Chapter Text
It was advertised to him as Makki’s idea. Maybe that should have been the first smoking gun.
It’s the last thing Hajime is thinking about as he’s being led up to Kyoutani’s third-floor apartment. It’s Tokyo, mid-June, nothing short of pastel-green hysteria outside the landing’s windows. The apartment is in a much nicer complex than he thought anyone their age could afford, and he has to bite his tongue to stop himself from making a remark about it to Mattsun, who’s fumbling with the spare key. Hajime loosens and tightens his grip around the sake he brought, a small gift he hopes is just cheeky enough to earn him groans.
“In ‘ya go,” Mattsun croons, finally. The door swings open, and it’s a grainy darkness inside. The smile he shoots Hajime is alarmingly bright.
“Alright.” Hajime takes a final look at him and enters.
The call had come a week ago. “I know you’re curing cancer in Osaka or whatever, but do you think you could make it up to Tokyo this weekend?”
Hajime had frowned against his phone. He stood straight-backed in the tangled heart of the lab, a clipboard digging into his waist, a spreadsheet blurring on the screen in front of him. He wasn’t supposed to be taking calls on the clock, anyways.
“What for?”
Mattsun had cleared his throat. “We’re throwing a surprise party for Yahaba. Graduation and all. Makki’s idea. Says he wants to scare him so bad he forgets everything and has to go through undergrad again. Whole crew’s gonna be there.”
Hajime frowned more deeply, and set his clipboard down. When he looked up, the laboratory wall stared back, clinically white, plastered-over with smudged whiteboards and notes. Utsui had left in mid-morning, leaving him and Ueno to finish up data entry for the day. Far from his favorite part of the job, but with a month of sixty-hour workweeks behind him, something of a respite, and the only time he wouldn’t feel a crushing guilt over taking a call. He glanced at the clock: one in the afternoon. The lab was always quiet around this time, treadmills eerily still, monitors hanging from their rigs as if frozen in time.
“The whole crew?” he asked. He forced down any discomfort in his voice.
“Yeah,” Mattsun said. “Kyoutani’s hosting. Dude’s got a sweet apartment. And I’m pretty sure, like, Yahaba’s sisters are gonna be there, and some of his college friends. But Kindaichi and Kunimi are coming down from Sendai, and Watari’s coming in from Hiroshima, or at least Makki says. Makki and I are coming too, obviously.” The list was rattled off as if practiced. “We’re waitin’ on you, man.”
Hajime let go of the counter, started at the realization that he’d been gripping it. It was odd that Mattsun was calling him at this time of day. He’d been living in Osaka for six weeks, he and his roommate from Irvine chasing down an old professor of theirs for internships; he’d begrudgingly advertised himself as mostly off-limits, knowing that whatever Makki and Mattsun had been brewing in Tokyo since graduation would prove difficult to keep away from otherwise. I’m probably going back to California in August, anyways, he’d said, but he hadn’t known if it was true. He still didn’t.
“I mean. . .” he began. He’d seen them only once since coming back, a blur of a night out that had landed them in Makki’s apartment the next morning, hungover and belligerent enough to remember none of it. Ueno was the only one with hours this weekend; Hajime could cram in his analysis on the train. Would it hurt to see everyone? “I guess, man. I don’t see why not.”
Mattsun’s laugh, crackling through the phone’s speakers. “Nice. Nice. Saturday at seven, no earlier, no later. Yahaba’s supposed to show up at eight. We’re gonna make him shit his pants. I’ll text you the details.”
“Mmph.” Hajime shifted the phone from one ear to another, wiggled his computer mouse to get the spreadsheet to pop back up, already distant. “Got it.”
“Oh, and,” Mattsun cut in. His voice dropped. “Don’t tell Oikawa you’re coming up. I know you’re gonna want to, but Makki wants to see if he can, like, FaceTime him in at the end or something. Doesn’t want him to know.” He barked out a laugh. “I can trust you to keep one secret from him, right?”
Hajime blinked unseeingly at the computer screen. It took him too long to respond. “Yeah, man, no worries.”
“See you there!” Mattsun killed the line.
Hajime let the phone sit between his ear and his shoulder for a couple seconds before setting it down. Outside the window, June was blistering and bright, punching beams of incandescence through the blinds and onto the linoleum. Around him, nothing but the hum of the machines.
How was he supposed to explain that he wasn’t gonna tell Oikawa, anyways?
He knows something is off when Yahaba is there, staring at him, as soon as he enters the apartment. That is not how surprise parties work. There are a couple seconds of utter confusion where the lights flick on, and everyone in the living room is frozen for moment, wide-eyed like they’ve been placed there on accident. And then the lights flick off again, and then Kindaichi is shouting somewhere behind him, and the lights come back on and stay this time.
Hajime stands there in front of Yahaba for a couple seconds, dumb, sake in his hands, and asks: “Isn’t this supposed to be your surprise party?”
He doesn’t get an answer. The room seems to erupt into conversation all at once, as if on cue. Heads jerk away. No one looks at him. Hajime’s confusion increases tenfold. Around him there’s Watari, and Kunimi, and a couple women suddenly talking amongst themselves who must be Yahaba’s sisters, and Makki’s girlfriend who he’s met all of once. He cranes his neck to try to catch Mattsun’s eye, who’s standing by the door with Kindaichi and Kyoutani, suddenly deeply engrossed in conversation. Hajime frowns. He’s missed something, or ten things.
Yahaba’s right next to him, then, smiling in an uncanny sort of way and taking the sake from his hands. “Is this aged?”
“What’s going on?”
Yahaba’s face screws up, almost like he pities him. “Wouldn’t expect aged from a broke grad student. Really missed us, huh?”
“What are you—what is this?”
Whatever weak poker face Yahaba’s holding together almost breaks, then, and suddenly he’s leading Hajime over to the couch, and draping himself onto it. “Don’t worry about it,” he says. He pats the spot on the couch next to him. “We’ve got it all under control.”
Hajime senses amusement rising in himself, then, as he slowly takes a seat beside him. “Isn’t this your surprise party?” Around him, people are stealing glances, and jerking their heads away when he catches their eye. He almost gets Watari to break.
Yahaba beams at him, already beginning to tear at the bottle’s packaging. “This alcohol is for me, right?”
Hajime can’t help but smile at his dedication. “Uh, if it’s your party, then yeah.”
“Hmm.” Yahaba feigns thoughtfulness as he studies the label. “I guess you could say it’s my party, since I get to watch.”
“What? Watch what?” It hits Hajime, then, like a club to the face. His head shoots up. “Wait, where’s Makki?”
