Chapter Text
You sat in the far corner of the café, plush armchair cradling you as you stared out the window at the gray skies and cool rain. You were here as a sort of break from the realities of your current life – favoring stories of young girls with beautiful golden tresses sailing across the seas over the dull monotony of the literature review you were writing for class, silently regretting your decision to further your education.
It'll be worth it in the end, you try to console yourself as you glance back to your laptop. The browser is still open and hundreds of tabs seem to mock you as you decide to close it and instead look back at the novel you’ve managed to distract yourself with (though truthfully it wasn’t hard). Unfortunately, its own bind on you seems to have weakened as your mind hops from one thought to another and you end up just curling up further into the chair, pulling your phone out, and mindlessly scrolling through your social media.
One picture has you hesitate – one of an old friend from high school when you lived in Japan. In it Yaku is smiling a big goofy smile in a Japan National volleyball uniform with a caption saying that he’d been accepted to play with them this year and how grateful he is for this opportunity. Last you’d seen he’d been scouted to pay with some Russian team and was posting about how he was adjusting to living in a different country. You smiled a bit, heart light after that little reminder of how your old friends are thriving, deciding to comment a quick ‘おめでとう!’ to congratulate him.
Just as quickly as you hit enter, you got a notification of a new message from the man himself. Eyes widening, you open it up.
Yaku: [Name]-san! Thank you! It’s been forever. How are you? Are you planning on watching?
Your face softens into a light smile and reply with an of course, gotta support my old friend!
Yaku: Current* friend. Just because we haven’t seen each other in years doesn’t mean that our friendship has to stay in the past. But speaking of old friends, guess who else made the team this year!
He proceeds to ask you if you remember Bokuto Kotarou, the Miya twins, Kageyama Tobio, or Ushijima Wakatoshi and then goes on to try to remind you of the ones you don’t remember. He also tells you that his old volleyball captain Kuroo Tetsurou is part of the media team as a promotor and laughs as you tell him you never thought he’d go for that job.
A couple hours pass like this – messaging Yaku back and forth, catching up on years of information that you’d missed since you left Japan at the end of your second year of high school. You only realize the time when he tells you he has to go to sleep since it’s after midnight for him and you decide to pack up and head out since your concentration had been completely shattered to try to continue working on your paper.
The walk back to your apartment is cold and rainy, but thinking about how your old friend invited you to come back to Japan and come to a get together they were holding to celebrate his and their friends' inclusion in the Olympics made the gloomy day seem not as bad.
You felt a little silly for actually considering it, but you weren't sure when the next time you'd get a chance like this would be - and school was having a break around that time anyways, so it couldn't hurt, right?