A/N: Also on AO3 and on my anime tumblr; see profile for links. This oneshot is for rabbittracks (tumblr)! Happy birthday ~
On the night after the game, Asahi finds the libero chewing on a stalk of grass on a flowery hill, sitting alone in a pool of crepuscular light, with the sun's radiance giving off its last glow in response to night's imminent arrival. He doesn't blink when Asahi joins him in quiet sympathy, doesn't twitch when a moth flutters at his face. His hands, deft and skillful, are stiff-jointed, as if they haven't been oiled in months.
He's quiet. Unusually so.
Wide eyes, pinched lips, a dapple of uncertainty flittering across his cheek. The setting sun pools at their feet, dripping off of the grass, leaking into the lake below; a wavering hint of gold, beyond their reach.
"Do you want to talk about it?"
He speaks for the first time in minutes. It's to the brim with a strained contemplation, said out of unwilling, gritted teeth, its only purpose to coax the stilted silence away.
"...no," Asahi murmurs, "no, not really." But he's quick to notice his avoidance is doing more harm than good, as Nishinoya draws back into a seclusive, hidden world.
Restless, and a little put at unease due to the decision he made, the third year fingers with the flap on his bookbag, clipping and unclipping the buckle. It is the only sound he hears for a good while, and it's amplified by the hush.
Asahi isn't sure what to say, but he does so, anyways — the silence is harsher than the lead pulling his heart. "I... I wanted to say..."
But just what is there to say? The game has ended. The court empty. The sweat washed off. And the play done, gone with a tick of time, carved into stone. Nothing can change the fact that they didn't make it.
"Don't say it," Nishinoya snaps, eyebrows drawn in, before his eyes grow wide and he retreats back to his well of thoughts. He's wrapped his body up tight with his two arms, like a child yearning for warmth in the wintertime.
Even without the snow, there's a visible frost building up in the gap of silence, a chill of some sort.
Asahi would give anything to melt it.
"Listen, Nishinoya... I wanted to say—"
"That you're sorry?" The muscle in his shoulder tenses as Nishinoya bites out a wary contention. "How many times do I have to tell you, we're a team! A team, Asahi-san! Do you understand?"
The third year gives Nishinoya a soft smile, accompanied by a slight puff of air. "I know that." He sombers a little, propping his hands behind him. "But it would've been nice if I could've got a few more spikes in."
"And there you go again. Stop with the 'I' this and the 'I' that!"
Asahi shakes his head. He's only speaking the bare truth, after all—part of the blame that rested on his shoulders. "You sound like my mother."
"I don't remember having a child with a glass heart like you."
"Hmm." Above, the sky adjusts its thermostat, rippling out in a brilliant display of intimate red and amber streaks, marred by a creeping black, swallowing all traces of color within a few minutes. It's getting chilly. Nishinoya isn't making a plan to leave, though, so Asahi keeps on staring, watching the first white fires bloom in the neverend dark.
He takes a cautious side-glance at the soundless form beside. Nishinoya's dark eyes glint from the reflections played by the stars, and the rivulets of tears take their time in their travels, glistening with a consistency matching the cricket chirps. "Shit," Nishinoya says, hastily brushing his tears away, a clenched fist forming under the authority of his pent-up anger—or perhaps, it comes from something out of his control, some instinct or divine empowerment not one on earth would know of.
"Are you okay?" Asahi ventures, after the sniffles have faded to a restless bite of a lip, the frustrated crinkle of Nishinoya's forehead. The boy seems more on edge than Asahi himself, even though there's no such reason why the libero had to accept this responsibility. His performance was top-notch, as usual.
It's the delay in a spike, it's not running hard enough to lift a ball back into the air. It's a hundred things, and a thousand things more, of all the things gone wrong and of all the things that could have gone right.
And Nishinoya's play was not one of them.
"I'm... fine," Nishinoya says, with somewhat of a convincing tone, though the simple act of his fist clenching and unclenching again betrays the word fine uttered from his lips. There's an uncomfortable strain between the two, Asahi feels it rattle his bones, and he's sure Nishinoya feels it too, because his spasming fist comes to a halt, grabs onto a patch of grass, and pulls his body to shift closer to the third year, closing the gap on the physical side of things.
"I don't think you're fine, Nishinoya."
"We're all not fine. None of us is fine. This, this," he stutters, and he points—off in the direction of the forlorn school gym, devoid of players. "This isn't fine. We should be playing, and yet we're not."
"Just..." Asahi takes in a breath. "Just think of this as a break." Yeah, we're just taking a break.
"And what happens then? Your high school career is... it's over now..."
"That's true. It's over." He's come to terms with this harrowing fact a few hours ago. It was hard, not to cry out until his energy reserves all but were drained, but the only thing left of the truth is a saddening feeling, embodied as a lump in his throat and an ache in his heart.