Yahaba meets his gaze, eyes blown wide in alarm or amusement. He doesn’t have enough time to answer. “Funny you ask, ‘cause—”
The door flies open. Makki’s there in the doorway, and every head in the room jerks towards him. His eyes search and find Hajime, and then he’s grinning.
And then, stepping out from behind him with a look of utter bewilderment on his face, is Oikawa.
Yahaba has Hajime by the arm; they’ve stood up off the couch, and Yahaba’s bringing him halfway across the room towards Oikawa and leaving him there.
“ Surprise! ” It’s an explosion, the whole room at once.
Time freezes. Hajime looks to Oikawa, and Oikawa is looking back. A channel is carved out between them where the crowd has stepped back and is watching. The obvious, pressing question is answered in an instant: No, Oikawa didn’t know either. There’s a look of panic on his face that he smothers immediately. A smile, taut at the edges, takes its place. His eyes crinkle in some dim attempt at mirth. Oh, God.
A surprise party. For them. Oikawa is supposed to be in Argentina. He’s supposed to be in Osaka. A surprise reunion. They got them together. Of course.
Oikawa is tanned, and somehow taller, and his hair is shorter, and the years have worked miracles on him. He’s wearing the white-blue of his Argentinean team like armor, the flag on his sleeve, and he looks so much like himself that it hurts. There is, all at once, so space for Hajime’s breath in his lungs. He is not a sight that can be prepared for. When was the last time? Was it that summer, before either of them left? In Hajime’s backward, his shoulders shivering, not half as muscled as they are now, his eyes, wet and gleaming—
Don’t tell Oikawa you’re coming up. I can trust you to keep one secret from him, right?
It’s cruel. Hajime only gets a few seconds of unreality before the room snaps back into focus, and the several moments of silence they’ve spent staring at each other are suddenly glaringly loud. His gut has dropped straight out. He notes distantly that should be doing something. He shouldn’t just stand there; if they just stand there, then everyone will know, and he’ll have to explain himself, and every pair of eyes on the room is trained on them, and it’s dead silent, and—
Oikawa’s arms are around him. He is all too solid, and all too warm, and the white-blue of his t-shirt has a smell that Hajime has never smelled on him before. It’s like betrayal. The deathly silence has broken and there’s the sound of phone cameras and someone else in the room is shouting something—Kindaichi, or Makki, or Mattsun, but Hajime is adrift and utterly deaf to it.
They pull apart, and faced with the sheer brilliance of him up close, Hajime cannot help but wonder if it would have been easier if they had been honest. It is a miracle that they let it get this far. What would it have taken? They’re such fucking cowards. Either of them, a word to Makki, they could have even played down just how bad it was— Yeah, Oikawa and I just don’t talk that much anymore. Would it have been that bad?
It could not be worse than this.
“Iwa-chan,” Oikawa says. His voice, pitched across a distance of five years. The room is no longer silent around them, but it’s unnaturally quiet, and when Hajime looks, he finds pairs of eyes watching them questioningly.
They’ve let it get this far. No point, now.
“Oikawa,” he says, and he pulls him hard into another hug, because he can’t come up with anything else to do. The room cheers, again, and Hajime watches the far wall go blurry. He feels numb where Oikawa’s skin is pressed against his.
It could not be worse than this.
<<<
Hajime doesn’t remember the last time he and Oikawa called. He remembers the gaps between the calls better than the calls themselves, the ever-lengthening spaces filled with not-calling first, and the calling second, maybe, if at all.
The last one was probably months ago, approaching a year. He can piece together a memory of it that’s probably only half-invention, late spring delirium, him laying on the fold-out sofa of his walkup in Irvine, watching, sideways, as Ueno did the dishes and the dial tone shouted in his ear. Why was he doing this, again? He had to go to the lab soon. Four, Five, until—
The phone crackled, and the miracle of Oikawa’s voice was on the other end. “Iwaizumi?”
Hajime jolted, and cleared his throat, and Ueno was making alarmed eye contact with him over a soapy dinner plate. “Oikawa,” he said. “Hey.”
And then they probably both smiled tightly into the receiver and talked about something thin and flimsy that they had talked about a hundred times before, like Oikawa’s team. Or the sweltering heat in San Juan. Or the internship Hajime applied for. Or the new hire in Hajime’s lab. Yeah, the other guy moved to Berkeley. And Oikawa would try to remember the other guy’s name, just as a kindness, but they both knew he wasn’t going to. Hajime would relieve him, eventually, and Oikawa would sigh, and the line would sit silent for a moment, impossibly heavy in both their hands.
There was no blame. There wasn’t even really a reason. Every time Hajime searched for one, he came up empty. Just the details of their lives, spreading further and further apart. He remembers the yellow couch cushions, the voices of Oikawa’s dozens of teammates and friends in the background, always tugging him away— ¿Con quién estás hablando? —and the phone static, always the phone static, as Hajime stared sightlessly across the room while Oikawa talked to them instead. He never learned Spanish. He was never even particularly good at English, until he moved to California. Oikawa would pull the phone away from his face, and Hajime would get the grainy suggestion of him prattling something off in Spanish, and even that shimmer of it would give him vertigo. Oikawa would laugh at something someone else had said, and Hajime would wonder if the earth was splitting open beneath the Yucatan, and Panama was widening into an ocean between them.
And they’d pick conversation back up eventually, and talk about the cracks in their floor, or something Oikawa’s head coach said, or a new insight in Hajime’s research, each topic more frayed and labored than the last. But Oikawa would have to go after a few more minutes, practice , or warm-ups , or another merciful alibi, and Hajime’s shoulder would ache with relief once he set the phone down.
He thought that it was nice, at least, that they still tried sometimes. No matter how stilted their conversations became. Made an effort not to disappoint their younger selves. A cable stretched over the Americas, four time zones and five years in length. How to measure a weight like that?
They set it down permanently sometime in May of that year. Maybe no one would have been strong enough.
<<<
He’s alone on the balcony, staring down a darkening Tokyo like it’s his adversary. The lights are white-pink, vertical towers lit up into christmas trees, the traffic a river of glow. The view of downtown is nice. The whole apartment is nice. Way nicer than Kyoutani’s apartment has a right to be, he thinks; he’d overheard somewhere in the throng of bodies how he’d gotten it, and immediately forgotten. It’s sticky-humid outside, the kind of night air that makes you feel like you’re at the bottom of a dark swimming pool, like you could just lie in it and gulp it down until you drown. Or maybe he’s just drunk.
