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Oikawa was always so fucking stubborn, a nightmare to deal with. He was the embodiment of the lion, being the most prideful individual in the goddamned universe, one who didn’t always know what to do with himself — so he self destructed. He sat there with his hands over his face, and imagined being the best, something he would never, ever have because hard work itself comes at a cost, and the harsh reality is that some people never have to pay.
You were in love with him, and it haunted you. He was so vulnerable, so easy to protect, and you were his knight in shining armor, shielding him from the horrors of the world, but always ready to strip yourself of the armor and show him every part of you. You so desperately wanted to give yourself to him, but how could you when you weren’t even what he needed? How could you be so selfish with someone who treated a volleyball court like a war zone, winner gets all? How could you passionately love someone with fire for eyes and a heart crafted out of insecurity and the phrase “I’m not good enough”? You tried so hard to make him more confident in his brilliance; you headbutted him, spoke to him, tried to make him just realize, but no matter what you did, he drove himself over the damn edge. You could always feel the way he hated parts of himself, and it fell over both of you like a dark cloud forming on an already rainy day — all he wanted was to win, all you wanted was him.
You…saved him a lot, or at least that was what he called it. “Iwa-chan, my savior!” Iwa-chan, his savior — who beat up his bullies, and rescued his stuffed aliens, and stopped him from hurting Kageyama, but didn’t he realize how selfish you were? Iwa-chan, who couldn’t stand it when his friend, who gave him butterflies in his stomach, was being trampled upon by inferior people, people who never even began to measure up to Oikawa. Those bullies realized that, and that was why they targeted him, but Oikawa didn’t realize because he was so blinded that he never realized anything. He didn’t realize you rescued his stuffed alien because the way his eyes lit up when he babbled on about space gave you your first real taste of pleasurable pain, he didn’t realize you stopped him from hurting Kageyama because it tore you apart to see him taking his insecurities out on others. He would’ve made fun of you if you told him how selfish you were. My selfish savior, he might have mocked dramatically. Woe is me. Behold — my hero is a villain, after all!
You didn’t consider that he might be in love with you. The thought never even crossed your mind until he kissed you on his bed, TV playing, clothes strewn on the floor, two hearts each beating a million times a minute.
You kissed him softly, like he was glass in a cardboard box labelled “fragile, don’t touch” but you were too rebellious to obey words on cardboard. Words meant nothing. Words said nothing.
He tried to kiss in the same way he did everything: aggressively, with the aim to be the best, nothing but the best, and you refused to let him, another act of selfishness on your part. You were in love with him, and you didn’t want him to be the best. If he was the best, he’d be snatched up, stolen from you, stripped of his magic. You wanted him to be your love, your baby, your everything, and so you kissed into him the emotions that defined your feelings towards him, you kissed into him the “ you’re so lovely” and the “I would give my life to be your knight in shining armor again, I need to protect you. ”
If only you’d known that the only thing he needed protection from was himself.
(You didn’t know though, so you kissed into him promises of eternal faithfulness, you kissed into him the kind of innocent love that began the day he ran away screaming when he saw a spider, and he kissed into you obsession and ignorance and the hunger that comes with finding something new to be the best at).
“You’re such a treasure, Iwa-chan,” he drawled once, tracing your lips with his fingers as though he would find the secrets of the universe wedged in between the swollen bumps on your lips that came from genetics and nerves. “I could kiss you forever if you stopped eating agedashi tofu, you know. It kind of tastes disgusting. Like I’m eating it myself. Which I would never do.”
Ordinarily, you would have kicked him, but his eyes had so much adoration in them that you kissed him instead, gentle, loving, an attempt at returning that adoration.
Like with everything he ever did, all his little temporary hobbies and lifelong commitments, he thought he wasn’t good enough for you and it sickened you down to your bones — he was so much more than you could ever be; he was everything and nothing at once; he was stars and black holes, breathing life and emptiness into everything he did, always making an obnoxiously large impact on everyone and everything, yet still believing he was near worthless.
(It might have been different if he was unconfident with purpose, if he really was untalented, unattractive, incapable. But he wasn’t, and if there was one thing you knew about your childhood friend, it was that he was good at everything, that his hard work always did pay off, that his genetics had been kind to him.
If he really had been worthless, maybe saying so would have made him an annoying friend of sorts, almost a burden, constantly fishing for compliments, but you knew him well enough to know that he wasn’t fishing for anything. He didn’t see the beauty in himself, that was all, and that didn’t make him a burden. It just made you sad. All you ever wanted was to help him.)