"You won't be able to play again."
"Who knows? Maybe I'll take it up again in university."
"I won't be able to play with you again."
"If you come to the same university as me, next year, maybe that won't be true."
Nishinoya stops his fruitless squabble, seemingly giving up. "You've... you've changed a bit, Asahi-san."
"In which way?"
"...Better."
Heh. Nishinoya saying this was almost equal to a compliment, the highest honor he could give. Am I, am I supposed to say thank you?
Maybe it's not a compliment?
But then again, Asahi's scared the silence will come back. And still, even as they were sitting closer, there's still an unbroken barrier sitting beside them both, looming.
Nishinoya saves Asahi's inner anxiousness with a simple, "That was a compliment."
How he always knows.
"Ah... um, thank you..." He feels his heart work itself in a tangle, this warm ache driving out his previous pain. And before he has the chance to lose the sudden mood shift, Asahi manages, just barely, "...that's what I wanted to say to you."
"Huh?"
"That, err," Asahi scratches the side of his head sheepishly. "I wanted to thank you. For always being by my side and, um, saving the ball, from, you know... from hitting the floor and stuff." Oh my god I sounded like a fool. He hadn't meant to retreat into a stuttering mess. Asahi hopes the other boy wouldn't laugh, but why wouldn't he? he thinks, with a sinking of his heart. It's just like Asahi, to mess up at the most crucial of times.
But there is no laughter, only the weight and warmth of Nishinoya's hand patting his shoulder. An embarrassed blush crosses Nishinoya's cheeks, before fading away as soon as it came. "Ah, really, heh... well, I guess. But really," Nishinoya says as he recovers, "I should be the one thanking you."
"For what?"
"For coming back."
There is a sliver of an unspoken sentence on Nishinoya's tongue. It feels like a missing half, and perhaps the libero had meant something else entirely with his words, but Asahi makes no intention to pry into what had not been said.
"There's no coming back now," Asahi says dejectedly, out of habit.
"Why'd you have to ruin the mood?" Nishinoya exclaims, and it pierces through the dead of night, a spear slicing through.
"...Sorry," Asahi begins, but bites his lip as soon as he notices Nishinoya bristle, as if in defense. He'd been caught up in the moment, and forgotten just what sorry meant to the second year.
"You can still come back," Nishinoya mumbles, soft enough for Asahi to only catch come back, half of the original sentence. "You can come back to our games next year and watch."
"I'd... I'd have to see if Daichi and Suga come, too..."
Nishinoya turns to the sky. "It doesn't matter. Just come."
Asahi bites the inside of his cheek. "Well, if you put it that way, I sort of have to come now..."
"Good." With this, the libero grins wide.
"...and I guess I'll want to see how the next ace performs."
Nishinoya's lip curls in distaste, recognizing the direction the conversation is leading towards. "Tanaka will do fine."
Asahi can't believe he's stepped on a mine yet again. It must be the words left on his tongue that he's afraid to say, but needs to get out to the world, to be rid of the burdens they bring. But those words simply could not be said right here, right now, right this very moment with this very person.
"Of course he will," Asahi breathes, his lips setting into a thin line. There is nowhere left for his convoluted emotions to develop, his mind is going cloudy by the minute; he feels his thoughts trickling to a stop after conversing to his limit. "He'll bring the team far, unlike..."
A thought winks in existence, sinking in deep in the pit of his stomach.
Unlike...
There's something else he has to say.
Unlike us.
"...It's our fault."
Only the brief wind interrupts them, ice cold tickling their faces, clouding their breaths.
"Don't you dare say it's your fault," Nishinoya starts, but catches himself just in time. "Wait... say that again."
The corners of his lips lift, no longer under Asahi's control. "It's all of our faults, why we didn't win."
"It's our fault," Nishinoya restates.
"Yeah, it's our fault."
"It's our fault we didn't make it."
A pathetic bubble of elation makes its way up Asahi's throat, one rarely experienced by him after such a devastating loss. "We weren't strong enough, and it was our fault." He realizes Nishinoya feels the same, because the boy's laughter spikes up at erratic intervals, mixed with a choked sob.
And that simple sentence, contradicting all the it's my fault we lost and the I should have got that spike in, becomes a mantra, repeated over and over again in an unbecoming hysteria. Chasing the night away, spiking past that wall in between, and it's like a light in the darkness, their laughs, their tears, the warmth of their hands.
(But really, it was none of their faults, yet all of their faults at the same time.)
The moment seems surreal, unbefitting the laws of time, but there's nothing compared to the glow in their hair and the breath they exhale, full of a bittersweet but relieved aftertaste—something shared only between the two, with no one else to know.
There's a strange comfort in the secrecy—almost, almost, like a small, quiet victory.