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The squeak of sneakers against the polished floor of the Sendai gymnasium echoed like gunshots in Kageyama Tobio's head. The scoreboard was an indisputable massacre in Kitagawa Daiichi's favor, but he didn't feel the slightest bit of satisfaction; only a growing, prickly frustration settling beneath his skin.
His own teammates couldn't keep up with his pace, couldn't reach his sets, complaining about his demands in whispers thick with resentment. The air stank of sweat and the apathy of a match decided since the first set. Kageyama hated mediocrity, hated the lack of ambition, and above all, he hated feeling like he was playing alone on a court full of people.
Then, the number one from the rival team broke the Matrix.
It happened during a completely broken play. A terrible, loose set with no power, heading straight for the floor on Yukigaoka's side. Kageyama was already turning around when a flash of orange crossed his peripheral vision. At ground level, a human blur moved at an inhuman speed. The boy with the wild hair, bright as fire, crossed the entire court in the blink of an eye, defying any law of elementary physics and leaving a trail of disbelief in his wake. There was no technique in the way he dragged his feet or how he set his body, but the raw power and the hunger with which he propelled himself into the sky left Kageyama paralyzed in his tracks.
The sound of the redhead’s palm smacking the ball echoed through the entire complex with a dry, violent thud. The boy didn't jump; he flew. For a millisecond that seemed to stretch into infinity, suspended in the air beneath the blinding white lights of the gymnasium, he looked like something unreal—an hallucination born of Kageyama's own fatigue. His eyes, golden and fierce like those of a cornered animal, locked directly onto Kageyama's through the net, holding his gaze with a destructive intensity. The ball hit the floor with violence before Kitagawa’s block could even reach.
Kageyama felt a violent flip in his stomach, a heavy drop of gravity that stole his breath. The air in the gym grew strangely thick, hot, and his lungs burned as if he had swallowed embers. An electric shock rushed down his spine, raising the hairs on the back of his neck and leaving his mouth completely dry. It was anger, it was bewilderment, but above all, it was a rush of adrenaline so pure it scared him.
(The most alive I've ever felt in my damn life.)
While his heart hammered hard against his ribs, he stood staring fixedly at the red-haired boy who landed on his feet, breathing heavily, with a fierce, broken, desperate smile that burned itself into his retina.
The match ended with an overwhelming victory for Kitagawa Daiichi, but Kageyama couldn't rid himself of the annoying, electric vibration in his hands. As he walked down the cold, gray concrete hallway connecting the locker rooms, the echo of footsteps and distant conversations from the other teams blurred into a white buzz inside his head. Suddenly, a figure intercepted him, cutting him off. It was him. The number one.
He was trembling slightly, exhaust, with dirty knees and bloodshot eyes. His cheeks were flushed from the extreme physical exertion and tears of bitter impotence pooled in his eyelashes, but the determination emanating from his small body was almost solid (a force of nature contained in a vessel too small). He stood firmly in front of the "King of the Court," forcing Kageyama to a dead stop. The physical proximity was a direct assault on Kageyama's senses: the smell of salty sweat and the way his chest rose and fell in rapid gasps.
"I'm not done!" He shouted, his voice cracking from held-back tears but with a firmness that made the air vibrate:
"I'm going to train hard, I'll get much stronger, and next time I'll defeat you! I'm going to be the one who stays on the court the longest!"
Kageyama tensed completely, feeling the hallway shrink down to just the two of them. They were so close he could count the tiny freckles adorning the bridge of Hinata's nose, see the wet sheen of his wide-open eyes, and notice the way he clenched his fists until his knuckles turned completely white. A strange, absurd, and overwhelming paranoia assaulted him for a second; the feeling that this boy was too perfect in his ridiculousness, too bright to be real.
(I’m paranoid I made you up, that my mind created the exact rival I needed so I wouldn't go crazy on this damn court.)
Hiding the absolute chaos he carried inside beneath his usual mask of rigid coldness and a furrowed brow, Kageyama took a step forward, cutting down the minimal distance separating them to try and intimidate him, though it only succeeded in making his own pulse race to the point of delirium.
"If you want to win and survive on the court," Kageyama said, his voice deep, serious, and direct, echoing with authority against the concrete walls, "you'll have to get much stronger. Don't think it'll be easy for you."
He turned around immediately and strode away, his hands buried deep in his club jacket pockets so that no one, least of all that annoying redhead, would notice his fingers were shaking from sensory overload.
At two in the morning, Kageyama's room was plunged into a deathly silence, broken only by the distant, muffled hum of cars on the street and the rhythmic ticking of the wall clock. He lay on his back, his sheets tangled, his chest bare due to the suffocating heat of the night—though deep down he knew it was his own system that couldn't cool down.
Every time he closed his eyes, the darkness of his eyelids played tricks on him: he saw an orange blur suspended in the air, a ball slamming against the floor with a deafening crash, and a pair of amber eyes defying him without a shred of fear.
Clenching his jaw, he rolled over sharply in bed, stretched out his arm, and grabbed his phone. The bright, cold blue light of the screen flickered on, illuminating his severe, tense features in the gloom of the room. He opened Instagram almost unconsciously, driven by a wireless intuition he couldn't stop. Searching the app felt like hostile, unfamiliar territory, but his fingers moved with clumsy speed. Tobio couldn't remember the name of the opposing team, so he had to look at the coach's message congratulating them to remember, typed "Yukigaoka volleyball" and began to dig. He scrolled through a couple of tagged group photos from that day's tournament, ignoring the images of his own team, until finally, a username appeared in the comments of a school post.
