Chapter Text
“Hajime, dear,” his mother says, and Hajime glances at her with a start, because even at five years old he knows that tone.
With it, she directs her gaze at another mother across the yard, past the adults and kids and the curious in-betweeners gathered for this all-welcomed welcome party of the neighborhood proportion. When Hajime catches sight of said mother, he thinks she is not being terribly kind to her child (he must be, for how similar they look).
He’s the brown-haired kid beside her, huddled in a bland sweatshirt with his face all scrunched up like holding back a deluge of tears and screams.
At the edge of failing, too, at that. So Hajime tries for that look as well, the one he’s picked up from his own mother as she pairs it up with a jagged sweet smile. Her tone feels more tremendous, somehow. “Go play with that boy over there, okay? I’m sure he’d love to meet a new friend.”
Hajime glances up at her. He isn't fond of crybabies, Hajime wants to say. When he turns back to the scene, though, the other boy is biting at his bottom lip and clenching his shaking hands into white-knuckled fists, a feat of strength of its own kind—
He decides, then, in all newfound sureness that five-year-olds often just get, that it is okay for boys to cry, sometimes.
(This is just one of the things Oikawa Tooru will teach him in their time together, aside from some inexplicable amounts of patience Hajime will develop in dealing with the likes of Oikawa Tooru.)
“Okay,” Hajime tells her, a sort of determined resolution growing in chest. She smiles warmly, ruffles his hair despite his exasperated protest—“'Kaasan! Now it's all sticking out and spiky!”—and nudges him toward the potential new friend.
(
Hajime has no idea what he's diving into.
Because faster than he—or anyone, really—could ever see it coming, this new friend accelerates into the glorious mess of best friends.
And, well. There's laughable chance of going back to peaceful times, after that.
)
“Hi. I’m Iwaizumi. Let's play.” This is said alongside a scowl, because he doesn't like playing pretend, anyway. Hajime grabs onto the boy's hand, still balled painfully tight, and tugs him away from the looming chaperone red in the face. He trusts the spontaneity that comes with their age to let them get away with impromptu rebellions a while longer, and so he grants no glances behind him, only staring right on ahead, and has faith in the other boy to do the same. Oikawa Tooru, as Hajime will later come to know of the name like he’s learned to breathe, trips over himself once or twice, unhinged by the unprecedented escape. He picks up Hajime’s pace soon enough, easing to run by his side. At five, they have yet to learn when to stop.
“There's something on your cheek,” Hajime blurts out, when they’ve finally slowed down to settle at a swing set in the park a bit farther from home. From his seat to Hajime's left, toes of his shoes brushing packed sand as he sways with hands wrapped tight around the swing's chains, Oikawa has that cheek turned away from him. Hajime's caught a glimpse of the blooming pinkish-red across it; stinging, even just by the look of it. Hajime isn't a really good conversation-maker, or at maintaining one.
Tooru, as the boy had mumbled out at the park’s gates, just pouts. Hajime thinks he's never seen someone puff their cheeks out this much, not unlike that hamster in a manga he once read.
“You kidnapped me,” he accuses, blowing a breath in the huffiest huff.
Hajime blinks back at him. Well. “I’m—”
“Are you an alien, Iwa-chan?”
“What.” Is alien an insult?
Wait, don't call me that, is what he's about to say, right on the front edge of his tongue (because, well. Hajime's always been Hajime—or Iwaizumi, sometimes, and his father always presses that such endearments are meant for girls). Tooru only tips his chin up to the sky, daring to not squint in the face of a cloudless dusk, like he might take in the expanse of it in all its entirety.
“Aliens come from the stars,” Tooru tells him, pointer finger leveled at some juncture in an edgeless universe. “They visit you in the middle of the night to abduct you and take you to places far in outer space. Away from here.”
“...It's not night yet, dumbass,” Hajime finds the voice to say.
Tooru is all over the place, and irritatingly vague, and starting to annoy Hajime a little. But Hajime keeps the sight of him, his round-eyed wonder at the boundless adventures in things like outer space, despite a stinging cheek, and determines to let Tooru fly with it, for now.
When Tooru finally humbles himself from such destinations, he glances at Hajime with a smile light-years too harried but luminous all the same. “You brought me away from there, Iwa-chan,” he chimes in, the stretch of his gnawed lips now crinkling his eyes, wideness tapered down to something acute, and with this Hajime realizes not everything better comes in colossal smiles.
