You can hear it in the silence, you can feel it on the way home
Pairing: Ushijima Wakatoshi x reader
Based on the song You Are In Love by Taylor Swift
Masterlist
The Shiratorizawa third-years have a running bet.
Tendou started it, technically, back in April, scrawling a tally chart on the inside of his notebook cover: days until Wakatoshi notices. Semi added a second column in May: days until she notices. By July the tally had run out of room and Tendou had to tape in a second page.
It isn't that Ushijima Wakatoshi is unobservant. He notices everything — the exact angle of his opponent's wrist before a serve, the millisecond hesitation in a blocker's footwork, the way the gym lights flicker twice before they steady. He notices that you always bring two onigiris to practice and hand him the second one without asking if he wants it, the same flavor every time, because he mentioned once, months ago, that he liked it. He notices that you wait by the gate even on the days he stays late for extra reps, sitting on the low wall with your bag in your lap, humming some song under your breath.
He notices all of it. He simply doesn't know how to call it yet.
"You could just tell him," Shirabu says, not for the first time, watching you refill Ushijima's water bottle before he's even asked for it.
"Tell him what?" you say, genuinely confused, and Shirabu has to walk away before his face does something undignified.
Across the gym, Tendou is narrating to Goshiki in a hushed, delighted voice. "Watch - watch this - he's going to walk her halfway home again and pretend it's on the way."
"It is on the way," Goshiki says.
"Goshiki. It is not remotely on the way."
It never stops being on the way, somehow. Every evening, without a single conversation about it, Ushijima falls into step beside you, matches his stride to yours instead of the other way around, carries your bag over one shoulder without asking, and talks - actually talks, more than he does with anyone else - about small things. The particular blue the sky goes right before it's dark. A serve he's still turning over in his head. Whether you've eaten.
You tell him about your day. He listens like it's the only interesting thing that's happened to him all week, which, if anyone bothered to ask him, it might be.
Neither of you has ever called it anything either.
"It's actually kind of sad," Semi says one afternoon, watching the two of you from the club room window. You, laughing at something, Ushijima's ears going the faintest pink as he tries and fails to look unaffected. "Like watching two people slow-dance and insist they're just standing near each other."
"I give it until the Interhigh," Tendou says.
"You said that in April."
"I'm an optimist."
They are, all of them, hopelessly outmatched by how slow this is going. The whole team knows. The manager knows. Even the first-years, who barely know anything, took one look at Ushijima carrying your umbrella over you in the rain while getting soaked himself and understood immediately, the way you understand weather.
Only the two of you seem to have missed the memo.
It happens, in the end, on an ordinary Tuesday. Practice runs late, the gym empties out slow, and you're sitting on the low wall by the gate the way you always do, humming the way you always do, when Ushijima sits down beside you instead of standing, which he has never done before.
"You wait for me every day," he says. Not a question. He has never been much for questions when a fact will do.
"I like walking with you," you say, like it's the simplest thing in the world. Which, to you, it is.
He's quiet for a moment, turning something over the way he turns over a serve - carefully, from every angle, until he's sure.
"You are my best friend," he says, plainly, like it's just a fact he's reporting, like the weather or a final score.
It shouldn't land the way it does. It's such a simple thing to say. But something in the way he says it - steady, certain, like he's been carrying the words around for a while deciding they were true - makes your chest go warm and strange all at once, and all at once you understand exactly what he means by it, and what it costs him to say plainly, and what it isn't quite the same as saying but is trying so hard to become.
You don't say anything back right away. You don't have to. He can see it settle over your face, and something in his shoulders eases, like he's been waiting to know if you'd understand.
"I think," he says, "that I have been slow to understand something obvious."
You laugh, a little startled. "What's that?"
He looks at you and for once in his life, Ushijima Wakatoshi doesn't have a perfectly composed answer ready. He just reaches over, careful, like he's asking permission with the motion itself, and laces his fingers through yours.
"I think everyone has known for a long time," he says. "I would like to know too."
Somewhere behind the gym doors, muffled and utterly failing to be subtle, there is the unmistakable sound of Tendou Satori losing his entire mind.
You're too busy smiling to notice. So is he.
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