Summary: Some coincidences are made, not found. You're just careful enough that he hasn't noticed the difference yet.
You knew he lived in a narrow house past the park, the kind with a low fence and a porch light that came on automatically at dusk, third from the corner. You knew he took the stairs instead of the elevator, always, even carrying his gym bag, even when it clearly would have been easier not to. You knew the corner store two blocks from his building sold the specific brand of canned coffee he liked, and that he stopped there more days than not, and that his snack of choice, without fail, was Chuupet, the cheap jelly fruit sticks sold in nearly every convenience store on campus. You'd seen him unwrap one outside the gym so many times that you'd started noticing the brand on the shelf yourself, unprompted, the way a word you've just learned suddenly appears everywhere.
You bought one, once. Told yourself it was curiosity, nothing more, and ate it walking back from class with the faint, absurd sense of participating in something private. It tasted okay. You finished it anyway.
The fox had started the same way, a small, private observation you hadn't meant to keep. Something about the shape of his eyes, narrow and a little sharp at the corners, unbothered in a way that read as faintly predatory even when he wasn't doing anything at all. You'd thought it once, in passing, and then you'd bought the burnt orange yarn.
You told yourself none of this meant anything. That knowing a person's habits wasn't the same as acting on them, that you weren't doing anything except occasionally walking the direction he happened to be walking, at the time he happened to be walking it. If you squinted, it was almost coincidence.
You had stopped being able to squint that hard.
Thursday, you nearly lost him.
A professor who ran ten minutes over, a friend who caught your arm in the hallway wanting to discuss a project you barely cared about, and by the time you made it outside, the window you'd learned to rely on was already closing. You knew, from three weeks of quiet, careful observation, that if you didn't reach the corner by the sports science building within the next few minutes, you'd miss him entirely, and the whole evening would stretch out ahead of you feeling strangely unfinished, the way a held breath feels wrong until it's let out.
So you walked faster than you meant to. Then faster than that.
You caught sight of him just as he was cutting through the edge of the campus park, gym bag over one shoulder, unhurried in the way he always was, completely unaware that anyone behind him was rushing at all.
Relief hit first, disproportionate to something this small. Shame followed close behind it, the recognition that you'd felt relief over something you had no right to feel anything about.
You slowed your pace to match a safer distance and clutched your bag out of habit. That was when you registered the absence rather than the object itself. The clasp of your keychain had been open, and your keychain nowhere in sight. You were still looking down when the footsteps ahead of you slowed, then stopped.
Suna had felt something hit the back of his shoe before he heard it. A small, soft thud against leather, nothing sharp enough to be a rock. He glanced down and found a small crocheted fox lying in the grass, a thin cord trailing from it like it had torn loose from something.
He picked it up, turning it once between his fingers. Handmade, unmistakably, one ear a little longer than the other, the orange yarn slightly uneven at the seams. He looked behind without expecting to find anything and found you instead, frozen mid-step, staring at the fox in his hand as though it had personally betrayed you.
"This yours?" he asked. His voice was as flat as it always sounded, not unkind, simply unbothered, as though a stranger's dropped keychain were a mildly interesting footnote to an otherwise unremarkable evening.
You closed the distance faster than was probably dignified. "Yeah. Sorry, the clasp on my bag doesn't close right." True, and beside the point, and you knew it even as you said it.
He held it out. Your fingers brushed his for half a second, and you were irritated with yourself for noticing.
"A fox," he said, not quite a question, studying it now that it had left his hand. "Someone make that for you?"
"I made it." You tucked it back into your bag, checking the clasp with more attention than it had received all week. "I’m still learning. It's not — it’s not very good."
"Didn't say it wasn’t good." He looked at you for a second longer than the conversation strictly required, something unreadable behind his eyes, and you had the sudden, uncomfortable sense of being looked at properly for the first time. Not glanced past, not walked by, but actually seen. "Why a fox?"
"No reason," you said, too quickly, and busied yourself with checking if it’s sturdy on your bag instead of meeting his eyes. Your face tightened because the reason himself was asking you why you made it.
"Mm." He said and was already looking back down the path, gym bag shifting on his shoulder like he was getting ready to keep walking. "You go to the gym block? Sports science?"
The question landed harder than it should have. "Psych building. Just cutting through."
"Huh." He didn't push it, didn't seem particularly invested either way. "Small campus."
"Yeah," you managed. "Small campus."
