Hi! So I just wanted to leave a quick thank you to everyone who reviewed or followed this humble, self-indulgent fic, the support really means the world to me!
Also, don't expect those author's notes often from me - I suck at them and never know what to tell you wonderful people who read this, I really do appreciate all you do, even if I don't mention it a lot. Anyway, enjoy! ;))
Yachi Hitoka stares at the pictures on her camera with critical eyes.
"The lighting of the first one isn't right, the second one's blurry," her low mumbling stops as a picture she hadn't seen before makes her breathe out, "Perfect."
She doesn't bother checking the other ones, deleting every picture but the one that had caught her fancy.
A mere day later, members of the Karasuno volleyball team marvel at posters with a familiar face, a familiar jump, stamped on numerous surfaces - a school wall, a convenience store's window, a library's wooden door...
Practice on Tuesday begins with a new kind of effervescence due partly to this, but mostly due to the Tokyo training camp in a few days that has the boys vibrating with anticipation.
"Nationals skies has a nice ring to it," Daichi-senpai tells her just as she puts a foot into the gymnasium, the towels in her arms precariously balanced in a neat stack that goes slightly over her head, Kiyoko who is behind the younger manager beams at the compliment, full-on beams.
"Right? Hitoka-chan's work is amazing," the third-year ignores the wide-eyed, awestruck look of the boys who had been blessed by such a rare, but dazzling sight. Instead, she proceeds to pat her kouhai's head, carefully avoiding the starry pins clipping Yachi's bangs out of her face, "Good job with the poster."
"Shi-Shimizu-senpai," touched, the first-year manager shyly tucks a piece of short blonde hair out of her face once the freshly washed towels were laid on the cart for it, revealing glimmering honeyed eyes, "Thank you so much! I'm glad you guys liked it."
Daichi shakes his head fondly, wondering if his old friend and manager tugs away the younger girl with her to go fill water bottles as a conscious move to keep Yachi all to herself.
He certainly wouldn't be surprised, with how attached Shimizu seemed to be to the other girl already - the few who could see past those ethereal good looks of hers would agree that the young woman could be quite cunning at times.
Daichi can't say he had not seen that one coming.
"Alright you guys," coach Ukai clears his throat pointedly when Kageyama and Tsukishima don't flock around him like the others, content with continuing to argue with each other, "Since we all have finals this week, practice will end an hour early again, but that doesn't mean you can take it as an excuse to slack off!"
The team should have seen the warning for what it was - because an hour and a half later, the lot of them are laid out on the floor, only their heavy, uneven breathing distinguishing them from corpses.
"Good job everyone, don't forget to stretch before you leave!" the two managers share a glance at their sadistic coach's empty words, Takeda-sensei muttering something about children and being too harsh.
Keishin Ukai is left unmoved.
"Nishinoya-san, Tanaka-san?" Yachi crouches down, hesitantly poking Nishinoya's too-pale cheek from the twenty laps the team had been subjected to at the end of practice, after practicing their receives and spikes and serves, "Are you two okay?"
"Ya...Yacchan," the girl tries not to smile at the nickname the two had easily adopted for her. Instead, she hands them their water bottles since they were so close to the tray the managers kept the items, yet were unable to reach.
Tanaka's blue-grey eyes are clouded, as if not being able to see her, "Is that really you..?" few are those who have the time and the patience to indulge those two's dramatics, it just so happens that Hitoka is too sweet not to be one of those few.
Curse her and that bleeding heart of hers.
"Yeah, it's me, you guys were amazing today senpais, real cool," the words seem to breathe life into the two who shoot up. She goes out to hand out the rest of the water bottles with Shimizu-senpai, much less efforts being necessary to hydrate the other boys.
"Good job out there!" Ennoshita must be the one least bothered by the coach's hellish training tactics, accepting the water bottle with his name neatly written on its corner without so much as a visible reaction.
The boy blankly looks at his two fellow second-years who are still shell-shocked by the girl's angelic-like intervention, the left corner of his lips barely tugging when he says, "You spoil us too much Yachi-san."
Before she can ask whatever he means by that - it is her duty to care for them after all, a hand lands on her shoulder, making her practically jump out of her skin.
"Eh, Kageyama-kun?" Hitoka whips around, the boy's shadowed navy eyes firmly stuck on the water bottle in her hands that is his, wordlessly drowning the whole thing down when she hands him his possession, "You-you'll be sick if you drink too quickly!"
