Chapter Text
– – –
It’s nearing the end of a long day and Iwaizumi is finishing his last appointment, a consultation with a new patient. Like many people in middle age, Kimura-san had recently taken up running to help manage his weight. After successfully shedding a few pounds, he had decided to take the sport further and signed up for his first 5K run, and just like many of Iwaizumi’s other patients at Kimura-san’s age, grew over-eager; forgetting to do the proper stretches and not giving himself enough rest, and soon started to feel a dull pain in one of his knees.
“Okay, you can put your shoes back on.”
Iwaizumi rises from his stool. He steps back from the examination table to give Kimura-san space to put on his shoes, but also so he can’t catch the angry growl his stomach makes from not having eaten anything but a banana since the morning. He moves to take a seat behind his desk and opens his drawer, fighting the temptation to open the packet of rice crackers he keeps inside, and instead, takes out his prescription pad.
“I’m writing you up for an MRI,” he says, writing down the instructions. “You may have a minor quadricep tendon tear, so I want to take a look so we can see what we have to do.”
At the corner of his eye, he sees Kimura-san’s wince at the mention of a tear. “Will it require surgery?”
“Fortunately, most minor ones don’t,” Iwaizumi says, pulling the sheet off. “And given I don’t see any swelling and you’re not experiencing any buckling, with enough rest and the right stretches, it can be easily managed.”
“In the meantime,” he adds, his voice firm. It’s a voice he often uses on patients older than him, and coincidentally, his parents, when he tells them to cut down on their alcohol and late-night karaoke. He stands up to hand the sheet to Kimura-san. “No more running. Focus on stretches. And I recommend some easy yoga to keep the muscles moving, but nothing too strenuous.”
Kimura-san nods, shifting his jacket to hang over his other arm as he takes the prescription.
“You can schedule your test with the department secretary,” Iwaizumi continues, motioning to the department’s front desk just a few feet away from his office. “And as soon as you get the results, we can schedule an appointment to take a look at it.”
Kimura-san nods once more, his eyes reading through the prescription. While he has yet to say anything, Iwaizumi can already begin to recognize the considerate look on his face, the slight dip in his shoulders, the nervous bite on his lower lip. He’s seen that same body language in many other patients, and it often precedes them asking—
“Iwaizumi-sensei,” Kimura-san begins, leaning forward and lowering his voice. “What about… you prescribe me something? I just need to get through the race next week, and I promise, I’ll follow what you’re saying after the race.”
Expecting this, Iwaizumi smiles and gives his well-practiced response, “I’m afraid a pill isn’t going to solve what’s happening with your knee, Kimura-san.“
Iwaizumi steps around his desk to walk him to the door. “So it’s better if we get to the root of the problem, and deal with it directly, to avoid it getting worse by masking it with medication.”
Kimura-san sighs, “If you say so.” They walk to the door and he pauses, turning towards Iwaizumi. “Oh, and sorry again for being late. I had to pick my daughter up from university.”
“It’s really no problem,” Iwaizumi says, opening the door for him. “Take care. See you when you have the MRI results.”
He returns Kimura-san’s polite nod as he leaves and stands by his door as he watches him walk toward the elevators. As soon as the elevator doors close, Iwaizumi checks his watch — and groans. 6:33pm. Which means the hospital cafeteria just closed for the day. His stomach follows up with a groan too. The cafeteria only served agedashi tofu on Tuesdays and he had spent the entire day looking forward to having some. Sighing, he steps back inside his office and takes a seat at his desk, pulling the drawer and finally taking out his rice crackers. He’s biting into one and scrolling through his phone to look through the usual places he orders dinner from when there’s a knock on his door.
“So I’m guessing you missed the tofu?”
He looks up to see Mizuki leaning against his doorframe, a pitying look on her face.
“Yeah,” he says, finishing the last of his crackers and crumpling the wrapper in his hand. He tosses it into the bin. “Just missed it.”
