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The Chuupet came the next class. You told yourself that one didn't count either, mostly because you'd run out of ways to make the sentence sound true and had stopped bothering to fully believe it. It required knowing something no one should reasonably know about a stranger's snack preferences, something you'd learned weeks ago by accident, catching sight of the wrapper poking out of his gym bag and filing the detail away the same unthinking way you filed away everything else about him now. Automatically. Hungrily. Like your mind had simply decided this was what it did.

You left it in the same spot as the coffee. He picked it up between two fingers this time, studying it like it might be a joke at his expense, and looked around the room again, slower now, the way a person looks when they've started to suspect a pattern rather than an accident.

He still didn't find you.

He ate it twenty minutes later anyway.

The vending machine alcove outside the gym was empty when you arrived, which was the part you'd been counting on. Practice would end soon, and you needed a reason to be standing there when it did, something with the shape of coincidence rather than intent. You were scanning the selections, already reaching for the right change, when footsteps rounded the corner and stopped with the confident energy of someone who hadn't considered the space might already be occupied.

"Oh," said the arrival, recalibrating quickly. "Hey."

You glanced over. Tall, blond, the kind of person who filled a room through volume rather than effort. You recognized him vaguely, one of the two brothers who occasionally wandered into your sports psychology lecture and spent the hour needling each other instead of taking notes.

"Miya Atsumu," he said, as though the name alone might accomplish something.

"Okay," you said.

He blinked, visibly recalculating. "That's it? No, like, recognition?"

"You go to my psych lecture. Sometimes." You pressed the button for a bottle of strawberry lemonade.

"Right, but I'm also—" He gestured vaguely at himself, the gesture of a man used to the gesture doing most of the explaining. "Volleyball. National level. You've never noticed?"

"I've noticed you talk a lot during lectures."

"That's fair, actually." He said it with real satisfaction, like a compliment had been smuggled in somewhere. He leaned against the machine, undeterred. "So what, you here for practice? You a fangirl? Here to see the Miya twins? Best setter in the prefecture, for the record. Well. One of us, anyway."

You looked at him, then back at the machine, and pressed the button for your own drink. "That's nice," you said.

"That's, nice?"

"Mm."

"You're supposed to be at least a little starstruck. That's usually how this goes."

"I don't follow volleyball," you said, which was so thoroughly untrue you nearly laughed at the ease of it, though the beauty of a lie like that was precisely how completely it closed a conversation.

"No way. Seriously? Not even a little?" He studied you with the particular interest of someone whose usual approach had just failed for the first time in recent memory. "So what are you into, then?"

You collected your drink, slid it into your bag without ceremony, and straightened. "Leaving," you said, pleasantly, and did exactly that, leaving him standing in the alcove mid-sentence, one hand still raised like he'd been about to make a point that would have changed everything.

"Hey, wait, I didn't even get your—"

You didn't look back to see how long it took him to give up. You already knew Suna would be out within the next ten minutes, and you intended to be positioned for it.

The note was different. You understood that even as you wrote it, folding the small piece of paper with more care than the words probably warranted, tucking it into the gap at the top of his gym bag where you'd watched him keep a spare towel often enough to know exactly where it would sit.

You shouldn't dry your hair so roughly. It's not good for you.

You wrote it in your neatest hand, the kind reserved for things that mattered, and told yourself once more that this was simply an observation. You'd seen it through the gap in his blinds one evening weeks ago, towel around his shoulders, scrubbing at his hair with more force than it needed, the kind of careless motion that would thin it early if he kept it up for years. You hadn't been able to stop thinking about it since. A small thing. A caring thing, if you didn't look too closely.

It wasn't until you were walking away from the locker room, pulse loud in your own ears, that the full shape of what you'd done arrived all at once, with nowhere left to hide from it.

You hadn't seen that from a street, a bus stop, a park bench, any of the places you'd quietly convinced yourself counted as public, as accidental, as almost coincidence.

You'd seen it from outside his window. Close enough to see through blinds that were never meant to be seen through.

You stopped on the sidewalk outside the gym and let the word sit in your head, finally, without immediately arguing yourself out of it.

Stalking.