“Don’t call me that,” Hajime says back, and boosts Tooru’s swing with a kick when the other boy just grins, sticking his tongue out in some playful tease.
“It's a cute nickname!” declares Tooru. “Just like you, hedgehog-chan!”
(Hajime does find hedgehogs cute.
That doesn’t mean he’ll ever admit it to Tooru, though.)
After the sun has bid its goodbye for the day, when they’ve begrudgingly relented the challenge to see who can reach highest in their swing, Hajime jumps down from his and goes to push Tooru’s, just because. Tooru yelps in surprise at first, but shrieks and giggles as they break through higher and higher, like he might catch flickering stars and the peeping moon and grander schemes beyond. Hajime finds the weirdest strength in this, in the laughter and grins they share.
On the way home, perhaps more on impulse than anything thought-out, Hajime presses a quick kiss to that stinging cheek, just a chaste peck he’d later deny for the rest of his life (and that Oikawa would proudly remind him and everyone of).
Under the break of glow between fussy streetlights, it’s hard to determine who’s more flushed in the face, but Hajime catches Tooru’s smile in all its blooming clarity, anyway.
(
And this is how Hajime learned to breathe: from a womb’s inert safety and unthanked warmth to the heart-stuttering jolt of drawing air into the rawness of his lungs for the very first time, crying, wailing;
—finding it soothing, in the end, and now wanting it to fill every space of his life.
)
“Can you not call me Tooru anymore?”
Oikawa says this on their walk to Kitagawa Daiichi, another first day since grade school or Lil’ Tykes Volleyball Club. At the abruptness of it, by every means unexpected of Oikawa Tooru—especially of Oikawa Tooru, who has a fondness for inventing unwarranted nicknames on-the-go, who puts up theatrics of being overly affectionate—Hajime halts in his track. Peering to his side to where the other boy is, he ends up with eyes on the road ahead of them again, when Oikawa shows no signs of slowing down.
“Why?” Hajime just asks, past Oikawa's affinity to hide these matters of himself; Hajime's resilient, too, that way.
“Hm. We’re getting a little too old for casual first-names,” Oikawa answers. His steps are light and weighed down.
“That's stupid,” Hajime retorts, a flare of indignation and something else he’d rather not dwell on reduced to those two words. Shame, if he dares admit to himself.
Iwa-chan, why would you wanna stop holding hands?
Because two boys don't hold each other’s hands, Tooru.
Oikawa stops in pretense of paying visit to a cat by the bus shelter. He goes to kneel, cares not for the dust or grime scuffing the knees of his new uniform, and stretches out a hand for the cat to pause its self-grooming and hiss at. “You know how it sounds, Iwa-chan. Two boys, best friends, walk to school together every day—they join the volleyball club together, spend lunch breaks together, go home and study and play together. All the sorts.”
Together. “There’s nothing wrong with that.”
“Like there was nothing wrong with holding hands and cheek kisses?”
Hajime bites hard at the inside of his mouth. Oikawa leans forward, inches closer to the feline by the scrape of his sneakers on pavement, the drag of knees that had been grazed and bruised and kissed better by Hajime countless times. Hajime thinks of cats’ nine lives and sixth senses, their propensity to fall from high perches only to shrug off the extraordinary feat with a sprint the other way, continuing on with life in the streets. He wonders about the truth of that sixth sense; even the cat by the bus shelter, by now familiar of Oikawa's presence and inclined to nuzzle into hands starting to callous, arches its back at the approach, bristling and yowling. Liar liar.
Without following any sort of cues, Hajime treads on as the cat inevitably lashes out. A passing sedan’s rumble covers up the beginning series of curses, the distinct pained hiss that always sends Hajime running to check.
The all-knowing cat has darted away when Hajime crouches beside Oikawa, slinging his schoolbag to his front, unzipping it to dig around for band-aids. (He’d learned fast into their together to keep some within reach.) On the subject of growing up, he chooses one with stupid green aliens and cartoonish five-pointed stars, anyway. Because past heights starting to tower and a middle school’s first day, hands not held and kisses refrained, and all the small changes soon to pile up, some parts of them should stay the same.
