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revasserium · 1 year

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54. first love, last rites (alternatively titled: sign)

kageyama; 2,631 words; mute!reader w/ mentions of japanese sign language, mostly fluff

01. new

he remembers the first time like a dream, scenes drifting in and out of focus, the images hazy behind the screen of time and memories re-remembered a million times, the rough edges and imperfections smoothed over by years of polishing — your shy, round face and your huge dark eyes peering at him from behind your mother’s legs. but he remembers your smile with a startling clarity —

so big, so bright, so sweet and happy and unrelenting.

your family just moved in next door, or so he gathers from the pitter patter of words he catches as the adults above you both chat. and you’re still watching him, half-hidden from view, your fingers digging into your mom’s beige slacks.

“tobio, say hi,” his own mother urges him with a pat on the back. he frowns, his lips pulling down as he tries to muster the breath. somewhere upstairs, he can feel his sister watching and he wonders at the unfairness. why’s he have to be the one to make friends with the new neighbors? why not her?

“hi…” he finally forces out. a huff of a word.

but when he looks up again, it’s to find you stepping out from behind your mom, a bit less hidden.

you reach out your hand and he stares at it for a solid five seconds before taking it in his.

it’s warm, he thinks, and soft, he realizes.

you pull your hand back and flash him a smile — that smile, that smile.

and somewhere in the back of his young, yet-unburdened mind, he knows he’ll be chasing that smile for the rest of his life.

02. weight

he’d never thought it was strange the way you speak with your hands, the way your fingers flicker and flash, your words big and sharp sometimes, small and hesitant at others. he doesn’t question, in the way that children never question, about the differences in your preferred modes of communication, and he learns quickly enough.

sign… language…

you spell out the letters one by one, slowly to show him and then the motions for the words — a rapid spinning of the fingers. he nods and repeats. you smile and continue.

and like this, he learns about the shapes and weights of words.

03. tomorrow

“ugh, i hate math…”

you look at him over your homework, blinking before you tap your pencil twice on his worksheet, motioning for him to hand it over. he frowns, sighing as he pushes the paper towards you, shifting his chair to sit next to you, bending over it to watch your pencil move.

your arms brush, your knees press.

outside, the spring droops on sun-soaked cherry trees, their branches budding in green.

you chatter with your free hand as you work out the equation on the page.

see? it’s easy, you push the worksheet back at him with two more decisive taps, the dark charcoal lead digging dots into his worksheet. he frowns harder as he tries to piece together how you arrived at the answer.

“it’s not easy,” he says, even as the bell rings, signaling the end of study period, and the classroom erupts into a clamor of voices, of scraping chairs and tinkling phone charms, of laughter and shouts and the poomf poomf poomf of the chalkboard eraser being cleaned.

you try to hide your laughter behind your hands even as kageyama tucks his workbook back into his schoolbag and shoulders it.

“same time tomorrow?” he asks as he makes his way towards the door. you flash him a thumbs up and a hearty nod and he finds himself smiling. he tosses his fingers up into a sideways peace sign before turning out into the crowded middle-school hallway.

see you later.

04. listen

he hears them whispering, talking in between classes, outside during break period, during their mandatory gym classes — he hears them wonder, musing on the reasons behind why he spends so much time with you. why he would even want to. he never answers them, but he hears them.

and he knows that you can hear them too.

it’s okay, you tell him, i wonder too, sometimes.

kageyama stares down at the lunchbox in his lap.

“because,” he says, putting down his chopsticks to motion with his hands, “i want to.”

you smile, reaching out to steal an octopus sausage, popping it into your mouth with a pleased nod. he watches, as he always does, with a kind of muted wonder at just how much can be said without a single spoken word. he watches the way you sway back and forth with the summer breeze, the rooftop scattered with other students, all out to enjoy their lunch beneath the welcoming sun.

it’s quieter up here, so much quieter than the cafeteria or the field out back or the classrooms that allow their students to eat at their desks.

“and…” he folds his hands together, palm to palm, as if trying to catch a firefly’s light, “we’re friends.”

05. hands

he has always thought your hands were beautiful.