The sake he brought was not aged, Yahaba had made that up on the spot. It goes down nicely, still, and he’s pretty sure that whatever mystery in the glass he’s holding has some of it mixed in. No one had denied him a drink when he’d reached for it; it had dawned on everyone already what was going on. A miscalculation. It had been like a hundred plates shattering, once he and Oikawa pulled apart in the living room for the second time and neither had been able to come up with something to say. Utter vacuum silence. Everyone’s collective realization of the wreckage they were looking at. Oh, God.
The worst of it was that it looked like they’d had some falling-out while they’d both been abroad. There was none. That vacuum silence. There was just nothing .
The look of guilt on Makki’s face had gut-punched him, and he still sees it now, swimming behind his eyelids. It’s fine, man, he’d said, when Makki had tried to pull him into the kitchen to apologize. There was no way you could’ve known. We just don’t really talk much. There was nothing he could have said to wipe that horror off of Makki’s face. Watching it dawn on his friends was like seeing it himself for the first time all over again, just how bad it was. Yeah. It’s that bad. He hadn’t said that part.
And now everyone inside is doing a winsome job of holding some semblance of a party together, mopping up the nuclear waste. Watari had broken the silence and pulled Hajime away from Oikawa, thrown some music on, begun dishing out drinks. Hajime, wordless, had followed him like a buoy tugged across the surface of the ocean, and watched with mounting dread as the party took on a certain uncanniness. People began talking amongst themselves purposefully, or suddenly found interest in a piece of art on the wall, and politely averted their eyes from Hajime and Oikawa the way people politely avert their eyes from car crashes on the highway.
He’s not sure when he came out on the balcony. Maybe he was dumped out here by Mattsun after his fifth drink, when he began sidestepping all attempts at conversation altogether, and even Oikawa’s tidiest efforts to keep himself at the opposite end of the room could not stop Hajime from glancing at him. All the better.
Oikawa had made the Argentinean Olympic team this spring. The crowd seemed to bring it up slowly, testing if it was okay, and then all at once. It was the only reason he could make it to Tokyo, anyways, for the Olympics. That was the way they’d arranged the surprise, getting Oikawa to fly in a week before the rest of his team. It was nice, and easier to talk about than anything else, and the party was stunningly eager to lean into it. Isn’t it amazing? He’s their first-string setter. It is amazing. He’ll be on the Olympic stage in a matter of weeks. Hajime had heard Oikawa laughing in the kitchen, prattling off to a semicircle that had formed around him, and didn’t have to guess at the topic.
And the news of it is months-old at this point, but Hajime had heard it only peripherally, weeks after it happened, back in May. Makki and Mattsun had both assumed that he’d already heard it from Oikawa himself: Hey, since Oikawa’s playing for Argentina and all—
Moments like that, where he could have said something, and thought it easier not to. It would have been simple: I actually had no clue he made the team. We don’t talk that much anymore. It’s utterly stupid now. How many moments like those has he had? They seem to stack on top of one another, now, like a tower of stupidity, a lit-up Tokyo skyscraper of the hundreds of places he could have taken an out, and didn’t.
Oikawa had switched passports to do it. Not unheard of, and no great surprise to anyone anymore, since his two years in Argentina had turned to three, and his three into four, into five, into a sort of perpetuity that no longer seemed to require an explanation. In their stilted phone conversations, he’d caught glimpses of why. Friends, always tugging at Oikawa’s sleeve, house parties, roomates, Spanish fluency, the Argentinean wine, the allure of a spot on the Olympic stage. Home, becoming situated elsewhere. No longer, when are you moving back to Japan, but when’s your next visit?
He can’t truly hate him for it. Hating him for it never would have come into question if not for this nightmare, and now it only picks weakly in his gut. And maybe that’s only because because Oikawa had seemed to slide right into the evening like it was nothing. Show up in his Argentinean shirt, stare at Hajime like a deer in headlights, but then slink off into the kitchen and begin laughing with Kunimi and Kindaichi like nothing was wrong. Maybe nothing is wrong. Hajime sets down his empty glass on the railing. The Olympian in the room. Maybe, for him, nothing is wrong.
And, God, a week ago, he probably would have said that nothing was wrong, too.
A tap on the door. Hajime jerks his head around.
Oikawa is there. Hajime’s stomach drops. He is sudden, and impossibly vivid, and outlined against the backdrop of an emptied-out living room. Hajime’s eyes dart away from him. The party is over. Everyone slipped out when he wasn’t looking, and Kyoutani is the only one left, at the far wall, fiddling with the sound system.
How long has he been out here?
Oikawa waves, and if he sees the startled look on Hajime’s face, he pretends not to. He opens the door without waiting for a response, and in the next second he’s at the bannister beside him.
The space seems to warp around him, grow wider and smaller at once. When he leans against the railing and says nothing, Hajime lets himself study the side of his face, the set of his shoulders, solid, unflinching. Olympian. The thought gives Hajime vertigo. Oikawa huffs out a single breath, looks down a dozen stories into the glow-pool of traffic. It shines back, illuminating his face.
“Fucking hot out here.”
Hajime barks out a laugh, it’s that startling. Neither of them are immune to the sheer absurdity of the situation. Beneath the glacial terror there’s almost a solidarity to it, standing together on the silent balcony after everyone else has already left, their backs to the empty apartment. Both of them were dragged into that room and faced with the other when they weren’t ready, and here they are, now, deciding that they’re going to do it on their own terms. Hajime decides to try to not be scared. What’s Oikawa going to do, bite him? There’s no one here to watch; if they do have the falling-out they never got around to and he flies over the bannister, no direct evidence.
“Not my smartest move. Maybe I could have hidden in the fridge.”
And that gets Oikawa to laugh. There’s a moment where they both risk looking at each other, and Hajime gets to watch his own wonder, and fear, mirrored on someone else’s features. Oikawa’s smiling face is a time capsule, a memory so real it’s unreality. He’s not actually taller, he just seems it, something about the ruddy sun spots on his cheeks and his grown-up haircut.
Or maybe it’s just the Argentinean national team shirt. In the dim, the blue could be mistaken for Seijou teal. Or the cobalt of Kitagawa Daiichi. Maybe that’s Oikawa’s cosmic trajectory, Hajime thinks—forever graduating from one shade of blue into the next.
Oikawa opens his mouth then, as if about to say something, but nothing comes.
“Makki didn’t give you too hard of a time, right?” Hajime relieves him.
Whatever fear had flashed across Oikawa’s face vanishes. A rueful smile. “Not terrible. He tried to apologize about a dozen times. I think we scared them pretty bad.”
I think we scared each other pretty bad. “I didn’t miss anything too interesting in there, right?”
