#awkward confession

Tsukishima Kei was not a man of many words. This was, by now, common knowledge among anyone who had spent more than five minutes in his company — his brother, his teammates, the poor first-years he needled during practice. What was less commonly known, because he made sure of it, was that the absence of words didn't mean the absence of feeling. It just meant he'd found other ways to say things.

It took Yamaguchi pointing it out, of all people, for Tsukishima to notice he was doing it at all.

"You know you never actually say it," Yamaguchi said one afternoon, tossing a volleyball between his hands as they waited for the gym to clear out.

"Say what."

"That you like them. You just—" Yamaguchi gestured vaguely, searching for the word. "Do things instead."

Tsukishima adjusted his glasses, which didn't need adjusting, which was exactly the kind of thing Yamaguchi was talking about. "I don't know what you mean."

"You carry their bag when it's raining. You memorized how they take their coffee. Last week you skipped stretching early just to walk them to the station." Yamaguchi shrugged, entirely too pleased with himself. "That's not nothing, Tsukki."

Tsukishima didn't respond, but he thought about it the whole walk home. He thought about it while he brushed his teeth. He thought about it lying in bed with his earbuds in, some documentary about ammonites playing at half-volume, and eventually admitted, privately, that Yamaguchi had a point he was never going to admit to out loud.

The problem was this: Tsukishima had never been good at declarations. Big, obvious, sweeping gestures felt like exaggeration, and exaggeration felt like lying, and Tsukishima did not lie about things that mattered. So when it came to you — the person he'd been quietly, steadily falling for over the better part of a year — he'd simply done what came naturally: paid attention, and acted on it.

The trouble was that paying attention and acting on it apparently didn't count as saying it. Not according to the internet, anyway, which he absolutely did not spend forty-five minutes searching that night for reasons why some people needed to hear things and others needed to be shown them. He found a term for it — something about "love languages" — and scrolled through the list with the particular scorn he reserved for things that were probably true but phrased annoyingly.

Words of affirmation. Acts of service. Quality time. Physical touch. Gifts.

He was, unmistakably, an acts-of-service person. This was not news. What was news — mildly unwelcome news — was the possibility that you might not run on the same frequency.

You were in his class, and you had a laugh that came out sideways, like it surprised even you. You weren't from the volleyball world at all — you ran the school's astronomy club, of exactly four members, and had once cornered him after class for twenty minutes about the difference between a meteor and a meteorite because you'd overheard him correcting someone about dinosaurs and decided, apparently, that this made him a fellow pedant worth knowing.

You talked more than he did. Considerably more. And you said things — actual, spoken-aloud things — like "that was really cool of you" and "I like spending time with you" and "you looked nice today," easily, like they cost you nothing.

Tsukishima had noticed, somewhere around month four, that every time you said something like that, he went quiet in a way that wasn't his usual quiet. And he'd noticed, somewhere around month six, that you'd started saying those things a little less often — not because you felt them less, he didn't think, but because you'd stopped expecting anything back.

That was the part that sat wrong with him.

He brought it up the only way he knew how, which was badly, and sideways, and three days after he'd actually decided to.

You were on the roof during lunch, your usual spot, sharing a carton of milk because you always forgot to bring your own drink and he always brought two out of habit now.

"You don't have to keep giving me half of that," you said, waving off the carton he held out.

"I bought two on purpose."

"I know. That's what I mean." You smiled, but it was a smaller smile than usual, the kind you gave when you were setting something down gently so it wouldn't seem like a complaint. "You're sweet about it. You just never say so."

There it was. The opening he'd been circling for three days.

"I looked something up," Tsukishima said, which was a strange enough sentence coming from him that you turned to look at him properly. "About why people... express things differently."

"Okay." You were clearly trying not to look too interested, and clearly failing.

"You say things. Out loud. All the time." He kept his eyes on the water tower across the roof, because this was easier if he wasn't looking directly at you. "I don't. I do things instead. Apparently that's — a category. A whole category people write articles about."

"Tsukki, are you telling me you researched me?"

"I researched the concept," he said, with as much dignity as he could summon, which was not much, because his ears had gone red and you'd clearly noticed. "The point is. I'm not going to suddenly become a person who says things every five minutes. That's not — I'd sound insincere. Like I was performing it."

