ONLY ME || Haikyuu x Male

CHAPTER ELEVEN

There was something really aggravating about the way that Oikawa Tooru was looking at Ren.

Karasuno was currently lined up, practicing their spikes to get ready for their early morning match against Seijou. They'd all prepared and planned and practiced everything last night when they'd returned from the first day of the interhigh preliminaries, but nothing that they'd briefed about had warned Ren about the uncomfortable amount of staring that Oikawa was doing. Those calculating brown eyes sent chills skittering down his spine, fraying his nerves and his focus. This was bad. If he let his defenses get destroyed by Oikawa before the game even started, he wouldn't be able to hold up during the match.

"Ren-san! Can you toss me the ball please?"

Tobio called out to him, and Ren snapped out of his daze, his cheeks dusting pink when he realized he'd been holding up the line while spacing out. "Ah, right! Sorry."

As he threw the ball over to the setter, beginning his approach, he couldn't help but notice that he and Tobio were getting more and more in sync. The first-year's set was flawlessly tailored to suit Ren. It was just the sort that he liked - a little ways off the net and not too high. As a duo, they seemed to click. Perhaps it was their mutual understanding of one another, but Ren liked to think that they'd practiced together so often that Tobio was doing this out of instinct and not some sort of natural premonition. After all, the first-year could only be so much of a genius.

Ren hit a perfect cross shot, straight to the corner of the court, and as he ducked under the net to go retrieve his ball, he gave Tobio a small nod and a smile. But that grin quickly faded as he saw that, to his surprise and dismay, someone else had already grabbed it for him.

"You really lost control of the ball there, didn't you, Hasegawa-san?"

Oikawa was smiling at him, the expression sickeningly sweet and his tone oddly patronizing. Ren felt the jab layered in those words like a blade to his heart and he lowered his gaze a bit, holding out his hands expectedly.

"May I have that back, please, Oikawa-san?"

But the familiar weight of the ball didn't meet his hands as Ren thought it would. Instead, his request was only met with light laughter from the Seijou setter. "So formal, Hasegawa-san! So polite! I heard that you were a maniac on court. A psycho. Absolutely undefeatable by anyone except yourself. I didn't think that you'd be so courteous. So put together."

Ren slowly retracted his hands, letting them drop to his side. He should be standing up for himself like he stood up for Asahi with Dateko, but that was when he was protecting someone else. Now, it was him that was being pointed at, shamed. Indeed, he didn't miss the teasing and slightly demeaning tone that Oikawa had taken on, and it was taking everything in him to keep his composure.

"Please don't speak of me as if you are familiar with me. We have never met and I don't think we are close enough for you to make critiques about my play style to my face. Now may I please have my ball back?"

Oikawa tilted his head to the side, his lips pressed into a sort of diagonal line. "Why? You probably won't even touch it during the match, so what's the point of giving it back to you?"

Bitch.

Ren scowled. Oikawa had been making him a little insecure and self-conscious before, but now he honestly just wanted to slap the boy. But if he did that, he might get benched for bad sportsmanship and he couldn't really afford to lose any more of his playing time. So instead of smacking Oikawa into next week, he only took a deep breath, took a step closer, and hit the ball out of the setter's hands so hard that it impacted the wall to their left, narrowly missing Hinata who'd just gone to retrieve his own ball.