She scowls. “That’s too bad. Well, I got you this.”
He glances up just in time to catch the tuna onigiri she tosses over.
“Thanks,” he says, leaning back on his seat as he unwraps it.
Mizuki pushes herself off the doorframe and takes a seat in the chair in front of his desk.
“What time did you start today?,” she asks, inspecting his Godzilla paper weight. “You were already gone when I woke up.”
“Six,” he mumbles, continuing to scroll through the food delivery app. Did he feel like having omurice today? Or maybe some karaage.
“Oh, yikes, early,” Mizuki comments, putting Godzilla back on his desk. “But you’re done for the day?”
His mouth full of rice, he nods in reply instead. Still undecided on what to eat, he puts his phone down and starts shutting down his laptop to pack up.
Mizuki claps her hands together. “Great! So you can run over to the supermarket because we’re nearly out of rice and sesame oil.”
While they worked in different departments — he, in physiatry, she, in internal medicine — they shared an apartment; an arrangement that began in their first year of medical school back in Fukuoka, when their landlord had mistaken her for a man and assigned them together, and the nearest available place at the same price range was a two hour commute away. And when they both decided to move to Yokohama — she, to practice closer to her family, he, to continue his specialization — they didn’t see the need to change things and go through the growing pains of learning how to live with a new person.
“Okay, I’ll pass by then.”
“And ice cream,” Mizuki adds, tapping on his desk.
“And ice cream,” Iwaizumi repeats, sliding his laptop into his bag as he glances at her. “Anything else?”
He pauses. His shift had started earlier today so when he had left their apartment she was still in bed. So it’s only now that he’s taking in her appearance — the floral dress under her white coat, the ornate pair of earrings at the same length of her coiffed bob. He raises an eyebrow.
“Why are you so dressed up today?”
“Why thank you, I’m glad you finally noticed,” she says, pleased. She gets up from her seat and waits in the hallway while he turns off the lights and locks the door to this office. He slings his messenger bag over his shoulder while she grins at him, her earrings swaying as she bobs her head excitedly. “I have a date tonight, so don’t wait up.”
“Oh, with who?”
“Blind date. A friend set me up,” she says, walking with him to the elevator. She fishes her phone out of her coat and scrolls through it before holding it up to show him a photo of her date. “All I know is that he’s part of the national fencing team.”
With a few months left until the Olympics and people from all over the world flying into Tokyo, in order to decongest the city, numerous national teams had set up training camps across other cities in Japan. With Yokohama being only thirty minutes away from the capital, the city was hosting a number of teams and their entourages, along with members of the press.
Coupled with the regular tourist season crowd, this meant the city was bustling with activity, a thrum of shared excitement and anticipation in the air. Restaurants were fuller than usual, the parks had more visitors, and in the mornings, the occasional team could be seen having their warm-up runs along the boardwalk or the riverside park, which meant a crowd of fans and locals who would stay to watch. It also meant, to Iwaizumi’s annoyance, more people on the trains and buses, thus more people on his regular commute home.
“Wow. It’s good he’s somehow managed to find time to date—”
Mizuki punches his arm.
“Ow!” he yelps, holding onto his bicep. “What was that for?”
“I’ve known you for years, don’t think I can’t pick up that judgey tone in your voice!” she says, narrowing her eyes at him. He laughs, not bothering to defend himself. “Besides, I don’t think practices have officially started yet. People are just moving in, getting used to the city.”
He stops in front of the elevator and presses the button. A few seconds pass before Mizuki clears her throat. “You know…”
“No.”
She groans. “Hear me out at least! I can easily set you up. I know for a fact that some of the residents are still gushing over that time you played during the last sports fest.”
Iwaizumi hasn’t played volleyball since high school. Now, the only time he’s able to play is during casual pick-up games with old Sendai friends or the hospital’s yearly sports festival, where he’s been the captain of the volleyball team ever since he arrived solely because he’s the only doctor with actual competitive volleyball experience outside of PE classes.