God, he was so fascinating, and so fascinatingly talented, and so fascinatingly unaware. He didn’t show his insecurity to anyone but you, but what you didn’t understand was why it existed at all. Because he wasn't the best? Neither were you. Neither was anyone, and yeah, everyone spent their lives building themselves up to become the best in a world full of geniuses, so maybe Oikawa’s ambition was valid in itself. The part you could never understand was the way he knocked himself down. How could one ever hope to build a castle if they bulldozed it into rubble every time they made any progress? Especially someone as smart as Oikawa. It was as though he knew what he was doing, and he knew it was bad, but he didn’t know what else to do.
That whole situation was the first domino which led to you ceasing to love him, the first domino ready to knock hundreds of others over into each other until all that was left was a mess no one would be willing to clean up. That was the first ignition of a spark, the fading of a star.
The second was Angelica.
You met her at a nightclub, her hands in the air, shaking her entire body and the club itself alongside it. She radiated confidence, her aura itself making it apparent that she put herself before anyone else. You liked that.
You talked to her when she came to the bar for a drink. Introduced yourself as Iwaizumi Hajime. Called yourself boring. She said her name was Angelica, and she was half American. She also said that you weren’t boring. She didn’t say it in the way Oikawa said it, gazing at you in wonder, accompanied by words that could have been spat out of romance novels, things like “If you’re boring, Iwa-chan, then I don’t want to be alive because the universe would have no purpose. I mean...you’re everything.”
All Angelica did was laugh, and toss her blonde hair over her shoulder, then smile a genuine smile at you. It came so easily to her. “You’re not boring,” she smiled. “I’d go as far as to say that you seem like the most interesting person in this club.”
You weren’t dumb. You knew she was flirting, but...you still talked to her for hours and hours. You refused to think of Oikawa, knowing it would put an unnecessary dull ache into your heart, suppressed desire, but you also refused to kiss her.
“Tomorrow,” you said, putting your number into her phone as she grinned in anticipation.
That was the night you broke up with Oikawa. You still remember the way he asked to kiss you, one more time, the way you rejected him. You still remember the hopelessness setting on his face like a volleyball tossed at the wrong angle, or a bird taking flight only to realize there was nowhere safe to go. You’d always been that safe haven to Oikawa, but you left him to fend for himself in the same world where he’d told you things like “I’m so devoted to you that if you hadn’t kissed me back, I’d have just let myself die of hanahaki instead of finding someone new.”
Selfish. You were so fucking selfish.
Today is a good day, though. It’s Angelica’s sister’s wedding. Angelica sent an invitation to Oikawa, but it’s been so long since you’ve talked to him, you’re not sure he’ll even care enough to glance at the invitation.
You’re dancing with Angie on the grassy area at the reception, and you’re happy, twirling her into bushes and kissing her until you’re out of breath. Everything about her just seems to glow, like alien pyjamas or rare genuine smiles. It has been one of the best days of your life, but as you’re leaving, hand in hand with your girlfriend, you see Oikawa, moving out of the way to let you through. You greet him awkwardly, throwing out a “hey, Oikawa.”
“Hi, Iwaizumi,” he says. It’s rare that he would call you Iwaizumi, but you get it; it’s an act of rebellion, maybe, an “ I don’t care about you anymore. I don’t care about our nicknames or our childhood.”
You can tell he does care, though, because it may be dark, but you can see his eyes are blurry with tears that are too stubborn to fall, his voice is cracking, he’s swallowing and swallowing, and...and you can’t stand it, but you don’t know how to help. You’ve become so unfamiliar with your own best friend, it’s like you don’t know him anymore. As though you’ve never met, or something equally painful. You never imagined, back in the days when you and Oikawa would make fun of celebrity stories in magazines, that you would almost take the role of one of those B-list celebrities telling stories about drifting apart from their best friends. You thought you were inseparable from Oikawa, but right now, he’s a stranger to you.
“We should catch up sometime,” you say, and you’re not sure whether you mean it or not. He agrees nevertheless, and then there’s a moment of deafening silence where you don’t know what to say. He’s the one capable of describing his emotions as though they’ve come straight out of a fucking poetry book. Not you. It’s never been you. You think in choppy sentences, and mentally formulate sad, vague ideas that are too distant to grab a hold of.
“Nice seeing you,” you say, and you know he’s going to nod, and you know it’s going to be the fakest nod he’s ever given you, and you don’t want to watch as he tries to fool you with his disingenuity, so you walk away. You walk away from him, hand-in-hand with Angelica, and you crack a shaken joke that she’s kind enough to laugh at. Your heart isn’t in it.
He’s so fucking beautiful, you can’t help but think wistfully. God, he’s so fucking beautiful. I could have loved him forever if he knew it, maybe.