Just in Case

The air in Onigiri Miya smelled like rice vinegar and seaweed. Osamu wiped the counter for the third time—something to do with his hands while his brain checked out. Behind him, Michelle sat at the corner table with crayons everywhere, drawing what looked like a whale with wings.

Sakusa leaned against the kitchen doorway, arms crossed, staring out the front window. He’d been sticking around later. Helping clean. Staying close. Neither of them had to say why.

Michelle looked up. Crayon paused mid-stroke. “Papa?”

Osamu turned. “Yeah?”

She tilted her head—brown eyes, Atsumu’s eyes—and gave him that earnest, bottomless look only a six-year-old can. “How come we don’t have a mommy?” The same tone she’d use to ask why the sky was blue. Simple. Honest. Devastating.

The rag slipped. Hit the floor with a wet slap.

Sakusa went still.

For a second, the only sound was the fridge humming. Michelle kept looking at them, waiting, not understanding why the air had turned sharp.

Osamu opened his mouth. Nothing. His throat had closed up, years of grief he never learned to swallow.

Sakusa took a step forward, stopped. His jaw tightened. For a long moment he looked like he might say something careful, something kind—then pressed his lips together and turned away.

Michelle’s lip wobbled. “Did I say something wrong?”

“No, baby.” Osamu’s voice cracked. He crossed the room in three strides, knelt beside her chair, pulled her into a hug. “No. You didn’t do nothin’ wrong.”

She hugged back, small arms around his neck. “Papa, you’re shaking.”

He was. Tremor running through his hands, his shoulders, his ribs. He pressed his face into her hair and breathed strawberry shampoo.

Sakusa hadn’t moved.

“She looks like him,” he said quietly. Not to anyone. Just to himself.

Osamu closed his eyes.

---

Memories hit him like a wave. He didn’t fight it.

Atsumu, eighteen, sitting cross-legged on the floor of their old bedroom in Hyogo, laughing at something stupid on TV. Blond hair in his eyes, golden in the afternoon light. Beautiful in that careless way that made strangers stop and stare.

“Samu, look—look at this idiot. He just fell off a roof.”

“Stop watchin’ that crap and help me fold laundry.”

“You fold. I’m doin’ important research.”

He was so alive. So bright. A fire that never burned out.

Osamu remembered thinking, even then, that his twin burned too hot. Gave off too much light, too much heat. No one ever thought to ask if he was cold when the flames died down.

They never asked.

---

Sakusa remembered after.

Atsumu, twenty-five, heavy with child, standing in their kitchen in Hyogo. Back arched to balance the weight, one hand on his belly, the other stirring miso soup. Humming something soft Sakusa didn’t recognize.

“You should sit down.”

“I’m fine, Kiyoomi. I’m not made of glass.”

But he looked exhausted. Shadows under his eyes. Cheeks hollowed. The pregnancy had been hard—hospital visits, bed rest, complications that made the doctors exchange worried glances when they thought he wasn’t looking.

And yet he smiled. That gentle, patient smile Sakusa had fallen in love with during their time on the same team. The smile that said, “I can handle this.”

Sakusa believed him.

Believed him right up until he came home to an empty house and a note that said I’m sorry in handwriting so shaky it barely looked like Atsumu’s.

Believed him even after the funeral. After weeks of silence. After the guilt hollowed him out and left him a walking ghost.

Easier to believe than to admit the truth: Atsumu burned out. No one saw the signs. Sakusa was so consumed by his own career, his own anxieties, his own self, that he missed the slow extinguishing of the person he loved most.

---

Suna found them an hour later.

He let himself in through the back door, still in his jacket from the shoot he’d finished that afternoon. One look at Osamu sitting on the floor with Michelle asleep in his lap, Sakusa frozen by the window, and he sighed.

“She asked, didn’t she?”

Osamu nodded.

Suna didn’t say I told you this would happen. He was too smart for that. He crouched beside them and gently brushed a strand of hair from Michelle’s forehead.

“We’ll figure out what to tell her. When she’s older. When it makes sense.”

“Will it ever make sense?” Osamu’s voice was raw.

Suna didn’t answer. Didn’t have to.

