re gonna get to visit Okinawa in the Spring, I checked the weather, it looks so nice, and then secondly, I’m going to get to meet some of your elusive family for the first time ever which is super cool, and even better is that you-” and here he starts poking Daichi’s arm. “-invited me along yourself and I didn’t even have to ask you to do it. So I’m feeling pretty good.”

“You’re not worried?” 

“Worried?”

“About what we might find?”

Suga tilts his head to the side, before shifting his bag over to his opposite shoulder, so he could reach forward and loop both his arms around Daichi’s. “I mean… no…?”

He slows to a stop at the bus stop, their first stop, and turns to face him. 

“You… you don’t believe me, do you? You don’t believe any of it.”

Suga pouts, looking a little guilty for a moment before saying: “It’s more complicated than that.”

“Is it?”

“Yes,” he insists. “I made a big fuss about wanting to be let into your life, so I am charging forward now with faith that you are not as stupid as people make you out to be, and wouldn’t be doing all this if there wasn’t a reason for it. I trust you, ” he says. “I believe you. But… I dunno. While I think you might find something, and maybe something unpleasant, I… I don’t see a solid reason to believe it’s gonna… be aliens.”

Daichi nods slightly, sighing and letting his breath cloud up the morning air before turning away to watch down the street, where the bus should be coming from. 

“I guess I can’t blame you for that,” he says. “You weren’t there for everything else.”

“I’m also not an innate believer in these things,” Suga replies. “I love it, I love folklore, I love ghost stories, but… never because I thought it was real.”

Daichi is quiet for a second, before saying: “If it were, would it change anything?” 

“What do you mean?” 

He wiggles his arm, the one Suga is still holding, and in response Suga grows a little bashful, shrugging and looking down to his feet. 

“Oh, I don’t know…” Suga mumbles. “It’s abstract, and hard to think of realistically. I also don’t even know what…” and here Suga shakes Daichi’s arm, “is. Would it change things for you?”

“What do you mean?”

“If you were right, about everything, would you change?”

“I’d be a fucking alien, I wouldn’t have a choice.”

This makes Suga frown, before he says: “No, I mean… would it change what… you want from life? Would it change what makes you happy? Like… if you are, you would have always been, so… you should still be you, right? Unless it… somehow knowing made it different, for you.”

“If you found out, tomorrow, that you were an alien, would it not change things for you?” 

“No,” Suga replies. “If you found out I was an alien, would it change things for you?” 

“No.”

Suga smiles, and Daichi is distracted enough by it, that when the lights of the bus are suddenly cutting through the early morning darkness, he’s startled by it. 

 

---

 

The plane touched down in Naha just before midday. Even in the spring, the sun has well past started heating the earth and with clear skies and a warm breeze, Daichi has to start agreeing with Suga that coming down here post-graduation probably should have been the highlight of his life. 

The airport is busy with tourists, but they navigate quiet easily through the lines and manage to make their way out and into the city. Daichi is already pulling out his phone, trying to pull up a map - Sugawara is just looking around with wide, excited eyes as they leave the airport behind them and track down a shuttle stop to get into the city. 

“Not that I don’t love cow-shit-farm-land we grew up in, but your parents did you dirty, man,” Suga says, following Daichi up the step into the shuttle. They stand close together and pushed aside by a gaggle of tourists, all excitedly pointing and talking and shouting.

“Well I wouldn’t have grown up-” and Daichi just waves a hand vaguely around. 

“I’m incredibly aware you wouldn’t have lived in an airport.” 

“No, I mean - my parents grew up in Chatan, it’s just a little bit north of here. My dad’s parents moved to Naha sometime ago - I wasn’t able to get reliable information on where my grandparents are at on my mom’s side.”

“Wait, wait- wait-” Suga says, putting a hand out to cover Daichi’s phone, to force him to look up. “You don’t know where your grandparents live?”

“No, I don’t think I’ve been back here since, like, elementary school,” he replies. “And I’ve never even met my mom’s parents, she doesn’t talk about them.”

“...huh…” is all Suga has to offer, and he’s stopped from saying anything else when one of the other tourists, riding the little bus, reaches over to tap his arm to get his attention, saying something loud and in English, in an accent he is not familiar with. 

Suga stares down at her, before looking at Daichi, and then back to her. 

“Please don’t do this,” he says, eventually. The woman repeats whatever she’s trying to say louder, and still in English. 

“I’m begging you,” Suga replies. “I’m begging you not to do this.”

The woman repeats her question a third time, sounding annoyed now. 

“I’m not from here either, lady, I couldn’t help you even if I knew what the fuck you were saying,” Suga says, voice rising, and Daichi steps in to pull him away from the interaction before he made this a scene. 

“Okay, she’s just… it’s not worth it,” Daichi says. 

“I got an A in English,” Suga says defensively. “It’s her fault I can’t understand her.”

“...okay.”

 

---

 

Freed from the shuttle bus things stop being quite so crowded and annoying, and Suga goes back to being in a good mood, stretching his arms up and skipping ahead a few steps as Daichi awkwardly points out directions as they go. They take a city bus across town, their first stop being the little motel he had booked for them, a two-night stay that, hopefully, will end up being enough. Thankfully, although evidence suggests there’s still quite a market for tourism this time of year, it’s not quite in peak season yet and there was still relatively easy booking. 

They drop their stuff - though admittedly they’re packing lightly, and Suga flopped down onto the bed, staring up at the ceiling. 

“Tired?” Daichi teases, eyeing him lying there on the bed and trying not think about how badly he wanted to join him. 

“Not at all,” Suga says. “Just enjoying the amenities. We’ve never taken an overnight trip together.”

“We absolutely have, that is a flat out lie.”

“Let me rephrase that, we’ve never taken an overnight trip together that is both unsupervised, and doesn’t include multiple fourteen year olds. Or Asahi.”

“Ah. That’s true, we’ve never gone just the two of us.”

Suga pushes himself to sit up, looking across the room at him, before slowly looking around the room, taking it all in. 

“You booked a double,” he comments. 

“That would be what you do when there are two people.” 

“You didn’t have to do that.”

Daichi freezes, fingers tapping in the air awkwardly. “Oh?” he manages to get out eventually. “I didn’t want to make you uncomfortable, I honestly didn’t know that you’d have been okay with that, you know, I just booked what I knew would be fine, I didn’t wanna risk being presumptive, or-”

“Alright, your panic is only cute for the first ten seconds,” Suga chuckles. “Relax.”

“You make it very hard to relax.”

“I’ll take it as a compliment,” Sugawara decides, before getting to his feet. “Now come on, I wanna track down your weirdly illusive family so that I can convince you tomorrow to take me to a beach.”

Daichi laughs, nodding slightly and still trying to recover, before they are heading out the door again. 

His phone’s map program is a damn godsend, so they make quick work of navigating through the streets and towards a more residential looking area. They don’t bother catching a bus, since it doesn’t seem like it’s that long of a walk, and the sun is nice and warm anyway. 

Daichi, of course, is feeling rather nervous, and on top of it, he’s beginning to feel wave after wave after wave of guilt, associated most strongly with the fact that every few minutes his brain screams at him about how weird it is that Oikawa isn’t in on what’s going on. He’d sent him a text, before he’d left, saying that he was going to Okinawa has they’d originally planned to do together, and then he’d immediately felt bad about the tone of his text so he’d followed it up with something weirdly formal regarding hoping he’s doing well, and then he felt weird about that so he’d turned his phone off for an hour and tried to ignore it. 

Oikawa wasn’t ignoring him anymore, not the way he was before, but the singular thumbs-up sent in response had hurt almost as much. 

Sugawara wants to have a little bit of fun, go explore a beach nearby, or hang out and try some of the local restaurants - he’s not really taking this seriously. Daichi wants, very much so, for Suga to be right. For his grandparents to have just a normal explanation that makes everything make sense, so that he can take tomorrow and go lounge on a beach and enjoy the sun and the freedom and Suga.  

But he also has Oikawa’s voice in his head, reminding him that Shima Three is, supposedly, on this island as well. That his father’s rendezvous tended to end up here, that he wasn’t going to visit his parents, not that the tracking device had seen, but was still spending considerable amounts of time in and around here. 

There’s something here, there’s something on this island, and he has no fucking idea where to start looking for it. 

“This is it,” he says, coming to a stop. Suga turns back around, having skipped along past the address because of a cat he was trying to chase down. (Unsuccessfully - it disappears into a yard.)

“Oh, here?”

“Here.”

The building is low and relatively unassuming. It looks… normal. It is the correct address, he triple checks. 

“So…” Suga starts, waving a hand. 

“So… yeah, uh… onwards,” Daichi manages to get out, sucking in a breath before heading up the narrow driveway and hoping the stone step that leads to the front door. 

It occurs to him in a moment of reflection that this day was going to be very odd for his grandparents whether or not he was an alien baby. He, maybe, should have called ahead. 

He knocks on the door. 

It takes a little bit, until he hears the sound of the door unlatching, and a woman is swinging open the front door, and-

She jumps, almost as if the people on the porch were shockingly horrific to her, before she seems to calm down, as if recognizing them. Then she begins to laugh, and apologize, and wave a hand, and Daichi is speechless for a minute, before he says:

“Uhm… hi, you probably don’t-”

“You must be my grandson, is that right?” she interrupts, still looking amused. 

He takes a good look at her now - he’s taller than she is, though not by too much. She’s not old, that’s for sure - he remembers that she’s only in her fifties, not at all the picture of a grandmother one would assume. She’s well put together, very orderly - she looks like him, that’s for sure, or, he supposed, she looked like his dad. 

“How’d… how’d you know?” he says, after a second. 

“You look… exactly like he did, at your age,” she says, smiling a little more. “I’d recognize that face anywhere - you, though-” and here she’s turned her attention to Suga, standing just half a step behind him as politely as he could. “There’s no way you’re one of mine, where’ve you come from?”

This turn of phrase seems to baffle Suga, and so Daichi cuts in with:

“He’s a friend, who came with me, I-”

“Are you parents here?”

“No, um… that’s actually what I wanted to talk to you about-”

“Rion didn’t get himself into some kind of trouble, did he?” she says, pointedly. 

“...ah, uhm… oh…” Daichi finds himself unable to answer that question. “Not that I know of - I actually… can we come in? I was hoping to ask you a few questions…”

“Ah, of course, of course,” she says, waving a hand and stepping aside. “Come on in, you’re always welcome. I’m going to go put some tea on, okay? You guys make yourself comfortable-”

And without much more, she’s turned and disappeared into the house. 

He glances at Suga, who’s already looking back at him. 

“She seems nice,” Suga says. 

“I’m aware,” Daichi replies, before setting his shoes to the side and heading through the house. They’re both just standing awkwardly in a living room when she reappears, waving at them aggressively. 

“Sit!” she says. “Sit down, sit!” 

“Ah- okay, sorry,” Daichi says, and both him and Suga hurry to comply and thump down into the soft couch. 

“Oh! I have cookies, one second-”

And then she’s gone again. 

Suga leans over to him, mumbling: “Based on your alien conspiracies I assumed she was more likely to shoot us on sight then welcome us in.”

“Me too…”

While she’s gone, he hears a tea kettle whistle, and it’s several more minutes before his grandmother has reappeared, handing them both little cups of tea, and putting out a plate of cookies. Daichi does really want to eat one, but he feels weird about it, so he doesn’t. 

“So, tell me, what’s brought you all the way down to Okinawa? Finally get sick of being away from home?” 

“Ah, uhm… well, I’m… actually just a little… funny you bring that up-” Daichi tries, fumbling over his words. “I was actually… hoping to pick your brain about… uhm… what life was like, while my parents lived here. They don’t like to talk about it, but…”

This seems to confuse her, and she tilts her head. “What do you mean?”

“Uhm… like… so-”

“What your eloquent grandson is trying to explain is that we got sent on an absolutely wild goosechase,” Suga says, cutting in and saving his life as he leans forward. “So it started a few months ago, when Daichi had to go to the hospital, and we found out his medical records are sealed, and then when he asked his mom she didn’t give him an answer, and his dad is always in Tokyo, and was kinda dodgy - anyway, it’s been driving us crazy, but we have a bet going that he’s actually adopted from some insane rich couple that had to get rid of their baby - sorry, we is the rest of our school friends - anyway, we’re sorry to both-”

“What are you talking about?” the woman cuts in. “Daichi certainly wasn’t adopted-”

“Well, it was just like… a joke we had-”

“It’s not very funny,” she replies, sounding a little more annoyed. “Trust me, Himari carried that boy and suffered for it, it probably would have been better for everyone if he had been adopted.”

“...okay,” Daichi says, followed by: “Any… specific reason for that, like… was it just… medically really rough, or-”

“Any specific reason?” his grandmother scoffs. “She was sixteen, maybe that was why, she was a little girl who didn’t know what she was doing.”

“...okay, I… sorry-”

“I know things are a little bit different nowadays, but at the time it was a proper scandal. Life was hell for those two kids for a while there, the fact that Himari even got her highschool degree is a miracle. They tried to stick around here, but I think between the gossip and the judgment and her family being a right terror on them, it’s no wonder they packed up and left. And it’s no wonder they don’t talk about it.”

Daichi opens his mouth, but nothing comes out. 

“Sorry, I don’t mean to go off like that,” she continues, sighing. “It just kills me to think of how everything went down. In a lot of ways, actually, you were probably the best thing that happened to Rion, he was a hot mess before you showed up. Your mother probably could have been prime minister, but she chose to marry him, so… I guess I should thank her at some point…”

“So there was nothing… weird, or…”

“Honey, the whole thing was weird. Himari’s parents kicked her out, your grandfather probably would have killed Rion if I hadn’t convinced him to stand down, the whole town turned on them… We really, really tried to make it work here, but… between money and peer pressure and everything else… Rion got that job offer in Tokyo and there was really no option. And look at you now! You’re doing fantastic, your parents did great, you’re a very handsome young man, with a lot going for you, it turned out fine in the end…”

“I… they had never mentioned it was that hard for them.”

“Maybe they didn’t think you needed to know,” she says, shrugging. “I try and reach out to Rion every once in a while, but he… he doesn’t really want to talk to us, and I don’t think your grandfather ever came around enough to start repairing that relationship… I’m really sorry you came all this way hoping-”

“Hang on,” Suga cuts in. “Why are his medical records sealed, then?”

“I’m sorry?”

“Daichi’s medical records - apparently hospitals need special approval to access his medical history, do you really not know what that’s about?”

“I… I didn’t even know hospitals could do that,” his grandmother says. “I… you think this happened when you were a baby?”

“It must have,” Daichi says. “I’ve been really… really healthy my whole life, I don’t… I’ve only been to the hospital a handful of times, if at all, and I don’t remember anything that would  have been cause for alarm, like… no weird diseases, or unusual conditions, so… we thought…”

“Huh…” she says, leaning forward to lean on a hand as she looked at him. “Well… maybe it’s just because of Rion’s fancy job? Working for the government and all that, maybe you qualify as some kinda special person of interest. You know, like those embassy people, that have special privileges?”

“...So you know Rion’s working for the government?” Daichi says, because he’s pretty sure that’s not the cover story. 

“I am incredibly aware of it,” she laughs. “Funniest thing I’d ever heard - Rion was so anti-establishment before you came along, spent most of his time trying to tear down the military bases by hand, probably would have if he’d had the time. Then he gets a baby and suddenly he’s off to the city, just like that. Only respectable choice he’d ever made, if we’re being honest.”

“You don’t… speak highly of him,” Suga says. “Every time I’ve met him he seems lovely.”

“I’m sure age has assisted in that. The kid I was trying to raise seemed sent from hell to give me an aneurysm.”

“Oh…” 

“But enough about that! My grandson didn’t travel across the country just to hear me yap!” she says, suddenly switching tunes and going back to being happy and friendly. 

Yes I did.

“Tell me about yourself, what are you into, what’s life like now, go on-”

 

---

 

God Almighty, this woman can talk. 

Daichi isn’t even sure what she’s saying at one point. 

“-which is crazy because Yano wasn’t actually supposed to be there at all, but the school district was running a little tight and the last volunteer had had that medical emergency - y’know, the one from ‘94-?”

Suga is staring at her with a glass-eyed look. 

Daichi thinks he’s going to die in this house. 

 

---

 

They get a little bit more information, squeezed out her both painfully challengingly and shockingly easy. 

His parents hadn’t had an easy time of things - Rion had gotten the job just a couple years after he was born - the same time they moved away. So it made sense that was the reason they had moved away. She does, eventually, confess - or maybe just remember - something else, though, once they’ve sat through enough of this spiel of information, which comes in the form of:

“Oh, you know what, you were asking about your birth there, now this isn’t exactly the same, but there was this one weird incident, when your mother was pregnant,” she says, eventually, leaning back in her chair. “Now they didn’t wanna talk about it so much, but she did get… lost in the woods, or… she took a fall - I don’t remember what Rion was blathering on about, but I remember him calling us from the hospital saying she’d been hurt. Now he was a little bit like that with her, when she was pregnant, so… probably him overreacting, but they did keep her a few days. You clearly were fine, though, so was your mother…”

“Huh… they never told you what exactly had happened?”

“Rion was a lot of things, and at the top of that list is independent. I don’t know what happened, but he didn’t want us pushing into his personal affairs - especially after fighting with his father over the whole affair-”

“Speaking of…” Daichi says, starting to get the suspicion that this grandfather might be a little more well informed on what Rion had been up to. “Where is he?”

“Your grandfather?”

“Yeah-”

“Oh, honey, he passed away a couple of years ago, I’m sorry. I thought you knew - we told your dad.”

“...oh,” he says, followed by: “No, I… I guess I didn’t.”

 

---

 

Eventually they manage to leave the house - the sun is setting. 

It still feels like something is here. Shima Three. Or… his mother’s parents, maybe, if he could find them - they disowned her. That’s why they’re not talking to them. 

Is that really it? 

All these moving pieces, spinning widely around his head, he’d wanted it to fit neatly together. But this… this…

He feels a hand on his back. 

Suga doesn’t look quite so happy anymore, but nobody would be after enduring a conversation of that length. Daichi leans into his touch slightly, before hearing Suga say:

“You look like you would have preferred being told you were an alien.”

“It… I don’t know,” he says, before pulling away from him to start heading down the street. Suga follows after him. 

“I mean-”

“It doesn’t answer any of my questions!” he cuts in, before Suga can try and persuade him in any direction. “This is all… meaningless, it’s nonsense, and none of it helps-”

“Daichi, you-”

“No, no, there’s something here, there has to be something in Okinawa, otherwise he wouldn’t keep coming here-”

“Daichi, listen to me-” and Suga’s hand grabs his arm, forcing him to turn around. “This has been a lot this evening, but you can’t… let yourself lose your mind over it. Just… try and calm down, and let’s go back to the motel, we can… get dinner, and just relax, and think over what this means.”

“What this means? This doesn’t mean anything-”

“Yes it does!” Suga says, voice pitching up slightly. “Oh my god, Daichi, yes it does. You want to know why your parents don’t talk about your birth? Don’t talk about where you came from? About home? It’s not a conspiracy they’re just… ashamed, or… traumatized, they’re trying to move on from the fact that their parents clearly turned away from them - I mean, you heard your grandmother, when she wasn’t taking about whoever-from-down-the-street she was practically cursing your father every way she could think of. They just didn’t want you to interact with them. That’s why it was all a big secret.”

“But… But everything else,” he says. “The… the… the Tendou reading minds, and my files being locked, and… and-”

“Tendou is the goddamn guess monster,” Suga says. “He’s good at playing tricks. And your medical history being locked could be suspicious, but it also could just be a technical glitch - didn’t you say the hospital got your history, once they asked? It’s not like it was withheld.”

“But… the… the files, the files in my dad’s drawer- in his office- they were all abductions-”

“They were abduction stories, Daichi,” Suga says, voice cracking. “And the one victim of them you got to interview confirmed that it wasn’t real. We have come across the country to chase down a ghost story and you have to know when to admit that a shadow might just be a shadow.” 

“You haven’t seen what I’ve seen,” Daichi whispers, hating the weakness in his voice as he tries to plead to any part of Sugawara that may be on the fence of the matter. 

Suga just stares back at him, before seeming to deflate, closing his eyes and letting his breath out, both hands lifting up to rub over his face. 

“Dai, if… if you’re really… if you’re really seeing things, you… you have to talk to someone, you have to see a doctor, or-”

“No, no, no, no, it’s not like that-”

“Has anyone else ever corroborated the sightings?”

“W…well, no, but - but… but - oh, oh, oh, Utsukushii, Utsukushii Airi, she knew, she knew about it, and… and she knew I knew, and she talked to me about it, she brought it up - I swear, Suga, when I noticed she had a fucking… a mouth, a mouth on her neck, she mentioned it to me,  she didn’t wait until I had said it and just agree, that… yes, yes, yes, I swear, she also saw it, she knew - that has to count, that has to count for something, please-”

And although Daichi expects to be met with a brick wall, he’s surprised by the conflict that crosses Suga’s face, before the other gives a slight nod. 

“Okay,” he says. “You’re right, if… if someone else saw… if that is what happened, then… that means that it’s… at least partially real, whatever it is, so-”

“So we have to keep hunting,” Daichi replies, moving closer to him. “We keep looking - something is here in Okinawa, and we can find it-”

“Of course, of course we can,” Suga agrees. “But… not tonight, okay? You’re… clearly way too amped up right now.”

“No, I feel great.”

“I’m sure you do. But… let’s go back to the motel, let’s try and relax for the evening, get some proper rest, and then… it’s a fresh start tomorrow, we can look at it when we’ve settled down a bit. Sound good?” 

Daichi feels the next breath in his lungs like a great sweeping relief, nodding quickly and submitting to his impulses to grab Suga by the arms and pull him into a tight hug. Suga makes a soft noise, before chuckling softly and relaxing into him. He feels his hands on his shoulders, rubbing his back gently. 

“I’m so glad you’re here,” Daichi mumbles, tightening his hold on him. 

“I’m glad I’m here too.”

“I promise I’m not crazy. There’s something bigger than me going on.”

He feels Suga shift to press his nose down against his shoulder, taking in a long, deep breath. 

“I’m trying really hard to believe you,” Suga mumbles back eventually. “I promise I am. I’ll do whatever I can to help.”

 

---

 

When he hears Iwaizumi come through the front door, he hurries to switch the tab on his computer off what he had been looking at, and over to the very neutral Youtube tab playing volleyball compilations. 

“Alright,” Iwaizumi calls. “I got dinner, snacks, I hope you’ve picked a movie because I am not watching that stupid planet documentary again or whatever it was you were on about last time.”

He crosses the living room and into the kitchen, putting stuff away mindlessly for a minute before popping his head back around the corner. 

“Ey, shitface, you listening to me?”

“What? Oh, yeah,” he says, staring at the idle, paused video screen. “Sure, we can watch a proper movie.”

“...okay. And what about tomorrow? Was there anything you wanted to do during the day? I need to know ahead of time, because Mattsun texted me an image of himself crying so I think he wants help with that late-admissions essay he has to write, but I wanna know if you need me around before I agree.”

With Iwaizumi around the corner, Oikawa switches back to the tab he had been on, a screen of noxiously green text on a black background, shitty, home-coded font across the top, a forum website that was probably feeding his laptop viruses by the ladle. His eyes scan over the chat history, the three or four individuals going back and forth over the details of this Aomori abduction story. 

“Uhm… yeah, you’re good to waste your day with Mattsun,” Oikawa says eventually. One of the posters was someone that went by the short alias of Fosteralien, a user that Oikawa had actually spoken to before, and had been in communication with for several years, though knew little about them apart from that they were currently living in Japan, but hadn’t been born here. They’d been the one to point them in the direction of Tenkai Kokomi and her abduction story. 

That is all to say, Oikawa trusted the information this person had, whoever they were. They did their research right, they didn’t bullshit around, and Oikawa thought that, although they were a believer in all things paranormal, they tended to lean more heavily into the skeptic’s camp of needing proof for everything. 

“Really?” he hears Iwaizumi say, and realizes that Iwaizumi has been talking. 

“Uhm… yeah, I… I’ve actually… I’m gonna go… I have…”

“...Are you trying to lie to me right now?” 

Oikawa lifts his head, finding Iwaizumi already looking down at him, arms crossed. 

“...maybe.” 

“Why?”

“It’s not important,” he replies, looking back down to his computer screen. 

Fosteralien: Honestly there’s no real data right now, but from what I can tell and what’s been released to the press, the girl is alive and healthy and still in hospital. I haven’t seen any reports of PSIA involvement, why do you ask?

Oikawa’s fingers hover over the keyboard, and he wants to type out a response, but he has to deal with Iwaizumi first. 

“It’s not important,” Iwa scoffed, before adding: “You’re a lot of things, Mr. Oikawa, but you’ve never been a liar. At least - well, not to me. What is up?” 

He sighs. “I’m just… Maybe I lied about being completely over the aliens thing, okay? There’s this new abduction case out of Aomori, and I’m… kinda focused on getting everything I can on it. I don’t really feel like taking a walk, or… doing any of that.” 

Iwaizumi is satisfied by the answer, huffing slightly before turning away to finish putting away his groceries in the kitchen. “You could have just said so. You know I don’t mind all your nerd shit, if you wanna hole up and deep dive, be my guest.”

Oikawa nods slightly, before hurried tapping out a response on the forum. 

Been working on a few connected reports, that’s all. Have a friend that has inside knowledge on the PSIA movements, we’re trying to find a pattern.

He sends it before he can think it through. We’re trying to find a pattern, present tense. 

We were trying to find a pattern should have been more correct. 

His fingers twitch, as he reaches to grab his phone and look at the lock screen. No new messages had come in - Daichi seems to have gotten the message and stopped texting him every thirty seconds, but Oikawa would be lying if he wasn’t dying to know how the trip to Okinawa was going. And, where he was.  

He doubted Daichi would be doing it correctly anyway. Shima Three could have a big, neon flag on top and the idiot would probably miss it. 

Did he know about the abduction in Aomori? Another to the pattern, young, pregnant woman. They want the pregnant women, he should send - is your dad in Aomori? 

Wait, shit - his dad had found the tracker, so they wouldn’t be able to tell anymore…

Hey, how’d that go down with your dad? He should ask-

Daichi probably wouldn’t want him suddenly pushing back into his life again. 

He’s in Okinawa with Sugawara - he’s probably having sex on a beach and loving life right about now, I shouldn’t intervene…

Oikawa isn’t sure what the feeling in his stomach was, since it seemed in the same family of jealousy, but he knew what jealousy felt like, and he’d never felt this before. 

“What are you doing?” Iwaizumi says, finished in the kitchen and coming back around to sit on the couch. Oikawa switches the tab as he sits down. 

“What do you mean? I’m not doing anything.”

“You were staring at your phone looking like you were trying to develop laser eyes.”

“Oh. Just… Daichi’s in Okinawa right now, visiting family or something… I don’t know, he’s… just wondering if he’d found anything interesting, I guess…”

Iwaizumi laughed, leaning back on the couch beside him and closing his eyes. “I’m sure he’ll tell you as soon as he does.”

“I’m not sure about that.”

“Oh, I am sure.”

“No, he… nah, I told him to stop updating me, he knows I’m not doing the whole video thing anymore.”

Iwaizumi peels open an eye to look at him, before saying: “And you were just staring at your phone, hoping that he would text you, so that you’d have an excuse to text him back and tell him about your aliens, yeah?” 

“...what? No, shut up. If I wanted to text him, I’d text him.” 

Iwaizumi snickers, using a foot to nudge at Oikawa’s leg. “You have a crush on him, don’t you?”

“ -what? Iwa, have you lost your mind?”

“Not a romantic crush, but like, a little friend-crush. You’re embarrassed to admit you just miss talking to him. You did the same thing with Hanamaki in second year. You refused to save his name in your contacts but you gave him a special notification sound so you’d know when it came in.” 

“I… I did not! And I don’t have a friend crush, that’s stupid. I just…”

“Really want to text him about your aliens, and really want to hear about… what, his vacation in Okinawa? Sounds like you wanna be his friend.” 

“... shut up. You’re such an idiot. Daichi doesn’t even like me, why would I want to be his friend?”

“...are you a dumbass, or?”

“I’m not a dumbass! You’re a dumbass!”

“Of course Daichi likes you, you two were inseparable for a few weeks there-”

“No, you don’t understand,” Oikawa says. “He… he-” he might be an actual real alien and I just walked away from him. “-he just… had a lot of weird shit going on. We were only… talking because of his dad, and… then the channel… we’d never be friends outside of that context. And that context is gone, because I am not continuing the videos, just… whatever, shut up.”

Iwaizumi laughed, pushing himself up and leaning in to kiss Oikawa’s cheek before getting up again. “Well, whatever. I’ll text Mattsun and ask him what’s wrong, you go pretend you don’t need anyone in your life and you’re totally fine researching your aliens solo, whatever you want.”

“Thank you. Good boyfriend.”

“I’m not your pet.”

“Eh, agree to disagree.”

Iwaizumi squints at him, before turning around to disappear into his bedroom for a bit, and Oikawa is able to go back to his forum. 

Fosteralien: Ohhhhh?? You have to tell me more about that, I didn’t know you had IRL contacts!!

Oikawa has to ignore that rather excited text, and instead sends: 

I’ll try and fill you in later. 

Would it be totally crazy for me to fly out to Aomori on my own to do some investigating? 

 

---

 

Admittedly, Daichi does feel a lot better by the time he’s stepping out of the shower and drying off. His briefly collapse into instability was replaced by warm water and enough time to let his brain wrap around some of the information he’d gathered, and he was almost willing to call what he was feeling optimistic. Sure, this hadn’t exactly gone the way he’d hoped, but they were still here in Okinawa, and there was a lot left to figure out, so they couldn’t give up now. 

Suga had stepped out for a bit to track down something they could have for dinner, but Daichi’s concerns about killing time alone were interrupted by his phone ringing. He hurries to catch it before it stops ringing, surprised slightly to see Kuroo’s contact across his screen before he’s putting it to his ear. 

“Yo,” he chirps. “What’s up? What’s happening?” 

“I figured I’d be asking you that question,” Kuroo replies, from the other end of his phone. 

“Oh?”

“I mean, last I heard you were on a quest down in Okinawa, how’s that been?”

“Terrible, thank you for asking.”

“Ah, shit, okay, sorry - like, you didn’t find anything, or…?”

“Not exactly, but… look, it’s not really worth getting into right now, I’ll… uh… I’ll update you on everything once I sort out what I’m doing down and we finish looking around. I’m thinking we may catch a bus up to Chatan and see if we can do any on-the-ground sleuthing around…”

“...okay, uhm… well, as fun as that sounds, I was hoping you’d have a bit more information for me regarding what it is exactly you’re looking to do.”

“What I’m looking to do?” 

“With uh… with all the stuff, y’know?”

“...eh?”

“Like… well, Kenma’s getting absolutely hounded online, by, ah, by our fans, about… about whether or not we’ll be posting soon. And… I mean, I’m still interested in us, in this happening, and I know Bo is too, but… Ushijima’s been… real hard to catch lately, I’m not sure what’s up with that… anyway, uh… we just… we were hoping you could tell us what we should… tell everyone. Like do we say we’ll be back to our regular content - do we tell them Oikawa left? I-”

As Kuroo’s speaking, Daichi pinches the bridge of his nose, trying to reroute his brain back onto Youtube specific concerns. 

“Right,” he says, when Kuroo takes a breath and he’s able to speak. “No, don’t… don’t tell them anyone left or anything’s wrong, but… maybe… have Kenma put something out that we’re… just on a hiatus. Tell them it’s just because of graduation and us planning on moving and all that jazz, okay? I just need a little bit more time. Once I… once I can figure some of this stuff out, I can come back and we will be back in business.”

Kuroo is quiet on the other end for a moment, before saying: “Okay, okay, I’ll… pass that along to Bo. Do you… do you know how long you think this’ll be? If we should tell them it’s indefinite, or…?”

“Well… I don’t know. Maybe. Just… for now.”

“Okay, and… well, you know if you need any help, you can always give us a call, we’re here for you.”

“I know. I know that, and-”

“Daichi!”

He pauses, the sound of Suga calling his name interrupting his train of thought as he heads to the window to peel back the curtain and glance out to the street. Suga’s standing on the sidewalk, beckoning him out excitedly, as if with something important to show him. 

“Hey, Kuroo, I gotta go, Suga needs something. I’ll call you tomorrow, okay?” 

“Oh- okay, sounds good, talk to-”

Daichi has already hung up, and he hurries to pull his jacket on and head out of the room. Suga is already waiting for him by the front entrance, looking at him with a wide, bright grin, seeming very excited. 

“Hey,” Daichi greets. “What’s going on?”

“I found something,” Suga says, as if sharing a secret, turning and starting to head down the street before Daichi could fully catch up to him. “Follow me.” 

“Oh? What did you find?”

“You’ll see,” he sings back, turning around to walk backwards and smile at him, chewing on his bottom lip. Daichi watches him, half with amusement and half wondering if this was some elaborate prank, but deciding ultimately it was better to let Suga do as he wanted. 

They head a block down, until Suga is disappearing between two buildings into a small alley between them and waving him along. 

Daichi expects to see something, something that would explain exactly why Suga wanted to drag him out here, but as his eyes scan over the alley - trash can, cracked wall of the building, the other street, blocked off by a fence and a no entry sign, there’s… nothing here. 

He glances around himself, wondering if he were just missing something, before looking up and jumping slightly, as Suga had turned around and taken a few steps back towards him, hands linked behind his back. 

“What is it?” Daichi asked. “I don’t see anything.” 

“You don’t see anything?” Suga teases back, which really only serves to confuse him more. 

His confusion is immediately rocketed from his brain, though, when Suga’s next move is to put both his hands on Daichi’s chest and push him back, turning slightly until his back was pressed up against the rough wall of one of the buildings. 

“Oh,” Daichi manages to say, uselessly, as Suga pushes in close against him, hands gliding up over his shoulders, before he felt his thumbs on either side of his neck, tracing a line upwards as if judging the feel of his skin. “Hi, okay, uhm - sorry, I don’t know - I don’t know what this-”

“You really are something else, you know that,” Suga mumbles, getting his hands all the way up to Daichi’s face, and tugging him down towards him. 

If he’d gone along with his instincts, he probably would have been killed, he thinks, because his whole body is lighting up with the feel of Suga’s pressed flush against his, and his hands on his face, and the way he’s pulling him into his lips, practically begging for him to close his eyes and give into it. 

But he doesn’t, no matter how badly he wants to, because this is just too weird, and what he wants to do is ask:

“Is everything okay?”

But he doesn’t, because when he blinks his eyes, Suga’s whole body seems to shudder and blur, as if Daichi’s eyes had been forcibly refocused, and then, he doesn’t have a face. 

Suga does not have a face. 

And Suga’s hands are putting pressure on his jaw and head, as if to suddenly twist it and break his neck fast enough that he doesn’t have a chance to process the smooth, featureless head in front of him.

“Oh holy-”

He tries to yank himself back out of its grip, but he smacks into the wall, and the creature - Suga? - is moving fast enough that its hands are already on him again, dragging him out and twisting around with an insane strength, to force him to stumble and hit the ground. 

Gravel digging into his shoulder, he twists onto his back at the same time it has dropped down onto him. He tries to kick up and throw it off balance, but the thing seems way stronger than he knew Suga to be, and it’s hands come down, fighting against him to claw and scratch at him, gurling a long, low moan that seemed muffled and muted through the creature’s throat and it’s skinned over would-be-mouth. 

“Suga!” Daichi shouts, uncertain what he even thought it would accomplish. “Hey- fuck- ”

One of Suga’s knees comes up to pin his shoulder down, crouched like a feral animal over him, his other leg bent over Daichi’s hip , putting pressure on the joint - he cursed, twisting away with one free arm, trying to keep the clawing hands out of his face. He needed - he tries to kick up, to shove him off, but he is heavy, and focused, and-

Daichi reaches to his side and he can feel around, in the rough, dirty alleyway, his fingers closing over a heavy chunk of stone at the same time this creature, without both of Daichi’s hands to keep it up and away from him, got it’s own fingers down and around Daichi’s neck. 

The pressure is immense, and he tries to jerk his head to the side to escape, but his thumbs press down on his throat and he coughs, choking, pain flaring up at the pressure as he tries to suck in a breath and could barely manage it. 

He needs to use the stone. 

His arm is out, Suga isn’t even trying to defend against it - if he smashed the rock down against him, he’d be forced to take a hand off his neck, and Daichi would be able to throw him off. 

He tries another gasping breath and nothing gets in. Fuck. 

But there’s a chance that this is Suga. 

Possession, or change, or - fuck, even if Suga has always been this creature - even if everything had been a trick or a lie and manipulation, even if that, Daichi didn’t think he could bear to do any harm to him. 

If Suga has been controlled, if something is hurting him, Daichi could kill him, his real body-

Suga could probably survive one hit to the head.

But Daichi couldn’t. Not for even a second could he hurt him like that. 

His hand hits the alley again, fingers loosening on the stone as it becomes harder and harder to control his body with the lack of oxygen. His vision is flickering and dark, and he tries to focus up on the faceless Sugawara, leaning his whole weight down to crush Daichi’s windpipe. 

“Daichi!”

He’s not even sure the sound is real. His ability to process information is shot, his consciousness wavering in and out, his brain fuzzy and everything dark-

He tilts his head back, just slightly, trying to fight through the instinct to just let this thing put him to sleep and-

A second Sugawara? 

His vision goes cross, he doesn’t-

“Hey, hey- hey- Daichi, hey-”

Suddenly the pressure is off his neck. He takes a breath in, and in an explosion of sparks behind his eyes as the air floods his lungs, and he finds himself gasping and coughing, each jolt a shooting pain in his throat. 

He focuses ahead of him, on Suga’s face - a face, that’s good - who’s now knelt by his side and is trying to get him to sit up, looking exactly has he did forty seconds ago, terror stricken across his face, but-

Over his shoulder, he can see the faceless Suga, scrambling back on hands and knees as it tries to get to its feet-

“There!” Daichi tries to say, but his voice comes out cracked and harsh, and he has to point behind him. “See?”

Suga turns around, but evidently doesn’t see anything, eyes wide and concerned before looking back to him. The arm around Daichi’s shoulders helps to keep him sitting upright, and he’s grateful to be able to lean his weight against him, coughing painfully again. 

“What the hell was it?” Suga whispers. 

“I… I don’t… I don’t know, but I swear, I swear it was there- It… I… How did you find me?”

“I… I was walking back and saw you leave the motel, so I followed to see what the hell you were doing, and- What the hell happened?”

“It… you didn’t see… it? You?” 

“What?”

Pain shoots up through his throat every time he tries to speak, so he doesn’t bother this time, swallowing back painfully and just leaning into Suga more. 

“Daichi…”

“I swear, I swear ,” he rasps. “Something was here- I-”

“I know, Dai, I know, you don’t have to convince me,” Suga whispers, and that surprises him enough that he jerks his aching head back to look at him. His expression must have been enough to ask what he was thinking, because Suga continues with: “I could… I couldn’t see whatever was attacking you, but - I could see the pressure it was putting on your body, the… the indent, the way-”

And Daichi flinches back, as Suga’s fingers come up, to grace ever so gently over the damage on his neck. Daichi can see tears welling up in his eyes, likely from panic or fear or just the adrenaline.

“I could see how it was touching you-”

It’s not supposed to be able to do that.

He remembers hiding under his jacket, when the bodiless woman had been inspecting him. The rules of the game were simple - the creatures were scary, and they could lurk and sneer and snarl and scream, they could pop out of corners and get under his bed, they could terrify, but never, ever, in all his years of nightmares and shadow puppets and hallucinations had anything ever been able to touch him before. 

He lifts a hand shakily up to his own neck, remembering the heaviness, the weight, the reality of it. 

Suga wraps his arms around him again, shaking himself as he pulls him in tightly. 

“I could see it,” Suga whispers. 

Notes:

end of act... ??? i forgot to keep track of normal acts. SO like. idk. Gotta be like five or six now yeah? okay. Love you all thank you for reading again it really does mean the world to me <3

Chapter 29: Idle Chatter

Each breath in was rough and painful in his throat, his head was still aching, and the task of trying to mentally unravel what had just happened, and come up with a plan was nearly insurmountable. 

Eventually, Daichi is able to process that sitting on the cracked cement in an alley was not the best place to be, so he uses Suga’s arm and hauls himself up to his feet. 

“Come on,” he says, as Suga puts his hands on his arms and tries to steady him. “Let’s… head back to the motel, I… need to rest-”

“What? Nuh-uh, we’re taking you to the hospital, you have no idea what kind of damage might have been-”

“No!”

The exclamation comes out too harshly, and his voice cracks as another wave of pain washes through him. Suga pulls back, looking at him like he was speaking a foreign language. 

“Uh - yeah,” he replies. “You just got - you just got strangled, Dai, you gotta go see a doctor.”

“No, I… what are we going to tell them?”

“What do you mean?”

Daichi opens his arms, beckoning around the alley. “What are we gonna tell them, Sugawara?”

“I… I don’t know, I just-”

“The ghosts? We’re gonna tell them the ghosts, the faceless version of my best friend, oh, yeah, that’s fine. Even if we try and lie-” he cuts himself off, voice cracking again in another spear of pain. Fuck. 

“I- Dai, you just… you can’t see yourself-”

And he finches back slightly, as he feels Suga’s fingers ghost delicately up his neck. “It’s already starting to bruise, and… I… getting choked like that is no game, if you… if something was damaged it could… kill you, or… something equally as undesirable, so…”

Daichi hates the way he immediately wants to melt into the gentle touch of his hands, especially knowing that very instinct had almost gotten him killed. But he can’t help it - it feels as built into him as any of the other features he had. 

“It was you, Suga,” he whispers, trying to stop his throat from seizing in pain any more than it had to. He knows his voice comes out barely more than a rasp - he knows it because Suga flinches back, looking up at him in misery. “It had your… body, your hands, I… I don’t want… Even if we lie and say a stranger attacked me, if they try to launch an investigation, I just…”

“I would literally rather be a suspected abuser than you going to bed tonight and suffocating in your sleep because you want to ignore it,” Suga replies. “I’m not playing around, okay? You need to get checked out.”

Daichi stares at him for a moment longer, before sighing and closing his eyes. 

“Okay… okay, fine…”

Suga chuckles, and he feels a hand on his cheek. “Thank you, for putting up with the intolerable idea of taking care of yourself.”

“Don’t be mean, I’m hurt.”

“I’ll be as mean as I want. Now come on, stupid, let’s-”

Suga had taken his hand and was intending to pull him away, back out of the alley, but Daichi stopped, a tug on his arm as he stopped Suga from walking, prompting him to turn around, looking confused. 

“What is it?”

“Before we go… Suga… I… The monsters… had never touched me before,” he manages to get out, eventually, lifting a hand up to rub at his neck. “They’ve never done anything like this, I didn’t even know they could, but… there’s… there’s something… Tendou and I had… reason to think that belief in the paranormal, in these monsters, is what gave them… power over you. Knowledge of it made it real, and… I… I told you about it, because you said it was that or losing you forever, but… You’re not…”

He can see the intake of breath Suga takes, the way his shoulders shift back as he digests what Daichi, in his broken voice, is trying to convey. 

“Are you asking me to leave, or warning me about staying?” he says, eventually. 

Daichi bites the inside of his cheek for a moment before saying: “I’m telling you that if that convinced you that I wasn’t crazy, then you’re at risk of it happening to you. So… you need to be careful.”

Daichi is trying to do a thing, he’s trying to do a thing where he ramps up into some profession of adoration, of how he cannot bear to be the reason Suga’s life has become infinitely more dangerous and terrifying, that he will do his best to protect him at all costs, but as he’s doing this, he notices Suga has completely checked out, and is clearly thinking about something else. 

He tilts his head to the side. “Su…Suga?”

Suga flicks his eyes back up to him, saying: “Why would the monsters attack me?”

“...what?”

“Why would the monsters attack you?”

Daichi blinks.

Suga seems to be having a lot of thoughts at once, so Daichi gives him a moment to wave his hands around and pull himself together. 

“Daichi,” Suga says, as if to punctuate a point he had not yet spoken out loud. “Why the hell would a monster want to kill you? You just had something try a hit on you, in the middle of a city, that’s like… if an animal did that it would be crazy, right? Like you have to antagonize dogs, or at least get into their space, dogs don’t… pick you out of a crowd and lure you into an alley-”

“Dogs also don’t mimic your face and voice-”

“You said this is the first time this has ever happened?”

“Mhm…”

“Well what’s changed? Why does the freak fake-me want you dead suddenly?”

“Nothing’s changed… Or… maybe we’re getting closer to figuring it out? I mean… Talking to my grandmother for the first time in like… a decade, so…?” Daichi says, frowning. “That… that doesn’t seem right… that can’t be right, that… she didn’t know anything.”

“Okay, well… maybe not, but… my point is still - has anyone else been attacked?”

“N…no,” Daichi says, hesitantly. “Well, actually… yes, Tendou - he… he got dragged into the river by Kappas, but… I mean, he didn’t have…”

“So you and Tendou-”

“Me and Tendou, we’re the-” Daichi waves a hand about aimlessly, trying to articulate his thoughts. “We’re the… we’re… the freakshows, we-”

“Kuroo can pet the cat,” Suga replies, and now Daichi is lost again. 

“Eh?”

“The bakeneko kitty, the little guy that’s following him around, Kuroo can pet him, Kenma gets scratched by him… if he’s also a yokai, then-”

Daichi puts his hands over his face. “Oh my god, the cat - Kuroo’s been able to touch the cat forever…”

“But you can also touch Tendou-”

“Sugawara, for the love of god, stop starting your sentences in the middle of your thoughts, I need you to help me keep up with you,” Daichi says, and speaking loudly and forcefully cracks his voice, and then he can taste blood in his mouth. 

Suga squeaks, alarm across his face.

“We… will come back to this,” Suga decides, taking him by the arms. “Hospital first.”

 

---

 

Sugawara is clearly frazzled, not just from the attack but from his now racing thoughts as he tried his hand at, for the first time, genuinely unraveling this puzzle. Before, he’d been merely a consultant, just poking his nose in to sniff around and see if he could come up with an easy solution. 

But Daichi could see it in his eyes now, the frustrated desperation, when it wasn’t just a thought experiment, but rather their very life. Something had very tangibly attacked Daichi - there were bruises in the shape of hands coloured dark purple and yellow around his neck to prove it. Staring at the bruises in the mirror of the emergency room bathroom, Daichi had never felt less certain of anything in his life. 

Real solid evidence. Maybe nothing that he could take back to anyone else - easily faked evidence, but for him, he knew. 

I’m not crazy. I’m not hallucinating.

But…

“They didn’t want to,” Suga says, when Daichi comes back to sit down. 

“Eh?”

“The reason why they’d never touched you before. They must not have wanted to.”

“Or they couldn’t,” Daichi supplies. “Or my constant persistent investigation has created a new physicality to them where they didn’t have it before.”

“But… Kuroo and the Cat - Tendou and the Kappas-”

Daichi has to think about this for a moment. 

“Maybe you’re right. Maybe… What the hell were you talking about touching Tendou before?”

“Oh, I just… I mean, if he’s a yokai, you shouldn’t have been able to see him, right? Like if your theory is that belief dictates reality, then… how can someone be a halfbreed?” 

“...right.”

“And how could… how could someone… be… so many of these legends are violent. Right, like, that’s the satori, isn’t it? An ape in the woods that comes down and targets hikers, steals women, eats people…”

“Right, so… are we suggesting that everyone who’s ever thought they’ve seen a ghost is… magic in some way?” Daichi says, rubbing at his neck. “What…”

Suga leans back in his chair, scratching at his arm mindlessly as he clearly continues to try and work this through and make his own reality make sense again. 

Daichi feels a little bad for him - he wonders, partially, if this is something akin to what drove Oikawa so mad. Maybe there was a benefit to not thinking in particularly complex ways. Daichi was used to not being able to solve riddles - Suga was probably livid at the idea of not being able to crack this one. 

He puts a hand on Suga’s shoulder, rubbing gently. “Hey… maybe try and take a breath, you look like you’re about to start smoking out your ears.”

Suga huffs, fidgeting for a moment before sitting up again. “I know, I know, it just… bothers me. It feels like… It feels like there’s this big, obvious thing hanging over my head and I just can’t quite get it.”

“I’m well aware of the feeling,” Daichi laughs, nudging him slightly before one of the clerks calls his name, and they’re both standing up to be led over to one of the exam rooms. 

Daichi settles on the exam bed. Suga sits on one of the chairs, leaning over to prop his head in his hand and stare at Daichi as if this whole confusing affair was a personal affront on his sensibilities. Daichi shifts slightly under the attention, but isn’t even sure what to say. 

Soon enough, though, the door to their room is being thrown open, and the actual interaction Daichi has with this nurse is: 

“Okay, I’m looking for a Sawamura…?” as she enters the room, looking at her clipboard, followed by her looking up and exclaiming: “Oh, christ-” with an actual jump back, staring at him with pure shock across her face. 

Daichi, who has his collar turned up to try and minimize the visual of the bruising around his neck, so he’s not sure what she’s reacting to, flinches back as well to stare at her in alarm. Suga has sat up as well, looking nothing but baffled as he looks between them.

She’s young, ish, probably not yet even forty, and definitely European - well, he’d wager based on the location she was probably American - with warm blonde hair tied up in a high ponytail, and muddy blue eyes that only slowly seemed to realize her slip in bedside manner as she chuckles and tries to regain her composure.

“Oh, dear,” she says, glancing down to the chart, then flipping the page and saying: “Oh, shit, yeah. December thirty-first. You must be Rion’s boy.”

He raises his eyes. “Oh? You knew my dad?”

“Oh, I sure did - hey, your voice- okay, let me take a look at you, the paperwork said - sorry, strangulation? What’s happened?”

“Ah, right-”

“My name is Helene, by the way,” she says, in introduction, as Daichi shrugs his jacket of, and adjusts his shirt to pull the collar down and give her access to get a look at it. “And… wow, someone really went at it, huh… so… what happened?”

“Uhm… I was… attacked, outside our motel,” he says, glancing at Suga for half a second. “I… didn’t get a good look at the guy, but… uhm… he was scared off when my friend showed up…”

“Huh…” she mused, leaning in again to get a closer look, her fingers oh-so-gently pressing along his neck. “You’re not… feeling any issues breathing, are you?”

“No, nothing like that. Hurts to talk, though.”

“That would be the strangulation, yes… okay… and you’re sure this was a man that jumped you?”

Daichi has a brief moment of panic. Considering he already knows that she knows his dad, the idea that she might be pushing the context - you sure you wanna go with the cover story of a human being attacking you?

But before he can stammer out some assertion that yes indeed this was a human, she follows up with: 

“Just because the… fingers look narrow, the hands were small. Could have been a woman,” which prompts Suga to go:

“Hey!”

Which makes everything bad immediately, as she whips around to look at him. 

Daichi closes his eyes, praying for a moment that this woman is an idiot and won’t connect any dots, but, alas, this woman is a registered nurse and made it through medical school, so she connects as many dots as possible. 

She looks very alarm, pointing at Daichi. “Did you do this?” she says, eyes widening. 

“Ah… shit, no?” Suga says, clearly aware of how he’s made himself look. 

She looks back to Daichi. “Did he do this to you?”

“...no?” Daichi says, wondering if a second lie will help. 

She looks back to Suga, then back to Daichi, then back to Suga, and he’s wondering if she’s trying to figure out why one might take his attacker to his hospital visit when she suddenly gasps and puts a hand over her mouth, specifically to hide her compulsive smile as her face turns red. 

“Oh,” she says. 

Daichi is slow - Suga’s eyes widen. 

“No no,” he says, sitting up a bit. “No, no, no-”

“I’m your nurse, I’m not here to pass judgment,” Helene says, clearly biting hard on the inside of her cheek to keep herself from passing judgment. “But it’s not good to lie to your care providers, we need to be able to take care of you properly.”

“I…” Suga is staring up at her, looking miserable for a moment, before turning his attention to Daichi for help. 

Oh, Daichi’s brain says, deciding to catch up. Oh, she thinks… she thinks it was a sex thing.

Well… that is… better than the truth. And makes more sense. And won’t involve faking a police report.

He just gives her an embarrassed smile, and it’s a lie that doesn’t really need confirmation, as she tries to pull herself together and return to what she was doing. 

“Open your mouth for me?” she asks, as she tilts Daichi’s head up and tries to get a look down his throat. She hums softly, clicking a light out to get a better view before seeming satisfied and glancing back at Suga. “It’s really no reason to be embarrassed-”

“Oh my god stop it please,” Suga wails, having pulled his shirt up to cover his face. 

“-but given the bruising, you would have had to be holding him down while he was thrashing, like-”

“Please stop.”

“I am trying to do my job!” she says, interrupting his pleading for mercy. Suga pokes a furiously red face out from his hands. Daichi doesn’t think he’s ever seen him look quite this colour before. “And unfortunately a part of that requires educating the young, you could have seriously hurt him, and I just want to make sure going forward that you engage in this kind of activity safely and without posing a risk to his pharynx.”

Daichi lifts a hand now to cover his own mouth, trying to keep himself together. Thankfully, it’s a lot easier being not directly under Helene’s attention. 

“I…” Suga has lost his ability to think. “Ah…”

Helene nods, grabbing her stethoscope and shifting around beside Daichi. “Can I pull your shirt up?” 

“Mhm.”

She slides the cold metal under his shirt, pressing into his back as she instructs him to take a few breaths in. After a little bit of this, she pulls back, seeming satisfied. 

“Well, nothing seems to have been broken, which is good, considering the bruising I was worried for a minute - you have full mobility of your neck?”

Daichi nods, turning his head from side to side. “Well… it’s kinda stiff, actually-”

“Stiff might be to be expected, you’re not gonna be comfy for a bit. You don’t feel any shooting pain, though, nothing stopping you from turning?”

“No, nothing like that.”

“Good… okay, for today, it looks like the damage wasn’t so severe, however compression on arteries and veins like this does put you at risk for developing blood clots, so we’re going to need to get you in for an ultrasound before you go home, okay? And you’ll need to pay close attention to how you feel, even if the scan comes back clear, they can develop at a later point, and a clot in your throat is no better than a clot in your brain, okay?” 

“...okay,” Daichi mumbles, staring up at her. 

“And… next time your boyfriend is suffocating, stop choking him,” she finishes with, clearly a little flustered over how it could have possibly become this bad without Suga’s common sense kicking in. 

Suga looks like he’s going to cry. “Okay,” he manages to get out, because there’s nothing else he can really say to that. 

“You are free to retake your seats in the waiting room, I’ll call medical imaging and see if they can fit you in this evening as quick as they can, okay?” Helene goes on. “We’ll let you know what the e-t-a for that’s gonna be.”

“Okay, thank you…” Daichi says, and as she’s packing up to leave the room, he adds: “Hey, sorry to… take up more of your time, but you… screamed when you entered the room…?”

She turns back to him, looking a little amused for a second before saying: “You look… exactly like your father did, at your age - or, well… you’re actually a lot bigger, but, in the face, for sure. It… honestly I thought I was looking at a ghost of the past.”

“Oh,” he says. “People tell me that a lot, I guess… didn’t realize it was so severe…”

“Well… I feel like I’d recognize him anywhere-”

“You were friends?”

“Ah… no,” she corrects, pointing at him. “I was really close with your mother, though. Rion hated me, but that’s… At the time it really hurt, but-”

“He… hated you? Why would he hate you?”

“My dad was stationed at one of the naval bases,” she replies. “He… didn’t like that, so he didn’t like me. But, I mean, water under the bridge. This is the only home I’ve ever known, so…”

Daichi chuckles softly, because she’s talking in an odd, jilted sort of way, as if talking about his father put some kind of mental strain on her, like she was holding back from something. 

“So you knew his mom?” Suga cuts in, having, only slightly, recovered from his mortification. 

“Oh, very well. Well… we weren’t best friends or anything, but we shared a lot of classes, hung out on weekends. Chatan was pretty small, especially back then, so… we got to know each other… speaking of, how is Himari doing? I feel like I haven’t heard from her since… since she left…”

“They’re… doing fine,” Daichi says, unsure if it’s a lie or not. “Can you do me a favour and not reach out to them to tell them you saw me at a hospital?” 

She smiles slightly. “Rest assured, patient confidentiality extends for all purposes. I will not tell your father about your extracurricular activities.”

“Please…” Suga whimpers, no longer quite as recovered. 

Daichi swallows his own embarrassment, nodding. “Ah, thanks, he… ah… he doesn’t know that I’m here, so…”

“Oh?”

“Yeah, I… never knew my family from here, or anything, so… guess I’m just out doing a bit of soul searching, or…”

She glances between him and Suga, face very much conveying yeah it looks like you are, before she smiles and says:

“That’s nice, but… not telling your dad about it? He adores this island, I’m sure he’d…” but she cuts herself off, looking a little confused. 

Daichi decides to answer the first part of her question, and ignore the weird ending. 

“Yeah, well… he actually… doesn't talk about it. And neither does my mum, so… I don’t know. I guess I’d thought we’d uncover a crazy family secret, but so far all we’ve learned is that all my grandparents hate him or my mom for one reason or another.”

“He doesn’t…?” Helene starts, before shaking her head slightly. “Well… I mean… I guess that makes a bit of sense, but… it really sucks that you got left in the dark then, huh? I mean… Well, I don’t know… I wish I’d kept in contact with your mother, sometimes, I know she was… really struggling with raising you, and with all the… medical things, and-”

“Medical things?” Daichi prompts. 

“Yeah, you… well you were a healthy baby, but… Himari was always so worried about you, and… well, I don’t know what I believe, but I do remember, shortly after you were born, that she was absolutely convinced that she had been the victim of alien experimentation, can you-”

Suga is now, over Helene’s shoulder, waving an arm in excitement to get Daichi to ask follow-up questions as if he didn’t already know to do that. 

“Hang on, she said that, out loud, to you?”

Helene laughs. “Yes, she… I mean, she had some kind of episode, late in her pregnancy with you, but… you know that… she was such a brilliant person, and… I never felt good enough to be her friend, really, she was the perfect daughter, so… when she got pregnant, and her parents disowned her and then she was living with Rion whose parents were just bastards to them, I… it made sort of a kind of sense that she’d… make up a fairytale to explain why this was happening. I mean, I’m not a psychiatrist, but I kinda always assumed that was it. Made more sense that an alien got her pregnant than it did that she just… messed up-” and here Helene stops, putting a hand on Daichi’s shoulder. “Not that they regret having you, I’m sure they love you.”

“I’m started to wonder if they do,” Daichi replies, before shifting to stand up. “So you - my mom… confided in you?”

“I mean, I’d say so,” Helene says, sort of apologetically. “I mean, I… I remember trying to help her, the best that I could, but… I mean, they… got help, a little bit after you… after you were born. I remember that, because I had just gotten into the University, and… your mom was suddenly able to go back to school and get her high school diploma, but she… she was always a little bit weird about where you were, she’d… usually just say Rion was taking care of you, but I didn’t see him around at all, either…”

“Was that about when we moved?”

“What? Oh, gosh no, that would have been… years before, before you learned to walk. I only saw you for a little bit, and then… I don’t know, I guess I always assumed your grandparents just shaped up and started helping out properly, but…” she shrugs, and when Daichi opens his mouth again, she says: “Look, I am… I would love to reminiscence, and tell you everything I remember, but I am at work, so-”

“When do you get off shift? I will meet you anywhere,” Daichi says. 

“... eight am,” she replies, pointing at the clock. “So we got about eleven hours to go-”

“That’s fine, I gotta wait for an ultrasound anyways, right?” he says, grabbing his jacket to throw it back on. “Amazing. Fantastic. We’ll talk to you after your shift.”

She blinks at him, before nodding slightly and saying: “Alright, I’ll tell my babysitter I’ll be home late.”

 

---

 

Oikawa took an overnight train up to Aomori. He had, very rarely, actually gone on solo trips, but with everything that had happened and all the concern and the questions and the confusion, forcing Iwaizumi along with him, even if he was more a believer now than he had been before, just didn’t sit right with him. He wanted to be alone, he wanted to just grab this whole situation and tear it apart and be done with it, he didn’t want to think about other people. 

Her name, he discovers, is Ito Ikumi, and she is currently admitted into the hospital. 

Oikawa is very persuasive. And he’s charming, and he’s good with people, and that’s probably why Ikumi’s family sits and talking with him for so long, and tells them how horrible it was, how much of a nightmare - their precious daughter! Disappeared! Gone! Into the air! For almost a full day, before showing up bruised and bleeding and in the woods. 

They never really circle back to why Oikawa had cornered them in a hospital waiting room and asked at all. 

He smiles for them, and he leans in and he pays attention, and they lean back to him, and they give answers, though they don’t really know much. He gets them to point out where Ikumi had been found on a map, he makes a mental note of the location.

He asks if she’s pregnant - the only reason he asks is because they didn’t volunteer the information at any point, and if their pregnant daughter had gone missing, that would be a big key feature. Ikumi is fourteen, after all. 

“How did you know?” the mother gasps in horror. He plays it off and tells her it’s nothing weird - he tells her the truth, actually, and says that his sister had experienced something similar, when she was young. 

They tell him that they didn’t know she was pregnant until they’d brought her to the hospital. It as during all these tests that they found out - she’s only a few months in. They’re still looking at options. With her condition, though, she’s not quite emotionally ready for that conversation. 

He smiles at them again. They smile back. 

He leaves the hospital and pulls out his map. 

Iwaizumi is ringing his phone like it’s his goddamn day job. 

It’s really early in the morning now - six am. Iwa probably tried to text him, or even went by Saku’s, and when he runs out of places for Oikawa to be - that is, not at school, not at Iwa’s, not at his sister’s - he tends to assume Oikawa is doing something illegal, or stupid, and probably both. 

Oikawa drops down behind the private property fence, the chainlinks chiming annoyingly. 

Iwaizumi was so overbearing sometimes. 

So he sends him a text back, when he has a spare moment to think: I’m at my mum’s, loser. Relax. Your texting woke me up.

And immediately Iwaizumi replies with: you slept at YOUR house???

Oikawa feels a little bit bad, both for lying and for the fact that Iwa probably knew Oikawa would only willing choose that if he was mad at Iwaizumi for whatever reason, so the idiot was probably panicking now. That’s also why he wouldn’t have already checked there, and he could get away with the lie.

CHILL, Oikawa sends back. I stopped by to pick up some of my books and it was late and I just decided to crash. No big deal.

Iwaizumi takes longer to reply this time, eventually just sending back: can I come over?

Alright, so Iwa really thought Oikawa was mad at him now. Well that’s not ideal, but considering Oikawa absolutely couldn’t let Iwaizumi find out he was lying this much now, he sends back: Not right now. I’ll text you in a bit?

Iwaizumi doesn’t respond right away this time. Oikawa almost starts walking again before his phone beeps. 

Did I do something wrong?

Oikawa groaned. Goddamnit. 

The worst part about dating your oldest and best friend was that they knew you. Iwaizumi may have the wrong answer but he wasn’t going to be tricked into thinking Oikawa was behaving normally, or that everything was proceeding as expected. 

He sends back: you didn’t.

And then he sends a string of texts, quickly, to try and approximate his own behaviour when thinks were normal:

Sorry for not telling you where I went 

I’m not mad at you I’m just struggling with this whole thing, you know that

Besides I thought you were helping Mattsun today so I made other plans. 

I love you <3

And almost immediately Iwaizumi gets back with: Plans with who?

Well, any of the other ghost-hunting troupe would be an immediate red flag since Oikawa had made a big deal out of not talking to them, Daichi was in Okinawa and Iwaizumi was helping Mattsun, which meant Hanamaki was probably also going to be either there or already had given an excuse to not be there, so…

He switches contacts, sending off a message to Kindaichi:

3000 Yen if you tell Iwaizumi I’m helping you with your serve today.

And then immediately to Iwaizumi: Meeting up with Kindaichi. We’re gonna do serve practice.

There’s a long silence.

Eventually Iwaizumi sends back: Fine. Don’t work yourself too hard, okay?

Before Oikawa can reply, Kindaichi sends back: 

That was the most terrifying string of messages I’ve ever received. Why are you hiding from Iwaizumi? Do I need to go to the gym today? What if Iwa finds out I’ve lied? He’ll kill me.

Oikawa sends back: we’re not actually practicing serves, you can do whatever you want. Thanks.

And then he sends a heart to Iwaizumi to wrap up the conversation, and is about to finally head out on his investigation when he gets a text back from Kindaichi that absolutely baffles him: a heart. 

A quick glance confirmed that he had fucked up and sent his heart to Kindaichi instead of Iwa, so he sends to Kindaichi now: no not you you weirdo that was obviously a mistake wtf

And Kindaichi, although the message is on read, doesn’t reply, probably stewing in his embarrassment. 

And then Oikawa is able to leave. 

It’s not a particularly big piece of property, a small patch of undeveloped land behind a house near the ocean that looks like it’s mostly used for local children to pretend they’re cooler than they are and secretly litter their empty energy drink cans around. That is to say, he’s never not within sight of the city and town - there’s a road and row of shops just over a couple of minor ridges and between a few sparse trees, and the green chain link fence is the only real thing separating this patch of land from the stone retaining wall that holds it up from overflowing into the city. 

It doesn’t feel like the kind of place a girl could go missing and wouldn’t be found. 

The sun is starting to rise, and Oikawa wishes he’d moved faster. Although he’s exhausted - he’s pretty sure he hasn’t slept in a while, he’s still thrumming with energy as his excitement got the better of him. 

He had known aliens were real for most of his life, he’d believed it with his full chest and his head and his heart and yet learning how abjectly wrong he’d been had shaken his ability to trust his senses. 

Since when was my mind my enemy?

Have I always been this easy to fool?