“Holding hands or kisses or first-names won't change us,” Hajime says, past Oikawa’s whining at the wound that just sounds theatrical. This, Hajime expects, but he wonders if he wants to make sure whether Oikawa got himself scratched-up on purpose. It's on the back of his hand, not that much of a hinder for playing volleyball. Today is also the audition for the club, after all. An utmost importance for Oikawa (or what Oikawa feels is of utmost importance).
No matter the destination—or the lack of it, since the journey is important, too—their walk has always been filled with chatter and banter, shoves and pushes and pulls, or just hums for the wind to chase. Oikawa's silence now seems tumultuous. When Hajime realizes that he himself has not said another word, either, still holding Oikawa’s hand and thumbing at the garish band-aid, he muses if he's the reason for the hush.
“I don't want you to get into trouble with your parents,” Oikawa whispers into the close space between them. “Last time, I saw—”
“You’ll still be calling me Iwa-chan, then?”
Hajime might've stumbled out the nickname, awkward-sounding when it comes from anyone other than Oikawa, and feels the tip of his ears go warm at the request-like-question. Oikawa just stares at him, through him and into him and past all that. With voice raised over any screech of car tires or a pair of hearts beating too loud, he says, “Of course.”
“Iwa-chan,” comes the heralding of the torrent, not long after they’d gotten up and continued on their path. Oikawa latches on to the name like he does the crook of Hajime’s arm. “Iwa-chan. Iwa-chan, Iwa-chanIwa-chan—”
Holding hands or kisses or first-names won't change us.
Would it, though, when he just wants to hold hands and kiss and say first-names?
When Hajime sees Oikawa outside his window in the middle of the heaviest rain, he hopes it's just his imagination, because surely he’s not stupid enough to go out in this weather. But he's there, right beyond the window, still in Kitaiichi’s dark blue and white tracksuit. Under the icy deluge, Oikawa pretends not to shiver.
Hajime slides the glass to the side with a jerk of his hand, the frames giving up a crack at the hurriedness of it. Splatters of rain and brewing thunders drown the spaces of his bedroom, howling over the music that blares from his headphones in a routine to put the storms’ roars behind him. Hajime wills himself to not flinch in the face of it, not in this moment, and later on he’d think how some fears can become irrelevant under the urgency of others.
Oikawa is tall, his body growing faster than he can adapt to, more gawky than anyone can glimpse of the rising volleyball star; but he curls into himself, small enough to slip through the window. Past any growth spurts and growing up, Hajime deems this a routine to keep.
He fetches a towel from the bathroom down the hallway, steps masked by the storm. He throws it over Oikawa's head and rubs with fervor, just so that Oikawa will whine and struggle back with a pout. Oikawa goes to dry himself off, and Hajime slings the fresh clothes he’s gathered at him in return for the mess in his wake.
“She calls me that,” Oikawa confesses three years late, under the coaxing darkness of a blanket fort and loose glow of a dimmed laptop screen playing some childhood's favorite. Things that stay the same. “Tooru. So it sounds all wrong now.
“Iwa-chan is different, though. Iwa-chan is special—”
“You're putting too much credit in me,” Hajime interrupts, can't help but to, just so he can hear himself over the pounding in his chest. (“Iwa-chan is special—”) For Oikawa, a limit had been breached, a dam splintering apart, tsunamis kept restrained far too long. Hajime could still hear echoes of the breaking point, even when he wasn't there for the fallout.
“Stop with this volleyball nonsense, Tooru! Three years and you can't even make it to Nationals even once!”
You weren't there for him.
(Some best friend you are.)
Oikawa lifts his head from Hajime’s shoulder, displacing the comforter wrapped around the both of them. Hajime shivers at the loss of warmth, the brush of Oikawa's soft hair against the sensitive nape of his neck, still smelling of drenched in rain and a hint of singed ozone. Another crash of such thunder pierces through the house's walls. Hajime does not flit his sight to him (some best friend you are) but he gives in, still, when lithe fingers graze at his jaw and turn it to the side by the gentlest orbit.
“Iwa-chan,” Oikawa starts. “You damn silly,” he says, and Hajime thinks of things changing, with how he feels little urge to whack Oikawa upside the head for that. “You deserve everything.”
Hajime grits his teeth. So do you.
So do you, so much more.
