Archive of Our Own ^beta

Your first real heartbreak was a wonderful, bubbly boy named Bokuto. God, that must have been what, hundred-hundred and twenty years ago? A distant memory, something that the flow of time should have swept up and made you forget decades ago, but the thought of him still hurts your heart at times.

“It doesn’t matter,” he’d told you when you’d voiced your concerns about your seeming lack of aging. The tests weren’t a thing back then, the process much more vague and less clear cut. “Soulmate or not, I love you.” 

It was the first I love you’s you’d shared with anyone other than your parents or family, and at the time you’d truly believed in it. Believed in a life where aging didn’t matter, where the thought of staying twenty-five forever with Bokuto seemed more romantic than any universe-made connection. 

You barely ever fought with Bokuto, that’s what shocked you the most about it. That’s why his unceremonious announcement that he was leaving you numbed you so much. It wasn’t you, he’d told you, and you weren’t even able to choke out a laugh at the severely overused line. 

He had apologized so many times you’d lost count, he’d cried and held your hand, but in the end, he’d left. Off to find true love. Which he did, to his credit, a few years later. You had been at his funeral, years and years and decades later, your face still as young as the day you met him. You looked younger than his children, and no one even knew who you were, but they shot you sympathizing gazes all the same.

You hated it. 

The clock ticks, the sound echoing and bouncing against the walls of the almost claustrophobicly small room. The chair digs into your back, uncomfortable and hard, and the gaze of the person in front of you pierces through you. Not for the first time in the last five minutes, you wonder if you made a mistake, signing up for therapy. 

The therapist clears her throat, wrinkly fingers curling around the pen in her hand. It might be the bitterness talking, but it feels sort of like a punch in the face, having this old, sweet lady as a therapist, as the one you’re supposed to share your worries and insecurities with. How is she supposed to relate to them, when she obviously already has a soulmate?

“So,” the lady starts, seemingly tired of the prolonged silence. “Do you mind if I ask you a few questions? Just to get a sense of what we’re working with here?” You nod awkwardly, hands clutching at each other in your lap. She fixes you with a smile you guess is supposed to be reassuring, nods back at you.

“Now, most of these are already in your forms,” she explains. “But let’s go over it anyways. To be sure we got everything right.” She clears her throat, a neat, small stack of papers resting on her knees. She opens the first page, the one with all of your information; your date of birth, your height, weight, family. Such a strange thing, to see a compilation of your long life tucked inside just a few pages.

“Age?” She starts, ripping the band aid straight off. You swallow, thickly, try to remember the last time you said the number out loud. You just turned hundred and fifty-four, you admit, and you can practically feel the strength leave your body. Feeling your age has never really been a thing, not when time is such a fluid and intangible thing, when age really is just a number. At once, you feel like you’re a thousand years old, some strange, time warping creature just passing through. 

The therapist hums, writes it down. Goes through the entire list of shallow personal information. It takes up the entire session, rips open wounds you didn’t even know you still had, and when you’re done, you feel empty. 

You need to listen to the ocean. 

It was Kuroo who took you to the ocean for the first time, showed you this little nook hidden away in plain sight.  It used to be your special place, the place he took you when he was stressed or when he had been away for a long time. 

Kuroo was important. Even more important than Bokuto, who came before him, or Oikawa, who came long after him. Kuroo was yours for a decade before finding his fated partner by accident. You couldn’t blame him for that; Kuroo was older than you, he had waited longer. It hurt like a bitch, but he gave you ten great years, and a life-long companionship that you treasured more than anything. You did not, could not, find it in you to regret Kuroo. 

Even now, years after his death, you find yourself returning to the sea whenever you’re sad or frustrated. There’s some sort of melancholy in it, in sitting where you used to sit with him. You’ll pretend to be talking to him sometimes, filling in the silences with whatever sassy comebacks you imagine he would have for your dramatic babble.

