Chapter Text
“Akaashi-kun!”
I rarely speak to other members of my class unless they come to me first. My friends are in other classes and clubs, one is even at another school far away. Typically we only speak online.
Lots of people wanted to talk to Akaashi. They wanted his notes, mostly, so Bokuto was supposed to say he’d forgot them at home. Not just anyone was allowed to borrow Akaashi’s notes and since Bokuto didn’t know who the special people were, it was easier just to lie. He’d told Akaashi in the park that his classmates must all want them because Akaashi was super smart, but Akaashi’d shaken his head and said he was just good at taking notes.
Which made Akaashi forgetting his notes not a very Akaashi thing to do. But Bokuto was not a very Akaashi-type person even though he was inside him for the time being.
Not like that.
Akaashi’s seat was by the window, the spot where the heroes in anime always sat. Bokuto wasn’t allowed to sit there because he didn’t pay attention. So he didn’t pay attention through the entire morning. He watched some crows fooling with something shiny, and a cat hanging around the dumpster. There was this plastic bag stuck in a tree that moved in a cool way so he watched that too. Since no one was watching him, he drew all over one of Akaashi’s blank notebooks.
“Akaashi-kun!” a girl’s voice said again, kinda annoyed this time, and he realized someone was calling him.
“Hey!” he said, turning to face whoever it was and just about to smile. Too excited. Too happy. He tried to make his face into a bunch of flat lines.
“Akaashi-kun, why are you drawing pictures of yourself?”
Oh shit. He hadn’t covered them up. But at least he knew he was getting good enough that she could tell who he was drawing. “It’s… uh… for a bet with Bokuto-san!”
The girl was medium sized with a sharp short haircut that came to points by her chin. She looked like she was probably really good at drawing mostly perfect circles. She also looked like she thought he was crazy at the moment. Which he probably sounded, because he wasn’t answering right.
“Are you okay, Akaashi-kun?”
Bokuto thought long and hard about what excuses he could make, which was dumb because the answer was that Akaashi would never say if he wasn’t.
“Thank you, I’m fine. This is just a silly thing Bokuto-san is making me do.”
“You keep saying that name, but who is… oh! The volleyball captain. The crazy one!”
“I’ve never called him crazy,” Bokuto hoped.
Perfect Circle laughed. “Of course not, Akaashi-kun, you would never call anyone crazy. Although you do have to put up with him quite a bit. I’ve heard he’s a handful.”
Bokuto put the feelings of hurt and shame into a locker.
“Or so I’d gather,” she smirked. “I wouldn’t want to imply that I’d broken through the ice and you’d told me something personal.”
He didn’t know what to say that wouldn’t be wrong, so he just said nothing. He was about sixty percent sure Perfect Circle was insulting Akaashi for being quiet about his own stuff. He’d never met someone with a death wish before. Bokuto wouldn’t hit a girl himself, but Suzumeda sure would if he told her about it. Not to mention that Akaashi was really, really scary, and could probably mess up her life in some secret way.
Or maybe he wasn’t quite as scary as Bokuto thought, if his classmates talked to him like that.
“Anyway, I’m not here to chat,” she crossed her arms. She had elbows that could probably poke a hole in somebody. “Aya-chan is at the vending machines. She’d like to talk to you.”
He didn’t realize that his jaw had dropped until Perfect Circle started laughing. “You don’t even know who I’m talking about, do you? Sato-san. And don’t act like you don’t get at least a confession a week. I told her that she wasn’t your type but she insists she can convince you otherwise. Don’t make her cry. Or make her, she might give you a black eye.”
Bokuto stood up as straight and as cold as he thought Akaashi would. And then he said something that Akaashi probably wouldn’t, but he was still proud of it anyway.
“I don’t think you know my type.”
He wasn’t sure if he should rush down or take his time. Akaashi went to the vending machines a lot to buy a drink before they met up to eat, so Bokuto was a little worried he’d run into him if he went down too fast. Although, he could give some pointers, so maybe he’d be better off if that happened.
Either way, he had to take a piss so he stopped at the restroom first. He’d been holding it in since practice, and it was probably going to kill Akaashi if he held it any longer. Or maybe it would kill Akaashi’s body and Bokuto’s mind. Or maybe he’d kill both of them somehow. So he had to take a piss in Akaashi’s body to keep everybody alive, even though he didn’t want to at all.
With this confession business, everything was rushed. He didn’t have time to figure out the best way to ignore Akaashi’s dick while also using it: just went into a stall, wrapped his hand in toilet paper, looked at the ceiling, and hoped that he didn’t miss.
Luckily, he was distracted. It was easy not to think about what was going on which was good since it was taking forever.
A confession a week???
Akaashi turned down so many girls that their mean friends got in his face about it.