Oikawa doesn’t let him ponder on that. He tucks right back into the crook of Hajime's neck, closer as they can dare.
(They’ve latched on too tight and a mother tells them, “Two boys shouldn't hug, Hajime.”)
“Except for your face,” Oikawa adds, casted in the muted, shifting lights of some action scene unraveling on the screen, his eyes half-lidded. “You can't get not-ugly all of a sudden. I hate dealing with rivals.”
Hajime snorts. “What, like you don't have that horde of a fanclub yourself?”
“Hm. There's just not enough of me for everyone.” Oikawa sighs, as if conceding to all the girls and boys and people vying for his attention. “It's the least I can do.”
He snuggles closer, anyway.
In nights like now, inside the comfort of their own making, the storms raging outside, Hajime thinks to allow himself to bask in this.
“I’d throw you at them any damn time,” Hajime tells him. “One less trouble tormenting me every day.”
“Mean, Iwa-chan!”
“I’m in love with you,” comes the other confession, in the haze of downpours and blanket forts and drifting off to chase dreams.
Oikawa's probably mumbling in his sleep, Hajime decides.
“I’m in love with you.”
They don't talk about it, in the morning or the days to come.
“How long have you guys known each other now?” Hanamaki asks around chewing his lunch, chopsticks directed at them like a host’s microphone to the guest stars.
Oikawa wrinkles his nose at the their new friend’s messiness. He himself has got crumbs from his milk bread clinging to the tip of it, Hajime notices. It's a nice nose. “Ew. Chew and swallow, Makki.”
“Makki.” Hanamaki taps his chopsticks against the corner of his blue-and-yellow bento box. He grins. “A bit too soon for that, but I like it.”
“Too soon?” Matsukawa pipes up, gaze finally taking a respite from his novel. “It's not like this is a dating thing.”
“Aww, you're just jealous, you caterpillar-eyebrows.”
“Okay, I veto you from making any nicknames.” Matsukawa's chuckle is light, and easy. He slips a bookmark between the pages and closes the paperback. “That's lame, more so when you consider your non-existent ones.”
“If anything, it's Oikawa you gotta watch out for,” Hajime warns. “Gods, the names he’s come up with.”
At this, Oikawa offers a troublemaker's grin to match Hanamaki’s all-teeth smile and Matsukawa's slacker posture. “You’re getting a cute name, too, Mattsun.”
The newly christened boy blinks back at him, languidly surprised, and Hanamaki snorts out a laugh.
“Mattsun,” Hanamaki repeats. “That's just cutesy.”
“That's...not as bad as I’d feared.”
“Mattsun,” he cites again. “Tsun tsun. Maybe you’re also a tsundere under all that hair.”
Matsukawa purses his lips, more in mock contemplation than something disagreeing, and leans forward to take a bite of Hanamaki's tamagoyaki for himself just as the latter is bringing it up to his mouth. It's perhaps the first time Hanamaki looks so genuinely appalled.
“Hey! We just met, so save the food-stealing for second base!” To this, they all join in the levity. Matsukawa leans against the high wire-fence bordering Seijoh's rooftop and opens up his novel, but Hajime thinks he's keeping both ears out for more opportunities to quip in. Hajime keeps a grin to himself; for a first day, this might be the best one they’ve had.
“But really, the childhood friends thing—how long?”
Hajime picks at his rice, pickled radishes nudged aside because old habits die hard. Oikawa sets the package of milk bread down on his lap with the crinkling of plastic, and raises both hands to head-level, palms forward, fingers splayed like he might reveal unexpected things with a casual ta-da! “Ten years,” he gives voice to the number, smile all bright of the rarest kind. “We’ve been best friends since we were five.”
“And I’ve been suffering for ten years too long,” Hajime adds, to that.
A gasp. “Iwa-chan!”
Hajime rolls his eyes, reaches out to wipe those pesky crumbs off Oikawa's nice nose, and watches as Oikawa preens even more at his attentiveness. When he returns to his lunch and shoots a glance at their fellow yearmates, Hanamaki is looking at him with a strange sort of unreadable expression.
“What?” Hajime asks, out of curiosity rather than anything accusing.
“Ah.” Hanamaki shakes his head, taps with his chopsticks again. “Nothing, nothing.”