You’re brought out of your reverie with the sound of a click and a flash of light against the side of your face. When you jerk your head around to chew out whoever thought it appropriate to take pictures of you without your consent, you’re met with a pair of large eyes, a distressed denim jacket and a mess of brown hair.

For a moment, you just stare. He stares back, a dusting of red splattered across his high cheekbones, undoubtedly embarrassed about getting caught in the act. He look to be around your age, but then, who doesn’t? He lowers the giant camera, lets it hang around his neck like an over-sized necklace, and he puts his hands up in the universal sign of surrender. 

“Sorry,” he says, brows knitted together. “I’m not some creep, I swear.” Your mouth twitches, almost giving into the smile that threatens to erupt on your face. You think he must be right; too out in the open and not subtle enough to be a creep, but you find yourself wanting to tease him. You get up from your position on the flat rocks you used to sit on with Kuroo, brush the sand off your jeans and take a few small steps towards your not-so-sneaky paparazzi. 

“I’m not so sure,” you tell him, voice low and conspiratorially, squinting as you approach him. “You’re taking pictures of me without my consent, isn’t that like, the definition of creepy?” His blush deepens, and the warmth that spreads in your own body alarms you.

“Listen,” he says, left hand gingerly touching his camera as if he’s afraid you’re going to rip it from his neck, the other hand going into the bag slung over his shoulder and resting at his hip. He pulls out a piece of paper hands it to you. “I’m a photographer. I mean, I want to be. I’m trying to be a photographer. And you looked so-” he stops himself, and you skim through the writing on the slip he handed you. An art gallery, it says, for up-and-coming artists from the area. There are names at the bottom, one of which you suspect is his.

“I looked so what?”

His face is softer when you look back up at him, his cheeks still reddened but his face less alarmed. It looks like he’s reliving a particularly fond memory. “I don’t know,” he murmurs. “You tell me.” 

He looks at you like he means it, like he wants to know what you were thinking, like he finds you interesting. You’ve heard what they say about artists, how they look at everything through different lenses than normal people. They’re more curious, they say, and looking at this aspiring photographer, you think you finally understand what they mean. He blinks, and you realize you’ve been staring at his face for far too long.

“You can look at the pictures if you want,” he says, pushing the camera towards you. He sounds nervous when he says it, as if your approval actually counts for anything. “I mean,” he stutters, trips over his words ever so slightly. “Delete them, if you don’t like them.” There’s something in his voice that tells you of his reluctance in saying the words. “I think they’re great, though, if you don’t mind me saying..” he trails off at the end, intimidated by the way you’re still just wordlessly staring. 

“No,” you murmur softly once you finally find your voice again. “I’m just fucking with you. I don’t mind.” You try giving him the slip back, but he waves his hand, a smile gracing his features. Your stomach does a weird sort of flop it hasn’t done in years, and you curse inwardly. 

“Keep it,” he insists, leaning a bit closer to look at the slip in your hands. You feel his breath hot on your face. “That’s me,” he continues, pointing at one of the names. Iwaizumi Hajime, you read. You glimpse at him, eyes quickly diverting back to the piece of paper when you notice his eyes looking directly at you. “Maybe you’ll come?” He murmurs, something akin to hope in his voice.

“Maybe,” you whisper back, choking on air as his smile widens. You know, as he shakes your hand and thanks you profusely, that you’re not gonna see the aspiring photographer Iwaizumi Hajime again. 

He looks dangerous. 

“I don’t understand,” the therapist admits, pen tapping against the yellow notebook as if impatient. You cross and uncross your legs, struggling to find a comfortable position in the same chair you sat in last week, and the three weeks before. “It sounds to me like you want to go to this gallery. What’s stopping you?” 

She always does this; probes and prods at your insecurities. You suppose it’s a therapist’s job, frustrating as it is. Asking questions. You’ve been alone so long, you forget what it was like having to answer to anyone but yourself.