Oikawa feigns thoughtfulness, and there it is again, a glimmer of the theatrics he put on constantly in high school. It looks no less silly on him as a man. “Kindaichi and Watari got Kunimi to do a round of tequila, so.” His face screws up. “I brought Argentinean wine. Not as interesting. They wouldn’t do shots of it with me, God knows why.”
Hajime smiles despite himself. They could do this for hours, he knows, passing conversation back and forth like a ball, never really saying anything. They got good at it, in the five years between that life and this one. He would ask about the wine, and then Oikawa would regale some tale about the bar where he first tried it, and Hajime would watch and listen and nod along and try not to grimace at the fact that he knows none of these names and none of these places, and that Oikawa is smiling at the memory of something he will never see. Will never be able to share with him, no matter how hard he tries.
Oikawa’s watching him, waiting for his next stage direction; Hajime grabs the steering wheel and yanks it the opposite way. Into oncoming traffic. “You’re in town for the Olympics.”
Oikawa blinks. “Yeah.”
“I didn’t know,” Hajime begins sedately, and maybe it’s the sake in him. He has to inhale and start the sentence over. “I didn’t know you made the team ‘till May. Found out from Makki. Over the phone. I pretended I knew already.”
Oikawa turns away, looks out over the pitch-dark shapes of Tokyo, like it’s suddenly too much. Hajime doesn’t mean to sound accusatory; he’s pretty sure it came out that way anyways. It’s another absurdity, really, in town for something as grand, as world-altering as the Olympics. Hajime never would have imagined himself saying it that way. He never would have imagined it that way it happened that May, either, hearing about his best friend’s dream a month after it was fulfilled, and only on accident. Shell-shock over the phone, as Makki mentioned it to him offhand. Yeah, he’s Argentina’s starting setter.
“I’m not just here for the Olympics, actually,” Oikawa says, and it’s an odd deflection. He’s leaning over the railing, and for a moment he seems just utterly Argentinean, tanned and muscled, the flag on his shirt sleeve. Hajime expects him to be mad; to kick back at the insinuation of blame, but his voice is quiet. “The plan is to stay here, once the games are over.”
“What?”
Oikawa glances up, smiles weakly. “Gotta move back home sometime.”
Hajime just stares. The career he thought would never end, the years that snowballed into half a decade, into citizenship, into the collective assumption that that was what Oikawa was, now, Spanish-speaking and sun-kissed. That he would never return to shore.
“That’s what I came out here to tell you, actually. I don’t know if you’re in the area, or if they ever let you out of that lab, but—” Oikawa begins digging in his pocket, and produces a crumpled sticky-note. “Got a Japanese SIM card again. Passport comes later, I’ve got business to take care of on the court first, but—” he holds it out. “Lost all my contacts.”
Hajime takes it unsteadily. A shitty, half-folded, fuschia pink olive branch. It’s Oikawa’s handwriting, the rushed, loopy, near-illegible scrawl that has stayed frozen in time since they were in fifth grade. But he can read it. Hajime swallows hard; of course he can read it.
“Thanks,” he says dumbly, and when he glances up he’s unprepared for the expression on Oikawa’s face.
“They told me it was a surprise party for Yahaba. Like they told you. Something told me you might be here, though, seemed like the kind of thing they would try to do for us, so I thought—” He gestures feebly at the post-it in Hajime’s hands, falters for a moment. His practiced words seem to run out. Eventually, he smiles. “Since we’re on the same continent again, and all.”
Hajime’s skin is hot static. “Yeah,” he says, and he feels like he’s coming undone at the edges. Oikawa’s face is a blur, ancient, and bright. “Yeah.”
Oikawa excuses himself, then, something about an early wake-up that Hajime doesn’t really hear, and in the next second he’s vanished through the glass doors. Gone as quickly as he came.
Hajime holds up the sticky note against the pitch-dark backdrop of midsummer Tokyo. It flutters a little bit, and the background blurs, and the whole world goes silent around him. In seconds, he has the numbers memorized.
Just so that they can’t slip away again.
<<<
When Oikawa was in high school, he wore the same Disneyland Tokyo t-shirt to bed every night. By their third year he had worn and washed it enough times that it was threadbare all over and the logo was a bleach-white ghost of itself, and the collar sagged low over his collarbones. It was one of a hundred things he wouldn’t hear Hajime’s opinion about. That, and his taste in sci-fi novels, and his preference for milk bread— eat a vegetable, shittykawa —and how late he stayed at the gym to practice. The shirt was the way he brandished his stubbornness. He’d show up to their impromptu sleepovers with it stuffed in his bag and change into it as soon as possible and then turn to Hajime, beaming, a wordless challenge to poke fun at it.
Hajime has a vague memory of himself, laying sprawled out on his bedroom floor, watching Oikawa pull it over his head for the hundredth time and deciding to bite. Are you ever going to get a different shirt, Oikawa?
A megawatt grin. No.
It was months later that it dawned on Hajime what the shirt was. His mother was cleaning out one of their closets, digging out bins of old schoolwork and clothes, and with it, a dozen random souveniers from Disneyland Tokyo. Among them, tucked between two binders and a plastic light-up Buzz Lightyear, was a Disneyland Tokyo shirt.
Hajime had unfurled it and stared, and understood only after several long moments. It was a shirt identical to Oikawa’s, only that this one was near-unrecognisable in its unworn, unwashed state, the logo still plasticky and saturated. They’d gotten matching ones, when they went together in middle school. Hajime had forgotten—Oikawa hadn’t.
Once Hajime saw it in the shirt, he began to see it everywhere, in everything Oikawa did. The space documentaries that he watched over and over again and never grew tired of, even when the CDs began to skip. The Super Sentai pen he always kept in his binder, the only thing he would take notes with, even when the cap fell off and it wouldn’t click anymore. The same brand of milk bread, even when the grocery store stopped carrying it and he had to go the town over. The jump serves, the jump serves. Even after he twisted his knee. The jump serves.
Even after he twisted his knee for the second time, in their first year, badly, and he was on the court gasping in Hajime’s arms, and their coach pulled him out of practice and his doctor put him in a brace—the jump serves.
Oikawa loved things to the point of destruction. His own destruction, sometimes. He would wear shirts until they were threadbare and watch the same movies until he had them memorized and talk to the same person every day until their lives contained nothing, nothing else, and he would stay at the gym and drive balls into the floor until the sun was gone and the stars were his only witness, and would let nothing stop him, even his own body slowly coming apart. Hajime would look at him, and that brilliant smile, and feel like he was holding a bomb in his hands.
Mention of Jose Blanco came towards the end of their third year. It was another one of those memories that Oikawa remembered so much better than Hajime did: the two of them as kids, whiteknuckling the railing at the exhibition match between Argentina and Japan, Oikawa chubby-cheeked, slack-jawed in wonder, Hajime asking himself what was so cool about a setter who only got switched in halfway through the third set.