The elevator doors open and he steps inside.
“Alright, enjoy your date,” he says, waving goodbye, and Mizuki reminds him about the ice cream one last time before the doors shut.
– – –
On the way to his bus, Iwaizumi stops by the supermarket inside the station to get their groceries. After getting the rice and sesame oil, he makes sure to get the ice cream, spending a few minutes standing in front of the frozen section to video call Mizuki so she can look at each available flavor and their calorie content before finally settling on pistachio.
He also buys a new pack of rice crackers for his office, his bottled coffee for tomorrow morning, and because he’s too tired to choose which restaurant to order from, another onigiri and his favorite brand of instant ramen for dinner. Mizuki has told him enough times that it’s embarrassing that he’s a certified doctor, twenty-eight years old, and still has a university student’s diet, but it’s a sentimental favorite; it’s the same instant ramen that powered him through university and his years of medical school.
After paying and packing the groceries, he exits the supermarket to head to his bus.
“— because your skin deserves only the best protection!”
Iwaizumi stops. He knows that voice.
He turns his head, but instead of a person, it’s an LED screen, and on it, Oikawa Tooru.
The commercial repeats; it’s an ad for DHC’s moisturizer with sunscreen. Oikawa is leaving his fancy apartment but makes sure to apply moisturizer before he leaves. It cuts to how the coverage lasts and his skin is still soft despite sweating through practice, matches, and even a pick-up game of beach volleyball. It ends with a shot of him in his black and red national jersey, holding up the product, and beneath him, the text reads, “Oikawa Tooru – Captain of the Olympic Volleyball Team.”
His eyes stay fixed on Oikawa as the commercial replays. All in all, Oikawa doesn’t look that different. But the years have sharpened his features; from the cut of his cheekbones to the definition in his jawline. While he looks to still have the same lean, imposing stature from when they played in high school, years of elite athletic conditioning have defined his muscles, obvious through the fit of his clothes and the flex of his thighs as he does his famous jump serve.
As Oikawa poses once again at the end of the commercial, Iwaizumi’s eyes linger on his face until he remembers he has a bus to catch, then runs before it leaves him. Fortunately, he gets there on time and takes an empty seat, setting his groceries down between his shoes. The bus pulls away from the station and while usually he would be using this quiet time of his day to scroll through his group chats and social media feeds to catch up on what happened while he was working, as he looks out the window, he finds his thoughts returning to the commercial, to Oikawa.
So Oikawa has finally achieved his dream of being captain of the national volleyball team. Was this recent or has he been captain for a while now? He imagines how Oikawa must have felt when he was told. He pictures him looking nervous, sitting on a chair in front of his coach, in an office that looks like Irihata’s office back in Aobajohsai. Then he thinks about how coincidental and even a bit funny it is to find out such big news through an LED screen in front of the train station supermarket he goes to nearly every day. But then again, it’s not like Oikawa would have told him. They haven’t spoken to each other for nearly ten years now.
Last he knew, Oikawa was still based somewhere in South America, accepting an offer there not long after he graduated university. And he can’t remember if he heard that from one of his get-togethers with Makki and Mattsun or if it was something his mom mentioned offhandedly during dinner in one of his visits at home. Oikawa’s family followed him to Tokyo not long after he started university and started getting endorsement deals, but he knew their mothers still kept in touch.
He knows all it would take is a quick search on the internet to be updated with what Oikawa’s been up to the past few years. He’s famous enough that it probably wouldn’t be that hard find out details on his personal life, who he’s seeing, what clothes he’s wearing, maybe even where he had dinner last Tuesday. But even if it has been nearly a decade, it’s still odd knowing that he now has to search for that kind of information, when he used to freely get it all the time, from Oikawa himself. Even during times where he was okay with not having to know, like in the middle of cramming a paper, or at three in the morning when all he wanted was to go to sleep but Oikawa would be going on about something that happened during the day or a thought that crossed his mind that he had to share.
