Leaning against the gym wall and held upright by it, Akemi was slowly coming back to her senses. Time seemed to have passed at a crazy pace, as if long hours had just passed, yet it had only been a few short minutes since she got back up. Her mind gradually recovered, the teen had managed to sort out the situation a little, to understand that it was a spike serve that had found refuge against her skull, the very moment she entered the gym.

The lights had stopped dancing, the voices no longer mingled in an asphyxiating hubbub, and yet her head seemed ready to explode at any moment. The more she put a hand on the right side of her skull, the more she felt the bump forming in just a few minutes, and she wouldn't even want to imagine what she would look like when she will arrive home and what excuse she could use for her sister.

"Feeling better?" the team captain Kita Shinsuke asked, as most of the volleyball players got back to their training.

"I think so..."

"You should go to the infirmary."

He punctuated his sentence with a glance in Suna's direction, who was his back to them and visibly ready to resume training. He stopped mechanically, without even having to turn around. In a sigh, Suna turned around, before moving forward with a nonchalant gait, as if he had grasped the message.

"That's kind, but no need to, I'll just go home" she politely answered, while thinking that she would better bury herself when home. "I'll just have to pick up my transport card in the locker room, so that I didn't get hit for nothing."

The middle blocker's jaw tightened at the understanding of these words, while a certain almost imperceptible guilt flew over the surface of his olive-yellow eyes. Far from resentment, Akemi smiled at him with a smile to which he did not react, before moving away from the wall that actually kept her standing.

"Sorry for the inconvenience," she apologized sincerely, but unable to bow. "Just be careful, I'll… come back."

Yet the pain that was gradually beginning to fade woke up as she began to walk to the girls' locker room. All the volleyball members seemed to feel more sorrow for her than mockery, yet Akemi could obviously add this incident to her list of her worst embarrassing moments.

"Do you live far away?" Kita asked as he saw her stagger.

"Not really, it's fast by train."

The team captain gave an implied glance to the second-year player still at his side, who grasped the message without him even having to speak: his serve, his fault, his problem. And when Akemi reached their height again, with her precious – or cursed – card in her hands, she was surprised to see Suna still in the entrance of the gym. Her bag, which she had left voluntarily in order to retrieve it on the way, was in his hands, as he visibly was waiting for her return.

"Kita-san told me to take you home," he explained, seeing the perplexity in her azure eyes.

And she didn't flinch, didn't ask the slightest question. Akemi just nodded her head as he told her that he was going to get his bags – to go home later, no doubt; after all, training had already started.

The fresh air on her face, as she walked through the doorway of the gym, made the girl feel way better. Her head was starting to get used to every step, becoming less painful with each passing minute, so that when Suna came back she could see completely clear in her mind again.

"I can go home by myself, y'know," she tried, vainly hoping to keep a modicum of dignity and erase her face from everyone's memories.

Obviously, this was a lost cause, but she had the right to believe it. Her interlocutor lowered his gaze in her direction, before shrugging his shoulders.

"Kita-san might have killed me if I had let you go home alone after knocking you out," he said nonchalantly.

"You could just have pretended you're taking me home because you feel guilty, y'know." Akemi answered, swelling her cheeks.

If Suna settled for another shrug and a sigh as an answer, the girl did not miss the tense features of his face, illuminated through the dark night by the gym lights that rested delicately on him. Despite his casual air, she was able to see some guilt – after all, he was not used to knock out classmates every day. And this impression was confirmed when he started to walk first, grabbing her bag in the process – which she had picked up when he went to get his things.

In normal time, Akemi would have protested to carry it herself. But right now, she had to admit that this evening she had neither the desire, nor the energy to do so. Her forces regained, in spite of her still heavy and painful head – and the bump which continued to swell – she followed him. As the impression he had left from the first seconds, he did not prove to be very talkative. From time to time, she saw him throwing a few glances at her, without saying anything.

If she was satisfied with the silence, which allowed her skull to some rest, she had to admit that it quickly began to become awkward. Especially on the train, where she was lucky enough to find a seat, but the high school student remained standing next to her, his back arched and his face turned towards the windows that offered a plunging view of the city of a thousand lights, his smartphone visibly more interesting than anything that could happen in the train.

