Chapter Text
Tanaka isn’t sure what the problem is.
Hinata and Kageyama are both good athletes, and are therefore automatically pretty cool. Kageyama is also tall and good looking, which mellows out his bad personality, while Hinata is cute and just plain nice, even if he is a little short. Neither of them should have any trouble getting girlfriends—and yet. And yet.
No matter how hard Tanaka tries, he can’t seem to set them up with girls.
“Oi, Hinata!” Tanaka calls, catching Hinata in the hallway between classes. “I gotta ask you something.”
“Tanaka-san!” Hinata smiles. He has one of those wide, bright, genuine smiles that girls love. Really, it should not be hard to pair him up with someone.
Tanaka slings an arm over Hinata’s shoulder and walks next to him, even though they’re going in the opposite direction of Tanaka’s classroom. “So I was thinking,” Tanaka says, “Yacchan is really cute, right?”
Hinata nods. “Yeah! Definitely.”
“And you like her a lot?”
“Yeah. She’s really nice.”
“Great!” Tanaka grins. “You should ask her out.”
Hinata’s brow crumples like Tanaka just asked him to do mental math. “What?”
“You should ask her out,” Tanaka repeats. “You think she’s cute, and you like her—”
“Oh! No, no, I don’t like her, like—like that,” Hinata insists, stricken. “I mean, I like her, but as a friend. Besides, Yachi-san doesn’t really like... well....”
“Doesn’t like...?”
“Boys?” Hinata says.
Huh. Tanaka thinks back to all the times he caught Yachi admiring Kiyoko, and.... Yeah, wow, it’s pretty fucking obvious now.
“Well, this is my classroom,” Hinata says. “I’ll see you at practice, Tanaka-san?”
“Oh, yeah, sure.” Tanaka takes his arm off Hinata’s shoulder. “See you later.”
They part ways. Damn... Tanaka had been sure Hinata and Yachi would’ve worked, but....
It’s time to come up with a new game plan.
—
“Kageyama,” Tanaka says before practice one day. Kageyama is sitting on the floor against the wall of the gym, filing his nails. When Tanaka approaches, he looks up.
“Tanaka-san,” he says. “Do you have questions about the new wing spiker strike pattern? Because if you do we can do it again in practice today—”
“I actually had a different kind of question,” Tanaka interrupts. He crouches next to Kageyama on the ground. “A very different kind of question.”
Kageyama frowns.
“Do you like any girls?” Tanaka asks, because he’s a good senpai, and he’s going to ask the question he came to ask, dammit. “You’re an attractive guy, and if you want, I can put a good word in with the right lady, if you know what I mean.”
“I don’t,” says Kageyama.
“You don’t like any girls, or you don’t know why I mean?”
“Yes.”
Tanaka frowns. His kouhai are really testing him, aren’t they? “C’mon, let me wingman for you. Get you a date.”
“Hm...”
Tanaka has honestly never seen someone look so unenthusiastic about the prospect of a date.
“Do you really not have a crush?” Tanaka presses.
“No.”
“There aren’t any girls in your classes that you like?”
“No.”
“What about any of the girls who play volleyball?”
Kageyama thinks for a moment, which is the best reaction Tanaka has gotten so far; this whole conversation has been like pulling teeth. His hopes are quickly dashed, however, when Kageyama shakes his head and says, “No. If I wanted to play volleyball with someone, I’d just play with Hinata.”
“But you wouldn’t be playing volleyball on a date,” Tanaka huffs. “You’d be going to, like, a movie or something. Or a park.”
“Why would I go to a park and not play volleyball?”
Tanaka gets to his feet. He’s willing to accept defeat and fight another day. “Just think about it okay Kageyama?” he says. “For me.”
Tanaka is really going to have to try some new tactics here.
—
A group date, Tanaka thinks, has to be the best way to go. It’s perfect: they can get food, have fun, and if both Hinata and Kageyama are there, there’s a better chance that at least one of them will hit it off well with a girl. Tanaka wants to be a good senpai. And for him, being a good senpai means helping these first years find love.
“Hinata, Kageyama—” Tanaka says, coming up behind the two after practice a few days later. “Get your thank-you’s ready, because I have a great surprise for you.”
Hinata’s eyes widen. “Barbecue?” At the word, Kageyama’s eyes widen, too.
“No, no, no—it’s not that kind of surprise.”
Both Hinata and Kageyama visibly deflate. Tanaka takes this in stride. He probably shouldn’t have led with the “surprise” thing.
“So,” Tanaka says, “a girl I know from the next school over is having a karaoke party. And she wanted to know if I knew any cool guys who she could invite, because all her friends are girls, and she wanted a mixed crowd. And I told her...” Tanaka pauses to savor the effect. “That I have two very fun and attractive kouhai who would definitely be interested. So, what do you say? Up for a little karaoke?”
If Tanaka wasn’t seriously invested in these two being interested, the identical looks of confusion on Kageyama’s and Hinata’s faces would have been hilarious.
“Um,” Hinata says, “Well... when is this?”
“This weekend,” Tanaka answers. Hinata and Kageyama share a quick look.
“Well,” Hinata begins.
“Hinata and I have extra practice planned,” Kageyama answers.
“Yeah. It’s at that new really cool gym they just built by the park?”
Kageyama nods. “Hinata’s cousin—”
“He works doing some kind of tech thing? And his work was handing out tons of free temp passes—”
“—and it’s a great facility, brand new—”
“—air salonpas!”
“The pass expires at the end of the weekend, so—”
“—we wanted to get as much time there as possible.”
They both nod in sync, like everything they just said made perfect sense.
“You don’t want to go to karaoke with a bunch of girls... because you’re going to a gym?” Tanaka clarifies.
“Yeah!” Hinata says. “Sorry, Tanaka-san. Maybe Yamaguchi will want to go? Or you could ask Noya?”
“Uh.” Tanaka scratches the back of his head. “Yeah, I guess.”
“See you tomorrow, Tanaka-san!” Hinata smiles. And then both he and Kageyama are heading to the bikes.
Tanaka walks back away inside the gym, trying to figure out what went wrong. Noya’s there waiting for him.
“So, are they going?” Noya asks.
“No,” he says. “No, they’re said they’re going to a gym all weekend.”
“Is it the new gym? The one by the park?”
Tanaka frowns. “Not you too, Yuu.”
“I’m just saying! It is a nice gym.”
“But it can’t be nice enough to pass up the chance to go to karaoke with a bunch of really nice, really pretty girls.”
Yuu shrugs. “Kageyama and Hinata are... special.”
Tanaka slumps, sitting down on the gym floor, and Yuu joins him. “What am I gonna do, Yuu?” he asks. “Why is this so hard?”
“I dunno, Ryuu,” Noya says. “You could give up?”
“Ugh, no, I can’t,” Tanaka insists. He flops backwards and spreads out his arms. “God, this would be so much easier if I could just set them up with each other.”
They’re both silent for a beat. Then there’s a short, ground-breaking moment in which he and Noya share the same epiphany. They give each other a look.
“Oh my God,” Noya says.
“You don’t think...”
“I mean—”
“We could—”
“We totally could—"
“Alright,” Tanaka grins. “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”
“I think so. But do you think it’ll work?”
“Well,” Tanaka says, pulling out his phone and beginning to type, “there’s only one way to find out.”