It took you two weeks to actually tell your new confidante about your run-in with the photographer Iwaizumi Hajime. At first, you thought you wouldn’t; what was the point, when it didn’t even mean anything? It was - at least you tell yourself it was - a meaningless, random meeting. Telling your therapist would prove it was something else. 

But when you find yourself staring at the slip, the slip you told yourself you were going to throw away as soon as you came home that very same day as you got it, you think you might need a second opinion. 

“I don’t want to go,” you claim, hands twisting in your lap. The therapist hums, writes something down in her notes. 

“Okay,” she indulges, inclining her head. “Then why are you so adamant about not wanting to go? It’s just a gallery, you don’t have to do anything. It’s not dependent on you.”

You ponder at that. It is a great point, after all. Chances are Iwaizumi Hajime doesn’t even remember you, that you were just another face in a sea of faces, an impulse soon forgotten. And - 

and that’s what scares you, the thought that you’re forgettable. You swallow; that’s probably what they call a breakthrough. 

“I’m old,” you admit, voice barely above a whisper. “I’m tired of caring about people only to watch them wither and die while I stay the same.” You remember telling Kuroo about this worry, just a couple of years before he passed. He’d scoffed, the sound turning into a cough with his tired lungs, and he’d asked when you became so cynical. You hadn’t replied at the time, but you supposed it had happened when you’d lost yet another loved one to the concept of true love. A concept that seems to constantly elude you. Your throat closes up, eyebrows knitted tightly together.

It must show on your face, and you wonder if you’re just easy to read or if therapist’s are just better at body language than you’d given them credit for in the past. “I understand,” she mutters emphatically, frantically taking notes. “But fate is about timing,” she adds. “If you keep isolating yourself, you might miss it.”

Against your better judgement, and with your therapist’s words ringing in your ears, you end up at the art gallery. You feel out of place, surrounded by artsy people and pictures you can’t even decipher. There’s sculptures, too, abstract pieces and artworks that makes your heart hurt. You can’t remember the last time you did something like this, your days melted together into a monotonous mess many, many years ago already.

You’re on edge, fidgety, constantly straightening out your coat or twiddling with your hair. You marvel at your own ability to act like a teenager despite being well over a hundred years old. You haven’t even seen Iwaizumi or his pictures yet, and even if you had, it doesn’t matter. You refuse to let yourself get swept away as easily as you did before.

(you refuse to get into another oikawa situation, is what you really mean, but you’re wary of letting that name cross your mind, even now) 

You spot something familiar, something that makes you stop, heart pounding painfully against your ribs as your eyes take in the sight. It’s not Iwaizumi, the aspiring photographer, but it is - obviously - one of his photographs. More specifically, it’s a photograph of you.

It’s been a while since you’ve seen a picture of yourself, photo albums hidden away in drawers and walls devoid of decoration. A sort of defense mechanism, you’ve realized, a way to make yourself forget how many decades you’ve seen pass by.

This photo makes you pause. The thing you never liked about photographs is how they’re always so staged; tight smiles and awkward arms around tense shoulders. You never really saw yourself as a photogenic person. It was one of those skills you never truly seemed to acquire. Here, though, you see yourself from the eyes of a stranger. Of someone who, for some reason, saw something that made them think to snap a picture.

You’re not tense, here, not smiling for a group-shot or even facing the camera. Your face is just neutral; mouth a relaxed line and hair blowing. The ocean is in the background, the colors toned down, almost foggy. So this is what you look like, you think, when there’s no one around.

“Oh,” a voice pipes up from behind you. You jump, twisting around as if caught doing something you shouldn’t have been doing. Iwaizumi looks down at you, eyes shining and shoulders straight.  “You came.” Iwaizumi’s voice is soft, the slight quirk of his lips even softer, and something within you seems to grow.

“I did,” you agree. “I didn’t think I’d see myself here, though.” The tall, brunet photographer looks bashful, embarrassed, and he can’t quite seem to know where to focus his gaze for a moment. You hate yourself for finding it so endearing. 

