#lolita has gotten me through some incredibly tough times

[nest-being]

lolita is more than just a fashion or an aesthetic to me, it's a way of life. it's like becoming a piece of art every time you get dressed. viewing the world through bow tinted glasses. everything is beautiful and frilly and cute. your heart may ache but the touch of lace on your skin soothes your soul. so many painful things in this world but your petticoat gives you courage to go on regardless. it's the wind under your wings after you've finally escaped the cage. a freedom you could never imagine until the first time you donned a coord and entered the world. peace and love in the form of frills.

[yamayamawrites]

Bake Sale - KageHina

Find this on AO3 here or read below!

Summary - Tobio and Shouyo are put in charge of baking cookies and cupcakes for the Karasuno bake sale.

They’re only two minutes in, and Shouyo’s shirt is already wonderfully dusted with flour. There’s some in his hair, too, Tobio thinks, and before he can deliberate whether he wants to reach out and muss up Shouyo’s hair to get it out or swat him upside the head for being a dumbass, his friend is hopping up on the counter, making himself at home there.

“What are you doing,” Tobio says, more as a command, a tell me what you’re doing before I kill you, or something. And Shouyo just giggles and kicks his feet like some sort of schoolgirl, and the entire thing is very cutesy and Tobio feels like this was a very, very bad idea.

“I’m sitting up here! Look, it’s like it was made for short people, Bakageyama!” Shouyo cries, pulls his phone from his pocket and turns on some sort of instrumental playlist of sorts.

“Quit calling me that!” Tobio barks in response, and he reaches to grip Shouyo’s hair at the top of his head and yank, and Shouyo dodges easily. He’s not even looking – how did he do that? And Shouyo laughs more, sets his phone aside on the counter. “The hell is this music?” Tobio asks, glares daggers at the phone even though it’s certainly not the culprit.

“Lo-fi beats to bake and chill to,” Shouyo recites with an index finger in the air. “Don’t tell me you’ve never listened to a ‘lo-fi beats’ station before.”

Tobio bites his tongue. The question resides there, being squished between his teeth – what the hell are ‘lo-fi beats’ – but he’s got the impression that asking that question will result in more idiocy from the boy on the counter, and he really doesn’t want to get into it. Instead, he pulls out his own phone and splays it out on the countertop, where a cookie recipe is loaded up.

They’re participating in this year’s bake sale, for reasons unbeknownst to Tobio. Normally the sports’ bake sale doesn’t extend past the female sports’ teams, from what Yuu mentioned of last year’s event, but Sawamura and Koushi insisted that they participate this year, and Tobio doesn’t quite know why. Still, he’s always been decent at baking – he and his mother bake Christmas cookies every year on his birthday, it’s sort of tradition. His only worry is that Shouyo – who looks like a walking hazard traffic cone with his orange hair – will screw this up for him. For the team.

He reminds himself that these cookies are for the team, and that he cannot eat the cookie dough.

“Oi, why do you look so serious all the sudden?” Shouyo asks from the counter, his words escaping around a smirk. “Don’t tell me you’re also the king of the kitchen? Ooh, that sounds like an American cooking show. King of the—”

“Hinata,” Tobio interrupts, his eyes glazed over that way they get when he’s ultra-focused on the court, “are you going to help me or not?”

“Well the thing is,” Shouyo nervously prattles his fingertips together, “I’m ah, no good at cooking. Or baking. I lit a toaster on fire once.”

“You lit a—how did you light a toaster on fire?”

“I mean, technically it started with a piece of paper towel and so I didn’t light the toaster on fire from the beginning.”

“Why did you put a piece of paper towel in the toaster?!” Tobio shrieks, like it’s some sort of heinous crime. Because, well, it is. His toaster has only ever seen bread and bagels and the occasional pop tart, and toasting a paper towel for breakfast seems, first and foremost, unfulfilling. He doesn’t know the nutrient value of paper towels, but he assumes it can’t be any better than a piece of toast. Second, it seems like it would be tough to digest, considering it’s made to absorb and that would probably…cause problems. (Tobio’s having a hard time working out the details here.)