A starry-eyed Oikawa explained it to him later, after he got that godforsaken jockstrap signed, his hands splayed out in the air: He got the hitters to do so much better. You don’t even notice him, but he’s why they won the whole game!
So it wasn’t a great surprise, eight years later, when Oikawa came barreling through Hajime’s back door, telling him that he met Jose Blanco again. They were third-years. He was wild-haired, wide-eyed, sloppily dressed in a way that was rare for him, with one hoodie string tucked in and the other frayed where he’d been chewing on it. Oikawa had figured out that he was stunning and that girls liked him sometime during middle school; this image of him, dressed like he was when no one was looking, was a time capsule from the years before that. His voice, breathless: “ Iwa-chan. I met Jose Blanco .”
This was within the first few weeks after they’d lost in the preliminaries to Karasuno, the thin and hazy stretch of time of which Hajime can remember little. He remembers mostly Oikawa, who had suddenly been too small for his own body, unmoored, the hard-won strength in his limbs a useless reminder of where he was not headed. It had been excruciating to watch him, full-grown and at the fullest flush of his skill, falling from the tower he’d built himself, to the point where Hajime’s own pain was an afterthought. He’d said he wasn’t sure if he wanted to continue volleyball at all, and Hajime had tried to gently coax him away from that thought, a bandage he’d slapped on a pride so wounded he didn’t know what to do with it. There was, ultimately, no one who could make it better, no matter how desperately Hajime wanted to.
This was also around the time when Hajime decided where he was going to college. A sports science program in California, at UC Irvine. It was the time of year where third years’ plans slowly crystalized, where conversations that did not begin with discussion of college always arrived there eventually, and Oikawa ducked out when they did. Hajime had decided, a while ago, that proximity to volleyball was going to be enough. He was not the one slamming serves over a net into the night, he was the one telling that guy to go home.
And Oikawa had applied there, too, and gotten in. It was obvious at the time, like muscle memory, the two of them doing things together. Just don’t make Irvine the only place you apply, shittykawa. And he hadn’t—there were places in Tokyo, in Nagasaki, acceptance letters received and opened and left on his dining room table.
That was before they last to Karasuno; things had only unraveled further since then, and college had only drifted further from Oikawa’s mind. He hadn’t sent in any commitment letters yet. Hajime had.
“I met Jose Blanco.” Oikawa was breathless, stepping into Hajime’s living room, pushing his bangs out of his eyes. It was late in the afternoon; they’d gotten out of class hours ago, would have just gotten out of practice, if they’d had practice. “Irihata said he was in the area for a conference. I got to talk to him.”
And Hajime, cross-legged on his floor, had set down his homework and smiled for him. He hadn’t seen Oikawa so energized since they lost; he floated around school, eyes half-lidded, sheltering his pride the way animals hide injured limbs. Maybe that’s what it took, Hajime thought, brushing elbows with a childhood idol. “Did he tell you you’re stupid for wanting to quit volleyball?”
Oikawa pulled a face that told Hajime he was trying not to smile. They’d begun joking about it, gently, Hajime studying his reactions carefully each time. Don’t go lost on me.
“He told me that—” Oikawa stopped, sat on the floor, entangled his legs with Hajime’s. His skin was flushed-hot, his fingers tapping against Hajime’s leg. His eyes searched the floor.
“Told you that I was right? That it’s a stupid idea to quit?” It was easier on him this way, when Hajime framed it as a petty argument, and not a matter of lifelong dreams. Hajime leaned back until his head rested on the couch, considered the ceiling, took away the pressure of his gaze. “Interesting.”
Oikawa took a long breath in, and exhaled slowly. Maybe the initial rush had worn away, Hajime thought. He stared at the ceiling fan and tried to picture the look on Oikawa’s face, his fine eyebrows pinched, his lips twisted into a frown, tried to feel the thoughts beneath his skin before he let him out. It had been a very bad three weeks. To have him practically in his lap here, talking about it, was a miracle. No sudden movements.
“I shouldn’t be surprised,” Oikawa said. It was quiet, like a secret, even though no one else was in the room. “I shouldn’t be surprised that something like this happened. Is what he said.”
Hajime wanted to jerk his head down and stare at him, but he stopped himself. It was the most candid Oikawa had been since it happened. “What do you mean?” He forced his voice steady.
“That there’s someone luckier than me. Roadblocks. Setbacks, I guess.”
Hajime chewed on the thought; Oikawa was dancing around it. “He said that you shouldn’t be surprised that we lost?” he asked. We was easier than you, even if they both knew who felt it more.
“Yeah.” A silence. “He asked me if I think I’m at the peak of my skill.”
Hajime’s head jerked up of its own accord. Oikawa stared back at him, moony-eyed, his own sorrow sketched so plainly across his face. So rarely was he so open, so readable. It was easy to picture Jose Blanco, silver-haired, wisened with age, seeing Oikawa clearly enough to ask questions like this.
Hajime dug his heels in. “Well, are you?” Tell me no.
Oikawa’s face contorted. He never liked this, staring things down directly and naming them. There was always some glittering deflection at the ready; Hajime watched as he set it down, this time. “I don’t think so.”
“I don’t think so either,” Hajime said.
He had learned, in all his years with Oikawa, to tell when he still had something left to say. Now was one of those times, with Oikawa’s cheek turned to him, his gaze thrown as far across the room as it would go.
“Spit it out, shittykawa.”
“He said he would help me, if I wanted to take a shot at the Argentinean league.”
Hajime went still. Oikawa’s eyes flicked to him and held him pinned there, searching his reaction.
They both knew what this would mean. The understanding somehow drew the air taut, a third presence in the in the room. Oikawa had jokingly flirted with the idea of going abroad before. Don’t you think I’d fit right in in the Italian league, Iwa-chan? But that, like every other glitteringly ironic quip of his, hid a grain of truth. Hajime had seen it all along, under the surface, the lingering gleam in his eye whenever he talked about it. Maybe he should have said something sooner, sober enough to shock him, like: Yeah, shittykawa, you actually would. You should go for it.
Because now Oikawa presented it flinchingly, like he was ready for Hajime to balk at him. It had been weeks since Oikawa had said anything that would suggest he had any interest in playing more volleyball, and here he was again, wounded, cautiously owning up to his desires, waiting to be beaten back again. Something deep within Hajime ached.
“Actually,” Hajime began. They both knew what going to Argentina would mean; it didn’t need to be said. Hajime knew that he was holding something very fragile in his hands. A tipping point. He spoke gently, as if touching a fresh bruise: “I think that would be really cool, Oikawa. Do you want to?”
