i.
In the first life, they are childhood friends, and Hajime cannot imagine a life without him.
"Hey, Iwa-chan, where are you going after graduation?"
Hajime glances up at him after a brief pause. Oikawa isn’t looking, though; one elbow is propped up on the desk Hajime is using, upturned palm cradling his chin. He’s staring out the window facing the school’s courtyard—Hajime strains his eyes to catch whatever it is that seems to have grabbed Oikawa’s attention, but notices nothing out of the ordinary.
"Iwa-chan?"
He isn’t quite sure what to say, wonders if ‘I’ll go wherever you go’ is too—much.
"We’re third years now," Oikawa says eventually, when Hajime doesn’t answer. "We have to start thinking about our ‘future’." He says the word with sarcastic relish, mimicking the tone of voice their homeroom teacher had used when he’d taken them and the rest of the third years aside.
You can’t play volleyball forever, was the gist of it.
"Can you imagine me with an office job?" Oikawa laughs, feet kicking off the ground and head tilting backward, his chair teetering precariously on two legs. Hajime’s brows knot slightly, 'watch out or you'll fall, idiot' hanging on the tip of his tongue.
He can’t. Imagine it, that is. Oikawa stuck behind a computer desk for hours every day, maybe taking a smoke break on the rooftop of the company building, loosening a tie tied too tight. Dating a couple of girls here and there, marrying one. Having children and a family. Settling down. Mundane. Boring.
Hajime shakes his head.
"Wouldn’t suit you," he says. The characters on his notes for Modern Japanese literature bleed onto the pages. Hajime reads the same sentence twice, but nothing sticks.
"That’s mean. Sixty percent of Japanese high school students end up with office jobs, you know, and you’re saying I don’t fit even into that sixty percent?"
You’re different from them, you’re special, Hajime wants to say. “Those are bullshit statistics,” he says instead.
Oikawa laughs as he leans forward. Hajime can feel him breathing warmly in his direction. He keeps his eyes on his notes, tries not to look up.
"I’m thinking of going to college. Get a volleyball scholarship."
Hajime blinks. “Okay.”
"Or maybe I’ll get scouted as a model."
He snorts loudly at that. Kusokawa.
Oikawa laughs again, but falls silent after. The classroom clock hanging above the blackboard ticks several seconds and Hajime tries concentrating on his notes for once.
"I don’t really know," Oikawa admits quietly. "What I want to do."
Me neither. But it doesn’t really matter—just so long as you’re there.
"Wherever you’re going."
Oikawa blinks slowly, the look on his face questioning.
"You asked me," Hajime says with a long-suffering sigh, "where I’m going after high school."
A conflicting number of emotions cross Oikawa’s face ranging from bewildered to confused, but eventually the corners of his lips tug at a smile, and then wider, until he’s outright beaming.
"Right," he says, relieved. "Of course."
ii.
In the second life, Oikawa is a model and Hajime your average white collar office worker.
Hajime sees him sometimes on his way home from an exhausting day at work, artificial smile peeking through the edges of glossy magazine covers.
He glances at them once, snorts, before picking up a convenience store bento and a pack of smokes.
In this life, Oikawa Tooru and Iwaizumi Hajime do not meet.
iii.
The third life Oikawa isn’t even human.
"How many?"
A sly smile, pointed canines poking at the corner of his lip. He sees a silky soft tail swish almost lazily, as if to flick away a particularly annoying fly.
"Seven," says Oikawa. "You want to touch them? I don’t mind." His eyes glitter in amusement as Hajime’s cheeks go stark red, feet stumbling over themselves in his haste to deny it.
In the end, he does manage to touch one of the kitsune’s tails, refusing to look Oikawa in the eye as he laughs, commenting on Iwa-chan’s bashfulness—if he’d wanted to touch it so bad, then all he’d had to do was ask.
He’s eight years old at the time, and his parents tell him kitsune aren’t real. They’re just a figment of his imagination.
That may be so, but Hajime can’t bring himself to care.
It’s only when they threaten not to bring him back to his grandpa’s home in the countryside every summer that Hajime learns to stop telling them about the fox spirit he’d befriended one hot afternoon.
“They’re dumb,” he says stubbornly, pants rolled up to his knees as he wades in the shallowness of the river. Oikawa lounges by the bank, lazily watching a ten year old Hajime search for crayfish in the water. “Of course you’re real.”