“it’s pretty,” he tells you one day, blushing as you blink up at him, quirking your head to one side, like a curious sparrow, waiting, wondering.

he swallows, hard, and its then that he realizes his hands are shaking. he bunches them into fists, squeezing them before letting go, feeling the blood rush back into his fingers, warm and tingling and strong.

“your voice,” he says, but he points to your hands, and as you look back down at them, he reaches out to take them in his.

“it’s pretty,” he repeats, his voice softer this time, less rushed, less forced, his fingers gentle as he folds them over yours.

06. care

he can tell you’re angry even without looking at your face, your normally fluid fingers stuttering as you swap between bandaging up his thumb and yammering away at how he’s gotta be more careful.

“i know,” he says, sighing as you glare up at him once more, dabbing iodine into the wound before tying off the bandage perhaps a bit too tight. he bites back a wince as you drop his hand, the first-aide kit clacking shut as you slam the lid.

his eyes follow the way your shoulders rise and fall with each of your breaths, how your cheeks are ruddy and red from worry, anger.

your hands are important, you say, reaching out to take them, clutching them between your own. you shake them as if trying to shake some sense into him, and he nods, but you shake your head, sharp and vehement.

no, you don’t understand.

“i get it! i do! i need them for volleyball, for setting —”

you shake your head again, squeezing his hands so tight that he does wince this time, his arms jerking back from the pain. your eyes are wide and dark and not for the first time, kageyama finds himself beholden by them, by the strength of your gaze, of your grip as you pull him back towards you.

they’re important to me.

you jab a finger into your own chest, once, twice, three times. so hard that he finally reaches out to catch your hand before you can do it again.

“stop — stop that! your hands are important too! th-they’re important to me!”

there’s a ringing silence, the kind that slices through a room, knife-sharp and bell-deep and kageyama realizes that his chest is heaving, his own heartbeats a thundering drumbeat behind his ears, pounding, pounding —

you slowly twist your palms in his till you can smooth your fingers over his loosening hands. you trace your thumbs along the the pads of his thumbs, pressing slightly to work out the tension he’s collected there. slowly, you move to the base of his pointer fingers, and then his middle finger, one by one, till his hands are warm and loose in his lap between your bodies.

“tomorrow’s game,” he says, his voice soft and rasping and more than a little sorry, “will you… be there?”

you let out an audible sigh, your shoulders slumping down, but you dip your head in a quick nod, your finger flicking out towards him.

i’ll go.

he feels himself relax, slowly softening back into his skin as he nods along as well.

“good. i’ll see you there.”

07. silence

even in the mind-numbing din of a game, there are moments of quiet — and it is in those moments kageyama finds himself most comfortable. in the space between when the spiker’s feet leave the ground and when their palm meets the ball, in the breath before a serve, in the millisecond space between a jump and a block.

“mah… but it really is impressive how you can find even the smallest moments of quiet in a match to concentrate,” sugawara drapes his arm over kageyama’s shoulder during court-switch, giving him a quick squeeze, and a teasing smirk “but i guess that’s why you’re a genius, and we’re all just plebs, hm?”

he dips his head with a huffed, “thanks,” but he glances up towards the stands and finds you immediately.

he feels your smile like a breath of air in a screaming crowd.

you catch his eye and raise both your fists, pumping them twice, and he feels his chest expand with warmth.

good luck!

he allows himself the shadow of a grin, turning back to the game, his shoulders square, his back straight, the cheers and shouts of crowd fading out. it’s his serve.

the whistle blows, he takes a breath, and he revels in the quiet.

08. sound

he learns the meaning of helpless the first time he hears you cry, the sound ripping through him like skin on gravel, harsh and tearing and raw. so jagged, so wrong — the way your breaths heave through your entire body, your hiccups cutting through the soft whine of your sobs.

you have your hands pressed to your ears, knees drawn up to your chest, your room dark except for the block of light pooling on the floor at this feet, caught by the shape of him in your doorframe.

there are so many things he wants to ask, so many things he wants to say — what’s wrong, who did this, tell me their names — tell me their names and i’ll make them pay — tell me, please — talk to me, say something — anything —

but for the first time in his life, when he reaches for the words, they do not appear. his voice stolen by the sight of you, curled up in the corner, hiding from the world, making yourself ever smaller, almost as if you wished you could disappear.

instead, he takes a step in and lets the door close behind him, shutting the pair of you in darkness. slowly, he lowers himself onto the edge of your bed, taking a deep, steadying breath, and then another one. you hiccup; the bed shifts; the sheets shuffle.

he pulls himself onto the mattress to sit across from you, cross-legged, leaving enough space between your bodies for you to deny him. he places both his hands there, palms up, open, imploring, patient. moments pass, and then just as slowly, the shape of you uncurls from itself in the corner, your toes inching forward till they almost touch his fingers.

you reach out to take his hands.