He gave a short nod, the kind that closes a conversation without being rude about it, and started walking again, unhurried, the same as always. You stood there a moment longer than you should have, watching his back get smaller down the path, the crocheted fox now warm in your palm from where his hand had held it.
You told yourself, walking the opposite direction now, taking the long way so it wouldn't look like you were following the same route, that it had gone fine. Normal. A completely ordinary conversation between two strangers about a dropped keychain. Nothing had been given away. He hadn't looked at you like he suspected anything.
Small campus, he'd said. Like that explained everything. Like it wasn't strange at all, that the two of you kept ending up in the same six-block radius of the city at exactly the same time, week after week.
Suna thought about it longer than he expected to, later, lying on his bed with the ceiling fan clicking overhead.
Not the keychain. The girl. Something in the way she'd looked at him before catching herself, smoothing her expression back into something politer, more composed, like she'd been startled by more than a dropped keychain.
He didn’t think much of it, not really. People get flustered by small things all the time. Dropping something in front of a stranger was mildly embarrassing regardless of who was picking it up.
Still, "psych building, cutting through" sat oddly with him, faintly, the same low static he'd felt once or twice before on this exact stretch of park, a word sitting just behind his teeth he couldn't quite reach.
Summary : One kind moment in the rain, and now you can’t stop finding reasons to be near him. You have a word for what this is. You just refuse to use it.
You hadn't planned on remembering him. Strangers did kind things in front of you all the time, presumably, small unwitnessed decencies that vanished the moment they were finished. A random guy crouched in the rain for two kittens who would forget him by morning shouldn't have been any different. And yet you lay in bed that night with your laptop open to a psychology reading you weren't actually absorbing, circling back again and again to the shape of him folded low over the pavement, apologizing to something that couldn't understand an apology.
Sorry. Don't have anything.
You weren't certain those were his exact words. You'd been too far away to hear him properly, and somewhere in the intervening hours your mind had filled in the gaps itself, furnishing him with a voice you'd never actually heard speak more than a sentence.
What unsettled you wasn't the size of the gesture. You'd witnessed grander performances of kindness before: the kind that got filmed, captioned, distributed for approval. This had been the opposite of that. No audience, no evidence, nothing to be gained. A boy getting drenched on principle, for an audience of no one.
You closed the laptop and told yourself you were being ridiculous. One moment didn't define a person. And even if it did, it certainly wasn't any of your business.
You believed that for almost a week. Then Tuesday happened, and belief stopped being relevant.
Sports psychology met in one of the tiered lecture halls on the north side of campus, the kind built like a shallow amphitheater, rows climbing upward in wide steps toward the back wall. Two-seater benches lined the far left and right columns, hugging the windows; the middle held longer rows, five seats across, where most of the class funneled in without much thought to where.
You sat middle, sixth row, flanked by the loose cluster of people you'd call friends more out of habit than conviction. You'd arrived early that Tuesday, the way you sometimes did when the morning left you with nothing better to do, and you spent the first few minutes simply watching the room fill in around you: bags dropped onto benches, jackets shrugged off, the low hum of conversations picking back up where they'd left off the previous week.
You weren't looking for anyone in particular. That was the part you'd repeat to yourself later, as though it mattered, as though intention could be measured after the fact.
Then he walked in.
Left side of the room, fourth row, one of the two-seater benches tucked against the window. You knew him before you'd consciously placed him, the way you might recognize a shape in the dark before your eyes had properly adjusted: the same unbothered slouch, the same dark brown hair, the same sharp, half-lidded disinterest in whatever was happening around him. It took a full second longer for the rest of it to surface, the alley, the rain, the two kittens who would never know his name.
It's him.
The thought arrived with an odd little jolt which was disproportionate to the size of the discovery. Of all the lecture halls on campus, of all the electives you could have chosen that semester, he'd ended up here, close enough that you could have called out to him if you'd had any reason to. You let yourself entertain, briefly and a little foolishly, the idea that this meant something. Fate? or whatever softer word people used when they wanted the universe to feel less random than it actually was.
What a coincidence you thought, and didn't examine too closely why the thought felt more like relief than surprise.
He sat alone in the two seater row, not by choice exactly. Though it amounted to the same thing. A pair of guys settled into the row ahead of him moments later, unmistakably related, sharp-featured and restless in a way that suggested they never fully ran out of energy to spend on each other. One with dyed blonde hair and one with grey. The blonde one twisted around and said something you couldn't quite catch, grinning like he already knew it would land.