Matsukawa hums low. “I think you might be a tad jealous, Makki. There's something about friends like that, you know? Someone who gets to know you inside-out and still chooses to stick around.”
There is, thinks Hajime.
“Not that far off from marriage, I’d say,” Hanamaki mentions, all unceremonious, and that has Oikawa choking on air and spluttering. And Hajime—
He just.
He smacks Oikawa on the back, makes sure his friend isn't suffocating, and tells Hanamaki to back off from comparing them to the likes of old-married couples.
Hanamaki snaps his fingers, says, “That was the term I was looking for,” and exudes teasing-natured amusement at how it renders Oikawa lost for words.
It doesn't matter, Hajime decides. They won't ever be near that sort of relationship, anyway.
Best friends is enough. This is enough.
Hajime stops touching Oikawa's face, after that.
(He can't risk contaminating him.)
(
It's an effort not to.
)
As it was with a certain confession, they don't talk about it. At seven and ten, Oikawa might've confronted Hajime on the matters of cheek kisses and holding hands respectively. He might've hid a bout of crying when Hajime had snapped at his persistence and spurned him; but in the span of these years, they’ve grown up a little and too much at once. Branches spread out so they might deliver without words, with side glances and the ghost of touches, and roots dig deep enough to prevent landslides.
It could also be the futility of exercising wishful thinking, that they’ve stopped insisting on breaking the world so they may fit in it, but Hajime likes to think of the former. It's the way he knows when to use threats and the likes of Shittykawa, points out Oikawa’s falsity of smiles, and shoves him off when he’s being terribly clingy or lets him stay and monopolize Hajime's lap for a power nap (because gods know Oikawa needs all the rest he could get). It's how Oikawa faces Hajime's stubbornness, nitpicks at the right time and things in the Oikawa Tooru’s way that raises Hajime’s blood pressure through the roof but is effective nonetheless.
These touches remain, if not to persist, for reasons neither of them is sure. Perhaps it's some perk of Oikawa’s string of transient girlfriends that they’re waved off under the superficial scheme of things, and Hajime wonders if it's what Oikawa’s been after all along.
Because if it isn't, as long as it’s a girl's hand Oikawa's holding, Hajime can selfishly redeem himself.
This is what he mulls over as he's lingering outside of the Oikawas’ residence for the walk to school. Back against the high border and buds of his earphones plugged in, he peers up at the steel blue of an early morning sky, the sheen of pinkish-gold like cheeks not kissed, and the shy peek of sunlight outlining the sparse clouds. It feels gentle, unhurried, in contrast to how mornings usually go most days of the week. Oikawa loves things like this. He likes preening up at the sky in general, the infinite of it, chirpy as a bird at dawn, but has always been weak when it's got all sort of colors.
Hajime prefers the summer sort himself, boundless sea of blues and white clouds smeared across in places. It's a nice mix to the robust green grass and trees. Simplest colors of nature. A boy of summer, Oikawa says, and it's one thing Oikawa's called him that he doesn't deny outright.
A click of a front door opened prompts his attention. Oikawa's jogged up to the gate as Hajime pulls one earbud out, and all Oikawa has to do is look up to see the offering. His smile does nothing to cover up the bags under his eyes. Not to Hajime.
Hajime clicks his tongue. “Did you even get any sleep?”
Oikawa hums, settles the bud into his left ear, and gives an approving nod at BTS’s Dope thrumming from it. He wouldn't stop gushing about the boy band so Hajime went into a spree downloading a shit ton of their songs over the past couple of days. Oikawa fails to compose his entire surprise, some dorky grin and excitement slipping through, and Hajime deems it was a task worth this. “Are you my mom, Iwa-chan?”
At whatever face Hajime's making, Oikawa holds up both hands in mock-surrender. “Don't worry”—he gives an okay sign—“I’m a-okay—top notch, even! We have a practice match with Datekou today, after all.”
To this, Hajime sighs, flicks Oikawa on the forehead, and goes to march down the street, Oikawa fumbling to keep them connected by the tangle of earphone wires. He spots no limp in Oikawa’s right knee from the way he regains his balance, graceful as a cat.
“Did you pull an all-nighter reviewing Datekou's DVD matches?”
“Well, they do have the best blockers in the prefecture.” He catches up to Hajime, turning to gaze down at him.
