Chapter Text
Hinata woke up on his stomach. The light that streamed in through the windows was too bright and he groaned when his back cracked loudly. He was groggy, and a bit sore from passing out in such a terrible sleeping position, but the frown on his face broke into a small smile when his hands ran over the navy blue sheets on the bed--Kageyama’s bed.
The night before had been a nightmare, with Hinata desperately trying to make adequate progress on his novel while attempting to avoid distraction from his month-long boyfriend. Who was, unfortunately, also his editor. It was fun until they were both rushing through drafts, which made revising anything incredibly difficult when they were both distracted so easily by shy smiles and casual conversation.It surprised Hinata every time to realize that Kageyama’s intimidating aura was only skin deep, and wasn’t representative of his true demeanor at all.
After another five minutes, Hinata finally found it in himself to pull himself up from the warmth of the bed, but frowned when he realized the other side was cold and had been for some time. There was no noise coming from the kitchen, no clinking of dishes that usually filled the mornings when Hinata stayed over. It was eerily quiet for nine in the morning, and while Kageyama’s phone was charging silently on the nightstand, he was nowhere in sight.
“Tobio?” Hinata called. He headed toward the bathroom and was disappointed when he found nothing. A mild annoyance began to brew in his gut when there wasn’t even a note on the kitchen table. Even more worrisome was the fact that his unfinished manuscript was still sitting on the coffee table where he’d left it last night.
Hinata grabbed his phone and speed dialed. The line rang five times before a cheerful voice greeted him.
“Hello?”
“Suga-san! Is Tobio at the firm?”
“Wow, straight to the point,” Sugawara laughed. Hinata waited, almost vibrating as he heard distant clacking of Sugawara’s fingers on his keyboard. There were perks to being close with the receptionist. Hinata could be as nosy as he wanted and Sugawara would always indulge him. “Hmm...no. He never signed in. And now that I think about it, I didn’t see Daichi, Tsukishima or Noya come in either.”
The unpleasantness in Hinata’s stomach only grew stronger. His hand clutched the phone as he chewed on his bottom lip.
“Hinata. Hinata?” Sugawara said after a stretch of silence.
“S-sorry,” Hinata sputtered. “It’s just--I came over yesterday to get some work done. I must’ve fallen asleep but Tobio’s not here. He didn’t leave a note or take his phone so…”
“Maybe he went to the store?” From the sound of Sugawara’s voice Hinata knew he wasn’t worried. A person like him always cared, but Hinata knew that out of all his friends, Sugawara was the most rational and was the least likely to jump to conclusions. Even so, he couldn’t shake the feeling that something was terribly wrong.
“You’re probably right. Sorry to bother you! I know you’re busy.”
Sugawara laughed at that. “No more than you or anyone else here. And you know I’m always happy to help.”
“Thank you, Suga-san.” Hinata sped past a few more pleasantries out of politeness and then hung up, feeling strangely cold and too jittery for his own good.
He paced in the kitchen for about ten minutes, hoping that Kageyama would return with coffee and red cheeks from the winter chill outside, but he didn’t. After an hour, Hinata’s shoulders were tense and his back was aching from sitting so long at the kitchen table. At some point he had to go back to the Karasuno Publishing firm, since Kageyama had not taken his manuscript in for a progress check.
It was the last thing he wanted to do, leaving without knowing if Kageyama was okay, but he would feel stupid if his book deal flopped because of an overreaction. Sugawara already reassured him, hadn’t he? And Sugawara was usually right.
Sighing, Hinata went to get a clean change of clothes from his bag and tossed his dirty ones into Kageyama’s near-full hamper. It would be a pain to wash his clothes too.
“Serves him right,” Hinata muttered under his breath.
With one last look around, he locked the door from the inside and walked away, the weight of his manuscript nothing in comparison to the heavy feeling in his chest.
It was close to five when he finally finished going through revisions with Yamaguchi, who was a great help coming in to edit and give him advice so last minute even when his own schedule was packed. Hinata was grateful, but definitely was not looking forward to the dirty looks that Tsukishima would no doubt give him when he heard about his collaboration with Yamaguchi. He was Tsukishima’s regular editor after all, and the blonde tended to be selfish when sharing resources.
In the lobby, Hinata pulled on his coat and took the time to shove his marked-up papers into his bag. The last thing he wanted was to drop everything, which had happened before.
“Long day?” Sugawara asked from behind his desk, grinning as he held up the sign-in-sign-out sheet. Hinata let his shoulders drop and nodded as he took the clipboard.
“Yamaguchi is great but I’m used to Tobio,” Hinata scribbled a signature quickly. Sugawara then manually imputed his information into the computer. “Plus, I don’t like anticipating Tsukishima looking like he’s going to kill me whenever we have to share editors.”