Something in Oikawa’s expression released. He turned away again, and Hajime was presented with his cheek, and his averted gaze. He watched his breath enter and leave him. Yes, he thought, I know the answer is yes. Their legs were entangled, their skin pressed together, Hajime thought could feel the word there, before it was spoken.
“I think so,” Oikawa said finally, and he was seven years old again, worrying a glance in Hajime’s direction, hoping to find a smile on his face. “I think, yeah.”
Hajime gave him the smile he was looking for. He would give him that smile again and again, every day of their lives, as many times as he wanted it.
“Then I think you should do it, shittykawa.”
He should have insisted, then. He should have made him commit, in that moment. Maybe things would have been easier.
<<<
“Ueno,” Hajime says. “Do you have any clue where that shirt is?”
“Huh?” Ueno’s sprawled out on the couch, a mug of tea in his fist, his phone glued to his face. Watching a Bundesliga match, probably. What did he say it was earlier, Dortmund against Munich? He is a vegetable whose eyes don’t move away from the screen. “How am I supposed to know what the hell shirt you’re talking about?”
It’s 8 P.M. in Osaka, and Hajime’s on the floor of their apartment, frowning at a blue button-down. He’s built a semicircle around himself of stacks of jeans and shirts, all of them extracted from their single filing cabinet, which sits crooked and half-empty behind him. It was a gift from professor Utsui, his cheeky way of telling them that they were disorganized messes and needed to keep their papers in order.
Professor Utsui was right. They don't use it to keep their papers in order; like idiots, they use it to store their clothes. Ueno and Hajime’s apartment in Irvine had been in dire need of storage space, and the one they’re renting for the summer in Osaka is no better. Seven weeks into their internship, and they’re only halfway unpacked. Mutual disablers, Utsui had called them. Hajime smiles whenever he thinks about it.
“The one, the—” Hajime paws through a stack of t-shirts, the ones Americans love to hand out for free at events, clubs, fun-runs, an intricate backlog of his undergraduate recreation. “It’s white. Kinda old. From 2007. I brought it with me from home, freshman year.” He flips over a pair of jeans, scowls. “Disneyland Tokyo?”
Ueno makes a face, and ceremoniously slides off the couch onto the floor beside him. An arm is thrown around Hajime’s shoulders, and his phone is tossed onto the carpet, soccer announcers’ voices still squeaking out of the speakers. He begins to study Hajime’s laundry with him. “I’m pretty sure I’ve never seen you wear anything like that, what the hell do you need it for now?”
“I dunno, I. . .” But Hajime knows he’ll get him if he tries to deflect. Ueno’s known him for five years and lived with him for three, a soccer-player-turned-sports-scientist from his program in Irvine, one of the few others from Japan, a friend upon arrival. They’d applied for the same research internship in Osaka last year, both gotten in, and decided to go from living in Irvine together to living in Osaka together. The kind of relationship that leaves fingerprints on the whole rest of your life. “I, uh, I’m seeing someone soon, and it would be— It’s relevant.” He knows that he’s done for as soon as it comes out of his mouth.
Ueno snorts, and Hajime knows he’s staring, but he refuses to meet his gaze. “What kind of friend of yours wants to see you in a fucking Disneyland Tokyo shirt from 2007?”
Hajime’s face screws up. It sounds ridiculous, put like that. “I’m not going to wear it, it’s just something I want to find.”
Ueno is silent. He hesitates for a moment, and then grabs a shirt out of Hajime’s hand, frowns at it himself. “I really don’t think you’re gonna find it in here, dude. Ir’s probably gone. You never wore it, anyways.” He tosses it to the side carelessly; Hajime can practically hear the question forming in his head. “Do I know this guy?”
Hajime presses his lips together. Ueno’s arm around his shoulders is suddenly very heavy. “‘Kawa,” he says, like cutting a syllable off will help.
“Huh?”
“Oikawa.” Hajime leans back so they can make eye contact. “Argentina.” His stomach swoops.
“What?” Ueno’s eyes widen, and his face goes slack with shock. “He’s back?”
Hajime wants to laugh. It’s like Makki gawking at him in the kitchen: It’s that bad? The things he’s managed to hide from people.
“Yeah, he’s, ah—” Hajime pushes Ueno’s hand away and puts down the t-shirt, slips out from under his arm, and stands to begin yanking open the drawers in their filing cabinet, like the gravity of it needs space to occupy. He tries to formulate an explanation, paging through layer after layer of shirts, and finds himself smiling. He’s here for the Olympics. He hasn’t talked to Ueno about Oikawa in months, something like that would sound ridiculous.
But isn’t that what this is? Ridiculous? Hajime lets himself smile. “Yeah, he made it onto the Argentinean Olympic team for indoor. He’s here for the games.”
“ What? You’re fucking with me.”
And Hajime laughs, and meets Ueno’s wide-eyed gaze with a smile. His own reaction, two months late. “I’m not, though. I know. It’s crazy.”
“But I thought you guys—” Hajime watches the thought cross Ueno’s mind, watches him stop himself.
Hajime’s smile drops. “Yeah, we did,” he says, if only to prevent him from saying the rest of it. We did. He lets it sit for a moment.
“But I ran into him at a party last weekend,” Hajime continues, “and he, well—” He gave me his number and then invited me to watch the Argentinean national team practice. The shirt is just— I just want to see it.
Hajime’s entire face stings, the feeling striking him all at once. It gives him vertigo, even thinking about saying it, and he lets himself chicken out. “Well, we made plans. It’ll be nice to see him again,” he says mildly. “Shirt doesn’t actually matter.”
Ueno is silent for a long time. “It’ll be nice. Do you think so?” he asks. The question is quiet and thoughtful in a way his questions so rarely are; it makes Hajime’s head jerk towards him.
It’s a question he’s asked himself, a dozen times. Staring Ueno in the eyes, now, he’s forced to confront it again. And it’s big this time, like God is watching, or Oikawa, or something.
“Yeah, I think it’ll be nice,” he says, and he means it.
They find the shirt thirty minutes later, wedged and half-crumpled in the back of the bottom drawer. Sure seems like you cared about this thing, huh, Hajime. The joke is that he does. Still in perfect condition, untouched by time, the logo shiny and bright and folded over itself only a little bit. A pristine time capsule.
Ueno laughs at him, when he sees Hajime going to bed in it that night, and Hajime can only smile, because not even Ueno knows.
<<<
Oikawa [1:26]
it’s the south gym
use the entrance by the parking garage
if the lady at the front desk gives you a hard time tell her you know oikawa tooru:)
Me [1:29]
She didn’t give me a hard time.