"Say that again and I'm switching seats," mysterious rain guy said, not even bothering to look up from the window.
"You say that every week!”
"And every week I mean it more than the last time. Read into that however you want."
The blonde one barked out a laugh. Rain guy looked completely unaffected, with the put-upon patience of someone who'd stopped fighting a losing battle a long time ago. You caught yourself smiling before you'd noticed you were listening at all, and quickly faced forward before either of them could see it.
You didn't learn his name until roll call, when the professor's voice moved down the list in that flat practiced monotone reserved for attendance, name after name answered with the usual scattering of here and present.
"Suna Rintarou?"
"Present."
You knew that voice. It was your first time properly hearing it yet something in you recognized it instantly, some downstream current tracing back to a rain-soaked alley and two shivering kittens.
Suna Rintarou, you wrote in the back of your notebook and spent the rest of the lecture failing to take notes.
A week later, it was one of your friends who confirmed, without meaning to, that sports psychology would be the only place your paths ever crossed.
"Okay, but the blonde one," Hana said one afternoon, nodding vaguely toward the front of the lecture hall before the professor arrived, where the Miya twins were mid-argument over something that had the blonde one, whom you now knew as Atsumu, gesturing like his life depended on it. "The quiet one who never talks. He's unfairly good-looking for someone who looks that bored all the time."
"All three of them, honestly," someone else added. "Are they even psych majors? I've never seen them in any of my other classes."
"They're not," Hana said, already scrolling past the question like it wasn't worth the suspense. "Atsumu and the quiet one, Suna, are sports science. The other twin's culinary arts, I think. This is probably the only elective they all share."
You filed that away with more interest than you were willing to admit to, doing the quiet arithmetic of it. Sports science. Culinary arts. Different faculties entirely, different buildings, different hours, no overlap you could reasonably expect to stumble into by accident. Whatever this was, this single Tuesday and Thursday lecture, twelve to one, was the only place it could exist honestly.
That should have ended it there. A closed door was a closed door. Instead, you found the volleyball gym.
It wasn't difficult to locate; the athletics complex sat clustered along the eastern edge of campus, glass-walled and impossible to miss. Practice ran Tuesday and Thursday mornings, well before your lecture even started, which meant there was no natural reason for your afternoons to bend anywhere near it. Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, practice shifted later, stretching into the evening, and those were the days you had no class with him at all, no excuse, nothing but the simple fact that you'd started walking in that direction anyway.
You told yourself, the first time, that you were only curious how the building looked from the courtyard side. The second time, you told yourself the trees were nicer over there. By the third, the lie had worn too thin to bother reciting, and you stopped offering yourself excuses altogether.
You learned the rhythm of him the way you learned everything else, by accumulation. The gym itself gave you nothing to work with from outside; its windows sat too high along the upper level to offer more than glimpses of light and shadow, and there was no bench, no angle, no reasonable vantage point that let you watch a practice unfold from a safe distance. If you wanted to see anything at all, you had to get close enough to look through the open doors at the front, which meant getting close enough to be seen doing it.
So you kept it brief. A slowed pace as you passed, eyes flicking through the gap in the doorway for the two or three seconds it took to register motion, sound, the general shape of a team mid-drill. Never long enough to pick him out clearly. Never long enough to be caught lingering. You'd walk on before anyone inside had reason to glance toward the entrance, and only afterward, safely past, would you let yourself replay whatever fraction of a second you'd managed to catch: a serve, a shout, a flash of dark hair among the others. That was all you allowed yourself.
Until one evening, you caught him leaving.
He came out alone, gym bag slung over one shoulder, unhurried in that same way he did everything, and turned down the path toward the main road. You told yourself you were only walking the same direction, which was almost true, right up until the point it stopped being true and you hadn’t noticed the exact moment it happened.
You followed him for six blocks before you caught yourself.
It wasn’t dramatic. He didn’t do anything, didn’t give you any reason to think he’d noticed. You simply looked up at some point and realized how far you’d gone, how deliberately you’d kept the same distance behind him the entire time, and something cold settled low in your stomach. You stopped walking. Let him get further ahead, then turn a corner and disappear from view entirely, and told yourself that was the end of it.
It was only once you were safely around the corner, pulse still climbing instead of settling, that the word finally surfaced.