“I would’ve told you,” he promises, fingers reaching to nervously scratch at his neck. “But I didn’t know how to find you. Never even got your name.” It’s subtle, but you hear it, the underlying request. For a moment you consider it, just playing it cool, rejecting the advances and getting out of the gallery before the damage is done. But as your gaze wanders between Iwaizumi and his picture of you on the wall, your therapist manages, yet again, to pierce through the monotone fog in your brain. 

So you tell him. You shiver slightly as he repeats it, and when his smile widens a fraction; so subtly that you barely even notice it, yours does, too.

“So you went,” the therapist praises, watching as you nod your head slowly with a hum. You’re avoiding eye contact, focusing instead on the paintings lining the walls of her office. The therapist does not seem to mind. “And you had coffee the next day.” You repeat the gesture; nod and hum, show that you’re paying attention. You try not to emote at the way your stomach flops at the mention of the coffee you’d shared with Iwaizumi. 

You don’t mention the near-constant texting, or that everything is moving so fast; faster than with Bokuto, or with Oikawa, or even with Kuroo, who you haven’t even mentioned to the therapist yet.

“I’m proud of you,” she says, suddenly, and your head whips around to look at her so fast the room spins for a moment. There’s a certain glint to her eyes as she watches you, the one only ladies old in both mind and appearance can produce. “I’ve worked with countless late bloomers,” she explains. You cringe at the term ‘late bloomer’; her parents probably weren’t even born when you were. “A lot of them much older and more jaded than you. Stubborn.”

She puts her pen and notebook down on the table separating the two of you, a show of giving you her undivided attention. “I’m glad you took my advice.”

Your instincts tell you to snap at her, to get defensive and disregard your budding friendship with Iwaizumi as just that; a friendship - something innocent and purely platonic. But then you’d have to get into why you’re so adamant about keeping things platonic, which is something you’re wholly uninterested in doing, and also the whole thing would be a fucking lie. So you say nothing.

“Now that that’s out of the way,” the therapist continues instead, unbothered by your lack of response as usual. She readjusts in her chair, and the air changes immediately. “Are you ready to start talking about Kuroo Tetsuro yet?”

Your heart thrums against the confines of your chest, your nails digging into the flesh of your hand.

“Are you ready to talk about your daughter?”

You’ve been seeing Iwaizumi casually for three months when he finally kisses you. You say ‘casually’, even though you’ve already met his friends, even though he calls you ‘babe’ and holds your hand in public. It’s been close, a few times, moments where the lingering gazes last too long, where one of you will accidentally drop your stare down to the other’s lips and the silence will drag on for too long.

Your therapist is ripping her hair out, chiding you for your reluctance, and you think she might be a bit too invested in your love life.

But anyways. It happens five months after you first met, three months after you became.. whatever the hell you are. Friends, you suppose. It happens by the ocean, where he first took that picture of you, the picture you now know he’s refused to sell and has instead hidden somewhere in his apartment.

You turn to look at him, staring instead directly into the eye of his camera lens. If there’s something you’ve learned about Iwaizumi, it’s that he never leaves home without his camera bag, and that he seems to find beauty in literally everything; stopping at every corner to snap a photo of something or other. It surprised you how quickly you got used to it.

“You’re always taking pictures of me,” you mutter as he lowers the camera, a fond smile on his face. “I feel like I know your camera better than I know you.” He laughs at that, a pleasant sound. 

“I’m a photographer, that’s kinda what I do.” He hums, taking a few lazy steps towards you. You feel the energy in the air change, like you’re crowded, suddenly, but it’s not an entirely unpleasant feeling. With the smell of the sea in your nose and the feeling of sand under your feet and between your toes, with Iwaizumi’s carefree smile right in front of you, you feel more at ease than you can remember doing for the better half of a decade. That used to scare you, but somehow Iwaizumi chased away that, too. 