Oikawa [1:30]
good!!
And then a string of volleyball emojis. They’re fifteen again, and Oikawa is blowing up his phone, and Hajime is smiling all the way down the hallway of the south building of Tokyo’s Ariake Arena. It’s a Monday, and he’d gotten Ueno to cover an entire afternoon at the lab for him, hadn’t even really had to work for it, something like: Oh, for an Olympian, sure, and a narrowly-dodged swipe at Hajime’s head. Hajime had left work half an hour early, just to be safe, and waited in his car in the parking garage for fifteen minutes, staring out over the bay and seeing nothing. The arena in his rear-view mirror was a beautiful work of glass, grand and glistening, suddenly the most Olympian thing he’d ever laid eyes on. Of course Oikawa was here, he’d thought without an ounce of irony. Something in his chest had keened. Of course.
They’d been texting for only a few days. Hajime jumped each time his phone went off. It felt like playing a very precarious game of chess, conversation launched back and forth like a hot coal, each of them afraid to respond too soon or too late. The initial invitation two days ago had been cautious to the point of formality. The games began in two weeks; his team had the arena booked for practice on Monday, Oikawa’d explained, and bringing along friends and family to watch wasn’t expressly forbidden, which meant that his teammates did it all the time. It was out of the blue:
i just thought you might want to see one of our practices. i know you have work, so if you can’t make it, that’s totally cool
Hajime had stood in the lab and stared at his phone, dumbstruck, and pushed against the sudden swooping feeling in his gut. It might have been the least Oikawa Tooru text message ever sent, wishy-washy in a way that Oikawa had never been with him before, none of the cocksure theatrics of their previous lifetime. But maybe that’s where they were at, he’d thought, rendered stiff by the sheer number of years, afraid to make any sudden movements. He’d sent an equally discreet response after drafting it a dozen times, determined to betray exactly none of the swelling excitement in his chest. Yeah, actually, I’d like to come.
It’s a laughably unfamiliar way to speak to him, but none of that seems to matter, now, because he’s made it through the automatic doors of Ariake Arena and past the friendly woman at the desk who hadn’t questioned him at all, and in seconds the gaping maw of the arena’s center is open before him, a blue-linoleum sea beneath a fluorescent sky. It smells like volleyball, fresh rubber against floor, and for a second the gap of years is closed and he is weightless. Of course Oikawa is here.
The Argentinean team is a huddle of baby blue gathered in a far corner of the court, and he wanders into the stands, a few rows up, where he hopes he’s not too visible. The arena is polished-bright, seats of orange plastic creaking under their own newness. His gaze wanders, and then he double-takes at the sight of another person, sitting at the very end of the row. A woman with a dark ponytail, waving at him.
“One of the reporters?” she asks, in perfect English, when he approaches.
If California granted him one thing, it was this. She must be Argentinean, he realizes, the girlfriend or sister of one of Oikawa’s teammates. She’s blithely comfortable, a handbag strewn across the seat beside her, legs crossed loosely at the ankle, like she’s been here before. “No,” he says, and he feels himself smile as he sits. It’s a relief not to be the only onlooker. “Er, a friend. Just here to watch their practice.”
“Ah.” Her gaze lingers on him. Not unfriendly, only gauging. Gold baubles swing from her ears. “I don’t believe I’ve met you before. A friend of which one?”
“The setter,” he says, and it’s only in the moment after that he realizes she must know the players by name.
“Oikawa?” She beams. “He told us he was expecting someone today. You must be Iwaizumi.”
Hajime shuts his mouth, so he doesn’t gawk. “Yeah,” he says, a couple seconds late. He told us he was expecting someone today.
“I’m Elena.” She seems to offer it as a sort of explanation, alongside a smile. When she holds out her hand he shakes it. “I’m Estrada’s wife. Pleasure to meet you.”
Estrada. It’s a name he’s heard before, he thinks, and when she sees the confused look on his face and goes on to explain that Estrada’s the captain, this rings true. She comes to almost all of their practices, she tells him, and the only expectation for visitors is that they don’t take any photos or videos. She’s friendly and talkative in the open way of most Americans, which is one of the hundred things he misses about California, and she goes on to tell him about the rest of the roster and the coaches, their practice schedule, when their first games are.
“Did Oikawa not tell you when their games are?” She arrives there finally, as they’re watching the team do receive warmups, she’s telling him their game schedule, and Hajime is putting the dates and times in his phone’s calendar.
Hajime grimaces for a moment. “Er, no,” he says, and he tries to ignore the surprise on her face. “I’m from out of town. Didn’t know if I was going to be able to make it up for the games.” It’s a half-truth.
“Oh,” she says. “Well, do you plan on coming? Their first match is against Germany.”
Hajime looks up, across the court, where the team is splitting off into groups to scrimmage. His thumb hovers over the part of his phone’s calendar where the first match is listed: Thursday, August 4, 2020, 2:00 P.M., Ariake Arena. He can see the number 3 on the back of Oikawa’s jersey flashing through the grid of the net. Oikawa had glanced and waved at him earlier, while the team was doing pass drills, his smile like a beacon shot across the whole room. It had given him vertigo.
Hell, Ueno can probably cover him at the lab for another afternoon.
“Yeah,” he says, “I’ll make it.”
The Argentinean national team is like a well-conducted orchestra. It’s been so long since Hajime got to watch world-class volleyball up close, even just a practice. The last time was probably sometime before he moved to California, he realizes; he got to crush his friends in pick-up games during undergrad, but the sport was so small in the US, and professional matches weren’t anything like this.
Carlos told me that the whole team seemed to change once Oikawa joined them, Elena tells him, after a particularly long rally. Hajime can see it. The side of the net Oikawa is on is the site of acrobatics, hitters reaching for spikes Hajime would have thought impossible until they’ve struck them. Oikawa wrists flash, and the ball is on the other side of the court, and the whistle blows, and they’re shouting in Spanish as they crowd around Oikawa to smack him between the shoulderblades. His team loves him. He laughs, and says something Hajime can’t understand, and the sheer absurdity of it makes him smile. He’s a different shade than Seijou teal, now, but blue. Always blue.
And as the practice goes on, Hajime can see nothing but him, but he knows another spectator might not. He quietly sets up shot after shot that makes his hitters look like stars. His side of the net wins the first round, and then the next. He’s like Jose Blanco , Hajime realizes, the way he steers the whole game silently, pulling strings in the background. Hajime can’t help but remember the starry-eyed boy he knew, his hands splayed out in the air, reaching for the world itself: He got the hitters to do so much better. You don’t even notice him, but he’s why they won the whole game!
