Level Pair; Day Three 2/2
Our universe grants every soul a twin—a reflection of themselves. And no matter where they are or how far away they are from each other—even in different dimensions, they will always find one another. ~Julie Dillon
Kageyama watches critically as Hinata pulls his shirt back on, absently analyzing the network of bruises that are starting to turn yellow at the edges as they begin to fade. It had still been a shock when he'd pulled his shirt off today and the ugly black and blue and purple marks glared back at him from his ribs. Kageyama is positive at least a couple of them are probably busted.
The redhead had forced them to pause every half hour the whole rest of the day to re-soak that stupid garment and tie it back around his sprained wing. He'd even gone so far as to give him a regimen of exercises that he insisted Kageyama do each time they stopped. He'd complained constantly, but Hinata had been adamant. It had been easier to just comply and now, Kageyama had to grudgingly admit that while it was definitely still sore, it was already moving a little more feely. At least until he stretched it a little too far. Then it would send him a sharp reminder of how much it disapproved.
"Kageyama?" The redhead turns a preoccupied gaze on him and the larger crow can see him spinning something black between his fingers absently. It takes him a moment to realize it's the feather Hinata had pulled from his wing earlier and he's slightly surprised to see that he'd kept it.
"Did you fly with that injury when you came to find me?"
Kageyama glances back at his face but he can't get a read on the question—can't determine if Hinata is honestly just curious or if this is coming from somewhere a little more precarious. He's doing a good job at masking his unease but there have been moments throughout the day where the façade slips just so and Kageyama gets a glimpse of the turmoil behind Hinata's almond eyes. Honestly, if the kid weren't so expressive, Kageyama doubts he'd have noticed anything at all. But at the moment…Kageyama can't tell if it's real or his mask. He frowns slightly in frustration.
"You were missing." He states as if it were a legitimate answer. Hinata's jaw drops a little.
"Are you stupid? That probably made it ten—no, a hundred times worse, you moron!"
Yeah, no kidding, he muses sourly and resists the urge to test out his mobility as if to prove a point.
"I could have just left you out here instead." He mutters darkly but it sounds more like a sulk. Even so, it seems to stem Hinata's obnoxious tirade about his poor choices almost entirely and the smaller boy glances down.
"Yeah… thanks for not doing that." He mumbles, his hands fidgeting with the feather.
Kageyama shrugs and eases down against a tree and leans his head back. Closing his eyes, he listens as Hinata shuffles around nearby until his soft footsteps come up and stop beside him. There's a long silence and Kageyama can't help but liken it to the way a parent instinctively knows something is wrong when everything goes too quiet. He fights the urge to open his eyes and see if Hinata has indeed done something stupid.
"Um…" His voice is tiny and embarrassed, but Kageyama doesn't miss it.
He cracks his eyes open to see the redhead standing beside him in the dimming light with hunched shoulders, his hands scrunched in the hem of his shirt, and his gaze carefully trained on the ground by his feet. Without a word, Kageyama reaches out and catches the boy's wrist and mutely pulls him down beside him, welcoming him to stay once again in the shelter of his wings. There's the slightest catch in Hinata's chest, a swallowed sob.
"Thanks." He whispers and Kageyama pulls him a little closer before leaning his head back and closing his eyes once more.
He doesn't know why he feels the need to fend off Hinata's encroaching nightmares in any way he can.
Hinata has never been anything except stupidly optimistic, a bundle of brilliance and energy. It didn't matter if it was in the middle of drills or a Volley game or in the race pits after his father had gotten pissed at them. It didn't matter if something bad had happened or he felt sick or they'd suffered some humiliation or other. It could be the middle of the night, the first day of the year, hell, even when Kageyama or one of the others was ridiculing him for one reason or another— usually his height—he never stopped looking forward. He could single handedly turn an entire game around or bring up their whole unit in two minutes flat. His personality was sunshine given physical form and Kageyama occasionally got completely and irrationally irate with him...but he could never bring himself to hate Hinata.
Everyone else maybe, but not the little redhead.
And as far as he can remember, Hinata was like this since the first day he'd first showed up to their training runs when they were still little. He had trailed Nishinoya into rank one day and all the other crows had crowded around the small kid with crazy orange hair who didn't speak hardly two words of their language. Noya's mother had apparently found him alone in the forest outside the rookery and brought him back home.
The kid had cleaved to Noya like a barnacle on a rock almost instantly despite him being probably a decade or so older, but the crow never seemed to mind. Noya had other siblings, but Hinata had never taken to them the same and none of them were so clingy. A week of the kid following him to training wound up with him just joining the group as it was simply easier to do that than try to separate him from Noya.
At the time, Kageyama could barely get over the fact that the shortest crow in their group had somehow attracted an even shorter scrawny and underweight kid who followed him around like a miniature god. He hadn't really seen that brilliance at first. But when Kageyama thought about it now, that bright personality and drive was there even back then.
The first month of training had left the little redhead definitely spent, and nine times out of ten, Noya ended up carrying the crashed out kid back home on his back. Hinata'd never complained and tirelessly worked to get better at everything. He hardly spoke their language but he'd sought out each person for pointers on the things they were best at.
He went to Daichi for help on learning to bank hard from a dead sprint flight and he cornered Tanaka for help with quick reversals and midair grappling. He got Asahi to give him pointers on how to get the most mileage out of a glide while using the least amount of energy and he went to Noya for help on improving all the little agility skills.