“The life of a writer.” Sugawara sighed for dramatic emphasis, and sure enough it had Hinata blushing to the tops of his ears.
“This is only the second one going to get published! I’m really not--”
“Ah, ah!” Sugawara shook his head. “I don’t want to hear whatever it is you’re going to say. Not from someone so promising.”
Hinata’s mouth closed mid-sentence, unsatisfied with being cut off but flattered. He decided not to pursue it and simply waved goodbye after wrapping a scarf around his neck.
When he got home, the first thing Hinata did was call Kageyama’s cell. It rang, and rang, with no answer until Hinata hung up in frustration. There were no texts or voicemails, no nothing. It wasn’t like Kageyama to not come to work and drop off the face of the planet without so much as a warning. He was always meticulous, and kind enough to hate worrying anyone about anything.
Hinata chewed on his fingernail.
Eventually, he gave up on trying to get through to the other’s phone and plopped down on his couch. There was no use in working himself up when he couldn’t even do anything, so instead he grabbed the remote and began flipping through channels until he settled on the six o’clock news.
“--unusual reports of disappearances which have been confirmed not only in Japan but in other countries as well. What people thought to be isolated incidents appear to have happened globally, all at once and in random variation.”
Hinata’s eyes widened, fingers unconsciously tightening as he turned up the volume. His heart was thudding quickly in his chest as he watched the newscaster on screen.
“Police have begun to take varying levels of action. It is still unclear what exactly is happening. We only know for a fact that large amounts of people have seemingly vanished. If you suspect someone you know has--”
At that, Hinata muted the television. His head was humming, breath coming in shallow gulps of air. What was this? From the moment he’d woken up today, nothing had made sense, and now there was this.
It wasn’t exactly panic that was filling him. It felt more like the air was getting thinner and he could do nothing but sit and try to breathe.
He couldn’t process this outlandish reality he’d been handed, or the fact that maybe Kageyama was actually in some sort of danger. He unmuted the television and flipped through a few more news channels, hoping that maybe the first station he’d settled on was doing some sort of prank or hoax. But sure enough, other networks were reporting the same thing, and a quick look through news websites on his phone revealed the authenticity of the reports.
Something like ice settled over his skin, and Hinata simply sat listening to the same broadcast until he couldn’t take it anymore and shut it off, threw his phone to the other side of the couch and curled up on it. All he wanted to do was sleep. And with the television turned off, everything felt far enough away that he could almost pretend it didn’t exist.
Hinata drifted off gradually, fighting off his quiet anxiety up until the moment he finally fell into a black and dreamless sleep.
The vibration of his phone woke him up before his obnoxious ringtone. Hinata’s eyes immediately darted to the clock hanging just above the door leading out of his apartment. It was barely four in the morning, and only a few streaks of sunlight had begun to slide against the window. With irritation and a shiver, Hinata rubbed his face with one hand and searched blindly for his phone with the other. When he saw the caller ID read ‘Suga,’ he was suddenly more awake.
“Suga-san?”
“Hinata,” he sounded calm as always, but Hinata had known him long enough to know when he was on edge. “Are you near the T.V.?”
“Y-yes...I slept--”
“Turn it on. It’ll be quicker than explaining.”
Hinata was still in a slight daze of morning fuzziness and confusion, and he was about to ask what channel Sugawara was even meaning for him to see but before anything could leave his mouth, the question was answered for him. Hinata sat rapt in attention, phone pressed close to the side of his face as he leaned forward and watched hundreds of people wander through the streets of Tokyo. Some of them he even recognized as neighbors and people who bagged his groceries at the supermarket, but what made his breath catch in his throat was when the aerial camera panned over Kageyama’s face, looking annoyed and just the slightest bit fearful.
The vacuum his senses were in suddenly broke and Hinata could hear the broadcaster’s voice come in through the speakers.
“--developing story from last night which we are now following up live in this breaking news segment. The disappearances which occurred early morning yesterday en masse have resolved themselves. Around the same time this morning we began getting reports of crowds wandering the streets in a daze, apparently all people who were reported missing.”
A strange mix of relief and utter confusion thrummed through Hinata’s body. The camera zoomed out again but he could still pick Kageyama out from the crowd.
“Suga-san, what is this?”
“It’s on every channel right now,” Sugawara said. “Apparently people were missing since yesterday. And I just--yesterday when you told me that you hadn’t seen Kageyama…”
“I see him,” Hinata said, already pulling on the shoes that he had haphazardly kicked off last night. His clothes were rumpled and his hair a bit greasy, but none of that mattered. “I just saw him. I’m going to go wait by his apartment. You should go try to find Daichi-san, too.”
“He already dropped by with Tsukishima and Noya,” Sugawara explained. “Be careful, Hinata. No one really knows what’s going on yet.”