He doesn’t need a flashlight, and he doesn’t want to give his position away, so he picks his way carefully through the blue dawn light eyes seeking anything that might be out of place or unusual. 

He follows what feels like a desire path left by highschoolers and tweens, before breaking off it and stumbling his way through a bush, pushing aside leaves and branches and kicking at rocks. 

Trees. Bushes. Rocks. Bushes. Rocks. Branch. 

It’s about to decide that maybe he’d come out here for nothing, that maybe his instincts were bad, and this was merely the case of a fourteen year old girl that had gotten abducted - by a human - and compensates by spinning a wild tale to avoid confronting what had happened after she got dumped by her abductor. 

It would not be the first time he’d heard of something like that happening. 

And then he hears voices. 

Oikawa stumbles back, hurrying as quietly as he can through the woods to slip behind a tree and try and get into what might be considered cover, but the voices are hard to track exactly where they’re coming from, and he ends up slipping down to crouch just to be safe. 

It’s movement that gets his attention first - and the moment he’s able to make out the shoulders and head of a man coming up through the woods, he’s able to hear their conversation. His heart rate quickens, as he catches sight of the PSIA logo in yellow across the man’s jacket, this is it, they might be talking about-

“You rejected my friend request again,” a young woman is saying, vibrant orange hair tied up in a ponytail out the back of a ballcap. 

“Oh my god, we’ve been over this,” Daichi’s father is replying, carrying a suitcase horizontally, as if it held something he didn’t want tipping around. “I’m not going to be your friend on facebook.” 

“That’s no fair! I’m almost up to a thousand friends! Why won’t you help me hit a thousand?”

“Because this is a crazy thing you’re doing. And you don’t know any of those people and you’re using a fake name, it would be wildly suspicious for me to have twelve friends I’ve known since I was twenty and then one Russian teen.” 

She sticks her tongue out at him. “I am not a teen.”

“Your fake alias online is.” 

“It’s not my fault my skin looks so good.”

Oikawa presses his face into the bark of a tree. What the fuck was this? 

But they’re moving on too quickly for him to dawdle around in his rapidly increasing despair. Why weren’t they just conveniently discussing the fact that aliens and monsters are real, or some shit? Fuck, they’re actually gonna make him follow them? 

So he slinks through the trees, as silently as he possibly knew how to be, and thankfully their inane chatter keeps them occupied from looking around them. 

If Oikawa was gonna be honest, this was far from suspicious behaviour. In fact, this is the behaviour of two PSIA agents who are absolutely within legal bounds and not worried about being seen or spotted or identified. They leave the woodland space and enter a small parking area, access to a beach that was only a little ways out. Oikawa hangs back.

There’s a black, unmarked and uninteresting minivan that Rion opens the back of, revealing an interior that, well, looked like a car. Well… it’s not like a regular back trunk, it’s clearly set up with whatever they use most frequently - nets and buckles to strap things in, a metal plate at the bottom for further security. But it’s empty and normal in the regard that it doesn’t scream high security. 

It’s all so normal…

The woman pulls away as Rion sets the briefcase down in the back, before pulling it closer to him and unbuckling it to open up. Oikawa is seething that at the angle he is, hidden in the tree line, he can’t see exactly what’s in it, except for that it looks dark - like the majority of the space might just be filler. 

She’s tapping away at her phone, at the same time Rion says:

“Whoever’s on zoning should be fired. This isn’t the first time I’ve had to go back to a scene due to an incorrect assessment of the site.”

“I’m aware.”

Oikawa is moving slowly, wishing he could disguise his appearance better as he, on light toes, slips from the woods and scrambles to duck behind another vehicle in the lot. 

When he peeks through the back windows of the car to look at them, the woman is looking in his direction. 

Shit, shit shit shit shit-

“Riri,” she says, after a second, looking back over to him, catching his attention. “You said you took care of your son, didn’t you?” 

There’s hesitation in Rion’s movement - Oikawa is exceptionally good with reading people, and that is a man who has lied to his boss. He knows it immediately. 

He wonders if she does. 

He wonders who she is.

“Yeah,” he says. “And you’ve seen it, they’re not ghost hunting anymore.”

The woman hums a response, staring at him for a second longer before saying: “And you’re sure he… listened to you?” 

“...what do you mean?” Rion says, and now he’s looking around, confused by her line of questioning, so Oikawa ducks down. 

Oh, she’s definitely seen me-

Wait, she shouldn’t know who the fuck I am? How would she have connected me to Daichi?

“Just… You can bully him into putting down the camera, you can force him to stop tracking you, you can punish him as his father as much as you want and try and wring this obsession out of him, but… that won’t stop him believing it. And if he believes it, he’ll keep finding it.”

Rion slams the top of the briefcase down, hard enough that the woman is tugged from her distraction to look back at him, glaring now. 

“Be careful with that. I don’t want to have to re-collect it all because you shattered the glass.” 

“Daichi is a good kid,” he replies, and Oikawa can hear the tension in his voice he is working hard to suppress. “He’ll smarten up eventually. This is… a… passing interest, he’ll be fine…”

“Uh-huh,” the woman replies, turning her attention back to the car where Oikawa was hiding behind. Oikawa closes his eyes. Shit! Shit.

There’s a bit of a silence as Oikawa hears the car door closing, and they’re moving around. He stays ducked down, listening to them pack up and head out. 

“So you’re sure that he’ll return to his normal life?”

“He’s got good friends. And he’s a reliable kind of guy, he won’t willingly choose… he’ll want a normal life.”

“And you’re one hundred percent sure that you spoke to him and convinced him to let go of all this investigative bullshit?” 

“... okay now you’re just worrying me. What are you trying to get at?”

“Trying to get at the fact that I got a message from Doctor Kobayashi saying the Naha Municipal Hospital put in a request to access Daichi’s medical history.”

“Jesus fuck that kid-”

And whatever else Rion is going to say is cut off as he slams the car door shut behind him. 

Why is Daichi in the hospital?

Oikawa scrambles to stay hidden as the car pulls out of the lot, before sitting on the cement by the blue little car he was hiding behind and pulling his phone out. 

Did he get hurt? What happened?

There are no messages. 

Bastard! Why isn’t he texting me? Surely if something put him in the hospital he’d tell me.

Oikawa groans, putting a hand against his head. 

Why didn’t that woman call me out? 

Who was that woman? 

Why is Daichi in the hospital? 

What the hell were they collecting?

What were they collecting?

I don’t wanna recollect that.

Oh, shit, that means there’s more.

What could they recollect? 

Oikawa pushes himself up off the ground and is stumbling back towards the treeline, trying to get his brain around whatever the hell was going on, and winds his way through the lot to find head back up into the woods. 

Something was in here that the PSIA wanted to collect - but not… not all of it, they didn’t want to collect all of it, so-

Samples of something. Samples of something in the woods. Samples… 

Testing. 

They’re testing for something. 

Testing the abduction sites for-

Alien matter?

Oikawa stumbles slightly as panic overtakes him, and he almost drops his phone as he fumbles to take it out and pull up Daichi’s contact information, sending out a hurried:

Your dad knows you’re in Naha!!!!

Before turning and recommencing his investigation of the little patch of earth. 

 

---

 

Daichi hadn’t been able to sleep much that night. Suga doesn’t really either, though he tries to curl up in the hospital waiting room and close his eyes for a bit. Once again, there’s a whole debacle with his medical information, and finally they’re able to get him into medical imaging - and then, finally, at about four am, they’re able to claw their way into bed at the motel. 

Suga collapses down onto one of the beds, groaning his frustration and anxiety. 

Daichi lays down on the other, staring up at the ceiling. His throat hurts, his head hurts, everything hurts both inside and out. He tilts his head to the side to look over at Suga, who’s still face down in the bed. 

He’s suddenly regretting agreeing to an eight-am meeting. But…

Helene seemed… different from his grandmother. She seemed like she’d actually known his mother, known her in the way that parents didn’t really get to know their kids - especially not parents that had kicked her out. So maybe…

“I don’t want to go see Helene again,” Suga mumbles, into the bed. 

“Why’s that?”

“She thinks I have a choking kink and I don’t want to see her again.”

“...well, that’s probably not true?”

And at this Suga sits up, turning to look at him. “What do you mean- you saw her!”

“Well, to be fair, Suga, she probably thinks I have the choking kink… if you had a choking kink you probably would have known how to avoid strangling me.”

Suga stares at him for a moment, before deciding this was no better and flopping back into the bed with a groan. 

Daichi looks back up to the ceiling and tries not to think about everything that he doesn’t yet understand, and he’s not even sure how long he lays there, not even trying to sleep, but he hasn’t fallen asleep when he gets a text message from Oikawa that reads:

Your dad knows you’re in Naha!!!!

He sits upright as quickly as he can, staring at the message for a moment and trying to unravel this. 

Why did Oikawa know this? How did my dad know? Was Oikawa interested in helping them again?

He sends back a string of text messages that roughly approximate these questions, but doesn’t get anything else back. Shit. Stupid Oikawa, stupid Oikawa ignoring him whenever he wanted and only texting when convenient…

Was his dad coming? Considering the tracking device thinly-veiled-threat, maybe he wouldn’t actually do anything and Oikawa was just letting him know he’d figured it out… 

A glance at the time tells him that it’s almost time to meet up with Helene. He tries to mentally plan a list of questions to ask her, to try and really go through the timeline, and he figures the very top of his list will be what exactly his mother’s abduction story was, and what had happened - the next would be whether or not they’d told her about anything weird that he had done or had done to him as a kid. Reasons medical records might be sealed. 

He gets to his feet, feeling his head suddenly grow heavy and dark as his body tried to get used to moving after laying still for so long - shit… they hadn’t eaten in… oh my god, pretty much a whole day-

He should wake Sugawara, though it felt like an egregious sin to do so knowing how late they’d been up, and the fact that he’d probably only been asleep a couple of hours, but they’d have to get moving if-

Ding!

He glances down to his phone again, surprised to see Ushijima’s message come through. The man had been completely unresponsive for the last couple days, and although that wasn’t entirely out of character for him, he’d always avoided unnecessary communication, Kuroo had advised that Tendou, too, had stopped replying, or had been giving mindlessly “sorry, busy” responses when he could. 

They’d been in the process of moving, though, so Daichi hadn’t been super concerned with their general lack of availability. 

So he opens Ushijima’s message, slightly glad to be hearing from him again, and get’s the privilege of reading:

Apologies if this is a bad time, I am aware you have been out of the city for some time but I feel like I have information that may be pertinent for you to know. 

Daichi kind of hates the way Ushijima texts, because of its over formality, because he never really seems to know how to just tell him to spit out whatever it is he wants to say. As Daichi is replying, something friendly, saying it’s okay, yes, what is it, Ushijima seems to have overcome his formality and adds:

Tendou tried to kill me. 

Chapter 30: Satori, Satori

Notes:

sure 13k is a normal amount of words for a chapter. I just didn't have the heart to split it up. I planned it to be one chapter, and by god it's gonna be one chapter.
(sorry)

“Daichi says he’s flying out to Naha tomorrow,” Ushijima says, focused down on his phone as he tabs out of the messages app to check the time. The rumble and bump of the bus jolts him slightly, as it winds its way through the back country roads, towards a tiny little stop on the side of the road that only technically approximated a town, with a couple of shops and a couple of miscellaneous homes and houses but ultimately lasting no longer than the road it stretched across. 

“Oh?”

Tendou had been mostly distracted watching the clouds roll along the blue sky, having stolen the window seat for this very purpose. He eyes the tiny little town, pretty much more of a station stop than anything else, a junction for travelers heading further into Sendai or back down towards Tokyo. When Ushijima had originally offhandedly mentioned having grown up in a ‘small town,’ Tendou hadn’t actually processed that you could get much smaller than the little farm-country jurisdiction that Karasuno was nestled in. But, apparently, just a train-and-a-bus trip away, you absolutely could. 

He half expects to see people riding around on donkeys or something. 

“He says he’s going to try and ask his grandmother if she remembers his birth. He thinks she’ll have information on what might be up with him.” 

“Oh, clever, clever,” Tendou says, tearing his eyes away from the unlit shop window of a small convenience store, to look back at him. “Olds always know shit we don’t expect.”

“What did you call them?”

“Olds.”

Ushijima frowns, but the bus is jostling to a stop, and there’s not much else for them to do but get up and get on the way. Tendou drags his bags out from under the seat in front of him, and they shuffle off awkwardly, carrying their lives along with them as they went, much to the annoyance of everyone else trying to ride the bus. 

The fresh air is nice - it had been a thirty minute bus ride from the train station, and he had started to get fidgety. On the side of the road, they stop to adjust the hold on their luggage, looping straps across shoulders and getting firm grips on handles. Ushijima slings a heavier looking duffle bag over his shoulder, before picking up his suitcase. 

Tendou had been surprised by how easily he’d compressed his life down into carryable proportions, and had been about to comment on it before doing his own packing and seeing he had managed the same. Anything he didn’t want to bother dragging around he had gifted off to Goshiki, and the rest of it had already been crushed down to the criminally small closet space of a single room shared between two teenage boys. 

He hadn’t even realized he’d developed the habit of getting rid of anything he wasn’t actively using until he was staring at the suitcase and realizing he was done, this was it, this was everything. 

He’s glad that Ushijima is still wearing the white and lavender team jacket, it’s a comfortingly familiar look across his shoulders that helps settle the nauseous unease of leaving high school, and gives Tendou something to ground himself on. 

Ushijima leads the way down the street, and Tendou follows along, trying to maintain a bounce to his steps but finding himself weighed down considerably. They’re just about at the edge of the tiny little town when a small cafe, or tea shop, some miscellaneous, all-purpose kitchenette of the town, catches his attention. They haven’t eaten since that morning, but he knows Ushijima is focused on getting home by the originally designated time. 

He’s about to call out and suggest Ushijima show him around what he’s beginning to suspect is the entirety of his home town, when the woman sweeping up outside the shop notices them, and does that for him. 

“Oh!” she calls, muffled across the street, before raising her voice and waving a hand energetically. “Is that Wakatoshi I see sneaking through?” 

Ushijima stops and turns around as if the voice calling his name had been a physical tether forcing him to do so, lifting a hand up in greeting. 

“Mrs. Tamura,” he says. “Hello.”

“Your mother told me you’d be coming home today - gosh, I can’t believe it’s already been… how long have you been at school?” 

“Six years,” he says. 

“Six years… must be weird, then, being home again?” 

Ushijima hesitates before replying - to anyone else, Tendou assumes they’d think he’s just being cautious and thinking through his words. 

But he can hear it, crackling through his psyche, he knows Ushijima better than that. 

This is not my home.

“I’m sure I’ll get used to it,” Ushijima replies, at the same time the woman is already speaking again. 

“And who’s this… uh, man with you?” she says, having finally turned her attention off Ushijima and over to Tendou, and he got the pleasure of watching her find him already staring at her, like Ushijima’s weird new puppet pal. He cocks his head to the side. 

“This is Tendou,” Ushijima replies, awkwardly opening a hand to indicate exactly which Tendou he was providing absolutely no context for. 

The woman stares at them for a moment, before clearing her throat and deciding this wasn’t worth chasing, saying: “Oh, you’re a charmer as always. Alright, I’m sure your mother is eager to see you, run along.”

He gives her a nod, before turning to head down the road again. 

Tendou watches her watch him leave, pushing a little bit, trying, just to test the waters of a power he was sure might still be within his reach, and-

He’s always been such a weird boy, but somehow he managed to make even weirder friends.

What was up with that guy’s eyes? I don’t think he blinked even once.

Well at least he’s making friends? I don’t know. I should call his mother.

Tendou bites the inside of his cheek to keep his face neutral, before turning to skip along and hurry to catch up to Ushijima. 

He settles at his shoulder, adjusting his bag to prop it over his shoulder to balance its weight, before looking over at Ushijima and trying to get a read on him. After a few minutes of silence, bouncing on his toes and mindlessly following the side of the road down and away from the town, he eventually decides to break the silence. 

“I think my psychic stuff is back,” he says, leaning into him. “Mhm. Yep. It was a little splotchy yesterday but it feels kinda like it used to today.”

Ushijima tilts his head slightly, to indicate he’s listening, before saying: “My mother is quite peculiar with her preferences, I believe you will be happier refraining from behaviours that might draw attention to yourself.” 

“Alright, bitch, what woke you up on the wrong side of the bed?” 

This response seems to puzzle him for a moment, as Ushijima frowns for just half a second before putting his attention back on the road ahead of them. 

“I slept fine,” he says eventually. 

“Yeah, yeah,” Tendou mutters, at the same time they’ve come across a gravel break in the road, an old, swinging wooden fence blocking cars from coming up, grass to either side of it. It’s sloped land, the gravel driveway winding up towards a long, old traditional house stood. The property is almost overgrown with flora, a treeline to one side and long stretches of vegetable gardens and flowerbeds, creeping vines and flowering trees. It’s not quite what Tendou was expecting, but he holds his tongue as Ushijima looks up at it, not making a move to cross the gate. 

After a second longer, Tendou reaches to take his elbow and drag him back up the road, just past the row of trees and making sure they were out of sight of the house and its large windows. 

“Hey, if something’s bothering you…” Tendou starts, but Ushijima is already shaking his head. “Or… if you’re not comfortable with me staying here, I know it’s not ideal, I can sort something else out, or go back to Gifu-”

“No, no, you’re plenty welcome here,” Ushijima says, lifting both his hands up to Tendou’s shoulders. “It’s just…”

I don’t want you to have to hear what my mother will have to say.

“I haven’t been home in a while. It feels weird. And… my mother is very… traditional. About everything. She is set in her ways and isn’t welcome to change, so…”

“You’re worried weird little me is gonna shake things up too much?” Tendou teases, trying to break the tension and lift his arms up to wrap around Ushijima’s neck, pulling himself in. “You don’t gotta fret, though, it’s all good. I’ve taken worse than a judgemental mother.” 

“I know that you can,” Ushijima agrees, before adding: “I’d have rather liked to never make you do so.”

“Impractical. I was going to meet your family one day,” Tendou replies, before leaning in to kiss him to shut him up from continuing the conversation down needlessly anxious alleys. Ushijima seems to respond well, a fact that Tendou never quite got over, and always slightly worried that the next time he leaned in for a kiss would finally be the appropriately responded rejection. 

But he lets Tendou guide the kiss, and he only lets it linger a couple seconds longer than he should have, before pulling away and thumping his forehead against him, trying to bask in the quiet moment for a second before saying: “Now come on, let’s get this over. Like pulling off a bandaid, right?” 

Ushijima takes a deep breath, pulling back slightly and shaking his head, as if clearing out a brain fog. 

“Yes,” he agrees. “Let’s go.” 

And Ushijima gives his hand a squeeze, one last time, before letting him go and turning to grab his stuff again and head towards the gate. Tendou follows after him, and turns his attention up to the house. 

They haven’t even reached the front door yet when it’s swinging open, and the woman that comes out to greet them is-

Younger than Tendou might have expected, though pretty much on par with every other notion he’d had of her. She’s about average height, which puts her well below both Ushijima and Tendou, even with her hair tied up on top of her head in a neat bun. She adjusts a shawl to wrap tighter around her, cold even in the warming spring air, and doesn’t immediately greet them as they come up the hill. 

When they’re just about there, coming up the two steps that led to the entrance, she says: 

“You two sure took your sweet time.” 

“Apologies.”

“It’s going to get dark soon, were you going to make me wait all day?”

Tendou sees Ushijima glance up at the sky to verify that this statement is in fact relatively untrue, as they had a good few hours of daylight left, before he replies: 

“I will be more conscientious of the time going forward, sorry.” 

“Good. Now, are you just going to stand there, or are you going to introduce me to your friend?” 

Ushijima hesitates again, before turning and stepping aside to let Tendou take centre stage, something he did very reluctantly, trying to give his best pleasant smile. 

“Mother, this is Tendou.”

Ushijima’s mother turns her attention on him properly, and if he was going to be honest, she wasn’t particularly intimidating. She seemed normal, if not simply annoying and abrasive. He wonders if it’s worth it to try and prod at the thoughts, see-

-looks like quite the character. Geez, eyes like a bug, certainly not a looker. I bet he’s one of those volleyball players too. It would be too much to ask for him to have made a respectable friend. Why is he smiling like that? He doesn’t look very-

Okay, fuck. 

“Tendou, Satori,” he says, deciding to play it cautious and minimize the amount of time he spent saying or doing anything. 

“Fascinating,” she replies, glancing between the two of them.

Ushijima doesn’t say anything, Tendou doesn’t say anything. 

His mother stares at them, expecting someone to say something.

This is going spectacularly.

“Uhm, It’s… a pleasure to meet you,” Tendou stammers after a second, trying to get this back on track. “And I am very grateful for your hospitality. You’ve saved me quite the headache.”

“It’s my pleasure,” she replies, and Tendou absolutely does not believe it, before she looks to Ushijima and adds: “Why don’t you go put your stuff away, and show him to the guest room?”

He gives her a polite nod, before nodding to Tendou to beckon him along and into the house. 

Ushijima moves like he’s on a mission, but as Tendou steps over the threshold of the house and into the dim, natural lighting, he feels a wave of something wash under his skin, sort of like nausea, but he doesn’t feel sick. It’s like there’s a current of electricity buzzing gently through his gut. 

“Mr. Tendou?” 

“Mhm?”

He lifts his head, to find Ushijima’s mother looking back at him, clearly regarding the fact he had stopped walking. 

“Ah, sorry-” he manages to get out, before turning and chasing Ushijima down, who was waiting for him down a narrow hallway. 

Ushijima stares at him a second longer, and Tendou doesn’t need to read his mind to know he’s having one of those moments where he knows there’s probably something to infer regarding the situation, but doesn’t know where to begin. So instead of saying anything, he just slides open the door to a very nice but minimalist guest room, and lets him in first.

Tendou takes a quick glance around, trying to throw off the weird feeling in his body. He hears Ushijima slide shut the door behind him, and he lets his breath out. 

“Kind of sucks that I’ll have to be staying in the guest room, eh?” he says, after putting his stuff in the corner and turning to look at Ushijima again. 

“You are a guest,” he supplies. 

“Yeah, I know,” Tendou says, slowly wandering over to him. “But it would have been kinda nice, y’know, if you didn’t have this big fancy house and we’d’ve been able to justify staying in the same room.”

“My mother doesn’t understand closed doors so well, so I think this is for the best.”

“I’m only talking hypothetical, work with me here.”

Ushijima seems to struggle with that for a moment, before reaching out to accept Tendou’s outstretched arms and pull him in. 

“I wouldn’t have minded getting to sleep beside you either,” he settles on. 

“Close enough. Speaking of, though, living arrangements, there is a crazy vibe in this house, you got, like, a gas leak or something?”

Ushijima blinks, before slowly saying: “I am… unsure what you are describing.”

Tendou chews on the inside of his cheek for a moment before saying: “Maybe it’s just me. I’ve felt a little weird since we got here - well, since we got off the bus, really.”

“Are you sick?”

“I don’t think so.”

Ushijima nods, before moving a hand to glide up the back of his arm. “Well… tell me if it gets any worse. I don’t want you trying to power through a sickness.”

“I’ll-”

“Wakatoshi! What’s taking so long? Come give your poor mother a hand!”

“-let you know,” Tendou finished softly, trying to resist laughing at the way Ushijima seemed to be already fighting off a headache, eyes closing at his mother’s shout. 

 

---

 

“Well didn’t you hear?” Tamura says, leaning over the counter of the shop to speak to the young mother. “Ms. Ushijima’s son’s come home, and he’s brought a right odd fellow with him. Yeah, yeah, that’s right, that Ushijima - yeah! No, no, I haven’t heard much, I’m gonna call his mother this evening-”

 

---

 

“-no, well, that’s not what Tamura ‘said,’ per se…” the young mother replies, as her husband stands in the doorway, taking off his shoes. “But apparently he’s quite unusual. I suppose odd attracts odd, but he certainly wasn’t our kind. Not at all. She says she’s gonna speak to Ms. Ushijima and get the full story. Do you think he’s one of them volleyball players, like the boy? Probably, they all are, out in the city. She should have never let that boy go away, for such a strong willed woman she sure did let her sensibilities fall to the wayside. That husband of hers must have been persuasive - ex husband, sorry-”

 

---

 

“No, she… said Mrs. Tamura had spoken to Ms. Ushijima, says he’s a real odd character, following around her son… odd, yes, that’s what she says,” the husband says to one of his buddies, as they appraise the landscape and try and decide on that years next big project. The sun is setting now, they’ll have to go inside soon. “I hope he’s not going to be causing any trouble. Does anyone know how long he’s staying for? He looks like the troublesome type, and Ms. Ushijima had been going on about how ornery her son had gotten, talking about moving to the city… he’s probably a bad influence - you should keep your daughters inside, yeah? You know how boys that age are, especially boys like that.”

 

---

 

“A proper troublemaker, he is. I can’t believe Ms.Ushijima is letting someone like that into her home. He better not cause any issues with the community, ya hear? I’ll take him out myself if he tries getting his hands on any of my girls,” the buddy says to his wife, as she finishes platting dinner and realizes she’s missing a few ingredients. “Apparently he’s a proper freak, too. A bad influence on that sensible Ushijima boy - if his mother has any of her willpower left, she’ll finally get control of him and do what’s right.”

 

---

 

“No, apparently he’s a real problem kid,” the wife says, to Mrs. Tamura as they run into each other in the shop. “My husbands worried about letting our girls outside if he’s gonna be wandering around, who knows what he’ll do to them. Monsters like that need to be kept an eye on.”

“Oh,” Mrs Tamura says, eyes lighting up in alarm. “Where did you hear that from?”

“Just here and there,” she replies, waving it off. “People have been talking ever since he came to town, haven’t you heard? Truly a bad wind is blowing through if the likes of people like him have come to our sleepy little town.”

 

---

 

For all her jilted behaviours, Tendou is pretty sure Ushijima’s mother is putting an effort in to be a good host. It occurs to him just as they’re sitting down for dinner, and she’s berating her son for not putting the glasses down correctly, that it’s highly unlikely that all of Ushijima’s neurotic tendencies had come from his volleyball loving, international expat father who seemed to love making friends and holding six hour conversations Tendou had not consented to. It had probably, then, come to him matrilineally, which meant Tendou was now trapped at a dinner with two Ushijimas. 

The food, also, was terrible. 

His mother could not cook. 

That wasn’t to say it was inedible, it was fundamentally fine in every way, but Tendou had, especially in the last year, gotten really exploratory with his food, and this was all quite… mediocre at best. He can tell from the way Ushijima is eating that he’s also just sort of tolerating it, though if Tendou was inclined to psychoanalyze the eating habits of his boyfriend he was prevented from doing so by the much curiouser anomaly, which was that Ushijima was, for some reason, currently using his chopsticks in his right hand. 

It was fascinating. 

He was actually quite proficient with it, but there was a particularly clumsy air about the way he’s trying to eat, and Tendou wished his mother would leave the room long enough for him to ask what the fuck he was doing. 

She doesn’t though. She seems to enjoy her food just fine. 

Neither her nor her son are conversationalists, so the dinner goes something like:

“So? How was moving, make it home without issues?”

“Yes. It was fine.”

“Good.”

And then Tendou watches Ushijima drop a piece of pork back onto his plate and glare at it as if it’s the food’s fault his right hand can’t coordinate well enough to hold it. 

I have picked a very odd family to-

And he catches himself there, down a very dangerous thought trail, one that could only end with some variation on the sentiment of marry into, which makes himself flustered, and he’s very thankful of the psychic monsters here, he’s the only one. 

Ushijima drops another piece of food. His mother turns her attention on Tendou. 

“So? I don’t believe I’ve heard much about you, Tendou,” his mother says, interrupting his mental spiral of attempting to not think about what one is thinking about. He’s grateful for the change of subject. “Where are you from, what does your father do?”

“Uh, well,” Tendou says, fidgeting slightly. “I was… I was raised in Gifu prefecture, I came out here to attend Shiratorizawa… My dad’s an electrician, which isn’t particularly interesting, I know…”

“Oh, it’s a plenty respectable job,” she says, dismissing his negativity. “Though you’re probably more like my son and are planning to gamble your life on a sports career, isn’t that right?”

Tendou swallows, trying to keep his voice level. “Ah, I’ve actually applied for a pastry school abroad, I’m… big into baking these days.”

“Oh!”

He watches her hold several emotions at once, this clearly not being a career she had a preconceived opinion on. 

“Well, isn’t that interesting,” she settles on eventually, before glancing at Ushijima, who’s still at war with his food. “You know, if you’re interested in baking I have quite the recipe book - I don’t even know how old it is at this point, it’s just always been in the family… Wakatoshi, why don’t you go grab that old book, it’s in the cabinet up above the fridge-”

Ushijima seems glad enough for an excuse to put the chopsticks down, nodding slightly as he pushed himself up to disappear into the kitchen. 

“Do you… use this book a lot, do you enjoy baking?” Tendou tries, after a second, looking back over to her. 

“Mhm. Quite a bit. Ushijima’s never been a big sweets kid, though, so once his father left, there wasn’t a ton of reason to make much.”

He always eats everything I make…

He assumes this implies her baking is about on par with her cooking. 

“That’s too bad,” he says. “I have a few recipes myself, I’ve been experimenting with. Y’know, I think people gave up on cookies too early. I’m sure there’s more variation to be found.”

This amuses her in a rather uncomfortable way, sort of like ‘it’s funny that he's wrong,’ but she smiles politely. “I’m more of a recipe follower myself,” she says, at the same time Ushijima returns from the kitchen. 

The next series of events happen so fast, even Tendou’s brain has to take a second to catch up with it. 

Ushijima, in the process of sitting down again, has offered what looks like the oldest book in the world over to his mother, and she, without any warning and barely taking her eyes of Tendou, turns and smacks her hand down on the back of his, making him jump and reflexively yank his hand back. 

“Apologies,” he says, quickly, an instinct so ingrained in him that it comes out at the same time Tendou squeaks, stifling a noise of shock as he jumps in response to the action. 

Ushijima moves the book to his right hand, and offers it to her again. She takes it pleasantly, giving him an almost scolding albeit approving nod. 

“Wh… what…?” Tendou says, not really able to get over his shock quick enough. Just starting to ask the question earns him a furious glare from Ushijima, though his mother seems remarkably nonplussed about the whole event. 

“What’s what, dear?” she says. 

“You… just-” he resists the urge to just wave his hands around. “I thought… what the-”

“Tendou,” Ushijima says, voice dropped low as if to try and compel him to silence. 

“It’s unbecoming to hand someone anything with one’s left hand. It dirties the whole interaction - Wakatoshi knows better.” 

“I do, I-”

“No, no no no,” Tendou says, not letting Ushijima interrupt. “I was under the impression that you had agreed to let him be left handed- was that not- what…?”

“In his public life, yes,” she replies stiffly. “But just because his father insisted he do as he pleases in school and in sports doesn’t mean I have to let him track impurities through my home. I don’t need any more bad luck than I’ve already got, life’s hard enough without wayward energy being spread around.” 

Tendou turns his attention to Ushijima. Ushijima has decided that the empty bowl in front of him is the most interesting thing in the world. 

“I… wasn’t aware there was that much risk associated with being left handed,” he says, slowly, looking back to her. 

“Evil lurks behind your left-hand side,” she replies. “It is for curses and magic potions, it is not for handing your poor mother a book,” she adds, sending a glare to Ushijima, who’s trying to die right now, or some approximation of it. 

“...right,” he says. “So… you actually… So you believe all that. I… I wasn’t aware such superstition still… existed-”

“Superstition,” she scoffs, sounding actually annoyed with him now. “It is the order of the world - for every good, there is an evil opposite. There is a right and a left. Forces that are kept in balance, and must not be forgotten. It’s our responsibility to live lives that favour the good kami, and not ones that invite yokai into our homes.”

On the word yokai, Tendou feels a stab of something cold and sharp shoot directly up his spine and lodge in his jaw, like each individual vertebrae was aching. It takes him a moment to recover, and when he tries to open his mouth, he feels like his jaw is wired shut, and he feels the joint pop and crack as he opens his mouth again. 

Ushijima is staring at him, confusion across his face. 

His mother seems worried as well, halfway to standing up to see if he needed help when he manages to wave her off. 

“Sorry,” he says, coughing slightly. “I… must have… breathed wrong, I don’t know…”

“You weren’t feeling well earlier,” Ushijima says. “Perhaps you should…”

“Yeah, I think-”

“Okay-”

Tendou tries to leave the table as respectfully as he can, but thankfully, due to the sudden and odd change to the energy of the conversation, they’re spared their table manners for extenuating circumstances, and he’s able to slip away and let Ushijima help his mother clean up. 

 

---

 

“Oh, you’re here,” Ushijima says, shutting his bedroom door behind him and looking over to where Tendou was curled up tightly on his bed, arms wrapped around his stomach. 

“Hope that’s okay.”

“Of course. Are you feeling any better?”

Tendou shifts slowly, rolling onto his back to look up at the ceiling, at the same time that Ushijima is slowly shifting to sit down beside him. 

“...yeah,” he says. “I feel alright. Whatever it is… passed, maybe…”

A heavy hand is placed on his forehead, and Ushijima is silent for a second before saying: “Your temperature is normal. You still might be sick, though…”

Tendou pushes himself to sit up, surprising Ushijima with the sudden movement as he pulled back to turn and look at him. 

“I think it’s a satori thing,” he says. 

Ushijima stares at him, and it takes Tendou a second to figure out what he’s confused about, so he clarifies:

“Not me Satori, yokai-satori. I think it’s a yokai thing.”

Ushijima nods slightly in understanding, before saying: “But… you were not… you… you are not…”

Tendou does feel bad, somewhat, knowing how much Ushijima would struggle to convince his brain to accept the impossible, but in some ways he didn’t mind hearing Ushijima’s highly pragmatic approach to the situation. Tendou could do with a dose of scientific reality right about now, even if Ushijima had recently started an open-minded crusade to support him. 

“Yeah?” Tendou prompts. 

“What would that even mean?” Ushijima says eventually. “Satori are… mountain-dwelling apes, they would have no reason to feel ill at ease in any old home.”

“Not any old home,” Tendou says, smacking at him lightly. “The house of a woman that is a devout believer of these things - me and Daichi were trying to work it out before, it’s like… the more you indulge in these things, the more - well! It’s like your mother says! If you invite in evil, you get evil, you have to live a life that… that doesn’t… you know, like…” 

Tendou cuts himself off as he catches Ushijima’s attention slipping away to look down at his left hand.

“No, stop it, that’s not what I’m saying-” he says, hurrying to grab Ushijima’s face and force it to look back at him. 

“So your hypothesis is that my mothers abject belief that evil kami may be lurking around every corner is creating… what, a reaction in you?”

“...yes, I guess? Nurarihyon said that something like this would happen, that you could… that… god, I wish… there’s something about it, there’s something about… believing it, or knowing it, maybe, or-”

Tendou cuts himself off in surprise, because Ushijima has slowly tipped himself forward, to thump their foreheads together. 

“Ah… what’s this?” 

“I do not think you are a monster,” he replies. “If you are correct, then I should have as much influence upon you as my mother.” 

There’s a moment of silence, as Tendou doesn’t know what to do. His first instinct is to say no, that isn’t how it works, that can’t be right, because it would be so simple, but- 

Ushijima’s logic is sound. If it’s about belief, then… Well… 

He feels Ushijima’s left hand lifts up to the side of his face, holding him in place. Tendou can hear the thoughts like a mantra in his skull, radiating out with genuine intent to help him. 

He is not a monster. 

He is not a monster. 

He is not a monster.

Tendou laughs after a moment, leaning into his hand. “You’re probably not gonna like this answer, but I actually do feel a bit better now.”

Ushijima opens his eyes, pulling back in surprise. 

“Really?”

“I’m not sure if it’s your psychic willpower or just the fact that you’re such a dork, it's distracting, but yeah. I feel better.” 

Ushijima looks back at him for a moment, before nodding slightly and saying: “Either way, if you are uncomfortable here we could find alternative arrangements, or… it should only be a couple of months - when did you say that program would be starting?”

Tendou freezes slightly. Technically, in autumn. However, he also knew that if he made the shortlist he’d have already heard back from them, and that hadn’t happened. So while his name might be the backup candidacy, it was unlikely he’d be going at all. 

He had not yet told Ushijima that, not quite sure how to deal with telling someone you’d failed before you even reached the interview stage.

“Uh, in the fall,” he says. “But I haven’t heard back yet, so who knows for sure.”
He hums a response, but further conversation is cut short by Ushijima’s mother calling his name. He glances behind him for a second, before looking back to Tendou. 

“I need to go,” he says. “Just… try and remember that my mother’s opinion on superstitious matters are the ramblings of a woman who cut me financially off for pursuing a career in sports. It has no bearing on your value. Or… your-” and here he just awkwardly waves a hand to beckon over all of him. “This. Everything.” 

“Okay,” he replies, glancing to make sure the door was still closed before leaning forward to steal a quick kiss. “You try and remember the same, okay?”

 

---

 

Tendou can not sleep that night. He stares up at the window of the small guest room and watches the clouds roll through the sky and thinks and thinks and thinks and thinks. 

He cannot read people’s minds when they’re asleep, that he knows for sure. That’s how he knows that both Ushijima and his mother are asleep. He tosses and turns, and although that sick, full-body ache does not return, he cannot find a restful position to fall sleep in. He tries to pry for Ushijima’s thoughts, trying to willpower him into waking up so that he’d have an excuse to go slip into his room, but Ushijima has always been able to sleep like the dead, and he can’t justify waking him up intentionally. 

He’s sure he eventually falls asleep, but almost just as quickly it feels like sunlight is cutting into the room and spurring him onwards. He rolls onto the back to look up at the ceiling. Now, he thinks, now he can hear thoughts, so it must be daytime. 

He tries. It finds it painfully easy to track and get thoughts, something that he usually wasn’t able to do with any precision unless he was in the same room as someone, though he supposed they were relatively nearby, just a few thin walls away. 

He can hear Ushijima’s mother, prattling on to herself something akin to-

Gotta get the floors clean, then wipe down the windows, then I should probably see if the boys will be needing lunch or if they’ll manage themselves… Tendou doesn’t seem like a picky eater so it should be easy… it’s so weird having kids back under the roof… wait, are you supposed to offer adult children lunch or should I just assume they’ll manage their own… Wakatoshi has always been so particular about his food…

And that’s relatively boring to listen to, so he tilts his head to the side to find Ushijima. 

How deep is this hole? 30 centimeters?

Wait what the fuck? 

The odd stream of thoughts coming from Ushijima are enough to get him up and out of bed, quickly stumbling around to change and head through the house, tracking the strength of the radiating thoughts until he had slipped out the front door and could stand on the narrow porch of the house, watching Ushijima assess a hole in the grass that he has, judging by the dirty shovel, just created. After a second, he seems dissatisfied, so he stands up again and sets to work with the shovel.  

Tendou decides to head over, calling: “Hey, Wakkun, woke up with a hankering for digging or is this normal for you?”

He seems startled, having not heard him come up, and he turns to look at Tendou, blank for a moment before turning to beckon to a small row of spindly samplings and saying: “I am planting trees.”

“...alright, let’s rephrase the question. Why are you planting trees and-” Tendou closes his eyes to do a rapid estimation of the time, and finishes the sentence with: “Seven in the goddamn morning.” 

“My mother asked me to.”

“...for what purpose?” 

And here Ushijima looks genuinely exasperated, opening his arms. “Because she saw me existing and didn’t know how else to handle it. I don’t know. She will always have something for me to do.” 

There are large windows in the house, and Tendou’s ability to hear thoughts does not allow him to accurately track locations, so he crosses his arms and makes sure to keep at least a few feet back, even if his instincts were always to reach out and touch or hug or otherwise bother Ushijima. 

The understanding had been mutual between them - his mother was a traditionalist. In the interest of survival, Ushijima had decided that not coming out to her was the most efficient way to avoid imploding both their lives. Especially for now. 

“Okay,” he says, then: “So… you’ve been home for less than twenty-four hours and now you’re digging holes, so this is great, we should definitely get on the lookout for a better living situation.”

“Once you are gone I will definitely-” and Ushijima doesn’t even bother finishing his sentence, nodding. 

“Great… okay… uhm… so if I go inside am I gonna be put to work, or?”

“No, no, you are a guest, you are fine. You should eat, if you haven’t already. I will… try and do this quickly, and hopefully we can… leave for the day, to… do something else.” 

“Uh-huh,” Tendou says, eyeing the property for a moment before saying: “Alright, well… Sorry about the hole-digging, I’m gonna go inside and… I guess spend quality one-on-one time with your yokai fearing mother.” 

Ushijima closes his eyes again, that pre-headache exhaust creeping over him. 

“Good luck,” he says. 

---

 

The issue, Tendou decides, is that Ushijima’s mother seems like a decent person. It would be so much easier to critique the way she treated her son or write her off as nonsensical and homophobic and villainous if she didn’t seem an otherwise pleasant person. 

She lets Tendou flip through that old recipe book, curled up in their living room and reading the handwriting of ancient long lost Ushijima’s, neat black ink on wrinkled and worn paper, metal rings holding scraps that have been fixed and repaired. There are some pages that she’s obviously had to give up on and re-make, and these ones he finds the most fascinating, her own neat handwriting listing ingredients and cooking times and preparation steps, carefully drawn and laminated, stuck in between papers older than she was to continue the legacy of a man who loved this recipe to write it down two hundred years ago. 

This is a family that doesn’t throw things out, not if they can help it, and that extends to their traditions and practices. He wonders if Ushijima is even aware of that in the way that Tendou can understand it immediately, if he understands that his mothers disgust at his love of the sport comes not necessarily from a specific distaste of it, but from it being a deviation from the way their legacy has been carried on before. In many ways, Tendou thinks, flipping the page to a newer, though still decades old recipe, Ushijima had overtly chosen his father’s legacy over this one. She was bound to be bitter about it. Her only child - if he didn’t take it up, it would end with her. 

She brings him tea and points out her favourite recipes from the book, and he asks a million only vaguely related questions, because he doesn’t know how to shut his mouth. 

Eventually Ushijima comes back inside, covered in dirt, and before he has a chance to remove his shoes, his mother has appeared and calls: 

“Oh, Wakatoshi, honey, before you take your shoes off, can you go out and take a look at the fence down by the road? I think someone backed into it, the boards are loose.” 

Ushijima stares at her for a moment, before nodding an understanding and turning around to leave without a word. 

Tendou watches from where he sits, putting a hand over his mouth to stop himself from laughing, because Ushijima’s internal thoughts, for as long as Tendou can hear them, are just repetitions of why?

“Ah, Ms. Ushijima,” Tendou says, as she comes back into the room. 

“Yes?” 

“Would you mind if I used your kitchen? I’d love to repay you for your generosity in hosting me, and… ah, well, I don’t know how better to do that than through baking.” 

She seems delighted by this, and tells him he absolutely has free reign of the kitchen, and he packs himself up to head into town to pick up a few things he’ll need. 

He passes Ushijima down at the end of the driveway - he’s a little ways away on the side of the road, losing a battle against a fence as he’s trying to pull old, broken wood off its still sturdy nails. 

Tendou heads the opposite direction into town, up the gentle sloping hills for a short but direct walk. He whistles softly as he goes, folding his hands in his pockets and enjoying the warm sun. 

The town does have a little convenience store, though it’s not particularly varied in its stock. He imagines you’d need to drive or bus into the next town over to get anything of considerable size. Most houses here seemed to have their own gardens, running relatively self sufficient to avoid traveling if at all possible. 

Either way, he bobs his head along to music that’s playing only in his head, scanning the shelves of the store and looking for what he needs. He’s a little bit distracted, so he’s not really watching what’s going on around him, until he lifts his head to turn around and notices two women on the far end of the aisle murmuring to each other, but keeping their eyes on him. 

Eh? 

He slowly moves the other direction, but this only puts his attention on a young man talking on the phone, who’s also watching him. 

He ducks his head and hurries over to the counter, glancing behind him at the odd people, before looking up to the clerk, and is about to make mindless chatter when he notices she’s pulled back, not looking at him as she quickly runs his items through. 

He pays, and thanks her, and she just gives him a nod. 

What in the hell…?

He heads out of the shop, and a glance either direction at first seems normal, before he notices from the upper-level floor of some shops, some private residence, curtains that tug shut as if notice him noticing them, and the movement of people who think they’re looking casually, leaning over to their friends or family to say something he can’t hear. 

He doesn’t think he should, but he stretches his psyche out, to get a feel for what the hell is going on. 

That’s him. That’s the monster. 

That’s the troublemaker Wakatoshi brought home. 

Someone should be keeping an eye on him, wandering around like that. 

God, he looks more like a monster than I thought. 

I guess the rumours are true… 

He’s planning something, I’m sure of it, look at how shifty he is…

Wait, what? 

Tendou jerks his head around, baffled by this sudden turn of opinion on him. He hasn’t met any of these people! They’ve never met him! How - where did any of this come from, he hasn’t done anything… 

There’s a pain in his jaw. 

Look at him prowling around. Probably looking for some girl to terrorize. 

A face not even a mother could love.

Well didn’t you see? Wakatoshi’s gotten himself tangled up with some internet celebrities or something. First volleyball, and now this? I heard that Tendou character’s a proper yokai. Yeah, yeah, there’s video online and everything. You can see him, he’s a monster.

No, no no no no-

No-

Tendou shifts the paper bag he’s holding to hold it with both hands against his chest, scared if he tried to balance it he’d lose his grip. 

Fuck. 

He can taste blood in his mouth, though he doesn’t know where it comes from. It takes him a second to realize that it’s his own blood, cut from his tongue as it scrapes against teeth so sharp they’re a hazard to his own mouth - he discovers this when he lifts a hand to his lips and cuts his finger. 

“Tendou.”

He jerks his head around, shocked to find himself staring back at Nurarihyon. Tendou doesn’t think he’s seen him in public like this, but based on the way everyone else is still watching him, nobody but him can see the old yokai. 

“Nu…”

“Don’t speak, it’ll make it worse. Come with me.”

And Nurarihyon turns to start walking briskly down the road. Tendou hesitates, before turning and hurrying after him. 

“Wh… what’s happening? Why are you here?” Tendou starts, but Nurarihyon cuts him off with:

“Don’t look at me. It’ll look weird. And don’t talk, they can’t see me. Just listen.” 

Tendou jerks his head around to look down the city street again, and keeps up with the old man’s quick pace as they walk. 

“A town like this is no good for a yokai,” Nurarihyon says after a moment, once they’re a little further up the town and away. “Towns like this will mob and lynch you faster than you can defend yourself and for yokai that’s like poison. They can make a monster out of you faster than anything else, and they will never blame the wolf in the woods for the damage done, it will always be you.”

“But they don’t even know me-” he says, under his breath, barely a whisper. “Why can they have this much of an effect on me?”

“They don’t need to know you, they just fear. You’ve tangled yourself up with the wrong people, you need to come with me now.” 

“I… no, no, I can’t-”

They’re leaving the town behind, so Tendou feels a little better about speaking, glancing over his shoulder to look back at them. They’ve gone the wrong way, he’s going to need to trek back through it - though he supposes Nurarihyon expects him to leave with him now.

“You are a yokai, Tendou,” Nurarihyon says, in a tone that refuses to take argument. Tendou stops walking, and the old man slowly turns to face him. “You are a yokai, which means you cannot play guest in the home of the superstitious and the sinistral.”

“But I don’t… I don’t want to go, I don’t understand-  U… Utsukushii gets to live her life! She’s a yokai, right? She’s a goddamn public figure, but I can’t live a few weeks in a sleepy little town?” 

“She is not a yokai, she is a host of one. Futakuchi-onna are not born, they are made. She is a rare success story in the long line of women who have fallen victim to that creature and given their lives for it - and the lives of others. You, however, were born this way. You are my direct responsibility-”

“Then why didn’t you get me earlier?” Tendou shouts, taking a step back. “When I was six and crying alone because everyone was calling me a monster, or when I was ten and being sent to a psychiatrist because my mother didn’t know what to do with me, why didn’t you approach me then? Why did you wait?”

“Because I didn’t know,” he says, and it’s a plain and simple answer that Tendou does not want to hear, and it takes the wind and the anger out of him, and he finds himself staring at the old man, who’s just that, an old, old yokai who looks exhausted, who looks… afraid?

“You… you didn’t know?”

“I am not omniscient. I do not know of every babe born of supernatural means, I am not able to track every yokai. I am merely able to help those that are brought to my attention, that make noise in the water. Families like the Ushijimas are dangerous because they come from a tradition of driving monsters like us out. If you give that women a reason to fear you, you will prove her right.”

“But… I… I’ve always been… I’ve known Wakatoshi for years, and we’ve never had a problem-”

“He didn’t believe it before now.”

Tendou shuts his mouth. 

Fuck.

“Sinistrals are not inherently magic but ones born and bred from bloodlines of power and superstition have innate…” 

Tendou tilts his head to the side. He had never been able to read Nurarihyon’s mind, but he finds that he doesn’t need to right now, to read the expression on his face, the somewhat scattered way he’s talking. Something has happened between now and the last time they spoke to spook him. Or… 

“You’re afraid of him, you’re afraid of Wakatoshi,” Tendou guesses. “Being left-handed doesn’t make him that special, it’s…”

Nurarihyon’s jaw tenses.

“Everyone with a left hand is capable of using it to touch into our world,” Nurarihyon says. “I am not afraid of him, I’m concerned about the level of power you are funneling together. To connect him to the believer, to the bigener… You are surrounding yourself with people who can see you as you truly are and it will get you killed.”

“Why?” Tendou hisses, leaning forward and working really hard on lowering his voice. “Why will it get me killed, why is it a bad thing, why won’t you-” he cuts himself off, breaking into a cackling laugh. “Again, isn’t it? You don’t know.”

“I don’t,” Nurarihyon spits back, and all of Tendou’s bravado at the accurate guess is torn out of him at the admission. It’s somehow worse than being wrong. “There has never been a point in history in which someone of Sawamura’s provenance has entangled themself with someone of Oikawa’s persuasion, and we do not know what will come of it. Yokai magic is fickle and gossamer, and you do not want to be patient zero for whatever comes next. Come with me to the Hyakki Yagyō, let me protect you.”

“No, no,” Tendou says. “I’m not leaving just because things are a little bit weird, things have been fucking weird my whole life, I’m used to-”

Nurarihyon sniffs, head tilting up slightly to look down at him despite his short stature. Tendou feels his argument die on his tongue. 

“Humanity will not accept you as one of them,” he says. “But remember that it was you that refused to be accepted by the yokai.”

“Your warning has been received,” Tendou spits back, but he doesn’t feel very confident in his choice. 

He’s not there anymore. 

Tendou feels a little bit crazy, since there’s never a moment of noticing him disappear, it’s more like Tendou’s brain suddenly remembers that he can’t see him, and he’s erased from his vision. He stumbles back a step, body aching and jaw tight and the lights and sound feeling overwhelmingly hot and loud in his senses. He turns his feet back towards the town, stumbling on heavy legs and trying to stay focused. 

He tries to block out the noise of the town, their thoughts and judgements and gossip, but he cannot do it, it seems an impossible task to close off his brain now, so he listens to their hatred of him and tracks his way back to the Ushijimas’ home. 

 

---

 

Her name was, technically, Ushijima Noriko, however it had been years, since anyone had called her Noriko. She’d probably last heard it before her mother passed away. She was, now, Ms. Ushijima, and she would probably remain so until she died, and she was fine with that. She had never particularly needed anyone else anyway. 

She answers the phone when it rings only because it is polite to do so, pressing it to her ear as she wipes down the counters in the kitchen, and watches her son sitting on the grass outside trying to figure out how to open the box containing nails to fix the fence. He’d get there.

“Haven’t you heard?” Mrs Tamura is saying on the line, sounding like she herself was bustling around getting stuff done. “That boy your son has brought home, rumour in the city is that he’s a proper yokai.”

This makes her laugh, waving a hand. “Oh, don’t be silly. He’s a perfectly nice boy. An unfortunate face, that’s for sure, but plenty respectful. Don’t judge a book-”

“No, no, you don’t understand! He is, you can find footage of it online!” 

“...online?”

“Yes, yes! Didn’t you know? How could you not have known, you’re his mother?”

“Wait, his - are you talking about Wakatoshi?” 

“Yes! My granddaughter showed it to me, your son has been digging around in haunted houses and cemeteries looking for ghosts. And now maybe they were joking, but there’s plenty of videos in which these… theses boys, your son, are talking about that Tendou as if he is a proper yokai - a satori! There’s footage from a party a week or so ago, where he’s right properly reading people’s minds, it’s terrifying! You know you should never have let that ex-husband of yours convince you to let Wakatoshi run around like he did - the devil is left-handed, don’t you know, and it looks like you’ve got him inviting in bad kami.”

Noriko doesn’t exactly know what to say to that. 

“Oh, well…” as she’s trying to come up with a response that is both polite and respectable and also carries the tone of ‘please don’t accuse my son of being possessed by the devil,’ the front door opens, and the subject of discussion himself, Tendou, walks in. 

He smiles, though it does little to ease the awkward planes of his face and the curl of his lips. He sets his bag on the counter, and he doesn’t start talking right away. If she were better at reading people, she might say he looks upset, but she’s not, so she just puts her attention back on the phone. 

“Look, Tamura, I need to go…”

“Oh! Of course, but be careful… it might be worth taking a trip to the shrine, asking the gods if there’s something to be-”

“I’ll take care of it,” she sings, before hurrying to hang up the phone. 

She stands at one end of the kitchen, staring at Tendou as he lined stuff up, face set in a neutral line. 

“Did you get everything you need?” she asks, when the silence was unbearable. 

He glances up at her, and unreadable and guarded expression. 

“Yes, thank you.”

“Good, good…”

She’s just about to dig around for something else to say, when he adds:

“If you don’t… mind me asking… what is it about the left-hand that’s so… I know you told me, last night, but… for real, really, what is it?” 

She thinks about it for a moment, knowing the subject - especially to the younger generations - could be tense and easily dismissed. 

“It’s how we’ve always done things,” she says after a minute. “I don’t… I don’t think my son is inherently evil for being left-handed, but… my mother, and my grandmother, and my great grandmother, they all said the same thing. The left-hand is not made for day-to-day interaction. It… by virtue of using it, you invite in bad luck and bad forces, it’s… impure and unclean, it’ll leave a stain on objects you touch - I was even taught, at a young age, that you cannot pick up any blessed talisman or token with your left hand, as it would dispel the magic, and kami would use their left hand to bestow curses upon an object or subject… It’s not evil, I just… I want him to live a clean life. I want him to only have the best of luck, and to be watched out for by the best of the forces of this world. That’s all. Why?” 

Tendou is quiet for a moment, before saying: “I’ve just been really interested in folklore these days, I guess.”

She thinks of the phone conversation with Tamura, of the videos that supposedly existed. Could this boy, this sweet boy who’d managed to befriend even her austere son, be a monster slowly infesting their family, wiggling his way in under the radar? 

Satori aren’t known to do that…

“Feel free to use anything you need,” she says, though her breath comes out quietly, before slipping from the kitchen and down the hall. She needed to see these videos for herself. 

 

---

 

Tendou waits until she’s left the kitchen to let his hands start shaking, hunching over and pressing his face to the arms, trying to still his racing heart with deep breaths and slow thoughts. She thinks he’s a monster. Or if she doesn’t now, she will, she will as soon as she finds those videos, as soon as she sees him using his abilities. 

Fuck. 

No, no, he’s not a monster, he’s not a monster-

 

---

 

“Haven’t you heard,” one woman says to another, after hanging up the phone. “That Tendou came to town, totally freaked out, wandered aimlessly around, talking to nothing… shouting at air…”

“Oh, he’s a monsters, that boy’s a monster - I spoke to Ms. Ushijima, but she seemed uncertain. Her! Can you imagine? Maybe he’s already gotten in her head. Mind controlling her I bet, you know what monsters do to women.”

“We should do something about it, yes, yes, if Ms. Ushijima won’t get him out of our town, we’ll have to do it ourselves.”

 

---

 

Ushijima always struggled to articulate why he never wanted to return home. Perhaps there was some metaphor to be made about it never actually feeling like home after his father left, but generally what he ended up saying was “my mother can be overbearing,” in an off-handed way, and when he mentions casually his childhood experiences of waking up with the sun to weed out the gardens and move stone for the retaining wall and spending all day outside, all day at work, they tend to find it amusing and sympathetic, but don’t really wrap their heads around what he’s saying. 

His mother had never wanted him so much as she wanted a son, and he had never really managed to make that work for either of them. 

He uses his left hand to hammer in the nails on the fence, and then wonders when in the world he had become so petty. 

Perhaps his mother was right, and Shiratorizawa had been a bad influence on him. 

But he’s finally done, so he trudges up the driveway and back to the house, a house that had remained unchanged for the duration of his life. Well into the afternoon now, his mother would probably start bustling around looking for something to prepare for dinner. He wished they lived in a different town - he wants to tell her they’ve made plans somewhere, and take Tendou away for dinner somewhere else, but the unfortunate reality is that there wasn’t really anywhere to go that wouldn’t be conspicuous, and certainly nowhere to go that would be believable. You had to plan in advance if you were going to head into the city for a day. 

He nudges his shoes off in the doorway, surprised slightly by the relative silence in the house. He opens his mouth to call to see if maybe they’d left without him noticing, but realized between his mother and Tendou, he wasn’t sure who he would be more concerned about calling for. 

As if reading his mind - or perhaps literally - he hears Tendou’s voice from the kitchen call: 

“I’m in here.” 

He doesn’t sound like himself. 

Ushijima slips into the kitchen, catching sight of Tendou quietly going about the routine motions of mixing together a dough in a plastic bowl. His face is tinted red, as if he’s been sniffing back tears for a considerable amount of time, and he doesn’t look up as Ushijima enters. 

“Is…” Ushijima glances behind him. 

“Nothing’s wrong,” Tendou answers. 

Why is he acting like that then?

“We need to talk, I want to… talk, but we have to do it in private, I’m sorry-”

Wait is he reading my mind to answer?

“Yes, I am,” Tendou snaps, and for some reason that cracks his voice, and he has to squeeze his eyes shut to regain control of his expression. “I can’t stop, I can’t… I-”

What’s happened? Why is this happening? How do I help him?

“Please, stop, stop thinking, stop-”

Tendou waves a hand to try and indicate Ushijima should leave, but he’s not sure why he would ever listen to that kind of order, and steps forward instead, catching Tendou’s hand and turning him to face him. 

“Hey,” Ushijima says, firmly, before Tendou can say anything. 

“Please,” Tendou says. “I need… please-”

“Focus on me, okay? Tell me what you need, I will do it.”

“I… it’s too much, they… I can hear everyone, I can hear the whole town, they hate me, they know I’m a monster, your mother knows I’m a monster-”

Why? How could they have known that?

He hears Tendou stifle a shriek, and suddenly he’s pulling back from him, lifting a hand up to his mouth in horror, staring at Ushijima as if he has hit him. 

“Sator-”

“You think I’m a monster too,” he says. 

“No I don’t,” Ushijima replies, confused. Why would he think that?

“Because you thought it, your thoughts aren’t as carefully prepared as your words, you agree that there’s something wrong with me, that there’s something for them to hate, you knew - you’ve been lying to me-”

What?

“That’s not… Satori, you know-” Ushijima steps forward towards him, and Tendou takes a step back, eyes raising in distrust. 

“No, no, no, you’re one of them, you’re- Nurarihyon tried to warn me, that you’d be dangerous, you and your whole fucking bloodline, I defended you, and you think I’m a monster-”

“I don’t,” Ushijima says, working hard to keep his voice from raising to a shout. He offers a hand out to him. “Let’s go sit down,” he offers. “Clearly you need a minute to process-”

With a growl of distrust that does not sound human, Tendou reaches to grab the wooden spoon he’d been using, twisting and bringing down to whip it hard against the knuckles of Ushijima’s outstretched hands, making him yelp and tug his hand - his left hand - back in against his chest. 

“You are not yourself,” Ushijima replies, breath coming in short and shaky. 

“No, no, I am myself, and that’s the fucking problem, isn’t it? I’ve always been this way, I’ve always been this way and no matter how badly you want me to be different I’m never going to be normal.”

“Tendou-”

“No, no, I can’t be here anymore, I can’t do this, I can’t do this-”

When Tendou tries to get past him, Ushijima panics, not knowing where he might be intending to go, and does the only thing he can think of, which is to grab him and pull him back. 

With a horrible, rumbling snarl, the moment he’s touched Tendou whips around with a lashing hand and rips nails across the skin of his cheek, half a scratch and half a slap, forcing him to jerk with the motion, caught off guard. 

There’s no hesitation in his movements. 

With Ushijima trying to recover and tilted down, Tendou grabs at his hair and shoulder and uses frenzied strength to yank him down low enough that he could drive his knee up into his face. 

Pain flares through his cheek as he stumbles back, claws in his hair cutting over his scalp as he tore himself out of Tendou’s grip. Tendou didn’t keep his nails long, though, he shouldn’t-

He stumbles back, disoriented, unsure if it’s the hit to the face or not that makes Tendou look like that, shoulders raising, arms half bent, longer than they should be handing down his sides, eyes dark and swallowed by his pupils, wrinkles to his skin around his mouth and eyes like he’d never had before. 

Ushijima hits the floor of the kitchen. 

Please stop. Please stop. Please stop. 

I don’t want to hurt you-

“Oh, you think you will hurt me?” Tendou shrieks, voice coming out in a pitched, horrible scream that did not sound like his voice normally does, as he lunges to the kitchen counter. 

He’s going to grab a knife-

Ushijima shoves himself up, not risking standing up and making himself more of a target, instead ducking to the side to try and get passed him while he was in the motion of grabbing the weapon. 

He almost makes it, but Tendou’s arms are so long-

He feels the collar of his shirt yank back, twisting him towards the counter. He doesn’t know where the knife is, that makes this dangerous-

“Stop it!” he shouts, hearing his own voice crack over the words. “Tendou, something is wrong, you need to-”

He drives his elbow back into Tendou’s chest, and the same time he feels the knife cut through the skin of his back, low near his side, only saved from a full evisceration by his elbow weakening his grip. 

He spins around to face Tendou at the same time he’s already sending another slash through the air. He lifts a hand reflexively, and feels the blade cut cleanly through the skin of his arm, wrist, and into his palm. 

It’s so painful that he can’t even process it - his body shuts down that part of his brain in service of the adrenaline that’s beginning to overtake him. Pain later, survival now. 

“Ten-”

One of Tendou’s clawed, furious hands grabs his wrist as he tries to shove him back, and it forces him to open up his body on one side. 

That knife draws back. 

“Please,” Ushijima begs. “Please, please, you are not a monster, you-”

He sees movement. 

It all happens so fast - his mother throws the first thing she could find, a small potted plant from a shelf in the living room. It cracks into Tendou’s side and hits the floor, and realistically Ushijima is sure all it should have done is distract him for a second, but Tendou is no longer playing by the rules of men-

He pulls back with a shriek, whole body contorting as his joints popped and his jaw elongates, sharp, terrible teeth snatching at the air. 

Tendou hits the ground for just a second, screaming as his body rearranges itself - more monster now than he was when he was attacking Ushijima. 

“Tendou-” he tries, stumbling forward-

“Wakatoshi, get back!” his mother shouts. 

Tendou looks like he’s fighting it. Ushijima is terrible at reading people, but Tendou is fighting it, he knows he is. 

He’s going to lose. 

He thinks he’s a monster.

And then, after stumbling into the wall as he tried to get up, Tendou has crashed his way out the front door and is gone.

“No!”

Ushijima takes off after him, but he feels his mother’s hands grab for him. 

He shakes her off without a second word, blocking out her screaming pleas for him to reconsider as he takes off down the gravel driveway, following the bright red hair, practically a beacon in the afternoon sun. 

Tendou stumbles, several times, but he recovers quickly, seeming just as comfortable at a running pace on his knuckles as he was on his feet. 

“Tendou!”  

Tendou has leapt the gate at the end of the driveway with ease, so Ushijima does the same, almost tripping himself in his haste as he stumbles onto the side of the road and fumbles to get back on his feet. 

I am faster than him, in normal circumstances.

I can catch him. 

What happens if I do not catch him?

He cannot find out. 

Ushijima takes off down the road after him, half aware that his mother is scrambling to follow them to the property line. His only moment of relief is noticing that Tendou is running away from the town, and not towards it. 

But he’s so goddamn fast.

Ushijima forces himself to run faster. It’s not even something he thinks he can do, it’s a must, it wasn’t trying to beat a personal best, or hoping his stamina to last longer than it was meant to. He has never in his life run at his top speed like this, he doesn’t know what his body’s upper limit will be, he just knows Tendou is still too far ahead and if Ushijima loses sight of him, that might be it. 

Please, please, please, please, please-

Come back. Come back. Come back. 

I need you. 

“Tendou!” he shouts, and when he’s just about to feel his body give him the signal to start slowing down, that he’s not breathing enough, that his muscles are not meant to be worked like this, he is not meant to be running like this, he notices that he is closing the distance, so he keeps running. 

You are not a monster. 

Come back. 

He stretches a hand out. 

He’s not sure if he’s really seeing what he thinks he’s seeing.

He knows Tendou is not a monster, he knows he is just a boy, a teenager, his best friend, but his eyes have never deceived him before, and it looks like there is length to his limbs that was not there before, a curve to his nose that isn’t supposed to exist, a heaviness to his brow bone, hair further down his neck than hair is supposed to grow- claws on hands that should be calloused but soft.

No. 

You. Are. Not. A. Monster.

His hand closes on Tendou’s jacket, and he digs his heels in to yank him back and redirect all his momentum. 