They sat in silence, the three of them, in a restaurant that smelled like Atsumu’s favorite onigiri recipe, surrounded by ghosts.

---

It was Suna who found the portal.

He told them about it the next morning, voice uncharacteristically hesitant. “I was walking the trail behind your parents’ old place. The forest’s grown over everything. Nearly tripped over it.”

“Over what?” Osamu asked.

“A light. Glowing out of the ground like a crack in the sky.”

Sakusa frowned. “A crack in the—that doesn’t make sense.”

“I know. That’s why I came to get you.”

They went together. Osamu dropped Michelle at a neighbor’s with a hastily prepared excuse. The three of them walked the overgrown path behind the old Miya house, past the rusted gate and the fallen sakura tree, deeper into the woods than any of them had been in years.

The light was exactly where Suna said. A vertical seam of gold, pulsing gently, hovering waist-high above a bed of moss. It didn’t illuminate the trees so much as hint at them—shadows that shifted when you tried to look directly.

Osamu stared. “What the hell is this?”

Suna shrugged. “Magic? Wish fulfillment? A very elaborate hallucination?”

“It’s warm.” Sakusa had moved closer without realizing, hand reaching toward the light. The air hummed, soft and low, like a heartbeat.

“Kiyoomi, don’t—”

But Sakusa was already stepping through.

The light swallowed him whole.

---

Osamu and Suna followed. Because of course they did. They’d already lost one person they loved; they weren’t about to lose another.

The sensation was like falling upward. A rush of warmth, a flash of color, then solid ground.

They were standing in a gymnasium.

The air smelled like sweat and floor wax and adolescence. Walls lined with banners for Karasuno High School. On the polished wooden floor, less than ten feet away, three boys running drills.

One of them was Osamu. Young Osamu. Grey-haired, lanky, in a practice jersey too big for him.

Next to him, a familiar figure with dark hair and a deadpan expression setting up a net. Young Suna.

And between them, setting a ball with the kind of effortless precision that made him a national sensation before he was twenty—

Miya Atsumu.

Alive.

Alive.

---

Sakusa made a sound that wasn’t quite a word, wasn’t quite a sob. His knees buckled. He caught himself on the edge of a bench, but his eyes never left the blond boy at center court.

Atsumu looked seventeen. Hair longer, falling into his eyes. Arms lean, legs powerful, whole body vibrating with restless energy. He was laughing at something young Osamu said, and the sound—bright, brash, young—hit Sakusa like a physical blow.

“Is that—” Suna started. His voice cracked. “Is that him?”

Osamu couldn’t speak. He was staring at his own past self, at the brother he lost, at the moment before everything went wrong.

The three boys finally noticed them.

Young Osamu’s eyes went wide. “Who the hell are you?”

Young Suna took a defensive step forward, hand reaching for a water bottle like it might be a weapon.

And young Atsumu—blond, bright, alive—froze mid-step, his gaze locking onto the three adults. Not scared. Confused. Angry, even, at the intrusion.

“Oi,” he said, voice exactly as Sakusa remembered. “This is a closed practice. You’re not supposed to be here.”

Sakusa couldn’t hold back.

He crossed the gym in five strides, ignoring young Osamu’s shout, ignoring young Suna’s raised hands. Stopped in front of Atsumu, close enough to touch, and then his legs gave out and he dropped to his knees.

“Atsumu,” he breathed.

Atsumu stared down at him, jaw dropped. “What—who—do I know you?”

Sakusa’s face crumpled. Tears he’d held back for years, for decades, finally broke free.

Behind him, Osamu and Suna walked forward like they were in a dream. Young Osamu was shouting something—get away from my brother, who are you people—but it sounded muffled, far away.

Osamu reached his past self and stopped. The teenager looked up at him, eyes hard and wary. Osamu saw the fear beneath the bravado.

“We’re not gonna hurt him,” Osamu said, voice rough. “We’re—God, this is gonna sound crazy. But we’re you. Older. From the future.”

Young Osamu’s mouth opened. Closed. Opened again.

“Bullshit,” he said weakly.

“Is it?” Osamu pointed at the Miya family crest on young Osamu’s jersey. “You got that tear in the shoulder from a spike you messed up yesterday. You patched it yourself because you didn’t want Ma to find out.”