“Why so many of me, though?” you ask, just as he stops in front of you, twists a lock of your hair around his index finger. It feel like electricity when he brushes against your cheek. 

“That way I’ll never forget you,” he responds, without any sort of embarrassment or hesitation. The sheer bluntness and cheesiness of the response makes you laugh, eyes crinkling and hands gripping at his over-sized hoodie. 

“Well, you’re a blunt one, aren’t you?” your voice wavers when his hands come up to grasp your face, gently and with barely-there caresses that makes your skin feel on fire. You lean into the touch, can’t even think to do anything else. He leans closer, breath hot on your face, and it feels so ridiculously fairy-tale like that you have to fight the urge to pinch yourself in the arm. 

For a moment there’s only silence, save from the sounds of the ocean and the world outside the bubble you seem to have secluded yourself in. It’s that sort of will-they-won’t-they moment, a moment of meaningful glances and careful touches, of slight movements and bumping noses. 

“Of course,” he murmurs at last, so close you swear you can feel the vibrations of his vocal chords through your whole body. “I know what I want.” And then his lips are on yours and any sort of response you might have had dies in your throat. 

Time passes. Seasons shift and Iwaizumi sells photographs and you wrap up your therapy.

You have ‘the talk’ with Iwaizumi. 

it goes a little something like this: 

“I’m almost 155 years old.” 

“Okay, cool. I’m almost 25.” 

“You don’t mind?”

“Mind what? That you’re a fossil? Do you mind that I’m not?” 

You pondered, at that. You thought you would mind, honestly, that it would feel wrong, somehow, to be with someone who hadn’t even had the chance to stop aging yet, whose parents were still alive. But - 

“I don’t. Mind, I mean. If you don’t.”

“Great, that’s settled, then.” 

There’s a silence, after that, Iwaizumi sipping his coffee with his eyes glued to the Mac in front of him. You’re both way past awkwardness, but you still feel the tension that seems to ooze out of your pores, your inner voice sounding freakishly similar to your therapist when it tells you to keep telling truths.

“There’s something else, too.”

You twiddle your thumbs nervously and Iwaizumi, sensing your unease, closes the laptop, looking at you with a carefully blank expression. You inhale. 

“I had a daughter.”

“Okay,” he replies, not even so much as a twitch of muscles hinting at any distaste with the news. “Cool.” 

“Okay,” you echo. “So that’s fine, too?”

He sighs, gets up from his chair and walks over to cage you between his arms, his body in front of you and the kitchen sink at your back. “Are you looking for a fight?” 

“No,” you quickly respond, hands fisted in the front of his loose t-shirt. “I’m just-” 

“You’re just insecure,” Iwaizumi interrupts, staring you down. There’s no venom in his voice, no piercing, accusing gazes, his words nothing more than a sentence; an observation. “You’ve been around for way too long, I bet you’ve lost a lot of loved ones. You’ve never talked about friends or family, so I’m guessing they’re gone or you pushed them away as well. You had a daughter, but you still look like a smoking hot twenty-five year old to me, so obviously the father found his soulmate and moved on, too. And now things are getting serious between us and you think I’m gonna do the same.”

He pauses after that, swiping his thumb against your cheek. You hadn’t even noticed that you’d started crying. 

“Is it that impossible to you that I’m the one?” He asks, then, and suddenly he sounds so heartwrenchingly vulnerable that you forget to breathe. “Or that I mean it when I say I’d rather spend an eternity with you than a lifetime with someone else?”

He presses his lips against yours, a chaste and careful thing, meant to reassure rather than entice. 

“I’m scared,” you admit, a shaky and fragile whisper against Iwaizumi’s lips. He looks at you; eyes hooded and lips pursed, and when he presses his lips against yours again, slower, this time, deeper. He grips your hips, fingers digging into the fabric of your jeans. His nose rubs against your skin.