Tendou immediately shifts to merely slip out of the jacket, but the motion trips him, and he hits the pavement. It’s enough to give Ushijima the time he needs to toss the jacket aside and leap forward, dragging Tendou back down onto the road before he could get up and keep running. 

Hissing, Tendou twists around and tries to dig his claws into Ushijima’s face and eyes, but he jerks his head back to avoid the claws, and gets ahold of one of his hands, twisting it away to force Tendou to-

Tendou twists his head down and bites down hard on the hand that was holding him. 

Cursing, Ushijima let go on reflex, and Tendou almost makes it up again, squirming out from under him. Ushijima stumbles halfway up to grab him by the waist and yank him back down again, crawling forward to keep him pinned down. Tendou screams, a horrible, inhumane noise as he thrashes underneath him, snapping and twisting and clawing at the pavement of the road with one hand, the dirt and grass with the other. 

He bucks up, and Ushijima is caught off guard enough by the motion that it almost works, as he tries to pin Tendou’s arms down to his side to keep him prone. 

“Stop it,” Ushijima hisses, barely able to breath. “Stop it, it’s okay, it’s okay-”

Tendou just screams again, twisting his head as he gets free of Ushijima’s arms and twists to bite down on the skin of his arm, digging razor teeth into him. 

Ushijima grits his teeth against the pain now beginning to take ahold of his senses, but doesn’t let himself react reflexively to pull away - that would let Tendou tear his skin off. Instead, he decides that as long as Tendou’s teeth are in his arm, they can’t be anywhere else, and forces his head in close against his chest, flexing his arm taunt to effectively immobilize his head, jaw stuck open and unable to remove itself from the arm. 

He throws his weight forward, pinning him down into the side of the road, his free hand grabbing one he didn’t have pinned against his side with his knee, forcing it down against the road. 

He can hear Tendou trying to scream and hiss and fight. He kicks and thrashes, but he’s not so strong with only his legs free, and pinned on his stomach. 

Ushijima presses his forehead down against the back of Tendou's head. 

Please, please, please, come back. Come back. 

You are not a monster. This is not you. This is not what you are. You are not a monster. 

Please. 

I love you.

I need you.

“Please, please, please, Tendou, please-” he’s mumbling. “Please, you are not a monster-”

He hears an intake, gasping sort of noise, as the screaming beneath him has changed its tune. It sounds more like-

Ushijima rarely trusts his intuition, but he does now, lifting his weight off Tendou just enough that he can get his arm off of him, just enough to take a look and process that all those odd, subtle changes weren’t quite there anymore, if they ever were, that his hands are thin and human, but there is blood under the nails from where he’d cracked them scrambling against the pavement. 

“Tendou-”

Tendou is crawling to his knees, shaking violently as he turns, trying to take in the situation, his usually rapidly processing brain suddenly misfiring over and over and over again. Ushijima wonders if he remembers any of it, or if he knows exactly what’s happened. 

Tendou lifts his head to look up at Ushijima, and screams, hands flying up to cover his mouth as horror overtakes his expression, taking in Ushijima, bloodied and panting, kneeling and waiting for him. 

“No, no-” Tendou starts, sinking lower to the ground, as if to grovel and crawl back to him. “No, no, no, no- I, I didn’t- I didn’t mean- I…”

“It’s okay,” Ushijima says, because he doesn’t know what else to say as he extends his arms towards him. “Come here, it’s okay-”

“Nothing about this is okay!” Tendou shrieks, before immediately breaking into violent, wracking sobs that nearly knock him over. It startles Ushijima - he’s never heard Tendou cry like this - he’s never seen anyone cry like this - like the noise itself was a scream that couldn’t be contained in his chest, air unable to reach his lungs, leaving him panting and shaking his head.

Ushijima doesn’t wait for him to come over, pushing himself forward to wrap him up in his arms, and for whichever reason, this only seems to make the crying worse, as Tendou buries his face in against his neck and gasps for breath he cannot catch. 

Ushijima can feel the adrenaline dissipating. The pain in his arm is the most severe, but everything aches and stings, and his heart is pounding so harshly he thinks it’s going to give out, but it’s not the pleasant burn of exhaustion or exercise, the way he was used to his heart beating, but rather it was running on pure terror. 

Tendou’s hands grab and tangle themselves tightly in the shirt he wore, clinging onto him like he was afraid he was going to turn into smoke. Ushijima isn’t sure there’s anything he can do to convince him that when he said his affection was unconditional he meant it. 

He puts a hand in his hair instead, and holds him as close as he can, shifting to sit more comfortably on the road and start rocking him gently, forwards and back, both for Tendou’s comfort and his own. He presses his nose down into Tendou’s hair, closing his eyes and slowly catching his own breath. 

You are not a monster.

 

---

 

By the time Tendou has stopped crying, both of them are exhausted and barely able to move, but three or four cars have stopped to ask if they need a ride to the hospital and it was getting hard to justify denying them. 

Ushijima helps pull him to his feet. Tendou is unsteady, and looks like he’s about to pass out, and Ushijima’s own body feels on the verge of collapse. 

Both of his arms have been torn up or bitten, but his right is the less damaged of the two, so he uses it under Tendou’s arms to help take his weight as they trek back together down the highway. 

Ushijima can see the misery in Tendou’s expression, this vacantness to his eyes that was never there before. 

Ushijima doesn’t need to read his mind or even read him at all to know what he’s thinking - that he doesn’t deserve to be helped back, that they should have let him go, that he really is the monster everyone always thought he was. 

“Will you be okay, closer to town?” Ushijima asks, as the gate to his property comes into view. He’s honestly not sure what he’s going to do or say, but he knows if he doesn’t check back in with his mother there will be a missing person’s report by nightfall. 

“I don’t know,” Tendou replies, barely a mumble. 

“Tell me if anything feels off.”

“Everything feels off.”

Ushijima stops walking, turning to look back at him. 

Tendou moves a hand up, slowly, to almost reverently ghost his fingers up the skin of his arm, tracing the knife wound that was still weeping blood. 

Ushijima can see him almost on the verge of breaking into more soul-crushing sobs, so he hastens to readjust and tug him along. 

“I never wanted to hurt you,” Tendou whimpers. “You’re not safe with me, you should-”

“Don’t be foolish.”

“But- What if I- what if this happens again-”

“Then I will bring you home again.”

“You make it sound easy.”

“It will be, for you.” 

Tendou is sniffling again, so they return to walking up the long gravel path. 

His mother comes rushing out to meet them, eyes wide. 

“Wakatoshi!” she’s shouting, waving a hand frantically. “Get away from him! He’s dangerou-”

“Stop,” he says, hearing his voice crack and shudder. “Stop it, I know you want to protect me, but-” he squeezes his eyes shut for a moment, before shaking his head to clear it and saying: “I know what he is. I love him. And if you ask me right now to pick between you and him, I will pick him.”

There’s a brief hesitation, before his mother is rushing down the hill to his side. 

“You get your persistence from your father,” she mutters. “You boys look terrible, come inside-”

And she lets Ushijima wrap his left arm around her for stability, as she places a hand on his chest and guides them both up towards the house. 

Chapter 31: Lighthouses

It’s the wee hours of the morning when a massive weight on Kuroo’s chest wakes him up. He briefly is concerned that he’s having a bought of sleep paralysis - given the recent changes to his understanding of the nature of reality, he really didn’t want to experience sleep paralysis. 

But that’s not the case, because-

“Mrrrraoooow-”

He stares up at the screaming cat, briefly frozen in fear before he manages to get his brain working again. 

“Why are you in my bedroom?” Kuroo shouts, sitting up quickly and knocking the cat off his chest. It seems rather content to just twist around on his lap, look up at him again and scream some more. 

“No!” Kuroo hisses back. “Shut up! Shut- up.”

The cat shuts it’s mouth, stares at him, and then scream again. 

Panicking, Kuroo stumbles to his feet and hauls the cat into his arms, lifting him into the air to look at him. “What do you want? What do you want! What do you want?”

The cat stops meowing, staring at him. 

He stands in silence for a minute, listening, and thankfully the house is silent and nobody else was awoken. 

He tucks the cat under his arm and fumbles around in the dark to turn on his desk lamp. He digs through his drawer to find a small basket of pinecones, grabbing a handful and heading to his room window. It was an old tactic, something they’d been doing since they were kids, Kuroo would not otherwise maintain a pinecone collection. 

As he moves, the cat squirms around and claws up his arm, to perch on his shoulder like he owned the goddamn place. The cat then promptly begins chewing on Kuroo’s hair. 

He opens his window, and then whips the pinecone across the alley between the houses to knock on Kenma’s window. He knocks again, then a third, and he’s about to go grab more pinecones when he sees movement and the light turns on. 

Kenma pulls his blinds open, and is in the process of pulling the window up when he freezes, staring across at Kuroo and the cat now riding him. 

“The cat is back,” Kuroo hissed into the night air. “It got into my fucking room.”

“Why is the cat in your room?”

“I don’t know! But Oikawa said it was an ill omen, so I’m scared someone is gonna- have you heard from anyone?” 

“No! Kuroo, it’s three in the morning!” 

“I know! The cat woke me up screaming!”

“Well what am I supposed to do about that? He’s your demon cat!”

“I…” Kuroo groaned, putting a hand over his face. “Just… I’m… Every time this cat appears something goes absolutely batshit… and it’s never woken me up before, I think it’s trying to tell me something!” 

Kenma stares at him for a moment, before, with an exhausted sigh, saying: “Okay, okay, fine. Let’s go to the park, I don’t want my mom waking up and asking why I’ve brought a cat inside.”

Kuroo nods, slides his window shut, and turns around to get dressed. The cat seems happy enough to make himself a nuisance and cling onto him. 

---

 

Daichi: Wait

Daichi: Like intentionally or???

Daichi: Because “Suga” tried to kill me recently too but that’s like a whole different thing

 

Ushijima: No.

Ushijima: And yes. 

Ushijima: It is an unusual situation. Why did Sugawara wish to kill you? 

 

Daichi: Well it wasn’t actual Suga it was faceless demon suga. Was yours actual Tendou?

 

Ushijima: I wish not to engage in discussions of Philosophy. 

Ushijima: It was Tendou. 

Ushijima: Why was Sugawara faceless?

 

Daichi: Dude I don’t fucking know his face just fell off it was a yokai or something. 

 

Ushijima: That sounds unpleasant. 

 

Daichi: YEAH WELL

Daichi: Are you okay???? Like legit what happened??

 

Ushijima: I’m not sure how much more clear I can be. Tendou tried to kill me. 

 

Daichi: You have GOT to know that is not enough information!

Daichi: You know what fuck this one sec I’m gonna call

 

Sugawara is very groggily finishing getting dressed behind him as Daichi fumbles around to make the facetime call, waiting as it rings and waits to connect. It only takes a second, before Ushijima is popping up on his phone screen. 

Daichi cannot help but yelp, since the first thing he notices is the long, scabbed scratch marks across Ushijima’s cheek, from one ear, down to his cheeks. They don’t look more than surface level, but they have welted, much like an irritated cat scratch. 

“What happened to your face?” Daichi says, before he can think this through. 

Ushijima looks genuinely annoyed at this question, repeating: “Tendou tried to kill me, how many times am I going to have to tell you this?” 

“I- does Tendou have fucking claws now, what the hell?”

“He did, briefly.”

“...alright - wait, where are you?”

Ushijima is moving around, and though he takes up most of the phone screen, Daichi is able to make out the sunny outside, green, lush gardens, and then the sudden darkening of the lighting as he ducks back into the house and heads into what must be a kitchen. 

“I’m at my mother’s,” Ushijima replies. 

“Okay, and why did Tendou try to kill you?”

What’s remarkable about Ushijima is how little he expresses any of his distress or emotions - Daichi can see, when he bends his arm to run a hand through his hair, than his forearm is entirely wrapped up, from elbow to palm, in gauze and bandage, immobilizing his thumb against his hand. He looks crazy exhausted, with darkness under his eyes and a generally unkempt look that Daichi has never seen him wear, but despite that his face is completely neutral, his posture is relaxed, his movements calm. In fact, Daichi assumes that the only reason he’s able to pick apart the small marks of tension - the twitch to his jaw before he speaks, the fact that he’s touching at his hair and face, the unnervingly steely gaze of attention instead of his usually somewhat aloof passivity - is because he’s spent enough time around him now to tell the difference between his casual apathy and intentional repression. 

Sugawara leans in over his shoulder to look at the screen. 

“Oh, geez, you look terrible,” Suga says. 

“It’s been a rough night,” Ushijima agrees. “How are you?”

“I’ve been better.”

Ushijima’s eyes flick slightly on screen, so Daichi assumes his attention is back on him. Before he can speak though, Ushijima lifts a hand up to tap at his own neck. 

“Oh, the strangulation?” Daichi says. “Yeah I had a rough night too.”

“So tell us what the hell happened,” Suga pushes in. “I’m well aware of Daichi’s thing, but this is all new. What happened?”

Ushijima sighs, eyes darting around for a second as he tried to pull his thoughts together, before saying: “Based on what we had previously established regarding the nature of Tendou’s psychic capabilities, I believe that my mother’s resolute believe in the supernatural led to an unfortunate spike in power that Tendou was incapable of controlling. Combined with his own emotional frustrations at the current circumstance and the undesirable location, it led to… what felt like a dam bursting. He attacked me after accusing me of thinking that he was a monster, but… I know he knows that I do not think that of him, so… He mentioned… It’s been a long night, and we… did not settle down properly to discuss every potential theory, but he mentioned the yokai Nurarihyon had tried to convince him to leave, before this happened, and he had angered him by refusing to go, and trying to call him out.”

“You’re speaking rather plainly of the yokai,” Daichi comments. “You believe it, then?”

Ushijima shifts slightly, looking a little bit uncomfortable for a moment before saying: “I do not wish to accept all things so readily, but what is in front of me I will not deny. Tendou is not a monster but Tendou also would not have attacked me, he knows what he spoke to, he knows what happened, my mother believes it full heartedly and though I am not usually one to accept her opinion on matters, I cannot deny that the way Tendou was affected. The way he was behaving was not in line with the behavioural instincts of the human animal.” 

“Every word out of your mouth is insane,” Daichi replies. 

“I do not feel sane right now, that is true,” Ushijima agrees, quietly, before saying: “But if you ask me how I feel about everything else I must still admit I am hesitant to believe it. Tendou and the yokai are one thing, but I see no parallel to draw between him and ghosts and hauntings, or the aliens you’re chasing.” 

“Mhm,” Suga squeaks, from where he’s resting his chin on Daichi’s shoulder. 

That makes Daichi frown, and he tilts back to look at Suga for a second, watching a particularly interesting look cross his face. Sugawara was a lot of things, and at the top of the list was that he was incredibly good with problem solving, good with drawing accurate conclusions from complex situations and an apt strategist - it was a look on his face that Daichi usually only saw when Coach Ukai was briefing them on the gameplay strategy of a particularly challenging team they’d be playing. 

It was a look that Daichi knew better than to press - so he decided to let Sugawara work on whatever he was puzzling on in silence and put his attention back on Ushijima. 

“So… what’s your plan now?”

“Ideally we leave this town, Tendou has been at ill ease since we arrived. My mother is in town right now, trying to get information from the locals regarding what they might have seen or heard, and spreading… what she described as counter rumours if necessary, she advised although it's its own kind of challenging, it might be best if we can convince the locals here that Tendou has a psychiatric condition, that what they saw or experienced of him was merely the results of a missed dose of medication. I… do not believe Tendou will like them thinking he’s crazy any more than he’ll like them thinking he’s a monster, but at least if they’re whispering about normal, human conditions they may not notice the rest of it.”

“That… will that work?” Daichi says. “Fighting rumours with rumours?”

“My mother says it’s best to be in control of whatever people are whispering, since they will be whispering no matter what.”

“Where are you going to go?” Suga asked. 

“We are not sure right now. We will-”

Ushijima is interrupted by a vague, muffled shout of sorts, the sort of garbled noise one might make if they were trying to speak with a mouthful of marbles, wanting attention. 

Ushijima hesitates, looking over his shoulder to where the noise was coming from before saying: “Apologies. Tendou is… miscellaneously screaming, I should probably find out what he wants.”

The camera jolts slightly, and as Ushijima moves from the kitchen into the living room, Daichi can hear him say: 

“Please cease shouting, I’ve arrived.”

And Tendou’s very muffled voice replies: “Mhm… give me the Daichi-phone, I need to tell him - the… give-”

“You should be resting.”

“Give me the phone!”

And shortly the camera is focusing down on Tendou, who’s clearly laying on a couch, and if Daichi had thought Ushijima looked fucked up, he was not prepared for the man of the hour at all. Suga, even, shifts to sit up a bit more in alarm. 

He looks just flat out terrible. His hair is a tangled mess around his head, his skin shockingly pale, almost sickly grey looking, made even worse by the dark rings that cling under his eyes and the pale blue veins he can see just under the surface. He’s got scabs on his cheek and chin and nose, like road rash, and red eyes barely-

Daichi blinks, tilting his head to the side. Has Tendou always had red eyes? Yes, right? 

Yes, he… why hadn’t Daichi ever noticed that before? He’s always been like that. 

Maybe he’d just written it off as contacts, or an odd shade of brown in dim lighting. Maybe. Or…

(Well, Daichi wasn’t quite ready to acknowledge the fact that Tendou had probably always been a yokai, and it was his own intentional dismissal that had missed the signs. But in his defense, nobody else had ever pointed it out either…)

All of that is to say that Tendou looked like he’d been hit by a truck and then contracted tuberculosis or something of equally terrible nature, but he’s clearly trying to force himself away to focus on the screen. 

“Hey, buddy…” Daichi starts, unsure why his instinct is to treat him like a small child. “You look… uh…”

“If I look as bad as I feel, I don’t want to know,” he replies, voice hoarse and raw sounding. “I’ve been asleep for-” his eyes flick behind the phone for a second before he finishes with: “about fourteen hours.”

“Shit. Ushijima was just filling us in,” Daichi agrees, lowering his voice. “He’s a little lost on the whole affair, though, do you…”

“Yes, yes - I… I need… okay you’re gonna have to bear with me kiddos, it’s gonna take my brain a hot minute to get this out in the right order… Nurarihyon… might have just disowned me too, but before that he was saying… there’s… okay, so there’s something special about you and Oikawa being together that is hardcore fucking with his head, he said it had ‘never happened before,’ or whatever, and I’m not sure if it’s… did you get strangled?”

Tendou cuts himself off, squinting at the phone. 

“Yes. It’s fine. Continue.”

“When did you get strangled?”

“Last night, about… eight? Nine?” 

Tendou is quiet for a minute, before saying: “That was after I went cray-cray. Alright… Mhm…”

“What’s that?”

“Nothing. Sorry. I just… Okay, so - he says… first of all, he don’t like me hooking up with Ushijima, but he especially doesn’t like me hooking Ushijima up with Oikawa-”

Behind the camera, Daichi hears: “Please don’t say it like that.”

“-or Oikawa hooking up with you-”

“He’s doing that on purpose,” Suga says. 

“But the kicker being he don’t like it because he’s a little scaredy bitch,” Tendou finishes. “I tried to get him to tell me why it’s such a big deal and why he’s all worried but he flat out said it’s ‘cause he don’t know what’s gonna happen if you two little bastards keep dancing like you are-”

He hears Ushijima’s voice again, saying: “Tendou, you do not sound like you’re in the right place to be worrying about this-”

“Oh, I don’t feel good, that’s true-” he agrees, closing his eyes as he talks. “I feel… worse than I’ve ever felt, actually. It feels like my body is rebelling against me. But - no, sorry, I need to say… Oikawa… have… where is he? What’s he doing?”

“I… don’t know,” Daichi says. “He texted me early this morning telling me that my dad found out I was in Naha but he never replied.”

“Alright… Okay… so what’s your plan? In Naha?”

“Uhm… I found this… we met this nurse, Helene, that knew my parents before and during my mother’s pregnancy with me. We're gonna meet up this morning - actually, we’ll need to get going soon… We’re hoping she’ll be able to give us a solid explanation as to what happened, and what I might-”

“Baby,” Tendou says, and for a second Daichi thinks he might be trying to get Ushijima’s attention, before realizing that he was, in fact, still talking to him. “You’re an alien, what are you still trying to figure out?”

Suga sits up slightly, seeming surprised by this.

“Wh… what do you mean?” 

Tendou looks a little pitying for a moment, before saying: “You know your mother was abducted, you know you’ve got all your freaky alien attributes, you know your dad’s with the PSIA covering shit up and doesn’t want you involved…”

“We don’t have… proof, though, we don’t have the full picture, we don’t know what I actually am, if not fully human-”

“Why do you need the full picture?”

“...uh?”

“This is why you people are always so flabbergasted when I guess shit correctly,” Tendou complains. “If you’re doing a puzzle, and you get enough pieces in order to tell that you’re putting together a picture of a lighthouse, you don’t wait until you put the last piece in to call it a lighthouse. You don’t need all the pieces to know what it’s gonna be. You’re wasting your time looking for the last piece when we should be focusing on what we do next.”

Daichi swallows. 

Truthfully, he wasn’t exactly trying to deny that they were putting together a picture of a lighthouse - he was desperately hoping that that last piece would clarify the image, take it from a lighthouse to a town, or change entirely and make it something else. That last puzzle piece could change the entire context… it could make this all go away. 

He didn’t think it would happen, but until he had all the pieces together, he could at least hope that it might. 

Tendou, however, was very right. 

“Well… I don’t know what else to do, then, if not this.”

Tendou still looks like he’s in a considerable amount of pain. It occurs to Daichi that although they were in similar boats, it was dramatically different circumstances - Daichi was trying to track down something that might have been done to him - Tendou was trying to reconcile something that he was.  

Or…

“I don’t know,” Tendou mumbles, rubbing at his eye. “But things have escalated, considerably… I… Nurarihyon doesn’t want us poking and prodding around but I cannot figure out what kind of power he wields, I don’t know if he’ll… I…”

“You know,” Suga cuts in, slowly. “Nurarihyon isn’t, like, a real myth.”

“...what?”

Daichi frowns, looking over to him. 

Suga waits for a moment before saying: “Like… okay, so the folklore for him is very simple, he shows up in your house and demands to be served tea and acts like he owns the place, he’s not… particularly complicated, but what I mean is… in folklore records, there’s no… real origin story. I… I mean, it’s even argued that him being a yokai is an entire mistranslation, like reference to him only appears relatively late in history, and only in like… a couple minor records, and… Well, I was trying to read up on him, when Daichi mentioned how much he’d been terrorizing you guys, and as far as I can tell, his whole schtick as the father of yokai is… like… pop culture, more than folklore, that doesn’t appear anywhere else, he’s mostly just this annoying figure a couple people mentioned one or two times in the past. He’s not supposed to be powerful…”

“God, you’re smart,” Daichi said. 

“Why’d we bench him?” Tendou agrees. “Where the fuck have you been - and why did Oikawa tell us he was super powerful?”

“Because… because he is, in a lot of modern lore, ” Suga says. “I just mean… if you guys are talking about… the power of yokai, or magic, or what you might need to do next… it might be worth… considering the fact that Nurarihyon’s legend is… not specific, and not like… not like the kappa or the satori or the oni. It’s… barely a ghost story. And not even a scary one.”

Daichi thinks about this for a second, before Tendou says:

“Great, that doesn’t really change the fact that he threatened me with expulsion from humanity and then I lost my mind and almost killed the love of my life, so honestly I don’t care where the fuck he came from, as far as I’m concerned he’s directly responsible for this.”

“Really?” he hears Ushijima say, sounding surprised. 

Daichi echoes the sentiment. “You really think he did this?”

“Mhm. Last thing he said to me he was super angry and told me to remember that I was the one who rejected the yokai, and now I am not only a violent risk to the people around me, but I feel… nauseous and sick and like my body is falling apart. I… call it a hunch, but if it’s the power of belief that was powering us up, then I think he stopped believing in me.”

“But wouldn’t that make you more human?” Suga says. 

“Depends on what you believe,” Daichi mutters. “Nurarihyon wouldn’t have stopped believing he was a yokai, but… he might have… if he genuinely lost faith in Tendou coming over to his side, there might have been some… big cosmic shift in how Tendou was connected to the yokai. Like being cast out of a tribe.”

Suga pinches the bridge of his nose. “This is annoyingly complicated.”

“We should try and get back together, all of us, and really put this goddamn puzzle together-” Daichi cuts himself off, before saying: “Or… maybe put the lighthouse away and focus on the new picture. If- ah, shit-” he realizes with a glance at the clock that it’s getting rather late in the morning - they needed to get on the road if they were going to meet Helene after her shift. “Sorry, guys, I… gotta go. I’ll… fuck, I don’t know what I’m gonna ask Helene, but, I’ll… update you as soon as I can.”

“Okay,” Tendou says, at the same time Ushijima is taking his phone back. 

“We’ll continue trying to get a hold of Oikawa,” Ushijima says. “Based on how Nurarihyon was talking about him, it’s beginning to concern me that he will not communicate with us.”

“Oh, god, right, he doesn’t want us together-” Daichi shakes his head out, trying to move on. “Okay, bye, okay-”

The call disconnects quickly, and Daichi takes a shaky breath before Suga pats his shoulder and says: 

“Alright, let’s get on the road, no time to waste, right?”

 

---

 

Oksana sends Rion on his way to deal with that son of his, but tells him she’s going to hang back and follow up on the abduction in Aomori. There’s a not inconsiderable change that the family of the young victim will choose not to keep the baby - she is not particularly far along in her pregnancy, and it is a viable option at the moment. A shame, she thinks, because there has never been a victim this young or this early in their pregnancy, typically the women abducted are at least six or so months along - they’re always already showing a noticeable bump. 

But, alas, she is not actually concerned with following up with the family. She can do that from Okinawa if needed. 

Instead, she’s returning to the abduction site itself. She’s quiet on her feet, and finds it easy to slip around unnoticed. She’s really good at not being noticed when she wanted to, though she knows this is far from any supernatural invisibility the yokai flaunt - she, merely, has been alive long enough to know how to avoid the spotlight. 

It helps, also, that the little Oikawa boy is so enraptured in his frustrations. Anger and annoyance can be blinding to even the best of people, and he’s been throwing rocks around and kicking at the dirt and shaking trees and generally venting his frustrations out, which means he didn’t notice her leaning against a tree, up the hill a bit, watching. 

He doesn’t notice her because he’s distracted, and she’s good at hiding. 

He doesn’t notice the yokai that watch him because he cannot see them. 

There are so many. 

Many of them little more than wisps of magic and shadow that have never been given a name proper, a handful of floating heads, oni that slink through the brushes, clubs dragging against the ground, snakes that coil in the trees, monsters of all shapes and dimensions, they allow Oikawa a clearing of space, and stick to distances that are out of his arm’s reach, as they stare and stare and stare in enraptured attention. They are noisy, with their movements, their huffing and their breathing and their leering, but Oksana is sure that for the young man in the center of the maelstrom, it all blends into the sound of wind through leaves. 

The yokai do not pay attention to Oksana. Not because they cannot see her, but because they do not think that they can see them. She is good at not being noticed, and she has perfected her ability to look without acknowledging, and pass between the monsters without giving them a reason to pause and regard her anymore than they might an average person. 

Oikawa turns slightly, having calmed down a little bit from where he was frantic a moment ago. Oksana slips back a few steps to stay out of his vision. 

He is red in the eyes, face flushed, mostly out of his own frustration. She cannot blame him. 

His phone rings, on occasion, and the yokai all jump in alarm at the noise, but he just silences it and ignores the call. 

The yokai whimper and lash their tails and circle around him. Curious, curious, curious little believer. They are drawn to him like ships to a lighthouse - not because they need him, or that they may wish to dock or land, but to use as a marker of relativity - something to keep over their left hand shoulder and guide them along their paths. And yet, here he was, gazing up at the sky, to the cosmos and beyond, attention set somewhere far beyond their little planet. 

So upset that he cannot figure out what she and Rion had wanted with this place.

She decides she should just talk to him. She knows it’s not her place - she knows it’s quite the contrary, that it’s the furthest thing from her place as it could be, but the poor kid was losing his way, and if Rion was going to go catch Daichi red-handed, the end was inevitably-

The Yokai start to twitch. Their attention is taken off Oikawa and turned up towards her, bristling in disconcertment. She knows she’s not the object of their attention though, and forces herself not to respond to their discomfort, knowing that would make them realize she was there. 

“Oh, Novikova-san,” Nurarihyon says, taking a step up to stand beside her. They are about the same height, same size. He can speak, though, without attracting the attention of Oikawa, who’s scratching at the back of his neck and ignoring his ringing phone again. “I do hope you’re not here to do what I think you are.”

She glares at him. He knows she can’t speak freely. 

“You promised me that the Sawamura kid wouldn’t become a problem.”

I couldn’t possibly have predicted this.

She is forced to stay silent. Oikawa, eventually, answers his phone, turning his attention to whoever he is talking to and wandering off. She hopes he leaves quickly, but he doesn’t seem to be in a hurry. 

The yokai have forgotten him, in seems, and have slowly come to crowd around Nurarihyon instead, staring up at him, a sea of bug eyes and claws and teeth and shadows and distorted faces. 

“This has gotten out of hand - out of your hands.” Nurarihyon says, stiffly. “I should have killed him when I had the chance - I should have killed you when I had the chance. I’m not going to let a single cuckoo decimate the nest.”

Oikawa is on the phone, distracted, wandering some distance away. She still hasn’t turned to acknowledge him, she hasn’t said a word, but she lets a smile ghost across her lips, and in a breathy tone, just for him, whispers:

“Nusan, you couldn’t kill me even if you tried.”

He huffs his annoyance. “Maybe not. But they can.”

He does not beckon to any specific yokai in the crowd that watches them, but she knows it’s what he’s implying. If the yokai suddenly saw her for what she was, or if Nurarihyon gave the order, well…

She doesn’t risk looking at him or the yokai, and Nurarihyon doesn’t look at them either, but rather, stares off into the middle distance, where Oikawa had disappeared.

She’s not sure he has a choice. 

She’s never been able to figure out if he can see them or not himself. 

 

---

 

“Okay, so I lied to you,” Oikawa drawls, leaving the little park and hoping his voice doesn’t convey his frustrations. It had been painfully, annoyingly empty. There was nothing to indicate that Rion and that woman had even taken anything. Which… he supposed that meant they’d been collecting dirt, water, samples of the area? If it was something they could recollect…

He’s so distracted, he misses what Iwaizumi is saying. He stays quiet, and after a second, Iwa just shouts:

“Oikawa!”

“What! What? Nothing, no worries,” he stammers. 

“It’s one thing to lie to me, okay? It’s one thing to run off to go ghost hunting, to… to chase whatever paranormal fuckery you’re into now, but - my god, you have to answer your phone - Kuroo was calling me in a state of panic because nobody can get ahold of you and his freaky bullshit cat is clinging to his side like the end times are near, we thought you were dead.”

Oikawa is quiet for a moment, before hurrying to say: “I… sorry, I’m sorry,” before Iwaizumi can start yelling again. “I just… I was chasing a theory, it… it’s just a dead end, though, so… I’ll be catching the next train back, don’t worry.”

“What theory?”

“Just… that… well I guess it’s not a theory so much as a… hang on…” Oikawa cuts himself off, pulling his phone away from his ear. “Oh, sorry, Ushiwaka is calling me. He’s been doing that a lot this morning.”

“I’m aware, because Ushiwaka called me to tell me Tendou went apeshit and tried to kill him and they think you’re going to be fucking murdered too.”

“...they think what?”

“Yes, it’s… complicated, it’s really complicated, and we could really use your goddamn expertise on putting the puzzle pieces together, so… fuck, Oikawa stop dodging your friends calls. The next time I can’t get a hold of you I’m calling the goddamn police, okay?”

He hesitates for a second, before saying: “Sure. Okay. Understood. I’m… I’ll get on the next train back.”

“Good,” Iwaizumi says, followed by: “Fuck.”

“...sorry,” Oikawa mumbles. 

“Goddamnit.”

“... I love you…” Oikawa sings, softly. There’s a moment of bristly hesitation on the other end of the phone before he hears Iwaizumi mutter:

“‘Love you too,” before hanging up, as if embarrassed by it. 

---

 

Helene greets them with a smile, and asks if they want anything, tea, cookies, something from the cafe they’re meeting at. Daichi waves them off, even though his stomach feels hollow, twisting in on itself. They need to eat. They really, really, really need to eat, but he just…

The thought makes him sick right now. 

“Okay, well, right down to business,” Helene says, retaking her seat at the little metal table. “Sorry that I look so terrible, twelve hour night shifts are not fun.”

“It’s fine, you… look fine,” Daichi says, quickly. “Uhm… okay, so… thank you, for… meeting with us again, uh… we… okay, so… what… actually, what you might be able to help us with most is… so my medical records are like, locked away, do you know anything… why might that be?”

Helene blinks, seeming surprised, before saying: “Oh, yeah. I noticed that, last night, uhm… well, of course we only get flags, and can’t see like… the full history, but it’s technically a patient’s right to have access to their medical records, so… if you wanted to submit a request for information yourself, you’d need to do it through a Dr. Kobayashi, she was the one that we had to reach out to to get around the flag.”

“Oh,” Daichi says. “Right… uh… how do you do that?” 

“You can usually do it by mail, or submit it online,” she says. “Or make a phone call. I mean, it is an unusual situation, Kobayashi isn’t a family practitioner, for her to be the primary contact is… I’ve never seen it before. I guess that’s… I guess it’s not impossible… I think she was a doctor, when she was young, but…”

“You’re speaking like you know her…?”

“Oh, yeah, Kobayashi’s from the island here,” Helene said. “She was a medical doctor at the hospital when I was interning, she got a job offer from the Okinawan public health laboratory, up north,” Helene says. “She’s still on the island, she comes into the hospital sometimes-”

“What’s this… what’s this lab?”

“Uh… it’s… it’s a clinical lab, mostly, they’re a private facility, but sometimes if we have a patient we can’t diagnose, we’ll send samples up there. They’ve got… crazy good doctors, resources… so…”

“Ah, and she’s… what, in charge of my medical records?”

“Uh… no,” Helene says, slowly. “It was just her name that came back on the approval. Emails all have auto generated signatures…”

“Okay… uh… so, like, it doesn’t strike you as odd that my medical files are being managed by a woman who works for a lab?”

“Oh, it’s… deeply unusual,” Helene replies. “Unfortunately it’s just not the kind of unusual I can help you with. Bureaucracy is a nightmare, and sometimes people get jobs and just never fully quit, even after they leave, like… I mean, she would have been a medical doctor at the time you were born, if… for whatever reason, if she wanted to stay on as your primary physician and just maintained the credentials under her own private practice, that’s all she’d need to do, really… unusual and unorthodox but ultimately… just a paperwork thing.”

Daichi frowns slightly, before waving a hand. “Okay, okay, so… what do you remember… you said my mother told you a story about-”

His phone starts ringing. 

“Do you need to get that?” Helene prompts, when Daichi hesitates. 

“Probably, my friends have been having… uh… problems, recently.” 

“Mhm?”

Daichi eventually cracks, pulling his phone out to check the caller ID and decide if he should take this. 

It’s his father. 

“Oh…” he says, out loud, panicking. “Uh… that’s my dad… uhm…”

“You should probably take that, then,” Helene says. 

Daichi does not want to take that. 

He already knows you’re in Naha.

“...okay,” he says, pushing himself up to his feet and hurrying to slip away from the table with an apology. With a shaky breath, he presses answer and puts the phone to his ear. 

“Hey, dad, what’s up?” he says, as casually as he can. 

“Why were you in the hospital?” is the immediate, brisk, answer. 

“Uhm…” he rubs at his neck, trying to figure out what exactly his father knew and what he could or couldn’t say. “Well, it’s… a dumb story, just…” you can’t use a choking kink as an excuse with your dad. “It’s… uh…”

“Daichi.”

“...it was no big deal, I’m fine.”

He can hear his father take a breath on the other end. 

“Kid, you cannot expect me to be okay with that answer. Tell me what happened. Why are you in Naha?”

Daichi squeezes his eyes shut for a moment, steeling himself for the conversation as he mumbles out:

“I wanted to find out the truth about… what happened to mom when I was pregnant… So I… came down here to talk to Grandma…”

He can hear his father groaning on the other end, though it blends into the other noise.

“Are you on a plane?”

“Yes. I’m on my way to you. Stay put.”

“I-”

“Daichi, I am not fucking around with you, okay?” 

He flinches, pretty sure he’s never heard his father curse like that. 

“...okay…”

“Did something try and hurt you?”

“...yeah,” he says, after a minute, struggling to really understand the heaviness that was building in his chest. He doesn’t think he’s ever been the object of his father’s anger like this before - he mostly remembers snickering at his younger siblings as they got yelled at, but the intensity in the tone his father is taking now makes his whole body feel numb. 

There’s a silence on the other end, then: “Did you know what it was? Was it a person?”
He doesn’t want to say it, he doesn’t want to say it out loud, because this isn’t how it was supposed to be. He was supposed to find some big puzzle piece, some clue, and then storm off to confront his father… or just back down. Maybe once he’d known the truth he’d be satisfied, and he could go back to normal life. 

He was not supposed to be in Naha with bruises around his neck trying to unravel some mystery he could barely understand. He was not supposed to be flinching when his phone rang because it meant another one of his friends might be hurt, he was not supposed to be the target of a monster’s attack, he wasn’t supposed to be yelled at by his dad over the phone. 

“It wasn’t a person,” he says, voice cracking. 

It wasn’t a person. It wasn’t a person. It wasn’t a person. 

“Where are you right now?”

“I’m… with Suga… uhm… just outside…”

“Okay, listen to me, both of you need to go back and get inside wherever you’re staying, just… find somewhere safe and hunker down and I will come to you.”

“I… I don’t understand… what… what’s happening?”

“I can’t… I can’t tell you everything on the phone, just… take Sugawara, get behind a closed door and keep yourself safe until I can get there, my… you’re not safe right now, trust me, okay? The yokai that went after you is going to be the first of several, now that they know who you are - this was stupid, Dai, this was really stupid. You shouldn’t have tried to push into this, the moment you got whiff of something bigger than us you should have come to me. Do you understand that? I don’t even… you probably can’t even conceptualize how much danger you’ve put yourself in. Do you think this is a game? Do you think we’re just playing around to mess with you? Jesus-”

Yokai. Yokai. Yokai.

He said yokai. 

“Dad, I-”

“No, just - do as I tell you. I’m about six hours away from landing in Naha, text me the address you’re staying at, and for the love of God, do not talk to or go with anyone until I’m there. That includes any of your friends, that definitely includes Oikawa, just-”

He can feel his eyes burning. He nods a confirmation before remembering that he’s on the phone, and manages to mumble out in a heavy voice: “Y-yeah, I can do that… can you tell me what’s going on-?”

“Do as I tell you. Now.”

Daichi’s ‘okay,’ is little more than a harsh intake of breath before he hears the phone line disconnect. 

Chapter 32: The Common Cuckoo

The year is 1751. Nestled east of the Ural Mountains is the small settlement of Yekaterinburg, not yet a city but growing rapidly in a prosperous industry in iron and metalwork. In 1750, about six months previous, the woman Anna Novikova had disappeared into the mountains, amid a burst of formidable light and wind. It had thrown the community into a panic, as Anna was the lady of Yekaterinburg, her father the landowner, and she had been set to marry in just a month. 

But now it is 1751, and Anna has just given birth to twin baby girls. 

The littlest, only about twenty minutes younger than her sister, is little Aleksandra. The elder, the first born, they name Oksana. 

The girls, by all true measures, would have a good life. Born into money, and born into land, even should they not have married particularly well they were put into a position of advantage that allowed them to not worry about the stressors of life. They held no stake in whether or not the serfs were emancipated, and they cared little for the trifling wars that plagued political conversations. 

Aleksandra grew up strong and well. She grew up brave, and passionate, and never let anyone forget who she was. She was not a particularly well mannered child, but everyone who met her said the same thing. 

“She has spirit,” they’d say. “She has ambition.”

Oksana was quieter. She was the eldest sister, and therefore she would be married first, to the next suitable suitor that came around, and in the meantime she passed her days with books and maps. She is much, much smarter than her sister, but people worry about her. 

“She’s such a pretty little girl, but she can’t hold a conversation. What man will marry a woman who pays more attention to the ground than to him?”

Aleksandra and Oksana are thick as thieves. At night, when they are meant to be sleeping, they crawl from their beds to share space under one blanket, giggling in the dark together about all the things they see. 

“There’s a monster by our window,” Aleksandra giggles, peeking out from the blanket to look at the dark, gloomy window, rain splattering across its glass and leaving the impression of shadows and toothy grins behind.

“Stop it,” Oksana laughs. “Don’t bother them! The monsters have done nothing wrong!” 

“But they live under our ovens and in the closest and they always chase me down the halls!” Aleksandra complains. 

“They are doing no harm! Ignore them, they’ll go away.” 

It does not occur to the girls, when they are little, that what they see might not be visible to someone else. 

“Careful,” Oksana says, one morning, while the maid is cooking breakfast. “The spirit in the oven doesn’t like when you knock on it like that.” 

“And what are you on about?” the woman replies, before giving the oven a hard bang with her fist to get the metal to stop rattling. “The bolts are loose, I’ll have to get someone to fix it.”
Oksana can see the spirit beneath it, a pretty young woman, flinch back and slink lower to the ground. 

“I’m sorry,” Oksana whispers, barely more than just mouthing the words. The spirit jerks it’s attention to her with wide, shocked eyes. If Oksana were older, if she were better at reading emotions, she might have been able to realize this expression was horror. But she is only eight years old or so, so she doesn’t, she just turns around and decides that if the maid wanted to bother the spirits, that’s her prerogative. 

After all, it would be silly to assume she couldn’t see them. 

They were everywhere. 

 

---

 

“Is everything okay?” Suga prompts, when Daichi is returning to the table. He has a very unusual look on his face - Sugawara had known Daichi a long time now, and he was very consistent in his attitudes. While the rest of the Karasuno team - namely the first years - would usually mutter about how Daichi went from zero to a hundred with no warning, Suga, and the older kids, knew this was really just a miscommunication between Daichi’s agitation and the way he showed it on his face. He’d keep himself calm and steady and then eventually boil over, it always looked out of the blue, but it had probably been brewing for quite a while before time. 

That is all to say, the fact that Suga can see the pinched look to his mouth and nose, the redness around his eyes that he’s forcing back, the clearly emotional state he was returning in, that was all bad news. That didn’t mean Daichi was at the first of several stages of amping up, that means whatever had happened had skipped straight to overflow, and overridden his own ability to keep himself in check. 

“Yeah,” he replies, voice whispery. He gives a small smile to Helene, before adding: “My father’s going to be here soon, so… he wants to meet us at the inn.”

“...oh?”

He nodded quickly, sniffing again and taking a deep breath to calm himself down another notch, and then says: “Yeah. Uh… he says we should go right now, he seemed… really concerned, about-” he puts a hand on his neck, rubbing the bruising gently. “Potential incidents.”

Helene cocks her head to the side. 

“Oh…” Suga says, and it seems weird, trying to avoid talking plainly about this, but he assumes what Daichi is trying to say is that his father, for whatever reason, was not comfortable with them poking around in a city with monsters trying to wring his son’s neck, and honestly, that might be fair. 

“Should we go?” Suga says. 

“Ah… soon,” Daichi agrees, looking back to Helene. “I… apologize, again, for… the hassle, and I hate… pressuring you like this, but if we could just… really quickly… I just need to know, what you know. You had mentioned my mother had… an abduction story?”

Helene stares at him for a moment, before taking a breath and nodding quickly. 

“Yeah,” she says. “When she was… probably about… six, six and half months pregnant, uh… from my experience, I remember one morning waking up and being told that she’d had to go into the hospital. Her parents said that there was some kind of… psychotic break, or stress-induced meltdown, something that had taken her outside, but… especially in the first few days, she seemed… very aware. She was scared, but… what she told me was that she had… felt this… sense of dread, and gone outside to see what was happening, and… followed a string of lights to the treeline, and… that was the last thing she remembered. The next thing she remembered was waking up in the hospital…”

“...okay,” Daichi says slowly. “And…?”

“Well,” Helene continues. “Your dad - they were living together, with your grandparents, at this point - says that she had become almost inconsolable with fear and had headed outside to try and find the source of it, and he backed up the lights, and says he could… see something in the sky, like a ship, but when he looked away from Himari, she had… disappeared. Now he was always weird with me about this part, I think… I think because he didn’t want me to tell anyone he was crazy, but he say he found her in the woods, about four hours later, unconscious, and that’s when he had called the police. She was… hurt, but… alive, and, of course-” Helene reaches a hand out to touch Daichi’s arm. “The baby was perfectly fine. So after a few tests at the hospital, they were released. But… Rion was always a little bit insisted that Himari didn’t have a breakdown, he says he saw everything too, and believed someone had done something to her - I think he assumed it was the government, since he already didn’t trust them, but… Himari and him didn’t go around telling this story like that, I think they were afraid that if people looked too far into it that they’d decide Rion was… somehow responsible for hurting her? Which…”

“You don’t believe that?”

“I… look, you dad was a bit rough around the edges but he didn’t love anything like he loved your mother, there’s no way he was involved in anything that hurt her.”

Daichi nods slightly. “And… okay, so… that was the end of it?”

“Yeah,” Helene says, giving him an apologetic smile. “I… met you when you were born, and… You know, I think the incident did freak them out a bit, because they were very relieved that you came out all in one piece, they really were thankful to have a healthy baby. But you seemed normal, otherwise. I think the most unusual part of… of that was that your mother went back to school, to get her high school degree, after about a year. I remember a lot of people talking, about how Himari should be the one staying home, that your dad should focus on getting a career, not the other way around, but…”

Helene shrugs. 

Daichi nods slightly, tapping his fingers on the table. “They never said anything else to you, about… what they thought might have happened to me?”

Helene leans forward a bit. “Can I ask you a question?”

Daichi seems surprised, nodding slightly before having to break away to cough into his elbow. Suga hoped his throat wasn’t getting worse, he’d hoped they’d be out of the woods for that. 

“Do you think something’s been done to you?”

Daichi hesitates on the question, before nodding slightly. “Yes.”

“Okay,” Helene says, nodding. “That makes it easier. Now… assume I’ll believe anything you say. It might be easier for me to know what to try and remember if I know what you’re after.” 

Daichi clearly doesn’t know where to start, quiet for a moment as he thought, foot tapping against the ground, before saying: “I think something was done to me, and… we think it was aliens, but… I suppose it… it could have been the government, too, but… specifically with my eyes? I… I see a lot of things others can’t, and… for a long time I assumed it was just hallucinations, or… my imagination, and…”

Helene tips her head to the side. “That’s… okay, actually, that does remind me of something.”

“Really?” Suga chirps, surprised that that could possibly have a connection. 

“Yeah,” she says, thinking really hard on what was undoubtedly an old and forgotten memory. “It was just a small thing, but - okay, so… after your mother had gone back to school, your dad had… we didn’t see him a lot. But one day he… remember, he didn’t really like me, but Himari and I were close, so I was surprised when he came to me and asked if I would be able, well, if I could babysit you, because he had something he had to do for work, and Himari had to be at school. I was… thrilled at the opportunity to try and convince him I wasn’t evil, so I was more than willing to help out, but… so he was running me through the list of things I needed to pay attention to, feeding, sleep, you know, baby stuff. And then… in the most unusual way  - you probably would have been… like… one and a half at this point - he said… and I’m paraphrasing here - and if he tries point anything out that’s not there, just ignore it. I know it’s natural to want to play around and baby-talk back, but really, it’s important to me that you don’t play make-believe with him, just… let him babble at the shadows but ignore him.”

Suga sits back in his seat, crossing his arms and looking across to Daichi, who’s returned to a very neutral, flat expression, taking this in. 

“Why wouldn’t they want…”

Helene shrugs. “You asked about… vision stuff. I… at the time I thought they were just being weird parents who wanted to stifle their child’s curiosity, but… I do remember that, from babysitting you. I remember thinking it was so weird, trying to ignore you as you sat and talked to things, and your head would turn and follow stuff across the room, but… nothing was ever there… I don’t know. You did have what… I mean at the time I thought maybe you were… maybe it was some kind of disorder, and they just didn’t want to tell me, but… You were a very weird baby.”

 

---

 

Oksana is married when she is sixteen. 

She is pregnant at seventeen. And eighteen. She miscarries both times, but promises she will keep trying. Her husband mutters under his breath and focuses on other matters. 

She is nineteen when Aleksandra shows up in the night, and they have to steal away into the kitchen to whisper in hushed breaths. 

Aleksandra has rejected every marriage opportunity that has come along. She is what many consider an undesirable woman, loud and aggressive and determined. She makes her own way, and usually somewhat successfully. She’s beautiful, but she’s crass. And she has her eyes set on a specific goal. 

“I need you to come with me,” Aleksandra is saying, in the dark of the kitchen, nothing but moonlight lighting their way but neither girls notice. They’ve never needed much light to see. “I need you - come on, I am so close-”

“Sasha,” she says, shaking her head. “No, no - you need to put this down, this is no good, they do not like it when we go seeking-”

“But I am this close!” she says, pushing into Oksana’s face, fingers pinched together. “And then I will get answers for us. If I can find her-”

“You speak so casually! You speak as if you’re trying to send a letter to our mother and not track down what might be the most dangerous woman in the world!” 

“She will have answers.”

Oksana tightens her jaw, staring down her headstrong, irritating little sister. When Oksana does not have a good answer, Aleksandra continues. 

“You are the only person in the world that can see what I see. I need you beside me, to watch my back. And when we find Baba Yaga, she will tell us why we are like this.” 

“Fine,” Oksana says, barely able to contain her anger. “Fine, I will go with you. But only because you’re too stupid to not go alone if I don’t.” 

 

---

 

“Why wouldn’t he want… that’s so weird… So he knew?” Suga muses. 

“I guess… that’s interesting… that he… that he was so specific about wanting you to ignore me…” Daichi agrees. “If… if it were yokai, if it were monsters, and if he knew that… you’d think he’d… want to take action. Get me out of the room, or… or… whatever… ritual can purify it…”

Helene shrugs. “He never said anything of the like. Just to ignore you.” 

“Huh…”

Suga can feel something prickling under his skin. Actually, this whole trip has felt that way, like he’s been just one step away from figuring something out. It was getting annoying. He considered himself a smart person, and puzzles like this shouldn’t be hard. He had a list of hard facts. If they ignored some of the variables, they got a very very clear list of facts. 

1. Daichi was, at least partially, an alien - or at the very least was not completely human. 
2. Yokai existed. 
3. Rion was involved in covering up alien abductions. 
4. Aliens were abducted young, pregnant women. That was an interest to the government, and Rion. 
5. Belief in the yokai seemed to make them more powerful. Daichi’s vision got stronger the more he used it. 
6. Yokai didn’t want Oikawa and Daichi together - as per Tendou, though that could be up to interpretation. 

As for why the yokai might have a stake in them not hanging out or being around each other, that was all guesswork. What Oikawa was was still guesswork. 

But even with this list of relatively insane facts, even if most of them weren’t verifiable past the evidence Daichi had said he’d collected, assuming they were all 100% correct…

What is the lighthouse?

Tendou had said to stop putting the puzzle together once you could see the image, but… as far as Suga could see, these were just puzzle piece thrown in a box, they didn’t make an image at all, it was-

Daichi coughs again, and Helene says:

“Are you getting sick?”

“What? Ah, nah. It’s probably just my throat, you know. ‘Cause of the-” and he rubs awkwardly a the bruises again, making Helene chuckle. 

“Maybe,” she agrees, followed by: “But do you know how many patients I see with severe issues that they wrote off as normal because they assumed it was some other problem? People with chronic pain are likely to miss the signs of new illnesses because they’re so used to the old one, y’know.” 

“Right, but in this case I was strangled and now I’m coughing, it’s pretty clear-”

“Oh my god,” Suga interrupts, as those puzzle pieces suddenly slot together in his brain. 

At the same time Daichi jerks his head over to him, his eyes suddenly go wide and glaze over, as he flicks his attention up over Suga’s shoulder, locking his attention on something surely only he could see.

“We have to go,” Daichi says, and Suga has never heard his voice sound that genuinely terrified. 

 

---

 

The forest twists in on itself, trees seem to move around them, the eyes that peer and stare and scowl endless in the darkness between leaves and under roots. Oksana can feel her heart racing, as Aleksandra keeps a tight grip on her wrist, dragging her along through the undergrowth. 

“We’re almost there, we’re almost there,” Aleksandra is saying, through her sobbing tears. “Just a little more-”

Hoofbeats like the devil stomp over moss to their right, breaking through branches and bushes. Oksana tries not to get distracted by it, as something dark and furious flits between leaves above them, screeching a furious howl. 

“We need to go back!” Oksana screams, stumbling over a root. “They don’t want us here! They don’t want us to find them! We need to go back!”

“No! No, no when we’re so close to getting answers-”

Something bursts from the darkness between the trees, claws out, teeth bared, face distorted in a mask of rage. Oksana screams again, jerking back hard on Aleksandra’s arm and only barely stopping her from having her head torn off as the creature sinks its claws into her shoulder and tears as much of it off as it can before it crashes to the ground. 

She screams, stumbling, and Oksana tries to haul her back up. 

Go back, go back, go back where we came from. 

Aleksandra digs her heels in. 

“They’re acting this way because we’re close! They know we’re close-”

“They don’t want us here!” Oksana shrieks back, but covering her words is a painful howl. From a heavy, old tree behind Aleksandra, she can see a figure peel itself away from the bark, tall and distorted and made of the very forest itself, the leshii cracks a grin that splits it’s wooden face in half, eyes like hot embers locking onto them. 

“Close your eyes,” Oksana says. 

“I am getting answers-”

“They don’t want you to know!” she screams, and a branch cracks as the leshii steps forward. Aleksandra whips around to lock eyes on it, stumbling back as the massive form took another step towards her. 

“Close your eyes!” Oksana screams, louder, voice cracking. “Sash-”

Roots and branches like sabres burst from the ground, and before Oksana can finish screaming, they’ve impaled and torn apart Aleksandra, less than a heartbeat required to tear her in a half. 

Screaming - sobbing - Oksana drops to the ground, covering her head and squeezing her eyes shut.

“No, no, no, no-”

She wails into the earth, into the leaves and the dirt and moss, she screams and she cries and she slams her fist down to try and break open the crust of the planet but nothing else happens. 

She lays there for hours, she thinks. 

Nothing else happens. 

Nothing happens. 

She can visualize the leshii. She can visualize it perfectly. It was only a meter away. With its power, it’s magic, it should have been able to tear her apart as easily as it had her sister. 

But nothing else happens. 

 

---

 

“We have to go,” Daichi says, repeating himself without looking at Sugawara, pushing himself up to his feet and knocking his chair backwards.

“No, Daichi, I-” Suga tries to say. 

I’ve figured it out, I’ve cracked it, I know why we can’t get our heads around this, I know what we’re doing wrong-

“What’s happening?” Helene starts, looking around herself in concern, clearly picking up on whatever terror was taking over Daichi. 

“We have to go,” he repeats, and before Suga can try and demand more information, he’s grabbed his wrist and taken off, hauling him to his feet with a stumble and starting down the sidewalk. 

“Dai- what? What is it?” Suga hisses, skipping a bit to catch up and take the tension off his arm. 

“A monster, I don’t know, a head.”

“A head?”

“A head, a floating head.”

“What?”

“I… fuck-” and Suga see’s his head jerk, to glance into the shadows by the corner of a shop, eyes widening. “Shit… they’re everywhere. They’re following us.”

“They’re following us?”

“Yeah. They… shit, shit… my dad… I should have listened, I thought he was being dramatic, he said… he said we were in danger, but-”

“But what?” Suga cries. “I can’t see anything.”

“Of course you can’t. Of course you can’t,” Daichi laughs, a terrified, nervous noise as he hits the crosswalk button and stops at a corner. 

“Daichi, what-”

Daichi turns to look at him, but whatever he sees behind, over Suga’s shoulder, makes him shriek instead, and then he’s turned and is yanking Suga off, into the middle of the street and immediately causing a cacophony of car horns and screeching breaks as he hauls them through the street to the other side. 

“Daichi! Shit - you’re going to get us killed-”

“No, no, they’re coming, they-”

Daichi is speeding up. His grip on Suga’s wrist is no less severe than before, and it forces Suga to jog as Daichi’s panic gets the better of them. 

He jerks around a corner and shrieks again, skidding on the sidewalk and turning to shove Suga the other direction, to cross the street again and take off. His head tilts up, swiveling over the roofs of buildings, the fences, the empty streets. There are a handful of pedestrians that gaze back at them with baffled curiosity, watching him stammer and shake as he picks up speed again, and now they’re running. 

“Daichi, stop-” Suga starts, panic beginning to rise in his chest. 

“No, no, they’re going to get us, we have to - we have to get back to the inn-”

“Daichi-”

Suga’s own eyes glance around, finding nothing to note, nothing expect the tourists and shopkeepers, staring back in confusion. 

“There’s nothing here-”

 

---

 

Daichi jerks his head around, staring back at Suga for a second before the dark, twisted creatures have started slinking down from where they watch from the rooftops, all bared teeth and horribly twisted expressions, bulging eyes. 

He sees that head, the head of the old man, zipping through the air, the objects that float around, the half-men on popped joints, scrambling around corners. 

“Fuck.”

He turns around and takes off in a sprint. He hears some of them screaming, howling, crying out, and he knows what they’re saying. 

Kill him. Kill him. Kill him.

“Daichi-” 

Suga’s plaintive cries aren’t helping. Will they kill him too? If they get Daichi, will they-

He turns the corner to the street that should lead back to the inn, but stumbling down the center of the road, hopping towards them, is a corpse that shambles and twists, each bouncing a jarring distortion of life. 

He twists around again. 

“The inn is-”

“We can’t go that way!” Daichi shrieks back, digging his nails into Suga’s wrist as he starts running the other direction, but- 

The monsters chasing them before have come barreling from down the street, like a great, writhing wave of horror, some of them so eager in their speed that they skid and crack into cars that do not even realize they’re there. 

Daichi tries to turn the other direction. 

Zipping from above, the bodiless monsters, the winged men with faces contorted into beaks and beady eyes. 

Shit. 

How long did they have? Seconds? 

---

 

Daichi’s breath is audible, rapid and shallow in his chest as he tries to pick a path. 

The streets are empty. 

He shoves back towards Suga, to try and get him to run. 

“Go,” he shouts, taking off down the road. “We have a better chance of-”

No-

“Daichi!” Suga shouts, using the grip Daichi had not loosened on his hand to force him to stop running, twisting him back around.

“Suga we have to run-”

“I have an idea, do you trust me?” 

“What? We don’t have time-”

He’s right. They don’t have time. So instead of waiting for him to finish arguing with him, like he always did, Sugawara does the first thing he can think to do that will crack through Daichi’s panic - he grabs him by the face, and pulls him in to kiss him, rushed and messy and bleeding panicked energy. 

Daichi, as Suga had expected, immediately loses his ability to process anything, hands up in the air as if unsure if he was allowed to touch Suga. 

It’s wholly unfair, Suga decides, that even in this moment, with his heart beating out of his chest, with aliens and monsters and conspiracies in the air, that Daichi should still kiss exactly like Sugawara has always imagined him to, in the halls of a classroom, in a bedroom late at night, in the locker room. It was the last vestige of a relationship neither of them had been able to find the right time for. 

He feels Daichi’s hands on his back. 

And neither of them are dead yet. 

Daichi pulls back first, eyes opening slowly to look at him with mixed confusion and remaining fear, but Suga squeaks, lifting a hand up to cover Daichi’s eyes before he could ask anything. 

“I said,” Sugawara mumbles, quietly, when Daichi opens his mouth to ask questions. “Do you trust me?” 

“Yes.”

“Then trust me. There are no monsters here.”

“You can’t see them-”

“I know. I can’t. Nobody else can see them, Daichi. Nobody else is in danger. I am not in danger. There are no monsters here.”

“They’re… they’re everywhere, they’re angry-”

“No. Think. If that was true, you’d be dead by now, right?” 

“...what?”

“Well if the monsters were chasing us down, we’d have been caught. It’s been like thirty seconds since we stopped running.”

“...oh.” 

 

---

 

Oksana’s bones have been soaked through with cold rain. 

It takes her a long time to get her body to start working. 

She slowly, achingly, pushes herself up to her feet. 

The monsters are not gone. 

She sees the leshii, still staring at her, waiting. Wanting to kill her, but confused. 

Aleksandra is torn apart - Oksana feels sick, just looking at the bloodied mess of the forest floor, but there’s no real body to take home, so she doesn’t. 

She turns slowly where she stands, eyes aimlessly glazing over the monsters, the shadows and the beasts. She does not let herself linger on any of them. Her body trembles with the effort of moving at a slow and measured pace, refusing the survival instinct inside her to run and escape.

She starts walking. Right through their midst. 

She does not look at them. When a creature with an unhinged jaw and joints that pop as it moves stands in her way she stares down the trees behind it and walks forward. 

She forces it to move first - and it does. 

She keeps her eyes on the path out of the forest.

She does not look at the monsters around her. And in return, they do not look at her. 

 

---

 

Suga draws his hand down Daichi’s cheek, brushing his thumb across it for a moment before saying: 

“I need you to trust me, completely.”

“I do.”

“Okay. So keep your eyes closed. And let me walk you home.”

“... you had a realization earlier, right… right before… what… what is it…? How did you know this would work?”

Suga smiles slightly, pulling his other hand off his eyes and finding Daichi was, indeed, keeping his eyes closed. So Suga takes both his hands, carefully turning on the street corner, aware of all the eyes watching them, confused if nothing else. 

There are no monsters around. He checks - he looks everywhere. There’s no monsters. 

He walks backwards, and when Daichi feels the tug on his arms, he starts taking slow, blind steps. 

“I… I didn’t… exactly know…” Suga says, softly. “The… the realization I had, it’s… the reason we can’t make this make sense is because it’s not one puzzle. We’ve been working on two - maybe more puzzles… it’s so… so silly in hindsight… Okay, carefully here, there’s a shop sign in the sidewalk, we’re just gonna step to the left- ah-”

Daichi bumps into the sign, hissing softly and stumbling to get around it. 

“...my left, sorry.”

“It’s okay. You were saying?”

“Right… uhm… You… It's so stupid. Yokai are… Japanese monsters, right?”

“...right?”

“And aliens are… from outside this planet.”

“...where is this going?”

“...aliens… aren’t paranormal. They’re extraterrestrial. We’ve been trying to apply the paranormal rules of earth to you, to whatever your dad is working on. They’re… entirely unrelated. It’s like trying to judge a fish by the metrics of a bird, it’s… not… it can’t be done. Different puzzles.”

Daichi is quiet for a moment, and Suga decides to let him think for a bit. 

“Okay,” Suga mumbles. “There’s a curb here, we need to cross the street - just… okay, yeah…”

Daichi gets down the curb, and Suga carefully leads him across the crosswalk, listening to the gentle beep of the walk signal. The world is calm and quiet, while Daichi lets him lead. 

“So…” Daichi starts eventually, voice soft. “How did you know we wouldn’t get killed?”

“...that was… just an inference,” Suga whispered. “I figured… If you’re new to this planet, if you’re… an invasive species, the ecosystem is bound to fight back. Because that’s what the aliens are doing, isn’t it? Impregnating women with their DNA, letting them raise their babies… the aliens might have no idea the yokai are even here, but the yokai must be… terrified. Humans were never able to see them before, but suddenly now there’s this new kind of creature that can just see them, look at them, engage with them with no explanation… It all seems so reactionary. You were never hurt for seeing these things before, but… when you start looking at them, not just seeing them… and… and Helene said your dad wanted to ignore it. So… I figured… if… if I ignored it, if I ignored your panic, maybe your dad knows something we don’t. So…”

“So why do I have to close my eyes?”

“Because the monsters are scary?” Suga chuckles, pulling him to a stop outside the motel, lifting one hand up to gently rub over his chest, feeling what was still a rather rapid heartbeat, despite how calm he seemed now. “And I wanted you to stop panicking. And it’s a lot easier to stay calm if you can’t see what’s scaring you.”

“Like hiding under the blanket at night.”

“Yeah.”

Suga opens the door, holding it carefully to direct Daichi inside. 

“Keep your eyes closed until we’re in the room. Just in case.”

“Okay.”

Suga takes his arm, ignoring the confused stare of the receptionist, and leads him down the hall. 

He unlocks the door, lets Daichi in, and then turns to shut it with a satisfying click of the lock. 

He knew, realistically, that if the monsters were real, a locked door couldn’t help them. But maybe that didn’t matter. Maybe this would be enough. 

“It just seemed… like… Even if the monsters were real, I’d have been able to walk down that street calmly and safely, I can’t see them, I’ve never been attacked…” Suga mumbles, turning to find him.

Daichi had stumbled his way to the bed, but still kept his eyes closed as he sat down. 

“What if that stops being true?”

“Then we worry about it when we get there. It worked this time.”

Daichi smiles slightly, before tilting his head to where his voice was coming from. 

“You kissed me.”

“I needed a way to shut your brain down.”

“Not a strong defense, I know you’re very okay with slapping me across the face.” 

Suga bites his lip, before heading over to him. “You can open your eyes, now.”

“Are you sure?” 

“No.” 

“...maybe I should just keep them closed?”

“You can’t keep them closed forever,” Suga says. “But if you open them, and we’re surrounded by monsters, you can’t scream and freak out, okay?” 

Daichi nods his confirmation, before slowly peeling open his eyes with a nervous twitch, glancing around the room as he blinks and adjusts to the dimmer lighting. 

“So? We safe?” Suga says, softly. 

Daichi swallows, hesitating a second before nodding and glancing back up to him.