“To clean it!” Shouyo cries back, exasperated. He swings himself off the counter now and prods a finger into Tobio’s chest. “What, does Gross-Yama never clean his toaster?!”

Tobio’s face pales. Ah, of course. Shouyo didn’t toast the paper towel to eat the paper towel.

“Why did you have it plugged in while you were cleaning it, stupid?!” Tobio barks, hopes that his cheeks aren’t too red from his embarrassment of only now coming to the understanding he did.

Shouyo wrings his hands again, looking anywhere but Tobio. “I mean, I dunno…I just wanted toast but it wasn’t clean so I thought I’d clean it really fast and…is it even important?” He demands this last part, prods Tobio in the chest again, gaining some confidence now realizing they’ve been side-tracked and for once it isn’t Shouyo’s fault.

“I mean,” Tobio defends, pokes a finger right back into Shouyo’s chest, “I want to make sure you’re not planning on lighting my kitchen on fire!”

Shouyo seems to take this as a fair enough excuse, because he huffs and turns his back to Tobio. “Whatever,” he grumbles finally, crosses his arms over his chest and leans over the counter to glare at Tobio’s phone screen. “What do you want me to do, Chef Kageyama?”

“If you’re a fire hazard, you should probably just mix ingredients,” Tobio glares.

“It’s not like I spontaneously combusted!” Shouyo shrieks, and cookies are forgotten as Shouyo once again leans into Tobio’s personal space, his little spindly fingers poking and prodding at Tobio’s chest in a way that is both extremely irritating and incredibly hot, and Tobio has to consciously remind himself that Shouyo has never once shown any romantic interest in him and if his resolve snaps now, while they’re baking cookies of all things, he will never be able to look Shouyo in the eye again. So he decides it best to turn around and ignore Shouyo altogether, crossing the kitchen to the cabinets and digging through for the proper ingredients.

Luckily enough for them, Koushi and Sawamura did all the shopping. The shelves are stocked with baking goods, a few boxed cake mixes for cupcakes later, and decorations. Tsukishima and Yamaguchi have probably already finished their baking, Tobio thinks stubbornly, staring at all the ingredients and reciting the list of tasks they have to complete in his head. They’re expected to make four dozen cookies and four dozen cupcakes, while Kei and Tadashi are in charge of making mochi balls. Tobio would have much rather made mochi balls, he thinks – he likes ice cream best – but they got first draw and Tobio’s still sour about it.

He comes back to the island with heaps of ingredients in his arms, and Shouyo’s standing on his counters to grab every single bowl that resides in the kitchen. “Dumbass,” Tobio barks at him, and the result is Shouyo dropping a silver mixing bowl in surprise and nearly falling off the counter he’s standing on. Instinctively, Tobio circles the island in case Shouyo decides to fall – he doesn’t need to clean up blood in his kitchen when he’s certain it’ll already be messy enough with Shouyo baking beside him.

And he’s not wrong. They’re halfway through the first batch of cookies – sugar cookies, arguably the easiest kind of cookie to make – when Shouyo spills the powdered sugar on the floor.

Tobio seethes, thinks for a moment that steam actually might be coming out of his ears with how comically angry he is. He’d told Shouyo not to sit on the counter, but Shouyo had stuck his tongue out and fuckin’ done it anyway like he owned the place, and while he was dancing to some instrumental garbage that Tobio still hasn’t gotten him to change, he managed to swing his knee up and knock into the large bag of powdered sugar.

“You dunce!” Tobio cries, and Shouyo’s yelping in surprise and jumping off the counter to clean it up, but it’s too late – nearly a quarter of the bag is lost to the kitchen floor. Tobio rubs his temple with the oncoming of a headache, quite likely caused by the pressure he’s applying to his forehead in the first place, but he’s too angry to care. “Sweep it up, idiot! Using a wet rag will only make it stick to the ground!”

The way Shouyo gasps out a “Yes, sir!” makes Tobio almost feel bad for yelling; Shouyo sounds a little scared. Then again, he should sound scared – he should be scared – because Tobio is intimidating and mean and most certainly not soft for his spiker. No way. Not soft for Shouyo.

