Work Text:
you do not run from the renewal,
however white-hot, however daggered
with spine and thistles.
If someone had told Oikawa Tooru that Hinata Shouyou of Karasuno and Miya Atsumu of Wherever the Fuck were romantically involved, then he wouldn’t have stopped over in Japan and dramatically reappeared at Shouyou’s front door with a bouquet and a bottle of Chardonnay. Sadly, because his friends are all assholes, they assume that he either already knows this or it doesn’t matter. So Tooru goes to Shouyou’s apartment complex. He rings the doorbell. He calls out Shouyou’s name in a playful, half-sultry voice.
Miya Atsumu from Wherever the Fuck yanks the door open and stands there looking like Shrek from Shrek 2. But hotter. And eviler. And probably taller.
“Who the fuck are you calling Shouyou,” he asks flatly.
“Oh,” says Tooru, who is suddenly fumbling with the bouquet. “Um.” Does Miya Atsumu know who he is? He might not, given that Tooru never made it to the Interhigh, given that Tooru’s high school life was, ironically, a series of prolonged lows. He grips his bouquet tighter.
“I think I got the wrong unit.”
Atsumu rubs his eye with the back of his hand. “Great,” he says. He adds, completely seriously, “Only I’m allowed to call him Shouyou.”
Tooru wonders if it would be fair to throw the Chardonnay at him. Before he can take that thought any further Atsumu shuts the door abruptly in his face. He leaves the apartment complex and takes the last train back while feeling very sorry for himself, because against all odds he had genuinely been hoping that he would be able to do something with both the flowers and the wine. He opens the Chardonnay and drinks it in his hotel room. Alone.
Even now, the sunlit shadow of Rio hangs over him. For years he had wondered if Shouyou felt it too, though scrolling through fan sites and Twitter bios, he discovers that he had been wrong. Tooru rolls over face-down on the bed. Maybe every single person who falls in love with Hinata Shouyou ends up feeling sorry for themselves. Maybe that’s the allure of it. A moment of vulnerability and the bright blue of Shouyou’s laughter. The immensity of the future being reduced to a leaf on the surface of a pond. Then the solid, gut-wrenching realization that after all this time spent basking in the presence of a deity, you’re still nothing but mortal.
::
If you ask him, and you should definitely ask him because he knows himself better than anyone else, it never began. There wasn’t some Ghibli movie moment where nature and the man-made world coincided to let him know that he was probably in love with Hinata Shouyou. There were the Spring High qualifiers. There was Karasuno. There was volleyball.
By the time he had shaken himself out of the fever dream of his teenage years, Shouyou was setting for him on a sweaty beach in Brazil. To his surprise, Tooru didn’t hit the ball Shouyou had tossed him with a feeling of misplaced guilt or frustration, as was his habit with balls that had been set with less care than a professional volleyball player could muster. He hit it with the flat of his palm, teeth bared, the night prowling around him. The ball made a sound as it hit the sand. Tooru thought: what the fuck, that was good. Hinata Shouyou got good.
It then occurred to him that Shouyou had actually leveled up in the Super Mario game of life. He had not gone to college and leveled up in the Cooking Mama game of life unlike most of their peers; no, Shouyou had gone for the kill. That single realization was so jarring, it almost knocked Tooru right out of the sand. Or maybe it had been the wind.
Or maybe it had been the way Shouyou looked at him after they won their first game. Or maybe it had been all those late-night dinners, cramped into tiny restaurants with sand still stuck between their toes. Or maybe it had been the way Shouyou kissed with his limbs tangled up between skin and sheets and moonlight, laughing into Tooru’s lungs like a shot of pure oxygen.
According to the laws of the universe, Hinata Shouyou does not belong to anyone. He launches himself uninterrupted into the wet heart of the moment, the point in a story whereby the protagonist is about to knife the dragon with the dagger he borrowed from his best friend’s garage. Shouyou does something heroic, like lend the protagonist a better sword. The city begins to dream of his smile and his laughter echoes down backlit streets after dark. Everyone falls in love with him.
He, in turn, falls in love with the world a little more. According to the laws of the universe Hinata Shouyou must, on principle, love everything. From the cruel to the disgusting to the gum someone stuck to a sidewalk in Ebisu before the turn of the century. From the skylines to the dirt-brown earth. From one end of Japan’s high school volleyball circuit to the other, they had all fallen in love with him at some point and been told, in a moment of kindness, that they had to leave.
In which case, what is Miya Atsumu, and where the fuck did he come from? Tooru swirls the last of his Chardonnay around in his hotel mug. The handle is wet. He had washed it in the bathroom sink earlier after discovering a mysterious stain along the rim.
