Chapter Text
Hajime gets all the way to the fifth or sixth of December before it really hits. There’s no real snow this far south, which probably goes some way to explaining how he’s held it off so long, but as the ubiquitous Christmas decorations start to go up here and there about the city he can’t escape it any longer. It’s winter, and there’s no Oikawa to make some obnoxious comment about the cold, or the snow, or Hajime’s fashion choices falling short of what are always impossible and inconsistent standards.
There have been no snowball fights; no slipping clumps of the stuff down the backs of each others’ shirts. No walking home together and picking which of their houses they’ll both head to that day, waltzing in without a care in the world.
Some of the season’s wrongnesses Hajime has accustomed himself to already. His initial wave of homesickness wasn’t pretty, but it’s over now and generally he’s fine with the way university life is treating him. The workload is actually easier to manage than High School, and though he’d never admit it, even volleyball isn’t so bad. Being a first year again has taken some of the pressure off, which—in the absence of Oikawa, again—has been something of a breath of fresh air. No one’s expecting him to carry the team here. He can focus on his form and his teamwork, and let the older guys worry about that.
But with the winter break approaching, all the progress he’s made is starting to fall apart. All that self-confidence about his choice of university and his current way of life is cracking a little. He’s homesick again in a way he hasn’t been since spring, and it sucks.
The obvious solution is to wait it out. He got past this whole nonsense at the start of university and he can do it again. He’s just got to take his mind off of it, and train his brain to make new winter associations. He’s known this was coming for years. It’s about time he really deals with it all. Properly.
…Which is all well and good in theory, but apparently his conscious, waking decisions don’t really carry much weight when he’s asleep.
The first night Hajime has strange dreams, it’s nothing really that unusual. He doesn’t even make the connection until a little while later, but it in hindsight it’s definitely the start of everything.
He’s walking along the road back home, just past the play area attached to the elementary school. The turning for his house is coming up on the right, but it’s…there’s something missing. He looks around, picking out all the familiar details.
Everything’s there, everything’s right. He’s sure of it. So the fact that there’s a certainty in the back of his mind telling him: No, this is still wrong, there’s still something missing here is genuinely frustrating.
It’s frustrating enough that he wakes up, jaw aching with tension, drenched in sweat.
The clock reads four in the morning, and he only went to sleep a little after two thanks to a night out with friends. Urgh.
He doesn’t dream for the rest of the night at least, which is a small consolation when his morning alarm rouses him from slumber at half six. Even less of a consolation is that there’s no volleyball: afternoon practice is great and all, but there’s something about a morning warm-up which has always woken him up, too. Seven or eight months haven’t broken him of habits laid down by years.
Seven or eight months haven’t cured him of a lot of habits, it turns out.
Night two happens a couple of days later, and it’s a repeat of night one but in more detail. Home feels so real he can smell the woodsmoke on the breeze, as house after house lights fires against the season’s chill. The path home is crisp with frost and fallen leaves, gutters holding the remains of the first snowmelt in white clumps here and there where the shadows are long.
It’s quiet though, peaceful in a way Hajime had almost forgotten. Clouds build overhead but the grey skies aren’t unwelcoming. Rather they’re a blanket, familiar and comforting and promising nights huddled around the kotatsu with hot drinks and good company.
There’s no one here, though, not that Hajime can see.
Perhaps it’s because this is a dream, he thinks to himself, and stops dead just opposite the park. Ah. He’s dreaming. Has he ever known about it mid-dream before?
The park wavers without moving somehow, losing depth in a way Hajime is sure he’ll never have the words to describe. It turns unreal—thin, perhaps—and he wakes with the strangest prickling sensation on his face, as though he’s just stuck his face out of an open window into the cold.
For some reason, he feels a little as though he’s lost something.
The rest of the week passes in similar fashion. Hajime’s never been one for repeated dreams, or even particularly vivid ones before now, but apparently this is his new lot in life. It’s probably homesickness driving him to recall the streets of his childhood in increasingly intimate detail each night, but knowing the reason doesn’t make it any easier to wake in the mornings, still caught up remembering small facets of home and knowing it’s still a little over two weeks before he’ll get to go back and see them again for real.
Still more than two weeks of lectures and assignments remaining, of dragging himself out of bed to a wet and windy winter with no snow in sight. Who would have thought he’d ever miss the cold, of all things.
It’s not really fair to say Hajime finds himself going to bed earlier on purpose, given that he’s bordering on exhausted and it’s almost more of a controlled collapse, but the result is the same either way. A week of disrupted sleep is enough to wear away at all his intentions of staying up to get work done, or to socialise with his friends and teammates.
He’s never really been one for going out late just to drink, anyway. Perhaps this is the universe’s way of kicking him out of some bad habits.
Besides, it’s hard to remember why he even wants to go drinking when he’s stood outside the park where he and Oikawa met for the first time, watching the swings blow in a steady breeze which whips up the leaves scattered around the park. What he wants to do—what he really wants to do—is to run over and have a go again, swing as he hasn’t swung in ten years or more.
He hangs back at the side of the park as a few stray flakes of snow fill the air, swirling down to meet the rising leaves as they’re whipped up into spirals that dance their way across the play area.
There’s no one here but him, he realises. And…he’s dreaming, right? He’s pretty sure he’s dreaming, anyway, despite an unplaceable certainty that there’s something else going on, something important which he’s missing. Something significant he’s going to kick himself about when he finally understands.
Well whatever it is, he thinks firmly, striding across the playground, it can’t hurt if I have a bit of a swing first.
Hajime wakes with a smile on his face and water pooling in his eyes, and can’t work out why he’s both happy and sad in equal measure.