“Safe,” he agrees, voice just as whispery as he reaches to take Suga’s hands again. He lifts them up slowly, to kiss his fingers. “You’re amazing.”

Suga hates the way he wants to melt, the way he immediately feels fifteen again, wanting to wrap himself up in that soft, praising voice, confident without reason but determined nonetheless. It had been an insane few weeks, a hurricane of emotions, anger and rage, fear, concern, adoration, comfort. It feels wrong, for everything to have just cycled back to where they’d begun. 

“You did pretty good yourself,” Suga mumbles, retrieving one of his hands so that he could tilt Daichi’s chin up, to look at him properly. 

“I panicked,” Daichi corrects. “I would have gotten killed.”

“We don’t know that for sure…”

“Yeah, we do,” Daichi replies. “I owe you my life. I don’t think I can repay that with just compliments…”

“Well…” Suga says, swallowing back his nervousness. “I’ll certainly be open to a proper kiss one of these-”

And Daichi does not require the rest of that sentence, already up and pushing into a demanding kiss, hands on his hips, then up his back, then pulling him in, anywhere they could hold. It takes Suga’s breath away, forcing him to gasp and try and make breathing room, but ultimately the idea of pulling away is so nauseatingly terrible that he puts up with the breathlessness. 

“Okay… This probably isn’t the best use of our time,” Suga manages to get out after a second, sucking in a breath as he turns his head to the side. “We should… call someone, tell them-”

“My dad said to stay put and contact no-one,” Daichi replies. 

“Still, this…”

“And you told me that I need to avoid focusing on the monsters . By your own prescription, Mr. Sugawara-” Daichi says, using a hand to tilt Suga’s face back towards him. “Kissing you is the safest action I can take right now.”

“...your argument is sound-” and before Suga can even properly concede defeat, Daichi has lifted him up and tilted him back to fall onto the bed. 

 

---

 

Oksana is forty-seven when she finds herself, ankle deep in marshy waters, gazing up at the stilted, worn wooden cabin. It’s risen several feet off the ground, a warm white smoke spewing from a chimney. There’s a ladder to climb up, faded and made of rope - indications of stairs exist, but seem to have been destroyed some time ago. 

She grabs the rope ladder, and drags herself up. 

She doesn’t look a day over nineteen. 

She never would. 

She’s starting to realize that - her family, her husband, the people of Yekaterinburg, they’re starting to realize it too. Whispers of ‘witch’ and ‘devil’s magic’ and ‘fairy’ circulate in the air. That she must have done something, been something, that wasn’t natural. She knows that’s true, but she doesn’t say it. She can’t let them say it too. 

Truthfully, Oksana would have never chosen to come here. 

She’d never have sought this place out under any other circumstances. She’d been content to live and die in this body, in this life, without ever prying into the why of it all. She didn’t need to. She’d seen what would happen if she did. 

But she wasn’t aging. And her people were starting to whisper and that was all too dangerous. She needed an answer - she needed a cure. 

She knocks on the door. 

There is a series of confused mutterings from inside, exactly like you’d expect of someone who was receiving visitors when none were expected. 

Eventually the door opens. 

Oksana isn’t sure what she expects. 

The ugly old woman stares at her for a minute, baffled, before looking around the marshy forest, and then back to her. 

“You… How did you find me?” she says, voice raspy. 

“...I walked. I asked for some help from some fairies. Promising your first-born child away isn’t such a problem when you’re infertile. I’m sure there will be hell to pay when they figure that out, but… it was worth it to find you.” 

“No, I mean - you… no human can see this place, it should have been impossible.” 

“Yes, that’s what I’m here about.” 

The woman narrows her eyes, tilting her head back. She’s about Oksana’s own height, short and squat and leaning on a cane. She might have been taller in her youth, if she had ever experienced youth. 

“Are you Baba Yaga?” Oksana asks. 

“... depends on who’s asking.” 

“I just need help understanding what I am,” she replies, clasping her hands together and getting ready to beg. Whatever it takes. “I have been plagued by visions of monsters my whole life - visions that are real. And now, now, I have found myself growing older in years but my face remains the same, I am worried I am not as human as my mother, I-”

Baba Yaga lifts her hands up, thumb and forefingers lightly pointing to each other to make a square, which she uses to cast down her body, as if appraising Oksana. 

“Well, I apologize, my dear,” she says. “But you are not a fairy. As far as I can tell you are wholly human.”

“As… as far as you can tell? But… but I’m not! I know I’m not! Humans age! Humans die! Humans cannot see and speak to fairies!”

“Ah, that is true,” Baba Yaga agrees, before stepping aside to let her inside. “Humans cannot find my home, humans cannot climb that ladder, humans cannot see me, either. But, alas, I cannot see fairies. I cannot see monsters, and you do not reek of any magical residue. So you are nothing I am familiar with.”

“...is that even possible? You were… you’re supposed to be… you’re…”

“It is rare, but not impossible,” she says. “It seems to me that you’ve found yourself neither human nor fairy. Nor spirit, for that matter. Able to intersect in both worlds, but belonging to none.”

Oksana is quiet for a moment, following her inside and looking around the house. It is covered in talismen and objects, some of them normal household needs, others looking fantastical and mysterious. From the ceiling hang stars carved out of wood and stone, tied with feathers. Baba Yaga moves across to where a warm fire grows in the hearth. 

“If I may provide you power, you may take it, but I fear that, since you are not a fairy, you are not one of mine. I will not be able to take you.”

“...can you help me find out what I am, then?” 

“Maybe. I am very old, and I’ve seen a lot. Never the likes of you. And unfortunately, if you are not mine I fear my potions and brews may not stick to you like they would a proper creature. You may find better luck with human-kind. Their fancy little gadgets are getting quite advanced, maybe they’ll be able to identify what you are.”

“But they are already whispering about me being a monster. They already hate me. They’ll think I’m a witch if I don’t start aging soon.”

Baba Yaga shrugs, using her left hand to ladle soup into a wooden bowl from a pot over the fire and hand it over to her. 

“Very well, then. Perhaps that is what you are. A witch. Seems unlikely, since you are not magic, but witches have existed before and I’m sure they’ll exist again. Take this, eat, you’ll need energy.”

“You don’t seem… you… I thought you’d be more magical.”

"Me? Magical?” Baba Yaga laughs. “Oh, no, dear, far from it. I am no magician, and I’m no fairy either. I’m merely a believer, and I do my part.”

“...so what do you suggest I do?”

The old crone has to think about this for a minute, before saying: 

“I suggest you leave. Go somewhere they do not know you to be odd, where you can be eighteen again. Go somewhere far away, before the humans realize there is something foreign amid their ranks. I do not imagine they’ll be kind to you. They are rarely kind, even on their own, when they are a little bit different.”

 

---

 

The plane touches down, and it feels like he’s taken way too long to get here. Damn it, damn it all. 

“Okay, so what do I do if they’ve already made him?” Rion says, as he leaps off the offloading stairs and hits the pavement in a jog, barely able to keep his phone between his ear and his shoulder.

“Just get him to Shima Three,” Oksana’s voice buzzing back in his ear. She sounds entirely too calm for this, considering six hours ago she’d been telling him that if the monsters got wind of Daichi’s condition they’d rain down on him with fury. “Keep him calm, somewhere he can’t get out and about. You know, this never would have happened if you’d talked to him like I’d told you to.”

“ You said ignoring it could train it out of him,” Rion spits back, heading around the side of the airport with his head down. 

“And I must have been wrong. It wasn’t a bad guess, though, it worked for eighteen years. Until he started sniffing around you. Might’ve worked his whole life.”

Rion just grumbles back. 

“I swear to god, Novikova, if you were wrong and my son is killed because you didn’t prepare right-”

“I won’t let that happen. Just get him to ‘three.”

“...I’m going. How far out are you, anyway? Are you coming?”

“...as soon as I can. Nurarihyon is still throwing a fit. If he starts believing us unsafe to be here, we’ll all have bigger problems than a couple wayward yokai.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well having the entire paranormal ecosystem bring hellfire down upon your heads doesn’t sound good, does it?”

“...no.”

“Okay. I’m gonna try and follow up with the Oikawa kid. I’m worried Nusan is gonna pull something.” 

“Okay. Okay, keep me updated. I’m going to hang up now, I need to run.” 

“Understood. Be careful.”

He nods slightly, even if she can’t see him, before hanging up. 

 

---

 

“Feeling a little better?” Suga whispers, from where he’s gently brushing his fingers across Daichi’s cheek, and up through his hair. 

Daichi nods back, pulling him back in for a few more soft, gentle kisses, before mumbling: “Much better. I can’t even remember what we were running from.” 

Suga laughs, pressing his forehead against him and holding him close. 

“I feel like we've waited forever for this,” he says, voice barely audible. “I wish it could have been…”

“Normal?”

He’s quiet for a second, before saying: “I don’t know. I just wish it could have been different.”

“This isn’t… bad though, is it? Just because it’s… not what we had asked for?”

“No, of course not,” Suga agrees, quietly. 

“And you’re not freaked out? By the fact that I…”

“Sweetheart, you’ve been a weirdo since long before this alien shit started, don’t think that’s going to scare me away.”

Daichi laughs, and is leaning in to kiss him again, though they’re shortly interrupted by a furious knocking at the door, incessant and aggressive. 

“That… is probably my dad,” Daichi says, scrambling to get up off the bed, brushing his shirt down and trying to make sure he didn’t look too much like he’d just spent a couple hours rolling around in a bed. He shakes his hair out, before answering the door, and is almost immediately knocked over by his father barrelling in. 

He’s looking around with wide eyes, frantically trying to take stock of everything, looking a little surprised to see Suga tucked up on one of the beds before turning around to look at Daichi again. 

The look of relief that crosses his face is nearly overwhelming, as Rion stumbles forward a step to wrap Daichi up in his arms, squeezing as tightly as he could. His father is about an inch shorter than him - and half his size otherwise, he’s not particularly big, and even so the hug is crushing, as Daichi leans into it. 

“I’m so sorry,” he hears his father whispering, one hand lifting to the back of his head. “I’m so sorry…”

Daichi doesn’t want to cry, not like this, but he can’t help himself, lifting his hands up to cling onto his father’s jacket, pressing his nose down into his shoulder. 

“Please just tell me what’s going on…” he whispers. “Please just… just tell me what I am…”

Rion is quiet for a moment, holding his head steady against his shoulder. 

“...Dad?” Daichi prompts, after a second. 

“I don’t know,” he says, eventually, voice cracking over the sentence. “I want to be able to tell you everything is going to be alright, but… I don’t know. I don’t know what you are, or what they did to you. I… I can only tell you what I’ve learned, what we know, but… it’s probably not going to be enough to satisfy you.” 

“You… you don’t know?”

“No, Dai,” Rion says. “How could I know? How could anyone?”

“But-”

His dad pulls away, looking miserable as all hell as he lifts his hands up to carefully investigate the bruising around his neck. 

“All I can give you is the data,” Rion says. “And the story as I know it. But it’s not going to answer your questions, it’s not going to make you feel any better. It certainly doesn’t make me feel any better.”

“Just tell me.”

“One-point-eight.” 

“...what? One-point-eight what?” 

“The percentage of your DNA of unknown origin. One-point-eight.”

Notes:

The issue I'm having is that so much is happening at once xD
Like my outline for the next few chapters is like "dear god what do I write first it all has to happen at the same time"
so be prepare for... several chapters. Anyway I told y'all this was gonna be a long one you can't be mad at me.

Chapter 33: Rion

It starts like all good stories do. With a very pretty girl, and a very, very stupid boy. 

Miyashiro Himari is so pretty, in fact, that it sends Rion to jail. 

(That is to say, she distracts him while he’s trying to skateboard away from the cops, and he hits the ground hard enough to make his forehead bleed and allow his pursuers to haul him off.)

He cannot resent her for it. 

He’s not sure she was impressed by his less than slick moves and his general haphazard approach to life. 

She’s in his year, at the high school, and even though the class is small they don’t really speak to each other. Well, Rion doesn’t really speak to anyone. He doesn’t want to. That’s not his scene. 

He, of course, thinks his time would be better spent bumming a cigarette off a two-years post graduate ex-friend. His time would be better spent trying to figure out how to do a kickflip without falling over. His time is not well spent on pretty girls who ace tests and spend their evenings gardening and knitting with their grandmothers. 

Life, of course, has a way of refusing what anyone wants to spend their time on, however. 

They’ve just about finished their second year of high school.

Rion is serving a community service sentence and picking trash up off the rocks and sand when he gets absolutely demolished by a volleyball that hits him directly in the face and knocks him over. 

His bloody nose would have been disconcerting enough if he hadn’t also, then, looked up to find one Miyashiro Himari looking down at him like an angel, amused by his plight but looking a little bashful. If Rion had had any hope of maintaining his cool-guy persona in front of her, it had gone out the window the moment she approached him in a swimsuit. 

“Sorry,” she says. 

“I don’t mind,” he replies, before she’s dragging him up off the sand. 

Himari is about three inches taller than him. Rion kind of likes that. 

He explains that he’s serving a community service sentence because he spray painted swear words on a naval base. He doesn’t tell her she’s the reason he was caught. 

She thinks he’s cute - he’s in love by the time the second ball is cracking into his face, after her failed attempts at trying to teach him how to play beach volleyball. 

Her friends think she’s wasting her time, she’s too good to hang around a loser. She doesn’t know how to explain that she kind of likes that about him. 

Rion thinks the world is never going to change. For better or worse. Sometimes he says things will stay like this forever, and it’s bitter and violent as he throws rocks at the wall and wishes for something greater. Sometimes, he says things will stay like this forever, as he brushes hair from Himari’s face, cradling her against his chest under the vast, starlight night sky, sunburnt from the day and damp from the sea spray. 

They are young, and they are in love, and they are bored. They think they are invincible

They’ve only known each other about seven weeks when Himari is showing him the thirteenth pregnancy test she’s taken. 

Whoops. 

A very pretty girl, and a very, very stupid boy. 

 

---

 

Rion had thought he would be a terrible father. He’s pretty sure everyone else had thought he would be a terrible father too. His own father certainly made that clear enough, his mother no better, none of his friends had seemed particularly thrilled by this turn of events, looking sympathetically if not in abject terror for the life of this little baby. After all, he was Sawamura Rion, he managed to fail home economics in school and then dropped out of high school because his girlfriend got pregnant - how was he supposed to raise a baby? 

He had thought he would be a terrible father, but instead he finds that it’s the easiest role he has ever been asked to slot into. There are little things that are complicated - learning to wrap diapers, the proper temperature for milk, the fact that their baby screamed and cried and never ever settled easily. But he had held him for the first time, this tiny, fragile little thing with the biggest brown eyes - his mother’s eyes - and Rion had clicked into place immediately. 

Lay down his life for him? Absolutely. 

Twelve hour shifts, working three jobs, the screaming, the crying, all of it meaningless in the face of who he was doing it for. 

It’s the only thing he’s ever felt confident about. This was something he could do. 

Daichi is just over two years old, now, he is laughing, joyously it seems, running around in the wide, green grass garden that is tucked out back of Shima Three. He’s alone, but he looks happy - playing with something that only he can see, somewhere in his imagination. He stops, stomping his foot, as if upset by the turn of events of something, before laughing again and turning around, watching with rapt attention as if something had ran past him and away. 

“You shouldn’t let him do that.”

Rion straightens up, out of the slouch he’d been in against the wall, turning to find Oksana there, tapping away at something round in her hands. 

“You told me not to react.”

Oksana thinks about this for a moment, before saying: “That’s true. But it’s not apathy, it’s… you gotta act like it’s irrational for him to be seeing what he’s seeing. Laugh at him, ask him why he’s playing with nothing, that sort of thing. Letting him do it gives him no reference point for what is real and what is not real - and what’s appropriate behaviour.” 

Rion groaned, looking back to where Daichi had reached the edge of the garden, and he could no longer tell if the little toddler was interacting with anything at all, since he seemed more concerned with the bug he was looking at. 

“But… if it’s that dangerous… I mean, it seems like the… whatever it was, was having fun, wasn’t it? If you’re right, if these monsters are going to try and kill him, then… why don’t they?”

Oksana smiles slightly, before her eyes roam down over the garden. “He’s playing with an amikiri,” she says. “They are… everywhere, in Okinawa. They’re kinda gross, uh, bird-headed-snake-with-crab-hands, for your visualization pleasure. They typically stay in the beaches, this one probably was just-”

“Crab-hands-bird-snake?” Rion interrupts.

“Yeah, yokai aren’t… always pretty,” Oksana laughs, before saying: “But they’re also not monsters. Not really. He’s a little kid, right now, and most… creatures, if they don’t eat humans, see him as a cute little kid. They don’t want to kill him. But that’s not always going to be the case. He’s going to get bigger, and stronger, and one day, they’re going to look at him, and he’s going to look back, and they’re going to see him as a threat.”

“I just… feel so weird about this whole thing. It feels like abuse, telling him he’s just making it all up, ignoring him when he’s screaming or afraid…”

“The other option is… keeping him here,” Oksana says. “Of course, I’ve survived for hundreds of years… it’s possible, but… he’d need to learn how. He’d need to not be afraid of them, and… I… not that I wouldn’t be willing to mentor the little guy, set him up the best he can be… but he would need to live here. This would be his life.”

“That’s not fair to him,” Rion says. “Or Himari. I know this is killing her, the only thing she wants in the whole world is to be a normal family. She doesn’t… like the experiments, the tests, she doesn’t like her son living in this… compound. She wants us to be normal.”

“And what do you want?”

Rion looks over to her, surprised by the question. 

I want to be a father.

“I want to find who did this to my baby.” 

 

---

 

“Watch,” Oksana says, to Rion, before sitting down in front of Daichi, who’s looking up at her and blinking his big eyes, confused as to why he’s back in this dark, sterile room. She presents him a handful of crayons, and blank paper, and leans in to him. Rion watches how ready Daichi is, already, for whatever she’s going to do. He’s quite used to this odd version of preschool, the lessons and the tests and the trials. He doesn’t complain about it - it makes Rion feel sick. 

“Hey, sweetheart,” she coos. “Can you draw a picture for me? Anything you like.”

Daichi stares at her, before looking down at the page. “Uhm…?”

“Anything that comes to mind. Why don’t you draw me?”

“Oh… okay,” he says. Rion is pretty sure he knows he’s being tested, but can’t figure out what for. 

Daichi is careful to select the colours he wants, setting to work on the page, scribbling with clumsy hands. 

“We’re just gonna turn the lights off, okay?” Oksana says. “Just keep drawing.”

“Ohkay,” Daichi mumbles, really focused on what he was doing now. 

Oksana nods to Rion, and he turns to hit the lights plunging the room into abject blackness - Rion can’t see anything. The human eye needs at least a fraction of light, something to give itself a reference point for the room. Here, Rion may as well have been blinded. 

He feels an instinctual fear in the dark, perhaps deeply biological, or perhaps because he knew what was there waiting for him, that he couldn’t see. 

He waits a good few minutes in the dark, before turning on the lights. 

Daichi has made good progress on his drawing. 

Oksana smiles. “You’re not a very good artist,” she comments, leaning over to look at the messy picture. 

Daichi pouts back at her. “It was dark!” he complains. 

 

---

 

Neither of them had ever wanted to leave Okinawa. But they decide it’s for the best just to get out of the eyes of their neighbours, the judgment, the confusion. It’s also better to get Daichi into a new environment - Oksana explains that yokai are very much like animals, but cannot be conflated with them. They know him as a baby, and will remember him growing up. It’s better to start over - for Daichi, too. In this new house, they all decide, there will be no ghosts or monsters of any kind. It’ll help compartmentalize the experience in his brain - he’ll forget the creatures he saw as a baby, and start forging memories in which they had never existed. 

Himari doesn’t want to be left alone. Rion doesn’t know what to tell her - there’s always been a bit of a divide between them. He loves her so much, so unbelievably much, but he also knows that even if she does love him, or even just like him, she would have never agreed to marry him had she felt she had a choice. 

He also knows, though she’d never admit it, that she is, in some important ways, afraid of Daichi. 

They live in Tokyo for about eight months before they decide they cannot stomach the city life, and she moves to the countryside in Miyagi. Rion stays in Tokyo, because it’s closer to the private airport they operate out of. It’s closer to his office, with the case files he is reading over, it’s closer to the PSIA agents who meet him for the first time, fascinated by the new hire with first hand experience. 

Himari doesn’t want their family. 

Rion knows that. It’s the wrong people, in the wrong location, with the wrong future, completely out of her control. 

But Rion is going to find out what they did to his baby, he’s going to make it better for them. If he can fix it, he will. But at the very least, at the absolute very least, he is going to get them answers. 

 

---

 

“He always cries out for you, you know,” Himari says over the phone. Rion actually thinks that the distance has made their relationship strong - Himari is much better than he is at shutting down Daichi’s odd tendencies. Her instinct when he starts talking about monsters is to shut it down immediately, after all, and she hates the whole subject. Daichi, apparently, learned very quickly that mum didn’t like talking about the weird creatures in the garden, so he stopped talking about them. And then he stopped playing with them, because if mum didn’t like him doing that, he wasn’t going to risk getting in trouble. 

Rion taps his bed down on the interview transcript he was reviewing. 

“He does?”

“When he has nightmares. Before he wakes up, he’s always crying out for ‘dad,’ it’s never ‘mum,’” Himari says. He can hear her cooking in the background. “He misses you. You should come home to visit.”

“I want to. Trust me, I want to. But…”

“Have you almost figured it out?”

“...maybe,” he admits. “There was an abduction about a year ago, that… matches the same criteria. Their little baby had… similar experiences to Daichi’s, as a kid, so Oksana is trying to get ahold of the parents and convince them to let us take…” he trails off, not sure how to say ‘the body,’ in a way that wouldn’t tip his already extremely stressed wife off to the idea that this baby had not survived it’s infancy.

“Oh,” she says, seemingly unbothered by this incomplete sentence. “That’s interesting… but… try to come home soon, okay? Your family misses you.”

“I miss you too.”

 

---

 

Pretty girl, stupid boy. Himari gives birth to their second child. 

“Is she going to be like… like Daichi?” Himari whispers, as they coddle the little baby girl in the hospital room. 

Rion shakes his head slightly. “No, no, no, it’s fine,” he says. “She’s… she’s perfectly healthy, perfectly… perfect… just… as far as we can tell what happened to Daichi happened to him specifically, not to you. So… she’s… she’s just perfect.”

Himari smiles, leaning down to press a very delicate kiss to the baby’s forehead. 

“Good.”

 

---

 

“How do we know if he’s…. Going to be… like you?” Rion asks, one evening, as they both settle down into the chairs of the plane, exhausted. There’s dirt under his nails he thinks will never come clean, but such is the cost of digging around for mud samples. 

Oksana looks barely better, tilting her head to look at him. “Eh?” 

“Uh, ageless? Functionally immortal?”

“I’m not immortal,” she replies. “I age, just slowly. I think I look about a year older than I did when I thought I stopped aging.”

“Right, so, that. How do we know if Daichi is going to be like that?”

“We don’t,” she says, followed by: “If human aging was bound to the DNA sequence, we’d have cracked the code for immortality by now. It’s… more complicated than that, that’s for sure, but… we haven’t been able to identify what exactly they changed for that to occur, which means I can’t crosscheck it with little Daichi’s own. So…”

“So…?”

“We wait. I stopped aging, like… eighteen, nineteen years old? Took me about ten years to realize something was fishy, about fifteen more past that for it to start fucking with my life. So like you’ll be able to tell for sure by the time he’s thirty, thirty-five.” 

Rion presses a hand over his face. “So I have… ten, fifteen more years to figure this out before it fucks up his life for good?”

“Do you think you can undo what happened?”

“No, but I’d like to know what happened before he starts asking questions.”

 

---

 

Himari had always wanted a big family, and maybe if Rion had been around more often they wouldn’t have had as many kids, but she was lonely in a big house, and it had been over a decade since she had spoken to her own parents, she was longing for some kind of connection. 

Rion is still in Tokyo.

He gets an email that Himari has sent him that’s filled with pictures of the kids. Daichi, standing on a little step stool in a little blue apron, helping his mother stir a pot on the stove. 

She tells him that he has almost no issues with monsters, nowadays. She says it’s remarkable, the only time she catches him behaving oddly is when he’s talking to the little siblings, he sometimes misunderstands them. 

“I heard him telling Chiyo she didn’t need to be afraid of the monster under her bed,” Himari laughs. “Which got me worried about there being monsters under the bed, but… maybe he was just talking about it the way every other parent talks about it, y’know? It’s hard to tell.”

Rion presses the phone to his ear, leaning back in his chair to look up at the ceiling, dim office lights flickering. 

“It seems like everyone’s getting along just fine. Though, I noticed in those images that you’ve gone ahead and signed our boy up for a sport team?”

“Look I know you have a thing against jocks, but he asked for it. And he’s really into it! Didn’t Oksana say exercise and hobbies would be good for him?”

“Exercise and hobbies are good for everyone.”

“That’s true, but he’s got all that blood pressure stuff, right? She said it would be good for him to be in something active. Plus, Rikun, it’s volleyball, so it’s fine. You like volleyball, don’t you?”

“I remember very little about playing volleyball, probably due to the obscene amount of brain trauma it inflicted upon me.”

“...our son plays better than you, that won’t be a problem.”

 

---

 

“I’m… a little worried about Daichi,” Himari says, late at night over the phone. Rion leans his head against the wall of his office, closing his eyes and trying only to enjoy the sound of her voice. How long had it been since he’d been home? Four months? Five now? Too long. He wasn’t even sure when he’d be able to get home again. 

“Oh? What else is new?” he mumbles back, somewhat sarcastically, though Himari doesn’t seem amused. 

“He doesn’t cry at all anymore.”

“...right, but-”

“No, Rion, I mean… like… God, I knew we knew this was going to happen, but… ignoring all his anxiety, all that fear, convincing him it wasn’t real, I’m scared we shut down the part of him that feels it at all. I don’t know if he trusts me to help him anymore, I never went running when he starts crying - and, now, with the little siblings… he knows I treat them differently. I can see it. I don’t… want him to think he’s less important than the babies, he’s just so much older and his… circumstance is so weird, but every time I go running to pick up Chiyo when she hurts herself, I can see him wondering why I never came when he was crying.”

“It’s not your fault,” Rion says. “You’ve done an amazing job raising those kids, and he’s a wonderful kid, smart and empathetic and I know he loves you, so much-”

“I… I just wish we could tell him. Maybe this was the wrong choice, maybe we should have embraced whatever he is and let Oksana take him.”

“I don’t want to lose him,” he says.

“Me either, but…”

“Just… he’s a good kid, he’s an amazing kid. Just stick with it a little bit longer. It’ll be okay.”

 

---

 

“Did you hear? Did mum tell you?” Daichi is saying, all excited in his overeager little voice. “My team voted me captain for next year! Which means I’m gonna get to wear the number one and I’ll get to do the handshake at the beginning of the games at the tournament. Isn’t that so cool?”

“Yeah, buddy,” Rion says, from where he’s sitting with his back pressed against the rough bark of the tree. “That’s amazing. You really took to the game, huh?”

“It’s amazing! It’s the best game in the world! And next year, mum says I can go to Karasuno, which is, like, the most amazing high school ever, they went to nationals once, did you know that?”

“I… did not. A nationals level team, eh? You think you’re good enough to get in?”

“Of course I am! And if I’m not, I’ll just work doubly hard and make sure I get better.”

He smiles slightly. 

“Good for you. It sounds like you probably earned this captaincy, I’m really proud of you.”

There’s a silence from his son on the other end. 

“Do you think you’ll be able to come back and make it for any of my games this year?”

Rion looks up, across the uneven forest floor, to where his crew was just finishing taking down the police tape they'd put up, clearing out all evidence of their involvement in the site. He had to take what he’d collected back to Shima Three in a few hours. He had no idea of being able to predict if or when he’d be able to go home. 

“I don’t know, bud,” he says. “You’ll need to tell me when they are.”

There’s another silence, before saying: “Yeah, it’ll probably be a few months still, so… guess you can’t tell right now…”

“Sorry, things are just busy, you know that.”

“Yeah, no worries.”

 

---

 

Rion closes the briefcase lid on a carefully sealed, tiny meteorite. They’d spent about eighteen hours in the woods digging around to find it.

“What a waste of time,” one of the officers groans, shaking out his jacket to try and cool himself off - the summer sun was killer, this time of year. 

“It’s not a waste of time,” another officer says. “We’re looking for signs of alien life, what could be cooler than that?”

Rion is going to take the meteorite off to be tested - maybe they will find alien life. Wouldn’t be the first time, of course. The real breakthrough would be finding alien life that offered any kind of explanation as to what the hell was going on. 

 

---

 

There are little moments of peace in the chaotic schedule he keeps, when he gets to go home, like sitting across from Himari and eating breakfast slowly and distractedly. He can hear their younger kids playing upstairs, laughing and chasing each other around. Himari giggles when she hears the littlest shout something about going to tell mom if they don’t let them have a turn playing. 

He hears footsteps coming downstairs. 

He turns around, just in time to see Daichi appearing at the bottom of the steps, buddled up in a jacket and scarf and clearly ready to go. 

Based on Himari’s expression, she was also not advised about their eldest leaving anytime this weekend. 

“Daichan,” Himari calls. “What are you up to, baby?” 

He glances over to them, before grinning and saying: “Sugawara invited me over to play the new Pokemon game he got. There’s this new challenge where you have to play it without letting any of your Pokemon die, and we’re gonna see how far we can get. Apparently it’s really hard.” 

Himari blinks. “Who… who’s house are you going to?” 

“Sugawara! He’s one of the other first-years on the volleyball team. He’s so cool, he’s, like, really funny and so nice and he even managed to make friends with the other first year on the team even though that guy is so shy and a little bit of a wimp about things. Suga’s not afraid of anything, though. The other day I saw him just pick up a spider, he’s so weird… Sorry, uh… I… sorry you didn’t ask, that, uhm-” Daichi looks a little bit embarrassed, before saying: “Ah, I’m gonna go, I told him I’d leave right away - uh… unless I’m… not allowed?”

The tone he uses indicates that although he is aware of his status as fourteen years old, he is not used to Himari imposing any kind of structured limitations on his independence. Perhaps because he’s never done anything like just decide he’s going to leave the house for a day - perhaps because Himari has never been quite sure the best way to parent him. 

“No, that’s fine,” Himari says. “Just make sure to ask his mum to call me if you’re going to be over there past lunchtime, I’ll get worried. And don’t leave or go anywhere else without telling me.” 

He gives a firm nod, before turning to grab his stuff and head out the front door.

Rion watches Himari stare after him, chewing on her lip for a moment. The moment the front door swings shut, she says: “Well, that’s going to be a sit-down conversation in a couple of years.”

Rion raises his eyes. “You think?”

“Uh-huh.”

Rion shrugs after a moment, turning around to go back to his breakfast. “Well I got a girl pregnant at sixteen, so if that’s the only sit down conversation he has to have with us, that will be a resounding improvement on his bloodline.”

 

---

 

It’s a belated birthday gift, in the new year. Daichi takes it graciously, smiling and thanking him, but he doesn’t open it up. Rion thinks that’s odd, that he just sets the gift on the table before continuing on with what he was doing - which seemed, by Rion’s calculation, to be packing lunches into school bags. 

“You’re not going to open that?”

Daichi glances up at him. “Ah, I will, I will, as soon as I’m done here - I have to get Chiyo and Hiro off to their weekend classes.”

“You have to do that?”

“Well, mum’s out with Yuchan for her swimming lessons,” Daichi replies, zipping up the bags and turning to brush past Rion, to the stairs, to shout up for his siblings to come down. “And if you haven’t noticed, there are four children in this house.” Rion watches him with apprehension growing in his gut. 

“Five.”

“Eh?”

“There are five children in this house, you’re sixteen - barely,” Rion says. Daichi looks confused by this statement, laughing softly and heading back over to him. The sounds of little feet rushing around to come down as called distract from the silence. 

“Sure,” Daichi says. 

Rion sighs.

“Well, how about we do something after you get back. I’m only in town for a few days, but-”

“Ah, sorry,” Daichi says, clasping his hands together. “I am actually going to the movies with Suga, this afternoon. And I really don’t want to cancel. But I should be available tomorrow?”

“Right, sure. Never thought I’d have to schedule an appointment with my own son, but… sure.”

“Well, if I’d known you’d be dropping by we might have been able to clear the schedule,” Daichi replies, amused, before turning around to watch his two little siblings go rushing by, hurrying to grab their bags and get to the door. 

Daichi, having been keeping an eye on them, gets distracted by something over their heads, out the glass back door. He just… looks. It’s not particularly tense or focused, like he may have spotted a rabbit or a bird. 

“Dai?”

He turns his head, waiting. 

Rion doesn’t have anything to say, so he just gives him a smile. “You probably need to get on the road?”

He nods to where the other kids are waiting. Daichi nods, grabs his bag, and heads to the door. 

 

---

 

“I’m gonna be Tokyo for the national tournament,” Daichi says, though he doesn’t sound particularly excited. “Do you think you’re going to be able to come? Our team is really, really good this year - and I know you missed out on coming to the prelim finals last fall, but… I mean, this is right by where you live, right? Do you think it’ll work out?”

“Of course,” he says. “I’ll do whatever I can to make it work. I promise.”

He wants to. More than anything in the world, he just wants to be a father. He doesn’t go, though. He ends up not being able to - there’s an attack on the other side of the country that he has to go do clean-up for. He tells Daichi something came up at work, and Daichi takes it like he always does. There’s a piece of Rion that recognizes the reason he had not bothered to sound excited was because he did not actually think Rion would ever show up.

He’s right for it, which is probably the worst part. 

 

---

 

There’s a moment in Daichi’s childhood that he doesn’t remember. 

He’s fourteen - almost fifteen, it’s his first year of high school. He doesn’t remember the otherwise uneventful fall day. 

Sugawara does. 

He does, because the entire volleyball team had gone out to do some light training in the fair weather before winter set in for real. They’d been running up the long hill behind the mountain - Suga had pulled ahead, because he always does. He thinks his new classmate and surely soon-to-be best friend is very cute, which means Sugawara must beat him in every conceivable competition, especially races up hills. 

But usually he doesn’t beat him this badly. It confuses him. The moment he reaches the top, he turns, and - nowhere. 

Huh? 

“Daichi?”

He starts jogging back down the hill, puffing to catch his breath, and rounding the slight corner to find-

Daichi is sitting on the ground, curled in on himself, holding his leg - everything about the scene is normal, Suga recognizes it immediately - it’s clear that he must have rolled his ankle running up the hill, hit the ground - there’s a scrap up his knee and based on the way he’s holding himself, he must have been in considerable pain, eyes squeezed shut. 

It’s so normal, especially for an athlete, but it’s so deeply unsettling to watch him make zero noise in response to the injury.

“Daichi!”

He jerks his head up in surprise, watching Suga come hurrying down the path. 

“Hey,” he says, jaw tensing. “Sorry, I just… fell…”

“Clearly! I didn’t you shout for me? I didn’t even notice you fall!”

Daichi looks confused. “Why would I have done that?”

Suga doesn’t know what to do with that. 

“Because you injured yourself, you clearly aren’t going to be able to walk back on your own, I- I don’t know, usually someone would have cried out! Or shouted! Or… I get that you’re Mr. Independent, but… damn it…”

Suga crouches down beside him, carefully trying to get his hands off his leg so that he could take a look and see if it was worse than it seemed. Thankfully, it still looks normal, so he’s relatively confident in his initial assumption of a sprained or rolled ankle. 

Daichi hasn’t responded. 

Suga looks over to him, indicating he’s still waiting. Daichi seems surprised by the insistence on talking about this. 

“I… I don’t know,” he says. “It just… I don’t… really do that, I guess. Scream or cry or… whatever. What’s the point? It doesn’t make a difference.”

“How else am I supposed to know something is wrong?” 

“Nothing was wrong,” Daichi said. “You didn’t need to know.”

“You’re… hurt,” Suga corrects. 

Daichi looks confused. 

 

---

 

“There is a unique structure of rod in your eyes that distinguishes between shades of black,” Rion says, from the driver’s seat of the car. Suga and Daichi sit in the backseat, feeling very much like they just got picked up from detention and were about to experience a lashing. That’s not what’s happening, but Suga has always been a little bit afraid of Rion, so that’s what it feels like. “At least,” he goes on. “That’s the best I’ve understood. You wouldn’t have ever noticed, but you probably experience vision at a desaturated level, compared to your friends. A sacrifice needed to accommodate the influx of what is usually a more minor attribute of human sight - rods also tend to be responsible for peripheral vision, which is… usually the parts of humans that are capable of capturing an image of yokai - just in the corner of their eye. So we think that it’s connected. But we don’t have definitive explanations for how yokai manage to hide themselves from almost all other forms of life. To answer your question.” 

Suga reaches across the middle seat to put his fingers over Daichi’s, linking them together gently. 

Daichi glances at him, just for a second, before looking back to where his father was focused on the road, chewing on his lip. 

“Why did they do that? To me? What’s the point?”

“Kid…” Rion starts, shaking his head slightly. “Look, it’s… we don’t know. And trust me, I know how deeply unsatisfying that is to admit, but we just don’t know. The best guess we have is that whatever is doing this is… experimenting, with… gene splicing, or… trying to create something specific… but… we don’t know why it’s only pregnant teenagers that are selected. We don’t know why some of the babies come out almost entirely normal and some, like you, are obviously not, we don’t know… how they keep doing it without being spotted, we don’t know who ‘they’ are, we don’t know if they have… a purpose for you, if they’re… monitoring you, or if they were done with you the moment your mother was put back on Earth, we don’t…” he pauses to sigh again, finishing: “We don’t even technically know if it’s alien aliens that are at fault for this, there’s… still a lot of wiggle room for it to have been a terrestrial - governmental - project they’re not telling us about. We’ve never actually… seen any aliens or alien tech that would be capable of this kind of… science.”

Daichi’s hands turned around to hold Suga’s a little more firmly. He’s so warm. 

“Is that it? They just fucked with my vision?”

“There are… other things,” Rion says. “Some… that we’ve tested, some that we can’t… prove yet.”

“What do you mean?”

Rion takes a breath. “Oksana will be able to explain it to you better, I’m sure-”

“Oksana Novikova?”

Rion whips his head around, and then remembers he’s driving, and looks back to the road. “You know-? How? Do you?”

Daichi is quiet for a second, before saying: “We broke into your office like… some weeks ago.”

“You - Daichi!” 

“I’m sorry! We thought you were hiding aliens! Which - you were by the way, so my paranoia was totally justified!”

“That doesn’t excuse breaking into a government building - oh, my god-” Rion says, suddenly pulling back as if realizing what he was saying. He glances briefly over his shoulder to look at Daichi again, very perturbed, before eventually settling on: “Guess it was too good to think you’d gotten your mother’s disposition. But I do need you to understand it’s not okay to go around breaking the law - fuck, how am I supposed to scold you about this? Break whatever laws you want when you think the government is hiding something - shit, no, that’s also bad - be…” 

Rion’s brain seems to be melting. 

Daichi looks a little concerned as well, before eventually speaking up and saying:

“Uhm… not to try and get out of being punished for breaking the law… or… not breaking the law enough, I’m rather confused by your sentiment… but can we go back to the alien experimentation issue? You said there was more?”

“Right, shit,” Rion says, then: “Your sympathetic nervous system is fucked up, is the other one. There’s an unidentifiable enzyme we’ve named zemlyase that eats epinephrine in your body and… converts it into a bastard form of serotonin we call serotonin-z. It doesn’t seem to serve a function in your body that damages it in any way, but performs the job of serotonin whether or not your body is producing serotonin, which keeps you incredibly efficient when under incredible stress, your body basically takes adrenaline, receives the flight-or-flight instinct, and then immediately converts it into a chemical that stabilizes your mood and keeps you running on operational levels. This bastard chemical is probably also responsible for your inability to sleep like a normal person and also your addiction to stress, any questions?”

“I… I have… I don’t even know what to say-” Daichi replies. 

Suga doesn’t think he’s ever heard Rion sound so stressed and annoyed in his life. 

“Fine, that’s normal,” Rion says. “It gets worse, but the good news is you have alien enzymes named after you - indirectly. Also, and I’m going to drop this on you right now because the alternative is waiting longer and I’m already experiencing heart palpitations, you might be immortal, but don’t worry, we’ll cross that bridge when you’re thirty-”

“Excuse me?”

Rion just gives an exhausted what can you do sort of shrug. “I told you, Dai, you were fucking around in things you had no business pursuing. I can’t fix any of this for you. I can’t make it better. These are just the facts as true as I can state them.”

Daichi swallows, putting his free hand over his face and taking a deep breath, clearly working hard to keep himself centered. When he’s recovered a bit, he says:

“Why did you keep this from me.”

“I wanted to give you the chance of a normal life.”

“If I might be immortal, how could I ever have had a normal life?”

Rion’s eyes flick to the rearview mirror - Suga realizes he’s looking at him. He tightens his hold on Daichi’s hand, maybe in silent challenge, maybe in recognition. 

“You might not be. And the other option was you… growing up a lab-kid, never feeling like a human being, never making proper friends. There was no middle ground - the middle ground got you killed by yokai immediately.”

Daichi nods slightly, seeming a little bit more functional before saying:

“If this was so dangerous, why didn’t you pull me out of it the moment you figured out I was onto you? Why leave the tracker in my room like a little threat?”

“I did what now?” Rion says. 

“The tracker, I put on you - you left it in my room? I presumed to try and threaten me into backing off? Why do that if you - I mean, you should-”

Rion smacks his hand against the steering wheel of the car, making Daichi flinch back in surprise. “God… fucking damn it Oksana-” he hisses. “Sorry, buddy, no, I don’t know what you’re talking about, that wasn’t me. I think I know who did… sorry, I didn’t tell you, I didn’t bring you out here the moment you caught on because, and I’m going to repeat this, there is no middle ground. Oksana was very clear about that, if you figured it out, you were going to have to come to Shima Three here and this was where you were staying. Normal life over. I wanted you to stop… fucking around and pull yourself together and just… stop. Before Oksana realized you knew. Before she pulled the plug on normality-”

“Who is this woman?” Daichi interrupted, laughing in his anxiety. “Why does she have that much power over me?”

“Because she’s… like you,” he said. “Or… she’s like 1.8 percent of you. And she’s the only person I know even remotely capable of making sense of this whole world.”

Daichi blinked. 

“So… wait, there are people like me?”

He nods, just once. “Very few as successful in life as you are, but… yes-”

“Hang on,” Suga cuts in, getting everyone’s attention back. “You said there was no middle ground, so… if Daichi knows, now, we all do, we’re… going to Shima Three, then? You’re taking Daichi away?”

Daichi snaps his head back to his father. “Hey, yeah wait-”

Rion doesn’t reply.

 

---

 

Tendou does not improve while staying in the Ushijimas’ home. If anything, he only feels sicker and sicker and sicker. 

Noriko tries to feed him teas and an assortment of remedies, but he stops being able to keep anything down. Eventually, the only solution they can come to is to get out of town as soon as possible. So they book a train ticket to Tokyo - Bokuto says his parents are okay with hosting them for a bit, but nobody has any idea what they’re going to do to explain this situation. 

It feels, Tendou thinks, like everything is falling apart. 

Daichi has stopped responding to messages, and Oikawa hasn’t replied to anything in days. Kuroo is raving mad about a cat that seems especially fluffed up, and Tendou, although seemingly once more stripped of his magical propensity, finds himself with hot flashes of mind reading in which waves and waves of psychic energy makes his stomach curdle and his skin tight and his teeth ache, threatening to overwhelming him again - he feels destabilized, functionless. Like a lightswitch balanced perfectly between on and off, only needing the most minimal of pressure to flicker and change. 

Tendou has to keep himself supported on Ushijima’s arm to walk out of the house, but he thinks the fact that he’s walking at all is a good sign. Noriko pulls them aside, and hands Ushijima a fabric charm - ward against demons. 

She’s worried that Nurarihyon will come back for them, she’s worried everything she’d feared about this world was true. She instructs him very carefully to not touch it with his left hand, and Ushijima folds it into the pocket on his right side. Doing so immediately sends a wave of sharp pressure boiling up his spine, feeling like his throat was able to tear out from between his teeth. 

He feels his vision flickering, struggling to stay lucid and awake. 

“The charm,” Ushijima says, when they are waiting for their train. “Is it affecting you?” 

Tendou swallows back nausea. “I think,” he manages to croak out. 

The charm serves its function for eighteen minutes - Ushijima crushes it in his left hand and tosses it into the garbage. Tendou does, actually, feel a little bit better once it’s destroyed. 

Once they’re on the train and heading out of the small town, he starts to feel even more better - the only thing that actually alleviates the discomfort, however, is when Tendou is laying down across their seats to rest his head on Ushijima’s leg, and Ushijima presses his hand down to the back of Tendou’s neck, rubbing firm, circular motions with the thumb on his left hand - it feels almost like a numbing agent. It gets a little easier to breathe, he feels a little less sick, his mind is less filled with static. 

Tendou feels the buzz of Ushijima’s phone from this position, but waits until he has read it completely to hum a soft question. 

Ushijima doesn’t reply, but Tendou feels the hand on the back of his neck fall still. 

“Waka?” he prompts again, pushing himself to sit up slightly. 

Ushijima looks at him, then back to his phone, then turns the screen around so that Tendou can read it himself. 

Iwaizumi: Has anyone heard from Oikawa? The train he said he was on arrived twenty minutes ago, and he hasn’t answered any of my calls.

Notes:

this chapter fcking ate me alive I swear I swear - I probably wrote about 10k more than is actually in this chapter with how often I scraped it and started completely over. Literally deleted like 10+ pages multiple times. ANYWAY that's all to say I hope you enjoyed it, because I'm happy with the result but by god it made me work for it <3

Chapter 34: Spirited Away

The cat is a heavy weight on his shoulders, it perches with its paws drawn in close together to balance on his collarbone, its long tail swishing across his back. It’s not making any more noise, right now, but it has, decidedly, stopped behaving like a cat. It can’t possibly be just a cat. 

“No, I haven’t… heard from anyone. We haven’t even been able to get a hold of Daichi, and… Ushijima just recently started replying to our texts but from what he’s said, he is not interested in running towards the magical bullshit.”

The speaker is Kenma, with his phone pressed to his ear, looking exhausted and cold and mentally strained to the point of cracking, but still going through the friendship duties of trying to manage a screaming Iwaizumi who, at this point, Kuroo thought should consider just breaking up with Oikawa, considering how much he was putting him through. 

“No that’s not what I said,” Kenma says, squeezing his eyes shut. “I mean… asking Tendou to help seems like it’ll go badly. If Ushijima doesn’t punch us in the face for it, based on what he’s been describing it could set Tendou off again. There’s nothing to be gained for Oikawa if Tendou is eating our faces.”

Kuroo frowns at that sentence, before lifting his hands up to grab the cat and pull him off his shoulder. He’s a hefty weight, and although he’s not a particularly broad cat, very narrow in its features, he’s bigger than most cats Kuroo had seen before. Fluffy and normal, staring at him with those big eyes. 

“What the fuck are you…” Kuroo whispers, wondering if maybe his apparent spiritual connection to this cat would allow it to start speaking Japanese and just answer their questions. 

The cat’s tongue pokes out of its mouth. 

“Cute, but unhelpful,” Kuroo replies. 

“And you’re sure there’s no way you got the train wrong, or Oikawa just made a second stop somewhere, it’s really early, he could have stopped for breakfast-” Kenma is saying, probably to give Iwaizumi something to cling onto to stop hyperventilating. 

Kuroo sets the cat down on the woodchipping of the playground, which it seems annoyed by, but ultimately just flops over to relax, before backing away from the odd creature and shrugging his jacket off. 

He carries it over to where Kenma has just turned away to start pacing the length of the playground fence, catching up quickly to drape it over his shoulders. Kenma had noticed his approach, jumping slightly and catching himself mid-sentence, turning to look up at Kuroo with questioning eyes. 

“You seemed cold,” Kuroo tries, helplessly, and Kenma gives him a small sort of smile before something on the other end of the phone makes him frown and he says:

“Iwaizumi, while thematically that would be very dramatic, I really don’t need you starting to propose the idea of alien abductions. Keep your head on.”

Kuroo laughs slightly, and Kenma waves him off, so he turned to head back to find his feline shadow and-

Cat was gone. 

No, wait-

He sees it, slinking along the edge of the playground. 

“Ah - Kenma!” Kuroo calls, looking back to him. Kenma lifts his head, so Kuroo adds, jerking a hand towards the cat: “The freaky demon cat is leaving.”

“The cat is leaving?” Kenma called back, sounding slightly concerned. He immediately gets distracted by Iwaizumi, listening for a second before starting to head back over to Kuroo. “Suga says the demon cat helped him find Oikawa last time he ran off.” 

“Suga’s on the call?”

“No, Iwaizumi says Suga said that the demon cat helped him find Oikawa.”

“Iwaizumi and Suga talk?”

“Not relevant right now?”

“Right, right-” 

Kuroo turns to start jogging after the cat, who’d left the playground area and was starting to cross the greenspace, weaving through the sparse trees. Kuroo doesn’t like this feeling. 

“Are you sure we should be following the cat?” 

“Do you have a better idea?”

“I just…” Kuroo bites the inside of his cheek for a second, as the cat reaches the end of the small park and bounces up onto a stone barricade, padding along it like it was the happiest cat in the world. “This cat… bakenekos are malevolent spirits, right? What if… what if it’s leading us to whatever got Oikawa, but like, in the way you get led into a monster’s mouth…”

“No, no, no, he didn’t mean it like that, Oikawa’s probably fine-”

Kuroo frowns, glancing behind him to notice Kenma frantically doing damage control, Iwaizumi’s voice loud enough to be coming through the phone even off speaker. He must have overheard the ‘something got Oikawa’ part of that statement. 

“Here,” Kuroo says, reaching to take Kenma’s phone. 

“Hey-!”

He presses the phone to his ear, shouting: “Iwa! Hey!” to shut him up quickly before saying: “I promise you, my man, we are gonna do our best to sort this out, but I kinda need Kenma focused to chase this kitty through the city, so adios, I’ll text you when we have an update.”

Kuroo hangs up the call. 

“Thank you,” Kenma sighs. “The yelling was starting to hurt my ear.”

Kuroo snickers, nodding slightly before saying: “All things considered, though, he’s being rather tame.”

Kenma raises an eye. “You think that’s tame?”

“Well, I mean, if something like this had happened to you, I’d probably have already started killing people,” he says, before he can think it through. 

Kenma stares at him for a moment, before coughing as a pink flush betrayed his cheeks, and he ducks his head down. “The cat is getting away, we should go.”

“Uhm… yeah, yeah, of course, we should-” Kuroo decides to just kill that conversation and turns to chase after this confusing little demon cat.

 

---

 

Approximately three hours ago, Oikawa had been sitting in his seat, magazine from a stall in the station opened on his lap to a full, glossy colour illustration of a UFO - the story, he’s sure, is fabricated. But the magazine ‘special edition’ covered UFOs and unexplained phenomena had caught his attention, and he’d succumbed to his impulses. 

He catches himself about to bite his nail, and forces his hand down to focus on flipping the page. Despite this, despite everything, there’s this strong, thrumming excitement just looking at the artistic renditions. He just… 

He just likes it. 

“Those magazines are all junk, y’know,” an old, hoarse voice says, as someone takes a seat beside him. Oikawa jumps slightly, having been too engrossed in his pictures, and looks up to smile at the old man sitting across from him. 

“I know,” he replies, before looking out the window. He hadn’t even realized they’d gotten to a station - it’s a decently long time from Aomori to Miyagi, so he hadn’t been paying attention. “Most magazines are under no legal obligation to cite sources or even present factual information - could be as good as fiction. Though, I suppose, documentaries and other programs are no better. It can be hard to find something verifiable.”

The old man chuckles. “Very astute,” he says, before minding his own business and digging around in his bag. 

Oikawa smiles again a little bit, looking back down to the image of the UFO, high definition, glowing lights. It’s big and magnificent, the digital painting effortlessly capturing the sweeping wind through the trees as the flying saucer spins. 

He still feels this measure of guilt, for having left Daichi behind. 

He’s an alien, right?

That was the answer. 

I feel jealous, though not in a way I’m familiar with.

I don’t want to be and alien, I just…

Shouldn’t have walked away from him. 

But at least Sugawara was with him now - and he’s sure Daichi would be properly pleased with that turn of events. Honestly, if he was in his shoes he might even consider it an upgrade. Oikawa had always been a… friend of convenience, it had seemed, or… at least little more than something mildly interesting, an avenue to uncover his father’s secrets. 

Still shouldn’t have walked away from him. He's an alien, I… 

He tries to convince himself that it’s interest that’s drawing him back, like…

I mean, who could give up the opportunity to meet a real non-human person?

But that’s not so earnest in his chest. He feels more…

I hope he’s taking it well. I hope he knows I didn’t mean it when I said I wasn’t willing to help him. I hope he reaches out if he needs help.

A brown paper bag hits his magazine, the old man having flopping it over. 

Oikawa puts his hands up, staring at it, before looking up over to the old man again. 

“What’s this?”

“A croissant.”

“...sure, why?”

The man laughs. “They had a deal if you bought two,” he says. “Figures may as well not waste the second one.”

Oikawa hesitates for a second, something-something, don’t take food from strangers, before he takes the bag and opens it up. It did… smell really good… nice and buttery and still a little warm. 

And-

As if the smell kicked his body into gear, his stomach suddenly knots in on itself as he realizes he hasn’t eaten in a while. He’s been up pretty much the whole night, and hadn’t slowed down for even a second. 

“Thank you,” he says, pulling it from the bag. “I appreciate it.”

“No problem,” the man grumbles. 

Oikawa lifts it up to take a careful bite, reveling slightly in flakey, buttery pastry - and lamenting slightly that he was cursed to be an athlete with this bread-loving body - before realizing eating on top of a magazine was the fast track to destroying a magazine and fumbling to fold it up and put it away. 

 

---

 

They walk for nearly an hour through the city, chasing this damn cat. It seems to be moving with intent - perhaps if it meandered more, Kuroo might abandon the pursuit. But he can’t do that when it looks so goddamn focused.  

They think they lose it a few times, through a busy morning market or across a road. But without fail, after a minute of searching, they’re able to spot it, sitting and seemingly waiting, as if annoyed by their slow trailing. Move faster, the cat says, with a swish of its tail. Are you not even trying?

Even so, Kuroo cannot help but feel like they are wasting their time. What if Oikawa was hurt somewhere? What if he was seriously hurt, and here they were, chasing a cat through Saitama? 

And then-

The cat slips between the legs of strangers, and bounces under the gate to enter a train station.

“Hey…” Kenma says, before looking to Kuroo. “What do you think it wants us to do? Get on a train? Go somewhere?”

Kuroo looks up at the station, frowning slightly. “Uhm… Well… maybe it wants us to go to Miyagi, where Iwaizumi is? Or, where Oikawa should be?”

“Maybe…?” Kenma agrees, before starting off again and making his way through the entrance of the busy station, weaving through the crowd just half a step ahead of Kuroo. “But… this isn’t the station I’d use if I wanted to go to Miyagi. I mean… I guess there’s probably a train that would connect, but… we passed a station a while back that would have been better…”

“Maybe the cat doesn’t understand the train system so well?” Kuroo offers, following Kenma through the crowd. 

They don’t bother buying a ticket to Miyagi off the assumption that that’s what the cat wanted, instead taking a few minutes to look around and try and spot it again, heading up to the main platform between the busy rails and hoping there would be a neon sign that would point them in the right direction. 

There is not, of course. And they can’t see the cat anymore. 

“I wonder if-”

“Hey!” 

Kuroo turns at Kenma’s shout, and finds him looking across the platform to where, of all things, Bokuto was standing, a cardboard box in one hand and his phone in the other, zoned out as one could be. 

“Bo?” Kuroo says, and when he doesn’t hear him, raises his voice and shouts: “Ey, Bokuto!” 

Bokuto jumps, looking around in confusion, before spotting him there. 

“Oh, Kuroo!” 

They meet in the middle, Kuroo still half looking around for that odd cat. 

He led us to Bokuto…?

“What are you doing here?” Kenma asked. “Did you hear from Iwaizumi? Oikawa’s missing-”

“Yeah, isn’t that freaky?” Bokuto says. “I have no idea where he might have gone. Haven’t been able to get a hold of Daichi, either, but… I mean, I didn’t know what I could possibly do to help, but - I’m actually here to pick up Ushijima and Tendou, their train is arriving shortly.” 

“Oh?” Kuroo says, frowning. 

“Why… why are you guys here?” Bokuto asks. 

“We… followed Kuroo’s demon cat,” Kenma says, turning where he stood to try and see if he could spot it. “But it seems to have abandoned us now… it seemed to want us to come here, but…”

“Maybe it’s rounding us up to kill us in one go,” Kuroo says dryly, before pointing to the box. “What’s that?”

“Donuts?” 

“...why?”

“I thought Ushijima and Tendou might be hungry,” he replies with a shrug. “It’s the morning, I don’t know if they’ve had breakfast.” 

“God, speaking off…” Kuroo mutters, and with a glance at Kenma sees the same look cross his face - waking up so early in the morning and just powering through wasn’t the best use of their energy, he was definitely hungry now and probably would only get more so. But-

A sudden burst of air enters the station as a train comes screeching in, chimes above them indicating its arrival, the entire platform bustling to life as people start moving around them, getting ready. 

“Oh, I think this should be them,” Bokuto says, backing away to get a better view of the train and see if he could spot them. 

There’s a minute of shoving and panic as passengers disembark and board at the same time, but it’s easy to spot the bright red hair Tendou wore through the crowd. 

Kenma lets out a sigh of relief - undoubtedly having been concerned that they wouldn’t be arriving in the same fashion Oikawa had failed to. 

Everyone has to fight through the crowds to meet up, and a glance over the two indicate neither are doing particularly well. Ushijima, although standing straight and seeming put together has heavy bandages up both arms, and scratches across his face - Tendou, who he’s got an arm wrapped around to basically carry through the crowd, is almost grey in the face, scratched blue veins around his eyes courtesy of the sunken, sick look he had. The fact that his eyes are focusing at all seems a miracle, and he makes an effort to stand on his own as they wander away from the crowd and try and face a clear space. 

“You look horrible,” Bokuto says, eyeing him. “Donut?” 

“Eh?” Tendou replies, before the donut box is presented to him. “Uh, no thanks, I haven’t been able to keep anything down since yesterday.” 

Bokuto offers the box to Ushijima. 

“No, thank you.” 

“Oh, good,” Kuroo says, once both boys have rejected the offer, and he reaches forward to snatch the box from Kuroo and offer it down to Kenma. 

“Hey!” Bokuto says, but makes no move to stop the two from digging into a gift not meant for them. 

Kuroo is about to start asking questions with a mouthful of donut, when through the crowd he spots their cat, sitting back on its hindlegs, paws folded flat against its fluffy stomach. 

“Cat!” Kuroo says, around the bite of the donut, causing everyone to spin. 

“Oh, that thing,” Tendou says. “Bad news kitty.”

“Bad news kitty indeed,” Ushijima echoes. “Should we leave? Is it not an ill omen?” 

“I.. it led us here,” Kuroo replies. “I don’t… know, Iwaizumi said to follow it - apparently it led Suga to Oikawa when he ran off once before, so…”

As if to answer the silent question, the cat waves one of its paws at them, very much beckoning to come here, before turning and disappearing. 

“Alright, let’s go with the cat, then-” Bokuto says, before heading off after the cat.  

Kuroo shoves the rest of the donut into his mouth and takes off after him. Kenma follows, and after an exhausted groan, Tendou and Ushijima have started following at a longer distance. 

 

---

 

It’s about forty-five minutes before the train is expected to pull into Oikawa’s station, and the man sitting beside him has been almost entirely silent, except for occasionally flipping the pages of a newspaper, or making polite smalltalk to the other passengers passing by. A train like this is not the usual commuter trains running between stations in a city, but meant for hours on the rail, cross-Japan trips and is therefore filled more with tourists and vacationers than salarymen and schoolkids. 

He cannot figure out which class this old man is, but figures it’s not his business anyway. 

He spends about thirty minutes of the trip on the phone with Iwaizumi, and for the first time in quite a while feels like his blood-pressure has come down, enjoying the rather aggressive intonation of Iwa’s voice as he talks about the frustrations of trying to navigate the dorm-registration of his university campus. Apparently, he’s probably going to be stuck with at least one random roommate, potentially up to three or four if he gets placed in a pod dorm. He doesn’t love that. 

Oikawa doesn’t mind him talking, feeling awfully tired and liking the option of just zoning out and listening to him complain. He tries to offer quips of advice or input when he can, focusing on controlling the way his voice sounds to come across as endearing as possible to make up for the complete lack of engagement otherwise. 

Eventually, though, Iwaizumi tells him that he has to do an errand for his mother before meeting him at the station, so he needs to go if he’s going to get that done in time. Oikawa wishes him a goodbye, and then more softly adds an ‘I love you,’ and gets Iwaizumi’s characteristic annoyed echo of the sentiment, as if pissed off every time Oikawa makes him say it aloud. 

With a soft chuckle he hangs up the phone, staring at the contact on his screen for a minute before a voice says: 

“Someone special?” 

He glances up to look at the old man, who’s looking at him rather fondly now, a smile across a weathered face. 

“Ah, yeah,” Oikawa says. “Very.” 

“Young love is so sweet. How long have you two been together?” 

“Uhm… a couple years, now,” he says. “But we’ve known each other our whole lives.”

“How lovely,” he replies. “Does she share your appreciation for the extraterrestrial?” he adds, poking at the magazine that was left folded over his knee. 

Oikawa laughs, shaking his head slightly. “Not really. He tends to indulge whatever I like, though. I couldn’t have asked for someone more forgiving of my bad habits…”

The man merely hums an acknowledgement, thinking about this for a while before saying: “Someone like that is hard to come by, in this world. Whether it be friend or family or lover, someone who truly, truly sees you, who cares for even the bad parts of you… that is a lucky find. You’re a lucky boy.” 

“Thank you,” Oikawa says, softly, before saying: “What… what about you, are you married, or…?” 

“Once upon a time,” he says. “I had a wife for many, many years. We had many children. And we were quite happy.” 

“Were?”

Oikawa probably shouldn’t have asked it. He knows that, it’s presumptuous to push into the personal lives of strangers, especially when the conversation was so otherwise light and pleasant. But he cannot help but ask it, something in his gut, or his heart, tugging as if by invisible strings to lean towards the man, intrigued. 

“They’re all gone, now.”

“Oh, I’m… sorry to hear that…”

“Ah, I am an old, old man. It’s to be expected at my age, nothing lasts forever. Not even the good ones.” 

Oikawa swallows slightly, but the old man continues without letting him interrupt. 

“You know, you are quite special. Quite like me when I was your age. So emboldened with your own sense of destiny that you concoct entire other worlds to justify why you cannot reach it. I failed because of forces beyond my control, or… If I work harder, the rules will change and I will succeed.”

Oikawa is staring at him now. 

“Wh… what are you talking about?” 

The old man smiles slightly. “You wanted so badly to be the victim of an alien abduction, didn’t you? To give yourself an excuse for why you were never quite the person you’d wanted to be?” 

Oikawa’s tongue feels heavy, caught off guard both by the immediate pounding in his chest, and the batshit conversation subject, pulled out of thin air like a crosshair drawn between his eyes. But before he can say anything, before he can pull himself together enough to ask who in the hell this man thought he was, there’s a loud: 

“Oh! Excuse me!”

And coming down the train cart is a tiny little red haired woman, who Oikawa recognizes instantly, and now he has an entirely different problem. 

She pushes through them like the old man doesn’t exist, scooting in front of Oikawa to plop down into the seat on his other side, giving him a grin and a giggle and blooming panic in his chest. 

“Y-you-” he starts to say, unsure of what to accuse her of.

Is Rion also here? No, no, he went to Okinawa-

Does she know who I am? Did she follow me? 

Oh my god what if the government is following me? 

What do I do? What do I do?

“Quick question,” the woman says, leaning into him. She looks so… young, up close, it’s rather shocking. “Can you see that man sitting beside you?” 

“...eh?”

“The old man. Can you see him?” 

“...yes?”

“Good!” she says, clapping her hands together too. “That means I’m allowed to see him too-”

And then she tilts herself to the side, to look across Oikawa and over to the old man, demanding in a hushed but firm voice: “What in the fuck do you think you’re doing? Really? You’re going to sit down here and accost this poor boy with-”

“Where did you come from?” the old man says, sounding genuinely frustrated. “We’ve been on this train for hours!” 

“I was sitting a little ways back hoping you didn’t need to be put on a leash. Have you lost your mind? I thought it was your own damn rule not to interfere or talk to this boy!”

“You don’t know anything about the rules, you wretch of a woman-”

“Okay, okay, okay-” Oikawa interrupts, putting his hands out and turning to the woman. “What the hell are you doing here? What do you want? What’s going on?”

The woman softens slightly, looking at him. “I’m here to convince you to not listen to this man, and to make sure he doesn’t try anything weird!” 

Oikawa blinks at her, then looks over at the old man. “And… and you? What do you want?” 

“I’m going to tell you why you were never the person you wanted to be.”

 

---

 

“Where the hell is this cat going?” Bokuto grumbles, as they jump a small cement barricade in a parking lot to head across an unkempt back alley greenspace, through the streets and down south of Saitama. 

Kenma’s feet are starting to hurt from the walking, he wishes they’d just stop. 

Iwaizumi keeps calling him. 

Any updates, any updates, any updates?

No updates, no updates. 

We’re chasing the cat! We’re still chasing the cat!

Ushijima is trying to relay the information to Daichi, and despite the messages going through, there is never any response. They don’t think he has a reason to ignore them, but can’t for the hell of them figure out why he might be away from his phone for so long. 