He tips the last of it into his mouth. He makes eyes at the ceiling. The ceiling nods lamely and reminds him that he’s going back to Argentina in three days, does a little four a.m. tap dance to cheer him up.
::
Tooru wakes up the next morning feeling like he hasn’t just discovered that the guy he was crushing on for two years is in a relationship with Shrek from Shrek 2 but hotter. God may not have blessed him with a fruitful love life but he has blessed him with insane alcohol tolerance and ass. Cheery and only slightly unhinged, he decides to go to the nearby supermarket, having forgotten that his nearby supermarket is also Shouyou’s nearby supermarket because he picked his hotel based on proximity to Shouyou’s apartment complex.
“I’m sorry?” Atsumu asks, sniffling disdainfully. He’s standing in the baked goods aisle. Tooru is standing in the baked goods aisle. Both of them are standing in the baked goods aisle and both of them are tall and buff and hot, though Tooru is hotter. And carrying a basket full of milk bread. And single.
“I’m buying milk bread,” Tooru says. "Got a problem?" Behind him Shouyou is poking at the contents of Tooru’s basket and comparing them with his own. What kind of boyfriend lets his boyfriend carry the shopping basket? Tooru silently berates Atsumu for being an incompetent shitfaced loser. If it were him, Tooru would do better.
Shouyou smiles brilliantly at him. “That’s a lot of milk bread,” he says. Tooru can’t even fault him for producing a statement that contributes nothing to the conversation. Shouyou says “that’s a lot of milk bread” like he’s saying “your new baby is adorable” or “congratulations on the new baby” or “nice baby”. After all these years he alone has retained the handsome innocence of high school. In spite of everything he’s witnessed, things that even Tooru had heard about in the months after; in spite of that first Spring High.
“Yes,” Tooru agrees.
Shouyou flits away with a stick of Tooru’s milk bread in his hands. Atsumu the demon boyfriend from hell dips his head to grin shyly at him like he’s got a conscience instead of a piss-yellow soul. He ruffles Shouyou’s hair.
Oh, this is exactly what Tooru felt in high school for Iwa-chan, only like three hundred times worse. He smiles at this blatant display of affection like a Buddha, but inside he’s clutching at his chest in agony and thinking I was at least HOPING we could be FUCKBUDDIES.
To hell with all of this. He picks up his shameful basket of milk bread and heads to the checkout counter to throw a pity party, but Shouyou manifests at his side like a ghost and puts his hand on Tooru’s shoulder. He smiles up at him like Tooru’s the thing at the center of the universe and says Oikawa-san would you like to get coffee together tomorrow?
Shouyou’s looking at him like a friend. Atsumu’s looking at Shouyou like he’s just announced he’s going to lick his foot. Tooru’s looking at Atsumu like his boyfriend has just asked him to start an affair with him and he’s just agreed, even though Tooru hasn’t said shit and doesn’t plan on it.
Atsumu takes the shopping basket from Shouyou. He deposits it on the floor.
“You,” he says, pointing at Tooru like Tooru’s not a whole year older than him and therefore cooler, and therefore more worthy of love and respect. “Don’t move.”
Then he disappears into the soup aisle, dragging Shouyou behind him.
::
“So, coffee?”
“Is your boyfriend okay with this?”
“My name isn’t ‘boyfriend’, it’s Miya Ats—”
“—My boyfriend will be fine. When are you free?”
::
They meet on Sunday at a fancy cafe in Shibuya that does egg-based souffle pancakes better than any other fancy cafe in Tokyo. Tooru tells Shouyou about this as the waiter seats them at the corner booth. He’s rambling, spewing information like a teenager who cafe-hops to distract from their debilitating family problems instead of a professional volleyball player. He’s nervous. For what, his consciousness yells at him, shaking him violently by the shoulders. No, seriously, for what?
Shouyou seems content to listen. He leans back in his sofa seat, the back of his head to a wall sporting an eclectic poster of a table lamp shaped like a penguin. Meanwhile Tooru’s nice ass gets progressively more bothered by the hard surface of his chair. It’s metal. The cafe is in the basement of a tall, skinny building. There’s a smoking section, just a few seats to their left.
They order the espresso pancakes on the waiter’s suggestion. They’re given a twenty-five minute wait time but the pancakes arrive while Tooru is only halfway through detailing the unsustainability of cafe culture in Tokyo. Shouyou asks for an extra plate. They split the pancakes between them, cutting the third one in half.
