Work Text:
There’s a certain phenomenon that happens at sea where two sets of wave systems crash into each other at differing angles, creating a faint, uneven criss crossing pattern in the water. It used to remind Tobio of volleyball, in the oddly disjointed way that everything in his life wound up somehow doing so. Now he watches Hinata bleed across the court like a sparrow on five types of painkillers at once, and thinks about how cross waves were probably born in people first.
Hinata isn’t dangerous enough to kill anyone. Neither is he strong enough to drown Tobio, who is taller than most sixteen-year-olds and drinks three packets of milk a day, but he pisses him off anyway, like how you can curse at the ocean for being unfathomably deep and cruel and mysterious and it will continue to exist just to spite you. Hinata breathes miracles the way children dream. To Tobio, who has only ever known how to bruise his own hands to make it rain, he seems closer to the gods than any of them.
Not that he tells him that. Tobio only has meandering philosophical thoughts once a week, which he prefers, because it makes it easier to pretend they’re just meandering philosophical thoughts and not the literary manifestation of a reality that is slowly starting to inch its way into his metaphorical bedroom. Yes, Tobio says, making his metaphorical bed while metaphorical sunshine streams in through a large, metaphorical window he doesn’t have, I know what this means. Shut the hell up. I haven’t had my third packet of milk today. No, the metaphorical radio bleats back at him. You don’t know.
He does, in fact, know. Hinata Shouyou makes him think of cross waves because he’s dangerous. He turns Tobio into a living liability whenever he walks into a room, dragging the ocean around in his wake like a pet lizard he’s tamed by pure accident, and there’s a word in his chest for this, a truth he’s never read about in any volleyball manuals, articles, stories, but Tobio doesn’t want to hear it right now. He’s sixteen years old and taller than most of his peers. He likes volleyball. It’s only the beginning of the rainy season, and Hinata’s barreling into the gymnasium again like he thinks he’s this close to flying and someone’s going to catch him if he does, by chance, crash into the ceiling lights, yelling Tobio’s name like a gemstone he’s tucked under his tongue. Tobio’s palms are clean and pure and pink. He’ll ask Hinata about heaven someday.