Hajime thinks of the increasing centimeters between them, the growing height his earphones has to cover. This is the boy Hajime spent most of his childhood protecting, from grade school bullies or superstitious youkai tales or a house that wasn't the best place to come home to. And he's grown into something so fierce.
(Don't leave me behind, comes another selfish thought.
“I’ll catch up with you,” he tells the stratosphere instead, because for all his love of the sky, Oikawa might actually conquer it, and it'd be a damn shame if Hajime isn't there with him for that, too.)
“Overworking yourself won't help us win,” Hajime says, tucking his hands into the pockets of his pants. It's always chilly this time of the day. “And if you push yourself outside of practice, Ayako-san will think she’s lost to your love for volleyball.”
“Ah!” Oikawa beams and clasps the both of his palms together. “Aya-chan said she was making me lunch today,” he gushes out.
He calls everyone -chan; there’s really no logical reason why Hajime wants it to be more reserved, special, and Iwa-chan still grates his nerves, anyway. “She’s a nice girl. She deserves better.”
“Hey, I heard that!” Oikawa huffs. “Rude.”
Hajime breathes out a chuckle. “Does she know you're allergic to shrimps?”
“I forgot about that,” muses Oikawa, and Hajime thinks she doesn't know Oikawa won't eat tomatoes unless it's grilled in the right way, either. That he likes his rice overcooked a bit, so it's softer and reminds him of the porridge Hajime's grandma spoiled them with when they got sick as kids (even if Hajime always fights him on how gross the texture is). That she won't recognize the subtle differences between Oikawa’s I like you and I love you smiles (because as much as Oikawa likes to believe he's fixing a front in place of the latter, Hajime’s come to know the both of them). “But we’ll get around. Don't be such a downer.”
“I’m making sure Seijoh isn’t losing its future-captain to something like shellfish allergy.”
“Iwa-chaaan.” He grins, slightly dopey. The playlist switches to another of his favorite song. “Is that a compliment I hear from you? You put that much trust in me?”
“I trust our teammates to pick the best.”
There's a glint in Oikawa's eyes. Something afire. “Does that mean you think I’m the best, Iwa-chan?”
Hajime ponders over this, but not too long, and not with the slightest halt in his steps. “Dumbass,” he just says, because Oikawa will know. He lengthens his strides, itching to move, for some reason, and tells himself to keep Oikawa on his toes.
Oikawa's taller, though, and Hajime's reminded that Oikawa knows him as much as the other way around, the paths through niches old and new, two pillars supporting one another’s burdens, as he catches up without a hitched breath. Hajime sighs into the cup of his hands and lets them fall by his sides. Their hands brush, seeking warmth by the grazes.
Matsukawa tries the name one day during the haze of post-practice. “Hey, Tooru!”
Oikawa's been bouncing a volleyball off of his fingertips. At the call, his rhythm flatters, the ball misses his setting hands to smack him straight on the forehead, his yelp complementing quite the comical display. From the benches, three pairs of eyes watch the almost-never-seen stumble.
“What is this you’ve awaken, Mattsun?” Hanamaki crows. “A name kink?” he asks, and at the bluntness of things, Hajime once again questions his choice of friends just two trimesters into this friendship.
“I’m wondering about names. Nicknames,” Matsukawa says. “Between the four of us, Oikawa is the only one left out.”
“You're right. This is a tragedy.”
“I call him names sometimes,” Hajime pipes in.
“Nah,” dismisses Hanamaki. “Shittykawa or Assikawa just doesn't have that ring to it, not like Iwa-chan, or Mattsun and Makki.”
Oikawa's returned the ball into the cart and marched toward them, flushed in the face from more than physical exertion. He puffs out his cheeks, like he does when he's trying to hold in embarrassment, flicks at his hair, and goes to fashionably refute any accusation Hanamaki has of him.
“Tooru isn't really a nickname, though,” Hajime says to Matsukawa when the other two continue on with their bicker-teasing. For once, Oikawa seems to be losing, getting more flustered as Hanamaki barrages him with wilder and weirder innuendos. He’s a chronic flirt, an incurable teaser, and he probably has the most dating experience compared to anyone else in their year. And yet he’s also like this.
“Tooru-chan?”
“You sound like one of his fans.”
Matsukawa leans back on his hands. “Well, as his longest friend, you have the most right to bless him with a new nickname.”