You didn't cry. You didn't feel the relief people always described, the release of finally naming something you'd been circling for weeks. What you felt instead was colder than that. Steadier. As though naming it hadn't changed anything at all, except that now you understood, with total clarity, that you were going to keep doing it anyway.

Suna found the note before practice, reaching for his towel with the same unthinking motion he used every day, and went still when his fingers closed around paper instead of terrycloth.

He read it twice before allowing himself to react to it at all.

You shouldn't dry your hair so roughly. It's not good for you.

The handwriting was neat, deliberate, almost soft-looking, though there was nothing soft about the fact that it existed. He didn't dry his hair roughly in public. He didn't dry his hair anywhere but his own bathroom, alone, door shut. Blinds he was fairly sure he never bothered closing all the way, because his apartment faced an alley, and who would be looking.

He didn't panic. Panic wasn't really in his range; he'd been called unbothered by enough people, often enough, that he'd started to believe it himself. What he did instead was think, methodically, the same unhurried way he processed a blocker's footwork or a setter's tell, running the note back through everything he knew and coming up short.

He looked around the locker room out of habit more than expectation. Osamu three lockers down, mid-complaint about a professor. Atsumu loud about something on the far side of the room. Nothing out of place. That, if anything, was the part that stayed with him.

He folded the note twice and put it in his bag rather than his pocket, as if distance from his own body might make it easier to examine later.

He didn't feel watched here, in a room full of familiar noise. Whatever this was, it hadn't come from inside these walls. Which meant, if he followed the thought all the way through, and he did, the same patient way he followed everything, that whoever had written it had been watching him somewhere he'd never once thought to check.

He said nothing to anyone. He got dressed. He went to practice, served, blocked, let Atsumu's noise wash past him as usual, and if his eyes drifted toward the gym windows more than the drill required, no one seemed to notice.

He noticed, though. He noticed everything. That was the problem, and he intended to keep noticing until it stopped being one.

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Thursday, you nearly lost him.

A professor who ran ten minutes over, a friend who caught your arm in the hallway wanting to discuss a project you barely cared about, and by the time you made it outside, the window you'd learned to rely on was already closing. You knew, from three weeks of quiet, careful observation, that if you didn't reach the corner by the sports science building within the next few minutes, you'd miss him entirely, and the whole evening would stretch out ahead of you feeling strangely unfinished, the way a held breath feels wrong until it's let out.

So you walked faster than you meant to. Then faster than that.

You caught sight of him just as he was cutting through the edge of the campus park, gym bag over one shoulder, unhurried in the way he always was, completely unaware that anyone behind him was rushing at all.

Relief hit first, disproportionate to something this small. Shame followed close behind it, the recognition that you'd felt relief over something you had no right to feel anything about.

You slowed your pace to match a safer distance and clutched your bag out of habit. That was when you registered the absence rather than the object itself. The clasp of your keychain had been open, and your keychain nowhere in sight. You were still looking down when the footsteps ahead of you slowed, then stopped.

Suna had felt something hit the back of his shoe before he heard it. A small, soft thud against leather, nothing sharp enough to be a rock. He glanced down and found a small crocheted fox lying in the grass, a thin cord trailing from it like it had torn loose from something.

He picked it up, turning it once between his fingers. Handmade, unmistakably, one ear a little longer than the other, the orange yarn slightly uneven at the seams. He looked behind without expecting to find anything and found you instead, frozen mid-step, staring at the fox in his hand as though it had personally betrayed you.

"This yours?" he asked. His voice was as flat as it always sounded, not unkind, simply unbothered, as though a stranger's dropped keychain were a mildly interesting footnote to an otherwise unremarkable evening.

You closed the distance faster than was probably dignified. "Yeah. Sorry, the clasp on my bag doesn't close right." True, and beside the point, and you knew it even as you said it.

He held it out. Your fingers brushed his for half a second, and you were irritated with yourself for noticing.

"A fox," he said, not quite a question, studying it now that it had left his hand. "Someone make that for you?"

"I made it." You tucked it back into your bag, checking the clasp with more attention than it had received all week. "I’m still learning. It's not — it’s not very good."

"Didn't say it wasn’t good." He looked at you for a second longer than the conversation strictly required, something unreadable behind his eyes, and you had the sudden, uncomfortable sense of being looked at properly for the first time. Not glanced past, not walked by, but actually seen. "Why a fox?"

