While staying at a hotel for an away game, Hinata gets a brilliant idea for social media fanservice. A famous skincare brand, courting him for an ad campaign, sent a box of products for him to try.
The box includes creams, serums, and animal face sheet masks. Hinata convinces Bokuto, Atsumu, and Sakusa that they should do a live while wearing the masks, saying the face will love it.
Bokuto and Atsumu jump on board immediately, and Sakusa does after considering the havoc travel wrecks on his skin. He usually packs a few sheet masks of his own, but Atsumu distracted him while he was getting his things together.
So clad in their pajamas, they make their selections. Hinata chooses the dog, Atsumu chooses the fox for obvious reasons, and Bokuto chooses the chicken because it’s the closest he can get to an owl.
Sakusa defers to Atsumu to choose for him, taking the panda bear mask with a slight quirk of his lips. Masks on, Hinata sets up the camera, and the live begins.
The fans go absolutely crazy, gushing in the comments about how adorable they look.
They make silly requests, asking Bokuto to cluck and Hinata to bark. Someone asks Atsumu to scream like a fox, which is declines with a laugh, only because he doesn’t want to get them kicked out of the hotel for a noise complaint.
No one knows what a panda sounds like, so they just appreciate that Sakusa makes a cute bear.
Atsumu pouts, asking them if he’s the cutest. He is the fox, after all. If he can’t be the cutest, he’s definitely the sexiest.
The chat bursts into agreement, the fans using the opportunity to be openly thirsty. Sakusa loses count of the number of people who refer to Atsumu as foxy. He stares at his partner out of the corner of his eye, not at all fooled by that carefree grin.
Atsumu knows exactly what he’s doing, the little brat.
The live ends, and the four remove their masks. Sakusa wastes no time in saying that he wants to sleep, and not so subtle instruction for Bokuto and Hinata to return to their own room.
Atsumu sees them out, barely able to keep the smirk off his face. The moment the door closes, he finds himself pressed against the door, scorching hot lips pressing down his neck.
“Why must you provoke me?” Sakusa asks, scraping his teeth over the pulse point.
“Because it’s too much fun.”
Sakusa responds by pressing his teeth into Atsumu’s neck hard enough to leave an indent, ripping a moan from him when he runs his tongue over the mark.
He drags Atsumu to bed, fully intending to remind him who he belongs to before they go to sleep. Hopefully tomorrow, some eagle-eyed fans will notice the mark on the MSBY setter’s neck.
The first time Sakusa experiences cute aggression, he is…disconcerted, to put it mildly. He has no idea what the feeling is or where it came from. It happens when he’s brushing Atsumu’s hair off his forehead.
He just finished getting him cleaned up after pounding him into the mattress, and both of them are exhausted and ready for sleep. Atsumu leans into his touch, nuzzling against his hand and giving him a blissed-out smile. His heart patters, and then the strangest thing happens.
The image of a sleepy, sated Atsumu travels from his eyes to his brain, where the information is processed. This is adorable, his brain tells him. Bite it.
Sakusa doesn’t know how to ask for touch. Up until this point in his life, it hasn’t been a problem. His parents stopped hugging him around adolescence, and his siblings never felt the need to express affection through physical gestures. It didn’t bother him, not really.
Occasionally, his teammates would pat him on the back, and that was fine. Maybe even nice. Just a quick moment of connection, never skin to skin. Komori likes to throw an arm around his shoulder whenever they’re together, and Sakusa doesn’t mind.
He wouldn’t go so far as to say he likes it, but he doesn’t feel the need to shake the touch off as soon as it happens.
But with Atsumu, he wants.
He craves the other man’s touch like it’s the world’s most addictive drug.
It starts during warm-ups. A wing spiker from the opposing team starts trash talking across the net. It's pretty standard, as far as trash-talking goes, but the majority of it seems to be targeted at Atsumu. The setter ignores it, throwing out a few barbs of his own.
The spiker is immediately on the Jackal's shit list, and they vow to shut down every ball he tries to get over the net.
Around the middle of the first set, they rotate, and it puts Atsumu and the spiker directly across each other. That's when things take a turn.
Sakusa can't hear what's being said, but he can recognize the growing tension in Atsumu's body. He sees the way his shoulders creep up towards his ears and the way his jaw hardens. He sees Atsumu shake it off the moment the ball is airborne.