Something within him aches.
And, God, he thinks, maybe the distance between them has never been more obvious than in this moment, with him on the sidelines, Oikawa speaking a foreign language in a foreign jersey in an Olympic arena in front of him. Maybe he’s never stared it so squarely in the face. And it should hurt, he thinks from some distant place, it really ought to hurt, but Oikawa glances at him through the net for the dozenth time, and he gets another one of those light-beam smiles, and the world is a singular hum.
“He was young,” Elena says, “When Carlos met him.” It’s late afternoon and they’re in the team’s final scrimmage now, bearded faces sweat-soaked, players leaning over their knees. Oikawa’s side of the court has won all but one of them. He leaps, now, and sends a toss flying to the back of the court. A hitter slams the ball into the floor. The whistle blows. 23-20.
Hajime jerks his head towards her. “Hm?” She’s chatted with him the whole time, telling him about this player and that, and he’s let himself sit back and put together an image of their national team, piece by piece. It’s nice to speak English again. Oikawa’s not the only one who went abroad.
“Oikawa, I mean.” She smiles at him. “Carlos met him in the Argentinean league the year after he moved.”
“Oh?” Hajime goes still, suddenly, under her gaze. There’s something she wants to say. “Did he?”
She nods, and there’s a quiet knowingness to it. It’s odd to speak to someone who has seen the years in-between, accessed the only version of Oikawa that he hasn’t. “My husband was on a team from Buenos Aires, but we moved to San Juan that year. Oikawa was on that team. He said he’s never seen someone work so hard. Or—” She laughs. “Learn Spanish so quickly.”
Fondness, sudden to the point of nausea. “Oh, that’s him.”
She’s watching him, and she nods again. “I met Oikawa later that year, too. He wanted more than anything to make it to the Olympic games. And it was surprising, a nineteen-year-old from a foreign country, so dead-set on something so lofty and difficult. So willing to learn the language. To trade passports to play for Argentina, even.”
She lets that hang, and Hajime eventually hums in acknowledgement. His face is beginning to sting.
“And it wasn’t Rio he cared about, he never talked about Rio. It was always Tokyo.”
The stinging has spread to his neck. Hajime can only nod.
She’s watching him still, the slightest smile on her face. “Carlos always wondered why. I did too. Tokyo’s in his home country, after all. I never knew why he wanted to work so hard in Argentina, just to come home. For a while we didn’t understand. What did he have to prove?”
Hajime is silent.
“But—I think I understand now.” She takes a breath in. “It’s been a while since you’ve seen your friend, right?”
Hajime, from a great distance, meets her gaze and nods.
She smiles softly, and nods back, and pulls her gaze to the floor. Hajime is static, suspended in air. Somewhere far away, a whistle blows, and players begin spilling off the court.
“I’m glad you’re here, Iwaizumi,” she says. “Today wasn’t the first time he talked about you.”
Oikawa finds them minutes later. Did’ya enjoy watching us practice, Iwa-chan? He drags Hajime off the stands and begins introducing him to everyone, and Hajime is still static, suspended in air. It’s so familiar of Oikawa, the way he grabs him by the wrist, throws an arm around his shoulders, presents him to his teammates as my favorite vice-captain, like this isn’t the second in-person interaction they’ve had in five years; it’s convincing enough that he wonders for a second if everything’s normal. He smiles genuinely and shakes one hand after another, blue-clad men taller and tanner and more bearded than him, asking Oikawa questions in Spanish over his head. It’s one long freefall, one long vertigo loop. Oikawa’s light-beam smile up close. His arm around his shoulders like a firebrand. He meets the coach, he’s pretty sure, a short man with another beard who smiles at Oikawa brightly. So you’re Oikawa’s friend from high school? We like him.
Hajime, dumb with shock, in his own head: I like him too.
The team clears out eventually, and everyone disappears into the locker room, and he and Oikawa linger in the cool vastness of the stadium while the net gets taken down. Oikawa’s sitting on the bench, legs crossed at the ankle, cheerfully chatting away about their schedule leading up to the Games. “Our dorms in the Olympic Village are, like, way bigger than. . .”
Hajime tries to listen. But he’s elsewhere, a thousand miles and a couple years away, picturing Oikawa at Elena’s dinner table, skinnier and pale with youth, telling them that he wants to go to the Tokyo Olympics. Biking through Sao Paolo, flying from practice to practice, to the gym, to bed, to practice, to practice again, Tokyo a monolith on the horizon—
Today wasn’t the first time he talked about you.
All the times Hajime had thought he’d been missing from the picture.
He stares at Oikawa’s sky-blue uniform shirt and tries to get his vision to focus. Oikawa is saying something about one of his teammates. Hajime needs to go soon, he knows, get back to Osaka in time to begin catching up on the work he’s missed, but—
“Iwaizumi?” Oikawa’s waving a hand at him, eyebrows raised, smile slipping. “Zoned out?”
The expanse of the arena snaps into focus around him. It’s so large, he thinks helplessly, so freshly-minted, the linoleum so new that it squeaks when he resettles his weight. Oikawa’s presence expands to fill the space. It’s not difficult to imagine him here two weeks from now, beaming beneath a dozen cameras, thousands of pairs of eyes. And, God— Oikawa’s being so familiar with him, so eager, filling Hajime’s stunned silences, introducing him to each one of his teammates, constantly searching his face.
He wanted to work so hard in Argentina, just to come home.
“Iwaizumi?” Oikawa’s face has fallen.
“What? Yeah.” Hajime blinks at him. The stadium snaps into focus again. He can only hear his own heartbeat. “Sorry. Zoned out.”
Oikawa is silent on the bench, watching him. That gaze dissolves the distance of years, and he’s five years old, and he’s fifteen, and he’s twenty-five. Just to come home. The sight of him is blurry. Oikawa is frowning. He has to do something. Oikawa starts talking again: “Iwaizumi, are you—”
“Oikawa.” Hajime cuts him off, seized by the stinging in his gut. Who is he, now, if he doesn’t make up for this? “I’m driving up to Sendai this weekend. To visit my mom.”
Oikawa blinks. “Huh?”
“She would love to see you.” Vertigo, like driving off a cliff: “Come up with me.”
A hand, outstretched, over the Sonora, Yucatan, Panama, the Andes. The terror of it doesn’t matter. All the times they hung up, or Hajime let the phone ring out, or didn’t call at all. Maybe those won’t matter either, if they get this one right.
Oikawa’s eyes, wide with shock.
It’s my turn to surprise you.
“Sure. Yeah.” Wide with hope. “Of course.”