“Move in with me,” he whispers. “Right now.” 

“What? Here?”

“Here, at yours, wherever you want.” 

“What if I want to move to the moon?”

“Sounds a bit inconvenient, but if that’s what you want.” 

You laugh. He swallows the sounds, presses you against the sink.

“I love you,” he murmurs. The words have been, you admit, hanging in the air for a while, but you both seemed reluctant to voice them. It doesn’t surprise you that he’s the first to do so. You wrap your arms around his neck, let him pick you up and carry you to the bedroom.

(“Shit,” Iwaizumi murmurs, voice muffled against the most sensitive part of your neck. His hands seem to be everywhere at once; in your hair, gripping at your backside and pressing you against him, fingers skimming underneath your already bunched up t-shirt. “You’re perfect.” 

It sounds so genuine, when he says it looking like that; face red and flushed, fingers shaking as the grip at every part of your body he can manage to get his hands on, teeth nipping at your collarbone. You feel like you’re about to cry, but the sound comes out strangled. 

Your head is swimming, mind too jumbled to form coherent sentences as Iwaizumi grips your hips, grinds slowly and deliberately against you in a away that makes you choke. He never breaks eye contact, not when he kisses you so fervently that you worry you might pass out, not even when he trails his lips down your stomach; nibbling and licking and biting at your inner thighs and whispering small declarations of love all at the same time. 

You grasp at the soft mess of hair on his head when he settles his face between your legs, and your head feels like it’s going to explode. 

At some point, maybe when he’s above you, or when you’re above him, or when you’re just about to fall asleep, you hear him whisper ‘I love you’ again into your skin. You can’t with certainty claim to have said it back.)

This particular tale ends much like it begins. 

At the dawn of your birthday with a q-tip swabbing at the inside of your mouth. There’s a tiny vial of transparent liquid on the sink, and a sleeping boy in the bed in the next room. 

So it’s not completely like it begins, you suppose. Last year, you knew, despite the strange sense of unease in your stomach, that the liquid would turn out blue. This year, the feeling in your stomach feels so much like hope that you struggle to stand up straight. 

If the three minutes it takes for the liquid to change color felt like an hour last year, it feels like a decade now. When the timer on your phone beeps, you can’t even bear to look at it at first. 

You press a clammy hand against your forehead, and you turn to look at the vial. You exhale.

“Iwaizumi,” you murmur, standing awkwardly in the doorway to the bedroom, observing the brunet as he stirs in the bed. “Hajime,” you repeat, a bit louder this time. He opens one eye, looks at you groggily. Sees the tense shape of your shoulder and sits up in the bed.

“Something wrong?” He asks, voice cautious. 

You clear your throat. “I took the test.” 

Iwaizumi groans, then, lets his upper body fall back against the soft pillow at his back. He rubs his hands over his face. “I told you. It doesn’t matter. Fuck the damn test.”

A smile spreads across your face, a completely involuntary and automatic twitch of muscles as you hold the vial up for him to look at. The bright, red liquid shines in the sunlight streaming through the window. 

“It’s red, Hajime. It’s red.” 

He sits back up so swiftly that you think he might fall over, squints at the vial. He holds his arms out, waves you over. You don’t need to be asked twice, taking long steps until you’re right by his side of the bed and he drags you into it, putting you on his lap and kissing you so deeply you have to breathe through your nose to avoid getting dizzy. He squeezes you against him, hands flat on your back.

“Are you happy now?” he asks, coaxing a laugh out of you. 

“I am,” you reply. “I love you. I’ve been waiting for so long.”

(there are a lot of other things you need to say; that he was completely worth the wait, that you understand what your therapist was talking about about fate, that you’re sorry for ever doubting him and that you’ve known, somehow, that he would be the one. but iwaizumi rolls you over, steals your breath and makes you forget how to form words. 

that’s okay, you think. you’ve got time. maybe not an eternity; but at the very least a lifetime.)