Kuroo tries calling him, no answer. 

Iwaizumi sends more messages. 

Please tell me you have some kind of lead. 

It’s only been twenty minutes. 

I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know, Kenma keeps saying. I’m sorry, I don’t know, we’re still chasing the cat!

And then the cat is-

At another train station. 

They all pile in, and once they’re up onto the main platform, the fluffy little cat has turned around and bounced towards them, clawing his way up Kuroo’s leg to lounge happily across his shoulders, as if to say: Okay! I’m done! Thank you!

“Where are we?” Ushijima asks, turning his head slowly. Tendou looks like he’s going to be sick where he stands, the physical exercise clearly not agreeing with the already heavily taxed body. Bokuto wanders a little ways around, before saying: 

“Uh… just a station - I mean, a big station, that’s for sure…”

And it’s an accurate if not obvious observation - the station is massive, with multiple platforms and what was probably dozens of trains coming in and out at any moment. It connected trains all across Japan, and a hundred little rails into the city. 

Kuroo grabs the cat off his shoulder, turning him around to look at. 

“I don’t understand!” Kuroo says. “What do you want? What’s here?” 

The cat licks his nose. 

“Aaaaaaaah-”

With a gust of wind a train pulls into the station - with a blaring horn another leaves, the chime of the announcer. Now leaving! Now leaving!

Tendou stumbles slightly, and Ushijima leads him away to a support beam on the platform that he can lean against. He looks like he’s starting to overheat, sweating and flushed in the face. 

Kenma slowly turns where he stands. 

Are we missing something, are we missing something big?

Someone’s phone goes off - and he twists around to see who it is, only to realize it’s his own phone - Iwaizumi is calling. 

Not now, not now-

He denies the call and sends a message back: 

We’re trying! We need a minute!

As he looks up from his phone, a chiming voice give the train number of the next arrival, place of origin and final destination. 

Place of Origin - Aomori Prefecture - Train number-

“Oh my god,” Kenma says, loudly, causing everyone to turn to look at him as he points up at the voice in the sky. “That’s Oikawa’s train, that’s the train he was supposed to get off of in Miyagi.” 

Kuroo looks down to the demon cat. “Good kitty!” 

 

---

 

They’ll be pulling into his stop in five minutes. Neither person to either side of him has stopped fighting. 

“Please, ignore him-” the woman is saying. “Please, please, please ignore him.”

“Ignore her,” the old man says. “She doesn’t even have a reason to care, she’s not even one of us.”

“One of us?”

“You know you are special, you’ve always known it. There are some people, some people like… like you, and like me, that are born with the ability to uplift and protect and manifest and change the world around them merely through their thoughts, their faith. Belief, belief that is power, is in everyone, but it is a weapon in the hands of people like me and you - she doesn’t have a stake in this, she is unaffected by it, she has no reason to care except for that her nature forces her to-”

“What are you-” Oikawa interrupts, squeezing his eyes shut. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I can teach you how to use your power properly. How to make your full potential bloom, become more than you are now- she wants you to dirty it, to throw it away in-”

“That’s not true!” the woman shrieks, and half the train turns to look at them. She hushes herself. 

“What is your argument?” Oikawa asks. “You’ve been quite insistent he’s wrong, but he’s not wrong about you not seeming to have a reason to care. Why do you care?”

“Because you’re a child!” the woman cries, voice cracking. “You’re a child, and you don’t deserve this, you don’t deserve to be treated like this, you should be left alone, you’ll come into yourself in due time-”

“I would have been happy to wait if he hadn’t tangled himself with the Sawamura child-”

“Daichi-?”

The woman doesn’t even blink. “That’s not fair! You’re running exclusively on theoretical damage-”

“If Oikawa’s belief is fractured, the entire balance Japan is held in could be destroyed-”

“Maybe!”

“I am not going to let my planet be infested with you people - he must grow as nature intended, he must stay unsullied-”

The train comes to a stop. Oikawa moves to stand up, hoping to just make a break for it - Iwaizumi is standing on the train platform waiting for him, and if there’s one thing Oikawa knows, it’s that he doesn’t want to take the side of either of these people. Not in this moment, maybe not ever. There’s something deep in his stomach that feels wrong. 

Call it polished instinct, but he’s pretty sure this isn’t the natural order of things. 

He is completely confident that if he can escape out onto the platform, to where Iwaizumi can see him, the world will fall back into place. Iwaizumi won’t let anything hurt him - all he has to do is escape and get away from-

A tight grip slams him back down into his seat. 

“You know what,” the old man hisses. “I think it’s time we have a private conversation-”

There’s a whistling noise, before a heaviness overtakes his head, and his eyes are fluttering shut, and Oikawa is swaying where he sat. 

No, no, I need to get to Iwaizumi-

He feels his head hit the back of his seat as the train starts to move again, and he’s asleep before he can have a second thought. 

 

---

 

The train whistles as it pulls into the station. It’s a shoving match against those exiting the cars to get in, but they make it work. It’s getting busier and busier the later in the morning it is, but thankfully there’s still enough room to move. 

As they head to push their way on, a young woman, maybe no older than Kuroo himself, comes stumbling out, eyes wide as she focuses on them, something akin to recognition flashing across her face before she grabs Kuroo’s wrist and turns him around. 

“Don’t go on there,” she says. 

“Wh-what? Who are-”

“Please, please, he’s not - he’s not taking him somewhere people should go - I can’t… I especially can’t, I- Please, please, come with me, I know you want to help your friend, but-”

She reaches to grab his arm and try and pull him with her, but the moment she touches his shoulder, the cat spits out a furious hiss, claws swiping down to scratch up the back of her hand. She yelps, pulling her hand back and covering the wound. 

Kuroo feels, instinctually, that if this cat hates her that much…

“I have to go,” he says, before stumbling away and hurrying to leap through the doors before they could close. 

“You’ll be killed!” the woman shrieks. 

He can see Kenma’s eyes widen, concern crossing his features. “Kuroo-”

“Everyone split up,” Kuroo calls, loud and commanding as he swirls a finger in the air. He doesn’t have time to worry about concerned friends, or to assure fears. Sure, they were all in odd demonic territory, sure, ghosts could be haunting them right now, magic in the air, but that didn’t matter. 

Their friend needed help.

“Look for anything.”

The cat on his shoulder meows an agreement, and hunkers down with its head on a swivel. 

What a good cat. 

Kuroo and Kenma go off in one direction - Ushijima and Bokuto head off another, Tendou declining, practically begging, to have them let him sit down for a bit. Kuroo, if he weren’t so amped on getting to this train in time before it arrived and getting on board, might be more concerned with the half-yokai’s declining state, but right now their priority was figuring out what happened to Oikawa. 

Please, please, don’t let whatever it was have happened before Miyagi…

If he was sitting, helpless, on a station somewhere in Aomori…

Kuroo feels another seizing snake of anxiety in his stomach and hurries faster. They move between the train carts, head turning from one side to the other, scanning the passengers. Some of them give him weird looks - probably due to the cat - but nobody speaks up. 

Nobody. 

They move to the next cart. Then the next. 

“I don’t… see anything,” Kenma complains, looking between them. “What if he’s not here?”

“There has to be something, there has to be a clue…” Kuroo replies, though he’s not so sure. 

How intelligent is this cat? He guides them to the right train, but it’s not like he had eyes inside it, maybe there was nothing to be done? Maybe it was just a train? 

They shove out of that cart and into the next, and then the next, and then-

“Oh my god!”

Ten rows back, tipped at an awkward angle across his seat-

“Oikawa-!”

Kuroo breaks into a sprint, making half the patrons mutter and hiss in distaste, and Kenma fumbles to pull out his phone and call the others to come this way. 

Oikawa looks like he’s asleep…

Kuroo would make a joke about how sleeping through your train stop shouldn’t have been this big of a deal, but he knows in his gut that that’s not what happens. He crouches down by the seat, and the cat leaps from his shoulders to walk across the back of the chairs. The person in the seats behind them gasp in confusion. 

He doesn’t hold back, just grabbing Oikawa and shaking him as hard as he can. 

“Get the fuck up,” Kuroo says, eloquently, of course. 

Nothing happens. 

“Why isn’t he waking up?” Kenma asks, voice cracking. 

“I don’t know- Oikawa-!”

Nothing. 

Nothing!

Kuroo grabs him, grabbing him to a seated position, but he remains floppy and limp, as if completely relaxed and, well…

Heart hammering, Kuroo fumbles to press his fingers to his neck, but-

“Well, his heart is beating - rapidly, might I add. He’s alive, but…”

“He’s not waking up…”

“Why isn’t he waking up…” Kuroo agrees, at the same time the sound of the train cart door opening alerts him to the arrival of the others. 

“We found him,” Kenma reports, hurriedly trying to catch them up. “But we can’t-”

The train cart is moving beneath their feet. 

“Well, I guess we’re going on a trip,” Bokuto says, as the train pulls out from the station. 

“Not important right now-” Kenma starts. “We can’t-”

 

---

 

“-wake Oikawa up, he’s not responding to anything,”

Tendou had, overall, been having a pretty terrible day. The four minutes of rest he’d been given when they got on board had barely been enough to catch his breath, and this horrible hot flash was threatening to send him to the ground. 

The only comfort he had was Ushijima’s left arm, that he kept wrapped around him for support, and still seemed to work like a balm on his nerves. He tried to breath evenly, swiveling his head around. 

Oikawa looked like he was just sleeping… 

Tendou had never been able to read minds while people were sleeping, or see dreams, nothing like that - his guesswork mindreading seemed to only function on what people were consciously thinking about. Dreams were out of that realm, he couldn’t even get into his head to see what was going on, but-

“What do you mean he won’t wake up?” Bokuto says. “What’s wrong with-”

“We need to call someone,” Ushijima says. 

“Who?”

“Police?” he tries, helplessly. “Paramedics? Something is clearly wrong with him-”

“I don’t think demon possession sleep curses are gonna fly with the police,” Kuroo hisses back. 

Sleep curses…?

Tendou tries to keep his body together as he pulls away from Ushijima, earning a confused look from him. 

“Come here,” he croaks, turning to lift Ushijima’s left hand up, pulling him through the crowd to where Oikawa was laying. “Touch him.”

“What?”

“With your left hand, like… touch his forehead or something.”

Ushijima hesitates for a second, before reaching down and pressing two fingers to Oikawa’s forehead. Tendou holds his breath for a second - everyone does - but nothing happens. 

Ushijima pulls his hand away. 

“...I thought that would work…” Tendou mumbles. 

“Though what would work?” Kuroo starts, at the same time a second voice, the familiar voice of Nurarihyon, says:

“That’s very clever, good work.”

Tendou yelps, stumbling back and spinning around to find the old man standing behind him. Judging by the reaction of everyone else - blank looks of confusion, concern, mutters of upset - they cannot see him standing there. 

“Y-you! Are you behind this? Did you do this to him?” 

“The reason it didn’t work,” Nurarihyon continues, without answering the question. “Isn’t because you’re wrong, but because you didn’t explain to Mr. Ushijima why he had to do it. He doesn’t believe in his own ability, so he cannot use it intentionally.”

“...what do you want,” Tendou says, and he feels familiar, calloused hands grabbing either side of his arms, as Ushijima moves in behind him. 

“Who are you talking to?” Ushijima whispers, as if cautious of speaking too loudly where someone might be listening. 

“Nurarihyon.”

Nurarihyon smiles, giving a little wave, as if Ushijma might be able to see him. 

“Does he know why this is happening?”

“I do,” Nurarihyon interrupts, before Tendou can answer the question. “And I’ll wake him when I’m done with him, not before-”

Nurarihyon cuts himself off, distracted slightly when he sees Kuroo’s cat standing on the back of the seat. He stares at it for a moment, as if finding it an oddity. After a second he seems to come to his senses, and looks back at Tendou. 

“For the record,” Nurarihyon says. “I wish you could have seen the Hyakki Yagyō under better conditions. I wish you’d chosen a different allegiance.”

“What-” he starts, before breaking off into a hacking cough. The rumbling motion of the train knocks him off balance, but Ushijima is already in place to hold him up, helping him stabilize against the rocking of the train, as it suddenly starts flickering dark and light, as if going through a long tunnel, but - there… Well, there shouldn’t be any tunnels here… 

Wait-

“What are you gonna do-” Tendou tries to shout, but when he’s looking around, he realizes all the other passengers on the train are gone. 

It looks like in his distraction with Nurarihyon, the others had noticed this. Kuroo and Kenma were up at one exit of the train cart, the cat perched on his shoulder, peering out to try and figure out what had gone as the train rockets over its rails, now little more than a shell of itself. 

Oikawa’s sleeping form is still there, Bokuto shaking him a little more gently, begging in a soft voice for him to get up. 

Tendou turns around, and finds himself face to face with Ushijima. The concern across his face is heartbreaking, but even if Tendou wanted to tell him everything was okay, that he was okay, he wasn’t sure what he would say, or if it would be true. 

“Do you know what the Hyakki Yagyō is?” Tendou asks, softly, as the train continues to rocket along its unknown rails. 

Ushijima has to think about this for a moment, before saying: “The Night Parade. The Parade of One Thousand Demons, it’s… something my mother had… mentioned before, but… I mean, I don’t…”

Tendou swallows nervously, looking over his shoulder to where Kuroo and Kenma were returning to them, looking helpless. 

“We’re stuck,” Kuroo says. “At least until the next station.”

---

 

The train keeps going. 

Forever. 

At least, that’s what it feels like. It should have stopped at some point - it’s night, outside. It was just after sunrise when they’d gotten on the train, but there is a vacant, starless sky out the windows, and a barren wilderness. 

Bokuto sits in the seat beside Oikawa, and pulls the sleeping boy’s head onto his lap, concerned for his comfort in this sleeping curse. He cards his fingers through Oikawa’s hair absently, and Kenma doesn’t think he’s ever seen the energetic ace this vacant and concerned. Bokuto was known for his sour moods, but this seemed to transcend this, like he had shut down completely. 

Everyone else takes a seat as well. Tendou curls up with his head on Ushijima’s shoulder, letting the other hide him from the train with his arms wrapped around him, nose pressed down into red hair, but eyes staring at the ground, lost in thought. 

Kenma stares at them for a long time. 

A lifetime ago, they’d gone on a day trip to a river and he’d been overcome with jealous by their easy relationship, by how Ushijima seems so effortlessly to prioritize his time with him. 

He tugs Kuroo’s jacket tighter around him. 

How much he would give, to go back to when that was his primarily cause of upset. 

Kuroo has been pacing the length of the cart as it kept rolling. He paces to one end, then pivots, and paces back to the other. 

He’s muttering under his breath, to himself. 

The cat rides his shoulder, only occasionally turning to glance at the others. 

Stuck on a train to a destination none of them knew - maybe no destination at all. Tendou had reported Nurarihyon as the one behind this, but… 

I didn’t text-

“Oh my god,” Kenma says, putting a hand over his mouth and feeling tears immediately leap into his eyes. The last straw on a heavy pile of hay. “I didn’t text Iwaizumi.” 

“What?” Kuroo says, sounding confused as he turned to look at him. 

“I didn’t… when we found Oikawa, he was asleep, and… I was distracted, I didn’t think to text Iwaizumi, and… and now-”

He waves a hand around, hearing his voice crack. “And now we’re all fucked. And he’s alone, waiting for us, I promised him I’d update if anything happened and now we’ve all just disappeared, and he’s… he’s probably so scared, right now, what if we never come back? What if none of us ever come back, and he just has to be alone?”

Kuroo has crossed the distance to where he’s sitting in an instant, sliding in to sit beside him and pull him in to hug him. The action surprises him, but he doesn’t mind at all, immediately wrapping his arms around Kuroo’s middle and squeezing him tightly. 

“It’s okay,” Kuroo whispers against his hair. “We’re gonna make it out of this, and we’re gonna bring Oikawa home, and everything is going to be okay.” 

“But what if it’s not?” Kenma says. “What if it’s not, what if we’re dead?”

“We’ll be okay…”

“Mrrw?”

Kenma lifts his head, just in time to feel Kuroo’s cat step off his shoulder and walk across Kenma’s back, bouncing down to step into his lap. 

The cat, too, had been showing signs of anxiety, twitching and quiet, but now it seemed to try and relax for Kenma, poking its tongue out as it looked up at him. 

Is it… trying to be cute? Or funny?

He stares at the cat for a little bit, before breaking into earnest laughter, smiling slightly. The cat makes a noise of pleasure, before bonking its head against Kenma’s chest. 

This cat had refused to let me touch it before… 

He puts his hands in its fur, scratching down the cat’s back and making it purr softly, before it coiled up to rest in his lap. 

“See?” Kuroo says, and Kenma realizes he’s still pressed in close against him, warm and comforting and heavy. “We’re gonna get home.”

 

---

 

And then the train stops. 

Everyone looks around, as the doors chime and slide open with a silent hiss. They all make eye contact, they all ask the same question. 

What now?

Kuroo gets up first, and hurries to the door to look out. A cold wind is sweeping into the cart. Kenma bundles the cat into his arms, hoping its fur would keep it warm against the night air, and follows Kuroo to the door. 

Bokuto takes a bit longer, having to get up and fumble around to heft Oikawa up into his arms, careful to position him against his shoulder, hoping not to jam his neck or cause him any pain. 

Tendou is shaking. The sort of all-consuming shake of a fever and the chills, of a sickness that was shutting his body down. He doesn’t seem well at all, and Ushijima pauses where they sit, to put a hand to his forehead. 

There’s quiet, as he considers what to say, probably desperately searching for some logical advice to-

“I’m sorry,” Ushijima whispers, after a moment, leaning in to press a kiss to his forehead. “We have to get up.” 

Tendou nods slightly in return, closing his eyes for a moment before letting Ushijima stand up, and haul him to his feet after him. He sways where he stands, but keeps himself upright. 

“Onwards to glory,” Tendou cackles, voice rough and whispery. 

Kenma glances back at him for a moment, before stepping out of the train cart after Kuroo, feeling the cat whimper slightly, as if unhappy behind outside, its muzzle nuzzling down into Kenma’s collarbone. 

“What is it?” Kenma asks, as he approaches Kuroo, who’s looking up at the station directory board. 

“Kisaragi Station,” Kuroo says, sounding abjectly baffled. 

“...eh?”

“It’s… it’s an urban legend,” he replies, as if the words were bitter on his tongue. “Like… like a new one, I read this shit on fucking 4chan, this isn’t… this isn’t folklore, it’s… hell, it may as well be…”

Kuroo turns where he is, to see Bokuto coming out of the train, Oikawa curled in his arms and still very much asleep. 

“Well,” Kuroo says. “It’s exactly the kind of thing I’d expect him to be up at night reading about.”

“Or,” Kenma says, more softly. “Dreaming about.” 

“Where… where are we?” Bokuto says, quietly, as a bell chimes above them, distorted slightly through the old, broken speakers playing the noise. 

The station is an outdoor one, with a roof and a few benches and a garbage bin, but other than that… nothing in all directions. It’s night, but when Kenma looks up, he only sees clear, dark grey skies. No clouds, no stars. 

In the distance, he thinks there are shapes - buildings, maybe? A city? But it’s impossible to tell. 

Last off the train, Ushijima hops down first, then holds a hand up to Tendou to help him make the step. As if waiting for them, the moment they’re cleared of the tracks, the bell rings and the doors slide shut, and an unintelligible voice makes an announcement before the train slides on down the rails. 

They are left, standing in the cold silence, waiting for something they do not understand. 

“Fuck,” Tendou suddenly spits, pushing away from Ushijima as if he’d started to burn him. There’s a bit of a gasp, and Kenma puts a hand over his mouth as he realizes that might have been exactly it, a handprint from Ushijima’s left hand sizzling on his hip where he’d been supporting him. 

“Tendou-”

Tendou lifts his head, and everyone, reflexively, backs away as he swivels his eyes around, face distorting slightly as his lips curl back to reveal sharp, oversized teeth. But his eyes widen in fear, and everyone, simultaneously, realizes that this empty station is not actually empty. 

They are all just unable to see it. 

“Oh my god,” Tendou whimpers, stumbling back and tripping himself. The moment he hits the ground there’s a burst of noise, as he shrieks a protest and his skin splits, coarse red hair bursting like flames from under his skin. He’s screaming, or howling, as he thrashes over on the ground. 

“No, no, no-”

Ushijima takes off towards him, and Kuroo - the only person not already occupied with something else, has no choice but to leap forward and intercept him, digging his nails into Ushijima’s jacket to drag him back just a step, giving Tendou enough time to stumble up onto spindly, long legs, hissing and scrambling away. 

There’s still fear in his eyes. 

Kenma survives off reading people, understanding their emotions, their wants, their thoughts. He understands how people think. 

“Let go of me!” Ushijima shouts, turning to shoving Kuroo as hard as he could, to try and break free. “I have to help him!”

Kenma wonders if he’s the only person who notices that Tendou turns to run away to protect them. Screaming and spitting in pain, as his body is consumed by the strange plane they’ve found themselves on, he takes a measure to protect his friends and chooses to run with the last shreds of choice he has, rather than hang back and let himself become a monster where he was still capable of hurting them. 

“It’s not safe!” Kuroo shrieks. “Look at him, it’s not safe!”

Ushijima gets about ten steps towards the edge of the platform when Kuroo has caught up with him again, grabbing him around the waist and taking him down to the ground. 

“Let go!” Ushijima screeches again, thrashing under him and trying to get up, as Kuroo does his best to force him down. “Let me go! I promised him I wouldn’t let this happen! I promised I’d bring him home, I…”

“We’ll figure it out,” Kuroo says, voice cracking, as Tendou disappears into the unnatural dark, and without a clear way to chase him down, Ushijima is left, heaving breath on a dirty cement floor and staring off where he’d disappeared, eyes wide and desperate as if he has barely begun to processes exactly what had happened. “We’ll figure it out, we’ll get him back, we’ll figure it out…”

Kenma isn’t sure that’s something they can do. 

The sound of Ushijima Wakatoshi sobbing is something he probably won’t be able to forget soon. 

The cat in his arms suddenly starts hissing, and Kenma stumbles to the side, as it leaps up and squirms from his arms, bouncing to the ground and then racing away to claw its way up one of the benches, looking quite disconcerted and lashing its tail. It stares down at something, hissing again and slashing out with it’s claws at something-

It’s then that Kenma remembers the last thing Tendou had done was to react to something they couldn’t see. 

He wonders, faintly, exactly how not empty this station might be.

Notes:

I, personally, absolutely adore how this chapter turned out, so I hope you all had as much fun reading it as I did writing it <3

Chapter 35: Fatal Influence

Oikawa is dreaming. He knows it’s a dream. He doesn’t dream a lot - and to the dreams credit, it’s doing a very good job of itself. The setting is all correct - Iwaizumi’s bedroom circa their second year of high school is exactly as it should be. The desk is exactly right, the light coming through the windows reflects perfectly off the back wall in slats, the air is just as warm as it should be. It’s as if it was pulled directly from his memory. 

Which, of course, is how he knows it’s a dream. Because it’s a memory. 

It’s one of his favourite memories, though, so he lets it play out. 

Or, perhaps, he lets it play out because it’s a dream, and he doesn’t have a choice. 

He can’t, actually, remember exactly what it was he was supposed to be doing anyway. He remembers, in the back of his mind, a train and a demon and falling asleep but he’s not able to pull up concrete memories surrounding what was going on. Instead, all he can remember is the memory of the dream that he’s currently running through, so he does that. He says his lines, he runs his hands through a slightly-younger Iwaizumi’s hair and gets used to the feeling of Iwa’s hands on a body that was not quite the one he lived in in the current time. 

It’s Iwaizumi’s birthday - or, it was, about two days ago. And they’re celebrating his birthday. 

They’d been planning this for a while. Whispering when nobody could hear them, what time are your parents leaving, what time will they be back, hurry, hurry, hurry, it’ll be perfect.

Oikawa has to consciously avoid remembering ahead of the event to avoid giggling in the memory, and instead trying to stay in the moment as his younger self to engage with the dream properly. 

Iwaizumi is uncharacteristically quiet. It’s not like they haven’t made-out before, quite the opposite in fact. They’d been spending more and more time tangled up on this very bed, teasing at the idea of doing anything more without wanting to say it aloud. And then this opportunity came up. 

We’re going to do it. 

We’re going to have sex. 

I’m going to lose my virginity to Hajime. 

Oikawa’s head skips ahead in the memory again, and he has to stifle another giggle and refocus himself. 

Well, not today…

Oikawa takes Iwaizumi’s shirt off - Iwaizumi holds the back of his head as he kisses him again, keeping his eyes closed very tightly. 

Oikawa moves Iwaizumi’s hands down to his waist - Iwaizumi moves his hands back up to his face. Oikawa moves Iwaizumi’s hands down to his thighs - Iwaizumi moves his hands back up to his shoulders. Oikawa pulls back to take his shirt off, and Iwaizumi finally opens his eyes, face flushing a bright red. It’s not like they haven’t seen each other shirtless before, but Iwaizumi seems to have forgotten that, eyes roaming down his body as he throws his shirt aside. 

“You’re looking a little shy there, Hajime,” Oikawa purrs, leaning back in to wrap his arms around Iwaizumi’s shoulders. 

“Shut up,” Iwaizumi growls. “You’re just so high maintenance, I don’t want to do something wrong.” 

“Don’t worry about that,” Oikawa says, kissing him again. “It’s your birthday, we’re here to celebrate, aren’t we?”

“Mhm…”

“Unless you don’t want to…?”

“No, no, no, I do, I do want to,” Iwaizumi says, and this time he moves his hands around, to wrap around his waist. “I really, really want to.”

“Then stop overthinking it-” Oikawa says, moving his hands to Iwaizumi’s wrists, guiding him back around to rest his fingers over the button of Oikawa’s pants, “-and let’s do this, yeah?” 

“Yeah,” Iwaizumi says, breathlessly.

Of course, that is not what happens. Oikawa tilts himself back to let Iwaizumi help him get his pants off, and there must have been something in that action - they’d changed together before, but Iwa had never had his own hands involved - that freaked him out. 

Maybe it became too real the moment his pants were down around his knees, and Iwaizumi had probably processed Oikawa laying back in nothing but his underwear, maybe it was because he’d realized the next thing he had to do was take that underwear off, maybe it was the idea of Oikawa’s hands repeating the same process on him.

The next thing that happened, either way, was that Oikawa was left half undressed on the bed, and Iwaizumi had locked himself in the bathroom. 

Oikawa lets himself laugh at the memory now, flopping back to stare up at the ceiling and take it all in. It was quite a remarkable dream. He didn’t usually know he was dreaming like this, and he usually woke up really quickly if he did realize it. He knows in the memory he should go talk to Iwaizumi through the bathroom door - it’s a sweet conversation, he remembers it fondly. Iwaizumi, hyperventilating and panicking about crossing that line, Oikawa assuring him as sweetly as he knew how - without laughing at him - that there’s nothing Iwaizumi could do that would disappoint him. 

But he doesn’t do that - he doesn’t need to relive the memory. Instead, he rolls to his feet and gets dressed, heading over to the bedroom window and pulling the curtains over it. He expects some kind of dream-void, but is greeted instead with a familiar residential street. 

Mhm. 

It’s a very precise dream. 

He runs on muscle memory to grab his stuff from the dresser in the room before heading out of the house, quietly shutting the door behind him and mentally apologizing to Iwaizumi if this was a dream-memory in which dream-him would experience Oikawa ditching him. He has a suspicion, though, that Iwaizumi in the dream does not exist outside of Oikawa’s attention. 

So he leaves, to the outside, and the sun is warm and the breeze is nice and it is a hot summer’s day in June, exactly as it should be. He can feel the heat on his tongue when he opens his mouth - he can feel his own hair against his cheek when the wind ruffles it. There’s a pain in his leg from an ache in his knee from an injury he sustained working too hard on his jump serve - an injury he had long forgotten in the present day, but seems pervasive still in this younger body. 

The accuracy is uncanny. 

It’s… actually, it is uncanny. Dreams shouldn’t be like this. 

It feels like he’s awake. He supposed people always thought that, but this was something else.

“Oh, took you long enough.”

The voice spooks him, and he whips his head around with wide eyes to spot the source of it, unsure why it surprises him when he lays eyes on a familiar old man, standing with his hands folded behind his back. 

“Y…you, you’re from the train,” Oikawa says, though the memory is like a harsh buzz in his mind, just out of reach. “You were on the train, with… the red-headed woman…”

“Ah, that’s right,” the man says, giving him a smile. “She was in my way, so I took us somewhere we could talk in private.” 

“My… memories?”

“No,” he says, shrugging and glancing around. “Whatever your mind chooses to see is a reflection of you, I do not control your psyche. It is unusual, though, that you should find yourself in the past. Most people dream of things that have not happened.” 

“I…” Oikawa doesn’t have anything to say. He looks behind himself, and then looks back to the house he’d come out of, and all of his senses are telling him he’s standing on the street, standing in the sun. If it were not for the content of the memory playing out exactly as he remembers it, he would not have been able to say he wasn’t awake. “Well… what… what do you want?” 

The man smiles, and then holds out his left hand. “My name is Nurarihyon.”

Oikawa hesitates slightly, before reaching out to shake his hand. “Oikawa, though I assume you already know that.”

“I do. And I want you to know that I am only here to help. I hope you’ll see that by the end of the conversation.” 

Oikawa tilts his head to the side. “What do you mean?” 

And almost before he’s finished asking the question, there’s a rattling beneath his feet, the rocking motion of something rocketing over rails, throwing him off balance. He stumbles back on the sidewalk, falling and expecting to hit his ass against hard cement, but instead finds himself sitting in a plush, soft seat, staring at the back of the seat ahead of him on a train shooting at high speeds on its track. 

He grips the armrests on reflex, squeezing tightly to try and still his beating heart, but-

“Ow, dude-”

He jerks his hand back, realizing that he had grabbed someone’s wrist, who’d already been resting there. He turns his head to the side, feeling nausea wash over him as he watched Daichi take a headphone out of his ear to look at him. 

“Did you need something?” he asks. “Or were you just trying to break my wrist for the hell of it?” 

“Uh-”

---

 

The car pulls into the parking lot at the side of the long, uninteresting building. He expects there to be gates with iron pikes and a hundred men with rifles waiting to kill them on sight if they stepped out of line. After all, this is Shima Three, the epicenter of the top secret government program to study and identify alien life. 

But it’s not. 

It’s a rather small building, with red brick walls and a low, sloped roof and a glass front door and a man smoking a cigarette standing outside it. There’s a sign that reaches Okinawan Public Health and Research Laboratory and nothing else. 

Daichi is sufficiently underwhelmed. 

“This is the top secret base?”

“Well… yeah,” Rion replies, glancing back at him now that the car was parked and he was able to. “What did you expect, men in black?” 

“...I don’t want to answer that.”

Rion opens the door and they all get out. The sun is much higher in the sky now, and it’s almost too hot for comfort. Rion keeps talking as he heads around the vehicle to lead them towards the building. 

“That would be a little conspicuous, don’t you think? Oksana runs this joint, and her philosophy is to hide in plain sight. Nobody wants to hack into a public health lab that only serves only Okinawa. Everyone is trying to get into Area 51. The Americans really fucked that one up.”

“Huh,” Suga says, stepping back to look up the building and take it all in. “I… I guess that makes sense. If you avoid looking suspicious, nobody questions you - I mean-” he looks over to Daichi. “It’s the same logic as you closing your eyes to avoid the yokai feeling like you can see them.”

“Uh-huh,” Daichi agrees, before pointing up the building to the one odd feature he could see - a stone gargoyle perched on the corner of the building’s roof. “What’s that?”

Rion glances to see what he’s looking at, before saying: “Oh, that’s Anthelme,” Rion says, as if that was a normal, clarifying response to the question. “He’s French.” 

“That is a gargoyle.”

“Correct.”

“...why did you import a stone gargoyle from France?”

“Because the Japanese-made gargoyles don’t work, and yokai know how to get around Japanese wards of protection, if they really want to. They’re very used to them. But Anthelme will straight up eat a tengu. Don’t look him in the eyes.”

Daichi jerks his head away, looking over to Suga with a look of alarm. Unfortunately, he only receives the same baffled look in return. 

They duck into the front lobby of the building - it looks like every reception desk Daichi has ever seen. He looks at the woman sitting behind it, busy at her job. She glances up as they enter. 

“Oh! Mr. Sawamura, what a pleasant surprise. We weren’t sure if we should expect you or not-oh, who’s this?”

“Ah, this is my son, Daichi, and his - friend - Sugawara.”

“Your son?” the receptionist echoes, sounding surprised. “Really? Oh, wow…”

“Ah, getting the feeling you already know all about me.”

The woman laughs. “Well, I have heard lots . Your father never shuts up about you.”

“Is that so?”

“Moving on,” Rion cuts in, waving them along to get them moving towards double doors at the end of a short hallway off reception. “We’ll have plenty of time to talk later, I’m sure. Now-”

He’s interrupted by his phone ringing, muttering under his breath as he pulls away slightly to check it. After a second, he says: “Ah, sorry, that’s Oksana. I should take this-” and presses the phone to his ear as he turns away. “Hello? Oks- woah, woah, woah, calm down, calm down, take it from the top-”

Daichi watches his father hurry away, frowning slightly at the odd interruption. After a moment of staring after him, he remembers his own phone still exists, and digs around in his pockets into pull it out, and-

“Oh, holy shit,” Daichi laughs. “I have… four missed calls from Kuroo, three from Kenma, six from Ushijima and like a dozen unread messages…”

Suga immediately reaches to pull out his own phone, as Daichi opens his messages to read the texts first, but he barely gets a message in before Suga’s shriek distracts him. 

“What is it-?”

“I have eighty-seven missed calls from Iwaizumi.”

“What?” Daichi says, not even sure what to feel about that. “Why? What’s going on?”

Before Suga can reply, his phone lights up again with an incoming call - evidently left on a do-not-disturb setting from the morning, he must have been calling non-stop for a while.

Suga answers and puts the phone on speaker, but before he can get halfway through a hello, Iwaizumi is shouting: 

“Oh, fuck, you finally answered! Oh my god, okay, have you heard from Oikawa? Do you know where he is?” 

“What? What, no, we’re - we’re still in Okinawa, we’ve been with Daichi’s fathers finally getting answers about the alien thing but I admit it’s not-”

“Don’t fucking care,” Iwaizumi cuts in. “Oikawa is missing. He got on a train in Aomori and never got off. I was talking to Kenma and they said they were following the evil demon cat but they’ve gone silent too.”

“What do you mean gone silent?”

“I mean I haven’t heard from them in like an hour! The last I heard they were following that cat through Tokyo and… thought it might lead them to where they needed to be, like when it helped Suga. But… They’re just gone. I thought you two were gone too, since you weren’t answering-”

“No, sorry about that, let… let me try them,” Daichi says, stepping away to try and call Kuroo. The phone rings and rings and rings.

“No, it’s no use, they’re gone. I… you… you really haven’t heard from him?”

“I wouldn’t lie to you,” Suga says, though Daichi can hear the pain in his voice as he says it. How badly he wants to be lying. “I’m sorry-”

“Fuck.”

There’s silence on the other end of the phone. 

Daichi tries calling Ushijima, then Bokuto. Nothing. 

Fuck. 

“Fuck,” Iwaizumi repeats again, but this time there’s a wavering in his voice, and Daichi can hear him holding back tears. “Well I don’t know what to do, then, I… you guys were my last… I… I don’t know what to do.” 

Suga puts a hand over his mouth to stop himself from saying anything, looking across to Daichi. 

Daichi doesn’t know what to say either. What could you? 

“I’m sure we’ll find him,” Daichi says, eventually, though he doesn’t think it’s a particularly helpful sentiment. “Oikawa is so smart, and so resilient, and… and he’ll be okay. We’ll find him. We’ll find all of them.”

He doesn’t get a reply from Iwaizumi, but imagines that’s because his energy is going to choke back his tears to keep himself together. 

 

---

 

“Do you remember this memory?”

Nurarihyon’s voice comes from over his shoulder, and Oikawa imagines, based on the reaction of everyone else, that he cannot be seen by them. 

“Yes,” Oikawa says, tightly. “This was on our way to Fukushima.”

It was the first time Daichi and him had gone anywhere alone. Apart from the occasional meeting to talk plans, they’d never actually… hung out. At the very least, Ushijima had always come along, they’d been talking about the channel or whatever they were planning next. This, though… Ushijima had been unable to make it, the Tokyo boys couldn’t come out, and…

Well, they’d gone together, for an overnight trip. Oikawa had practically had to beg him to pay their way and make it happen, and Daichi had rolled his eyes and muttered under his breath and complained the whole way but he’d gone along anyway. 

“Did you ever notice what he was reading?”

“Eh?”

“I’ll take that as a no. Take a look.”

Oikawa turns his head to the side, to the dream-Daichi that’s flipping through a small, encyclopedia-style book. He reaches a hand out to nudge Daichi’s hand and get a look at the cover - Myths and Legends of Japan. 

Daichi in the dream raises an eye at him, but doesn’t bother to remove a headphone again, and Oikawa puts a hand up to assure him he won’t keep bothering him. After all, they’re not friends, there’s no reason for them to talk during the train ride.

Oikawa feels a sharp pang of sadness in his chest, looking back at Daichi’s face, blank and passive as he reads the words on the page and ignores Oikawa. 

“What’s important about that?”

“Did you give him that book?”

“...no? I don’t think so, at least. I don’t remember doing that.”

“Exactly.”

Oikawa looks over to where Nurarihyon is standing, unaffected by the movement of the train. He waits for an explanation, and after ra minute, Nurarihyon complies, continuing with:

“That is the first book that he went out and bought on his own prerogative about Japanese monsters. This is the first instance of him actively seeking out knowledge of the yokai. This is where he started to care. You probably didn’t even notice it, in the moment, where things began to shift. But this was a big moment, he wasn’t comfortable asking you all his questions but he sought it out.”

Oikawa looks over to where Daichi was reading, head resting on his hand, looking bored out of his mind. 

Such an innocuous thing.

“Why does this matter?”

“Because this was the point of no return. The moment he started seeking it out of his own volition was the moment your influence had become fatal. There’s no way for him to return to normality after he sought out and paid for that book. It was no longer about you, so you could no longer stop it.” 

“Why would I want to stop this?” Oikawa says, unable to help but smile slightly as something on the page confuses Daichi, and he starts flipping through to find an appendix that could help him. 

“Because he’s not human. And the rules are different for him.”

“Rules?”

“It was in my best interest to allow Ms. Novikova to continue her research. The world is under invasion from an extraterrestrial force, they do experiments on women and mutate their babies and leave them behind like parasites, perhaps by accident. I do not know what they want with us, why they’re doing this - neither does Novikova, or any of her team. I want her to succeed, never make the mistake of assuming that I wanted her to fail. She understood the rules. She understood that the presence of the bigeneric humans had to stay apart from the yokai shadows.”

“What does this have to do with Daichi?”

“You’re not going to ask about yourself?”

Oikawa pauses, frowning for a second before tilting his head. “What do you mean?”

“What does this have to do with Daichi-” he echoes back. “Not what does this have to do with me? After all, I am talking to you, I did not want to speak with him.” 

Oikawa doesn’t know how to answer that. 

It just wasn’t his concern. 

“Well… I… I’m just…”

“You’re just normal, right? That’s what you want to say? You’re not special, you’re not worth asking about. You’re an unassuming nobody, you’re an uninteresting third party. But Daichi, he’s the alien, he’s the interesting one. So that’s what you care about.”

“No, I…” Oikawa shuts his mouth, a miserable whine stifled in his throat. “That’s… I just mean…”

“You’ve always been like that, but that’s the problem with being like you and me,” Nurarihyon says. “We are put on this planet to revitalize and empower every living thing, we are built with endless faith and determination, and expected to run it endlessly, run without ever tiring, believe without ever doubting, and do it all without any return favour. You are special in so many ways, Tooru. And the worst of the ways is that unlike every other beating heart on this planet, yours cannot benefit from your own strength.” 

Oikawa would reply, but the seat has fallen out from beneath him, and he’s crashing through darkness to land, heavily, on a hard floor. 

He squeezes his eyes shut for a second, trying to pull himself together, before a footstep alerts him to the fact that he’s not alone, and he tilts his head up, to look up at the silhouette standing above him. Horror rears its head in his gut. He’s not sure if this is a memory, or a nightmare now. 

“You?” he manages to get out, eventually. 

 

---

 

“We need to-”

“Our friend has gone missing-”

“Yes that’s what I’m gonna-”

“We have to go now, we have to do something-”

“No, you-”

“Yes, yes, I can’t sit by and let-”

“You could be killed. Oksana says-”

“Fuck what Oksana says!”

“Don’t-”

“No, I don’t care, I need to help-”

“I know what you think you need to do-”

“You don’t know anything!”

Rion grit his teeth, and Sugawara takes another step back to let him and Daichi continue fighting. They’ve only moved a few meters, down and inside the first set of doors, into a long and empty hallway, a row of closed doors offering no information on what might be here.

“I know more than you do,” Rion says. “It may not be much but it’s enough to know that if you go off chasing yokai shadows you are going to get yourself killed.”

“But we figured it out! All I have to do is not look at them-”

“That’s… not how it works-”

“Yes it is! We tried it!”

“It’s an oversimplification! And if Nurarihyon gives the order to kill you, it won’t matter. They’ll hunt what he asks of them.” 

Daichi stares back at him for a moment, before just shaking his head and turning away. “That… It doesn't matter to me. We have to do something, we have to find him. If Oksana knows something…”

“She says it’s likely Nurarihyon took him to the Hyakki Yagyō. Which, if that’s the case, is absolutely out of the realm of places you can go and help,” Rion says. “That is like… even if we had a way to get there, that’s… that’s the foundation of yokai magic, it’s their world, if you… if you set foot in there… you’d be… torn apart. I doubt even Oksana would be able to pull off walking through the Night Parade without getting killed - there’s a reason she didn’t stay with Oikawa to begin with.”

“But the other option is doing nothing,” Daichi spits. “And I can’t… I can’t do nothing.”

“Yes, you can-”

“No! No, no, no - there’s no way you’re going to convince me to just sit back and let someone else handle it. Who else is going to handle it? Oksana? You? As far as I’m concerned, I’m the only person left on this planet that has the ability to make this right.”

“And what makes you so sure of that?” Rion spits back.

“Because it’s what Oikawa would say if he were here.” 

 

---

 

“Where are you going?” Kuroo squeaks, stumbling to try and tug at Ushijima and pull him back. “Don’t wander off, we have to stay-”

“I’m going to get Tendou back,” Ushijima replies, shaking himself free of Kuroo before stepping off the train platform, boots crunching over cracked twigs and dry, black earth. 

The rest of the group cast their eyes around the empty, dark train platform, the empty landscape, the stark, sharp angles in the distance, like buildings but not quite detailed enough to be a city. 

“We shouldn’t leave,” Bokuto says. 

Ushijima stops where he’s walking, staring off at the fake-city for a second before turning back to him. 

“And what do you suggest we do?”

“Wait, for the next train,” Bokuto replies, immediately, shifting the way he held Oikawa’s body in his arms. 

“Bokuto is right,” Kenma agrees. “The only… recognizable shape in this place is the train. We should stay here and try and get on the next one. It might take us out of whatever hell this is.”

Ushijima stares at him for a moment, before saying: “And assuming you’re right, assuming that works, you expect me to get on that train and leave him here?” 

“...well-”

“No, I’m going to find him-” 

Ushijima turns around again, heading off with a resolute set to his shoulders and stiff but even steps, walking steadily into the swallowing darkness. 

The cat whines slightly, looking clearly uncomfortable being here, seeing something they could not. When Kuroo makes his way back over to them, the cat leaps from the bench it sat on to claw its way up to his shoulders, looking a little more calm perched high up, though its tail kept lashing, and it kept its eyes fixed down, watching something on the ground. 

“What do we do?” Kenma asks, as Kuroo came over. “We can’t let him… we can’t let him go alone-”

“I know,” Kuroo says, reaching out to take Kenma’s shoulders in his hands. “Stay here with Bokuto and Oikawa - if that train comes, you get on it, and you do not get off again until it takes you somewhere else, okay? All of you.”

“But you’d still be-”

“I know,” Kuroo says. “But I’m gonna catch up with Ushijima, we’ll find Tendou, and we’ll get back here as soon as possible. With a little luck, we’ll only be a train or two behind you.”

Kenma stares up at him, head shaking slightly in protest but unable to justify any kind of complaint. It’s a miracle, even, that Kuroo was functioning on a level that allowed him to stay calm, to make a plan, to make the best of a bad situation like this. 

He sniffs slightly, and decides that there’s no point complaining, because every plan would feel bad, and the best they can do is keep moving. 

Keep flowing, keep themselves in action. Don’t let things stall. 

“Okay,” he says, nodding firmly. “Understood.”

Kuroo stares at him for a moment, before lifting both hands to Kenma’s cheeks, pulling him in closer to kiss his forehead, eyes fluttering closed just for a second. 

“I hope you know how much I love you.” 

“Don’t.”

“What?”

“Don’t say that. Don’t say that like you’ll never get another chance to.”

Kuroo is quiet for a moment, before kissing his forehead again and pulling away. 

“I need to hurry. Remember - the next train, if it comes, you get on it and you get out of here. Don’t look back.” 

“I know,” Kenma called. 

 

---

 

It’s all Oikawa can do to stop himself from shaking. 

Kageyama crouches down to be more at eye-level with him. 

“I adored you,” Kageyama says, voice soft and judgemental and filled with barely contained distaste. He shakes his head, as if lamenting a long lost issue, not even worth his attention anymore. “I thought you were the coolest person in the world. Tall and strong and smart and so, so good. And on top of all that, people liked you. They smiled, and wanted your attention and they wanted you to like them so badly. No matter how good I got, how much training I put in, no matter how much I loved the game, I was never able to be like you. I never got people. And then you went and turned yourself into this.”

“You can shut up,” Oikawa hisses, pushing himself up to his feet, fueled by fury and disgust. “This isn’t a memory, you can take whatever fucking psycho-trip this is and shove it up your ass, I’m not interested.”

Kageyama stands up with him, frowning slightly and taking a step back. “Take it from me, anger doesn’t make you better than you are.”

“No, shut the fuck-”

“You were so afraid of him,” Nurarihyon’s voice came into focus, and Kageyama, suddenly, has frozen in time. “You were so, so afraid of him. From the moment you laid eyes on him. Belief can be a tricky mistress, but you mastered it so early. You believed Kageyama would be your downfall and you made sure to be right every step of the way. You turned that boy into a monster just to make sure you’d never be better than him.” 

“I did nothing of the like,” Oikawa spits. “Kageyama’s freakish setting is his own game-”

“Of course, of course. You cannot turn someone into something they are not. All you did, of course, was give him a reason to hate you enough. All you did was make him feel like the whole world thought him a monster.”

“How could I-”

“Because you’re you. And he loved you. And when someone you love turns away from you, it doesn’t matter who else is there. It feels like the end of the world. You rejected him. You feared him. So he justified you by turning into what you thought of him. Faith is an ouroboros, Tooru. And it always comes down hardest on the believer.”

“Tooru?” 

When Oikawa turns around, he’s suddenly aware of having fallen out of his adult body. He didn’t notice the perspective shift, he didn’t notice the change in height, but his body is suddenly soft and short, he’s unsteady on his feet, his fingers are short and uncoordinated, and his vision is clear, even though he is not wearing his glasses. He’s probably thirteen, it would be hard to tell. 

He’s looking up at his mother. 

“You can’t love someone into being something they’re not.”

“You were over at Saku’s again, weren’t you? I’ve told you, I don’t want you wasting your time with that girl, she’s a bad influence on you. After everything that happened you’d have thought she’d have shaped up and done what was right - but no, she wanted to raise the child, and destroy our family reputation in the process. You know, we used to be a proud family? Your father, well, he did everything in the name of family. If he was still around, he’d be disgusted by how quickly your sister walked away-”

You walked away! he wants to scream. You’re the one who told her she couldn’t come home if she kept the baby! You’re the one who said our family was broken! She loved you! I loved you! And you let us break!

“At least you still have a good head on your shoulders. Keep it that way, okay, Tooru? I don’t want you ending up in the slums like your sister. You can do so much better.”

“Do you think you learned what a monster was from Jun?” 

Oikawa stumbles around again, unable to actually find where Nurarihyon was speaking from. 

“What do you want!” Oikawa shrieks, lifting his hands up to dig into his hair. “What is your point, to torture me? I get it! I get it, I’m a fuck up, I made so many mistakes, what do you want from me!” 

“I want you to understand your power.” 

“What power?”

“The power you exert over everyone else. I want you to understand your place in this world so you can make the right choice, and be the person you were meant to be.” 

“What’s the right choice? Tell me, please, tell me, I’ll do whatever it is, I’ll make it whatever-”

He blinks open his eyes, rain splattering in his vision, clothes soaked down against his skin, shoes digging into the wet earth at the edge of the ridge. 

Saku is screaming, clawing at the wrist that was tangled so tightly in her hair, yanking her head to the side. There is blood coming from her nose, tears streaking down her cheeks, Jun is screaming, and screaming, and screaming at her, every horrid thing Tooru had never wanted to hear. His own face still burns, it burns from a hard strike across the face, a hand so much bigger than his own. 

Jun lets go of Saku’s hair, letting her stumble forward a step before pulling his arm back, and bringing it down hard against her cheek, sending her reeling to the side in a fit of sobbing desperation. 

No. 

He doesn’t get to hurt my sister.

The problem is that Tooru moves with complete clarity. The problem is that he is not acting on fear or instinct. He moves with intent, the rain lashing his face and biting into the skin on his neck - they should have gone home early. The weather focus had said it was expected to rain, but the daytime had been so clear, Tooru had convinced them to come up the hill to set up their equipment anyway.

Maybe the weatherman was wrong, and the skies would be clear, and they’d be able to see the stars. 

He grabs the back of Jun’s shirt and twists. 

He doesn’t need to do a lot - he’s strong, for his age, and has the element of surprise. 

The cliff will hurt him - with any luck it’ll kill him, so he shoves him in the mud and makes sure he falls over. 

You don’t get to hurt my sister. 

I want you dead. 

“Tooru!”

Saku’s shriek of horror, as the sickening crunch of Jun’s body against the rock at the bottom of the small ledge, snaps him out of his conviction. 

Wait-

How could I-

No, no, no, no, there’s…

I’m not that kind of person-

I’m better than that-

I’m not-

I wouldn’t-

But-

But-

He slips in the mud, falling back and scrambling up to his feet, sick anxiety overcoming his body and making it impossible to think clearly. Saku is screaming his name - the sky is howling wind and rain. 

“Do you understand what happened here?” Nurarihyon said, as the sky begins to fill with alien saucers, spinning lights and beams of energy. 

“I didn’t… I didn’t mean to… I didn’t mean to hurt him,” Tooru sobs, voice cracking, barely audible over the rain. 

“That’s neither here nor there. The aliens, though. That’s what we’re after. Do you know how powerful you have to be to create aliens where none had existed before? To trick the mind of a true believer into believing something false? Whether or not you encountered aliens that night remains in the air - what you believe, after all, is inherently true. What you chose that night is different. A scared little boy so afraid of who he might actually be that he spends the rest of his life turning everyone else into monsters to make up for it. To prove-”

Oikawa twists around, suddenly back in his real body, his adult body, and brings his hand down hard against Nurarihyon’s face, forcing the old man to stumble back with a shocked gasp. 

 

---

 

“No answer from anyone else,” Daichi says, scrolling through his phone messages. “I think we’re on our own.”

“Well that’s no good,” Suga says. “Do we… Do we know where they went? You said the Hyakki Yagyō, which, if I remember correctly, isn’t… a place…”

“Correct,” Rion agrees, as they head across the tarmac, the small little plane being pulled out of the hangar and over to where they could board. “But we don’t know what it is. In some folklore, it’s described as a parade, or… a… riot, of yokai. But it’s also… in the title of some famous encyclopedic books on yokai, and… finding out what it was originally is… impossible. Nurarihyon is said, in some legends, to lead the Hyakki Yagyō through the streets of Tokyo on summer nights. But I doubt us being in the spring would be any help in preventing whatever he’s doing.”

“So… if he leads the Hyakki Yagyō in Tokyo… he’s still… around then-”

“Well… we don’t know,” Rion says again. “I know how badly you want this to have a neat little explanation, but we just don’t know. We don’t know what he’s doing, we’ve never been there-”

“Is there a way to get in?”

“Uh… apart from Nurarihyon himself, not that we know of-”

They’re climbing up into the little plane. 

“Then where are we going?” Suga asks. 

“Hanamatsu,” Rion says. 

“Eh?”

“The final destination of the train Oksana said Oikawa was riding. According to her, Oikawa was sent to sleep on board and should still be on the train - with any luck, everyone else will be too.”

“And they’re just conveniently not answering their phones, just chatting on a train-”

“Don’t be snarky with me,” Rion snaps, and Daichi shuts his mouth. “Now give me a moment, I’m going to make some calls and see if we can get someone on the ground quicker than the few hours it’s going to take us.”

 

---

 

Nurarihyon is frozen for a second, before chuckling slightly. 

“What’s so funny?” Oikawa spits. 

“You are. You and your fury. Now-”

The world spins again, and Oikawa finds himself falling over, landing heavily on his butt as he fell into a body from only a few weeks ago, the darkness of a somewhat familiar bedroom taking over.

There’s a book open on his lap, and he’s looking through a phone, held discreetly, to film Daichi staring off at an empty, dark doorway. 

He remembers this. 

“Do you know where this is?”

“Yes. This was… the study night we posted online, because-”

“Daichi had seen something, and it had freaked you out.” 

“...yeah, exactly,” Oikawa says, staring across at Daichi for a minute, taking in the details of his face. He didn’t… look afraid, not really. It’s not fear in his eyes, it’s… well, maybe confusion would come closer, but if Oikawa were to add some nuance to it, he’d say it was more like Daichi was puzzled by the fact that he was seeing anything at all, caught perpetually trying to decide if it’s real or not, confused by the vision itself, wanting to interact, to ask, but firmly believing it can’t possibly be real. 

“Have you figured out what I’m trying to teach you?” Nurarihyon asks, sitting down beside Daichi, hands folded neatly on his lap. “Have you puzzled it together with that clever brain of yours?” 

Oikawa swallows, staring at him for a second before looking back to Daichi and really, really trying to think about it. What was Nurarihyon saying with all this? What had he wanted from him, what was he trying to teach him? And why would he care?

“You… you’re like me,” he says eventually. 

“Good start.”

“You control the yokai-”

“Colder.”

“You…”

“I am the light, to the yokai. We are lighthouses for them, we do not make them exist, but we do guard the power that they draw upon to survive. A yokai isn’t real, lest one of us exists to know it. So, what am I trying to teach you?”

Oikawa is quiet for a moment. 

Iwa. Kageyama. Daichi. Saku. My Mother. Jun. 

“I don’t know.”

“Try harder.”

“... I don’t-” he pauses, thinking for a moment before saying: “Daichi isn’t… Daichi didn’t need to believe in the yokai to see them. He said… he said he’d always had an active imagination, so… even before he met me-”

“Good. Daichi is not one of us - the bigeneric children born of alien experimentation are like parasites on this planet, they can cast their eyes onto the yokai without belief in them, forcing them to exist without purpose, to live in uncertain circumstances. You and I could be dead and gone, and Daichi and the alien infestation would still be able to hunt the yokai down - and then you, you, went in with your faith and your love and your turned him into someone who could hunt us down. Someone who-”

Nurarihyon is cut off, as Daichi in the memory pushes himself to his feet and heads across the room, firmly shutting and locking his bedroom door. 

“Someone who does not play by the rules of human nature.”

Daichi in the memory says something about it being nothing important. Oikawa in the memory puts his phone away. Oikawa in his own mind looks down to his hands. 

“There’s… a missing piece,” Oikawa mumbles eventually. 

“What are you not understanding?”

“In this story you’re telling me,” Oikawa says. “Daichi, Saku, my mother, Kageyama, Jun, all of them, you showing me the worst I’ve ever done, the biggest mistakes I’ve made, the villainy of my belief in people, or… the lack of my ability, but-”

He glances up, and the bedroom has fallen away. They’re standing now, on a train platform, invisible to everyone around them, and Oikawa is only vaguely aware of his own body cradled in Bokuto’s arms, limp and unresponsive. They do not see him, or Nurarihyon, but that is a concern for another time. 

“That’s just what you believe. And I’m starting to get the feeling that what you believe of our purpose has been poisoning it. I refuse to believe that of myself - and if you’re afraid of Daichi, then it’s you who's done this to our planet.”

Chapter 36: Oikawa of the Night Parade

The ground is dirt, but so rock-hard it may as well have been cement. It’s cracked through with deep rivets, barren and dry and leaving many small notches for toes to get caught in. Kuroo kicks at the earth as they walk, knowing no small part of Ushijima was blaming him for Tendou being gone at all, and it was only the other’s ferociously dominant pragmatism that was stopping him from flying off the handle about it. 

So Kuroo tries to make himself unobtrusive, as the large, looming stone blocks grow bigger and bigger. The darkness has swallowed up the station behind them, only the most distant, dark and shadowy illusion of mountains interrupted the blackish red sky, and split the difference between it and the ground. 

Kuroo wouldn’t be able to explain the feeling, but he gets the sense that this land - planet? - could be circumvented on foot without much issue. There’s something about the gentle curve to that mountain range that is just a little more severe than it would be back home, like they’re standing on an asteroid and not a full planet. It feels… claustrophobic, to say the least, even though they’re in a massive, wide open space. 

Ushijima’s walking with a focused determination, eyes set ahead on what Kuroo had first thought was a city, but now looked more like a cemetery. Or… maybe it was a city, but it wasn’t a city for people. 

The stone blocks were three, four storeys tall, smooth and grey, and arranged in grid-formation like a city block would be, but they were not built for aesthetics. Smooth exteriors, windows and doors carved out but empty of any glass or curtain. A few of the blocks, even, were tilted over, as if sinking into the dry earth, creating harsh, contrasting angles compared to the other, straight, stone blocks. 

There are no shadows, Kuroo notes, and after reconfirming this - and turning around to see that he himself doesn’t have a shadow, he realizes this means that there is no light source. 

Which doesn’t make sense, because he can see.

But-

He stops walking, turning slightly, to try and figure out this little optical phenomenon, before realizing that Ushijima was not going to slow down or wait for him at all, and turns to hurry along. 

Everything is empty. 

Well…

Kuroo pulls the cat down from his shoulder, holding him in his arms properly and running his nails down its back to try and help it stay calm. 

The cat certainly seemed to see something. Its attention never stopped shifting, eyes darting around, focusing on something nobody else could see, and then on to the next thing. 

“What’d’you see, boy?” Kuroo whispers, scratching around the cat’s neck. “Do you think you’d be able to lead us to where Tendou went? Or is it just Oikawa you can track?”

The cat shifts in his arms, tilting his head back to look up at him. Big eyes blink at him, and Kuroo is once again overcome by the sensation that this cat could understand him, in a way that animals were not supposed to, an undeniably sapient quality to the way it responded to his voice. 

In that way, Kuroo can’t tell if he’s projecting, or if the cat genuinely looked sympathetic as it looked away, a clear no to that question, though perhaps only because the cat did not feel comfortable leaving the perceived safety of Kuroo’s arms to lead them anywhere. 

That’s okay. 

“Ushijima?” Kuroo calls, then, looking down the - street? - to where Ushijima had drawn ahead.

“What?”

“Where are you going? Are you following some kind of trail…? Or…?”

Ushijima stops walking, taking a glance around before looking back to him. 

“No,” he says. “There’s nothing to follow.”

“I… that’s my point,” Kuroo says. 

“If you’re going to suggest that this is impossible, or that we should just go back, or anything like that-”

“No, no,” Kuroo says, interrupting him and hurrying to placate the rising frustration in his voice. “No, not at all, I… meant that we need to approach this with a plan - something other than random walking and hoping to find what we need.” 

Ushijima frowns, before nodding slightly. “What are you suggesting?”

What was he suggesting?

It would be a lot easier if they had more people. Fan out, do a proper search. Kuroo bites his lip, glancing around the empty street, then behind Ushijima to the next intersection. 

“Well,” he starts. “This… city… is already a grid. We should organize ourselves in a way to prevent any unnecessary doubling back. Approach each street systematically to make sure we cover all the ground, and-” he moved to use the heel of his shoe, testing to see if he could mark up the dry earth - he could. “-we can number intersections as we pass, so that we can find our way back. It’ll also help get a good handle on the size of this place…”

Ushijima stares at him for a second longer, before once again giving him not much more but a simple nod. “That sounds like a wise plan.”

Kuroo tries to give him a smile, but Ushijima does not seem in the mood to try and reciprocate, turning instead to continue up the street, towards the first intersection. Kuroo skips a few steps, to catch up and walk by his shoulder. 

Ushijima’s steady pace falters slightly as he heads into the center of the intersection, steps slowing for a moment before he slowly turns to look down the cross-street. Kuroo follows his gaze, to the long expanse stretching seemingly endlessly both left and right. It’s almost dizzying, to look at - off in the distance, Kuroo can see the block buildings smushing together and getting smaller as they disappeared over the curve of the horizon, but even in this smaller-scale reality, it looks like it would be an hour of walking just to get to that horizon - who knew how much further the ‘city’ stretched passed it. 

He turned his attention to the other side, and finds the same image. 

He looks back, and sees the edge of the city again, sees the definitive threshold. It did have boundaries. Theoretically. 

The streets are wide, Kuroo notes. He mentally visualizes a car, and sets them in imaginary lanes, counting the distance… it’s gotta be a five lane road at minimum, he settles on. Maybe six. Wider than a city street should be, or… 

Made to accommodate something bigger. 

He looks up the startlingly barren buildings, their cold stone and faceless fronts. Empty windows that dissolve into darkness so thick Kuroo can’t reconcile the image with the fact that no shadows are being cast otherwise. 

Different rules…

He turns around again, hugging the cat tighter to his chest on protective reflex. 

“Ushijima, we should-” Kuroo cuts himself off, staring the short distance to his friend. Ushijima hasn’t stopped looking down the cross-street, and for a second Kuroo thinks that maybe he’s started to see whatever monsters the cat was responding to, or maybe he’d caught sight of something - anything - to provide a hint for whatever they were looking at. 

But that’s not what’s happening. 

Ushijima stares, and stares, and stares, and as Kuroo stares back and watches him, he sees, despite his face remaining stony neutral, the wet glisten that begins to gather in his eyes. 

There’s no way to brute force this problem. Even with a systematic approach, even with perfect planning, it looked like this could take days at minimum to traverse the city, if not weeks and weeks. If it was even possible. 

“Ushijima?” Kuroo prompts after a second, taking a few steps towards him. “Hey, it’s okay, we’ll figure it out - we’ll figure something out-”

“I don’t understand what’s going on,” Ushijima replies, which isn’t exactly what Kuroo is expecting, but he figures, after processing the statement for a moment, that it might be the most accurate statement to be made.

“I don’t understand anything either.”

This catches Ushijima’s attention, as he tilts his head back towards him. 

“You don’t?”

“No,” Kuroo says. “It’s… painfully overwhelming, it’s scary, and… I don’t… want to have to do it. I want to go home - I want to be with Kenma. But that’s not what we get to do, we have to deal with this instead. And it sucks, but… there’s no option. Onwards to glory, and all that.” 

Ushijima stares at him now, before nodding slowly and looking around the city more slowly. 

“There are no shadows here,” Ushijima comments. “I did not expect to be afraid light.”

 

---

 

“You’re going to blame me for this?” Nurarihyon barks, a sharp, laughing noise that makes Oikawa bristle. 

“Well who else is to blame?” Oikawa spits back, clenching his fists together. “I didn’t even know I could do this, I don’t even know what this is, so it must have been you. Why can’t they see me?” Oikawa finishes his statement by jabbing a finger through the air towards where Kenma was kneeling beside Bokuto, the latter cradling Oikawa’s own body in his arms.

“Because you’re just a soul,” Nurarihyon replies. “You were disconnected in your sleep, while you were dreaming. I’m impressed, actually. You reached the Hyakki Yagyō much quicker than I thought you would. You are quite prodigious in these matters.” 

Oikawa stifles a growl of response, turning to cut passed him. Well, if he was a soul, he was going back into his body-

He bends down in front of Bokuto and reaches out to grab his own face and - well, he wasn’t sure what he was planning on doing, but he was shocked when his hands sail harmlessly through both his body and Bokuto’s. 

It sends a frigid blast of water down his spine, and he recoils in horror, before looking down to his own hands. 

“W-wait-”

“You’re wondering how to wake up?” Nurarihyon asks, and when Oikawa looks up, he appears to have teleported over to stand behind Bokuto, leaning against one of the cement supports of the station. 

“Yes.”

“Well, that’s like trying to force yourself awake from any other sleep, isn’t it?” Nurarihyon replied, before nodding down to the body Bokuto held. “That’s not you.” 

“Wh-what do you mean that’s not me?”

“Well, it’s not your physical body. It would be impossible to be your physical body. It’s a manifestation of you in some small way, for sure, but it is not the body you need to wake up in. Your friends, though, they’re…” 

Nurarihyon reaches down, to pluck at a few of the white strands of hair sticking up from Bokuto’s head. He flinches down, lifting a hand to run through his hair, shaking his head out. “Yeah, your friends are here.” 

“How’d you touch them?”

“Well I’m not sleeping. You’re sleeping.”

“If you’re not sleeping, how are you here?”

“This is the Hyakki Yagyō, this is my domain. Well, it’s your domain too - do you not recognize the inside of your own mind?” 

Oikawa frowned, pushing himself to stand up, stumbling back a step to get another look at the desolate station. 

