Work Text:
then
(As a kid, Hajime had never been the type to stay indoors. His mother had a hard time reigning him in long enough to convince him to eat breakfast during weekends, because as soon as he’d get dressed, he’d clutch onto his bug-catching net and want to go outside to play with the other kids. He’d eat too fast, little feet impatiently banging against the legs of his chair, and then cheer excitedly while running towards the back door when his mother told him he could go outside. In kindergarten, he’d watch the playground outside instead of writing his alphabet, and he’d always be the first to demand that they play a team game during recess.
He always had grass stains on his clothes, dirt underneath his fingernails that his mother would help him clean out, little scrapes and bruises on his knees and palms from falling over and then getting up too fast. To him, the world was one big adventure rolled up with beetles and cicadas, and he was a conqueror of all challenges.
So when he met Oikawa Tooru for the first time when they were both six years old and attempting to size each other up while simultaneously trying to hide behind their respective mothers’ legs, he thought they wouldn’t get along at all.
Oikawa Tooru was shy, too small for a boy his age, and he didn’t look like he liked the outside world. His socks didn’t match — one was a pair patterned with daisies, Hajime’s favorite flower, and the other had candy canes on them. (It wasn’t Christmas. Mama said the candy canes were for Christmas only, and Hajime didn’t like people who didn’t listen to his Mama.) His eyes were shining, soft and curious, and his hair was the color of Tachibana-san’s coffee candy. Everything about him, from the shiny bunny on his shirt to the buttons on the pockets of his shorts, was polished, put-together, and proper .
“It’s nice to have you both over, Oikawa-san,” Hajime’s mother was saying, her voice polite and kind, and Hajime tore his eyes away from the curious Oikawa boy to look at her when she squeezed his hand. “Hajime, why don’t you play with Tooru-kun for a while? I’m sure he’d love to get to know you.”
Oikawa’s grip on the side of his mother’s dress became even tighter at that, a clear sign that he’d rather do anything else.
“I don’t think he likes me very much,” Hajime had mumbled, and when Oikawa looked at him again, his curious eyes boring into him, he became too aware of the twigs in his hair and the dirt on his cheek from the hit he’d taken from a flying baseball.
“He’s just a little shy,” Oikawa-san had said. She’d gently pulled Oikawa’s fingers away from her dress and squeezed his hands as she knelt down to meet his eyes, like Mama did with Hajime when he was scared of the flu shots at the doctors and she reminded him to be brave. “Tooru, you do want to be friends with Hajime-kun, don’t you?”
Hajime had twigs in his hair and grass stains on his elbows where he’d been crawling on the ground to hunt for beetles. Oikawa had a mole on the side of his cheek and his eyes were shining a bright, curious caramel.
“You have a twig in your hair,” little Oikawa had said, in a small voice.
“I know,” little Hajime had huffed, and as their mothers left, he tilted his head towards the open door which led to his backyard, a peace offering to the curious boy with mismatching socks, and asked, “Wanna catch bugs?”
Forever began like this: it was a midsummer day in Miyagi and the birds were chirping overhead. Six year old Oikawa didn’t like bugs but he laughed when six year old Hajime twisted his bug catching net like he was a cartoon character. Hajime caught a ladybug for Oikawa, and as the sun smiled down and the clouds melted into one another, he placed it onto six year old Oikawa’s open palm, and six year old Oikawa smiled his first real smile since he met six year old Hajime.)
….
now
Oikawa’s made coffee again and it fucking sucks.
He’s added too much creamer and used the ugly mug because he’s a nightmare like that, and to make matters worse, he’s left the spoon right on the counter instead of tossing it into the sink. The ugly mug is a gag gift from Hanamaki, with an obscene drawing of Michelangelo’s David making a crude gesture with his hands along with the text now you can fuck with god’s permission. It’s from the wedding and Oikawa had laughed at it for hours, despite his religious parents looking thoroughly scandalized at what it implied. The coffee is ninety percent vanilla creamer from the convenience store and only ten percent coffee itself.
“‘Morning,” Oikawa says, barely looking up from his phone. His coffee is in the Pikachu mug he’d gotten for Hajime a few years ago, back when they were long distance and Oikawa lived in Argentina. It’s just Hajime’s by name, really, because it mostly resides in Oikawa’s hand or on the nightstand by his side of the bed. He pauses, clears his throat like it’ll hide the fact that he hasn’t spoken at all since he woke up and adds, “I made coffee.”