"I don't need you every five minutes," you said, gentler now. "I just like knowing you mean it. That's all it's ever been."

"I do mean it." The words came out flatter than he wanted them to, more clipped, and he felt the familiar frustration of his own face refusing to cooperate with what was actually happening in his chest. "I mean it when I bring the milk. I mean it when I walk you to the station even though it's out of my way. I meant it the entire month I spent learning the bus schedule to your grandmother's place because you said you hated changing trains alone at night."

You had gone very still.

"You did that a month ago," you said slowly. "You never told me that."

"You weren't supposed to know. I just wanted you to not have to change trains." He finally looked at you, and immediately regretted it, because you were looking at him like he'd said something enormous. "That's — see, this is the problem. If I say it, it sounds like nothing. A bus schedule. But if I just did it and never mentioned it, it would've stayed nothing, and apparently that's worse."

"It's not nothing," you said. Your voice had gone thick in a way that made his stomach drop with something that wasn't quite dread. "Kei, that's — you've been quietly rearranging your evenings for a month because of one offhand thing I said. That's not nothing, that's—" You stopped, pressed your lips together, blinked hard at the sky.

"Don't cry about a bus schedule," he said, but there was no bite in it.

"I'm not," you said, and were, a little, and laughed at yourself for it, that sideways laugh he liked more than he'd ever admit. "I just — I didn't know. That's the whole thing, Tsukki. I didn't know, because you never said."

"I'm saying it now."

"You are." You wiped at your eyes with the heel of your hand, still laughing. "Kind of a long way around it, but you are."

Tsukishima considered this, the milk carton still held loosely between you, your shoulder close enough to his that he could feel the warmth of it even through his blazer.

"I'm not going to become someone who says things constantly," he said again, because it felt important to be honest about his own limits rather than promise something he couldn't deliver. "I'll probably still mostly show you. That's just — how I work."

"That's fine."

"But I can say it more. The actual words. When it matters." He paused, weighing something, then added, quieter: "It matters now."

"Then say it," you said, not unkindly, just plainly, the way you said everything.

Tsukishima looked at the water tower again, and then, because avoiding your eyes had never once made anything easier, he looked back at you instead.

"This is about the maximum amount of vulnerability you're getting out of me today, so I'd appreciate it if you didn't make a whole thing out of it," he said, and you had the audacity to smile at that, which did not help.

"Noted. Go on."

"I like you," he said. "More than I know how to make sound as big as it actually is. That's the — that's the honest version. The rest of it, the bus schedules and the milk and walking the long way to the station, that's just what it looks like when I try to hand it to you in pieces instead of all at once."

You were quiet for a moment, which for you was practically an eternity.

"That was a lot of words, for you," you said finally, voice a little unsteady.

"Don't get used to it. My quota's used up until at least next spring."

"I won't." You bumped your shoulder against his, small and deliberate, and left it there. "But I'll take it. All of it. The pieces and the words both."

Tsukishima didn't say anything else. He didn't need to — he handed you the rest of the milk instead, and you took it, and understood exactly what he meant by it, which was, he was starting to think, the whole point of learning any language at all: not that everyone had to speak the same one, but that somebody bothered to listen closely enough to translate.

Alright bc I need to get this out there I genuinely think what Darius was referring to when he said “unless?” When he accidentally revealed his feelings to Brooklynn was specifically the talking about it part, bc he said to forget about it, and his feelings in general, UNLESS if she didn’t want to-

I don’t think it had anything to do with her being out of a relationship and him wanting one- TvT

Cause he obviously respected that she had just recently broken up, and he didn’t want to make her uncomfortable and he cared more about them being friends first, but since he’s feeling the way he does for her, and since it’s an ENTIRELY new thing to him, he messed up and stumbled on his words and subsequently made things awkward. Which hey, he’s a normally awkward dude in general, that’s completely normal.

And call me too ace to understand regular romance stuff [or too demiromantic as well ig] but how is that toxic in any way??

Cause all of what he’s been doing, and how he’s felt plus what we’ve seen so far, is literally reminiscent to how I’ve ended up discovering I’ve had crushes on people, or discovered that I liked someone in that way. When it’s been months or YEARS after knowing them and then something clicks and it’s just “oh I liked them - wait what I liked them!?”