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Memories are a weird concept.
It’s weird how some of them are important and some of them are immediately forgotten, how one can be the most precious thing someone can give and others can leave scars across hearts that never fully heal and how a few are impossible to remember no matter how hard you try.
(a majority of his childhood memories include just one obnoxious person besides his parents, but that isn’t really important now.)
It has always been strange to Iwaizumi how some people are infinitely more important than others, how some stay and others go for seemingly no reason at all. It’s not that he’s particularly cared about most of them, just as long as there were those few people that did matter, he didn’t really need anything else. There honestly aren’t many he considered vital to his existence, the number he could probably count on one hand.
(one stands out in particular he can admit, if a bit begrudgedly.)
“Iwa-chan, remember this?”
The room smells like musty attic and old clothing, memories stuffed in styrofoam peanut filled storage containers and preserved in breakable self portraits. Packed cardboard boxes piled at the doorway and masking tape slapped haphazardly across flaps, they had finally finished packing after days of unending backaches and sleeping on the floor with each other as the primary source of warmth. It had taken much longer than expected, Oikawa never wanting to exert actual energy (“Iwa-chan, there’s the new Transformers movie on tv tonight,” or “I’d much rather just give you a blowjob on the couch than move the couch out right now.”) and Iwaizumi not having the patience to really motivate him in the end.
(the Transformers movie was awful as expected and the blowjob was fantastic.)
But now the walls had been striped bare and wooden floors completely cleared all except for him, sprawled out on the single still-unpacked blanket; shirt hiked up and half off so that his pale collar bone and stomach lay exposed. Mussed and fluffy hair with streaks of auburn accented along with the sunlight from the single window falling in mess, eyes half lidded and mouth drawn up in an innocent, almost self important smirk. If Iwaizumi looked close enough there was a strip of purple fabric peeking from Oikawa’s jeans, no doubt his favorite spaceship patterned underwear that he had owned since high school (although that was a fact that Oikawa himself would never admit).
(he has always been important, Iwaizumi would be lying to himself if he didn’t know so,)
They had found it in one of the boxes shoved in the back of a closet, an ancient and dusty old photo album that was probably from Oikawa’s mother back when he had initially left the house two years ago and moved into the apartment they sat in now. It’s brown binding and green canvas cover had faded with the years and lack of sunlight, but every single photo slide into it’s plastic holders still remained as they always had: untouched and colorful like they were taken only yesterday.
(everywhere he went, Oikawa always seemed to be there too,)
Two kids huddled together, one slung over the other’s back with a toothy grin and the other bent over and petulant. The deep color of the sky matches the neon of the blue goggles dangling loosely off Oikawa’s neck and the bucket filled with sand clenched in Iwaizumi’s left hand. It had been scorching hot outside that day, and Iwaizumi had cut the bottom of his foot on a seashell and Oikawa insisted on carrying him back to shore, complaining the whole way about how heavy Iwaizumi was despite himself. They had almost fallen over completely more than a few times, Oikawa and his scrawny legs barely able to keep Iwaizumi’s feet off the sand. He had ended up with four neat blue stitches for that cut, and glancing down to his left leg all the way down he can see the minuscule scar, white and barely there at all anymore after the passage of time.
(Iwaizumi really can’t stand him sometimes, just like back then)
“You wouldn't stop whining that whole day. How could I forget."
He shifts his weight down to his arms, leaning backwards from his position on the other half of the blanket. Oikawa shifts accordingly too, nestling deeper into his position on his lap, head resting in the crook of his chest and shoulder. Iwaizumi can feel the gentle and easy rise and fall of his breathing, hand tracing lazy circles on his leg. There’s a kind of drunkenness to his movements and maybe its the two half empty bottles of beer at his feet or the nostalgia of digging up summers long gone but Iwaizumi swears the happiness is radiating off of Oikawa in waves, and half of him wishes he would cut it out already.
(the other half of him wishes it would never stop.)
Oikawa sighs and turns his head ever so slightly to see Iwaizumi’s face, breath smelling faintly of alcohol and spearmint mouthwash. His eyes turn playful with sleepiness and warmth, and it’s a look that the other knows all too well; it is the gentle persistence that has never failed to make Iwaizumi’s resolve falter when necessary or support him in their longest hours.
“You’re smiling, Hajime.”
“So are you."
(it’s this kind of Oikawa he can’t get enough of, no matter how his words portray him,)
Peering over his shoulder, Iwaizumi can see some of the other carefully placed photographs, laminated and far away looking, like the two bright eyed and scuffed up children of this other world in the photos couldn’t possibly be the two of them. It’s too remote, too far removed, like looking through the looking glass into another person’s life that parallels his own. Yet they all flash across his eyes in the split second he sees them, sputtering like camera flashes in brilliant colors and disappearing again like they never existed.