Oikawa hums noncommittally, seven tails swaying in the air behind him. “Mhmm.”
Hajime frowns, hating the way he talks like that. Like he knows more than him. Like he’s on a whole other plane of existence, somewhere Hajime can’t ever reach, even if he tried. “You are. You’re real. Aren’t you?”
“As real as Iwa-chan wants me to be~”
“That’s not an answer,” Hajime says accusingly.
“Is too.” For a spirit that claims himself to be ‘a thousand years older than you’, Oikawa is incredibly childish.
“Why won’t you show yourself to them, then?” His voice cracks the slightest bit, upset and desperate. “Why am I the only one that can see you?”
Oikawa doesn’t reply, and Hajime takes his answer for what it’s worth.
They don’t speak of it again, but Hajime pointedly tells his parents that maybe he’s getting a little too old to go to jii-chan’s place this year, can I stay home instead?
He tries not to think of Oikawa waiting for him alone at their meeting spot by the river.
iv.
“Star volleyball player takes his life after a career-ending injury, declared dead on arrival.”
v.
“Hey. You’re Iwaizumi, right?”
Hajime scowls through the thin cloth of the blanket tossed over him, glaring up at a pair of brown eyes peeking over the edge of the top bunk.
“I’m Oikawa. Oikawa Tooru.”
“I know,” Hajime says, exasperated. “You introduced yourself earlier. We all did.”
“This is crazy, huh? I never imagined myself a soldier!” Oikawa’s smile is bright despite the darkness of their cabins in the dead of night. A time he really should be sleeping, Hajime thinks, irritated. “I hope I get awarded a medal of honor when we get back. My mom said she’d frame it.”
Hajime groans, turning on his side. “Go to fuck to sleep, Oikawa.”
“Hey, can I call you Iwa-chan?”
“No.”
“Hey, Iwa-chan. Iwa-chan? Did you fall asleep?”
“Oikawa. Shut the fuck up.”
There’s silence after a while. Hajime assumes the quiet means his bunkmate has fallen unconscious and, relieved, succumbs to sleep as well.
…
It’s hell on earth, and it’s everywhere.
Hajime stumbles several times (are they the bodies of enemies? comrades? Hajime doesn’t know, doesn’t want to know, figures it’s better they’re nameless bodies instead of actual people. It’d be easier that way) as he tries to make sense of whatever’s going on around him—it’s too loud. It’s loud and people are shouting, and he can’t think like this—
Someone on his right tells him to keep moving. He’s thankful for something to do, some direction, maybe they can get out of this alive.
“Iwa-chan!” he hears, loud and panicked into his ear. Someone pushes him out of the way and he stumbles and falls; a grenade had been launched not too far from him. Those few feet he’d been thrown away from it had saved him his life.
There’s a body on the ground that he recognizes. Blank eyes, familiar. A dirty, crusted dogtag hidden within the folds of a weary military jacket.
Oh, Hajime thinks.
What the hell are you doing? Do you want to die? A violent push to his shoulder forces him out of standstill. He doesn’t know how he does it, but his feet somehow manage to stumble him to safety, where he’s rushed into a medical tent to treat his wounds.
Hajime survives after the war, but living after that is an entirely different matter.
(It’s not a medal of honor, but he does leave her a rusted dogtag. He was a hero, Hajime says thickly to a mother who’d just lost a son. He saved my life.)
vi.
There are lives where they grow old together.
Where they dance around each other for several years before one of them or both of them finally musters up the courage to actually do something about it.
There are lives where they experience picking out an apartment for the first time, or fighting over who does the dishes (but Iwa-chan, I did them yesterday!), or what to have for dinner, or whether to keep a cat or dog (they keep both, and Oikawa names them Tooru Junior and Hajime Junior respectively).
These lives are better, but they are infinitely few, and far in between.
vii.
He can feel Oikawa’s hand tighten around his under the table as they face a conference room full of reporters, their camera shutters at the ready. Hajime doesn’t feel at all ready for this. It still feels unreal, to be honest, as if he’s occupying another person’s body.
“As Japan’s representative volleyball team for this year’s Olympics, now that you’ve won—what’s the next goal?”
Hajime takes in a deep breath, and lets out.