Hajime peers at the boy in question. Hanamaki has his thumb and forefinger pinched together, inserting the index finger of his other hand through the circle gap, and Hajime watches as the implications dawn on Oikawa by how his eyes widen and jaw goes slack. He laughs through the ruddiness of his cheeks and waves off the gesture. He shakes his head, like Hanamaki’s showing him a childish jest.
“That isn't such a bad idea.”
When Oikawa comes close to tripping down the stairs and bashing his skull open the next day, they agree that whatever it is, Tooru shouldn't be part of it for now.
(“This isn't a kink. This is a squick,” Hanamaki whispers. Matsukawa stares at him, face much too composed; Oikawa squawks; and Hajime decides he doesn't need to know any more than that.)
On the week before their exams in December, Oikawa gives him a hedgehog.
“Oikawa, what the hell.”
“Say hello, Iwa-chan. Don't be shy!”
At the sight, Hajime's mother smiles at the both—the three—of them, standing by his bedroom's door with hands on her hips, somewhat proud-looking. Hajime glances at her, incredulous. Are you involved in this.
Yes, yes we are.
“You've been studying all week,” Oikawa observes. Hajime's mother closes the door, letting them sort things out. “So auntie and I decided to intervene.”
“Isn't this counterproductive?”
“Nope. I talked to nee-san and auntie, did research on my own, and it turns out having something to take care of reminds people to take care of themselves.”
And Hajime's about to argue back at this, that maybe someone else he knows would have better use of this kind of thing—particularly someone who tends to push and hurt himself, who already has a track record of doing so in the past—but Oikawa's gaze steels, the joke of the gift fleeing as fast as it came. “You haven't been sleeping,” Oikawa ticks off the list. “You’ve been holed up in the library during breaks. There's less power in your serves and spikes, and you're lagging behind on our runs”—Hajime has been letting him win one too many times, just by a few seconds—“Plus, you haven't been paying attention on our movie nights!” He huffs at the last part, as if it's the most serious offence.
When Hajime hasn't replied, he cradles the small carrier he’s holding to his chest. “This is Hoshiko,” he introduces. “Because she's prickly. Like you, Iwa-chan.”
“What does star child have anything to do with being prickly?”
“Well, because stars look like they have prickly points.”
Hajime snorts out a chuckle. He feels the beginning of a smile tugging at the corners of his mouth, anyway. “You just wanted to name her that, dumbass.”
Oikawa gives up a grin, unusually sheepish, and prompts Hajime to hold the carrier. He pads past Hajime in his alien-socked feet (a Christmas gift from Hajime some years ago) and goes to dig into the boxes at the foot of Hajime's bed. Hoshiko’s Care Package, Hajime finally reads the words scribbled on the biggest one, in none other than Oikawa's handwriting, alongside doodles of chibis—of them—and hedgehogs and five-pointed stars in constellations. For all the hurried way he writes (“The teachers always talk too fast, Iwa-chaaan.”), these drawings have always been detailed. Like he’s treasuring the small moments captured in graphite and ink, he takes care to convey as much as he can (because Oikawa might talk a lot but memories fail with each recollection, and this is one act of preserving). If Hajime were to measure the distances and angles between his stars, they wouldn't stray far from the real numbers.
“We’ll set up her home together,” Oikawa tells him. “It's not the fanciest thing but we got one that'd keep her happy. It's got a wheel, a hiding place, and tunnels for her to play in. Oh, and the litter box.” He scrunches up his nose. “A necessary evil, I guess.”
Hajime follows his steps. He crouches beside him, careful not to jostle the sleeping Hoshiko, and skims over the habitat's parts laid out for assembly (of course Oikawa would pick the colorful one. Not that Hajime minds). Over the rustling plastic and clanking of metal frames, Hajime remarks, “I’m not like you, you know.” He sets the carrier down, staves off the urgent want to play with the resident for later, and helps Oikawa with the little pieces. “I can take care of myself pretty well.”
“Of course you aren't me,” Oikawa affirms, burying his nose into the instruction manual once he finds it. “You aren't as smart or handsome as me, or else you wouldn't have to study this much.”