@shoyo_hinata
Hinata... So that's his name
Kageyama swallowed, feeling the dry click in his throat. His index finger hovered for a moment over the tempered glass before pressing the name. The profile was public, a window wide open into the life of the person who had sabotaged his sleep.
The feed was a chaotic explosion of color, sunlight, and overflowing energy that contrasted almost violently with the sober, empty, and orderly aesthetic of Kageyama's own profile. With a furrowed brow and a stinging mixture of guilt, ridicule, and a budding obsession eating at his stomach, he began to stalk every single post. He swiped his thumb, stopped, zoomed in on the images with two fingers, and held his breath in the dark, strangely afraid that the redhead could somehow perceive his obsessive gaze from the other side of the network.
There was a photo of Hinata at the beach, surrounded by a group of noisy boys; the redhead was frozen mid-air, jumping over the wet sand to catch a pass, his skin noticeably tanned by the sun, his hair an untamable mess from the sea wind, and a clean, loud laugh that could almost be heard through the muted speaker. In another post, a sweaty, blurry selfie taken at sunset on an outdoor concrete court; the sky in the background was a gradient blend of pink and purple, and Hinata’s face was covered in a thin sheen of sweat that glistened under the last light of day, with strands of hair plastered to his forehead and eyes visibly tired but ridiculously bright, full of genuine happiness.
Kageyama lingered on every single detail in a borderline sickly manner. The rounded, expressive shape of his eyes, the elasticity of his lean, developing muscles, the electric energy he transmitted even in a static photograph. He moved on to the highlights, finding shaky videos of Hinata devouring giant bowls of ramen, photos of misshapen homemade onigiri with exaggerated captions, and loud laughter in the background that made Kageyama's jaw tighten.
Then, scrolling further down the feed, he reached a post from the previous year. Hinata appeared holding a visibly homemade birthday cake, with poorly spread, slightly melted chocolate frosting, and fifteen lit candles illuminating his excited face from below, giving him an almost mystical aura.
The caption read:
"Turning 15! Gemini season 🔥 Training twice as hard this year, nobody's gonna stop me! 🏐💪"
Kageyama froze completely, staring intently at the word. Gemini.
The discovery triggered a latent, deep memory in his mind, bringing back his grandmother's voice with a clarity that startled him.
She had always been obsessed with the zodiac, the stars, energies, and the compatibility between people. Kageyama, with his extremely structured, meticulous, routine-obsessed personality—a way of being that his grandmother always said bordered on the inflexible fixity of a stubborn Pisces, locked in his own ocean of demands—used to listen to her mystical comments and jokes during tea times after his childhood practices.
'Tobio, you are so rigid that one day you are going to break yourself,' she used to tell him, looking at him with a wise, compassionate smile over her steaming cup. 'You need someone to completely unstructure you. A Gemini, perhaps. Someone who is pure chaos, air, lightness, and joy. Someone who will break all your neat little boxes, pull you out of your head, and force you to look at the sky.'
A real chill ran down his body, freezing his blood for an instant.
How stupid, he thought to himself in the emptiness of the room, feeling his cheeks burn with embarrassment and pent-up anger. It's a damn esoteric nonsense. He's just an annoying rival who doesn't even know how to receive a damn ball. It's pure coincidence.
He set the phone face down on the mattress abruptly, determined to cut it out and force himself to sleep. He closed his eyes tightly, squeezing his eyelids. Five seconds passed. Seven. Ten. With a groan of pure frustration, he reached out his hand again and grabbed the cell phone, unlocking it instantly.
He went back to the fifteenth birthday photo, carefully observed the golden warmth of the candlelight reflected in Hinata’s pupils, the way his lips curved upward so widely, without a single shred of malice or double intention, the pure and inexhaustible vitality emanating from that body. He was chaos personified. The same noisy chaos that earlier today had destroyed whatever little peace of mind Kageyama had left on the volleyball court.
He tried to convince himself that he was just thoroughly analyzing a dangerous opponent for the future, that it was a tactical study, but the lie collapsed under its own weight in the loneliness of the early morning. It wasn't a rival analysis. Kageyama wasn't stupid. He knew perfectly well what this was, the exact nature of that suffocating knot in his throat. He was completely fascinated. Obsessed to the bone by a boy he had just met and beaten into the ground. The memory of Hinata's extreme proximity in the hallway, the smell of effort on his skin, his ragged breath hitting his face, and the animal ferocity of his gaze assaulted him with a renewed strength, making him wish, with a guilty fear, to have him that close again.
He locked the phone definitively, tossing it to the opposite end of the queen-sized bed, and covered his face with both arms, burying himself in the pillow. His heart was still beating at a frantic, runaway pace, completely infected by the wild rhythm of the boy with the hair of fire. Tomorrow he would go back to training alone, he would go back to setting perfect balls against the wall, and he would follow his disciplined path to the top of volleyball. But Kageyama knew, with a terrifying, addictive, and deeply romantic certainty that drove itself into his chest like a direct kill, that his perfectly structured world had just suffered an irreversible earthquake. And the epicenter of all his chaos had a name, a last name, and a radiant smile under the sun.