The girls do quick work of the net as the players drag their feet towards the changing room, poor Yamaguchi even tripping over his feet and falling face flat because of his slow pace.
Which of course makes Yachi drop the net she had been folding, running over to the boy with wide, panicked eyes.
"Yamaguchi-san! Are you alright? Did you hit your head - how many fingers am I holding up?!" Sugawara who is closest to the two watches as the girl slowly descends into nervous madness when the boy doesn't answer, muttering about ambulances and concussions.
Meanwhile, Yamaguchi's freckled cheeks tint red at the close proximity to the small manager.
The girl is kneeling next to the boy who has crawled so he sits on his backside, elbows supporting his weight, instead of on his stomach like previously.
Dainty fingers twitch as they roam the area around Yamaguchi's face and shoulders, hovering, but never truly touching. The mildly shy boy still hasn't said a thing, murky green eyes wide as the first-year manager's expressions shift from worried to downright terrified, face so close to his that he can feel her breath fan against his own.
"Ah...uh..."
Sugawara Koushi sighs, wondering why he bothers with such hopeless first-years - probably for the same reason as to why Kiyoko simply continues her way to the closet to put the volleyball net away, why Daichi and Asahi threw a look at the pathetic scene and promptly left the gym to go change.
The reason as to why his closest, most trusted friends have abandoned him is that Suga is the sensible one.
"Yachi," the grey-haired third-year says, not unkindly, "I'm sure Yamaguchi's just fine, but you're a bit close right now and making him uncomfortable."
The girl blinks, information registering at a painfully slow pace.
She then throws herself off Yamaguchi with a screech that is heard from the other side of the door, "I'm so sorry! I didn't mean to invade your personal space like that, I swear! P-please, forgive me!"
Hitoka bows, her knees itching the longer she puts her weight on them, forehead almost hitting the floor.
Of course, this makes sweet, darling Tadashi break out into hasty demands for her to stand up, "It's fine, really! I'm fine too, I was just caught off guard!" this escalates into a battle of wills, the two apologizing to the other in numerous, varied ways as if it were a competition.
"Enough you two," Sugawara scolds softly the only two first-years he never thought he would have to scold, "Yamaguchi go change, and you should go help Shimizu with the cleaning Yachi."
The girl is off in the next second, screaming something about brooms and mops.
When Koushi finally enters the changing room, a blushing Yamaguchi trailing after him like a duckling, his eyes seek Daichi's and Asahi's, who are of course almost fully changed back into their regular school uniforms, "You're both terrible and I hate you."
Exams week to Yachi Hitoka means a whole hell lot of studying, imagining her failure and ultimate doom as well as consuming an unhealthy amount of caffeine.
The girl is practically vibrating in her seat, eyes glued to her math textbook as she waits for Hinata and Kageyama to show up - three extra expresso doses was maybe a bit much.
But well, exam seasons calls for extreme measures.
"Seriously Yacchan, you need to take a break, you've been studying for almost two hours," Harada Koharu, the blonde's classmate and tentative friend, says while she rubs at her dry eyes, "Not to mention the history exam this morning was terrible."
"There's only an hour left before the next one," Hitoka says, frowning as she tries to remember what variable was dubbed N in the formula.
Harada sighs, taking a sip of water and fanning herself, "I know, but I also know you studied all night for math, you'll be fine," the library is filled with students in different states of disarray, some on the brink of tearing their hair out while others had fallen asleep from exhaustion.
"Sorry, we're so late!" Hinata whispers loudly, falling into the seat next to Yachi's, "We weren't able to finish before the time was up and ate before we came here," he explains.
"It's fine, how did modern lit go?" Hinata shrugs while Kageyama's face flinches, avoiding the girl's eyes, "I did good with kanji, but there were a lot of long comprehension questions and there wasn't much time to analyze the text like you showed me..."
"Oh," the blonde blinks, "I'm sorry we didn't focus much on that then, I hope it will still be enough for you to pass."
The dark-haired boy almost tells her that he doubts it, instead, he clears his throat, "Yeah, me too, thanks for taking the time to tutor us." Not much else is said after that, the four of them sticking their noses into their books, with the two volleyball players asking questions to their manager once in a while.