But Shouyo’s so soft.

Tobio’s helpless, gooey, right-brain supplies this thought right as Shouyo clambers onto his knees with a hand broom to clean up the mound of powdered sugar littering the floor. His cheeks somehow have powdered sugar on them, and some clings to Shouyo’s nose and lips as he sweeps a little too hard and gets powdered sugar on his face. Tobio feels like he’s done it on purpose, because the way he grins sheepishly and upturns his head to face Tobio has his heart melting like glaze off a donut and he really can’t look for too long or he’ll dissolve.

“Sorry, Kageyama,” Shouyo lilts from the ground. “I made a little bit of a mess, huh?”

“Fuck kind of game are you playing?” Tobio grunts back. “You look like a Lolita, stupid.”

Shouyo tilts his head to the side, and the way he sits back on his heels so his thighs splay thick below him is really unfair, especially considering how toned those stupid thighs are and how many times Tobio has unfortunately thought about leaving marks on them aside from the natural bruises and bumps Shouyo gathers from volleyball practice. “Lolita?” he asks, as if he doesn’t know, as if he isn’t acting like one right now, and Tobio’s cheeks erupt bright red in a strange mixture of anger and embarrassment that he’s sure he’s felt before.

“Idiot!” he barks out. “Lolita, you know? Ugh, just clean the rest of it up. I’m going to put the dough in the fridge,” he grumbles as he rolls the sugar cookie dough out into a slab and wraps it in plastic wrap. He tucks it into the refrigerator as Shouyo finishes sweeping.

“I’m really sorry, Tobio,” Shouyo murmurs as he passes behind Tobio on the way to the trash can, and the sound of his first name on Shouyo’s lips makes Tobio’s body recoil enough that he throws out a hand instinctively.

And knocks the dustpan full of powdered sugar all over the goddamn kitchen.

“Hey, what the fuck was that for?” Shouyo whines, having taken a surprising amount of sugar to the face. And he’s coughing, ready to sneeze it looks like, with the amount of powdered sugar on his face.

“Why’d you call me that?!” Tobio yelps back, as if he can in any way construe this to be Shouyo’s fault and not entirely his for his limb’s awkward flailing. But he will sure as hell try to blame this on Shouyo.

“I dunno!” Shouyo cries defensively, and now he does sneeze, in a cutely stupidly adorable way that has Tobio recoiling like he’s just taken psychic damage. He nearly flings another arm out in the opposite direction and knocks over their bowl of half-mixed chocolate chip cookie dough. Luckily, he catches himself this time.

“Just – go clean yourself up,” Tobio grimaces, and his voice drops in decibels until it’s hardly audible over the sound of the stupid music playing in the background. Tobio vows to change it the second Shouyo leaves. “I’ve got extra shirts and stuff in my bedroom. Go change, you look like you were inside a baby powder factory that exploded.”

Shouyo sticks out his tongue, then licks his lips and giggles. He giggles. And Tobio thinks to any and all gods who live above, please save me from this stupid cute boy. I don’t want to be gay anymore if it means having to be attracted to such a dumbass. The gods don’t listen, because as Shouyo skips off down the hall, Tobio’s left watching his thighs as he goes.

His first course of action is to change the music. He knows Shouyo’s phone password – not because Shouyo has told him in case he forgets it, but because it’s his stupid birthday, which is a stupid password, and also his own passcode on his phone. He stops that heinous music and instead turns on a playlist of hits from the last decade, which he also quickly regrets, and decides to settle for no music, instead turning on a volleyball game in the living room that he can see from his spot at the island. He likes this much better, he decides.

Then, even though all of this took a good four minutes and twenty-two seconds (Tobio is keeping track for no reason whatsoever of how long Shouyo spends snooping in his room), Shouyo still hasn’t returned, so Tobio’s next course of action is to get as many cookies on baking sheets as he can before the monster returns. He manages three dozen, and he’s just getting the sugar cookie dough from the refrigerator as Shouyo returns.