And since Kageyama had been playing Volley almost since he was born and was easily the most proficient of them at it, Hinata had come to him for that. The game that was played twenty feet in the air using their wings to smack a ball over a net to the ground on the opposing team's side. Kageyama had been completely put out when his frosty glares and outright dismissals hadn't even fazed the redheaded mass of energy. He'd returned the next day with a ball and Noya beside him.
"He wants you to teach him how to play Volley." Noya had said and Kageyama had wanted to bang his head against the wall. The little brat had apparently thought he didn't understand what he wanted with his communication skills as lacking as they were and so he'd brought Noya to interpret for him. He'd quickly come to find out that that wasn't it at all; Hinata was just stubbornly persistent to a maddening extreme.
Kageyama had adamantly refused at first. Noya had pointed out that he'd have to learn eventually since it was part of their training and there was no one better to teach him since he was the best. When Kageyama still refused, Noya had remarked that having any weak link on their team would be a target when they went up against the other teams, especially Iwaizumi's. At the reminder of the other training group that his father had basically hand-picked for their strengths and compatibility specifically at Volley, Kageyama had wavered before giving in.
Back then, he'd hated Iwaizumi. He'd hated his own teammates, too, but then, he'd hated a lot of people.
Kageyama had been intentionally tough on Hinata, doing everything in his power to try and make him miserable. Daichi had even threatened him with pain if he didn't lighten up at one point. Kageyama can't even recall why he was so angry at the little shrimp, isn't even sure what his goal was by being so hard on him. But whatever he had been shooting for, he'd failed.
Instead, the kid had determinedly progressed with a happy charisma at a frighteningly rapid rate. Once his skills all sharpened—all that diving and banking and agility that he'd worked on with the others—his natural talent had begun to peek through. Suddenly, Hinata was keeping up in their scrimmages, finding openings, and even creating blocks. His plays weren't stellar and he still made a lot of mistakes, but in the staggering wake of his progress over the course of the two months since he'd first walked into their training group, Kageyama'd clung to that with vigor and used it to push and criticize the smaller kid even still.
So Hinata'd gone back to the others once more. He went to Tanaka for attacks, Daichi for defense, Asahi for pointers on serves since Kageyama had downright refused once again, and Noya for the fine tuning of his reflexes and diving. It seemed like it happened almost overnight. Hinata's faults largely disappeared and pretty soon, Kageyama had almost nothing to complain about. What was more, it didn't matter how mad he got at him, how often he yelled at, scolded, or insulted the kid, the redhead was never bothered—as if he were oblivious to all of it. Except he wasn't completely because he always worked to get better at the things Kageyama pointed out.
Hinata might have been the smallest attacker on the team and definitely not the strongest but he had the quickest bursts of speed, the sharpest eyes, nearly even reflexes with Noya, and Kageyama hated to admit it but probably the highest drive of them all. Kageyama had still jumped all over him for the smallest errors...but something else had started happening.
With Hinata in games, the whole team had started to connect and his teammates didn't seem as useless as he'd once thought. Kageyama had been saddled with this group for over a decade and had failed at every turn to get things to work. They'd lost more times than they'd ever won. With Hinata in the game and Kageyama coordinating everything from his setting position, the whole team around him seemed to rise until they were nearly seamless. Everyone got better with each individual gaining their own unique strengths, ones that Kageyama finally recognized and worked to maximize.
In less than a year, their team had risen to its feet and became unbeatable among all of the other youth teams his father had put together. They were placed in brackets with older sentry training groups but it hardly mattered. They only started losing when they were placed against kids who had a couple hundred years on them and who were far superior in speed and power.
It didn't stay that way. Centuries went by and they all grew; everyone got taller, stronger, faster. Hinata managed to gain an inch on Noya. They'd even added the passive Suga at the surprisingly adamant insistence of Daichi, a thrush species with impressive grey wings who had an eye for the game like he did and was the occasional relief for himself. By the time they were hitting seven hundred years, no one could touch them.
And the weapon at the head of that team was the fiery and indomitable little redhead he'd initially written off altogether. He'd become the most versatile player of them all.
And Kageyama has never been able to hate him.
Even those first impressions, the first time the kid had come up and chattered at him in a language he didn't know punctuated by 'Volley', when he wound up in the race pits because of the redhead's antics, even when he found himself looking over his shoulder wondering when Hinata would overtake him, he couldn't hate him.
Hinata is sunshine personified. And he can't stomach that changing. Kageyama is loath to admit it, but he is determined to protect and preserve that side of the small redhead who's long since fallen asleep against him, wings or no wings. He doesn't really understand why he wants to comfort and reassure him, he only knows that a silent and brokenly brooding Hinata is wrong.
Kageyama's eyes crack open in the dark and he stares up at his injured wing. The redhead's insight into the sprain makes Kageyama absently wonder at how little he actually knows about Shouyou Hinata.
They've been great comrades, unbeatable teammates, and horrible punishment magnets mostly due to Hinata's ability to draw him into a bickering match— something only the redhead can do on a regular basis. But beyond that… he's not sure. He knows Hinata's tastes tend to run sweeter than the rest of them, knows that he drools when he sleeps, and he knows how to read the other boy pretty well, but he's an open book as far as that goes. Kageyama is sure Noya probably knows the most about him; he's been raised as one of his siblings since their shortest crow's mom brought him home.
Kageyama moves the wing experimentally now that Hinata is asleep. He lets out a lingering sigh. It is stiffening up again and he can see that the feathers aren't nearly as glossy as they normally are. Kageyama's mind goes blank.
Wait. It's dark. I didn't start any fire.
How the hell is he seeing his wings? They are lit with a soft glow that emanates from… in front of him? He glances down to where Hinata is and his face goes slack. Oh...
OH.
…
Well isn't this just great?