Haikyuu Oneshots

🌤️ (KinKuni) Tangible 🌤️

I love KinKuni..they always get so mischaracterized and it frustrates me so much :[[
I wrote this during school so it's a bit uhhhh mild. I LOVE PROJECTING ONTO CHARACTERS. KINDAICHI SO ME <333

I totally got forgot about posting this until now but it's been done for a while. No spellcheck and all the italics and bold are gone since I copy and pasted from google docs 7n7

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Sometimes, when Kindaichi was particularly tired or happy or sad or angry, his mind would float away from him, soaring above his body, a phantom with drone eyes that he could see through. It didn't happen a lot anymore, not since middle school, but he still had...habits that he'd formed to ease the initial panic.

He needed things to touch. He needed reminders that he was real. At first, it was simple: he'd tap his toe against the back of the steps going up and his heel when he was going down. Sometimes it'd slow him down but it was pretty hard to notice unless you were staring straight at his feet. Back in middle school, Kageyama would scold him for walking so slow but he'd simply lied and said he was terrible with heights. That had been a reasonable excuse for a while until things got worse.

The tapping got too familiar, a repetitive little choreography that he could do with his eyes closed. Tap step tap.
Step tap step.
So he improved on his technique. He'd hold onto the railings up and down stairs--always his right hand, always the far ride side of the stairs. On some sets of steps, this was just expected--he wasn't doing anything strange. On other occasions, he would push past groups of people just to get to the other side. He needed that cold metal. He needed to know he was real. This only frustrated Kageyama further and they stopped walking to classes together. Kageyama wasn't rude about it, but Kindaichi wasn't stupid.

Kageyama would spend extra long packing up his stuff and he'd murmur a quick "Why don't you go ahead--" to Kindaichi. Every single day. Kindaichi wasn't stupid.

His habits continued to divulge. He'd tap on each wall of a bathroom before anything else to make sure they weren't figments of his imagination. He'd check the time obsessively to make sure he hadn't accidentally spaced out for an hour. He'd turn his headphones on and off and pause and play the music until he was sure it was in his ears and not on speaker.

Sure, they got in the way of school sometimes but everyone had weird quirks--he wasn't special. But when everything with Kageyama--with Tobio happened, these little episodes grew frequent.

He'd spend whole class periods staring at the clock, making sure time was really passing. He'd run his knuckles against walls to make sure he was going the right way. He remembered when people said they'd pinch themselves to make sure they weren't dreaming and that made its way into his rituals too.

Kindaichi, ashamed of it all, tried to be careful to keep people from noticing. And god, he thought he was doing a really good job until he got to high school.

They'd made their way into volleyball too.

How do you block a ball you don't believe is real? How do you spike one? There's no walls around him to touch, no tactile cues that he was alive.

It was at its worst the first time he saw Kageyama again. The walk with Yahaba...Kageyama's calm response to him. He was spiraling.

This can't be real. This can't be real. Thiscan'tberealCan'tberealCAN"TBEREAL--

A thud and a quiet yelp--he hadn't noticed Kunimi standing in front of the doors to the gym. Hell. He hadn't even realized he'd walked to the doors. He turned to me and glared. "Oi...Kindaichi, watch it..."

Somehow the impact was enough to shock him out of his dissociative state. "Ah--sorry. I'll be more careful next time--!" he shook his head to clear his thoughts.