Kisaragi Station.

Did I make this place? 

Wait - 

So my soul is in my mind and my body is in my mind also? Where is my mind? 

Wait he said-

But-

Okay calm down take a breath-

Oikawa looks back down to his hands, thinking for a moment, before saying: “Why would this be the inside of my own mind? I wouldn’t want it to be some terrifying red wasteland.”

“Well…” Nurarihyon waves a hand for a second, before saying: “It’s not. You just can’t see it.”

“I can’t see it? But - I’m here-”

“You’re just a human,” Nurarihyon says, smiling slightly. “That is the unfortunate burden that we both must carry as believers - there would be no power in your belief if you were able to see it so easily, would there? The Hyakki Yagyō is… bigger than you or I, we are merely blessed with the capacity to empower it, and provide sanctuary for the yokai that need it. But we cannot live here - we cannot see it. I’ve always wondered… wondered what the most lovely of them may look like, what the world might be for them… They, surely, are swarming us now, hoping for a favour, or a glance, for special privileges. We can do anything - you can do anything.”

Oikawa stares at him a moment, opening his mouth, then closing it, then opening it again, then saying: “What do you need me for - is this some… rite of passage, coming of age shit? Some destiny of mine? Are you going to die?”

Nurarihyon laughs, shaking his head. “No, no, but my-oh-my, you certainly are clever. It’s far more simple. You could have lived your whole life never knowing you were one of these believers. Most do. I’ve watched five or six come and go in my lifetime now. I don’t need you for anything. What I need is for you to agree to keep away from the bigener. I need you to stop hunting aliens.” 

“...what?”

“I need you to stop empowering them. You are… even amongst the believers, you are of a rare power, that I have not seen since I myself was young. And with the Sawamura-kid’s eyes, you could be given access to knowledge of the yokai a believer is not meant to have - or, you may give him access to powers the aliens did not even realize could be unlocked within his DNA. One wrong step, and you could disbalance the entire ecosystem - you’re the mother bird feeding the cuckoo, instead of her own chicks.”

“I… I haven’t… we haven’t done anything wrong-”

“Right. And hopefully you never will. Just… agree to leave it behind, and in exchange I’ll gladly show you all the wonders you’ve been missing. Wouldn’t you like that? Wouldn’t that be better?”

“Better…”

“Everything you’ve ever wanted - answers, fantasy, the secret world of magic right under your nose, I will teach you everything. You could become more than just a beacon for the yokai, you could be their King. You just have to let go of the aliens. You have to let that stay untouched, leave it to Daichi and his father and Novikova to sort out.”

Nurarihyon holds out his left hand, to make a deal - a simple handshake, to agree to the terms. And they’re simple terms. They’re not asking for much, not really. And truthfully, Oikawa thinks, as he looks at that hand. He could probably have made it. He might have, he might have wanted to. 

But then Nurarihyon adds: “It’s time for you to come to where you belong,” and Oikawa feels every nasty flaw in his personality rear its head at once. 

“Oh, fuck you,” Oikawa says, and to his credit, Nurarihyon looks genuinely baffled by this response. “Fuck you and your elitism. Fuck you and your opinion of me - and certainly fuck anyone who tries to tell me where or what I’m supposed to be. I pick where I go, I pick who I’m friends with, and I’ve never in my fucking life let someone tell me where I should be. Fucking hell, I’m so sick of people trying to tell me where I need - my whole goddamn life! This is the goddamn Shiratorizawa speech all over again - fuck you, if the price of your knowledge and power is the same fucking this is where you belong speech , get the fuck- just- screw you, okay?” 

“Wh-”

“And, speaking of-” and Oikawa walks through him, to the end of the station, towards the odd blocks he could see in the distance. “Where is everyone else? Did Bokuto and Kenma come alone? Let my friends go - there’s no reason for them to be here with a weird dead version of me, this is-”

“Let me rephrase my offer,” Nurarihyon says, and suddenly he’s appeared in front of Oikawa again, though this time his smile looks sharp and carnivorous and threatening. “I like children. And I like you. So I’m giving you the option to make things go peacefully. I know how much that alien boy means to you, so just make a deal never to engage with any of the bigeners again and we’ll all be happy-days. Otherwise I will take the option away from you.”

Oikawa takes a step back. “What the fuck are you talking about?” 

“You either choose to walk away from it, or I slaughter them all and take away your choice.”

 

---

 

“They have Oikawa,” Rion says, taking his phone from his ear and immediately starting to make another call. 

“Wh- what? They do? Where? Who is they?”

“Some agents we had nearby. Local authorities were called to the scene when a fellow passenger of the train reported being unable to wake him. He was taken to the hospital about an hour ago where they’d been working on him, I’ve had my guys step in and take over, so we should be okay to go see him-”

“You can do that?” Daichi says. “Just… one call, and suddenly you’re the primary care provider for an unconscious kid?”

“You’d be shocked by what I have the power to do,” Rion replies, putting the phone to his ear. “The issue will be figuring out what-”

“Wait, you said Oikawa - what about the others.”

“The others?”

“Everyone except for Iwaizumi is MIA-”

“Oksana!” Rion interrupts, as the call is picked up. “Have you reached Hanamatsu? Oh, good, good - sorry, my son is just asking about the other boys. Did anyone call in any other conscious teenagers? Or - no? No-” he looks back to Daichi. “They’re saying Oikawa was alone on the train-”

“Well what happened then-”

Rion lifts a finger to silence him, before listening to Oksana on the other end of the phone, nodding along for a moment before saying: “Okay, good. Keep him comfy there, we’ll be just a few hours. Do you have any idea what this looks like?”

Daichi keeps his mouth shut, chewing on the inside of his cheek as he waits and waits and waits and-

He jumps slightly, as a touch against his hand surprises him, and he turns his head over to find Suga already looking back at him. 

“We’re going to figure it out,” Suga says, softly, keeping his voice down, wary of the conversation just a few feet away. “I’m worried about everyone too, but finding Oikawa is huge, right? He’s okay-”

“He’s unconscious-”

“But he’s alive. You should call Iwaizumi.”

“You should call Iwaizumi,” Daichi replies, laughing softly. “I-”

“Dai,” Suga laughs, though it’s not a very joyful noise. “It should be you.”

Daichi nods slightly, before pulling out his phone to find the contact and press call. He’s not sure why he feels a surge of guilt, or fear, at the prospect of having to tell Iwaizumi what’s going on, but Sugawara is right. He needs to-

“Daichi! Did you find him?” Iwaizumi doesn’t waste any time. 

“Yeah,” he says. “We found him.” 

There’s silence, clearly Iwaizumi had not been expected an actual yes to that question, hesitating in his shock before in a horrified whisper saying:

“Then why don’t you sound happy?”

“...we haven’t seen him yet. My… dad’s friend says he’s unconscious-”

“What?”

“I know, I know, look, I was just-”

“What happened to him? Is he hurt? Is he going to wake up? Who did this-”

“Iwaizumi, please, listen to me, I… we don’t know all the details yet, he’s in Hanamatsu, we’re on our way now, okay? I’ll… once we have a chance to see him, I’ll call you again. I just wanted to keep you in the loop-”

“I… okay, okay…” Iwaizumi says, though Daichi can hear his voice breaking. “Promise me that you’ll keep him safe for me, okay?”
Daichi holds his tongue. He doesn’t even know what’s going on. 

“Daichi. Promise me you’ll keep him safe.”

“I promise.”

He can hear Iwaizumi nodding on the other hand, the ruffle of hair as he runs a hand over his head and moves through his house. What a nightmare it must be, trapped on the other side of the island. Alone, lost. 

“What about everyone else?” Iwaizumi says, after a second. “Did you find everyone else? Why did they stop responding?”

“...no, we’re still looking for them.”

 

---

 

“You’d… slaughter them?”

“Infestations can be tricky to get rid of,” Nurarihyon purrs, turning to wander slowly into the darkness that hangs between the station and the block city. Oikawa cannot do anything but follow him. “Once rooted, they usually must be dealt with with extreme measures. Bed bugs, for example, take rounds and rounds and rounds of fumigation and treatment to be sure are clear. Blackberries - oh, blackberries, what demons they are, with thorns and roots ready to suffocate everything they encounter - you have to raze the earth to clear blackberries from an area. When a limb begins to decay, you amputate it to preserve the healthy body. We’ve been lucky, so far, that none of the bio-experiments these aliens have left on earth for us have been able to reproduce, but my patience has been worn thin. If you will not protect the planet, I will.”

“No-” Oikawa says, trying to get in front of Nurarihyon - he just walks through him. “Shit-”

He twists around to chase after him again. 

“No, this is - that’s - murder-”

“Sure,” Nurarihyon agrees. “Culling for the sake of the herd, it’s not uncommon.”

“No, no, no, no-” 

“Then make a deal with me,” he says again. “Cut them off at the source so I don’t have to get rid of them.”

But there’s something in his gut that says no. 

No, I don’t trust you. No I don’t like your methods, no, your belief does not align with mine. How can that be? How can we be the same if we believe fundamentally different things?

No, I don’t fear Sawamura. I don’t fear him at all. I don’t fear any of them, but-

They’re monsters, are they not? 

Should I fear them? Should I fear him?

“What would this deal look like?” Oikawa asks. 

“You come with me, and I turn you into the most powerful version of yourself you can imagine. I show you the world.”

The silliest thing crosses his mind. 

I wouldn’t be able to play volleyball again.

It saddens him in a way he doesn’t expect. He wasn’t even sure he loved the game like he used to, but suddenly faced with the suggestion of walking away from it - walking away from his normal life…

I’d lose Iwaizumi. 

I’d lose everything. 

And what would I gain?

This isn’t right. 

I don’t fear… I don’t fear him. Any of them. 

Why does-

“No,” Oikawa says, planting his feet. “No, I will not become like you. I will not do what you’ve done to the yokai. You’ve turned them into monsters.”

This catches Nurarihyon off guard, and he turns to look at him properly. 

“Are you still on about this?” he snipes. 

“You’re afraid of them,” Oikawa says. “I… maybe for good reason, maybe you have a good reason to be afraid of them, but if it’s our belief that makes them what they are, then your fear is part of the problem, and I will not accept your assertion that these yokai cannot be more than monsters.”

Nurarihyon cracks a sardonic smile. “Is that so? So you’re going to hang the life of your friends off the claws of the yokai?”

Oikawa tenses his jaw. “I reject the world you’ve proposed to me. I do not believe it.”

“On what text?” Nurarihyon laughs. 

Oikawa sniffs, straightening his posture. “I’ve met Daichi, and he is good, wholly and completely. And I’ve met Tendou, who has done nothing but try his whole life to be more than what people thought of him, and I will not be the one to deny him that. That is my text, that is my evidence, and that is what I believe.”

Nurarihyon stares at him a second, before nodding and lifting a hand. 

“Interesting that you mention Mr. Tendou,” he says, snapping his fingers. 

Materializing out of the dark, as if shedding a skin of shadows, the human ish figure steps out from behind the old man, undeniably a monster - undeniably Tendou. 

“You’d asked where everyone else was…”

Oikawa takes a step back on reflex - he’s never seen anything like this, before. It’s… it’s Tendou only because Oikawa knows it is, in his eyes, and his cheekbones, and the soft, pale skin of his face, but everything else is monster, everything else is animal. He’s tall - seven feet, maybe? - his arms are almost as long, and even as he straightens his poster up and rolls his shoulders back, his knuckles drop down far enough to graze against the earth. His body is sharp and angular, human in all the worst ways and remind Oikawa not quite of a monkey, but of something built to hunt in the jungle nonetheless. Harsh red fur, a mouthful of teeth for tearing and cutting. 

Oikawa realizes, with horror, that his first instinct was fear. 

He’s stepped back. 

I’ve voided my own assertion. 

“What did you do to him?” Oikawa whispers, at the same time Tendou’s face cracks into a wide-splitting grin, and he whispers, overtop of Oikawa’s own words: “What did you do to him?”

“Oh, I’ve done nothing,” Nurarihyon says. “I actually wasn’t going to let him in at all, but the sneaky bugger found his own way in. It seems inevitable that yokai end up here one way or another - and, well, once he was in, there wasn’t much else to be done. Are you scared of him? You have no need to be.”
Oikawa doesn’t have an answer to that, save to clenching his fists together and trying to steady his gaze. Show no fear. 

“You know, Oikawa,” Nurarihyon says after a moment, turning his body slightly, to face Tendou, to lift his hands up and cradle the monster’s head in his hands, as he stoops down to be at his height. “Satori are an endangered species. I’d wager there’s less than a hundred left in the Gifu mountains, they don’t breed very well - after all, they’re all male. They require human mates to produce children, which almost always results in half breeds, if the woman survives the mating process. It’s a species made to die off, a biological mistake in a bottleneck that cannot possibly endure the test of time, they’re saved only because of my protection - my finding of these halfbreeds, and bringing them home. If I abandoned them, it would take barely a century for the rest of them to disappear, the satori would be little more than a few stray chromosomes scattered among the Japanese people. But…”

Nurarihyon looks back to Oikawa, who’s starting to feel sick. He has a feeling he knows where this whole affair is going. 

“...doesn’t he look happy? You say he is good and kind but you say that because of his humanity, the parts of him that make him like you. That’s the same half that tormented him, that ostracized and abused and damaged him. Here, though- you may see him as lesser, but I promise, I promise, his life would be filled with pleasures and comfort. Joy.”

Tendou dips his head down, and Nurarihyon runs his hands through his hair, scratching down the sides of his face like he might an animal. Oikawa stares at him, and he cannot deny that the creature that stands before him does look at ease in its condition - it does not seem to be in pain, it’s not fighting back…

“Would you rather subject him to the life he was living before?”

“That is not Tendou,” Oikawa settles on eventually. “Tendou doesn’t want to be a monster. If he could see what you’ve done to him, he would hate you.”

“Do you want to put it to the test?”

“Excuse me?”

“If you think you’re so much smarter than me, let’s put it to the test. You believe that he is inherently good, that his humanity will win out. I believe that the yokai within him is the dominant instinct. So let’s let him run loose. We have a few mice wandering our maze that need to be dealt with anyway.”

“What are you-”

Nurarihyon whistles, once, sharply, and Tendou straightens up, as if standing at attention. 

“Satori,” he chirps. “Go on, find the wanderers. Do whatever you please with them.”

“Wait-”

But Tendou is off like a starting gun has been fired, skidding in the dry earth for a second as he takes off on his knuckles. 

Nurarihyon snaps his fingers again, and they both disappear from the plains. 

 

---

 

As they’re rushing up the steps to the local hospital, the short, red-haired woman comes out to meet them, hands out and a lanyard around her neck IDing her as having priority access around the hospital. 

“You made good time!” she calls, before breaking into a grin as she locks her attention on Daichi. “And look who you’ve brought. Why, I think it’s about time that me and you had a proper meeting-” and she sticks her hand out. “Oksana Novikova.”

Daichi hesitates slightly, before taking her hand, but almost immediately they’ve moved past the greeting, and she’s turned to start leading them inside.

“I’m so excited to get to know you, now that your daddy’s letting you play the big leagues. We got lots of work to-”

“With all due respect, whatever that means,” Daichi interrupts. “I’m only concerned with getting my friends back.”

Oksana laughs. “Oh, of course, of course. Don’t worry, though, I’ve been butting heads with the yokai since I was ten years old, this is small potatoes for me. I got a few tricks up my sleeve left.”

“Oh? Please, do share-”

The elevator isn’t ready, so they unanimously decide to just cut to the stairs, rushing up as fast as they can. 

“Be careful, Oksana, I-” Rion starts to say, but a glare from her cuts him off. 

“Riri, trust me, we’re long past be careful. There’s no point withholding anything now. You know that.”

Rion, somewhat miserably, nods and keeps his mouth shut. 

Daichi looks back at Oksana as they push their way out on the second floor. “So?”

“Well, Oikawa and… probably your friends, have been taken to the Hyakki Yagyō, which… well, it’s a yokai… realm, or… place, we don’t know exactly what it is, but… we do have two very crucial pieces of information about it.”

“And what’s that?”

“One, you can only be invited in. Nobody can brute force their way in, not even the yokai. There are some yokai that can get you in, but typically Nurarihyon is the only person who can jump between here and there without hassle. A true believer, the father of the yokai, those are the gatekeepers as well - and I mean father in the patriarchal, father-of-the-state way, not any kind of biology, ‘kay? Keeping up?”

“Yes. What’s the second point?”

“It’s filled with monsters. Monsters that, upon seeing someone like me and you, would kill us on sight-”

“Oh that’s right,” Daichi says. “My… father mentioned, you’re… you’re like me, you’re an alien too-”

Oksana stops outside one of the doors, smiling at him as she leaned back against it. 

“Charmed to meet you too. I’m sure we’ll have plenty to talk about once your friends are back on solid ground.”

Daichi wants to ask a flurry of questions, but bites his tongue. They had a job to do. 

“So what do we do, then?”

“Well…” Oksana says, as they head into the room. Black curtains have been drawn across the windows, cutting off all light and any prying eyes from seeing. There’s a bunch of medical equipment, but it seems to have been disconnected - there’s a sign on the door indicating it was not to be entered unless specially ordered. 

There’s a man in a PSIA windbreaker standing silently in the corner, and Daichi can see the rifle strapped to his back. 

This unit doesn’t fuck around, apparently. 

And, Oikawa. 

Laying there as easily as if he’s been sleeping. 

“So… what’s happened to him?” Daichi says, heading around to the side of the bed, to lean over Oikawa and look down at him. His eyes flicked, rapidly, under his eyelids, but he otherwise stayed still. 

“Well, Oikawa himself is a true believer,” Oksana says, which causes both Daichi and Suga to jerk their heads up. Oksana blinks her surprise, before giggling softly and adding: “Oh, had you not gotten there yet?”

“We… knew there was a belief component to it, but-”

“Your boy here is quite special,” she agrees. “He should, under normal circumstances, be able to leave the Night Parade all on his own, but… Nurarihyon has put him under a very simple, but very effective sleeping curse. Separating his soul from his body, he’s effectively been able to trap him in either his own dreams, or, what must be the Hyakki Yagyō proper. I can’t imagine that’s not where they’ve gone. Unfortunately, nobody has ever seen the Hyakki Yagyō, not really, so I can’t say for sure the benefit of trapping him as a soul there.”

“Well… what do we do, then, can you put me under like he is? Maybe… maybe if I’m just a soul, then… I can go help him-”

“No,” Rion says, as if it’s the stupidest thing he’s ever heard. “Under no circumstances are you going to let you wander into a monster’s parade being their number one target.”

“And…” Oksana says, before Daichi can fight back. “As I said, there’s no way to brute force your way in. I could get you under the sleeping curse that I think they used on him, it would be easy enough - Rion is good enough with his sinistral hand to perform it - but… you’d just be stuck in your nightmares. There’s no true connection between dreams and the Night Parade…”

“Well… maybe not for humans,” Daichi says. “But I can see more, right? We can see more- Maybe there is a connection, if… if you can put me under, if I can keep myself lucid enough, I might be able to find the way through…”

Oksana seems to agree with this point, but shakes her head and replies: “I don’t think you’re wrong, Dai-kun. The problem is if you’re right, you’ll be breaking every survival rule us aliens have. They’re terrified of us, they don’t want us damaging their ecosystems, they’ll kill us if they think we’re a threat, so… breaking down the front door of their castle seems like the quickest way to get you killed, forcing your way in… that’s… that’s exactly what they’re afraid of.”

“But there’s no other option,” Daichi says, throwing his hands in the air. “Plus, the… the rest of my… my friends, Kuroo, Ushijima, Bo, they’re all gone, they must be there too - can humans even survive there? What if it’s already too late? We need to do something.”

“What if we can get invited?” 

Daichi had almost forgotten that Suga had been following around just a few steps behind them, but everyone turns to look at him now.

“What do you mean?” Rion says, nodding to him. 

Suga shifts, fiddling his hands together. “Uhm… I mean… Oikawa… you said Oikawa should be one of these true believers, right? And… so… Daichi doesn’t have to siege the castle so to speak if Oikawa opens the doors for him… so…”

“But there’s no way to ask him to do that,” Rion says. 

Oksana lifts a hand up to chew on her nail, thinking this over. “It’s still risky. The yokai might not listen, they… Oikawa might not be in a position to help him, Nurarihyon has unbelievable power in the Hyakki Yagyō…”

Daichi chews on the inside of his cheek, before turning to look back down at Oikawa, lifting a hand up to carefully brush hair out of his eyes, watching him twitch slightly, as if fighting through an unpleasant dream.

“You hear that?” Daichi says. “I want to come help you, I want to fight for you, but you’re gonna need to get me in there. Can you hear me? Oikawa?” 

There’s silence, and maybe they all sort of hope that this magically works, that he just disappears, but-

Rion glances back at Oksana, shaking his head slightly. 

Oksana, however, is looking over his shoulder and out the window, eyes vacant and unfocused, as if disconcerted over something she could see in the sky.

Daichi drags a chair from the wall over, sitting down and grabbing Oikawa’s hand to squeeze it tightly. “I promised Iwaizumi I’d keep you safe, so don’t make a liar out of me, okay? I believe in you. I don’t know what’s going on, but I believe in you. Believe in me in return, okay? Let me keep you safe.”

---

 

The howl that splits the air comes from behind them - both Kuroo and Ushijima jerk around, shocked to find themselves no longer alone in the desolate city. Skidding into view at the far end of the street, a hulking, red-furred beast, chest heaving, spit dripping from a razor grin, eyes dark and locked on to them. 

Kuroo, briefly, is concerned that he’s going to have to drag Ushijima kicking and screaming just to keep him alive, but that’s not what happens - the creature takes off in a gallop towards them, and the two move in tandem, turning and breaking into a sprint to get away. 

“Why is he chasing us?” Kuroo shrieks, sucking in a breath and trying to focus on not losing his balance as he runs. Ushijima runs like a robot, perfect posture, back straight, eyes ahead. He does not reply to the question - Kuroo wonders if he actually has a plan, or is just desperately trying to come up with one. 

Ushijima grabs Kuroo’s wrist, jerking to the left and dragging him down one of the cross streets, then turning right, then left, each turn hearing the monster hiss and snarl, cracking into cement buildings as it cuts corners close and seems unsteady on it’s limbs. 

If they could just run a little faster - if they could just get a little further ahead, they’d be able to get around a corner-

Ushijima is trying to get out of its view - make a corner it can’t see, get somewhere it doesn’t know to find them - but it’s an impossible task. 

The creature is reading their minds, after all.

It howls in delight of the chase, the pounding of its hands against the earth growing closer and closer and-

Kuroo jerks his head back, eyes widening in horror as he realizes it’s going to be within grasping distance in… seconds, at best. 

There’s another howl, then-

Pressure on his shoulder suddenly releases, and Kuroo gasps as the cat kicks off from his back, screeching in a furious hiss, claws extended. 

They hit an intersection, and Ushijima spins around just for a second to get a look at the monster as the cat digs its claws into its face and hauls it off course, forcing it to stumble and falter, slowing it down and distracting it. 

They go right. 

Double back, back towards the station. 

It’s the only choice they can make. 

The monster thrashes as the cat refuses to let go, claws in it’s fur, forcing it’s attention to stay on it before-

It gets a clawed hand under the cat’s chest, and slings it violently across the road, the small animal cracking into the stone of one of the buildings.

The monster huffs a breath, shaking itself out as blood drips from the claw marks, down into its eyes. 

It recovers in just a few seconds, turning and huffing another breath to taste the air and catch wind of the prey it followed. 

 

---

 

“Stop it!” Oikawa shrieks, from the top of one of the stone towers, stumbling to the edge to watch Tendou tear his way through the city, cutting through the cross street and skidding into place behind Ushijima and Kuroo. “Stop, this isn’t fair-”

“I thought he was a good person,” Nurarihyon says, behind him. “I thought he was more than the yokai.”

“But this isn’t fair, you’re not giving him a choice!” 

“Who says? I told him he could do whatever he wanted - are you perhaps referring to the fact that yokai are, at their core, predatory? That you do not believe him capable of making any choice but a violent one? What happened to choosing to believe their goodness?”

The poor little cat, that odd little cat, has recovered itself enough to take off running, looking like it’s top speed was much faster than either man or Tendou, though it was quite a bit behind and would need to catch up before it could be of help again. 

“You’re doing this to them!” Oikawa shouts. “This is your fault! You believe he’s a monster and you’re turning him into one-”

“If I recall correctly,” Nurarihyon hisses. “It was you who told him he was one first.”

Oikawa stares back at him. 

No. No, this isn’t right. This isn’t right.

I’ve faced off against Tendou so many times, I’ve seen him at his worst, I know what I thought and I know what he can do but he’s so much more than that. 

He’s not a monster-

“He’s not-”

Yes he is, right now. 

Nurarihyon has turned him into one. 

Has he done this to all the yokai in Japan? 

Tendou is a monster.

Oikawa stumbles back along the edge of the stone building, watching the hunt as he grew closer and closer and closer-

 

---

 

“Keep running,” Ushijima gasps, eventually. Kuroo is almost out of breath - even with his athleticism, a sprint at top speed is only sustainable for so long. “Get back to the station.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to try and get him back.”

“You’re going to die-”

“I’m going to be honest,” Ushijima says, sparing a glance behind him at the rapidly approaching figure. “I’m not sure we’re not already dead.”

Kuroo doesn’t have a reply for that. His lungs are burning, his legs hurt, his throat is dry. He’s going to have to stop running eventually. 

“I did it once before,” Ushijima replies. “Just go back to the station.”

“What if-”

But Ushijima has already pulled himself to a stop, twisting around to stand his ground instead of run, and when faced with the option, Kuroo doesn’t follow, instead focusing on the threshold of the city, where he knew the station would be in the distance, to where Kenma was waiting. 

He keeps running. 

---

 

Tendou falters, slowing down, as Ushijima turns to face him. 

Oikawa feels his heart lodged in his throat. 

The satori falls into a comfortable rhythm, its grin spitting out an uneasy laugh as it latches its mind onto Ushijima’s. 

Come on, come on, come on, Oikawa begs. 

“You are not a monster,” Ushijima shouts, focusing his attention on him, like he was trying to wake him from a dream. Tendou echoes the words back, right on top of Ushijima’s own.
“You are not a monster.”

“You are not a monster.”
“You are not a monster.”

Ushijima raises his voice. Tendou picks up speed again.

“You are not a monster!”
“You are not a monster!”

Fifteen feet - ten feet - 

He’s going to leap the last seven or eight feet, flying through the air, claws out, teeth bared, ready to tear him apart. 

Oikawa stumbles to the edge of the building, a voice coming from deep in his chest and ripping through his voice as he screams:

“You! Are! A! Monster!”  

Ushijima doesn’t flinch as Tendou crashes into him, the massive beast taking him down to the ground with ease, rolling over and over and over again as their momentum takes over. 

If you can hear me, let me help you. Let me in.

Oikawa feels heat under his skin. 

“Tendou Satori, you better pull your shit together this instant!” he shrieks, hoping to be heard over the distance. “I didn’t lose to Shiratorizawa that many goddamn times just to find out they’d been cheating with yokai magic! Monster or not you have never let anyone tell you what to do before, so don’t fucking start now and get your ass back in the game!”

The pair comes to a rolling stop, and-

There is no bloodshed, there’s no torn limbs, as Tendou’s massive, monstrous form settles over top of Ushijima, it’s to enthusiastically nuzzle in against his cheek and, much like a dog, begin licking his face in greeting. And Ushijima is laughing, though it’s an exhausted and confused noise, as he scrunches his nose up and swats at him to get him to stop. 

Oikawa doesn’t think he’s ever heard Ushijima laugh like that. 

He cannot help but smile in his victory, twisting around to look back at Nurarihyon, who looks horrified by the turn of events. 

“Where I come from,” Oikawa spits. “Being a monster is a compliment.”

Nurarihyon disappears. 

Oikawa, on reflex, jerks his head around to find him standing on the street, staring at the pair - and Kuroo, some distance back, who’s stopped running and turned to look in baffled shock. 

Oikawa thinks he’s starting to get it. 

He closes his eyes, and blinks himself back to attention on the ground, just a half step behind Nurarihyon. Tendou is the only one of the three that can see them, lifting his head slowly to look back. 

“I refuse to be like you,” Oikawa says, as Tendou rises up, unsteady slightly as his body begins to crack and shift. His howling scream is muted, and as he stumbles forward, each step sheds bursts of fur and skin, until his heels are melting down to normal posture and his face is returning to the very boyish, acne-scarred look Oikawa was more used to. 

He looks exhausted, as he walks forward, bare feet and tattered clothes, but he keeps his eyes set on Oikawa. 

Oikawa, please. Please let me help.

Oikawa is beginning to understand it - he can feel Tendou, deep in his soul somewhere, a tether of magic, that at some point in this transaction Tendou had been severed from Nurarihyon and attached himself to Oikawa for the same power. It’s just the barest hint of how this works, this massively complicated game of universal truths and improbable accidents and belief, but it’s a clue that puts a lot of answers right into the palm of his hand. 

“Satori!” Ushijima calls, pushing himself, unsteady, up onto his feet, unable to see what Tendou was moving towards. 

But Tendou has started to pick up speed again, first breaking into a jog, and then pushing faster as he locked on to Nurarihyon in front of him. 

“Tendou!” Nurarihyon roars, and Oikawa can feel the power in his command, practically feel it rattling the entire city. “You are not to harm your-”

“Tear him apart!” Oikawa shrieks, over the old man’s voice and as if on the command, Tendou has leapt, whole body contorting now into that ape-like, monstrous form as he brings clawed hands down - Oikawa can almost see it, the victory, crushing Nurarihyon and forcing him to surrender. 

Nurarihyon disappears, before Tendou’s claws could grab him, and the yokai goes crashing into the ground, rolling over in the dust and howling a distorted “No!” as he realizes the man has made his escape. 

And then everything goes to hell. 

I want to help you.

Tendou drags himself back to his feet, but it only lasts a second before something catches his attention, and he stumbles before something massive and invisible crashes into him, dragging him down and throwing him against the hard earth. 

Blood sprays in random arches from invisible bodies. They flicker in and out of his vision, there for a second in a staticy haze, then gone again. Tendou gets to his feet and then something heavy is dragging him down again, forcing him to thrash and roll over to dislodge it. 

Oikawa doesn’t need to actually hear him to know Nurarihyon has given the kill order. 

“Satori-”

Ushijima’s shout is immediately cut short - he gets about three steps forward before something is tearing into his chest and throwing him to ground, forcing him to kick and thrash - Oikawa notes that it’s first order of business seems to be focused on his left hand, pinning it violently behind his back before yanking, eliciting a loud scream as it tries to dislocate it - or tear it off.

Tendou shrieks, but even with all his monstrous qualities, cannot shake enough of the weight to get free to help for more than a few seconds, before something new is tearing him apart. 

Oikawa stumbles, when something furry goes racing between his legs, and that cat is weaving and twisting its way through - onwards towards Kuroo in the distance, desperate to get back to its master before the monsters reach him too.

Oikawa thinks it might make it, before Kuroo’s body is suddenly distorted and thrown by an invisible force, and Oikawa loses sight of him, too. 

“No!” Oikawa screams, though he is little more than spirit amid the monsters here. “Stop it! Stop hurting them! Nurarihyon!”

This isn’t right. 

They’re going to be killed. 

I can’t see them. I can’t see the monsters. I can’t see Nurarihyon - I need to find him, I need to - 

Fuck. 

Fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck-

 

Let me fight for you. 

 

Oikawa snaps open his eyes, heat flushing his skin as he tilts his head up to the sky and wind begins to overtake the street. Like every memory that had never happened, the shape grows heavy in the sky, larger than the street and flashing with whirling lights, blue and green and white and yellow, twisting and spinning a furious, mechanical maelstrom. 

He’s so afraid of you. 

Come show us what his fear has made you.

“Come on!” Oikawa screams, not quite missing how both Tendou and Ushijima have been able to drag themselves to their feet, as if the monsters tearing into them had been distracted, turning their eyes up. “I can’t do this on my own! Get your ass down here and tell me what I can’t see!”

This is Oikawa’s belief, is it not? Split, perhaps, with Nurarihyon, and the foundational beliefs of the world at large, the folklore and superstitions that permeate through culture and time. Oikawa was never going to be enough to make a permanent, grand change. He couldn’t rewrite the world into being something it wasn’t. 

But there was nothing he believed in like aliens. 

And, he supposed, Nurarihyon could say the same. He shouldn’t have told Oikawa he was scared of Daichi becoming a predator to them.

Well-

“Come show’em what you’re made of, baby!”

In a beam of sickly green light, and the whirl of mechanical engines, the ship opens from below, and with an echoing laugh of raw adrenaline-riddled excitement, Daichi falls to earth.

“Are you ready, Nusan?” Oikawa shrieks, as Daichi hits the ground, balancing himself for a second before straightening up. “Think you can hide from him?”

Chapter 37: The Alien Invasion

Daichi is whispering, knelt by Oikawa’s bedside as if bent in prayer, squeezing his hand so tightly as if willpower alone would be enough to break through and make this all better. 

Suga wasn’t even sure what he thought he could do, but that had always been the sort of person Daichi was. It wasn’t about what he could do - it was about the fact that he couldn’t do nothing. Like a perpetually running machine, Daichi did not have a setting below giving 100% of what he had, come hell or high water. 

Or… comatose, magic friends, apparently. 

Suga moves to stand over his shoulder, putting a hand down on his back and rubbing gently. Daichi doesn’t respond, just hanging his head lower and continuing to mutter along - Please, let me help you. Please. Whatever you need, let me help.

He can hear Oksana and Rion mumbling in the corner of the room - Oksana trying to map out some mystical solution to the problem. A potion seller might have something that could wake him up!

Rion, trying a less uncertain path - Maybe the hospital can administer a shot of adrenaline? Boot him awake?

And Daichi, helpless, but not quite willing to realize it yet. 

And then-

Daichi’s whole body slumps forward suddenly, as he goes entirely limp against Oikawa’s side. Suga squeaks, stepping back on reflex and staring at him. Did… did he just power down? What the hell was that? 

He leans in, shaking his shoulder gently.

“Dai?” he coos, trying not to leap immediately into the worst possible situation, even though at this point he thought that might be justified. “Daichi-baby, what’re you doing…?” he sings, increasingly stressed. 

“Suga?”

Suga turns around, looking back at Daichi’s father as he stares at him, waiting for an explanation. 

“Ahhh… you might wanna come take a look-”

 

---

 

Daichi is begging the universe to let Oikawa hear him through his dreams in one second, and in the next, he’s whipped up in a frenzy of wind and free-falling through the air. 

The fall steals in breath away, wind too fast to catch, and then wham! he hits the earth with a furious slam, though he finds no jolt of pain reaches his body. He spreads fingers out over smooth, white cement, taking slow, heaving breaths as he hears the unmistakable sound of Oikawa cackling in some kind of victory, hooting and hollering like he’d just won the lottery. 

He slowly rises to his feet. 

The city is…

Magnificent.

Wide, white streets of marbled cement stretch off in all directions - massive, black stone skyscrapers stretch up three or four stories, windows framed with gold and ivory, rich, deep green vines draped from flower baskets, blooming with every colour under the sun. Ornate street lamps dot the city, casting light in shades so bright he isn’t even sure it’s white - colours beyond white, beyond absence, dazzling into hues he’d taught himself not to see. 

And the monsters-

They scattered back like oil to his water, giving him a wide berth on principle alone. So many of them, most of them human enough, some of them pure animal. Through their legs, or arms, or tentacles, or fur, he can see Ushijima laid out on the ground - there is something very big, with many arms, that is poised to crush him back into the ground, though it seems distracted by Daichi, and Ushijima is slowly sitting up. 

Everything is looking at him - the sky above, cloudless, is almost pure white. Not from the sky itself, but rather, it is so compact with stars that there is little blank space left to see. He takes it all in for a second, unable to wrap his mind around exactly what he was looking at, before suddenly the lights and sounds and heat of the city around him burst back into life, and a woman with the body and mandibles of a spider has come lurching forward, hissing a warning. 

All the monsters want to kill me.

“Daichi-!”

 

---

 

Oikawa wants to just shriek and dance around, but he tries to keep himself relatively calm. 

“Daichi!”

Daichi twists at his name, spinning around to face him on the empty, dusty street, and for just a second, maybe even a quarter of a second, there is a glimmering reflection in his eyes that Oikawa cannot trace the lightsource of. 

Daichi stares back at him, before also screaming. 

So Oikawa screams back. 

“Oh my god, what the fuck is going on?” Daichi shouts. “Where are we?”

“Hell? I don’t know!” Oikawa laughs back, and though he wants to crush Daichi in a hug, he refrains, because- “Oh, my god, the monsters are gonna kill everyone you need to catch the old man!”

“I need to what now?”

“The old man, Nuraruihyon, you need to find him, he’s doing this-”

“What’s this?”

“I don’t know, man, he’s trying to kill you-”

“Oh, because I’m an alien-”

And now Oikawa is properly shrieking, jumping up on the balls of his feet. “Yes, oh my god you’re a fucking alien-”

“You’re magic!”

“I’m magic!”

“Oh-! Oksana says you should be able to get us out of here,” Daichi stammers, before lifting his hands up to grab Oikawa’s shoulders to shake him. When he tries this, though, his hands just whiff right through him, scattering Oikawa like seafoam. 

Daichi screams again. 

“Oh! I’m not in a body,” Oikawa says, and then before he can say something else, something is tearing at Daichi’s clothes and twisting him up into the air from five or six different angles.

 

---

 

His whole body goes jerking upwards, sharp pain shooting through his side as he’s twisted through the air. He gasps, trying to angle himself and get a good view and-

He’s dropping, now, down towards the opening mandibles of the spider-woman - But I wasn’t looking! I was ignoring them!

Does that not work here?

This is their castle.

Fuck!

He tries to twist around in the spindly, jabbing arms, but there’s no way from him to free himself, the arms tearing into his clothes and tangling around him, and-

“Stop it!” Oikawa is shouting, though it is not so much a command but a plead, panic and confusion in his voice. “Don’t hurt him!”

“Get rid of him! Get rid of the parasite!”

The other voice, older and rougher and nastier, snarls from somewhere unseen. 

The spider seems-

Confused?

She looks around, down to where Oikawa was starting to back away, looking around nervously for something he could do to help - then over-

Daichi tries to twist around and see where the other voice is coming from, but before he can sort himself out something comes in hard to crash against the spider, hauling Daichi down from the air and tumbling them head over heels across the street. 

Somewhere in the commotion, the spider’s legs detangle from him, and he ends up rolling to a stop on his own, lifting his head from the cement with a groan as he tries to figure out what had happened. Standing over the spider, pinning her down with massive, long arms and screaming fury in her face is - something?

It, probably, is Tendou. But Daichi’s rational brain can’t compute that information right now, the monkey-like monster only bearing a passing resemblance to him. But the spider-woman seems terrified anyway, crying and flinching back and jabbing at him with her free legs but not making too much of an effort. 

Daichi gets to his knees, turning his head around, to take another - a better - look around the city street. 

There are numerous beasts - monsters, to be sure. But that is not the whole truth of what he is looking at. 

Across the street, standing in the doorway of a shop selling flowers in shades that Daichi had never been taught words for, there’s a little girl. And for all purposes he can see, she looks… human. Normal. She’s probably about six years old, her black hair is tied up in pigtails with yellow bows. She wears an apron. 

She’s terrified, staring at him, but he doesn’t think she’s afraid of him. 

She’s afraid of the fighting. 

But before he can follow his instinct and call out to her, there’s a great beating of wings, and a black, crow-like tengu lands on taloned feet and uses a wing to sweep her away, shushing her and ducking into the flowershop. The moment of the tengu is-

Well-

It’s-

Concerned. Normal. Parental. Panicked. Human.

It’s human. 

It’s so human.

Daichi gets himself up to his feet, wiping grit from his hands and stumbling a few feet out.

“Daichi!” Oikawa is shouting, eyes flicking between him and behind him - probably to Tendou. “Oh my god, are you okay?”

“Ah - rough question-”

There’s a gowling behind him. 

Daichi turns to watch Tendou, with one last good shove against the spider’s face, push off of her and straighten himself up to head over to where Daichi was. 

The monsters have stopped, they’re staring. 

“Kill him before he destroys you all!”

“I’m not gonna hurt anyone!” Daichi cries back, whipping around to try and find where the voice was coming from - for a second, he thinks he sees a flash of movement. An old man - just-

He breaks into a sprint. He hears, with a bark of noise, Tendou take off after him, but-

Screaming-

He skids to a stop, hoping not to lose track of where he’d thought the figure had gone, looking first over to Oikawa, finding him silent, before-

Everything is happening so fast. 

Tendou is gone from his shoulder, scrambling through the city street that monsters were rapidly clearing off of, clearly deciding they did not want to be in the satori’s way. Target - Ushijima-

Wait, why are the monsters targeting him?

The many-armed creature had returned to its assault, though it’s a short lived endeavor to follow the old man’s orders as Tendou crosses the distance in about 3 seconds and has ripped the monster off, flinging it violently into the ground. 

Daichi wonders, in all of the monster politics and biology lessons and panic over invasive species, if that meant that there was room for an apex predator in the yokai ecosystem. 

The noise Tendou is making is more reminiscent of an ape than a proper scream as he thrashes the hulking body into the cement.

“Daichi!”

He whips his head around, to find Oikawa standing there, looking so solid but apparently little more than fractals of light.

Oikawa looks afraid - Oikawa can’t see any of it. 

“You need to find Nurarihyon-”

“Why?” Daichi says. 

“-what?”

“Why?”

“Why, what’ll that do?”

“...he’s - responsible for the yokai trying to - kill - he’s… all of this is his fault?”

“Tooru, I came here to get you, and all of our friends, home safely. I don’t give a shit about the rest of it. Unless there’s a damn good reason why we need to speak to him, I say let him hide.”

Oikawa is staring back at him, stunned silent for a moment before, in a softer voice, saying:

“I don’t know how to get home.”

“You brought me here,” Daichi said. “And Oksana said you should be able to move in and out, you’re the gatekeeper for this place-”

“I… can’t!” Oikawa says, waving his hands. “I don’t know how! Don’t you think if there was some instinctive way for me to do that I’d have done that the moment I showed up here?”

Daichi opens his mouth slightly, rapidly trying to remember everything he remembered hearing. 

“It’s because you’re a soul,” Daichi says. “You can’t leave because of the sleeping curse - Oksana said there must have been a reason for Nurarihyon to bring you here in this state and not normally- But… your body is in… the real world, so-”

“Oh!” Oikawa says, jumping up on his heels. “Bokuto has my body!”

“Bokuto what?”

“Bokuto has my body,” he repeats. “I couldn’t get into it before-”

“So that makes three of you?”

“I think two and a half,”

“Ah-”

Daichi turns around, and finds the street empty - or, mostly empty. Cleared out is a better description. Shadows flit between buildings, luminous eyes peer from windows, movement of the bigger, the more monstrous yokai makes heaving sounds of footsteps, as they slink around. 

Tendou is pulling himself off the monster, as it slowly, twitchingly, starts dragging itself away and up off the street, fleeing the moment Tendou appeared to provide even a second of mercy. 

Past them, Daichi thinks he can see Kuroo standing, holding his arm as if something has hurt him, but that demon cat weaving between his legs, as if warding off anything from approaching. 

“Where’s Bokuto, then?” Daichi asked. “Where’s this body?”

Ushijima looks a little beat up, but reaches out towards Tendou to grab him by the elbow, despite the monstrous appearance he wore. It’s a subtle change at first, Daichi isn’t sure what he’s looking at, but then it becomes more obvious. Tendou is shrinking - gasping and hissing as hair sheds and his face returns to normal. 

He doesn’t fully return to the human body Daichi was familiar with, but he comes something that more closely approximates a teenage boy, staring at the monster as it dragged itself away, and then turning on stumbling feet to collapse into Ushijima. 

“Uh… by the… station,” Oikawa says. “But, I tried to touch me, I couldn’t do it, I don’t know how to reconnect myself-”

“I have an idea,” Daichi says. “But we’re going to need-”

“You think you’ll be going anywhere?”

Daichi whips around again, and over Oikawa’s shoulder, just a meter away, Nurarihyon has made a reappearance. He stands with his hands clasped behind his back, staring him down. 

Daichi does not miss the fact that he placed Oikawa between them - even made of light, it must come as some kind of comfort. 

“You know,” Daichi spits, which makes Oikawa jump slightly, turning to see what he was looking at. “You could end all of this if you just helped us, let us go-”

Nurarihyon stares at him, and it’s-

Sad?

Sad, concerned, confused, the monsters are not acting particularly monstrous.

Nurarihyon shakes his head. 

“What makes you think I can let you go?”

“...you’re the father of all yokai-”

“You are not a yokai,” he spits back, absolute rage shaking in his voice. “For the last time, you insolent little brat, you are not a yokai, you are not one of mine, you are not even of this planet, not even a human, a believer, your DNA itself is antithetical to the magic that lets the yokai breathe. I cannot let you go because I have no jurisdiction over you. And this place cannot sustain you.”

Daichi takes a step back. Oikawa turns around, to look at him, concerned. 

“Did you think I was afraid of you because I was stupid?”

“No, I-”

“I’m afraid of you because there’s nothing I can do to stop you.”

“But Oikawa let me in!” Daichi shouts, almost angrily now. “If he did it, why can’t you?”

“Nurarihyon!” Oikawa shouts at the same time. Daichi doesn’t think he can hear Nurarihyon’s half of the conversation. “This isn’t fair, show yourself! Pay for what you’ve done-”

“It is not my fault that he has canonized himself as patron saint of the alien invasion, he believes in you, he believes in what you stand for, he believes in his friends, and I don’t fault him for that, but you stupid, arrogant children really thought you could break the rules? You thought that I was out of touch because I didn’t like you?”

The ground has begun to shake. 

It’s not… quite like an earthquake.

Daichi half expects a monster to come bursting from the street, but that’s not what happens. 

He jerks his head up just in time to see the sky split in half. 

 

---

 

“Hey, hey, sunshine,” Rion is singing, in one of the most tensely terrified tones Suga has ever heard. He’s trying to shake Daichi awake, but is too afraid to use any kind of course. “Kiddo, come on, this… okay… please-”

He straightens up, looking over to where Oksana was shaking her head. 

“Why isn’t he waking up?” Rion says. “We didn’t… we didn’t put him under a sleeping curse, we didn’t- we didn’t… how… who - is anything in the room with us? Who did this-” and Rion turns around, feverishly trying to spot something that he could neither see, nor that existed. 

“I… I don’t know,” Oksana stammers. “It… maybe… maybe Oikawa heard him-”

“Well how do we wake him up?” 

“I… I don’t know if we can,” Oksana says, which immediately twists Rion’s expression into one of fury. 

“What do you mean you don’t know if we can?” he spits, stepping into her and shoving her back against the hospital room wall. Suga squeaks, stepping out of the way and hurrying around to the other side of the bed, reaching over to rest a hand on Daichi’s arm, reflexively trying to keep him steady. 

“I mean,” Oksana says, and she does not seem to be concerned at all by Rion holding her by the collarbone against the wall. “It might be up to whatever drew him in. Oikawa, or-”

“That’s not good enough!” he shouts, fist tangling into the collar of her jacket to yank roughly, once, before he pulls himself under control and lets her go, turning around and putting his hands in his hair. “You promised me he wouldn’t get hurt. You said you wouldn’t let that happen, why did you lie to me? I’d never have done any of this if-”

---

 

Everything begins to rattle. Kenma slowly gets up off his knees, looking around with wide eyes, trying to figure out the cause of this - the platform itself seems to shift underneath them, the overhead ceiling swaying. 

Bokuto adjusts himself against the pillar, not moving to stand up and instead shifting to tuck Oikawa’s head down against his chest and cover it with his arms, clearly preparing for the worst. Kenma thinks it might be wise - he can feel dust and grit against his cheeks, disturbed off the top of the overhang. 

And then - splitting down the centre, like someone had cleaved the empty, dark sky in half, a fissure appears. If they’d thought it was dark before, that ink that seeps out of the fissure is light-consuming, a blackhole in the space beyond the atmosphere. 

“Bokuto-”

“We were told to wait,” Bokuto replies, clearly knowing that Kenma was going to suggest they run. 

“Sure, but-”

“They won’t know where to find us if we run.”

Kenma swallows, looking back at him and trying to still the rapid, fluttering heart in his chest. 

“What if they need our help?”

Bokuto is quiet for a moment, as the shaking of the earth quiets for a moment, and Kenma wonders if it’s hard for him, right now, to keep himself calm like this. Kenma had played them in matches over and over and over again, and had seen Bokuto’s volatile emotional state up close. He knew how uncontrollable it could be. What he had never seen before was the other half of it, the half Akaashi had always insisted existed, the half where he held the fort down for his team when the situation seemed impossible. The half that had led that team through nationals. 

But he doesn’t seem unpredictable now. 

“It’s just an earthquake, Kenma, we have those in Japan all the time.” 

“The sky has split open.” 

“Come here, then,” he says, shifting slightly, and Kenma hurries back over to him, as another set of fracturing lines shatters the sky into pieces. Nothing falls, though. Nothing but that seeping, inky blackness from the other side.

Kenma crouches down beside him, under the overhang of the station and where he didn’t have a clear look up at the sky. 

“Kuroo will be okay,” Bokuto says. “You gotta tell yourself that. He’s with Ushiwaka, and he’s smart.”

Kenma nods slightly, leaning in against his side and letting Bokuto pull him in to cover his head with his arm. 

 

---

 

The yokai are running. 

Daichi shoves through Oikawa - who makes the motion of trying to get out of the way, even though it’s unnecessary and he’s scattered, briefly, into wisps of dust, and launches himself at Nurarihyon with nothing but the intent to make himself feel better about the situation. 

He’s surprised by how fast the old man is, blinking out of one position and appearing in another, just a few feet to the left. Daichi twists around and lashes out, hoping to be fast enough to land a punch in the man’s face, but his fist whiffs through air harmlessly, and Nurarihyon speaks from behind him. 

“I want you to know that I didn’t want you dead for the sake of it,” he says. 

Daichi twists around to face him. 

“What? If you knew this was going to happen, why didn’t you tell us?”

“I didn’t!” Nurarihyon spits back. “I feared it would - But would it even have mattered? Tell me, little alien boy, if I had told you that you were a danger to these creatures, would you even have believed me? Or would you have thrashed and fought and deemed yourself smarter. I’ve never said that you want to hurt us. Only that you will.”

“Daichi,” Oikawa interrupts, forcing him to look away from Nurarihyon. The moment he does, the old man is gone. “What’s going on-”

“I…” Daichi doesn’t even know where to start. “I… I think-” the ground heaves a great, jerking motion, and it throws him off balance. He hits the ground, grabbing at anything he could to stabilize himself as the earth grew in its anger, violent and quaking. Oikawa is entirely unaffected, holding neither a body nor the DNA needed to experience any of this. 

But past him, over his head, Daichi can see the city coming apart. The violent shaking dislodges windowsill pots from the buildings, and they fall, crashing into the earth and shattering. The street lamps flicker, some going out entirely. Cracks begin to form, up buildings and along the road. 

Above him, that brilliant canvas of stars, begins to go out. 

One by one, the stars extinguish. 

“I think…” he says, trying to stumble to his feet despite the shaking. “I don’t think you were supposed to bring me here.” 

“I know that,” Oikawa scoffs. “I chose to anyway, this is my monster’s parade, I can-”

“No, you don’t understand,” Daichi says, swaying on his feet to keep his balance. The quaking settled for a second, allowing him to breathe as he looked back up at him. “I think… I think it’s… like a chemical reaction. I don’t think I was supposed to be here, I don’t think this place can handle it.”

“What about Nurarihyon?”

“Gone, for now-”

“The monsters?”

“Running.”

“Running from what?”

“I… I think if this place collapses, it’ll take everything else with it, too.” 

Oikawa gives him a firm nod. 

“You said you had an idea?” 

Daichi tries to give him a smile, before turning and moving past him, towards where Tendou and Ushijima had gathered themselves up, and were heading across to them already. Tendou looks a little worse for wear, but still on his feet - he’s glancing around with a sort of twitchy anxiety, and Daichi realizes he’s also able to see the city, and the monsters that still watch them. 

“Ushijima’s hand,” Daichi says, calling to them. “When he touched you, you became more human. I think it can break the sleeping curse-”

“Eh?” Tendou says. “We already tried that, genius, it didn’t work - on the train, before this whole hullabaloo started.”

“That wasn’t this Oikawa,” Daichi says. “That Oikawa stayed in the real world, I’m with him right now. You need to break the curse on his soul - get him back into… I don’t know, we just - where is he?”

“With Bokuto and Kenma,” Ushijima replies, rubbing his shoulder. “I am… not magic, though-”

“You don’t need to be,” Daichi says, before looking back to Oikawa. “Do you think-”

The earth quakes again, and he stumbles to try and stay on his feet, and almost makes it, before the ground begins splitting in half and he’s thrown off balance, hitting the cement hard and rolling over. 

We…

“We don’t have time to waste talking,” Oikawa says, and Daichi wonders what he can see or feel, or Ushijima. Ushijima seems affected by the earthquake, and the sky-

Fractals of the skyline begin to fall, disappearing into smoke before reaching the earth. Chunks of the cement begin to break off and float up, into the sky. 

Fuck.

“No, we have to run,” Daichi agrees, pushing himself to his feet. 

“But-”

Tendou is thrown off balance by the next great violent shake of the earth, and Daichi realizes they’re getting closer together. 

We don’t have enough time. 

How long is it going to be before reality disappears? 

It’s already-

He lifts his head up into the sky, the great nothing beyond the veil seeping through to eat everything he could see, every ray of light, particle of dust, every atom. 

We don’t have enough time. We need more time-

What happens to them if everything collapses in on itself while they’re here? 

Everyone would be dead.

There are people waiting for him. For all of them. 

My friends are here.

Well-

The only people missing were Iwaizumi and Suga. 

Oikawa is looking down at him, waiting for him to say something, to tell them what to do. The sky is exploding, the earth is shaking, the buildings are tearing apart at the seams as unreality begins to take over. 

Not enough time. Not enough time. Not enough time. 

“Tendou,” he shouts, the moment he’s made up his mind. “Get Oikawa back to his body, you can see him, eh?” 

“Aye aye, yes!”

“Get him back, and have Ushijima break the curse, okay?”

“But-”

“Close his eyes, and tell him where Oikawa is, and trust me, okay?” Daichi says. 

“Why are you speaking like you’re not coming with us?” Oikawa spits, his anger a thin cover for the fear in his voice. 

“I’m gonna-”

Do not tell them. They won’t leave otherwise.

“-find Nurarihyon,” he says. “I don’t think he’s telling us the whole truth, and I’m not gonna let him get away with it.”
Oikawa stares at him for a moment. 

He doesn’t believe me.

“Just… go,” Daichi says. “Get into your body and then figure out how to get everyone home safely.” 

“Yes sir,” Oikawa replies, before turning and starting to jog to meet Tendou and Ushijima, unaffected by the next violent heave of the earth, but struggling now to navigate the fissures and breaks. 

Daichi gets himself back to his feet, watching them head off in one direction, while he turns to head deeper into the city. 

Tendou looks back at him, mostly human with Ushijima’s hand gripping his arm tightly, but red eyes still tinted with something else - he gazes back at him, hauntingly, and for the first time Daichi is really, very glad that Tendou was not able to read his mind.

But he’s pretty sure he’s guessed his intentions anyway. 

 

--- 

 

The demon cat jumps up onto his shoulder, as Ushijima and Tendou come running down the street, stumbling and jumping over the cracking ground. Tendou’s attention shifts rapidly between the buildings around them and the road ahead, but Ushijima stays focused on keeping his feet level. 

Kuroo struggles to keep his balance, trying to move only when the quaking was the weakest. 

“Why is Daichi running the other way?” Kuroo called. 

“He’s going after Nurarihyon,” Ushijima replies. 

“Huh?”

“He’s going to try and…” Tendou cuts himself off with a hiss, turning to look back over his shoulder, as if he’s listening to something Kuroo can’t hear. Eventually he finishes with: “It doesn’t matter, either way. We need to get back - sorry, we have Oikawa’s soul - Daichi said Oikawa should be able to zip us out of here if we reconnect them- He thinks Wakatoshi can do it.”

“Didn’t we try that on the train?”

“We’re gonna try it again,” Tendou says, though Kuroo can hear the lack of conviction. 

The ground trembles again. 

“What the hell is happening?”

Tendou shakes his head slightly, before they’ve fully closed the gap, and Kuroo turns to fall into place behind them, running as much as he can with the earthquakes rippling underneath. 

It was like nothing he’d ever seen before. 

It wasn’t just that the city was crumbling, it was coming apart at the very seams - stone that broke off from the empty buildings seemed to fizzle and crackle into thin air, the sky chipped off in chunks of black fog, the earth split, but nothing burst forth from it’s crust to replace the cracks - it simply left fissures as it ruptured, through which darkness was rich and unnervingly deep. 

It was just… 

Disappearing. 

Crumbling. 

“Shouldn’t we maybe wait for Daichi?” Kuroo asks. 

“No,” Tendou calls back. “If we wait, we lose time and-”

But whatever they’re saying is cut off by a much larger, violent shaking, as the earth shudders and they’re all disbalanced. 

The fissure runs beneath them, dirt shattering and splitting into darkness - Tendou shrieks, stumbling back and clawing at the earth to drag himself and Ushijima back far enough to avoid being lost into the darkness. Kuroo finds himself lucky enough to have been off the main fissure, but the cat on his shoulder digs its claws into his shirt. 

It’s separating them. 

“Where’s Oikawa?” Kuroo calls. 

Tendou nods to him. “Your side, beside you.” 

“Alright, let’s - try and stay together, but-”

As if punishing him for saying it out loud, the fissure beginning to separate them starts crumbling away, widening significantly. 

“How about we just run?” Ushijima interrupts, before grabbing Tendou’s arm and taking off towards the way they’d come in. 

“Come on,” Kuroo says, talking either to the cat or the ghost-Oikawa that was supposedly following him, as he turned to break into a sprint, praying he didn’t trip and lose himself to the void beneath the earth. 

 

---

 

The railroad is collapsing. 

The station crumbles, chunks dissipating into thin air, the sky torn into ribbons. The whole world shakes, and Kenma keeps his head ducked low to try and keep himself safe. 

He tries, weakly, a few times, to shake Oikawa, as if they hadn’t tried that again. 

“Please,” he whispers. “Please, come on, wake up, we need you.” 

But nothing happens. Nothing can happen. 

And their plan, their only plan - 

Well, Kenma wasn’t sure any other trains were coming when the tracks were disappearing into the black veil of nothingness beneath the earth. 

 

---

 

The fissures grow wider, and more sporadic. They have to jump a few small ones, but it’s not until they’re out into the long, vast expanse of space before the station that Kuroo realizes exactly how bad things had gotten. 

It occurs to him that there’s more blackness than world now, that the earth is becoming a series of islands, that the sky is fluttering just a few weak strips. 

A quake hits that throws Kuroo off balance, and sends another crack splintering across the earth, splitting a massive rift in the distance. 

Thankfully, Kuroo thinks it's not in his way - actually, ahead of him is quite stable. Secure. 

Tendou and Ushijima don’t have such luck-

“Let go of me,” Tendou says, shaking himself free of Ushijima’s grip. The moment he’s left untouched, he begins to splinter and stretch again, hissing in pain as his bones pop for what must be the dozenth time this evening. 

“Wait-” Kuroo shouts. “Are you going to try and jump that?” 

What happens if someone falls into nothing?

But even if they heard him, neither seem to take much heed of his terror, and Tendou breaks off first, paws slamming into the earth as he builds up speed. It’s… almost awe-inspiring, as he launches off the edge, sailing through the air to clear the gap with something that was near ease, kicking up dust as he lands and turns around. 

Kuroo thinks, with a bitter irony, that he’s rather glad that they’re all strong athletes. He remembers Daichi quipping about how nice it was that Bokuto, a to-be professional athlete, was the one that fell down the well.

It sure is nice that asking Ushijima to jump that rift is a viable option. 

“Be careful!” Kuroo shouts, maybe uselessly, as Ushijima winds up to a run-up. 

He does not have a faster top speed than the satori - he does not have the distance of the yokai - the earth seems to crumple and tear further beneath him. 

Tendou leans himself out over the empty space, unnervingly long arms extended, and-

Kuroo wonders if there’s even a drop to drag Ushijima up from - something in his gut tells him that there’s only about a foot of space to fall before the emptiness would claim them. 

But he doesn’t find out. 

Tendou’s claws dig into his extended arm, and he’s able to yank him the rest of the distance to go tumbling into the earth on the other side. 

Kuroo feels like his heart is going to explode, as he watches both of them, in some kind of overwhelmed silence, pull themselves up and start heading off again. 

“Well it’s a lucky thing we don’t have to do that, eh?” Kuroo says, as he turns to start running himself again, though he’s immediately thrown off balance by another quake. More fissures are split, but his path remains at least manageable. Then he adds: “Let’s go, Oikawa,” even though he has no idea if Oikawa’s even still with them or not. 

---

 

Daichi finds it surprisingly easy to navigate the disappearing world. Jump here, turn there, adjust his balance a bit. He leaps through the broken city, its beautiful architecture disappearing in sharp, jagged rips. 

I’m the problem. I’m the problem. I’m the problem. 

I’m the reason everyone is in danger.

He occasionally sees the yokai - a woman with a torn up, bloodied face sprinting away, a massive, hulking snake disappearing between buildings. But they’re running, they’re all running. 

I have to make this stop. I have to make this stop whatever it takes. 

I need them to be safe.

“Nurarihyon!” he shouts, when he reaches an intersection that has most of its ground intact. “Come out! Come out! We need to talk-”

“I don’t think we do,” the furious voice spits, and Daichi stumbles around to find Nurarihyon standing there, feet planted on the empty space above one of the fissures, as if the ground still existed for him. 

“Yes, we do-”

“Shouldn’t you be running with your friends? Desperately trying to undo what you’ve done? Making one last final play?” 

Daichi opens his arms. 

“That’s what I’m here for.”

Nurarihyon tilts his head. 

“Oh? Do tell.” 

“I know you can’t send me back. I’m not asking you to - but you can send them back. I know it. You can undo Oikawa’s sleeping curse, or… or just zap them somewhere safe. They’ve done nothing to deserve your wrath except be my friend, and you can’t punish them for that.”

Nurarihyon seems to consider this for a moment, before saying: 

“Then… what do you want me to do with you?” 

Daichi laughs, beckoning to the collapsing world around them. 

“I go down with the ship.”

“You’re fine with that?” 

“That’s what you want, right? That's why you've done all this at all, to keep them from me. So I'm giving you what you want. Let them go, let them be happy, let them live, and you've got me, you've got me here, whatever you need to do to put a stop to all this, do it. If I'm the problem, solve it.”

“You…” Nurarihyon tilts his head to the side. “Do not look like a man asking me to kill him.” 

“What do you mean?” 

“I’d have expected… more emotion. Tears, a shake to the voice, upset of some kind.”

Daichi has nothing to offer but a hapless shrug. 

“I don’t know what else to tell you,” he says, after a minute. “Crying won’t save me, will it?” 

“No, I don’t suppose it will.”

“Then just do it. Whatever it is you need to do to stop me from finishing the job on this place, to stop them from getting hurt by this, to make it go away, just do it-”

And Daichi steps back, opening his arms wider and closing his eyes. 

“You’re a good man,” Nurarihyon says. “It’s a shame you weren’t allowed to be one for longer.” 

But before Daichi can reply to that, there’s a sharp, tearing pain in his chest. 

Sorry, Dad. 

You tried your best.

Tell Mum I love her.

 

---

 

“Then call someone!” Rion is shouting. “Call your magic-yokai-shaman-whatever you have, do something!”

“I… I will, I’m trying,” Oksana shouts back. “But if you remember, the yokai fucking hate me, so I don’t actually have a ton of easily accessible-”

“Uh, guys?” Suga interrupts, as Daichi suddenly, and without warning, starts to seize, body stiffening suddenly and then slipping too fast for Suga to catch, as he falls from his chair and hits the ground hard. 

Rion whips around, eyes going wide with panic before he pulls himself together and rushes across the room to hit the ground beside him. 

The seizure grew more violent, as Rion tries to pull him away from the hospital bed, or anything that might hurt him to knock into. 

“What’s happening?” Suga says, though his weak question is lost in the sea of shouting and panic. He glances at Oikawa, who remains still and calm, chest rising and falling in that ever constant sleep. 

“No, no, no- no-” Rion is saying, voice shaking.  “Oksana-?”

“I don’t know,” she says. 

“Oksana-”

“I don’t know!” she shouts, louder, before looking at Suga. “Don’t just stand there, go get a doctor!” 

Suga doesn’t think he can move at all, actually, but the terror in her voice is enough to kickstart his nervous system, and he stumbles back a step, feeling sick to his stomach, before he hits the door and has to turn around to force his way out. 

“Help!” he shouts, hoping to catch the attention of any of the hospital staff - oh, thank god they were already in the hospital. “Help! We need help now - Please!”

---

 

The whole world has become nothing but an earthquake. So violent that Kuroo doesn’t think he’s going to be able to stand up again. He hits his knees, and it’s all he can do to stop himself from being thrown into one of the fissures 

He hears the cat crying out, and everytime he almost gets to his knees, it’s right there with him, as if unwilling to leave. 

“If you can get outta here,” Kuroo coughs. “Run, kitty.”

But the cat does not. It stays. 

He thinks he’s going to be left behind - but when the earth gives him four seconds of reprise, he can see, maybe a dozen meters off, Tendou and Ushijima in a similar predicament - they’ve managed to get back to their feet, but every movement just throws them to the side, and it takes both of their complete focus to not be thrown into the abyss. 