"No reason," you said, too quickly, and busied yourself with checking if it’s sturdy on your bag instead of meeting his eyes. Your face tightened because the reason himself was asking you why you made it.

"Mm." He said and was already looking back down the path, gym bag shifting on his shoulder like he was getting ready to keep walking. "You go to the gym block? Sports science?"

The question landed harder than it should have. "Psych building. Just cutting through."

"Huh." He didn't push it, didn't seem particularly invested either way. "Small campus."

"Yeah," you managed. "Small campus."

He gave a short nod, the kind that closes a conversation without being rude about it, and started walking again, unhurried, the same as always. You stood there a moment longer than you should have, watching his back get smaller down the path, the crocheted fox now warm in your palm from where his hand had held it.

You told yourself, walking the opposite direction now, taking the long way so it wouldn't look like you were following the same route, that it had gone fine. Normal. A completely ordinary conversation between two strangers about a dropped keychain. Nothing had been given away. He hadn't looked at you like he suspected anything.

Small campus, he'd said. Like that explained everything. Like it wasn't strange at all, that the two of you kept ending up in the same six-block radius of the city at exactly the same time, week after week.

Suna thought about it longer than he expected to, later, lying on his bed with the ceiling fan clicking overhead.

Not the keychain. The girl. Something in the way she'd looked at him before catching herself, smoothing her expression back into something politer, more composed, like she'd been startled by more than a dropped keychain.

He didn’t think much of it, not really. People get flustered by small things all the time. Dropping something in front of a stranger was mildly embarrassing regardless of who was picking it up.

Still, "psych building, cutting through" sat oddly with him, faintly, the same low static he'd felt once or twice before on this exact stretch of park, a word sitting just behind his teeth he couldn't quite reach.

It wasn't sharp enough to chase.

So, the same as before, he let it go.

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The thought arrived with an odd little jolt which was disproportionate to the size of the discovery. Of all the lecture halls on campus, of all the electives you could have chosen that semester, he'd ended up here, close enough that you could have called out to him if you'd had any reason to. You let yourself entertain, briefly and a little foolishly, the idea that this meant something. Fate? or whatever softer word people used when they wanted the universe to feel less random than it actually was.

What a coincidence you thought, and didn't examine too closely why the thought felt more like relief than surprise.

He sat alone in the two seater row, not by choice exactly. Though it amounted to the same thing. A pair of guys settled into the row ahead of him moments later, unmistakably related, sharp-featured and restless in a way that suggested they never fully ran out of energy to spend on each other. One with dyed blonde hair and one with grey. The blonde one twisted around and said something you couldn't quite catch, grinning like he already knew it would land.

"Say that again and I'm switching seats," mysterious rain guy said, not even bothering to look up from the window.

"You say that every week!”

"And every week I mean it more than the last time. Read into that however you want."

The blonde one barked out a laugh. Rain guy looked completely unaffected, with the put-upon patience of someone who'd stopped fighting a losing battle a long time ago. You caught yourself smiling before you'd noticed you were listening at all, and quickly faced forward before either of them could see it.

You didn't learn his name until roll call, when the professor's voice moved down the list in that flat practiced monotone reserved for attendance, name after name answered with the usual scattering of here and present.

"Suna Rintarou?"

"Present."

You knew that voice. It was your first time properly hearing it yet something in you recognized it instantly, some downstream current tracing back to a rain-soaked alley and two shivering kittens.

Suna Rintarou, you wrote in the back of your notebook and spent the rest of the lecture failing to take notes.

A week later, it was one of your friends who confirmed, without meaning to, that sports psychology would be the only place your paths ever crossed.

"Okay, but the blonde one," Hana said one afternoon, nodding vaguely toward the front of the lecture hall before the professor arrived, where the Miya twins were mid-argument over something that had the blonde one, whom you now knew as Atsumu, gesturing like his life depended on it. "The quiet one who never talks. He's unfairly good-looking for someone who looks that bored all the time."

"All three of them, honestly," someone else added. "Are they even psych majors? I've never seen them in any of my other classes."

"They're not," Hana said, already scrolling past the question like it wasn't worth the suspense. "Atsumu and the quiet one, Suna, are sports science. The other twin's culinary arts, I think. This is probably the only elective they all share."