Out of breath and out of pointless conversation topics, Tooru starts asking questions, like: how’s life in the VLeague? Tell me about your teammates. What was your first official game like? And later, when his pancakes are gone and he’s swirling a pool of syrup with the pointy end of his knife: do you ever wish you were somewhere else? Do you miss Rio?
Predictably, this is the part where Shouyou accidentally taps into the heart-valve of the universe and begins to spew things that no one is prepared to hear, least of all Oikawa Tooru. Oikawa Tooru is freshly heartbroken, though how much of a heart there had been before this remains to be questioned. Shouyou tells him perfect and perfectly terrible stories about the MSBY Black Jackals, tryouts, their game last month against the Adlers. He draws parabolas in the air between them as he animates Tobio’s asshole serves and Sakusa’s cleaning rituals. The cafe empties out. Then it’s just them and a pair of tourists at the other end of the cafe, talking furiously about the US presidential elections.
Shouyou’s voice isn’t half as loud as it was when he was fifteen and kind of bad at volleyball, and his world was the size of a shoe. But it pisses Tooru off anyway. Who let him be so beautiful? Who gave him a distribution license for unlimited kindness? You could be dying of a terminal illness and if Hinata Shouyou smiled your way, you’d probably forget about the inevitability of your own demise for like fifteen seconds.
“Sometimes I think about Rio and Pedro and my room with the ocean-view. Rio was good to me, after all. And to you.” Tooru draws Pikachu shittily in his syrup with his knife. “But I’m happy now, Oikawa-san.”
Shouyou stirs his water with his metal straw, brushes his bangs out of his eyes. He tilts his head to one side.
“Are you?”
For a moment, Tooru thinks he might cry. He excuses himself to the bathroom, where he sends Iwa-chan a really long text message about how he’s probably going to die single and surrounded by twenty-two dogs who only like him because he feeds them gourmet dog food from the fancy pet store on the other side of the city. He glares at himself in the mirror, practices smiling, practices frowning. His face is tired from keeping up with the sheer inexplicable joy of Hinata Shouyou. His heart’s sunburned.
“You knew there was a chance this would happen,” Tooru tells himself. His expression contorts. “You came back anyway.”
He empties out the bathroom’s supply of alcohol wipes, which he discovers in a cabinet under the sink. He fixes his hair. Then he heads back out to the god/boy/god still beaming at him from the corner booth of his favorite cafe, still waiting to break the news about the weather, and later Tooru’s inescapable destiny.
::
You must have been looking for something. What were you looking for?
::
Iwa-chan doesn’t reply to his text until three weeks later. This is no longer a surprise though it does worry him a little. Back in high school Tooru was an unofficial Iwa-chan GPS. If you wanted to know where Iwa-chan was on a Thursday evening, Tooru was the guy. If you wanted to know where Iwa-chan might go after getting into a fight with the neighborhood kids over who was supposed to feed the stray cats, Tooru was also the guy. Tooru was the guy for all matters pertaining to Iwa-chan, except for matters of the heart.
In the end the thing between them didn’t work out, but they didn’t lose volleyball and Iwa-chan refused to let Tooru delete his number. He sends him photos of dogs he sees on the street sometimes. They’re unrecognizable; probably mixed-breeds and strays. Tooru can’t tell for shit where he is based on their backgrounds, though he always tries.
Yesterday Shouyou dropped by with freshly-steamed daikon and a volleyball. They passed the ball back and forth between them in the parking lot downstairs until the sun went down and snatched all the color out of the sky. Tooru contemplated the health benefits of confessing, thought of Shrek from Shrek 2, decided against it. Shouyou told him to text when he’s in the city again. Tooru said he would.
He sees himself off at the airport. He flies economy. For lunch there’s a Japanese option and a Western option and he chooses the former. They serve soba with the sauce in a plastic tear-off packet and soggy braised beef, and summer fruits with salt-preserved apples. He contemplates the health benefits of falling in love, and concludes that they must be plentiful.
It’s a long way to go between Tokyo and Argentina. But it’s a long way to go between immortality and mortality too, and they’re all chasing after it anyway, scaling the cruel side of the mountain with ripped palms and bloody teeth. Even though their parents told them to keep their dreams behind their eyelids, even though life’s only worth living when you’re running from something. Even though he's spent twenty-three years looking for the shape of his own silhouette through the morning light, searching for that sliver of white-gold that winds into the empty gymnasium like a river, carrying them out of the underbelly of the universe and into the sun.
::
"What're you looking at, Oikawa-san?"
"Hope. You."