When Sakusa first joins MSBY, he is quiet and withdrawn, and responds in one-syllable answers to his teammates’ attempts to make conversation.
That is, until Miya Atsumu, still a second-string setter, loudly declares in the locker room one morning, “Water isn’t wet.”
The rest of the team barely reacts to this, used to Atsumu’s antics by now. But then from the corner of the room comes an indignant splutter.
“How the fuck is water not wet?” Before the team fully registers that, Sakusa is striding over to Atsumu’s locker and glaring at him ferociously.
Atsumu’s eyes dart around the room behind Sakusa, the face of a man who has poked a bear and is not prepared to face the consequences. His wordless cries for help are mercilessly ignored by his teammates, who are all wearing expressions of morbid curiosity.
“Well,” Atsumu steels himself to meet Sakusa’s eyes. “Water makes things wet. So how can it be wet? It’s like saying the chicken is the egg because the chicken makes the egg.”
Silence, like the calm before a storm. And then-
“How the hell did you pass the third grade?” Sakusa demands. “You should be in jail.”
Because Atsumu’s mouth functions as the equivalent of a chatbot on a dating site, he blurts out. “The only thing I would be in jail for is a crime of passion.”
Now, Sakusa has run into Atsumu a few times throughout his high school volleyball career, but never before has he been treated to such a lethal dosage of Miya Atsumu, and is left gaping like a goldfish. Atsumu, displaying some sort of self-preservation skill at last, seizes the opportunity and legs it out of the door immediately.
The incident, though utterly bizarre, is put at the back of everyone’s minds soon. Until one particularly gruelling five set match, when the last point was a spike from Sakusa which had gone out of bounds.
Sakusa hasn’t headed straight for the showers, like he usually does. Instead, he sits alone on the bench beside the court, a towel draped over his head.
Meian starts towards him, but Atsumu beats him to it. “The moon landing was fake!” he yells.
The team is utterly flabbergasted. Then, against all odds, Sakusa raises his head slowly to stare at Atsumu. Clearly feeling encouraged, Atsumu continues, “Yeah, dontcha know! The government shot it in a studio! Flags don’t wave on the moon!”
Then, before anyone really knows what’s going on, Sakusa is on his feet and yelling right back at Atsumu.“There were so many journalists witnessing it! How do you explain the astronauts landing in the ocean?”
Atsumu is slowly backing away in the direction of the locker rooms. “Planes land in the ocean all the time,” he says. “That doesn’t mean they’ve been to the moon.”
“Get back here,” Sakusa growls, and then the two of them vanish into the locker rooms, arguing loudly.
“You know,” Barnes overhears Hinata telling Bokuto later, “when my senpais said I had to watch out for locker room talk, this wasn’t quite what I imagined!”
The rest of the team slowly begins to pick up on Atsumu’s strategy. Whenever Sakusa looks like he’s on the verge of completely withdrawing into himself, someone would yell a completely untrue statement. Nine out of ten times, it immediately elicits some kind of visceral reaction from him.
On his worst days, though, only Atsumu is able to drag Sakusa out of his funk. “Evolution is a myth,” Atsumu would say. The team marvels at the fiery glint that immediately appears in Sakusa’s eyes. Within a few minutes, Sakusa would be back to normal.
When the new season rolls around, Atsumu is finally made the starting setter.
“You deserve it,” Meian tells him, completely sincerely. “There truly is no one who brings out the best in his spikers like you do.”