(Oikawa was an island only he had ever been able to reach,)
Their first day of grade school, their uniforms still a bit too big and Iwaizumi is taller by a good three inches. Oikawa with his gap toothed smile, hair unruly and collar already stained with god knows what kind of food, Iwaizumi with a runny nose and a band aid plastered across his ruddy chin. It’s blurred, almost like whoever was taking it was in a hurry to capture the moment, afraid it might slip away forever. He doesn’t even remember who had taken it or the fact that it had been taken at all, but he remembers snippets of that day still with clarity.
(Oikawa had held onto the back of his shirt all day and hid repeating that he wanted to go home like it would magically send him there. his shyness had worn off with time, as was evident by his later reputation.)
A festival from the end of elementary school; all bright colored lights and grins that stretch from one ear to the next. This, this one he remembers a little too vividly for his own good. Maybe it’s because that night when the fireworks went off he happened to look for a little too long at Oikawa’s face and it did something funny to his chest that kind of felt like butterflies but also could have been a mini aneurysm. The feeling was foreign and more than terrifying in the giant bursting of sounds and how he suddenly couldn’t breathe when Oikawa’s eyes danced with brilliant reds and iridescent greens, his gaze as steady and warm as the sun that would rise the next morning. It felt so natural, sitting side by side with their leftover plates of takoyaki and bags of goldfish won (he had won it, but Oikawa had begged and naturally, as with most things between them, Iwaizumi had handed it over without much of any real fight); and it was the first sense of true belonging that he can remember feeling in the small spectrum of his life.
(Oikawa had always had that way about him, the way that made the girls hurry with blushing whispers and delicate laughter, but not for Iwaizumi, never for Iwaizumi-)
And then he had smiled, a real smile, and Iwaizumi didn’t know whether he wanted to punch his face or kiss it.
(-until then, of course.)
There’s one of after their first win together in their second year of middle school, blue and white uniforms sweaty and shirts half untucked with hastily pasted on smiles and hands smacked together in a fleeting high five. It had been their first game as a pair officially, and Iwaizumi remembered thinking at the end of that game that as long as they were together they could do anything. There wasn’t a match they couldn’t win, wasn’t an opponent they couldn’t topple because they were the combination that everyone had been waiting to rise to full potential, linked in more ways than one.
That night when they had walked home together he fought the urge to reach out and grasp onto Oikawa’s hand, to feel those familiar and shaking muscles he had known for as long as he could remember and hold it as tight as he could. He had bit his tongue and tried to avoid eye contact as much as possible, gluing his stare to the cracks in the sidewalk as they went.
(this was the first time, and it definitely wouldn’t be the last)
“Even then…”
He starts and trails off again, not sure where to take the sentiment thats forming at his lips and he grinds his teeth in a futile attempt not to speak anymore.
“Hm?” A curved brow and glinting eyes find their way into his vision with the questioning hum, and wow he really wants to kiss him right now what in the world is-
As a second (and more viable) option, he points in the direction of the glossy photographs neatly sitting in their place holders.
“Just thinking I...loved you-”
(Oikawa’s eyes widen the slightest fraction, his mouth drops every so gently and his gaze softens; it’s a small comfort to know that Iwaizumi is the only one who has ever seen this look.)
“Even then. I loved you.”
The air is soft and warm between them for a moment, time passes so slow it’s nearly stopped and then Oikawa breaths for what feels like the first time in an hour,
“Oh.”
The finger that was tracing patterns across his leg stills and he’s aware of moving slightly to accommodate for how close they are now, Oikawa stretching to bump their foreheads together and nudge his nose against Iwaizumi’s cheek. His laugh is breathless and a little verklempt when it finally comes, stirring something in Iwaizumi’s brain that almost feels nostalgic:
“Aren’t we sentimental today, Iwa-chan. That’s so unlike you.”
“Shut up.”
(it lacks any bite and he really doesn’t mean it at all and it’s doubtful Oikawa will listen anyway because now Iwaizumi can’t help the enamored, sighing laughter that mingles in the shared space in between their mouths)
When their lips finally meet its with lazy movements and gentle presses, and he isn’t sure whether it’s the alcohol or melancholy feeling of simply existing in the same space as Oikawa but something tastes sweeter with a little more tenderness than usual; a familiar ache that resonates through his throat and down to his toes. Out of sheer habit his hands find their way to Oikawa’s hips and trail paths across his sides, reveling in the way the staccato ridges of his ribcage and flushed skin feels beneath his fingertips.
By the time they pull apart he realizes he’s lying across the floor with Oikawa sprawled across his chest, arms planted on either side of his head and lips ghosting their presence over his own.
“Me too.”
(it’s hardly there at all, practically whispered like it came from Iwaizumi himself but when he opens his eyes into Oikawa’s they are pools of globbing amber and sunlight and he can’t breathe again,)
“I always...always...always-”
(Iwaizumi just kisses him again because he simply cannot take it anymore and can already guess what Oikawa was trying to force out of his trepid and swollen lips, and that doesn’t really matter right now anyway,)
“Looks who’s the sentimental one now.”
It doesn’t matter, because deep down, Iwaizumi has known all along, always-
(“I love you.”)