And Tobio really shouldn’t have offered up his own clothes.

They hang off him like a blanket. Shouyo’s put on one of Tobio’s old middle school tee shirts, probably with the hope that it will be smaller (and it’s most certainly not). Tobio nearly can’t tell Shouyo’s even wearing pants – he’d worn super short shorts over here, claiming it was because of the heat but Tobio almost feels like he’s being teased. And, to top it off, Shouyo’s pulled his bangs into two high-sitting pigtails.

His jaw must have dropped because when Shouyo walks back into the kitchen the first thing he does is press his palm roughly into Tobio’s chin, sends his bottom jaw back upward into his top one. And what little mental cognition Tobio has left is dedicated to moving his tongue out of the way so he doesn’t bite it when Shouyo does this. He can’t even formulate an angry response – can’t even call Shouyo a dumbass – because his tongue feels swollen and heavy in his mouth and he wonders if he really did bite it and he just can’t feel it because he’s so distracted. “Shut up,” Shouyo huffs. “I know I look stupid but I thought this would help keep the flour out of my hair.”

“Maybe if you weren’t such a dumbass you wouldn’t get flour in your hair in the first place,” Tobio shoots back, and he doesn’t really remember wanting to say that but he just shrugs. Better than accidentally calling Shouyo a Lolita again.

But maybe not, because Shouyo had grabbed a half-cup of flour as Tobio said that, and he decided his next course of action would be to dump it on Tobio’s head.

Tobio blinks, shakes his head a little, and he can tell by Shouyo’s widening eyes that he knows he shouldn’t have done that, because now Tobio’s pissed, now he’s going to beat the shit out of Shouyo and it doesn’t matter how damn attractive those thighs and that face and that ass are, because he’s dead, and Tobio’s not into dead things. (Call that human decency.)

“Shouyo,” he says, voice quiet and dripping with malice. And Shouyo takes a step back, but he’s trapped between the counter and Tobio, and his lip is quivering like he’s either going to laugh or cry, and Tobio can’t tell which will be worse. He grabs hold of one of Shouyo’s stupid little pigtails, but he doesn’t tug yet; instead he watches the way Shouyo’s face contorts in preparation to have his nose broken. “What the fuck did you do that for?”

“Y-y-you said,” Shouyo’s stuttering, and god it’s cute, it’s so cute. “I-I mean! Now y-you’re a dumbass, too!”

“I’m a what?!” Tobio barks.

“Y’know, a dumbass,” Shouyo replies, as if Tobio doesn’t remember what a dumbass is. “Stupid. Himbo.” He waves his arms in vague gestures and that lip quivering is gone but his eyes are still blown wide, still trying to remember the phone number for ‘9-1-1’ probably in case this goes haywire.

Tobio moves his other hand to steady himself on the counter, effectively caging Shouyo in. “Is that what you think?” he seethes, and he can see that lip beginning to quiver again. “I can’t believe you spilled powdered sugar all over the floor and got shit all over your face and lit a goddamn toaster on fire, but I’m the idiot here.”

“To be fair, you knocked a dustpan full of powdered sugar all over the floor,” Shouyo comments feebly, lifts his index finger pointedly.

The hand clamped around his pigtail moves down and grabs the collar of Shouyo’s (his) shirt, and he leans closer to Shouyo, who really doesn’t look scared enough anymore. “I only did that because you called me—”

“What?” Shouyo shoots back, and now he looks more defiant than anything. “Tobio? I called you by your name and so you threw powdered sugar everywhere?”

Tobio scowls at him. “Fuck you, you’d do the same thing,” he glares.

“Actually, I wouldn’t.”

“Would too.”

“Would not.”

“Would too!”

“Would not times ten!”

“Would too times a thousand!”

