The first thing that hit was the silence. Not the gentle, pre-dawn quiet of a normal weekend, but a thick, pressurized silence. The kind that comes after a sonic boom, after a thousand people have stopped screaming all at once. Yesterday, Hyogo Prefecture had roared for the Inarizaki High Boys' Volleyball Team. Today, it was holding its breath.
I rolled over, the sheets twisting around my legs. My phone was on the floor where it had fallen. 4:17 a.m. Useless. Sleep wasn’t coming back.
On my desk, a row of coloured pencils was arranged in a perfect spectrum, from canary yellow to deep indigo. A nervous habit. When my thoughts get too loud, I make the world outside my head quiet and orderly. My textbooks were stacked the same way, spines creating a subtle gradient. It’s a stupid, pointless thing to do. It helps anyway.
The whole school felt like one big, collective wince. Losing to Karasuno. To the crows. After a deuce that went into the thirties. A match like that doesn’t just end; it fractures something in the air.
My thumb hovered over his name in my contacts. Atsumu. I hadn’t heard from him since the team bus got back last night. Just a single, solitary message sent at 1:28 a.m.
*The sound is wrong.*
That was it. No context. No greeting. I’d replied immediately. *What sound? Are you okay?* And then, an hour later, a more desperate, *'Tsumu?*
Crickets. The digital kind, which are somehow worse than the real ones.
Right. Action. Sitting here stewing in the quiet was just another form of paralysis. I pulled on my school uniform—the dark blazer felt strangely formal for a Saturday—and slipped out of the house. The air outside was cool and damp, carrying the smell of rain that hadn't decided to fall yet. My stomach grumbled. I needed coffee. Not the sweet, milky junk from the vending machines. The good stuff. The UCC Black in the silver can, the one that tastes like it’s angry at you for drinking it. That’s what this morning called for.
The convenience store was an island of fluorescent light in the grey dawn. I grabbed my coffee, paid the half-asleep clerk, and headed toward school. There was no reason for him to be there, not really. No official practice. But where else would he go? For boys like them, the court was church, confessional, and home, all rolled into one. It was the only place big enough to hold the sheer, vibrating energy of a Miya twin.
Especially a Miya twin who had just lost.
The school grounds were deserted, haunted by the ghosts of yesterday’s pep rally. A few crumpled banners lay near a bin, the gold and black ink bleeding from the damp. I walked past the main building toward the second gymnasium. The heavy doors were propped open an inch. A sliver of light cut through the gloom.
My heart hammered against my ribs, a frantic, unsteady rhythm. I pushed the door open.
The gym was empty.
Almost.
One figure stood under the far basket, his back to me. Same height, same shock of hair, dyed a defiant, unnatural colour. But the set of his shoulders was different. Looser. Less like a coiled spring.
He turned, and the part in his hair was on the wrong side.
“Osamu,” I breathed out, the name a small puff of condensation in the cold air.
He gave a lazy, one-shouldered shrug by way of greeting, his mouth full. He was, of course, eating an onigiri. “Mornin’, Emiko.”
“I—I was looking for Atsumu. Have you seen him?”
“Saw him this morning.” He took another bite, chewing thoughtfully. His grey eyes were flat, betraying nothing. It was his superpower: looking like he was thinking about nothing but the texture of rice when he was actually cataloguing everything. “Headed out early. Said he was going for a run.”
“A run? Where?” My own initiative had led me to a dead end. Worse, it led me to the one person who could give me all the answers and wouldn't.
“Didn’t say.” Osamu crumpled the onigiri wrapper into a perfect, tiny square. “You know how he gets. The gears grind too loud. Needs to burn it off.”
I hated how well I knew. The restless pacing, the constant, low-grade thrum of energy that poured off him when he was agitated. But this felt different. The text message wasn’t restless. It was… strange. Dislocated.
“He sent me a weird text last night,” I admitted, pulling out my phone. I didn't show it to him. It felt too private. “He said the sound was wrong.”
Osamu’s jaw tightened for a fraction of a second. It was the only tell. A flicker of something—annoyance, concern, maybe both—passed through his eyes before the placid mask slid back into place. He looked away, toward the net.
“He’s always been weird about sound,” Osamu said, his voice dropping a little. It was the most he’d ever offered on the subject. “Hears things different. Don’t worry about it. He’s just bein’ a drama queen ‘cause he lost.”
It wasn’t that. I knew it wasn’t that. This wasn't the theatrical sulking that followed a practice match. This was something deeper, something hollowed-out. Osamu knew it, too. He was just better at building walls. He was withholding the shape of his own worry, offering me a flimsy, paper-thin reassurance instead.
“Right,” I said, the word tasting like a lie.
He pushed off the wall. “Gotta go. Mom wants me to pick up rice.” He walked past me, close enough that I could smell the faint scent of salt from his snack. He paused at the door.
“Emiko.”
I looked up.
“He’s louder when he’s quiet,” he said, and then he was gone, leaving the heavy door to swing slowly shut, sealing me inside with the echoing quiet and the single, baffling sentence on my phone screen. The silence in the gym was no longer pressurized. It was empty. A vacuum. And his words echoed in it, making less sense and more sense than anything all morning.