Hinata just barely remembered to lock his own door and was already jamming his finger into the elevator button by the middle of Sugawara’s sentence, but he assured him that he would be cautious before hanging up.
From his place to Kageyama’s it was about fifteen minutes on foot, and Hinata wasted no time in getting there even though he ended up winded and out of breath by the time he reached Kageyama’s apartment complex. There, he finally tried to calm himself and even knocked on Kageyama’s door. There was no reply, so Hinata simply leaned against the wall and waited.
Time was, at once, going too fast and too slow. Cars seemed to sluggishly trod along, but Hinata’s thoughts were garbled and warped as they zoomed past him much too quickly to make sense. He was about to check his cell phone again, maybe call Sugawara, but when he looked up he saw a familiar head of hair turning the corner and he rushed over with a speed that surprised even him.
“Tobio--” Hinata called when he reached Kageyama and ignored the disoriented look the other shot him in favor of wrapping his arms around his neck. It was comforting to feel this familiar warmth against him after such a stressful day. Hinata’s breath came out in a rush, his shoulders slumped and he held Kageyama tighter, but Kageyama only stood still.
“Tobio? What happened? You were gone for nearly an entire day and now it’s all over the news that these people had disappeared…”
Hinata pulled back and was startled when Kageyama fixed him with a steely look, his shoulders tense and looking as if he wanted to back away.
“No, not this again…” Kageyama muttered. He shoved Hinata away and continued towards his apartment. It was light and had no real power behind it, but it sent a very clear message: don’t touch me.
“Tobio.” Hinata’s brows furrowed and he reached out.
“Stop calling me by my first name!” Kageyama whipped around, in the middle of digging through his pockets for his keys. The tone of his voice made Hinata jump. “Ever since I woke up in the middle of fucking nowhere people have been acting differently. Now this? Seriously, is this some sort of prank? Because it’s really not funny.”
Eventually Kageyama found his keys, though Hinata frowned when he saw that the charm on the keychain was different, the one he’d given him when they first started dating was nowhere in sight. It was disturbing, but the only thing Hinata’s brain could manage was the singular thought: this was not Tobio, this was not Tobio, this was not.
Hinata reached out again and grabbed the back of Kageyama’s coat before he could shut the door in his face. “What the hell are you talking about? If anyone’s pulling a prank it’s you! I called Sugawara-san because I was worried you might have been dead in a ditch somewhere and you don’t so much as leave a note.” His voice was nearly a hiss, confusion morphing into a hot, unexplainable anger.
Kageyama turned back and barked a laugh that was nasty and five shades of mean, something that Hinata had never, ever witnessed, much less been on the receiving end of. It wasn’t even a tone he thought Kageyama capable of producing.
“Contacted you?” Kageyama said, his voice nearly hysterical. He looked beyond pissed and taken aback. “Hinata, we’re not even close and I don’t understand why you’re here.”
“Why are you saying that, you complete asshole,” Hinata said, but by that point there was nothing left in his voice but quiet shock. “Can you please just tell me what happened yesterday?”
Kageyama pulled out of Hinata’s grasp again, but this time the redhead followed. The door slammed shut and inside the apartment and within the four walls, the atmosphere seemed to ferment into something even more surreal.
“No, I cannot. I don’t remember,” Kageyama pulled off his coat, eyes still burning with a glare. “Now unless you need to talk to me about work, I’d appreciate it if you left now.”
Their argument came to a sudden halt, and Kageyama seemed so sure of himself, of what he was saying, that for a moment Hinata wondered if maybe he was in the wrong. He swallowed once, voice low and a bit shaky when he spoke.
"Where do you work?"
"Really, Hinata?" Kageyama looked vaguely disgusted and more than annoyed. "I'm starting to think you're just drunk or on drugs. Get out."
"Tob--" Hinata started, but backtracked at the last minute. "K-Kageyama, please. Just answer the question."
Some of the desperation must have shown through his face because although Kageyama's expression didn't soften, he didn't kick him out either. "I work at Karasuno Publishing. I'm an editor. You're the shit author who's in the process of getting his first novel published."
Half of his sentence added up, half of it didn't. Hinata pressed on. "What's your name?"
"Kageyama Tobio."
"How old--"
Kageyama seemed to be at his wits end as he pushed past Hinata and opened the door. "Kageyama Tobio. I'm twenty-four. I was assigned to be your editor but I had to let you go because you write garbage. Is that what this is about? Harassment for signing you off to someone else? Seriously, leave."
Hinata's mind was reeling so bad that the only thing he could get out of his mouth was, "But you are my editor!"
Kageyama shook his head, incredulous that Hinata was still talking. "Not in a million years," and with that, he shut the door, leaving the redhead outside in the cold with parted lips and clenched fists.
The world must have turned upside down, because Hinata couldn't understand how any of this could make sense any other way.