Stalking.
You dismissed it immediately. That word belonged to something uglier. That word belonged to strangers in news segments, to obsession with teeth, to intent. What you were doing didn't feel like that. It felt smaller, softer at the edges, closer to curiosity than pursuit.
Stalking's a harsh word, you thought, and the sentence settled into you with an ease that should have alarmed you more than it did. You weren't stalking him. You were simply aware of him now, in a way you hadn't been before, and awareness had a habit of placing a person in the same orbit without any real design behind it.
You believed that, too, for as long as you needed to.
Suna didn't notice her. Not with any certainty.
He wasn't oblivious by nature. Noticing things was half of what made him useful on a volleyball court: reading a blocker's shoulders before they committed, clocking a setter's intent before the toss left their hands. But this sat outside that register entirely. Faint enough to dismiss. Too formless to name.
A few times, cutting through the park on his walk home, he'd felt the prickling certainty that someone was behind him. Not close. Not threatening. Just present. He checked over his shoulder both times and found nothing worth remembering: a jogger, a couple with a stroller.
It happened again near the gym once, well after practice ended. He was heading out for something he'd forgotten when he caught movement past the entrance, someone turning too fast, footsteps picking up pace outside. By the time he reached the door, whoever it was had already vanished between streetlights.
He decided it meant nothing. People walked fast all the time without it being about him.
Still, the feeling didn't fully go away. It sat low in his mind, unfinished, not urgent enough to chase, not weak enough to forget.
The rain came down without warning, the way it always did in this city. Clear skies one minute, then a wall of grey rolling in off the coast like it had somewhere better to be and was in a hurry to get there.
You'd left your umbrella at the apartment. Of course you had. You'd checked the weather that morning, seen a soft little cloud icon with no percentage attached, and decided against carrying around the extra weight of it all day for nothing. Now you were regretting it, standing under the awning of the convenience store near campus, watching the rain hit the pavement hard enough to bounce.
You didn't mind waiting, though. You never really minded waiting. There was something comforting about being forced to stop, an excuse to stand still and watch the world blur at the edges without anyone expecting anything from you.
That was when you saw him.
At first you didn't think much of it. Just a tall figure crouched at the mouth of the alley across the street, an umbrella tilted low over something you couldn't quite make out. You might have looked away entirely if it weren't for the stillness of him. Everyone else on the street was moving fast, shoulders hunched, bags held over their heads like makeshift shields. He wasn't. He was completely still, folded low to the ground, unbothered by the rain soaking through his shoulders because the umbrella wasn't over him at all.
You didn't recognize him at first. Just messy dark hair plastered to his forehead, the sharp, unimpressed set of his face. Then the jacket registered.
Inarizaki volleyball team.
Right.
He clicked a second later. You'd seen him once during a practice match your friend had dragged you to. The guy who looked perpetually unbothered by literally everything, like nothing in the world was interesting enough to earn his full attention.
Except right now, something clearly was.
You squinted through the rain and realized what he was crouched over—two kittens, soaked through, pressed against the brick wall where the alley met the street, trying and failing to make themselves small enough to escape the water. He'd angled his umbrella so it covered them completely, sacrificing himself to the downpour instead.
You watched him reach into his bag with his free hand, checking for something. A snack, maybe. Anything.
He came up empty.
"Sorry," you heard him mumble. "Don't have anything."
Like he wasn't embarrassed at all to be talking to two half-drowned kittens on a public street.
You leaned forward before you even realized you were doing it.
He stayed like that for another minute, umbrella tilted, shoulders steadily darkening with rainwater. Completely unhurried, even though he was getting soaked for two kittens who had no idea who he was and would probably forget him by tomorrow. There was no one around to see it. No teammates, no cameras, no reason to perform anything.
That was what struck you, if you were being honest with yourself. Not that he was kind. Plenty of people were kind—in loud, visible ways, in ways that wanted to be noticed.
This wasn't that.
This was quiet.
Small.
Entirely for no one.
It didn't match.
And you never quite knew what to do with things that didn't.
The rain eased, not stopping so much as thinning into something more forgiving. Before leaving, he crouched one last time. His mouth moved again, too quiet to make out.
Then he stood, shook the rain from one sleeve with mild annoyance, and walked away like none of it had happened.
You stayed beneath the awning a little longer than you needed to.
You told yourself it was because the rain hadn't fully stopped.