Like his teammates, Suna Rintarou was already somehow popular within the school. If the various sports clubs were highlighted, in Inarizaki, they were not all as much as the volleyball club, especially since their final at the nationals the year before. Having practiced this sport during her middle school years, Akemi had been able to value their level, during the rare matches she had attended, during the beginning of her first year. And her best friend, Nagano Ritsuka, a player in the high school women's team, was even more excited to watch them play.

And it was precisely this reputation that seemed to make them difficult to approach. A year older than her, Suna seemed more inaccessible and colder to her at that moment, as the train doors opened once again and as he glanced at her, probably to make sure she was not supposed to get off here. Distant and concerned were a strange combination.

"It's the next one," she indicated in front of his insistent glance.

However, when they had to go down, and in spite of his apparent detachment, he grabbed again her bag, that she had left on her knees. The few hundreds of meters that separated them from her home seemed even longer than those which connected Inarizaki to the train station, and this silence for the least awkward and stifling was obviously the reason of it.

"So, you qualified for nationals, right?" she asked, even though it was without a doubt the stupidest question she could have come up with.

Of course, she knew the answer: not only had she seen their game, but when they had won the prefectural qualifiers, the whole school had been talking about it. This head injury was obviously more disturbing to her than she thought so. Suna however threw an interested glance in her direction.

"Yeah," he answered, before pausing. "The qualifying teams are often the same from one tournament to the other."

"That's a bit pretentious, y'know."

Akemi didn't miss the smug smile that blossomed at the corner of his lips, lit by the streetlights that lined the street in her neighborhood. These were more teasing words than serious ones, because deep down he was right. The best teams usually came back from one tournament to another, she knew that very well – and Ritsuka didn't fail to often make her remember.

Before she could say anything else, she was already able to see her house. It somehow was strange to come home with a stranger: it was the feeling of being in front of the familiar house that made her realize it.

"Even if it was mostly to avoid getting killed, thanks for walking me home, Suna-senpai."

He frowned at the honorific used.

"Wait, you're a first year?"

A nod of approval, and Akemi was already reaching for her bag, not caring about the surprise on her elder's face – after all, what kind of senpai would knock out his juniors like that? He slipped a hand into the back of his neck, before a long sigh escaped him, as if he had been holding it in all the way. He was even less expressive and harder to figure out than she could have imagined…

"Sorry. For the ball, I mean," he finally dropped.

That was hard to say.

"It's okay, it's my fault. I should have been more careful when I went in, anyway."

"The twins will talk about it for the rest of my life," he sighed. "You feeling better, though?"

"Yeah, walking and getting some fresh air kinda helped. You will be just responsible for the second head which grows on the first one," she said, as seizing without the least embarrassment his hand, to pose it on his bump.

"Wow, that's something," he spontaneously said.

Indeed, he might have hurt her much more than he thought, actually – the kind of details he was better off keeping to himself, so his teammates wouldn't find out about. Suna would have preferred the twins to be in the path of the ball during this service training session, although aiming for the gym entrance had not been his goal in the first place. The mere prospect of the comments he would be entitled to the next day awakened in him a certain laziness and removed all his motivation.

His fingers left the swollen skull of the girl in front of him. With a little hindsight, it had to admit that the situation was rather laughable. Certainly, if he had found himself filled with a certain fright while seeing her falling right under the blow, the muffled laughter of Atsumu beside him at this time had not escaped him. And now that he thought about it, he kind of understood him.

"Well, bye," said the girl next to him, whose name he didn't even know.

He answered a quick "yeah", before she turned to disappear behind the small gate of the house they were in front of. He remained thus alone in a neighborhood he did not even know. And for having followed her mechanically from the train station, he had only a quick idea of the road by which they had come from.

What a weird evening.


I gotta admit that I'm kinda nervous about posting this fanfiction, especially with my english lmao. But I hope you've liked this second chapter~ don't hesitate to fav/follow if you did c:
And don't hesitate to leave a review, I'm really curious about people's opinion 3