The real snowfall starts somewhere in the middle of week two of his nightly dreams about home. It’s past time, really, and Hajime tells the sky as much as he wanders the streets of his childhood looking for the whatever-it-is that still eludes him.
“Honestly, you’re behind the times,” he says. “I got a call from home—the real home, mind you—and they’ve had it almost a week already.”
The sky stays silent though, as is its wont, and just sends more flakes to swirl and flurry and settle into a growing blanket across the park.
It cushions the bushes where he and Oikawa had lost their first volleyball, and where he’d scratched his arm badly trying to find it again. As he wanders, he sees it smothering the bench outside the convenience store where they’d always stopped on the way home from school to buy snacks, and carpeting the bridge over the creek which feeds the rice fields just on the outskirts of town. They’d lost a volleyball there once as well, and—
—And suddenly he knows what’s missing, or rather, who. He’s never walked to so many of these places without Oikawa before. They were always together, always practically hand in hand. Close enough to be, certainly, even if he never would have dared, and Oikawa never would have thought to.
Hajime wakes suddenly. Alone in his bed; his room; his student apartment. Alone in the city really, in every way that counts right now. Damn. Damn it all, he is kicking himself for not realising sooner.
Simultaneously, he’s kicking himself for realising at all.
The snow is still there when he falls asleep the next night, a welcome sight after almost an hour of tossing and turning. He’s still the only person around, too, although now there are footsteps here and there, some of them half buried by the snowfall, others tantalisingly fresh. As though he’s just missed whoever left them. As though, if he could only have been there sooner, he might have found someone else.
Against his better judgement, Hajime follows them all the way to the park, and along the winding path to the open space where he and Oikawa had sat on sunny afternoons, perched side by side on a tree stump as they ate ices or sweets. The footsteps go right up to the stump and fade away there, as though his subconscious is determined to parade him past every possible nostalgic place it can dredge up out of his memory.
He kicks the stump, frowning as a little of the snow on top falls off along with some flakes of wood. Oh great, now he feels bad about it, as if anything he does in this stupid dream has a meaning other than the fact he seriously needs to let go.
Hajime isn’t sure why he decides to sweep the snow off the stump, grimacing at the slightly off sensation of not-actually-melting-snow which prickles his hand as he does so. The stump is rough beneath his fingers, but similarly wrong: the product of an imagination not quite good enough to trick his mind, even inside the dream.
It’s only the fact he’s sure it is a dream which explains why he sits down on the cleared stump, stubbornly ignoring its shortness or the way his backside is instantly cold and damp.
“Wish you were here, asshole,” he mutters, glancing at the empty space beside him. “Well, wish we were both there, but you know what I mean.”
Oikawa doesn’t, of course. It’s just a dream, even if it is a bit of a strange one, so the only person Hajime is talking to is himself. But it’s comforting to think of Oikawa hearing, and to imagine the sort of reply he’d make. Melodramatic feigned offence goes without saying, but he’d have a bit of that glint in his eye which promised as good as he got, and that’s pretty much the same thing as laughter where Oikawa’s concerned.
Hajime sighs, and rests his palms on his knees to stare out over the snow-covered park. The real thing would be crowded, even at this time of year. He makes up his mind to go and check for sure when he gets back home for New Year in a few days.
Oikawa ought to be home for the holidays too. Maybe he’ll drag him out of whatever stupid obsession he’s fallen into this time and make him come along. For old times’ sake, obviously. Maybe they’ll get some snacks from the konbini too, and sit and watch the world go by.
Yeah, right. But this is only a dream, so Hajime feels perfectly entitled to let his imagination run wild. What exactly is it going to hurt?
The next night more snow has fallen, a thick layer smoothing out the edges of the world. It’s cold and it’s wet, and Hajiime stomps his way through it with his arms wrapped around him, marvelling a little at how much better he feels in the snow than he does in the milder, rain-streaked streets of real-world Fukuoka.
It’s still a little unsettling walking the streets of his home in empty silence, no birds in the trees overhead and no people or cars to dodge as he makes his way along. But he’s used to it now, used to the peace and quiet as he marches from his usual starting point somewhere on the way home from school.
Except suddenly there isn’t peace and quiet any more, because someone else is out in the snow, and it’s a silhouette he knows very well.
Oikawa is quieter in dream form. Quieter and more visibly relaxed than Hajime has seen him in years. That’s probably the result of his being a product of Hajime’s nostalgia-centric subconscious as much as anything, though it’s comforting even so. He falls in step beside Hajime with just a smile and the comment “There you are! I’ve been looking for you!” and almost immediately they might as well be kids again, strolling along the street without a care in the world, directionless as a leaf caught in a breeze.
They find themselves at the park before long despite—or possibly because of—their aimless wandering.
Oikawa sighs as he leads the way over to their stump. “It all looks small now,” he says
“That’s because you got so damn tall, idiot,” Hajime replies, nudging him in the arm with an elbow. “We’re not kids any more.”
It’s an obvious enough thing to point out, and he avoids Oikawa’s face as he says it. The thought of seeing the same aimless acceptance is a little more than he can bear. Far better to keep the pretence going. To imagine that he and Oikawa really are sat beside each other in the park where they spent half their childhoods together, close enough that their thighs meet as they squash onto a perch grown far too small for the both of them.
It’s a good dream, and Hajime is sad to leave it behind when daytime comes calling once more. But, there. The way things are going, odds are that it’ll only get better tomorrow night. Something to look forward to as he makes his way through cold drizzle to his classes on the twenty-third, mentally counting down the days until he can board a plane and fly home to the real thing.
Not long now, and at least until then he has the memory of Oikawa’s face as they walked together through the peaceful streets.