You filed that away with more interest than you were willing to admit to, doing the quiet arithmetic of it. Sports science. Culinary arts. Different faculties entirely, different buildings, different hours, no overlap you could reasonably expect to stumble into by accident. Whatever this was, this single Tuesday and Thursday lecture, twelve to one, was the only place it could exist honestly.

That should have ended it there. A closed door was a closed door. Instead, you found the volleyball gym.

It wasn't difficult to locate; the athletics complex sat clustered along the eastern edge of campus, glass-walled and impossible to miss. Practice ran Tuesday and Thursday mornings, well before your lecture even started, which meant there was no natural reason for your afternoons to bend anywhere near it. Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, practice shifted later, stretching into the evening, and those were the days you had no class with him at all, no excuse, nothing but the simple fact that you'd started walking in that direction anyway.

You told yourself, the first time, that you were only curious how the building looked from the courtyard side. The second time, you told yourself the trees were nicer over there. By the third, the lie had worn too thin to bother reciting, and you stopped offering yourself excuses altogether.

You learned the rhythm of him the way you learned everything else, by accumulation. The gym itself gave you nothing to work with from outside; its windows sat too high along the upper level to offer more than glimpses of light and shadow, and there was no bench, no angle, no reasonable vantage point that let you watch a practice unfold from a safe distance. If you wanted to see anything at all, you had to get close enough to look through the open doors at the front, which meant getting close enough to be seen doing it.

So you kept it brief. A slowed pace as you passed, eyes flicking through the gap in the doorway for the two or three seconds it took to register motion, sound, the general shape of a team mid-drill. Never long enough to pick him out clearly. Never long enough to be caught lingering. You'd walk on before anyone inside had reason to glance toward the entrance, and only afterward, safely past, would you let yourself replay whatever fraction of a second you'd managed to catch: a serve, a shout, a flash of dark hair among the others. That was all you allowed yourself.

Until one evening, you caught him leaving.

He came out alone, gym bag slung over one shoulder, unhurried in that same way he did everything, and turned down the path toward the main road. You told yourself you were only walking the same direction, which was almost true, right up until the point it stopped being true and you hadn’t noticed the exact moment it happened.

You followed him for six blocks before you caught yourself.

It wasn’t dramatic. He didn’t do anything, didn’t give you any reason to think he’d noticed. You simply looked up at some point and realized how far you’d gone, how deliberately you’d kept the same distance behind him the entire time, and something cold settled low in your stomach. You stopped walking. Let him get further ahead, then turn a corner and disappear from view entirely, and told yourself that was the end of it.

It was only once you were safely around the corner, pulse still climbing instead of settling, that the word finally surfaced.

Stalking.

You dismissed it immediately. That word belonged to something uglier. That word belonged to strangers in news segments, to obsession with teeth, to intent. What you were doing didn't feel like that. It felt smaller, softer at the edges, closer to curiosity than pursuit.

Stalking's a harsh word, you thought, and the sentence settled into you with an ease that should have alarmed you more than it did. You weren't stalking him. You were simply aware of him now, in a way you hadn't been before, and awareness had a habit of placing a person in the same orbit without any real design behind it.

You believed that, too, for as long as you needed to.

Suna didn't notice her. Not with any certainty.

He wasn't oblivious by nature. Noticing things was half of what made him useful on a volleyball court: reading a blocker's shoulders before they committed, clocking a setter's intent before the toss left their hands. But this sat outside that register entirely. Faint enough to dismiss. Too formless to name.

A few times, cutting through the park on his walk home, he'd felt the prickling certainty that someone was behind him. Not close. Not threatening. Just present. He checked over his shoulder both times and found nothing worth remembering: a jogger, a couple with a stroller.

It happened again near the gym once, well after practice ended. He was heading out for something he'd forgotten when he caught movement past the entrance, someone turning too fast, footsteps picking up pace outside. By the time he reached the door, whoever it was had already vanished between streetlights.

He decided it meant nothing. People walked fast all the time without it being about him.

Still, the feeling didn't fully go away. It sat low in his mind, unfinished, not urgent enough to chase, not weak enough to forget.

He didn't know what to do with that.

So, for now, he did nothing at all.

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