He’s in a pale blue sweatshirt that’s from Hajime’s side of the closet. It stretches over his shoulders and falls just a little short of his wrists, barely covering up the mole he has where the palm of his left hand meets his forearm. Outside, the sun is barely over the horizon, shades or orange and purple mingling together as if they’d been carelessly blended by a lovelorn artist, but Hajime only spares it a few seconds before he turns to Oikawa again.
He’s going to hate every sip he takes from the shitty coffee Oikawa made, but he’s going to drink most of it. It isn’t because he doesn’t want to hurt Oikawa’s feelings and make him upset or whatever knight in shining armor bullshit Issei would accuse him of: the creamer is just really expensive, and Hajime will be damned if he doesn’t get his money’s worth.
“We could have slept in today,” Hajime mumbles, barely restraining a wince when he takes the first sip. It’s far too sweet for five-something in the morning, but it’s warm. “It’s so early.”
“I wanted to see the sun rise.” Oikawa says, and this time, when Hajime looks up from his obscene mug, he sees that Oikawa has a small smile playing at the corner of his lips. His glasses are crooked and they make his eyes look asymmetrical, and there’s still the imprint of the pillow on the side of his face from the night before, and Hajime is sure that he’ll find that Oikawa is wearing mismatching socks if he looks under the table.
“There’s a window in our room.” Hajime mutters. Oikawa hooks a socked foot around the leg of Hajime’s chair and pulls him closer, until their knees bump together under the small table.
“Yes, but your big head was blocking the view.” Oikawa says. He dodges the kick to his shin surprisingly fast, so either Hajime is getting slower or he’s getting faster. Either way, Hajime scowls and Oikawa grins, a flash of pearly teeth and polished hardwood eyes.
Then he gets up, clumsily knocking his phone a few inches to the right, and offers his hand to Hajime. “Let’s go to the balcony,” he says. It’s five thirty in the morning and Hajime drains the rest of his shitty coffee before taking his hand and letting himself be dragged away.
He finds that Oikawa is wearing mismatched socks, one patterned with volleyballs and the other patterned with onigiri.
The sun is almost fully up, by then. It stands like a splash of sunflower yellow on a canvas mixed with orange and purple and red and pink. The birds are sparse and the blinds of the other houses are shut, the buildings dead as if the rest of the world had fallen off the radar and left the two of them to live on their own. The world is pulsing with life, wind whistling and the sun smiling.
Oikawa rests his chin on Hajime’s shoulder, one arm around his waist and the other linking with Hajime’s fingers. His hands are fucking cold, like always, but they fit into the spaces between Hajime’s like god had made them two pieces of the same puzzle, and it’s hard to complain when he huffs a laugh into Hajime’s ear.
“Hey,” he says, “that cloud looks kind of like a dick.”
He’s awful. Hajime’s in love with him, onigiri socks and crooked glasses and horrible cloud discerning abilities and all.
“Fuck you,” Hajime tells him, and he turns his head until his nose is brushing Oikawa’s, and their lips meet in a kiss that tastes like overpriced french vanilla creamer and the first rays of the sun.
….
then
(At twenty five years old, Hajime liked to think that he’d grown up a little from the boy with a bug catching net.
Except he hadn’t, really, because he still had grass stains on his jeans because he was sitting in the garden, and if he was being honest, he didn’t mind it much either. Tokyo was supposed to make him into a mature man who didn’t get excited because he heard cicadas in the wind, but he grins when he hears them singing from a distance. The neighbor’s house, maybe. The back of his house hadn’t changed much since he was a kid: some flowers are gone and replaced with others, but it was mostly the same.
It was half past six. The sun was slipping past the horizon and dipping into the cluster of buildings in a distance, the edge of the world from where he’s sitting, and the sky is colored orange and pink and red and purple in odd places, a lovelorn artist’s masterpiece in the making. The sun smiled a bright, vivid yellow, like a liquid drop of fire.
“It’s really pretty outside today,” Oikawa said, shutting the back door with a click as he steps out. When Hajime turned, he was smiling like the sun’s rays had dissolved into the honey of his eyes and the light warmed him from the top of his sleep-tousled hair to the tips of his toes. He bumped shoulders with Hajime when he sat next to him on the grass, stifling a yawn. “Why’d you want to see me here, Iwa-chan?”
Nothing really prepares you for it. The perfect moment, that is. There’s no guidebook on how to ask someone to marry you, no definitive formula for success, and there’s no right or wrong.
He’d spent the last few months thinking about the cold of the ring in his hand, the sun dipping into the horizon, the cicadas singing, the bed roses in full bloom at their feet.