It's getting late, and Hajime's been sleeping five hours per day since the start of the week, and today's volleyball practice had really wrung him out. Despite the rush of energy fueling him right now, he deems those to be the reasons Oikawa manages to dodge his hit. And he doesn't want to cause a ruckus and end up waking Hoshiko, anyway.
Half an hour and a half-constructed habitat later (abandoned for an impromptu wrestling match, pillow fights included), Hoshiko wakes up.
“She's so small,” Hajime says in awe, all attention on the way she huddles in the gentlest cup of his hands.
(He does not coo. That's Oikawa's thing.)
Oikawa snickers, if a bit wary of the animal. “See! Just like you, Iwa-chan!”
It takes a lot of chasing and yelling but Hajime, in all his sleep-deprived glory, manages to pin him down under his weight. He lets Hoshiko loose on Oikawa's back, right near the ticklish area of his neck. The rest is lost to Oikawa's shrieks, his eventual laughter, Hajime joining him soon enough in the lightest feeling.
They fall asleep in a pile of tangled limbs and rumpled clothes, spent from laughing, of all things, too content to lay out the extra futon. Hajime’s coming down from the adrenaline of such feat, a tickle fight for the ages, silly as it sounds, and at the beginning he dreams in millisecond flashes that obey no consistency of time, switching between awareness and back just as quick and endless. A hedgehog's wheel spins, creaky. There's a weight clinging to him, crushing his ribs, soft strands of hair tickling at his jaw. But it’s awfully warm, pleasantly blistering, and Hajime really should never do this not-sleeping thing ever again; he's bringing up his arms to press Oikawa closer to him, and Oikawa just nuzzles into the curve of his shoulder, like taking a nap on the bus ride home after wins and losses, like it's something natural; this is wrong, and he can’t think to let go.
“Auntie, can I marry Iwa-chan when we grow up?”
Hajime freezes. He doesn't wrench away from Tooru’s hold on the crook of his arm. Tooru just stares through his too-long bangs up at Hajime’s mother, and Hajime can only thank any deity that would listen that his father isn't here to witness this as well.
Her expression twists strangely, amusement trickled with concern. Hajime’s stomach wrings itself by a dreadful lurch. “What are you saying, Tooru-kun?”
Hajime’s mother looks at Tooru like he's something contaminated, like she's considering pulling them away from each other so Hajime isn't infected.
But no. No. Hajime's the dirty one, who likes to kiss Tooru's cheeks and lets him swing their hands to and fro on the way to school, who really likes to hear Tooru laugh, withstands his silly schemes and nicknames so he can experience more of it. Hajime likes it even more, when he pries a genuine one from him, the sort of smile that crinkles his warm-brown eyes like the one Tooru first gave him at their perch on a swing set; those giggles that has him covering his mouth with the spread of a hand, cheeks ruddy from the generous force of it, like he can't believe he's this happy.
Tooru is good, Tooru likes girls. He says they're cute, too, and likes to make them blush and smile. He’s kind to them; teasing, still, because that's just how he is, but he makes them happy. Hajime is not special. He hopes he won't ever be.
He fakes a scoff. Hajime isn’t good at lying. “Tooru’s been watching too many dramas again,” he says, and the other boy detects the waver in his tone, tenses up a little at it, but he doesn't let a frown come on to his face.
“I have not!” Tooru purses his lips. “Space documentaries are cooler, anyway. But what's wrong about it? Iwa-chan likes to be with me and I lov—”
Hajime pinches the tender skin on the inner side of Tooru’s elbow, harder than the usual banter, but Tooru takes it with an almost completely muffled whimper. Hajime should be worried about how he handles pain so well. “There's a meteor shower tonight,” he lies. Tooru bites back his protest at their codeword. “Tooru and I want to watch from the hillside by the park. Can we go out for a while, okaasan?”
Her smile is a bit lopsided, and there's a wariness in her eyes that Hajime fears won't go away anytime soon. “Of course,” she concedes. After a moment of hesitation, she goes to ruffle their hair. The gesture feels just normal. “Come back before it's too late, okay? And don't get lost.”
As they're leaving, the front door moving to shut behind them, Tooru, huddled in a colorful patterned scarf so unlike the bland sweatshirt he’d worn so long ago, just whispers for her to miss, “We’ll always find each other when we're lost, anyway.”
Hajime says nothing, to that.
(On the way, he lets go of Tooru's hand.)