The earth falls away around them. 

There’s nowhere to go-

And then-

Nothing. 

It stops. 

The earth trembles into silence, and then there’s this whistling noise in Kuroo’s brain, a ringing in his ears, as absolute silence takes over. 

The ground doesn’t shake, the sky doesn’t fall, the emptiness doesn’t creep up. 

He pushes himself up to his knees, finding himself barely more than a foot away from the edge of the darkness, looking around until the fluffy black cat scrambles under him, as if to take shelter, and casts its attention around in curiosity. 

He looks across the world, to where Ushijima and Tendou were sitting up as well. Kuroo can see them talking, but can’t hear what they’re saying. 

“Oikawa, was that you?” Kuroo shouts, but there’s no way to get an answer. 

“Kuroo!”

He lifts his head, turning to see Tendou shouting at him, then pointing into the distance. 

He looks, and-

The station. 

Kenma, looking frazzled and terrified but blessedly still alive, waving his hand eagerly. They’re still quite a distance away, and there’s quite a bit of damage between here and there, but-

Well-

Without the violent shaking of the earth, without everything falling apart, it seemed…

Well, they could make that work. 

How lucky they were, that it had all just stopped. 

Chapter 38: Time of Death

Suga thinks the worst is when Daichi is seizing on the floor, but that’s not the case. 

The worst is when he stops seizing. 

The nurses have moved him to a stretcher, and they’re moving in panicked order, shouting and cursing and trying to hook him up to find out what the hell is wrong with him but-

“He’s not breathing,” one of the nurses says, as a doctor comes rushing into the room in a big, sweeping entrance. 

“Who the hell even is this?” the doctor says. 

Rion has pushed through at that, saying- “Sawamura Daichi, he’s - my son-”

“Great, get dad out of here please-” the doctor sings, but when a nurse tries to do that, Rion shoves her off. 

“He wasn’t a patient here, we were- visiting his friend, he’s - eighteen years old, about seventy kilograms, he doesn’t have a history of seizures or any kind of chronic illness but he does have high blood pressure and he responds badly to aspirin though never badly enough to go to the hospital - we don’t know what triggered the seizure, he hasn’t been exposed to anything and-” Rion jerks his head around, frantic eyes locking on Suga. “Before we met up, you were at lunch, did you eat anything? Did he-?”

“Ah-n-no…” Suga stammers, and though he thinks it’s the truth it’s also the truth that his brain has stopped functioning and he can’t remember anything. “No, nothing he… nothing weird, nothing that… no…”

Do we tell the doctor about the magic yokai bullshit that’s going on here?

Do we tell them Daichi might be dying because of something happening in some dream world?

“Thank you for the download now please get out of my way-” the doctor sings back, pushing Rion aside to move in closer, doing his own quick check of his new patient before a nurse is nudging her way in and fitting an oxygen mask over his nose. “Who’s that?”

Suga - and Rion, and Oksana, follow the doctor’s attention over to where Oikawa was laying. 

“His friend, he’s-”

Yeah, what exactly is going on here? 

The doctor can’t do his job without all the information, but-

Rion is fumbling into his jacket, trying to get himself back on track but Sugawara is watching him fall apart, and his hands are shaking so badly he does not manage to get whatever he needed out of his pocket. 

Oksana, then, moving like an eel between the nurses, as if they weren’t realizing she wasn’t one of them, flashes her government badge across at him. 

“Mr. Oikawa’s case is under government jurisdiction, his condition is none of your concern - Mr. Sawamura here, however-”

The doctor does not seem particularly thrilled by the concept of working on government-project-patients but just rolls his eyes and focuses back on Daichi. It’s about then that one of the nurses has managed to roll in a cart of equipment, and Suga has to step back to avoid being in the way. 

“What happened to his neck?” one of the nurses says, touching the bruises in confusion, immediately followed by: “If his throat is damaged it could be any number of problems-”

“Sir?”

Suga jerks his head around, to find a nurse taking his elbow, backing him up. 

“Oh, uhm-”

“Do you mind just… stepping aside for me? I know it’s scary, but the nurses are doing everything they can for him, and it would be a great help to not worry about tripping over you.”

“Ah, yes, of course-” Suga replies, voice cracking. Suga lets himself be guided out of the room - two of the nurses have to drag Rion. 

 

---

 

The stillness after the constant quaking is… mind numbing. 

Ushijima, generally, still doesn’t having any fucking clue what’s going on. Magic, then, it must be? That was a bit out there for his general tastes, but he supposed the evidence of his own eyes shouldn’t be so easily discounted. 

(However he had not yet ruled out the possibility that he was dead and this was Hell.)

Tendou keeps shapeshifting, which is also unpleasantly concerning. It seemed Tendou still, instead of taking on so many of those monstrous instincts, but he wasn’t sure what that meant.

Plus, there was the issue of Kuroo and that cat, who’d been separated by a big rift in the earth. Ushijima was relatively certain that there was supposed to be dirt, and, like, other things beneath the crust of the earth, but soul-consuming black void was fine too. 

He slowly pushes himself to his knees, now steady on still ground. 

His hands are shaking still. How odd. 

“‘Tosh?”

Warm, thin hands are covering his own, as Tendou kneels in to get a look at him. His face is mostly human right now, familiarly comforting big, red eyes blinking at him, slightly parted mouth, hair that no longer resembles any specific shape, after the trial it’s been put through. 

He knows Tendou can read his mind - whether or not you want to take that literally or metaphorically was irrelevant, Tendou had always been able to tell what was concerning him. 

Tendou’s taking this so easily - it’s like it’s not even happening to him. How does he just roll with everything without question?

“Waka-”

“The earthquakes stopped,” Ushijima interrupts, getting to his feet. Focus on what matters, what’s right in front of you. Overwhelming yourself with the inconsiderately improbable circumstances will only make things worse. 

Tendou gets up with him. “They did.”

“Is that a good or a bad thing?”

Tendou ticks his head to the side. “Eh? Good like, I imagine. How could that be a bad thing?”

Ushijima waves a hand in the air, a little bit too exhausted to try and track his own thought process to explain himself. After a second he manages to get out:

“Waves disappear before a tsunami - no wind in the eye of a storm.”

“Ahh…” Tendou says, nodding seriously before saying: “Let’s just get the fuck out of yokai dodge and not stick around to find out, yeah?”

“...yeah.”

 

---

 

The doctors are so confused. Suga can’t blame them, this is a patient everyone is insisting has zero underlying conditions and was in perfect health five minutes ago.

Suga basically just has his hand in his mouth to bite down on, though he had originally intended to just chew his nail. Oksana has slid to the far wall to watch, eyes focused and concerned. 

One of the doctors hooks him up to a heart monitor, and immediately the room is filled with a long, consistent tone - nothing moves on the monitor. 

The doctor stares at it like it’s in a language he’s never read. 

“He’s in cardiac arrest?” one of the nurses says, sounding baffled. “How long has he been in cardiac arrest for? What happened, why-”

“Start CPR-” the doctor orders, twisting away to try and dig through the drawers on the cart they’d brought in. “Administering one milligram of epinephrine-”

Rion appears beside Suga, suddenly, banging his fist into against the glass of the window to get their attention. 

“It’s not going to work!” he shouts. “You have to give him more than that! His body won’t even process that as anything!”

The doctor is clearly ignoring him.

“Oksana!” Rion shouts. “Tell them, tell them, they need- they’ll-”

Oksana does not move from where she’s standing, staring at Daichi and the doctor and the nurses with a vacant, glazed look in her eye. Sugawara figures she’s reached the conclusion that Rion will take many, many hours to find.

 

---

 

The shaking has stopped? 

Oikawa wasn’t really being shaken to begin with. He wasn’t sure the collapse of this place could affect him, but he did imagine that being stuck in a lightless void without even the dark to keep him company was a fate worse than death, so he’s doubly glad the melting reality has also stopped. 

He’s getting comfortable being just a soul - or, rather, he’s getting comfortable playing by the rules of this hellscape of a land. He flicks in and out of existence, teleporting like the shutter of a camera wherever he feels he should be. 

He tries to ignore what he knows has happened. 

Daichi being here was the reason this place was coming apart. 

Did I destroy the Night Parade? 

No, no, I… I was going to make it better. I was going to fix what Nurarihyon had done-

He blinks into existence at the station. The railroad is mostly destroyed, there’s streaks of empty, blackish nothingness throughout the earth and the mountains beyond. 

Nurarihyon did this. 

I did this. 

Can I undo this?

Can Nurarihyon undo this?

Maybe if I give him what he wants, if I agree to go with him, he’ll make it okay again.

He shutters back a step and finds himself staring down at Bokuto, who’s still dutifully holding Oikawa’s body. Oikawa turns around to see what he’s looking at, and notices that the blurry motion in the distance are people - Kuroo, and Ushijim and Tendou. Moving in slowly. 

A little distance away, Kenma has starting to investigate the cliff-edge of the rifts. Oikawa wants to spray him with cold water or something, tell him to get away from the edge and don’t even consider touching at void, but thankfully Kenma’s self preservation instincts seem to be winning and he doesn’t reach a hand in. 

He’s just curious. 

Who wouldn’t be?

Oikawa returns to Bokuto, and crouches down to reach a hand out, phasing through himself annoyingly. Goddamnit. 

Alright, well - 

He pops away again, appearing back in the crumbled and ruined city. 

Empty. 

He moves to a different street. 

Empty. 

He moves to an intersection. 

Empty. 

Hmph.

“Oikawa?”

He jerks himself around, shocked by the voice speaking to him. Coming face-to-face with Nurarihyon now feels like some kind of cruel joke. 

“Where’s Daichi?” Oikawa replies. “He came to find you, did you speak to him? Is that why everything’s still?”

“Mhm. That would be correct. The boy was a good seed. It’s a shame these were the circumstances that came to pass, but… I did warn you.”

Oikawa grinds his teeth down, feeling a sharp pain in his jaw that reminds him that’s not good to do. 

“Where is he?”

Nurarihyon gives him a smile. “I sent him home.”

Oikawa doesn’t believe that for one second. 

“If you were capable of doing that, you would have done that the moment he appeared here,” Oikawa spits back, stepping towards him. “What did you do with him?”

“Your friend asked me to make sure you got home safely,” Nurarihyon replies. “He accepted the consequences of guaranteeing that would be possible. I didn’t do anything I wasn’t given permission to do.”

Oikawa feels sick. 

He reaches a hand out to jab it at Nurarihyon’s chest, but his hands whiffs through him, like dust. He remains looking solid. 

“What did you do to-”

“Oikawa,” Nurarihyon interrupts. “Your friends need you if they are to have any hope of waking up. I suggest you return to them and do as Daichi wished.”

“No, no, I’m not leaving without him-”

“Then you are not leaving at all,” he says. “And you are dooming your friends to a similar fate. That train will not arrive without a conductor.”

Oikawa stares at him, trying hard to quell the rising, burning panic in his chest. Oikawa has felt bad plenty of times. But the dread that roots itself into his stomach is unlike anything he’s ever felt before. 

“If I go home and he’s not there-” Oikawa says, and he can hear the water in his voice. 

Nurarihyon stares back at him, level and impassive and unreadable. If Oikawa were to take a guess, however, he’d say he looked… 

Empathetic. 

“-I will kill you,” Oikawa finishes, and Nuriarhyon merely dips his head in acknowledgement, and then with one slow step backwards, disappears into a puff of dust and nothingness. 

 

---

 

Tendou was having a truly terrible day. 

I think Daichi just killed himself. 

The city was crumbling. It was one of the most beautiful places Tendou had ever been, and it had been turned to dust after mere minutes of existence for them. 

He kept looking back, to the massive, glossy black buildings that were not cracked and distorted, to their long, green foliage and the street lamps and signs and it had been alive.

There had been so many years in which Tendou had heard the word monster and thought it made him an animal, monster had come alongside lizard-face and freakshow and he’d never thought monster would be something that lived somewhere like this. Somewhere gorgeous and outstanding and alive.

And yet-

There is blood and skin under his nails. 

And he no longer had the excuse of being mindless. Oikawa and put strength into him and un-fucked his brain and that meant he’d been responsible for the choices he made. 

It came so naturally.

That thing had been trying to tear Ushijima’s arm off - Tendou hadn’t even hesitated for a second to go for a kill-attack, and that was without the monster taking over. That was just who he was. He’d only just barely been able to pull himself out of it, out of that mindless fury, with the thought of there being bigger fish to fry. 

So I am a monster. 

I am capable of that kind of violence. 

Maybe he always had been. 

Maybe he’d just gotten so good at smiling when people looked at him and laughing at jokes and ignoring the leering that he’d forgotten how easily eight-year-old him had thrown rocks and sand at anyone who bothered him. 

Maybe he’d become so wrapped up in living this life of things he thought impossible for him - community, love, friends - that he’d convinced himself he was normal. 

Ushijima is radiating a steady and consistent wave of thoughts:

I don’t want to be here anymore. I don’t want to be here anymore. I don’t want to be here anymore. What happens if you walk into the dark void stuff? Not important. Have to go. Have to get out of here. Have to get out of here with everyone else. 

Tendou feels his hand still resting between his shoulder blades as they walk, and it’s weight is familiar and grounding - it keeps his body more human than nought, even though Tendou was still mentally scattered on exactly how that was supposed to work. 

(Actually, there were a lot of questions they hadn’t actually resolved yet.)

Wait - is Daichi dead?

Tendou looks behind himself, to where they’d come, to the city again, and wonders what the hell happened here. 

Tendou can’t read Daichi’s mind, but he’d read it on his face, as easily as he ever had standing with a volleyball net between them.

I’m the problem - remove me from the equation.

Fuck. 

And then it had all stopped. 

He feels Ushijima’s arm move up to his shoulder, hugging him to his side slightly. It catches his attention enough that he decides he should pay attention again, and finds there’s another series of crackling, river-rifts of evil nothingness. Fuck. 

“Guess we’re jumpin’ again, eh?” Tendou says, tilting his head to the side to give his best ‘no point in freaking out now’ grin to him. 

Ushijima stares back at him, before giving a firm sort of nod, and taking his hand off of him. 

The feeling of his body splitting and growing makes him sick. He hates it - it hurts so much, his bones stretching and breaking under his muscle, the itch of fur that sprouts from under his skin, the ache in his gums as his teeth shift around yet again. 

It’s exhausting, he hates it, but both bodies feel as natural as the other, so he’s not even sure which he prefers. 

There’s a wave of humiliation, when he feels the unnaturally long arms drag against the dry earth, as he lines up to jump the gap. 

Ushijima, at his side, staring at him. 

He had told me there were no such conditions on his love. 

But I don’t think I’d still love me like this.

But it’s a problem for a different day. 

Wait holy fucking shit is Daichi fucking dead? What the hell? Should I go back for him? Maybe I should go back for him-

“Satori?”

Tendou jerks his head to the side slightly, just enough to find Ushijima looking at him, nodding towards the gaps. “Let’s keep moving.”

He cannot speak in this form, he’s noticed. He can only speak what other people are going to say. It’s… shockingly stifling. He had not realized how much pleasure he had derived from singing and shouting and saying whatever he wanted. But he nods his acknowledgement. 

He cannot ask Ushijima if he thinks they should try and find Daichi. 

But based on Ushijima’s thoughts - 

We need to get out of here. We need to get out of here. We need to be somewhere safe. Somewhere we understand. I don’t understand - how is any of this possible, I don’t understand - I don’t understand - it doesn’t make sense - I don’t like it. I don’t like it, I don’t want to be here - we need to be somewhere safe - I don’t -

He’s not holding it together as well as he might be pretending to. 

Tendou swallows, feeling a little guilty for that. 

He watched to thrash and bloody something invisible - he’s bound to be thrown off his game a little.

So he gives another nod and lines up to jump. 

 

---

 

Oikawa notes, as he stands and watches Tendou and Ushijima leapfrog each other to get across what was essentially little lilypads of land left, that Kuroo has had no issues of the sort. 

His little cat friend just pads along in front of him, and Kuroo follows, and the biggest gap they need to concern themselves with is just a couple feet wide at the most. 

Huh. 

As such, they reach the station first.

Oikawa twists out of the way when there’s a shout of excitement, and gets the privilege of watching Kenma go running towards him, minding the gaps, and Kuroo is more than glad to sweep him up into a hanging hug, squeezing him tightly. 

“Oh, I was so worried about you…” Kuroo mumbles. 

“Worried about me?” Kenma laughs, quietly. “You’re the one that went wandering off into a city and exploded reality.”

“That was not me!” Kuroo says. “That… was… well, that was… I actually don’t understand what happened, so we’re gonna worry about that once we’re home-”

“Did you find a way to get home?”

Kuroo puts him down, but Kenma keeps his hands on his arms holding him closer. 

Oikawa smiles slightly, watching them. They’re adorable, he decides, though the cat seems to find this display of affection tedious and wanders off - well, actually, he wanders towards him. 

Can the cat see me?

Oikawa crouches down, stretching a hand out to try and get his attention. The cat, to his surprise, does notice him, and comes trotting over only to be immediately disappointed when Oikawa is unable to pet him. 

“Sorry, baby,” Oikawa laughs, as the cat makes a distress mewling noise at the lack of petting. 

“Eh, you, quit your whining you weird animal,” Kuroo calls, wandering with Kenma over to where Bokuto was waiting. 

Oikawa looked down at the cat, who was still looking up at him. 

“You’re such a weird little thing,” OIkawa says, after a minute. “What… are you…?”

The cat meows, loudly, then sits back on its hindlegs and beckons a paw at him. Oikawa tilts his head to the side, that’s like-

“Oh my god,” Oikawa shouts, suddenly, and the cat - probably delighted to have finally been recognized, makes a soft trilling noise. “You’re a - fucking hell, are you a maneki-neko? You’re a lucky cat?”

“Mrrw!”

“Shit,” Oikawa laughs. “You look… I thought… you’ve got the long white tail - which, in hindsight, is a sign of magic and not… I guess… evil… and… well… shit… wait - was this the lucky ending?”

The cat blinked at him for a second, and Oikawa does not need to speak cat to know that he’s receiving a very judgemental: Oh, you wanted more than this? Just think about how badly things would have gone without me.

Stories of the maneki-neko were few and far between - now mostly a pop culture symbol rather than a real yokai. But… Well, they were based on stories of cats leading people to safe havens before disaster - bringing good luck. 

This little fucker must have smelled the bad luck coming down the line and attached to them out of pity. 

Or-

“Wait… why are you helping us?”

Oikawa asks, but before he gets an answer, Kuroo shouts:

“Ey, freaky demon cat, stop… standing like that staring at nothing, you’re freaking the hell out of me-”

And the cat - happy to obey what Oikawa assumed it had decided was its master - wanders away from Oikawa and up to join Kuroo. 

 

---

 

“Should we… should we page Imaging? IR? General Surgery?”

“And what? Test for what?” the doctor snapped back, running through a frantic list of options. “I… I don’t… If we can’t get his heart started again there’s no point in taking him anywhere! I’m gonna push another dose of-”

“You need to dose him higher.”

The voice is soft, from the back of the room, and the doctor whips around to face the odd woman that had manages to stay at the edges of the room. The government agent, the one with the secrets. 

“Yeah? You go to medical school?”

“He’s… different from other people, his body is different, it responds to adrenaline differently. If you want even a fighting chance of that working, which... You need to… shit, I wouldn’t even just double it, just go crazy - hail mary, right? What have you got to lose, his heart has already stopped.”

The doctor looks at her like she’s insane, before saying: “Alright, no, but-”

And he does push a higher dose, just to escalate a little bit, the nurse whose arms are aching from CPR has to tap out, and the adrenaline they’re flooding his body with has no effect. 

No prior medical history - no reaction to anything, no injuries, his body is fine - his throat is clear, even with those bruises, they couldn’t find-

He was… 

“Still no pupillary response,” one of the nurses says, shining the little flashlight between the eyes she held open. 

“No circulation either - well, very poor circulation, but we have a woman hammering on his chest, so-” another reports. 

There’s no identifiable cause of it, and yet-

This kid is just… dead.

 

---

 

“Oikawa!”

He turns around, shaken from his cat-musings by the cheerful voice Tendou is pretending comes naturally to him. Oikawa gives him a slight grin in response, opening his arms. 

“Tendou,” he replies. 

“Fancy meeting you here, isn’t this just so fucked up?” he says, breaking into a cackling laugh. “The best part is, I don’t think they cover this sort of thing in therapy, so…”

“No, I imagine we’re on our own for that,” he agrees, and then realizes they’ve attracted the attention of everyone else, staring at him. So Tendou points, and says:

“Oh, Oikawa’s here, by the way.”

“Oh,” Bokuto says, nodding seriously as if it had been obvious. 

“Right,” Kuroo agrees, then: “So… okay, wait, Daichi said - Ushijima can fix it?”

Curse breaking, Oikawa wants to clarify. Oikawa… didn’t believe in the whole left-handed-devil thing. And neither did Ushijima. But Daichi did, now, for whatever reason. And he’d been insistent that it could work, so…

Oikawa would trust him. 

“Wait,” Bokuto says, as if his brain had just caught up to him. “If Oikawa’s there, who am I holding?”

“Also Oikawa,” Tendou replies. “Ushijima here is gonna punch that soul back into it’s body.”

Immediately alarmed. 

“Excuse me?”

“Relax, just kiddin’,” Tendou says. 

Once again, Oikawa is overwhelmed by the fakeness in his voice. Tendou had never been inauthentic - in fact, Oikawa had been rather pissed off by him being his genuine self so often. But this was next left. 

Maybe everyone’s just barely holding on by a thread.

“Okay,” Tendou says, clapping his hands together. “Ushijima, come here-” and now he’s positioning him quite gladly in front of Oikawa. Oikawa finds himself trying to straighten his posture and match up with Ushijima, who, honestly, just looks exhausted and confused, so it makes Oikawa feel a bit dumb for the posturing. 

“Alright… and Daichi said to close your eyes, so close it.”

“What’s that about?” Kuroo says. 

“Ah… dunno,” Tendou chirps, looking at Oikawa. “What’s that about?”

“Dunno,” Oikawa echoes back. “I kinda thought he was just being glib.” 

“You - huh,” Tendou replies, then: “I’m not gonna tell the rest of them that, that’ll be bad for morale.”

“What will?”

“That you don’t know what this is supposed to do.”

“Tendou, I’m the only one they can’t hear.”

“Ah fuck. Ignore that everyone, everything is totally normal and good,” Tendou replies, laughing, and Oikawa rubs his hands over his face.

“Just… get on with it.” 

“Right,” Tendou says, before he looks up to Ushijima, adding: “I gotta let go of your hand, so I’m gonna go all freaky-deaky again, but all you gotta do is close your eyes, and reach out, Oikawa’s right there. ‘Kay ’kay?”

“Understood,” Ushijima replies. 

Oikawa cannot help but be drawn to watching the way Tendou’s body once again is contorted and twisted away, and clearly both Bokuto and Kenma - got previously privy to the last few times this had happened - both curse and move away from him. 

Tendou does not lose control, though, merely rises to his feet and stares back at them, then-

Whiff.  

Oikawa looks down - Ushijima’s hand in his chest. 

Fuck.

 

---

 

The whining noise of the heart monitor piercing through his ear and into his brain, making his chest hurt and each breath feel like acid. 

This can’t be happening.

He feels almost weightless - his breath is numb and each beat of his heart feels hollow and sick. He thinks maybe he’s about to throw up, but his vision is flickering at the edges and he can’t really focus on anything at all, let alone move. 

There’s a crowd gathering - nurses and attendants and doctors who could not help, clerks and interns, all pretending - this is normal, for the hospital - and try to work, try to ignore the pitched whine. 

The rapid response doctor has stopped working. He’s just breathing - like he himself is on the verge of a panic attack, overwhelmed by what seemed like such needless fatality. He just shakes his head. The nurse that was still, dutifully, working on CPR falters slightly, and glances back to him. 

Really? She’s asking. 

Really?

Suga doesn’t know how they could have made the call to stop working. 

Keep going, he wants to scream, but Rion is already doing that so he holds his tongue. Don’t give up on him.

He’s stronger than that. 

The whining from the machine has disappeared, as one of the nurses takes the patches off his chest. He thinks someone asks about taking him for a scan - to see what went wrong. 

How can they just call it like that?

It’s barely been-

They’re doctors, they should be able to do something. 

Wake him up!

Why won’t they do anything to help him?

“Sir-”

Suga’s eyes flick, just for a second, to find that one of the nurses is trying to wrestle Rion back from the entrance to the room - the doctor hasn’t technically officially called anything, yet, and they need him to stay clear. 

Suga also realizes that he can’t hear anything. 

It’s like his brain has shut off. 

But he can tell - maybe he can hear it? It’s hard to say - he can see it for sure - he can tell that Rion is screaming. The nurses are afraid of him - they probably have a good right to be, but they’re begging him to sit down, let the doctor work-

Suga reaches out to grab him, and maybe it’s because he looks so much like Daichi - or maybe it’s just because he thinks if Rion isn’t given something else to do he’s going to end up hurting one of the nurses - but Suga whispers that it’s okay, that everything is going to be okay (he doesn’t believe it) and pulls Rion into him. 

There’s resistance only for a minute. 

(Please, please, tell them they have to keep working, they need to save him, I can’t lose him-)

And then he’s squeezing Suga so tightly it hurts.

He thinks he can hear the doctor in the other room: “Time of-”

Suga’s never heard anyone scream like that.

 

---

 

“Nothing happened,” Ushijima says, slowly opening his eyes again. He waves his hand around experimentally. Nothing. 

Tendou isn’t sure what to do. 

“Well… fuck,” Oikawa says, looking over to him. “How do we… get home, then? What do we do? Are we stuck here forever?”

Tendou reaches a hand out, and Ushijima moves his hand over to grab it- immediately forcing Tendou’s body once again through the nauseating transition. 

He spits what tastes like blood and bile from his mouth, scrunching his nose for a second before saying:

“I don’t… get it,” he says. “You’re right there, and - I mean, clearly his hand works on me.”

“Daichi really thought this would work- what’s the closing eyes thing about?” Oikawa asks. 

Tendou has to think about it for a second. 

“I… actually don’t know,” Tendou replies, before looking back to the others. “Did… do you guys know what that’s about? Daichi said, specifically, close his eyes, have him touch Oikawa, like… why would he have said that?”

Kuroo crosses his arms, chewing on his lip nervously as he thought. “Mediation?” he offers eventually, a little helplessly. “Like… clear your mind?”

“Ushijima’s mind is clear, trust me,” Tendou replies. “And Daichi - he doesn’t. It was like… an order. Close his eyes. What for? He must have known something we didn’t.”

There’s a heavy silence for a second, before Bokuto says: 

“It’s because Ushijima doesn’t believe that any of this is happening.”

Oikawa turns around, rather alarmed. Tendou asks the obvious question:

“Yeah, I think we’re a little beyond… Ushijima - you can-” and Tendou cuts himself off. You can see what’s around us, of course you believe it.

“That was… I mean, that’s always the answer he’d give when we were ghost hunting,” Bokuto says. “Doesn’t believe in things he can’t see and verify himself. So… close his eyes. Anything’s possible if you can’t verify the truth.”

Ushijima shakes his head slightly, before saying: “Well… I-”

“Come here-” Tendou says, grabbing him by the arms and turning him around. “Look at me. Really look at me - only me, okay?” 

Ushijima nods. 

“We need to go home, okay? Which means I need you to trust me. Do you trust me?”

“Of course.”

“Not good enough. Close your eyes.”

Ushijima closes his eyes. 

“Good. Now listen to what I’m saying. Oikawa is standing right behind you. I can see him. I can see him, and talk to him, and I promise you, I promise you, that he is there. I have to let go of your hand for you to do this, but I need you to - trust me - and turn around, grab him, and bring him home, okay?”

“Okay,” Ushijima echoes. “I trust you.”

“You don't have to believe it, okay? You just need to trust me.” Tendou whispers back, before taking a step back and letting go of his hand, feeling himself get overwhelmed by the yokai again. 

 

---

 

Ushijima is still for a moment, before turning around with one sharp, decisive step, snatching his hand out, and-

Oikawa feels the fist tangle in the front of his shirt, gasping something akin to genuine surprise as he-

 

---

 

Is gasping awake, cradled carefully against Bokuto’s chest. His whole body is numb, like it had been frozen in time while he was away, but slowly he can feel himself coming to. 

And-

He sucks in deep breaths, as Bokuto grins and ruffles his hair and welcomes him back. 

And Oikawa can feel why Nurarihyon had separated him from his body in this place. He can feel how it’s connected to him, how the power is so free flowing - he can feel it tethered Tendou to him - he can even feel the maneki-neko drawing from it. One and the same with the Night Parade. 

None of it is real. 

Oikawa becomes aware of it with such a startling clarity that it almost makes him laugh. 

None of it is real. 

Not really.

“Let’s go home,” he mumbles, at the same time an old coal train comes blazing into the station with a gust of hot air and wind. 

“What, you gonna make me carry you-” Bokuto starts to tease, but-

 

---

 

Bokuto is opening his eyes, the rumbling noise of a train rocketing over rails, chattering, laughter. He sits up, head groggy and eyes blinking to adjust to the light. He’s curled in the seat of a passenger train, arms distinctly empty of Oikawa-

“What?” Bokuto says, jerking his head around. 

Beside him, Kuroo startles away at the noise, hand snapping out and grabbing Kenma on reflex to shake him awake. 

“What’s happening?” Bokuto asks, before noticing Ushijima and Tendou both slowly stirring in the seats in front of them. 

“What’s this?” he hears Tendou chirp, confusion in his tired, tired voice. 

Bokuto leans forward, to get the attention of the woman sitting across the aisle from him. 

“Excuse me?” he shouts. “Have we always been here?”

Predictably, the woman does not have a very good answer to that question. 

 

---

 

Movement catches the corner of his eye. 

Oikawa, still prone in his bed and forgotten about in the misery of the moment, slowly stirring, blinking bleary, exhausted eyes open. 

Something shocks itself back to life in his brain.

Don’t let him see-

He has to shove away from Rion, stumbling over himself and tripping through the doors. He catches the nurses off guard and manages to barrel through them, crying out gibberish as he reached-

He doesn’t mean to smack Oikawa in the face but he does anyway, clamping his hands down over his eyes and jerking his head towards him, opposite of Daichi’s bed. 

“Eha-” Oikawa starts to say, before Suga is taking the hand off his eyes and giving him his best and brightest smile. “Ah - Sugawara?”

“You’re okay!” Suga laughs, feeling his eyes overflowing with tears - he probably doesn’t look as happy as he’s trying to. “We were worried, everyone was worried when you wouldn’t wake up-”

“Oh, it was- a whole- where’s Daichi? Is he okay? Did he make it back-”

“Yeah,” Suga says, crouching down by his side to be more at eye level. He’s quite glad they had already taken the beeping machines off of Daichi’s body. “Yeah,” he repeats. “Yeah, he’s okay, everything’s okay.”

“Nurarihyon said-” Oikawa starts, shaking his head as his own tears start to well up. “I don’t… I didn’t see what happened, I thought he-”

“No, no, everything’s fine-”

“Why are you crying..?”

“I was scared, it was scary-”

“Nurarihyon said-”

“Oikawa, hey, listen to me,” Suga says, reaching a hand out to brush his tears away. “What reason would I have to lie to you? About this?”  

Oikawa stares at him, looking… hopeful, if not doubtful - Like he didn’t dare believe Suga was telling to truth, didn’t dare get his hopes up. 

Suga nods along with him, trying to prompt him to do the same. 

“Everything’s okay now,” Suga says. “Daichi is okay, he’s okay-” he hears his own voice crack over the words. 

“He’s okay?” Oikawa echoes back. “He’s really okay?”

“Yeah,” Suga repeats. “He’s really okay.”

And as Oikawa closes his eyes, nodding along to Suga’s voice, there is a deep gasp of breath from the stretcher on the far end of the room. 

 

Chapter 39: Must This Be The End?

→ honk: hey where the FUCK did the ghostcap squad go what the fuck happened
     ↳ lilylotus [replying to honk]: based on previous videos, def got eaten by that bakeneko
     ↳ honk [replying to lilylotus]: no but for real like??? Kodzuken puts out that “haha yikes we’re busy” message and then everyone else is just MIA off the internet forever?
     ↳ balthazar [replying to honk]: it is super weird for 5 teenage boys to go completely dark on social media

→ JustFairyThings: i wonder if maybe the influencer shiz just wasn’t for them? I mean, they went to that mega party and then all clearly burned out. So.
     ↳ Ziggyzagoon [replying to JustFairyThings]: idk it was just so sudden? And all the vids from that night look like they’re having so much fun
     ↳ JustFairyThings [replying to Ziggyzagoon]: you’re probably the kind of person who’s easy to lie to
     ↳ Ziggyzagoon [replying to JustFairyThings]: uncalled for???

→ Lousan666: not a day goes by where i don’t think of those guys. What the fuck was that even about? The teenager equivalent of a mid-life crisis???? “Five volleyball jocks realize they’ll all die someday and become social media stars”
     ↳ Bread [replying to Lousan666]:in hindsight it’s super fucking weird that five people, all volleyball captains, suddenly decided to start a ghost hunting career
     ↳ Lousan66 [replying to Bread]: yeah I’m thinking their ‘disappearance’ is just them going back to their normal lives

→ Pwetzelman: withdrawal is so real. Caught myself watching old recorded games from tournaments. I don’t even like sports and i don’t understand this game but it’s so cute when they’re trying so hard
     ↳ Pwetzelman [replying to Pwetzelman]: WHY WAS NOBODY GOING TO TELL ME SAWAMURA WAS SPOTTED IN FUCKING NAHA WITH STRAGULATION BRUISING???? WHAT THE FUCK WHAT THE FUCK GUYS WHAT IS GOING ON

→ Lousan666: I rescind my “maybe this is normal” statement a friend of mine just told me Oikawa’s BODY was taken off a train in HAMAMATSU???? WHAT THE HELL??????

→ honk: praying to the bakeneko that the boys aren’t FUCKING DEAD. 

 

---

 

“Have you figured out what happened, yet?” 

Daichi lifts his head, surprised to see that it’s Oksana that slips through the little office door and into the small waiting room. It feels, somewhat, like an interrogation room - it’s clearly set up for interviews. There’s black glass against one wall that he is sure is a one-way mirror. But the room itself is homely - soft chairs, a coffee table with magazines, house plants and a corner of children’s toys that reminds him of the dentist. 

He glances around, surprised that she’s alone as well. 

“I thought my dad was coming,” he replies. 

“He was going to, but given the obvious conflict of interest, I decided I would be the one to speak to you.”

Daichi thinks about this for a moment, before nodding slightly. 

She repeats her question: “So? Have you figured it out?”

“Figured what out?”

“What happened.”

“... I don’t think I’m following.” 

Oksana sighs, heading across the room and dropping into the seat across from him. She swings a leg up to cross one over the other, leaning back on the arm of the chair and gazing at him in a way Daichi had grown used to her never doing. Oksana seemed to always have this… faraway look in her eyes, like even when she was holding eye contact, which was incredibly rare to begin with, she was seeing right through him. It made him uncomfortable in a way he couldn’t explain. 

Like she could look without seeing.  

“Sorry,” he says, habitually, as soon as he feels like he’s disappointed her somehow. 

It was weird, though, that his instinct was to give her so much respect and authority over him. After all, although he knew she was old, she looked like a teenager, not too much older than he was. She looked immature, soft in her features, unassuming. He tries not to be intimidated, but he cannot help but feel like he should avert his eyes now that he finally had her full attention on him. 

“Don’t worry,” she says, voice soft and musical. “I simply mean to ask, now that you’ve had some time to reflect, now that everything has been quiet for a bit, do you understand what happened - what got you from ghost-hunting-videos to being dead on a stretcher?” 

He has to think about this for a second. 

“I’m an alien,” he answers. 

She makes an incorrect answer noise, waving the answer off. 

“You’ve been an alien your whole life. That didn’t matter.” 

“...it… didn’t matter?”

She stares at him for a moment, before saying: “Just try again, think a little deeper about it, what happened.”

Daichi really does try. He really does, leaning forward on his knees and looking down at his hands to try and think back to everything that had happened. The motion forward sends a stiff, aching pain up his chest, still unhealed ribs protesting the movement. It had been weeks, and yet his body hadn’t fully recovered. It was annoying, if nothing else. 

What… What had happened? 

After a moment, when she realizes he’s not going to come up with the answer, she says:

“You started looking.”

“Eh?”

He lifts his head again, waiting for an explanation. 

“The principle behind not telling you about what you were, in training you to avoid looking at anything, was to rewire your brain into perceiving everything as normal, to never give yourself a reason to question it. And as a result, it never occurred to you that anything could be amiss. How many times did you subconsciously tell yourself that there was only one shade of black? How many times did you tell yourself that everyone only saw one shade of black simply because there was no point in distinguishing between them. How many times did you try and explain to someone else that the shadows swirled with such starkly different shades, were so obviously alive with the shades of black, and then got nothing but confusion in return? How often did you tell yourself that they must see it too, but it just didn’t matter? How long did it take for you to just stop bringing it up?”

“I… I don’t know-”

“And then, suddenly, you meet this smart young man who gives just a seed into your mind, a thread of belief that maybe there is more to the world than what has been presented as fact, and all you have to do is tug at it, pick at it, unwind that thread and suddenly the whole blanket is coming undone, the whole world you understood is unraveled and you cannot put it back anymore.”

He feels like he’s being shamed, but Oksana is speaking rather plainly, and has stopped looking at him, her characteristic, empty gaze, fixed at some point behind his shoulder, unseeing. 

“The problem,” Oksana continues. “Was that there was no conspiracy.” 

“I mean,” he opens his arms, beckoning around him. “Secret alien organization, evil magic yokai, I got strangled, like, things were trying to kill me, you said it yourself, I was dead-”

“Nurarihyon is not evil,” Oksana replies back, a little sharply, despite not looking at him still. “You were the one that picked at the thread.” 

“Uh - I think he was-”

“Daichi,” she says, snapping her attention back to him. “What was Nurarihyon doing?”

“He was-”

He tries to remember what the last few months have been like. 

“He kept… appearing to Tendou, trying to… to-”

“Exactly. Nurarihyon was interested in the yokai halfbreed. Because that’s his job. But you saw a thread, and you started to pick at it. And you picked at it, and picked at it, and created a conspiracy around him that forced his attention on you. Mr. Tendou reported Nurarihyon’s initial references to you were unfriendly, but dismissive. He did not wish to engage with you at all. Until, of course, you made yourself a threat to him.”

“That’s not my fault! He went after Oikawa, he… kidnapped my friends, he was torturing Tendou!” 

“Oh, I’m not saying he’s a good person,” Oksana says, leaning forward, towards Daichi, and reflexively he leans backwards. “I’m explaining to you why you ended up dead. Ideally, we want to avoid a repeat offense, you know? If you go looking for monsters, you will find monsters. Full stop. That is the-” and here she lifts up a hand, tapping her temple, just a quarter of an inch from the corner of her eye. “whole point. Everything occurred because you expected something to occur. You went looking for a problem. And it killed you.”

“Don’t poke sleeping bears,” Daichi replies. 

“Exactly.”

“Why hasn’t Nurarihyon just… killed me again? Why haven’t the yokai tried to kill me - there were… hundreds before, like… I could barely walk a block without seeing something, but… now they’re…”

She tilts her head to the side. 

“Because it’s over, Daichi,” she says, sounding a little amused. “Do you not realize that?”

“...what?”

“Nurarihyon believes there was a kind of finality to the events that occurred - he got to kill you, the Night Parade… apparently collapsed, not that we can verify that… And Oikawa believes that there was a finality to the events. He got everyone out of the Night Parade. You woke up okay. The monsters stopped attacking. Both of Japan’s core believers think that the climax is over, and therefore, it is. The yokai have retreated, back to their natural habitats and homes to live as they’re supposed to, the believers are not pumping them full of anxiety and fear and pressure anymore, so they are content - now, that’s not to say that there won’t be the odd monster that finds its way into your path that you might need to worry about, but… what I’m trying to say, Daichi, is that you are now looking at a new blanket, and there are a thousand dangling threads, and you need to be careful not to start picking at every single fucking one of them just because you don’t know how to leave something alone.”

“Well… what do I do, then? Go back to being blind? Ignore the fact that magic and monsters are real?”

She smiles slightly, before saying: “When you were born, I wanted to keep you here, but… your father wanted you to have a normal life. So I extend the offer to you again, formally this time. If you wish for a path in life that might make this whole thing make more sense, then… stay here-” she opens her arms. “Work with us. We could use another of us on the team.” 

Daichi thinks about this for a second, before saying: “I don’t… even understand what you do.”

“We’re looking for the truth,” she replies, sincere and sweet in her voice. “We don’t know why the aliens are doing this to the planet, we don’t know the first thing about them, we’ve never gotten video or photographic evidence, we’ve never even gotten a… a lost screw from their ships. Nothing but the DNA they leave behind in our children. So if you want to seek the truth, if you are dissatisfied with everything else, this is where you start. That is the threat - the yokai are not for you to control or bother, they are part of what we are trying to defend.”

“And what if I say no?”

She shrugs. “Then you go get a job. Live your life. Do whatever it is that you want to do. But be careful, about what it is you intend to do with your free time. You can’t stitch your old blanket back together, you’ve already taken it apart.” 

 

---

 

“Have you figured out what happened, yet?” 

Oikawa looks up, slightly surprised to see Rion standing in the doorway. 

“I created a feedback loop of belief that culminated in Nurarihyon attempting to kill Daichi due to our mutual fears about one another.”

“Excellent. So this won’t take so much time,” he replies, shutting the door behind him as he moves to sit in the seat across from him. The room is… rather uninteresting. Oikawa had been stuck here for a few hours now - everyone had, actually, in some kind of protective hold. Daichi was injured, apparently, from whatever had happened with Nurarihyon, and they’d kept him under observation otherwise. Oikawa had been offered to be taken home, but declined. What home would he be going back to? With his mother? Saku? There was no point, not after everything he had done. 

Iwaizumi had come out here, the moment they’d had the option. He’d been grateful for that, living in a hotel alone, with nothing but his own discomfort to stew in, had been almost unbearable. But he was going home now, and so was Daichi apparently, which meant that Shima Three needed to do what Oikawa figured were exit interviews - debriefs, to cap off the casefile under his name. 

There was something very odd about Daichi’s father, Oikawa thought. Perhaps it was merely a byproduct of the fact that he himself did not have a father in his life growing up that made him so wary of any kind of parental oversight, but there was something so… unusual about a man who had dedicated his life to finding out the truth behind aliens. Perhaps, Oikawa reasoned, it was not his inherent distrust of fathers, or authority in general, but rather that Oikawa could see his own future in this exact kind of place. Rion was, albeit with slightly less of the whimsy and personal gravitas, the exact same kind of person as Oikawa - that is to say, obsessed to the point of insanity with trying to find alien life. Different causes, sure, but it was an uncomfortable mirror. 

Would Oikawa be happy in this kind of life? If they offered him a job, would his obsession with it all be enough to fuel a career? Was it enough for Rion? 

“Do you have any follow up questions?” Oikawa asks, when he noticed that Rion had been quiet for a minute, writing something on a clipboard he kept braced against his knee. 

“Mhm,” Rion assures him, apparently just a slow writer. So Oikawa waits patiently. He waits, and waits, until Rion looks up again, a painfully aware kind of look, the kind of look Oikawa was not used to being under. Like he was the only thing in the room Rion was seeing. “I can’t tell you how to live your life,” Rion says, after a minute. “But I do want to run through a few things to make sure you’re aware of it all.” 

“Oh?”

“Number one, your power of belief and the concept of knowledge are not synonymous, you will not be able to choose to make something real, that is to say, if you want something, it will not happen, that’s not how belief works.”

“Oh, so it’s the not-fun kind of debrief. 

“Number two, you can tell whoever you want about this, there is no government agency running around shooting those who seek to prove that monsters are real, that would be crazy, however whether or not you feel like you want to go around trying to convince the general public that you’re a super powerful quasi-psychic magic man is up to you, I advise against it, in the past that has not gone over well.”

Oikawa thinks about that for a second, before saying: 

“You’re saying I should keep it a secret?”

“I’m saying if you like life outside of a psychiatric hospital you should do your best to not convince people to put you into a psychiatric hospital.” 

“Got it.”

“Number three-” and here he cuts himself off, staring at the clipboard he held and, after a second, sighing and putting his pen down to look at Oikawa again, clearly annoyed with whatever he had read. “Look, I’m going to level with you, kid-” he starts, which makes Oikawa sit up and pay a bit more attention. “This isn’t something we can help you with. Oksana has a wide breadth of knowledge and if there is something we can do to help you, we will, but as far as we know, it’s… all just… whatever it is. It’s important to me that you understand that you’re still human. Nothing that’s happened changes the fact that you’re an otherwise regular human kid. So if you can live your life, happy and healthy, I’ll consider this whole affair a case well handled, and that’s all that matters. But if you’re not planning on doing that, if you’re planning on chasing down Nurarihyon, if you’re planning on pursuing this… we need to know - I can’t-” he cuts himself off, clearly struggling with whatever he was trying to shove down. 

“You… don’t want me hanging out with Daichi anymore, do you?”

A look of pain crosses Rion’s face for a second, before he nods just slightly and says:

“Nurarihyon was afraid of your connection, and he’s… been MIA for the last few weeks, so we have every reason to believe he’s backed off, or… satisfied with whatever he has, but… if he… Oksana survives by not engaging with the yokai - she doesn’t want you anywhere near Shima Three or herself. That’s why I’m here - she didn’t think it was appropriate for her to conduct this interview, but…” he shakes his head again, sighing and sitting back in his seat. “I can’t control Daichi, and I can’t control you. But I can tell you that… this started… this was my fault, for not being transparent with him from the beginning, for not protecting him properly. I don’t condone what Nurarihyon did, I don’t think it’s fair to either of you, this should never have happened, I don’t think you did anything wrong. But I can’t risk putting him in danger again, I… I know it worked out this time, but I…”

Oikawa knows this is a threat. 

He knows it’s a threat coming from a man who has never wanted to have to give a threat, it’s a man who only wants to help him but it is a threat nonetheless, and he feels a sudden, terrified seed plant in his stomach. Equal parts the fear of hurting Daichi by proxy - and the fact that he really, really, really didn’t want to lose him as a friend. 

But that he might have to. 

And suddenly he feels twelve again. He feels twelve, and he feels like he’s staring across an interrogation room table at this very same man, and he doesn’t have anything to say because he knows he’s the problem. 

He wants to scream - I didn’t mean to do it! I didn’t mean to hurt him! I didn’t want it to happen, I didn’t want to cause any pain! How can I be the problem?

But it doesn’t matter that he didn’t mean to - if he hadn’t walked away from Daichi, he might not have ended up in this position, if he hadn’t had to go investigate all on his own - if he’d been on the train, if Oikawa had been beside him, like he was supposed to, maybe there would have been a different ending-

Of course, everything is okay. 

Everything was almost not okay, but they’re okay now. 

So-

“Why… why did this happen?” Oikawa says, after a moment. He knows the answer - he understands everything, in a way he’d never understood anything before. When he’d connected back into his body in the Night Parade, and had this eagle-eyed view of the entire reality, this understanding of it being fake, a world manifest only for the purposes of that moment, and nothing else. He knows that Nurarihyon only cared about him because he was interested in aliens and that Nurarihyon only hurt Daichi because he refused to stop. He knows that Nurarihyon only cared about him because Oikawa pushed the matter, that there are other believers, other dreamers, that Daichi could have met, that could have caused the same problem, and all that means is that there was something about Oikawa personally that was the problem. He can track the order of operations perfectly - Oikawa’s distrust of authority figures and parents, his obsession with turning Rion into the conniving father that was scheming behind his family’s back, his obsession with the government lying to them, with the aliens, with proving that he himself was not the problem. The videos getting carried away - loving the attention, loving the game. Loving that Daichi was so weird, loving that he was so afraid, seeing how different he was, and pushing, pushing, constantly-

“Who knows?” Rion replies, giving him a pleasant, uninterested shrug. “One thing I learned, Tooru, is that you have to get real comfortable with not understanding anything. There is no government agency - well, that I know of - that you can chase down to give you answers. Nurarihyon doesn’t even have all the answers. Oksana knows… shockingly little. I know even less. And this is just for Japan. There are monsters in forests we don’t even have names for in our language, and there are believers like you in those forests taking their friends by the hand to show them the way and hoping they’ll understand why they love the fantastical so much. Yokai are as geographically locked as any animal, and the believers, no matter how prolific, cannot believe in them all. So one country hunts them, another seeks to farm them, another understands, and the others dont. Secret organizations conspire, others share the truth, believers believe and the aliens keep kidnapping our pregnant women. There is no through-line, there is no story. There are too many players with agendas to tell you an easy truth. I’m sorry you got caught up in the worst parts of it.” 

Oikawa doesn’t really understand why he’s crying - he doesn’t understand why he’s bothered at all. 

Doesn’t this mean that nothing has changed? 

He already believed in all this, and there’s no truth to be found, so…

Isn’t it the same? 

“You’re a bright kid, you’ll do fine,” Rion says, followed by: “Now if you have any questions, we have quite a bit of time left, do you-”

“Do you think Argentina will be far enough away that Daichi won’t have any issues?” 

 

---

 

“Oh, you’re still here?” 

Sugawara lifts his head, surprised to find Oksana coming down the hall, tapping something into her tablet, barely paying attention to him. 

“I’m waiting for Daichi.”

“He’ll be out in a minute, he’s just-” she glances over her shoulder, back down the hall for a second before finishing, awkwardly with: “gathering himself. But there’s not much we can do, other than hoping everything works out in the end.” 

“Ah,” Suga replies, biting the inside of his cheek for a second before saying: “Are… are the monsters going to try and kill him some more? Should we be letting him back into the public like nothing’s wrong? Don’t all the yokai know he’s alien now?”

Oksana thinks about this for a moment, before saying: “You want me to go back in there and shackle him to the chair?”

“...what?”

“Just… shouldn’t you be glad you get to take him home?” 

“I want whatever is going to keep him alive.” 

She gives him a smile. 

“Sweetheart,” she says, looking amused if nothing else. “Based on my memory, that’s you. I can’t imagine better hands to be passing off his guidance to.” 

“...oh-”

“In fact-” she reaches into the inside pocket of her jacket, and in doing so, tips her tablet slightly to the side, giving Sugawara a chance to glance at the screen and realizing she had been feeding a digital cat treats and not, in fact, doing secret government work. She hands him a card. “Take my number. We could use another head on the team with an aptitude for this work.”

He blinks in surprise, looking down to the very simple business card - heavy, cream cardstock with a phone number printed on the bottom and S-1803 across the top. 

“An - aptitude?”

“Now don’t tell anyone this,” she says, leaning into him. “But I’m pretty sure you’re the only one that actually understood how this whole thing works. Playing the system like that is quite impressive.”

Suga feels his face heat up. “I mean, I’m sure anyone-”

“No,” she interrupts. “Not anyone. I don’t think you understand how impossible what you pulled off is. Oh! Speaking of- it’s probably a good idea not to let Oikawa learn exactly what had happened. As he understands it, Nurarihyon had attacked Daichi but not killed him. We… don’t actually know where the intersection of belief-and-knowledge ends, so… him finding out he was dead, might… you know, maybe just-” and here she mimes zipping over her mouth. 

Suga nods slightly, a dread settling in the pit of his stomach. “Okay,” he says. “Understood.”

She smiles again, not quite looking at him, before saying: “But, if you’re ever looking for a job-” and she taps the card he now holds, before beckoning to her tablet and saying: “Now, I’ve got business to attend to, so… have a good flight out. I’d say goodbye, but… I’m sure this won’t be the last time we meet.”

“...thank you,” he says. “And… goodbye.”

She giggles at that, before getting her focus redrawn into her tablet and wandering off. It’s almost at the exact same moment that Daichi emerges from down the hall, looking a little frazzled and fidgeting nervously, but-

Well, alive.

Even if he was still walking with considerable stiffness and pain, those broken ribs were nasty, he was so unbelievably alive that he couldn’t really feel bad about it. 

“Hey,” Suga says, getting Daichi’s attention as he approaches.

“Oh, hey,” Daichi replies, sniffing slightly. “I didn’t know you were waiting, sorry-”

“Don’t apologize,” he says, followed by: “But I’m not the only one, actually. I couldn’t keep them away.”

“What?”

Suga beckons him along, pushing open the front doors and revealing the entire gaggle of teenage boys that had been waiting in the sun for their last few compatriots to reappear. 

Ushijima and Bokuto are leaning against the railing of the stairs, and Kuroo is standing a little distance away, seemingly trying to… coax Tendou into coming closer, who is standing a good few meters away, and pointing up at the building and shouting was sounding like relative nonsense about not liking the way the gargoyle was looking at him. 

“Oh,” Daichi says, sounding genuinely surprised. “You guys didn’t need to stick around, you could have gone home-”

“What? And leave you guys here?” Bokuto says, sounding genuinely offended. “No way! Besides, your dad offered to pay for the room we were staying in, so who was gonna say no to some weeks in Okinawa? This shits been the perfect graduation celebration. Also, they asked us a bunch of these really weird questions about the hell-world we visited so I think we might be persons of interest."

That makes Daichi smile a bit, because if there was one thing Bokuto was good for, it was keeping the mood up. He wanders down the stairs a bit, at the same time Ushijima says:

“Additionally, your father took some of Tendou’s blood, and wanted to speak to him about the situation.”

“Clearly not in this building,” Daichi says, nodding over to Tendou. “Is Anthelme really causing him that much trouble?”

Bokuto seems confused, but Tendou seems to have heard the question and shouts: 

“I don’t like him! I don’t want him looking at me! He’s got a crazy evil aura, I hate it! I hate him! I am not setting foot in that building!” 

Kuroo seems to give up, pinching the bridge of his nose for a moment before turning around to look back at Daichi. 

“Kenma apologizes for not being here, but he had to go back for school.” 

“No worries, again, none of you had to wait around for me-”

“We… of course we did,” Kuroo laughs, heading over to join the group. “Dude, this isn’t… this isn’t a regular day, y’know? And, yeah, I know we haven’t really had a good chance to talk, but… We’re here for you - both of you.”

Daichi nods slightly, giving him a smile, before saying: “Well, I’m glad to have friends like you, I guess.”

This makes Bokuto laugh and slap his back, which, considering his still healing ribs, makes Daichi gasp in pain.

“My bad.”

“It’s fine,” he wheezes. 

The door behind them opens, and they all turn around to see Oikawa at the top, looking genuinely surprised to see them. 

“Oh,” Oikawa says. 

“Hey,” Daichi replies, and after a good hesitation Oikawa heads down the stairs towards them. 

“You guys just loitering for fun, or is this an intervention?” Oikawa chirps, folding his hands into his pockets. 

“We’re loitering for you, silly,” Bokuto laughs, putting his hands on his hips. “You two have been so dramatic lately, y’know?”

This makes both Daichi and Oikawa laugh, both trying to steal the same glance at each other before forcibly averting their gaze. Oikawa stares down at his feet - Daichi looks off to the middle distance. 

“So,” Suga cuts in, trying to calm the rapidly rising tension. “Now that we’ve all been… what, discharged? We’ve been thinking of… we’ve been putting together a plan-”

“A plan?” Daichi says. 

“Hell yeah,” Kuroo says, cutting in. “You didn’t think this was done did you? First of all, Kenma is right pissed that he’s been having to fend off just a shit ton of comments and questions on his own, but we’ve all been too afraid to post without being on the same page-”

“I mean, obviously we can’t tell everyone was really happened-” Bokuto starts, but he’s cut off by Ushijima saying:

“We don’t even know what really happened. Lying to our audience is not ideal.”

“Right,” Suga says. “But we’re sure nobody would be too unbelieving of a-”

“Hold on,” Oikawa says, sounding very sad but more confused than anything else. “Did you all… think we could go back to what we were doing before? That this was some long, extended ghost-hunting episode?”

This causes everyone else to deflate immediately, looking at him with wide, worried eyes. 

“I… well…” Bokuto tries to say, looking a little lost. “Uhm… I just… I meant… we… weren’t we having fun before? And, like... this was... I mean we set out to find paranormal creatures and... and then did, how can this not be... like... clearly-”

Suga turns his attention to the two silent ones, just in time to see a look of pain cross Daichi’s face. 

“Sure,” he says, followed by: “But… I can’t. If you guys want to, then… go ahead, but-”

“I can’t either,” Oikawa echoes back, sounding even more miserable. “I’m sorry.”

“But-” Kuroo starts, waving his hands at them. “You two are like our main dynamic duo-”

“Yeah and what are we going to do without our believer? We need-”

“Stop it,” Oikawa snaps, immediately. “Did none of you figure out what happened? We can’t do that shit again, it… fuck, it almost got one of us killed. I’m not going to be the cause of that, okay? So-”

Suga, truthfully, had not really expected this. 

Not this.

They hadn’t even let them finish their little planned spiel. 

We know we can’t go monster hunting in quite the same way, but-

That wasn’t what it was about. 

Did neither Daichi nor Oikawa realize that wasn’t what it was about?

But it sounds like-

Yeah, it sounds like they might know that. 

They don’t think they can do any of it - not just the videos, but the relationships.

Suga risks looking back at the other boys, and is caught off guard by how miserable Bokuto looks, standing closest to them and staring at them with genuine hurt, trying to wrap his head around this response. 

Daichi doesn’t say anything. 

“But-” Kuroo starts, but before he can finish, Ushijima interrupts with:

“They have made their choice,” and turns to head down the stairs, the first to break from the pack and end the conversation. 

Kuroo nods slightly, before saying: “Right… sorry-”

“Guys…” Bokuto whines softly. “Come on-”

“No,” Daichi said. 

Suga tries to rationalize it. Aren’t they right?

He thinks of Oksana telling him that she felt like he’d understood how this whole thing worked. He thinks that might be true, and - he knows what Oikawa and Daichi are saying must be… true, but… 

Why doesn’t it feel right?

It’s like there’s a piece missing from the puzzle again.

That annoying, needling feeling in the back of his mind has come back into play, and he bites at his lip as he thinks, trying to figure out exactly what it is that he doesn’t get. There’s something missing, there’s something missing…

“Thank you all for staying,” Oikawa finishes with, glancing over to Daichi. “Are we… flying home together?”

“I think so,” Daichi replies. “I think my father just needs to finish up, so… we’ll… probably head out this afternoon, uhm… but…”

Bokuto slowly backs away, shaking his head slightly before turning to jump the last few steps and head over to where Ushijima and Tendou were waiting. 

Kuroo gives them both a smile. 

“Well, let’s just enjoy the last day we’ve got out here then, yeah?”

Oikawa glances between them. 

“Iwa’s waiting for me,” he replies, pulling away. “I… we shouldn’t… anyway-”

“Oh! Uh, okay-” Kuroo starts. 

“Have a good trip back,” Daichi calls, though Suga can tell his heart isn’t really in it. 

“You too,” Oikawa calls back, not looking over his shoulder. Suga wonders if Daichi is able to tell that Oikawa is crying.

Daichi, of course, isn’t. 

Notes:

*heavy breathing* only a couple chapters left! I think it's going to be 2 chapters left. I'll update the ? counter the moment I know. Preemptively, thank you so, so much for reading along with me <3 and all the support and everything.

Chapter 40: The World Keeps Turning

The sun is up in the sky and the world is still turning. Rion holds the large glass door for Oksana to slip through, and they both go trotting down the cement stairs and out into the busy Tokyo street. It was always terrifying, Rion had thought, whenever he was reminded that Oksana was not the highest most authority of their department. Founder and driving force, for sure, brains and ideas, yes, but Oksana had built this industry on the funding and support of multiple powerful people and eventually squirmed her way into governmental backing - perhaps out of necessity, how many governments are willing to allow an alien invasion on their own soil? 

But it mean that, on occasion, even she was subject to the authority of some government bureaucrat with a receipt and a leash on their activities. It meant getting dragged out to Tokyo, into a terrifyingly old building to be sat in a meeting with a man who whispered harsh threats regarding national security and the badges they wore and why the fuck was a Hamamatsu hospital doctor claiming some kid died and came back to life? How did this get so out of hand? Was it not their jobs to keep everything hush hush? Do better! And do not give me a reason to see either of your faces again. 

“Well he was a peach,” Oksana says, the moment they’re back on public property. Rion huffs an agreement, digging the car keys out of his pocket and tossing them across to her as she headed around to the driver’s side. 

“He has a point, though. We didn’t exactly stay on top of this one.”

She stops, stretching up on top of the car to lean over the roof and look at him, and he does the same, the metal warm on his hands. 

“Yeah. My fault for letting you get away with your wishy-washy bullshit.”

“Hey!”

“But for real,” she goes on, leaning her head on her hand. “I’ve been wondering on it. Are you gonna retire now?” 

He tilts his head to the side. “Eh?” 

“Well… you only joined to protect your baby, and now the cats outta the bag, isn’t it?”

Rion turns his head further to the side. 

“Don’t look so stupid,” she says, then: “I mean… He’s got all the information now, wouldn’t you… want to be with him to protect him? Or… go back to your wife? Your other children? There’s no secret to keep, I… I dunno, everything’s ending, it feels like, so… thought maybe you’d find it the right time to move on too.” 

He thinks about this for a moment, before saying: “Nah.”

“Nah?”

“I can’t. I… get your point, and… maybe you’re right, you’re usually right, but… I didn’t… I didn’t start this to protect my baby, I started this to find out who did this to him and Himari and make sure they got what was coming to them - whatever the fuck they are. So you’re stuck with me - well, at least until I get the chance to punch an alien in the face,” he says. 

This makes her smile slightly. “I am glad to hear that. I’d be hard pressed to find a half decent replacement for you.”

“Speaking of,” Rion replies, glancing back at the big government building. “I’ve never been here before.”

“Oh, right, forgot to tell you I promoted you-”

“Fuck, why do you keep doing that to me?”

“Because I’d be hard pressed to find a half decent replacement.”

“What does this promotion mean?”

She breaks into a toothy grin, and then tosses the car keys at him. “I don’t want to drive.”

He catches them, rolling his eyes and they move in tandem to cross in front of the car and swap sides. 

“What does the promotion mean?” Rion repeated, more annoyed. 

“Consider yourself a chief officer,” she says. 

“Chief officer of what?”

“Y’know,” she replies, waving a hand and opening the door to get into the car. Rion scrambles to follow after her. 

“Chief officer of what?” he repeats, a little more stressed about it. 

“Just… whatever’s happening.”

Rion squeezes his eyes shut, taking a slow breath before saying: “I am begging you to stop giving me promotions I don’t understand. Is the only change in my role the fact that I now have to go with you to get yelled at when some government bitch is mad at us?”

“Yeah pretty much. And a new sign on your office door.”

“Maybe I should retire.” 

“Hah! Too late. Ya already rejected the offer. Stuck with me now.”

Rion shakes his head, before going through the motion of starting the car up and focusing on what route to take to the airport. There’s a few minutes of silence, as he worries about driving safely and merging back into the city street, but eventually he says:

“Have… have you figured out what happened yet?”

Oksana looks up at him, before barking into a laugh and replying:

“Oh, fuck no, oh my god, are you kidding me?” she says. “Look, between Nurarihyon going full fucking sociopath, Oikawa executing omnipotence over death itself, and that fucking cat that was following them around, I’m shocked that only one person was legally dead by the end of it.”

Rion groans. “I was really banking on you understanding what the fuck happened.”

“Nah,” she says. “We’re extraterrestrial investigators, Riri, not paranormal. Leave that paranormal shit to someone else.”

“Mhm… Is there a government agency that’s… like… dealing with the yokai? Should we maybe team up with them, once in a while?”

“What? I dunno,” she says, digging around to pull out her phone. “Never checked, I guess. I mean probably, but…”

Rion sighs again, before saying: “Also… who the hell did Oikawa bring Daichi back to life? I thought the entire goddamn problem was that aliens were not affiliated, or couldn’t be touched by the believers, wasn’t that? Like? The thing? Was does that mean for us? For you?”

“Well, we don’t know for sure that we are aliens,” Oksana reminds him. “We’ve never caught an alien, so… maybe… it’s just the most likely solution. And, we don’t know for sure that it was Oikawa that brought him back to life.”

“Uh, pretty sure that it was,” Rion says. “You saw what I saw.”

“I did,” she says, opening up a game on her phone. “But I also know that I don’t age. Now, I’ve never been killed by anyone before, but… hey, maybe he can’t die. Maybe the aliens are… using Earth like lab rats, to find the cure for death.” 

This, for some unknown reason, causes Rion to tighten a white-knuckled grip on the steering wheel. 

Oksana eyes him for a second, before saying: “hey, relax-”

“I will not! You’re telling me my son might… what am I supposed to do? What is he supposed to do?”

“Well I offered him a job-”

“Not comforting!”

“Riri, chill,” she says, waving him off. “It’s scary, I know, I lived through it, but… look, no father gets to protect their children through everything. But I can promise you if the worst case scenario is true… I’ll be there to watch out for him. I promise you. If Daichi’s like me, he won’t have to figure it out like I did. I’ll be there for him.”

Rion relaxes slightly, but not quite enough. 

Well, how could he? 

“It’s not so much better,” Rion says after a minute. “To hope that it was Oikawa that saved him. Because if Oikawa figured that out, we’re worried it could have a reversing effect, right?”

“...right-”

“So either my son is an immortal, undying alien who’s going to be doomed to live an indefinite lifespan, or, a highly emotional teen is the only thing keeping him alive.”

Oksana purses her lips. 

“You gotta work on your delivery. I prefer to think of it as… Your son is either a super-powered alien with unknown potential, or has a friend capable of bringing people back to life with his mind. Super cool either way.”