Young Osamu went pale.

Young Suna, meanwhile, was staring at Suna with dawning recognition. “You have the same scar. On your jaw.”

Suna touched his face. “Accident with a camera rig two years ago.”

Young Suna nodded slowly. “I saw it in a dream. Last night. I saw—this.”

---

Young Atsumu was still frozen, Sakusa kneeling at his feet. The confusion on his face was painful.

“I don’t understand,” he said. “Why are you cryin’?”

Sakusa looked up at that young, unmarked face. At eyes that hadn’t learned to dim.

“Because I miss you,” he whispered. “Because I love you. Because I didn’t—I didn’t—”

Osamu stepped in, hand on Sakusa’s shoulder. Steadying him. He looked at his younger brother with everything he had.

“Atsumu. Listen to me. You gotta promise something.”

Young Atsumu’s brow furrowed. “Promise what? Who are you?”

“I’m Osamu. Your twin. From eighteen years in the future.”

The teenager’s eyes darted to young Osamu, then back. “Samu, what the hell is he talkin’ about?”

“I don’t know,” young Osamu said, but his voice was unsteady. “But he knew about the tear.”

Suna stepped forward and crouched beside Sakusa, forming a protective triangle around young Atsumu. “We don’t have much time.” He glanced at the portal—flickering at the edge of the gym. “The light’s fading. We need to say what we came to say.”

Young Atsumu crossed his arms, defensive. “Say what? Y’all are makin’ no sense.”

Osamu reached out and took his brother’s hand. The younger flinched but didn’t pull away.

“Take care of yourself,” Osamu said, voice breaking. “Stay by his side.” He looked at young Suna and young Osamu. “Both of you. Make sure he knows he is loved. Every single day.”

“Why wouldn’t I know that?” young Atsumu asked, but his voice had lost its edge. Something in the adults’ faces was getting through.

“Because sometimes,” Sakusa said, “people forget to say it. And sometimes people who shine the brightest are the ones who need to hear it the most.”

He stood slowly and pulled young Atsumu into a hug. The boy went rigid, then hesitantly hugged him back.

“You’re gonna be happy,” Sakusa whispered into his hair. “You’re gonna be loved. And if you ever feel like you’re not—find him.” He nodded at young Osamu. “Find her.” At young Suna. “Find me. Find anyone. Don’t go quiet, Atsumu. Don’t disappear.”

Young Atsumu pulled back, eyes wet. “I don’t understand what’s happenin’. But you’re cryin’ and it makes me want to cry.”

Osamu laughed brokenly. “Yeah. That’s about right.”

Suna wrapped an arm around both of them, pulling them into a group hug. Young Atsumu looked at his younger counterparts, bewildered, but didn’t resist.

“Promise me,” Osamu said, fierce. “Promise me you’ll look out for him.”

Young Osamu swallowed. “I promise.” Shaky, but certain.

Young Suna nodded. “We will.”

“And Atsumu.” Sakusa wiped his face. “Promise me you’ll let them.”

Young Atsumu looked at the three men. At their grief. At their love. At the way they held each other like they were afraid he might dissolve.

“I promise,” he said softly.

The portal pulsed, a cascade of golden light across the gym floor.

“We have to go,” Suna said.

Osamu held his brother one last time, pressing a kiss to his forehead. “Be happy, ‘Tsumu.”

“I will.” And for a moment, young Atsumu looked like he understood.

They let go. Walked backward towards the light, eyes locked on the boy who had been lost and found in the same breath.

The portal closed behind them.

---

They came back in the same forest, the light vanishing like it was never there. The sun was setting through the trees, sky in shades of gold and rose.

Osamu sat down on the moss, exhausted. Sakusa and Suna joined him, close enough to feel each other’s warmth.

No one spoke for a long time.

Then Osamu said, “We’ll make sure no one else feels that alone.”

Suna leaned his head on Osamu’s shoulder. Sakusa wiped his eyes and nodded.

In the distance, a bird sang.

And somewhere, in a gymnasium in Miyagi, a boy with blond hair and a bright future felt a strange wave of warmth pass through him, and decided to call his twin brother and tell him he loved him.

Just in case.