Shouyo gasps, appalled by jumping from ten to a thousand, and Tobio smirks, victorious. “Shouyo,” he murmurs, low and intimidating like Shouyo did to him, and Tobio sees him shrink, sees him quiver a bit. Whether it’s under his gaze or his hands he can’t tell; both of his hands, now, have migrated to the shirt collar and hold him there. And their faces are close together – almost too close for comfort, but Tobio’s trying to prove a point right now – and Shouyo’s jaw has dropped now. Tobio almost wants to do the same to him, to but a palm to his chin and forced his mouth closed, but then that mouth is on his and he forgets literally everything that’s led up to this moment.

Shouyo tastes like powdered sugar. He tastes too sweet and yet it’s not enough, as if it’s not as sweet as Tobio’s expecting. And his lips move hungrily, like he’s desperately trying to find the same sweetness on Tobio’s lips, but Tobio isn’t a dumbass and hasn’t had his face covered in baking supplies (though he has been sneaking cookie dough when Shouyo isn’t looking). Tobio’s entire body tenses for a millisecond, trying to recall if he’s the one who instigated this but he doesn’t think so because his eyes are opened and Shouyo’s are closed. And so he wraps an arm underneath Shouyo’s legs and places him on the counter, and his fingers knot in Shouyo’s hair, desperate and hot in the warm kitchen, and their lips press against each other’s roughly, like this is all either of them have wanted.

Shouyo moves to pull away from the kiss but Tobio chases his lips, chases the feeling he’s been so desperate to learn since the end of their first game, since the first time he’s seen Shouyo really fly on the court. (He initially worried that maybe he was gay for birds, but he’s just gay for boys who can jump. It’s a relief, really.)

“Tobio,” Shouyo sighs out, and between each syllable is another peck of the lips, another moment where Tobio’s trying to memorize the imprint of Shouyo’s mouth on his own. “Cookies.” Tobio ignores him. Shouyo’s hands meet Tobio’s shoulders and give a weak shove. “Cookies,” he repeats, and that’s when Tobio hears it – the sound of the oven timer going off. He forces his lips away from Shouyo’s with more effort than he assumed it would take, and quickly he’s pulling out sheets of cookies and setting them on the counter to cool. And Shouyo’s waiting expectantly for him on the counter across the room, and this time it’s Tobio who initiates it, and Shouyo’s left following along.

When they finally force themselves away from each other for more than a half second to inhale a sharp suck of breath, they’re panting and red-faced and Shouyo’s hair is tangled and there’s flour dripping down Tobio’s hair to the back of his shirt. He shakes the rest of it out into Shouyo’s lap, and Shouyo squeals and squirms, laughing and trying to push Tobio away from him. “Stop it, stop it!” he’s wheezing, and Tobio’s laughing – he’s laughing at this – and he doesn’t know that he’s ever been happier than this.

“You dumped it on me!” Tobio replies, through laughs and gentle nudges and kisses, oh god Shouyo’s kissing him again and he nearly faints. He forgets all about the cookies, damn the cookies, damn the cupcakes they need to make later because Shouyo’s lips are the only sweet thing he ever wants to taste again, and he’s probably being a melodramatic horny teenager but damn it all if that’s not what he wants. To be a melodramatic horny teenager with a short boyfriend who can also fly and is just as stupid as him.

He sighs past Shouyo’s lips. Of all the people he could have been gay for, it had to be a stupid idiot jumping bean.

The baking process goes decently smoother in the afternoon, considering their rough start in the morning with spilled sugar and cups of flour and the subsequent cookie-dough fight that happened after they finally parted their lips for more than a minute and a half. Tobio surveys the damage – there are still globs of cookie dough sticking to various bits of cabinetry and a piece even managed to get stuck to the corner of the television – and he sighs. But Shouyo’s arms are around his waist, trying to grab the bowl of cake mix from his hands, and Tobio thinks that the efforts to clean will be completely worth it for the opportunity to kiss the boy clinging to him.

Once he finishes mixing, he holds the spoon over his shoulder for Shouyo to lick it, then licks the spoon himself. “Gross,” Shouyo whines. “I just licked that!”

“My tongue was literally in your mouth two minutes ago,” Tobio deadpans back, and Shouyo laughs.

And Tobio doesn’t have to refrain from swallowing that laugh with a kiss.