"In this case, it's easier to move around the variables before we replace them with numbers," she leans on Hinata slightly without noticing as she rewrites the formula from the boy's science book on a piece of paper, "So if the unknown variable in this exercise is the mass, you isolate it by dividing by g, which gives you m = W/g which is easier to solve."
She's so close in fact, that Hinata can smell the light, flowery aroma from her shampoo.
The boy quickly types on his calculator, "30.61...in kg, right?" the girl nods, happy that he had remembered the right unit since it was common for teachers to deduct points when they were forgotten.
"That's it! Does your teacher permit you to have a note sheet for the formulas?" Hinata shakes his head, pouting, "Ouch, that's rough! You need to memorize everything then."
"Yeah, but since there's not that much it isn't so bad," Hitoka quickly checks his previous answers to the exercises, excited when she sees they're almost all right - when Hinata had told her that science was his best subject, she hadn't thought he would be this good.
But well, that would be an awfully mean thing to say, so she doesn't and instead strikes the two wrong answers and corrects them, then, she draws little stars in the right corner of the page along with a Great job! written underneath them.
Shouyou laughs at the cute, sudden, but very-much-like-her thing to do.
Takeda-sensei almost cries when he tells her the amount of money gathered from donations after only a few days of her poster being up - Karasuno alumni mostly, as well as that one sports clothing shop.
The gleeful squeal she makes has most of the members of the Karasuno team, who were currently on a water break, turn to the two with confused expressions. She ignores it and runs past a curious Asahi and Nishinoya to pop right in front of Kageyama and Hinata, hands clasped in front of her chest.
"Thank you!" her cheeks hurt from how wide the smile that stretches her lips is, and something tightens in her ribcage, "Let's all go to Tokyo together!"
"Ah, uh well..." she's so happy she feels lightheaded and does not notice their hesitance, or the unsure glance they share, they wouldn't get their exam results until tomorrow, but both Kageyama and Hinata have an idea of how badly some of their exams went.
But, the girl's eyes are wide and hopeful and so pretty that they're unable to tell her. Instead, Hinata beams right back, "Yeah!"
Kageyama whips around, but doesn't renounce the notion, simply disfiguring the boy in the same manner as Tsukishima, who is close by, does. The tall middle blocker's nose wrinkles and he sighs, "You're both hopeless."
It's like there's a knot deep within her chest, tangled and tugging. Hitoka looks at the two boys before her, boys who she has only known for a few weeks, who are so endearing it hurts.
She wants to hug them.
"All right everyone, gather around!" Daichi calls, eye twitching when multiple persons groan. Hitoka's hand which had slowly begun to reach out, falls lifelessly to her side as the two boys go around her to crowd around their captain.
Dazed, she does not notice the figure creeping to her side, "Yacchan, is everything alright?" the tiny, jumpy girl turns to face Shimizu-senpai properly, mortified about what she had been about to do.
"Ye-yes!" her voice is a pitch or two higher than usual, "Water! We should refill the water bottles!"
The third-year manager raises a brow when Hitoka grabs as much of the half-empty reusable water bottles as it is humanely possible, even somehow managing to hold one between her shoulder and cheek like one would a phone.
"I'll go get the bag," Kiyoko says, shaking her head fondly at the poor sight her kouhai makes.
Later that day, right before the end of practice, she gets handed a Karasuno volleyball team sweatshirt and watches with watery eyes as the whole team turns so their back faces her, pointing to the white script on the back of their black sweatshirts that are the same as hers, screaming variations of Welcome to the team!
"It's a pleasure to work with you!" she bows and holds the soft, freshly cleaned jacket close to her chest. It smells of fabric softener and new beginnings, Hitoka loves it to death.
"Come on," Nishinoya says, suddenly much closer than he was seconds ago, "Put it on!"
She does, fastening the zipper up to her chin and marveling at how warm and safe a simple piece of clothing makes her feel, she has to roll up the sleeves so they don't go past her fingers, and beams, "I love it, it's so comfortable!"
"I know right?!" the slight tugging in her chest makes another appearance and for a split second, Hitoka, overthinker and professional worrywart, feels her head clear, as if the fog within her mind had dispersed.
She gets high off the way these people make her feel, all warm and tingly inside, how it's like she just fits with them. Everything is perfect, wonderfully so.
Then, the next day, they get the exam results.