But it didn’t make it any easier. Oikawa had sunshine in his hair and clouds in his eyes when he tilted his head upwards to look at the sky, his face completely bare and natural like it always is when he forgoes the mascara after sleep, his lips curved into a happy, sated smile like he knew that he belonged where he was. And like an idiot, Hajime’s voice got stuck in his throat.
Eighteen years since the first day they met, catching ladybugs and laughing in the dirt, and he was still a fool when it came to Oikawa.
He held his hand out, the metal of the ring almost burning a hole into his skin because he’s nervous and fuck the ring was sitting in his car for the last three months, and said, “Open it.”
It was him and it was Oikawa, old as they were, sitting in the yard where they’d met for the first time. Hajime’s hand was curled into a fist so tight that it felt like he’d cut skin, and Oikawa laughed as he held it and pried the fingers apart like he was unwrapping a gift.
And he saw it: the exact moment when Oikawa realized what he was doing in the backyard of Hajime’s childhood home with his knees in the grass and the cicadas singing. It was in the way his fingers went numb on Hajime’s wrist as he looked from the ring to Hajime and then back to the ring again.
“I’ve been in love with you since we were thirteen and you punched me across the face after I wore a paper mache on my head to scare you during a sleepover,” Hajime said, and when he shifted the ring in his hand, he was relieved that it didn’t fall out of his palm. “I loved you when we didn’t win the nationals, I loved you when you moved eighteen thousand kilometers and several oceans away to play volleyball, I loved you when you got sick and your hair looked like shit, I loved you every day since I knew what it meant.”
“What the fuck ,” Oikawa said, because he was eloquent when it came to expressing his feelings.
“So,” Hajime continued, and he hoped that his hand wasn’t shaking when he reached over to tug Oikawa’s left hand towards him. He puts his hand under Oikawa’s until his palm is splayed out. He places the ring on it. “It’s a ladybug.”
( “Hold your hand out!”
“What? Why? Are you going to give me a beetle?”
“No, ‘Kawa, just gimme your hand!”
“Okay.”
“...”
“...”
“It’s a ladybug. I got you a ladybug, ‘Kawa.”)
“I got you a ladybug, Oikawa,” he said, and Oikawa held the ring up to the setting sun and gasped when he saw the ladybug on the ring, made of silver and rubies.
And maybe that was it. The perfect moment. The setting sun dispersed its light into the tears falling onto Hajime’s wrist because of course Oikawa was crying, and when he flung his arms around Hajime’s shoulders and pulled him close enough until their hearts beat in successive staccatos together. The ring fit on his finger exactly like it should have, and everything in the world was okay, for then.
“I didn’t even get to ask, ” Hajime said, after a while.
“Then do it!” Oikawa’s voice was muffled into his shoulder, and there was going to be a huge tear stain on the shirt when he pulled away.
“Okay, cool.” The sun was fully gone into the horizon now, far from the buildings and into the sea, and the sky was colored purple and red and orange and pink. “Oikawa Tooru, the most high maintenance boyfriend in the whole world, light of my life and pain in my ass since we were six,” and then he laughed, because holy shit, this was really happening. “Will you,” he inhaled, pulling Oikawa even closer, “Will you marry me?”
“Fuck yeah, I will,” Oikawa muttered into his shoulder, and the next thing he knew, they were both laughing in each other’s arms on the grassy yard like they were twelve and wrestling for the water gun, and the world was the brightest place Hajime had ever known.)
….
now
“Hey,” Hajime starts, not quite sure where he’s going with this, and turns from where he’s standing in front of the closet to look at Oikawa. He’s sitting cross legged in the center of the bed surrounded by blankets and pillows and the newest copy of the magazine he’s on the cover of. He’s wearing his own shirt, thank god, but one of his socks is Hajime’s. It makes him smile, so he says, “I love you.”
“Ew,” Oikawa says, muffling a laugh when Hajime tosses a blanket at his head. When he’s done laughing, he grins and says, “I love you too, but where’s this coming from?”
“Nothing.” The bed is warm when he crawls onto his side and switches his light off. Oikawa does the same, and their noses are almost touching when they lay down. “Just wanted you to know.”
The only light in the room is the ruby red from the ladybug gemstone meeting the citylights from the windows.
“M’kay.” Oikawa kisses him in the dark and it tastes like sunshine and home, even if it’s nearing 1AM and the night is dark outside.
Forever is a long, long time.
But all the days in the world wouldn’t make him sick of Oikawa, and he holds him close until they’re asleep in each other’s arms.