Perfect Circle hadn’t just been mean about that, though. She treated Akaashi like he was some kind of really cold person, which Bokuto knew couldn’t be true just from watching him with the team. Saru made Akaashi laugh almost every day with jokes that Bokuto didn’t even sort of get. Akaashi’d given advice to Komi about getting a girlfriend that somehow worked. He talked to Washio about how they both made little kids cry on accident. He had inside jokes with Suzumeda that were sort of terrifying. Yukie was running some kind of underground betting ring with him. He and Konoha talked so much it made Bokuto jealous, and…
Jealous?
Why did he feel jealous of Konoha?
The nice thing about being Akaashi was that it was a lot easier to stay calm. The bad thing about that was, it made all the things he’d learned to do in therapy almost automatic. So he had to think about his feelings in a slow quiet way, or put them in the lockers. And the lockers were getting full.
Well he was jealous about the confessions for sure. Nobody had ever confessed to him, even after the team had made it to Nationals for the first time in three years all thanks to him. And the rest of the second years too. And Akaashi! But especially him cause he was the ace and the team was on his shoulders. Even after that there was nobody. No girls, no boys, nobody else. And that didn’t make any sense, since he was awesome, and had confirmed that morning that he had a really nice ass.
Everybody knew that.
That didn’t make the jealousy go away, but the leftovers were smaller and about something completely different, so he shoved them in a locker while he zipped up and left the restroom.
Sato-san was one of the prettiest girls in Fukurodani. Bokuto had seen her lots of times, in the halls with her friends, her long straight hair flipping around behind her like it was doing a little dance. She had a really nice body too, chubby and perfect. He’d always thought about talking to her one day, but he always forgot. Which was maybe good since he hadn’t even known her name to begin with. He just called her Flippy Hair in his head.
And here she was, standing with her hands behind her back in front of the vending machine. Akaashi was supposed to be here getting a cold Pocari Sweat but he wasn’t. Bokuto was stuck doing this alone.
“Akaashi-kun,” she said in a normal voice. She had an okay voice. But mostly just normal. For some reason he kinda figured that anybody confessing to Akaashi would sound like an angel instead of just looking like one.
One of the lockers in his head started to rattle.
“Could we go somewhere a little more private?” she said. She wasn’t nervous. He figured she’d be nervous. He was about as gutsy as they come, but he’d be nervous as hell if he was confessing to Akaashi. Not that he would do that. Akaashi was his best friend and that wasn’t what you did to your best friend. They were separate things and separate feelings. You couldn’t have both.
There were a lot of ways to say “yes,” to Sato-san’s question, but not a lot of ways Akaashi would say it.
“If you’d like.”
The place where people always confessed was a grassy spot between two parts of the main building. But it was winter, and it had just rained a bunch, so she took him to a spot on the covered sidewalk. It didn’t seem very private, anyone who went to the vending machines could see them if they looked around the corner, but he figured that just meant nothing weird would happen. Standard confession that he couldn’t mess up.
He put his hands behind his back like Akaashi might, and tried to have a flat kind of face. Akaashi definitely wasn’t interested in this girl. If he had been he would have said something that morning, since he was comfortable enough to talk about Bokuto jerking it in his body. But he hadn’t said anything about confessions at all. So… maybe he was interested and it was just too private to tell Bokuto about. But probably not.
“I’m sure you know why I’m here,” Sato-san smiled. Her smile was sorta… well, it was nice, he guessed. Plenty nice for him, actually, but not really at Akaashi levels. She looked like she knew what was gonna happen in the end but was trying anyway, which Boktuo thought was ballsy as hell.
“Yeah, I kinda guessed,” he said, and her smile got weird. Probably because Akaashi would not have ever said it like that.
She reached for his arm, sliding her fingers down his jacket until she pulled his hand loose and was holding it. Was this what confessions were like? He’d thought there was a lot more sputtering and bowing and a lot less touching. No touching at all, really. He definitely wanted to sputter. But Akaashi wouldn’t do that so he just made a little hm noise.
“I really admire you,” she started. At least this part made sense. But then she ran her thumb across his knuckles and it felt really good.
Akaashi really was a blusher.
“I know that lots of girls probably tell you they like how athletic and handsome you are,” she kept moving her thumb. Bokuto knew he should probably move his hand away, but he was frozen in place. Her voice was sort of overdramatic and now he thought that maybe Perfect Circle hadn’t been joking when she said he might get decked.
“But I like you because you’re so cold, so distant. You’re like a prince, trapped in ice…”
She took a step forward, grabbed his tie and yanked so their faces were even.
“…I want to melt you, Akaashi Keiji.”
Bokuto didn’t really expect his first kiss to be so… suggestive. But then he also did expect it to happen in someone else’s body. Did that make it his first kiss, even? Was this Akaashi’s first kiss? Or were he and Akaashi sharing this kiss as their first?