09. butterflies

the sight of your laughter never fails to stump him, to force a break in his thoughts, to slam pause on whatever else he might be doing.

a friend of yours is making you laugh, showing you something on her bedazzled phone, the pair of you giggling, your freshly painted fingers flashing like fish-scales beneath the fluorescent classroom lights. he catches bits of your conversation, his eyes so used to the rhythm of your hands, the way you flutter your fingers in between your thoughts, how you tend to move your entire upper body when you’re excited about something.

“ah… bakayama-kun, are you staring at your girlfriend again?”

kageyama whips around to glower at a much too smug-looking hinata, a shit-eating grin spreading across his face even as kageyama reaches out to try and whack him upside the head. hinata ducks out of the way with a gleeful laugh, and kageyama can feel his cheeks burning as he sinks further into his seat, glaring at the place where hinata used to be.

he feels your eyes on him before he ever turns around to look. but when he does, you quirk your head, blinking at him, a question in your eyes.

he shakes his head before grabbing his bag and stomping from the room, even as the bell rings to signal the end of lunch period.

when the teacher asks where kageyama-kun thinks he’s going, hinata answers that he’s probably got some stomach butterflies to deal with.

10. again

he doesn’t know when it happened, just that by the time he realized, it had already been happening for longer than he can remember. there was no after-school confession, no long-winded letters tucked into one another’s shoe lockers, no homemade chocolates on valentines day, no return-gifts on white day.

kageyama thinks that he’d simply woken up one morning and understood — he’d understood it in the same implicit way that his body had always understood the feeling of a volleyball court, the weight of a ball in his hands, the precise distance between the toss and the serve, the swing and the impact.

“tobio! you’re going to be late!”

he groans as he rolls out of bed, pulling on his track pants, haphazardly brushing his teeth as he digs for a pair of clean socks.

you’re waiting for him by the door, a bright red scarf around your neck, blowing warm air into your palms. you shoot him a bright grin and a wave as he slings his sports back over his shoulders and steps into his shoes.

“morning,” he says, blinking as you hand him a freshly steamed curry bun, still a bit hot to the touch.

he flashes you a grateful smile as he takes it, stuffing half of it into his mouth before you’re halfway down the street and when you turn to look at him with an exasperated huff, he crinkles his nose and holds still as you reach up to wipe the crumbs from the edge of his lips.

you motion for him to hurry, tapping at your wrist.

we’re going to be late!

he sighs, rolling his eyes as he shovels down the rest of the bun, breaking into an unwilling jog.

you let out a tiny, exasperated laugh before reaching out your hand towards him.

he blinks, stares at it for a second, and then reaches out to take it.

your hand is still small in his, and warm, and just as soft as he remembers. but your fingers are cold, and he curls his own fingers around yours, holding them tight as you smile up at him — bright and sweet and unrelenting.

you run your thumb over the back of his hand.

don’t let go.

you both hear the first bell ring when you’re a block from the school gates and he breaks out into a run, pulling you behind him, lacing your fingers between his, grinning despite himself.

you give him a squeeze and he squeezes back.

i won’t.

#haikyuu #haikyuu!!#kageyama tobio #kageyama tobio x reader #haikyuu x reader #kageyama x reader #haikyuu scenarios #kageyama tobio fluff #haikyuu fluff #floofy floof floof #this was a weird one and i struggled with getting it 'right' and im still not sure if i did but... i tried lol #it felt like a story that wanted to be told; i just didn't know if i was the right person to tell it #many thanks to 手話ちゃんねる yt channel for being such a resource #for my many jsl related searches and yes -- the sign language described in the fic is japanese sign language #for... obvious reasons LOL

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