“Have I told you lately that I hate you?”

“Yes, about twenty minutes ago when we were being yelled at for being bad at our jobs.”

 

---

 

The silence on his phone was almost unbearable. The only people he was really texting anyway was Daichi and Kenma, though he tried to keep up with Bokuto and Ushijima - he was not sure how to even begin reaching out to Oikawa. 

Truthfully, Kuroo wasn’t even sure what he would say. Oikawa and him had never been… close, not like he was to Daichi or Bokuto - and not like Oikawa was to Daichi. Kuroo felt like collateral damage in all this, just a third friend on the outskirts forced to pick a side. 

It was annoying. He much preferred being in control of his relationships. 

But… it’s not like they’d ever hung out, like, together.

They’d just broken into an office and stolen government intel together. 

Did that count as hanging out? 

“Maow!”

“Eh?”

Kuroo lifts his head, from where he’s working on sending out emails to potential apartment landlords, and finds that his little cat friend, the cat Oikawa had assured him as a good force and Kuroo was still at least 80% sure was evil, was scratching at the window to be let out. 

Why the hell it was in his room to begin with was beyond him, but the cat seemed to keep a pretty regular schedule - gone in the morning, back in the evenings. Sometimes it even walked home with Kenma, after school. 

Kuroo was only slightly put off by the idea that the cat might still think he needs good luck. 

What’s coming down the line, buddy? he wants to ask, but the cat mostly just ignores him and sleeps. 

So he gets up, and lifts the glass of the window, to let the cat slip out and disappear into the dawn, going about it’s evil - or good? - lucky cat business as it always did. 

Kuroo watches it go, shaking his head slightly before pulling back inside and turning to head back to his laptop. 

 

---

 

The summer had set in nice and slowly, and Kita was honestly quite pleased with the way work on the farm was progressing. It was especially strange to be working without school looming overhead. Well, not high school - and not volleyball. He caught himself struggling with the limbo of rearranging his schedule. What did he replace the hours and hours of time he’d dedicated to volleyball with? He’d need something that got him a bit of exercise - farmwork kept him active but it didn’t push him any, not really. 

He fends off calls from both Atsumu and Osamu regarding who was technically vice-captain and who was supposed to be captain, and he tries to explain to Suna that no, he can’t do anything about the fact that there were no better options for captain, and also you shouldn’t be calling me during school hours, I know you’re supposed to be in class. 

And he worries about his work. Aran was looking into professional teams, which was incredibly impressive, and by contrast, Kita was a little underwhelmed by his small university agricultural program he was toting around for his future. 

He wasn’t used to being underwhelming.  

Consistent, slow, reliable, persistent, steady. Stay the course, he tells himself. It’s natural to feel a little let down, going from a national-ranked sports team to nothing, but you cannot let it get in the way of what matters to you. 

He opens the door to his home without paying much attention, moving on autopilot as he kicked his shoes off and wiped mud from his palm off on the front of the overalls he wore, muttering to himself about needing to find proper help for his grandmother before he left for university. He certainly wouldn’t be able to help like he used to, not until he graduated-

“And what! Do you think! You were doing? Playing! God? You! Insolent! Little-”

Kita is caught very off guard by the screaming ihs grandmother is doing, and then is even further shocked to find her in the living room, spry as if she were only eighty years old, chasing an old man around the living room and absolutely wailing on him with a slipper. 

“Grandma?” Kita says, standing in the doorway to the living room. 

“Ah-” Yumie stops, turning to look at Kita, seeming surprised that he had come back into the house so quickly after leaving. “Dear, I apologize-”

“Oh,” Kita turns his attention to the old man, who is unraveling himself and brushing himself off. “Nusan?” he says, when his brain had been given a moment to recognize the face. “I… didn’t see you arrive, when did you get in?”

“Ah, just a few minutes, my dear boy,” Nusan replies, dipping his head. “Checking in on your lovely grandmother here.”

“...clearly,” Kita says, at the same time Yumie cuts in with:

“Why don’t you go boil water for some tea, Shin?”

“...I will do that,” Kita replies, recognizing that tone Yumie was using was a little bit don’t fucking say no, this is what you’re doing now.

He slips from the living room, to head across to the kitchen. 

The moment he’s gone, Yumie turns around and throws her slipper at Nurarihyon. 

“Ow!” he hisses, kicking it away. “Would you-”

“I will not calm down!” she shouts back, though she makes an effort to prevent Kita from overhearing. “Do you understand how badly you could have fucked everything up? You are a servant to the gods, not one yourself. You had no right, no right-”

“You are insufferable,” Nurarihyon hisses back. “You and your gods, your gods that don’t even exist, your plans and your kami, acting like you’re some elevated being because you come from blood untainted by mere yokai-”

“Not everything needs you to be real,” Yumie spits, taking over her other slipper. “That poor boy, you’ve gone and properly terrorized them. Think what will happen now!”

“He was fraternizing with the alien-”

“Perhaps that was the will of the gods, perhaps that’s what he was here for, did you consider that? You are too brash, you are too arrogant, you are too old. If I had my way with it, we’d be right done with believers like you. You’re lucky us foxes don’t take justice into our own hands like you seem to think you have the right to.”

Nurarihyon stares back at her, practically seething for a moment before breaking eye contact.

“I am trying to protect our planet,” he says eventually, with a more even tone. “I’m not sure how I’m the only one left that seems to care that this could be dangerous.”

“Of course I care,” Yumie replies, throwing her hands in the air. “Never think that I do not care, Nusan, I am… merely faithful to our purpose. I serve my god, that is what I am here for. If he asks me to intervene I would do so handily, but until he does, I must have faith that it is because he wishes things to be as they are. And I will not disavow his judgment.”

“Well good for you,” Nurarihyon spits. “I’m so glad that you’ve got unconditional faith in a god only you can feel. I don’t get to be so lucky. Do you know how exhausting it is? Day in and day out being asked to believe in something I cannot touch? Believe, believe, believe, how am I supposed to believe when every action I take ends with more trouble than we started with. Believe in the gods, that don’t speak to me, believe in the yokai, monstrous as they are, believe in that boy, that one of them will be smart enough to take my place because lord knows I am tired of being alive and would quite like to be put to rest. So tell me, tell me, fox, tell me that there has been a sign from your kami that there is any kind of plan. Because we are in the midst of an alien invasion and I don't see your so-called kami doing anything to help."

She gives him a smile, a little more sincere than she had been. 

“My dear,” she says, sounding rather sympathetic now. “You know I cannot answer that. It is not for you to know."

Nurarihyon stares at her, jaw tense for a moment, but before he can say anything else, Kita has returned from the kitchen holding a tray of tea. 

“Sorry we don’t have anything fancier,” he says. “I haven’t had a chance to go into town and pick anything up, so the cabinets are a bit dry…”

Yumie stares him down for a minute, before Nurarihyon moves away from her and over to Kita, dipping his head politely and accepting the offered tea. 

“No worries, my boy,” he says. “This is more than hospitable enough. Now come, sit, your grandmother has been rather tight-lipped with me, but I’ve heard you’ve gone and got yourself graduated! Tell me, tell me, what’s next in your plan? I’m sure great things are ahead for you.” 

Kita gives him a smile, and moves to get the tray down, and Yumie bites her tongue and moves around to take her own seat and listen in on the conversation. 

 

---

 

The office at the back of the Nekoma school facility rooms is dusty and overused, sitting in the lower levels and about fix feet underground, meaning only a tiny, narrow glass window had been left at the top of its walls to let natural light in. 

Nekomata scratches at the plan in front of him, trying to decide which of their new first years would be best fit for a starter. They only needed one to replace the spot they had open, but they also had to start thinking about training a new setter, and the best kid, the kid he wanted for both positions, couldn’t really fill both positions unless they wanted to do a season of double-setters on court. 

There’s a scratching at the little dirty window. Nekomata pokes his head up, to where the fluffy, greyish-black cat was trying to be let in. 

“Oh-”

He pushes himself up, unlatching the window and sliding it open. The cat noses its way in, the drops down onto his desk with a thump, dirty paws leaving little marks over his papers. 

“Good morning,” Nekomata says, dropping a hand down to scratch at the cat’s head, then under its chin. “Still keeping an eye on our boy, I see. You’re quite the diligent little worker.”

“Mrrow!”

“I know, I know. But I know you were worried about Kenma figuring you out, were you not?”

“Ma-row.”

Nekamata chuckles at the joke, and nods along. “Very well, very well. If you insist. It’s probably a good idea to keep an eye on him anyhow, I have no doubt that those boys will be getting back into trouble sooner rather than later, don’t you think? Especially since they’re hanging out with all the worst kinds of people. Believers and aliens and sinstrals. Gosh! You’ll have your work cut out for you, eh?”

“Mrr…”

“You’ve already had quite the adventure, that’s right! An impromptu trip to the Night Parade is nobody’s idea of fun. Let’s hope the next time you’re dragging them out of the hurricane you get to do it somewhere more pleasant. But I have to admit, even I’m a little envious of your lucky-streak, not sure who else could have gotten everyone out of that alive. Alright - you’re quite late, that’s enough chit chat, go on, get going.”

The cat meows again, loudly, and bounces off the desk, and the moment all four paws have hit the ground, he is contorting and shifting, shaking himself out. 

Nekomata looks back down to the starter lineup, a muddy little cat print right over Kenma’s name. 

He taps his finger over the pencil he was using. That little Kenma… so clever, so aware, of people… and patterns… and his little maneki-neko was still little more than a kitten… would he really be able to keep Kenma’s clever attention off him? 

“Are you sure?” Nekomata calls, before he can leave the office. “Kenma’s going to be your vice captain now, and you’re spending a lot of time with Kuroo - are you sure that neither started to catch on? I need you to be sure.” 

This earns him a giggle, and he turns around in his seat so that Fukunaga can give him two ok signs with his hands. 

“ Paws- itive,” he chirps, before laughing at his own pun. 

Nekomata resists the urge to groan, before just giving him a nod. “Good. Now get going, the bell is about to ring.”

He gets another firm nod, but he waits until his office door has swung shut to turn around and get back to work again. 

 

---

 

“Just text him,” Sugawara says, as he squirms his way in to settle between Daichi’s knees and lean back against his chest, tilting his head up to look at him. “I’m sure he’s just as eager to hear from you.”

“No,” Daichi replies. 

“My God you are one stubborn motherfucker,” Suga replies. “You spend all day moping and dragging your feet and complaining, and then just no when I tell you to fix it.”

“It’s not that simple,” Daichi mutters, wrapping his arms around him and squeezing tightly. “Things are… complicated…”

“Ugh. But this is pathetic, I hate seeing you all-” and Suga just wiggles his fingers in the air, unsure of what exactly he’s trying to convey. 

“I thought you’d be over the moon.”

“Excuse?”

“That I’m not speaking to Oikawa anymore. I thought you’d be glad that it was over, I know you weren’t the biggest fan of it. All of it, so… life can go back to normal, now.”

“Normal?” Suga squeaked. “Dai, you’re not completely human. Normal flew the fuck out the window. Normal doesn’t even have your postal code.” 

“Hah-hah.” 

“And… sure, I didn’t… love knowing you were traipsing around with a hot, flirty boy that was doing suspicious things with you, but that was before. That was when I didn’t know the truth. That was also before I got my mitts on you and we weren’t kissing on the regular. You’re mine now, bastard. Which means I do, actually, feel bad that you feel bad about losing one of your friends. I can grow like that, y’know. Duality, or whatever.”

Daichi laughs, pressing his nose down into Suga’s hair to kiss his head softly, before mumbling:

“Appreciated. But… doesn’t matter. I have… this… alien physiology thing to work out, and… as far as anyone knows, Oikawa is like… acid to my health, so… and he agrees! Clearly he agrees, it’s unsafe to associate. Also he’s moving anyway, so… you know, he’ll have… new friends, and better places to be, and he’ll be in some fancy new country doing whatever he wants with cooler people playing volleyball at like a wickedly talented level, and-”

“Oh my god you’re pathetic- remind me not to break up with you, you’d be insufferable.” 

“Hey!”

“Just saying.” 

Daichi just sighs, and Suga lets the conversation drop, even though there’s still this heavy, hurt feeling in his chest. 

Is this the end of it all? Really?

He didn’t believe that. 

But why can’t I figure out what I’m missing?

 

---

 

“I’ve figured it out! I’ve figured it out! I did it-!”

This sound is Bokuto, screaming. 

Specially, he’s screaming as he kicks his way into the guest bedroom at about two am, and laptop in one hand spreading bright blue light into the dark room, his foot kicking the door shut behind him. Ushijima previously quite contently sleeping on the futon they’d laid out on the floor, is immediately his victim was he sets the computer down and crawls over him, grabbing him by the shoulders.

“Ushiwaka-Ushiwaka-Ushiwaka-Ushiwaka-”

“Aaaaa- aaaaaaa-?-!”

Ushijima wakes up with an understandable fear response, fighting off Bokuto who’d decided the only sensible way to wake him up was to straddle him like a demon and shake him awake. 

“Hey, stop it,” Bokuto starts saying, swatting at Ushijima’s fighting hands. “Stop hitting me, stop it, it’s just me, it’s Bo-”

Eventually, with Bokuto grabbing his hands to mobilize him, Ushijima is able to process who this night terror is. 

He lays back down, staring up at him. 

“ Why.”

“Because I figured it out,” Bokuto replies, leaning into him. “It took me forever, because I’m not super good at googling things and I kept getting distracted by movies I wanted to watch, and also we were fighting the devil, or… whatever the hell happened, but I figured it out-”

“What did you… Bokuto why… why have you done this?”

Bokuto stares at him, seeming confused with how Ushijima could be receiving this with anything less than excitement. 

“I’m here to share incredible excellent information, and I solved the mystery, and you’re acting like I’m punishing you!”

“Bokuto,” Ushijima repeats. “You are sitting on me.”

“And?” 

“...fair point. How foolish of me to think that abnormal.”

Bokuto gasps. “Oh my God, you know how to sass?”

“Will you please just tell me what you’ve discovered so I can go back to sleep?”

“Oh! Right, right, okay, so - wait - I should wake-”

And Bokuto turns to the left, intending to reach over and shake Tendou awake as well, but instead finds, about three or four feet away, Tendou had silent sat up, knees drawn up, eyes luminous and red, reflecting the moonlight, hair wild and stuck in all directions, face round and pale, staring-

Bokuto flinches back. 

“Christ, dude,” he says. “What the hell-”

“I don’t sleep as heavily as other people,” Tendou replies. “Why are you making me be awake right now?”

Bokuto continues to stare at him, before looking back at Ushijima, then back to Tendou, then back at Ushijima, then back to Tendou-

“You’re wondering why we’re sleeping so far apart, aren’t you?” Tendou says, in a pleasant and kind tone that is so scary Bokuto is reconsidering allowing them to stay in his home. 

“...yeah. I guess. You guys on a break or something?”

“No, Bokuto,” Tendou says, maintaining his forced politeness. “We’re sleeping this far apart because this is the fourth time you’ve shown up in this room uninvited after midnight. You’ve done this to us. You’ve ruined the night time.”

Bokuto shivers, staring back at him for a second before slowly looking back at Ushijima. 

“Is… is he gonna kill me?” Bokuto asks, lowering his voice to a whisper. 

“Not my call to make,” Ushijima replies. “Now please, please, tell us what you have woken us up for.”

“The ghost!”

“Which ghost?”

“The Shiratorizawa ghost!”

“...Shiratorizawa does not have a ghost.”

“What? Yes it does, we met her!”

Ushijima just ends up staring at him, clearly trying to fit this into his head for a second before just letting his breath out and saying:

“Can you please get off of me?”

“What? Oh-” and Bokuto crawls off of him, dropping down beside him and then immediately crawling back over Ushijima to grab his laptop. “Here, let me just show you-”

Despite his deep resentment over being woken up, Tendou crawls over to shove in beside Bokuto on his other side, to see what this whole affair was about, and Ushijima resigns himself to this as well, turning his attention to - 

Bokuto’s laptop, to Bokuto’s credit, has what looks like a dozen different tabs open. And when he flips to one in the middle, open to a PDF file of an old news article - a scan of something from decades ago - both Ushijima and Tendou realize simultaneously that Bokuto has been doing legitimate research. 

“Wait, hold up-” Tendou says, leaning in to point at the picture in the newspaper scan. “That’s Shiratorizawa - like a smaller version, but-”

“That’s what I was saying!” Bokuto says. “Okay, okay, listen to this - do you guys remember - well, Ten’ you weren’t there, but Ushijima was, and… okay, do you guys remember when Oikawa brought out the flashlight, and you hated it and I wanted to speak to horse ghosts?”

Ushijima frowns, but nods. 

“Well, in that mix, right before Goshiki scared the daylights out of us, we got four scarily prompt and specific answers on that flashlight. We got that someone had been murdered, that they were a teacher at the school,  that nobody knew that they were murdered, and that they were angry about it. And then, in addition to that, we got a few more things by omission - that… I mean like the flashlight didn’t do anything after we asked. That they weren’t murdered by students or a teacher, and that they didn’t care for the horses, like they weren’t a stable person.”

“Right, so-” Tendou waves a hand at the screen. “What’s this then?”

“Well,” Bokuto says. “I thought we were doing a ghost-hunting thing, so it stuck with me that all we really had to do was find a match for a dead person who maybe went missing, or something that matched this… set of answers, y’know? So, anyway, that turned out to be really hard, and you guys all immediately went off the rails hunting monsters, but I still wanted to know if we’d spoken to a real ghost, so Akaashi showed me how to find these old news articles in some online archives and - well, look! Here-”

Everyone leans in as Bokuto keeps talking, flipping to one of the tabs that showed a newspaper announcement for an obituary from 1958. 

“This is Hayashi Mizuki,” he says. “Her obituary is really vague, and just says she’ll be missed, tragic loss, all that, whatever, but I matched it to a different news article-” he’s flipping through the tabs. “-about a teacher at Shiratorizawa Academy that had gone missing about five months previously, also named Hayashi Mizuki. Same age. So I did some digging and there’s not a ton, a picture of her in a few school photos, stuff like that, and I was still wondering what the hell had happened, right, so she got murdered, which meant there was… like, a murderer somewhere, right? Well, I ended up finding her wedding announcement in the news about two years earlier, she was a young girl, uhm… married to a man named Hayashi Fumiji. And for a long time that was all I had. I would have brought it up earlier, but everything was… ah…” Bokuto waves a hand. 

“Literally falling apart around us?” Tendou supplies. 

“Yeah. And everyone was moving so fast,” Bokuto adds. “I felt like… you know nobody cared about this one freaky experience we’d had, I didn’t wanna make it a thing if I didn’t have the answers, but-”

“You must have figured it out?”

“Well… yeah,” Bokuto agrees, opening another tab. “This article here was… okay, so maybe this is a bit of a stretch, but… I started thinking about sports, uh, ‘cause your school is good at that sort of thing, so out of curiosity I decided to just start looking up publications from competitions and all that, and I found, first of all, Shiratorizawa’s team went to the national tournament that year, and that’s great for this story because the captain of the team at that time did an interview with a journalist covering the event, in which they had asked him what was motivating their team this year, and he says-” Bokuto scrambles to find the right tab, reading out: “Our facility advisor Mrs. Hayashi has been our biggest supporter this year. We are able to be here today due to her dedication to our team, and intend to repay the sacrifices she had made for us by playing our very best. It’s not everyday you get the support of someone like her, who managed to find time for us despite everything that was going on in her personal life. It’s not everyday you find someone willing to sacrifice like that for you.”

“You think her husband killed her?” Tendou says. “Or… someone from her personal life, I guess. Could be anyone. Ex-lover, friend, whatever.”

Bokuto nods slightly, before saying: “Like maybe she was trying to get a divorce or something? This tournament took place about two months before the article about her going missing was published, and I… try as I might, I could not find any reference to what happened to her husband, or… well really anything else. So… I don’t know, I… I just feel like… this is it, this has to be the person we had… made contact with, right? And… she said she was angry, angry about it, and… I… feel like maybe she’d be less angry if people knew what had happened to her.”

“It could all be a coincidence,” Ushijima says. “Nothing here with the exception of the disappearance has any indication of any kind of murder, and even then they must have had an investigation that turned up nothing.” 

“I know,” Bokuto says, sounding immediately upset that neither boy was particularly onboard with labeling this a case closed. “But… I solved it… I think it this is the ghost we spoke to…”

Tendou thumps his head down on Bokuto’s shoulder, closing his eyes and mumbling: “You know what we could do?”

“Mhm?”

“Grab Mr. Haunted and go back and check. Right? Put him and Oikawa in a room together and you got the cell-phone and the receiving tower, we could… probably just ask who killed her.”

Bokuto thinks about this for a second, before saying: “Do you think you can get us back into Shiratorizawa? Will they let us on campus?”

“I can get us in,” Tendou replies. “Easy-Mcpease. But not right now. Right now, I’d love, so deeply much, if you’d let me go back to bed.” 

Bokuto blinked, before looking back at his computer and saying: “Oh my god, it’s two am.”

“It is two am,” Ushijima agrees. “Please leave.”

“Please leave,” Tendou echoes. 

Bokuto nods quickly, before pushing himself up to his feel and grabbing his computer, stepping over Ushijima to head back to the door. 

“I’ll call Daichi and see if he can meet us at the school - someone’s gotta reach out to Oikawa, what if he says no?”

“We’ll figure it out,” Tendou called, waving him off. “Please continue leaving now.”

“Right, okay, well, good-night-”

“Wait,” Ushijima calls, and Bokuto stops in th doorway. “I’m worried that you are planning on calling Daichi right now. I cannot stress enough how you must not do that, and please go to bed. Call him in the morning.”

Bokuto hesitates for a second, before saying: “Ah, right, of course. I’ll call him in the morning. Goodnight.”

The door to the guest room shuts. 

Tendou groans, flopping over and stretching himself across Ushijima’s lap to be generally miserable about being awake. 

Ushijima, lacking anything better to do, just pats him on the head. 

“I am going to increase the priority on finding alternative places to live,” Ushijima says. 

 

---

 

“Does it feel weird?” Iwaizumi asks, leaning in to put his chin on Oikawa’s shoulder, looking down at the email he was reading. “After all these years, and finally, finally, the plane ticket is booked. You have a date.” 

Oikawa smiles slightly, though it pains Iwaizumi to recognize that it is thin and unsatisfied. Oikawa was supposed to be a silly person, he was playful and cheery, the radiating waves of deep sadness was heartbreaking in a terrible way because Iwaizumi didn’t have anything he could do about it. He couldn’t fight whatever was causing the problem - hell, he couldn’t even apologize for it. It was weird, for there to be a Oikawa-issue that Iwaizumi was not involved in, and yet, here they were. 

He, of course, had just been so overwhelmingly glad to receive a call from Sugawara saying everything was okay. That everyone had been brought home just fine. They found Oikawa, they found all the boys. He’d been filled in slightly, quickly, though everyone had been… sketchy about it. 

“What happened?” he’d asked, over the phone, and Sugawara, with a voice heavy with tears and clearly exhausted, and mumbled:

“I don’t know, but it’s okay now.”

And Iwaizumi had asked: “Did they get hurt,” and Suga had laughed, and said:

“I… it’s okay now. We’ll get all the details later.”

And then Iwaizumi had asked, and asked, and asked. 

And Bokuto had told them Oikawa had been asleep, for a long time, and Tendou had told them they’d gone to the demon realm, and Kenma had said that Nurarihyon had kidnapped them, and Kuroo had said that the world had fallen apart and Ushijima had said that none of it had been real anyway and when he pressed Daichi he’d gotten this glazed, far awake look and then a rather confusing “I don’t really know, but they broke half my ribs.”

And then he’d asked Oikawa, and Oikawa had given him this very sad, very sincere smile and told him that, ultimately, nothing had happened. That he had just overreached again, that he’d made an error of judgment and gotten people hurt. 

He’d eventually explained more of the details - he’d explained everything this Nurarihyon had tried to tell him. 

Something about magic, something about power, something about aliens and a lot about Oikawa, but-

Well, Iwaizumi had already known that Oikawa was special, so he wasn’t really sure what was supposed to change. 

And Oikawa had told him the best thing he could do was go forward with his plan. 

Go to Argentina. 

Leave.

As far away as possible. 

Iwaizumi was going to miss him a lot - but he’d have felt better about the whole thing if he knew Oikawa was leaving with no regrets left behind. 

“I have a date,” Oikawa replies, staring at the email confirmation of his flight. “You’re gonna have to come visit me lots,” he adds, tilting his head to the side to look at him. “I’m going to miss you so much. You have no idea.”

“I have some idea,” Iwaizumi murmurs back. “I’m gonna miss you too.”

Oikawa smiles, then leans in to kiss his nose, so Iwaizumi makes a big deal about how gross it is and how he doesn’t wanna be kissed by him, but it’s most performative, so that everything still feels normal. 

And then Oikawa is watching him with that sad expression again, and nothing feels normal at all. 

This was supposed to be a celebration, Iwaizumi thinks. He’s supposed to be happy. This is his dream.

“Hey,” he prompts, after a minute, reaching over to nudge him. “You… you should give some of the other guys a call. Give Daichi a call. I’m sure they’ll wanna wish you farewell too.”

Oikawa shakes his head. 

“Oh, come on, you’re moping around pretending you’re this island man who doesn’t care, but this is a pretty dramatic cold-turkey break,” Iwa says. “You two were inseparable for a few months there - I mean, hell, you were starting to get me jealous, which is really hard to do.”

“You’re jealous all the time,” Oikawa replies. 

“Not of people who are five-nine.” 

“...putting that aside-”

“Just… call him, or… at least call someone, so that they can spread it around that you’re leaving. They’ll miss you. Not as much as I will, but they’ll miss you.”

Oikawa sighs, and shakes his head again. “I… can’t. I can’t. And he… doesn’t want me to either. What he is - I… the risk of us hanging out, or… associating, or whatever, is… if Nurarihyon comes back I don’t know what we can do, what if he… like everything right now is fine, or whatever, because we’re all just chill-zenning ourselves into not psychically inciting the end of the world but if we… y’know if Daichi says the wrong thing and I fuck it up by believing it, what if Nurarihyon gets mad again and sends a troupe of yokai to kill him?”

You can understand why Iwaizumi has been having a hard time wrapping his head around this. 

Iwaizumi stares at him for a minute, before sighing and leaning forward to press a kiss to his forehead. 

“All I know is that you are better than ‘what if I fuck it up,’” he says. “You’re Oikawa Tooru, you… you never pull back when you’re backed into a corner. You always fight your hardest.”

Oikawa shrugs. “I don’t know what to tell you,” he says. “I’m trying to be responsible. It’s not safe for me to-”

Which is approximately when there’s a sudden, furious knocking on the front door, and a chorus of about six teenage boys shouting for them to come outside. 

Notes:

If they didn't want me bastardizing all their characters into magical beasts, they shouldn't have made so many of their characters direct references to magical beasts.

Chapter 41: The New Vanguard

Oikawa isn’t sure he even wants to go see what’s waiting for him, but he has to. The knocking is insistent, the shouting determined. 

“Oikawa! We know you’re in there! Get your ass out here!”

Well he has to go-

He opens the door a little tentatively, even though he already knows what he’s going to see standing out on the steps of Iwaizumi’s family home-

Daichi stands at the front of the pack, breaking into a grin once Oikawa has opened the door. His instinct, for a second, is to slam it shut again. But he manages to withhold that, feeling a surge of anxiety well up in his chest. 

No no no-

“Sorry to barge in on you-”

“You know you shouldn’t be here,” Oikawa interrupts, swallowing back the worst of his anxiety so that he could speak. His eyes flick up, to the rest of the crowd-

Bokuto, looking as cheery and pumped as every, Kuroo, leaning on Kenma’s shoulder, his new permanent-shadow, that dark cat, has kept itself perched on his shoulder and is watched Oikawa, beckoning him, as if daring him to shut the door again. Ushijima stands a little further back - Tendou is bouncing on his heels, waiting, eagerly - Tendou does not wear the same concerned look that everyone else does. 

Is he in my head? 

Beside Daichi, perhaps, to Oikawa, most shockingly of all, is that beside Daichi is Sugawara, who stands with his hands folded together, a pleasant smile on his face, watching him, looking, as if taking in data from every breath and blink Oikawa took. 

“None of you should be here,” he finishes. 

He feels a hand on his back, and he turns to glance at Iwaizumi, who’s settled in beside them. 

“Maybe you should hear them out,” Iwa says, softly. 

“What, are you in on this or something?”

“ Pfft, no, I have no idea what bullshit your friends have concocted this time around. But I think you should hear them out.”

Oikawa chews on his lip, before looking back down to where Daichi was waiting - patiently, expectantly - for him to give the green light. 

This is dangerous. 

Did you not see what happened?

We cannot be friends-

“Fine,” Oikawa says, though it’s with a heaviness in his chest. “What is it, why have you all shown up like a mad mob?” 

Daichi watches him for a second, before saying: “Ah, we’re… going to try and make contact with ghosts at Shiratorizawa, we, ah… were kinda hoping you’d come? You know, seeing as you’re-” and he just waves a hand vaguely at him. 

“You… you really think… you really think that’s a good idea?” Oikawa scoffs, and for a second he feels anger bloom in his chest. “You think we can just waltz around ghost hunting like nothing’s the matter, and everything will be fine?”

“Oikawa, I know what-”

“No, you don’t know, and that’s the problem. And now, suddenly, you seem to be willfully ignorant of the fact that you are literally yokai enemy numero uno, you go calling to ghosts and they will kill you.”

Daichi opens his mouth, but it’s Kuroo that interrupts with:
“Well, ghosts aren’t necessarily yokai, so-”

“Yeah they’re kinda a different class entirely,” Tendou chirps.

Oikawa hates that they’re right, shutting his mouth and honestly more upset that they had caught a mistake in paranormal matters. 

“It still doesn’t make it safe-”

“We don’t know that,” Daichi says. 

“What? What? Yes we do!” Oikawa cries. “Oh my god, how stupid are you? Did you purge your last few months of memory or something? Do you not remember the world falling apart, the evil yokai trying to rip you in half, the fact that Nurarihyon explicitly said he would kill you?”

Daichi seems like he’s struggling for something to say, thinking this over for a minute before saying:

“A while ago, when I… when this was all still new, and I didn’t know what was believed, or what was real, I asked Ushijima-” and Daichi, reflexively, points behind him as if Oikawa might have forgotten who that was, “-how he managed to maintain such intense pragmatism even in the face of actual evidence, evidence we were starting to find, and… now I’m gonna have to paraphrase this, but the answer was that just because something is true doesn’t mean we understand it - and that doesn’t make it magic. My being able to see the yokai wasn’t magic, it was a genetic experiment - maybe your thing is magic, but what I do know is that my father, and Oksana, and Nurarihyon himself have all admitted that the big scary thing is simply that they don’t know what happens with us together. And… these guys have… look, they found some ghost evidence, and they need us to to properly check it out, and we have to do it together. And… honestly, if we have the option of solving a decades old murder because of who we are, then I think we should check it out. We… should find out what happens, instead of just being afraid of the I don’t know. So…”

Oikawa takes a slow breath in. 

“Monsters weren’t trying to kill me my whole life. We went ghost hunting in this exact location and nothing bad happened. There is as much evidence to suggest that putting me and you together is benign and unimportant, we spent weeks together without getting hurt. Let’s… look, you’re flying out to Argentina in a few weeks anyway, let’s… give it a shot.”

“I…”

“Come on,” Bokuto says, groaning and stepping forward. “Whatever… magic alien yokai bullshit you’re all facing aside, this is ghosts, Tooru. You like ghosts - are you really going to walk away from the option to talk to one? For proof? Isn’t it fun?”

It was fun. 

I really, really liked hunting ghosts with you guys.

Daichi must have read it on his face. 

“Let’s go have some fun, yeah?”

And Oikawa feels himself crack and give in. 

“Yeah,” he says. “Okay.”

 

---

 

It’s a familiar route, to get across town to the big, Shiratorizawa school campus. They have to go at night, of course, because that’s when the ghosts come out. But unlike most schools, the students, and some of the staff, don’t ever leave. It’s a highly secure live-in school that these idiots are now trying to break into, since nobody actually attends the school anymore.

Which is why Tendou is leading them through the alley of the city behind the school at an hour approaching midnight. 

“Where is it we’re going again?” Kuroo asks, as they finish crossing the road, and approach the large chainlink fence that was cutting through a small greenspace, the top of the school just barely visible through the dark and the woods over the hill.

“Getting into Shiratorizawa without being seen,” Tendou replies, following along the fence until he found what he was looking for, stepping in to pull aside a low growing bush and reveal a damages and opened part of the chainlink. “Ta-da.”

“Is this how you were always sneaking in and out?” Ushijima asks, as Suga decides to bite the bullet first and get on his hands and knees to crawl through. 

“Mhm,” Tendou says. “Super secret tunnel. The front of Shiratorizawa is riddled with security cameras, so even if you have a way to unlock the front doors, you’ll still be caught. Nothing’s out here, though, so as long as you know where the cameras are, you can get in anywhere.”

“Why did you never tell me about this?”

“Because you can’t keep a secret worth a damn.”

“I am great with secrets.”

“No, if that were true I wouldn’t know about Leon’s pregnancy scare last year.”

“Well you don’t count,” Ushijima says, annoyed, before it’s his turn to get through the fence, and Tendou follows after him, popping up on the other side. 

“Alright, now follow me kiddies, we gotta go the long way to the stables to avoid the cameras.”

“Got it,” Bokuto chirps, immediately starting to walk the wrong direction. Daichi grabs him to turn him around, so they can all follow Tendou across the grass. 

“Also, if you had this way in,” Ushijima starts after a minute. “Why were you caught so often? You were suspended quite frequently-”
Tendou waves it off. “That’s part of the ploy, ‘tosh. You gotta let them catch you every few months so they think you’re bad at sneaking in and out. Then, when it matters, they won’t be lookin’ so hard.”

“That goes for everything,” Oikawa chirps. “If you’re too good at something, people watch you like a hawk. That’s how-” and here he’s grabbed Daichi’s head “-this fucker got to nationals. We weren’t paying attention ‘cause of how often they’d been losing before.”

“Ow,” Daichi says, as his head is bent forward. 

Oikawa just sort of growls about it before shoving him away. 

Daichi regains his footing, catching up to them again and settling in to follow Tendou through the fields behind Shiratorizawa, having to jump the fence into the actual pasture for the horses, and head up to the barn. 

“Okay, ‘t, take ‘em on ahead I need to swing down to grab the key for the stables.” 

“The abstraction on my name has become rather severe.”

“Suck it up. Alright?”

“We will be alright.”

Tendou slinks off through the darkness, and the rest of them finish the gentle hike up to the doors of the barn. 

It feels almost… wrong. To be back here, to be doing this. Kuroo does not have his camera out, neither does Kenma, and somehow that feels even more wrong. 

Daichi looks back to where Tendou had run off, before slowly turning where he stood to look out over everyone else. 

Oikawa still stands a little ways off, head tilted back to look up through the wispy clouds at the stars. 

“Hey.”

Daichi jerks his head down, turning to find Suga sidling in beside him, taking his arm. 

“Oh, hey…”

“What’s on your mind?”

“What isn’t.”

Suga smiles a little, petting a hand down his arm for a second before saying: “Just… we’re here to have fun, remember? Try and enjoy it. We’re going to talk to a ghost! When did that stop being super cool for you? I’ve never spoken to a ghost before.”

Daichi cannot stop himself from smiling at that, nodding slightly before leaning in to kiss his forehead. 

Suga was right to some degree. 

Everything feels… wrong.

But it feels wrong in a familiar way. 

Why is that? 

Daichi notices that Suga notices he has immediately fallen back into his thoughts, despite his best efforts to keep him out of them, but he doesn’t say anything this time, just holds his hands and stays huddled in the shadow of the barn. 

Daichi sweeps his eyes, slowly, over the hills and the grass. Down the pasture, into the shadows of the trees, he can see darkness of multiple colours, swirled beneath the summer canopy. Empty, right now. No monsters to run from, no lurking horrors to scare him, just quiet, colourful darkness. 

The last time they’d been ghost hunting, they’d laughed and chased each other around, they’d made stupid videos and Bokuto and tormented Oikawa with either one or multiple frogs he kept picking up, and they’d all…

Been happy?

No…

That’s not quite right. 

It had been… 

The first time they’d gone ghost hunting, Daichi hadn’t even liked half of them - but he remembers standing with Oikawa and watching those curtains flutter without a wind, he remembers the-

Way the fear shot through his heart, the panic, that was laughter in his chest as Oikawa almost lost his mind at the burnt out candle. 

He thinks of afterwards, laughing and eating at a cheap restaurant that was open that early, he remembers…

Well, talking. Being with his friends. 

What, is the problem that I know the truth now? 

We had been truthseekers before, is accomplishing our goals always this dissatisfying? 

If I’d won the national competition with Karasuno, would I have stood to the sidelines and felt this kind of aimlessness?

A whistling noise alerts him to Tendou’s return, and he turns to look through the dark night across to where he’s appearing. He seems to… glow, more, nowadays, Daichi thought. He’s pretty sure that it’s just his eyes that see it. He’s pretty sure that the sort of unreality that shimmers over his skin, the otherness that’s so undeniable, the brightness of his eyes, it all feels like magic. 

But maybe it’s just that we don’t understand it.

Or, maybe that’s just-

Why does he feel like he’s so close-

Maybe it’s just-

“Got it?” Kuroo asks. 

“Got it,” Tendou chirps back, and turns to unlock the door.

They slide open the large doors, Daichi repeats to himself, over and over and over again, that they’re here to have fun, to find this ghost and confirm what did or didn’t happen to her. 

The horses are mostly sleeping - a few stir to stare at them, and they all whisper their apologies for waking them as they creep up into the hayloft again. 

There’s more of them, this time. 

(That’s good, right?)

They find the place they were in before. 

Oikawa methodically sets up the flashlight - the same flashlight - exactly as they had before. 

So similar and yet not the same.

Daichi sits beside him again, and Oikawa looks over to look at him. The look is searching, waiting, wondering, curious - endless curiosity, maybe that was Oikawa’s superpower. Not faith in what he didn’t understand, but a willingness to acknowledge he didn’t understand. 

Wanting to know more, to be better, to grow further. 

“Alright, you haunted bitch,” Oikawa teases, and despite the longing sort of gaze in his eyes, he manages to force his voice playful and normal, like nothing was wrong at all. “Let’s see how this goes.”

They all sit in a circle. 

Suga sits beside him on his other side - and Kuroo beside him, with that cat settled in his lap, then Kenma, and Tendou, and Ushijima, and Bokuto, and Iwaizumi - and back to Oikawa. 

He feels Suga take his hand again, squeezing it gently. So he lifts his other hand, and offers it to Oikawa. 

Oikawa might, for the first time since they started tonight, actually smile, reaching to take Daichi’s offered hand, and then forcing Iwaizumi to let him hold his - and it takes remarkably little coaxing to convince the circle to go around. 

Unprompted, Oikawa says:

“You know, they say completed circles have power. I… Ah, I wish I could say I’d brushed up on my folklore before coming here, but… there’s something to be said, for a completed circuit, making things…”

“That’s what I was thinking,” Daichi says, as the flashlight in the center flickers off. 

“Go ahead, then,” Kuroo prompts. “Do your thing, alien boy.”

Daichi smiles slightly, keeping his eyes on the flashlight. 

“We’re looking to speak to a Hayashi Mizuki,” Daichi calls, trying to use his chest and speak with intention, to make this as serious as he could. “If you’re here, please tap the flashlight to turn it on.” 

There’s a long, breathless silence. 

 

---

 

Fear has followed her every step of her life. Her father, with his heavy hand and drunken words, her brother, uncontrollable and violent, her husband, quick to turn on her when he should have been loving. She lives in a world of darkness - she has since that night, since - since - 

She’s so angry. 

She’s so angry for being afraid. How dare they make her afraid. 

She’ll show them. 

She’ll show all of them. 

“We’re looking to speak to a Hayashi Mizuki. If you’re here, please tap the flashlight to turn it on.”

Mizuki. 

Mizuki.

She hasn’t heard that name in… decades. 

Is that her? 

She’s so angry. 

Is Mizuki angry? 

No, no, Hayashi Mizuki loved… she loved… cats, and daisies and her students. She loved sports and was competitive. 

Mizuki wasn’t angry.

She was so angry, though. 

He killed me. 

How could he killed me. 

I loved him.

That’s not fair. 

They should pay.

She can destroy things, easily. She knows she can, if she fanned her anger into a brighter flame, she’s done it before - into doors, into the hay, into the horses, she can light this place up with her anger, she makes the children scream, the walls shake, the shadows whisper. 

Right now, though, she is only being asked to touch. 

She reaches down, through the pitch darkness, the world that doesn’t exist, a realm that doesn’t exist. 

She taps the flashlight on the floor in the hay, and it lights up. As it does, as that one beam of light shoots out, it turns the whole world upside down, the darkness recedes as the familiar barn blooms into vision, rarely so vivid as it was to her now. 

“Oh-”

She looks up, making eye contact with a young man that say on the floor in front of her. 

How did you do this? she wants to ask. What are you, boy? How did I hear you? 

No, no, I’ve… I’ve… seen you before - I

She looks between them, around herself, at the group that was sitting, hands linked as if to worship her, but passive and quiet - they direct their energy and their minds to the boy she had first seen, they give him their faith, so she assumes that means that he is who she should look to. 

And she does. 

He looks back. 

He can see me? How can he see me?

“Can you talk?” he asks, and she squeaks again, jumping back. 

Who am I? Can I talk? I have not talked in…

How long have I been here?

What was that name he’d said? I do not remember…

It is so hard to remember…

All I am is angry…

“Can you see something?” the boy beside him speaks, and he gives him just a slight nod. “Can you describe it for me?”

The first boy - the boy with the eyes that see right through to her soul - gives a slight nod. 

“She’s… younger, than I thought she’d be. Twenty… twenty-five? -ish? She has black hair, about shoulder length… she… well, she looks like a ghost. I can’t see her feet, but… she’s dressed like a teacher, black skirt, white shirt… she’s…”

I am a ghost, aren’t I?

She smiles for him. 

She is those things, she thinks. She can feel her skirt against her shins, she can feel her hair over her shoulders. 

“Can she talk?” the other boys says. 

“Uhm-” the first looks back to her. “Sorry, can - are you able to speak? Can you tell me…”

“Do you…” she says, for the first time in decades, the first rattling of wind through non-existent vocal chords, an autonomy manifest only by the attention these odd students have come to offer her. 

When was the last time I spoke? 

When was the last time I sang?

Oh, gosh, how I used to love to sing. 

“Do you know my name?”

He nods. “Hayashi Mizuki, wasn’t it?”

Oh, yes! Oh yes!

No, no! No! No!

She shakes her head. 

“Wh-no, no, hey, it’s okay,” he says, reaching forwards. She reflexively tries to take his hand, but can’t quite touch him. He laughs an apologetic noise-

“Sorry,” he says. “I guess I can only do so much. But… tell me wasn’t wrong, you - you-”

“Tell me what’s happening!” the boy beside him says, sounding eager and childish, leaning into him. 

“She… she… I… she got… all… distorted, when I said her name. Like she didn’t… like it made her mad.

I am mad. 

I am so mad

I am-

I am-

I am-

“Hey, what… what’s wrong? What’s your name?” the kid asks, catching her attention ago. 

My name? 

Oh…

“Yoshinaga,” she says, and she feels that anger dissipating out from her skin, from her mind, from that dark purgatory she’d been lost in. “Yoshinaga Mizuki. Please don’t remember me by the name of the man that killed me.”

The boy smiles more. “Yoshinaga Mizuki,” he echoes back. “It’s been quite the pleasure to meet you.”

“Yoshinaga Mizuki?” the boy beside him says, and it’s as the name rolls off his tongue, true and earnest, that she feels it seep into her soul. 

I can’t believe I let that man turn me into this. 

I don’t have to stay here anymore. 

I don’t want to.

I want to move on. 

“Thank you,” she says, to the boy, because he deserves to be thanked, for reaching out. But his surprise is only on his face for a second - or, maybe longer - since she’s gone, nothing but flecks of dust in the air of the hayloft, maybe never there at all, and certainly never there again. 

But that’s okay. 

It’s how she wants to be. 

 

---

 

The ghost was little more than shapes and light, dancing in his vision, back and forth. She speaks like she’s ten feet underwater, each movement she makes distorting her further away. 

She smiles at him, before dissipating completely. 

Daichi opens his mouth, wanting to shout something. Come back! Tell us more!

But-

Yoshinaga Mizuki.

Please don’t remember me by the name of the man that killed me.

“Oh,” Daichi says, sinking back where he sat in the hay, tilting his head over to look at Oikawa, who’s already staring back, eyes filled with stars and waiting to hear what he has to say. “I get it now.”

“You get it?” Oikawa whispers back. “Get what?”

“What Nurarihyon is afraid of.”

Oikawa leans in more. 

“That we could change things,” he explains. “That with my true sight of yokai as they are, and… and… your… belief, your faith in them, if I… Nurarihyon thought… that I could corrupt you, that maybe you’d stop believing, and rather start knowing, but - that was never your… that was never what made you great, you… do know things, about the yokai, your belief is knowledge, and clearly that didn’t ruin you, but… with me… I-”

Daichi is scrambling to find his footing in this - he wishes someone else had figured it out, because he’s never been so eloquent with words, simple and straightforward was what he was known for, but-

He pushes himself up to his feet, and drags Oikawa up with him - the rest of the group scrambles up behind them. 

“There is so, so much in your head,” Daichi says, taking Oikawa’s hands. “There is so much, knowledge and folklore and legends and faith and everything in your head is trapped there, it’s… rooted into our culture and it seeps into our media and our idioms and our lifestyles, it’s everywhere, it’s stuck in our minds like a parasite, and - but - with… I don’t have it, I don’t have it, because I can see them, I can see them actually as they are, and-”

He realizes he’s laughing, turning around to look at the group. 

“And I can ask them who they are. I can ask them how they want to be known. And if I can give that knowledge to you, you can let them live as they should, as they are meant to be, however they are- that’s-”

He drags Oikawa forward a step, closer to Tendou. “That’s how you saved him, isn’t it? You said he tethered his yokai half to you, that he broke from Nurarihyon’s belief, but what is different between yours and his? How come Tendou is not fighting back urges anymore, half monster, bleeding from the nose, suffering, how come? Because you didn’t empower him as what your folklore told him he should be as a satori, you knew him as… as an athlete, and a rival and a friend, you let him choose how his power was going to manifest with who he was- imagine- imagine if-”

And he cuts himself off, because it’s Iwaizumi, behind them, that says:

“Imagine if you could do that for the whole world.”

Sugawara breaks into a grin. “If you could show the world the monsters as they are, as they want to be known, you could-”

“Make a world where kids like Tendou - kids like me - don’t have to grow up afraid, or confused, or lost, because there’d be nothing monstrous about being a monster,” Daichi says. 

“Those are loft ambitions,” Oikawa says slowly, turning in a circle, looking them all over. “I don’t even know where to start-”

“You’ve already started,” he says. “And there’s no right way to do it, we just…”

“There’s no right way,” Sugawara cuts in again, catching his attention, and Daichi is relieved to have someone else keeping up with his vision. “Lofty ambitions or not, there is no… right- I’ve been mulling this over since we were in Okinawa, and… I think I’m finally starting to really get it. None of this is real -  and that’s not to say it doesn’t matter, it means… it means that it doesn’t have to stay. If it doesn’t suit you, Tooru - burn it down. You don’t have to let yourself be the threat - you and Daichi can be friends, if someone is telling you that’s wrong, burn it down. Start fresh, make it better. We have that power. Nurarihyon knew it, I think Oksana knew it.”

Oikawa seems to be on the edge of an agreement, but there’s fear in his eyes, in his motions, the slope of his shoulder and the set of his jaw. 

He looks over Suga’s shoulder to Iwaizumi. 

“It’s so much pressure,” he says, in a voice that cracks. 

“I’ll be here to catch you,” Iwaizumi replies. “We all are.”

“But what if-”

“What if you make everything worse?” Tendou cuts in, presumably reading his mind. Oikawa whips around to look at him, nodding. 

“Then you make it worse. And whoever comes after you will have to clean up your shit. I mean, isn’t that gonna be what you’re doing for Nusan?” 

“I think the real tragedy,” Kuroo chirps. “Would be never trying at all.” 

“It’s dangerous-”

“Are you me you’re not good enough?” Ushijima says, and Oikawa stiffens, straightening up and standing to attention as if something had pulled the strings attached to his spine. 

“Never,” he replies. 

“And most importantly,” Bokuto adds, leaning in. “We’re going to have so much fun.”

And there’s a chorus of laughter, because he’s right.

To love and live and have fun - to make the world better. It’s a lot to ask of one lifetime, but-

He thinks he can do it if they’ve all got his back. 

“Look,” Daichi says. “I’m not telling you it’s going to be easy… or quick, I’m not even saying it’s going to be successful. I’m just saying that nobody in the world has the answers for you, so… we may as well go make something for ourselves. If you want to stay out, that’s fine, you can stay out, but-”

He takes a step back, to give himself space, leaning in to put his hand in. 

“I’m all in.” 

Almost instantly, from behind Oikawa, Sugawara leans in, looking across the gap to him as he rests his hand on Daichi’s. 

“I’m in. Always.”

“I’m in,” Bokuto chirps, joining the circle. 

He feels Kuroo’s hand go in, and Kenma’s rises from below to join in. 

“Of course I’m in,” Kuroo says, as his cat meows an approval, and Kenma gives them a smile. 

“I’m in,” Ushijima agrees, resting his hand on top. 

“Ah, what the hell,” Tendou says, putting his hand on. “Sounds like it’ll be a blast.”

There’s a beat of silence, and then Iwaizumi pushes his way in, reaching out to put his hand in. 

“I’m in,” he says. 

“Iwa-” Oikawa starts. 

“Don’t disappoint me,” Iwaizumi replies. “We’re all counting on you.”

He can see Oikawa almost immediately start close to tears, but after a second he starts to laugh, really laugh, and with a slow breath in, reaching out to put his hand at the top of the pile. 

“Okay,” he says, giving them all a firm nod. “I’m in. Let’s change the world.”

 

---

 

“Ah, aah- shit, shit, I need help-”

Daichi hurries to catch up the stairs, stooping to grab the box that his father had been about to drop and lift it up for him. 

“Geez, you really are not strong,” he says. 

“Respect your father!”

“Go to the gym! This isn’t a heavy box!” Daichi replies, laughing before turning to head up the last few stairs. 

“Some of us have jobs,” Rion shouts back. “We can’t all be unemployed youtubers.”

“The unemployment is temporary,” Daichi replies, sounding annoyed. “I told you that, I’m looking for a job.”

“He’s not.”

Rion jumps, slightly, as Suga appears at his shoulder, also rather easily carrying one of the heavier boxes. 

“Wh-what?”

“He’s lying. He’s not looking for a job. Kenma showed me the analytics for the channel and he’s not gonna need to get a job he just doesn’t wanna admit that.”

Rion stares at him for a moment, before patting his shoulder. “I like you. You’re good to have around.”

Suga gives him a bright smile, before they both finish heading up the stairs and through the little, narrow apartment door. 

It’s not the most glamorous of places, that’s for sure, but it was probably the best case scenario. 

“No, Kenma- I told you,” Kuroo is saying, absolutely not helping anyone or himself move in, and is instead pacing around on the phone. “The cat hasn’t done anything weird. It’s not even here! I know it’s weird that it disappeared, but - look, Daichi is starin’ at me again, I don’t want him to start calling me lazy, so I gotta go, but stop freaking - no I know our whole thing is tracking weird paranormal stuff but the cat disappearing is… it’s fine, let it be- okay, yes, goodbye-”

“Problems?” Suga chirps. 

“Ah, nah. I think my move spoked that little cat that was following me around,” Kuroo explains. “Kenma, however, is worried about our lucky-cat-charm disappearing right after making huge lifestyle changes.”

“That seems reasonable,” Suga replies. 

“Stop taking his side.”

Suga sets his box down beside the one Daichi was carrying, looking around the small space. It was going to be cramped, for three people, that was for sure, but it wasn’t so bad. Plus, he liked these three people, so-

Laughter from down the hall catches his attention, and he looks over his shoulder to see Oksana coming up the hallway, not at all helping carrying anything, but very eagerly showing off what looked like a Tamagotchi to Oikawa as he carried the last of the stuff up to the apartment level. 

“Hey, Dai-” Oikawa calls. “Did you know she’s kept this thing alive for almost twenty years? This Tamagotchi is as old as you are!” 

“Almost exactly,” Oksana agrees, grinning and tucking it away as she comes through the door. “Woo, nice place. Perfect spot for a ghost-hunting base.”

“I think it’ll do just fine,” Daichi agrees, nodding to himself. 

“I still don’t think this is a great idea,” Rion adds. “The whole concept is sketchy to begin with, I mean - even taking out the paranormal aspect, I don’t love the idea of you guys running into unknown circumstances because you don’t know what’ll happen. I mean-”

“Dad,” Daichi groaned. “The point is to keep an open mind about it-”

“That’s not what I have an objection with! I don’t like the idea of my child … slinking around through abandoned factories or whatever the hell you’re going to be doing. Or… exorcising ghosts, apparently, I still don’t really understand what you were talking about-”

“Oh, give them a break,” Oksana says, trotting over to nudge Rion. “They’re doing exactly as they’re supposed to. They’re being becoming adults.”

“Thank you,” Daichi says.

“I think,” Suga adds. 

“Besides,” Oikawa cuts in, getting their attention. “We’re still doing as you asked, I’m leaving in-” he looks around, trying to find a clock or something, and ultimately decides to just grab Daichi’s arm and use his watch to check the time. “-like eighteen hours to live halfway around the world. We’re gonna give Nurarihyon plenty of time to cool down before we try anything.”

“But it’s the twenty-first century,” Daichi adds. “The time difference won’t be anything a few video files can’t overcome.”

“Plus, I still have volleyball dreams to attend to,” Oikawa says. “We didn’t all get to compete on a national stage in high school and wipe our hands of the ambition.”

“Oh, poor you,” Suga says. 

“You play volleyball?” Oksana says, looking over to Oikawa in shock. “Since when?”

“Excuse me?”

“You know,” Kuroo cuts in, before that can get out of hand. “This whole thing has gotten me wondering one very big, very important question.”

“Oh? What’s that?”

“Does… does all this - so… is Santa Claus real?”

Oikawa stares at him, clearly having to suddenly backtrack on a ton of his beliefs to try and figuring out an answer to this question, but before he can, Oksana says:

“No, he’s not, I checked.” 

“You-” Oikawa turns to look at her. “You checked?”

“Yeah, of course I did,” Oksana says. “That’s like… one of the first things I did. And he’s definitely not real. Oh! But you know who is?”

“Who?”

“Krampus.” 

There’s a heavy silence over the room. And then, most terrifyingly of all, Oikawa says:

“Krampus is real?”

“Woah, woah woah-” Daichi starts, as him, Suga, and Kuroo go stumbling onto the scene to try to stop Oikawa from speaking. “Let’s not-” he turns to Oksana to hiss: “Why in the sweet fuck would you tell him that?”

“It’s true!” she says. “I found him in the woods during the years I was searching for Baba Yaga. He’s scary-”

“Krampus-”

Daichi clamps his hand down over Oikawa’s mouth. 

He’s not sure why he’s surprised when Oikawa starts licking him. 

“Oh, ew,” he says, pulling back. 

“Don’t silence me,” Oikawa replied. 

“How about, though,” Suga says, waving his hands around. “Given how we now understand the world to work, you now purge what you just heard from your brain.”

“What, about Krampus?”

“You’re gonna fucking summon it! Stop saying Krampus!” Kuroo shouts, before adding: “Shit-”

“Who the hell is Krampus?” Rion says, prompting Oikawa to start with:

“Oh, it’s a really interested Eastern European bit of folk-”

Suga panics and punches Oikawa in the gut to shut him up. 

“Do you not understand how this works?” Suga is shouting, as Oikawa is wheezing and trying to breathe. “Stop saying things!”

“We’re putting a ban on - nobody is allowed to say the K-word anymore,” Daichi says, before turning and pointing at a slightly in pain Oikawa. “And you… think about something different. If I find out you’ve been researching… you-know-who I’m gonna to beat your ass so hard you’ll forget your own name.”

There’s a beat of silence, as Oikawa stares at him, and Daichi figures out exactly what’s gonna happen the moment Oikawa tilts his head slightly, and then he says: 

“Promise?”

Daichi groans, waving it off and turning to walk away. From behind him, he hears Suga call:

“You walked into that one, you can’t be mad about it!”

There’s an assortment of laughter, before Oksana catches her breath and says:

“Well, there’s only a couple more things down in the car, can I get some help to bring it up? Then you boys will be all set to start unpacking.”

“Yep,” Rion says, turning to follow her out of the apartment. 

She lets him pass, and over her shoulder points at Suga and makes a motion that he should follow to provide actual assistance. 

They watch them go, and Daichi helps pat Oikawa down as he recovers from a gut-punch he knew from experience could be rather damaging. 

 

---

 

They grab a few remaining things, Rion runs on ahead with a smaller bag that had been left behind. 

Suga helps Oksana get the last box up. 

“So?” she says. 

“So?” he says, sounding confused. 

“I know you boys have… had your whole… thing, your whole… whatever, but… have you thought much about my offer? I’d quite like to have you on my team.” 

Suga smiles for second, taking one more extra moment to think about the offer, before softly replying:

“I think I’m gonna stick with what I’ve got for now. Really, really, thank you for the offer, but… I think we have something special on the horizon, and I want to see it through.” 

She smiles, then reaches out to nudge him. “Okay. If you ever change your mind, you’ll know where to find us.”

---

 

They spend a little bit of time unpacking and arranging things, but eventually Rion and Oksana have to go, and Oikawa needs to get some rest for an early - and long - day of travel tomorrow. 

Daichi finds himself standing on the sidewalk of a street outside of an apartment he now lives in but has never slept in, saying goodbye to a father he doesn’t really know anymore. 

“I know you said you didn’t want to work with us,” Rion says, and Daichi is surprised by the softness in his voice, the gentleness in which he puts a hand on his elbow. “But I hope you know that… everything we have is yours. So… if you encounter something… scary, or… out of your league or just too complicated, or too unfamiliar, you give us a call, okay? I… I would jump in front of a bullet train to keep you safe, I wouldn’t even think twice, so…”

“I know,” Daichi says, though he hears his own voice crack, and he isn’t sure he believes it. “And… we’ll… be safe, and yeah, of course, I’ll… I’ll call you if we need any help, we just… we really think we need to do things our way, for this to work-”

“Kid,” Rion says, letting go of him and putting his hands up. “You don’t have to tell me twice. If I could drop the government badge I absolutely would. I’m kinda glad you’re gonna do it on your own. I think your way is… well I’ve always thought you were brilliant, so… maybe I’m biased- oh-”

Daichi cuts him off, hugging him tight as he pressed his face down into his shoulder. It takes a second for Rion to process it, but eventually he does, slowly lifting his hands up and wrapping them around him in return.

“I love you so much,” Rion says, softly. “It’s undeniable that you changed my life, but I just really hope you know that you have only changed it for the better. I know I haven’t… I wasn’t always there, in the way you probably needed me to be, but I don’t regret one second of getting to be your father. You have been the privilege of a lifetime.”

“I love you too,” Daichi says, though it’s hard to say as he’s breathing through growing tears. “I’m sorry I stopped saying it.”

 

---

 

“I heard Ushijima and Bokuto are gonna be moving in together,” Oikawa says, checking his phone as they stand outside airport security.

“Yeah, I heard,” Daichi replies. “Tendou is so mad. He thought they were escaping.”

“Rent’s steep, and they’re athletes, they’ll probably want more than just the three of them.”

“Ah, well, Kenma’s working on… money,” Daichi says. “Hopefully it won’t be too much of an issue.”

“Mhm.”

They converse mindlessly. Iwaizumi meets them at the gate - he’s going with him, for a few weeks, to help him get settled and make sure he’ll be okay. Daichi knows better than to comment on the fact that Oikawa’s mother does not show up for the goodbye. 

Iwaizumi is like a frantic bird, constantly double checking tickets and worried Oikawa had forgotten something. 

“It’s all in the checked bags,” Oikawa assures him, patting his face. “Chill the fuck out.”

“I’m sorry, I just… this is a big deal, this isn’t a vacation, if you forget something-”

“I will survive.”

“...maybe.”

“I will.”

Iwaizumi stares at him, before shaking his head. “Come on, let’s… we need to get through security.”

“I’m we’re three hours early-”

“So let’s get going-”

Iwaizumi turns to leave, and Oikawa takes a few steps, before turning to look back at Daichi. 

“I guess this is where we say goodbye?”

Daichi smiles slightly. “It’s more of a see-you-later situation, isn’t it?”

“Cheesy. But… accurate.” 

There’s a bit of a silence, and Daichi knows they haven’t really fully worked out all the kinks in their plans, all the hopes they have, everything they want to do. He knows Oikawa is still afraid of this going badly, but-

“Hey, uhm…” Daichi starts, and Oikawa tilts his head in response. “So… look, I… know we… like… I do still think you’re… one of the worst people I know-”

“Thanks.”

“-but… I… have a lot of… I have a lot of little siblings, I’ve always… I’ve always sort of been a third parent, my mother need help, they were… so much younger than me, we don’t have anything in common, but… It… with you, I just… I think it’s been really nice to… feel like a brother. So… I’m going to miss you. Like… properly miss you.”

He stands and waits in horrible silence, bearing his heart on his sleeve and waiting for a rejection, but all he gets his twelve seconds of every emotion Oikawa knew how to process flashing across his face, before Oikawa has burst into tears and wrapped him up in a hug so tight he thinks he might be rebreaking his ribs. 

“Okayokayokay-” Daichi gasps, trying to push him off.

“I’m-I’m gonna-I’m gonna miss you too-” Oikawa is crying, unwilling to let him go. 

“You really do have to though-”

“No I don’t. Iwa-chan isn’t even this nice to me how am I supposed to say goodbye-”

“You’ve got a country to dazzle! Go! Go!”

“No I wanna stay now-”

“Iwaizumi!”

“I got it,” Iwa calls, returning from where he’d been trying to get into the security line, returning to first smack Oikawa on the back of the head and then grab him by his backpack and drag him off. 

“Goodbye!” Oikawa cries. 

“We’ll see each other again!” Daichi calls back, stretching up onto his toes to wave as much as he can. 

“Just say goodbye!”

“Goodbye!”

 

---

 

[The video isn’t very formal, just Daichi leaning into the camera propped on his desk, arms folded in front of him, talking. The room behind him is messy and half set up, his stuff stacked on one end, Suga’s on another, nothing quite arranged properly. It feels… new. Different. Messy. 

“So… sorry, to have disappeared for so long. We… can’t really tell you why, uhm… well, you might not believe us… it’s… well it’s a whole thing. But… things are working out now. So. uh… a proper recap, since I know all of you are absolutely going crazy waiting for an update, but… me and Kuroo have moved into a new place, and- well, we’re gonna have some new faces-”

He pulls away from the camera, leaning over his shoulder and calling: “Babe? I’m doing the filming thing now, if you wanna come-”

“Maybe later?”

Daichi turns back to the camera. 

“He doesn’t really understand how the filming thing works, I was gonna - so my boyfriend is also living here, but… he’s a student, so… like a university student, with Kuroo… he’s gonna be joining us on… uh… videos, though, from now on.  Kenma is still our editor, but he’s in high school, so it’s… a little on and off. Oh, right, and, as you all probably heard, or… saw… Oikawa got picked up by some fancy Argentinian team, so… he’ll be out of direct action for a while. But! That’s not to say he’ll be gone. He is more than thrilled to start filming his little rambling videos again, plus, he says he’s met a girl that has so many local tales memorized, he’s basically texting me non stop just the most terrifying bits of local legends. So… Ushijima is also on a team now, and Bokuto… I think is just waiting a bit before taking an offer… I know Tendou is… going to be going overseas, eventually, but… I gotta check - ah, shit, sorry, I started to… I’m way off topic.”

He laughs for a bit, adjusts the cameras, and sits back. 

“That’s all to say, I guess, that… we’re still here, even if things are gonna look a little different. And we’re… so excited, to see what the future brings. I’m gonna be honest with you, I think there’s some spectacular things coming down the line. So… if you’re all willing to stick it out with us, well… I think you’ll love it.”

Daichi glances over his shoulder again, when a sudden crash from outside the door catches his attention. 

“Okay, well, I think Suga’s trying to cook, or…” Daichi frowns slightly. “God forbid Kuroo is in there with him. I’ve gotta go. I don’t even know if this video will see the light of day, I might redo it entirely… I really need to work on my improv, this is rough, okay-”

He leans forward, reaching up to turn the camera off. 

“See you next time,” he sings, before the camera goes dark.]

Notes:

*crying softly* thank you SO MUCH for everyone who's been reading through with me - ESPECIALLY to those who have been reading from the very beginning, I know who you are, I LOVE you, I love you all, I see you, I'm SO SORRY I haven't really replied to all (any) comments but it has been such an honour to share this silly little story with you.

And, as you can probably tell, no, this is not the ending. There are *SO MANY* cool bits of folklore and legends and myths that I just couldn't include, and between the home team in Japan, Tendou going to Europe and Oikawa in South America, I've basically got the entire world to pull from. So I am SURE, if it's something you're hoping for, that you'll see these fuckers (in this timeline) again in the future. Though... probably not in another 290k Epic, geez...

Until then, of course, Thank you, I love you, Please understand you all deserve the world, I love you again, and see you in the next one

xx

Series this work belongs to:

• Part 1 of Paranormality