That wasn’t really the way he’d imagined it, the few times he’d let himself think about it.
As first kisses go it was kind of bad, at least compared to what he thought it’d be like. There was definitely a lot less of “him agreeing to it” than he’d like. And some specific stuff that he was only now realizing had kinda always been part of his fantasies. He pulled away, trying to think of the strongest way Akaashi could reject her while still sounding like himself, when he heard it.
“AGHAASHHIIIIII!”
“Oh,” Sato-san sighed, “it’s him.”
Bokuto turned around to see Akaashi making a very angry face. He squeezed his Pocari Sweat can until it popped, and then stomped away, still with his neat steps, except they were hitting the ground hard enough to pop through to the other side of the world. For pretty obvious reasons, Bokuto needed to run after him, but if he didn’t end this right Akaashi might have a really scary girlfriend.
“You seem like a nice girl…” he started.
“I’m not,” she sang.
He cleared his throat, “Then, um, you seem like a girl.”
“Do you not like girls?”
Bokuto was like, seventy percent sure that Akaashi did not like girls, but he wasn’t gonna out him to this crazy person. He wished Hoshi was here, or even Nakihara. Maybe he and Sato-san would fall in love and be happy together here in this damp spot within yelling distance of the vending machines.
“I don’t like you,” was what he said. Which was maybe short enough for Akaashi, but not polite enough at all. But he couldn’t take it back, so he just bowed. “You’re beautiful and spirited,” where had he even come up with that? “and I’m sure you’ll find someone much more interesting than myself in no time.”
She wouldn’t not ever find anybody more interesting than Akaashi.
Bokuto stood up and waited to get punched, but Sato-san was biting her lip and sniffling to hold back tears. He did not like to make anybody cry, even terrifying girls who just went around stealing first kisses.
“You really think so?”
This was terrible. It was a good thing he could stay calm in this body because otherwise he’d be freaking out.
“Yes. I really don’t like you.”
She laughed, loud and kind of obnoxious and it made him feel a little better and a little more terrified.
“I meant… the beautiful part, and all that.”
Was she kidding? He’d… well, he didn’t want to say, but how didn’t she know? “Oh! Everyone thinks you’re beautiful. Bokuto-san says you’re one of the prettiest girls in the–”
“Wait. Are you two really together? I thought that was just a nasty rumor. Did I just mess stuff up for you?” she wiped her eyes on her sleeves, which made Bokuto happy to see since Akaashi always said it was disgusting when he did that, and she was too pretty to be disgusting so Akaashi was wrong.
Also, she had no idea that he and Akaashi were super a thing, but not the kinda thing she was thinking about.
That wasn’t ever going to happen because Akaashi was his best friend, and you couldn’t be both and his friendship meant more especially now all this had happened and… he shoved the rest of wherever those thoughts were going to be into a locker, but he was running out of space and everything was just so much and…
Her lips had sparkles on them. They hit the light when she talked, and he couldn’t hear her because of the buzzing in his head. Everything was slow and quiet except there was so much pressure and then he was floating out of Akaashi’s body and maybe flying back to his own.
“-oh shit, I did, didn’t I?!” was the end of her sentence. She was yelling and that pulled him back or woke him up? He really didn’t know what the fuck was going on.
“We’re not together. He’s just my captain,” he took a deep breath, hoping maybe she’d be nice and not say anything. But he couldn’t out Akaashi, no matter what. So he’d out himself.
“He’s probably mad that I had my first kiss before he did.”
Well he still outed Akaashi a little. Assuming he’d never been kissed before which was something for the lockers, except they were full.
She covered her face, looking humiliated, which was pretty much the last thing he expected. “Oh. I… I’m so sorry, Akaashi-kun. I just thought that maybe if you saw how gutsy I can be you’d accept my feelings. I mean, I am gutsy, but girls aren’t supposed to be, you know. But Bokuto-kun’s so brash and you like him so much, everybody knows that. I thought maybe… that was the sort of person you like, since you don’t really talk to anybody else.”
Bokuto didn’t know what to say. It was like everything in his head was strapped down and he couldn’t find any reaction or anything. Or words.
“I’m a mystery!” was what he managed to say after a very long time when maybe her hopes got up again.
She huffed a little laugh, “You sure are.”
He bowed again. How many bows was that? Thirty?
“If you’ll excuse me, I–”
“It’s fine,” she smiled. “Go chase him down. Tell him I was a terrible kisser and you’re going to regret it for the rest of your life.”
“Well it wasn’t that bad, but you really should ask,” he scratched his head before realizing that Akaashi would not say that. There really wasn’t any lower he could get in the hole he’d been digging, so he bowed again.
Then he turned and ran back to the school in a way that Akaashi definitely wouldn’t, trying to find himself.