The traffic light turns red and the bus slows to a stop. He had woken up at five today, so he should probably close his eyes and doze off for a few minutes, but his mind continues to nudge at the image of Oikawa, slowly dredging up thoughts he believed he had long past moved on from; of how exactly he and Oikawa had just, well, stopped being friends.
As far as he could remember, it wasn’t a sudden turn of events. There wasn’t a dramatic, explosive end. They had chosen separate schools, he, in Fukuoka to take up medicine, and Oikawa had been scouted by the top school in Tokyo to play for their volleyball team. At first Oikawa had been upset he wasn’t going to continue playing volleyball, but he eventually accepted it, and those first few months apart were exactly as they promised to each other. They kept in touch every day, scheduled calls a few times a week or whenever they felt like talking to each other while they had their separate dinners.
But as they settled into their own separate lives, it wasn’t long until the time between replies grew from minutes, to hours, to sometimes no replies at all. Their regular video calls were postponed for something more important or something that just came up, until eventually they stopped rescheduling under the unspoken pretense that it was mutually forgotten. Oikawa’s family had moved to Tokyo by then, so there was no chance of seeing him during holidays in Miyagi, and Iwaizumi remembers, despite offering numerous times to visit him in Tokyo on the way home, either Oikawa would take too long to reply or he’d apologize and say he was too busy with the team, schoolwork, or the U-23 team.
And like replaying a movie he hasn’t seen in years, Iwaizumi remembers what he felt then; a confused combination of frustration, disappointment, and even hurt. Was he the only one who cared that eighteen years of friendship could just peter out like that? And why did it feel like he was the only one making the effort to keep it together? Was he just overreacting and it wasn’t something he should take too seriously? After all, that was what he wanted for Oikawa, right? To go after his volleyball dreams.
It took close to a year until he eventually came to accept that maybe it was just a part of growing up. And as he’s playing back his feelings now, he realizes it’s not frustration that he’s currently feeling anymore, but a resigned acceptance of, well, that’s how it is sometimes. These things happen; as you get older, your circle of friends grows smaller. People lose touch, priorities change, relationships don’t stay the same. The length of a friendship doesn’t determine its strength.
But maybe like everyone else these things happened to, he had thought it would be different for him and Oikawa. That maybe all those years together, their friendship weather through time and distance.
He’s so lost in thought that he almost misses his stop, realizing just as the last few passengers are getting off. He scrambles out of his seat, apologizing to the other passengers and the driver as he exits the bus. As soon as he’s off, his stomach grumbles, snapping him out of his daze and reminding him that he’s running on a banana, rice crackers and a tuna onigiri, so he quickly heads to his apartment. He’s standing in front of their door and in the middle of fishing his keycard out of his wallet and shifting his groceries to his other hand, when their neighbor’s door opens.
“Oh, Iwaizumi, are you just getting home now?”
He turns away from his door to quickly greet their neighbor with bow. “Ah, yes, Iriyama-san,” he says. “Good evening.”
Iriyama-san has been their neighbor ever since they moved in. A divorcée in her sixties, she lives by herself, but her children and grandchildren visit a couple of times a month. They know because she always gives them a plate of brownies after each visit to apologize for the noise they may have made.
She looks over his shoulder. “Oh, is Mizuki still at work?”
“Ah, yes, she’s,” Iwaizumi pauses. “… Overtiming again tonight.”
Iriyama-san shakes her head, the pink curlers in her graying hair bobbing side to side. “You both work so late,” she says, with accompanying tsks. “Like I tell my children, a couple should always try to have dinner together every night.”
She also thinks he and Mizuki are in a relationship, which, given her fondness for prying into people’s business, they never bothered to correct her on. Mizuki also fears that if they broke the truth to her, she’d think they had deliberately lied to her the entire time, and she would stop giving them brownies. They are, objectively, very good brownies.
He gives a small laugh as he presses his keycard against the lock. “Ah well, you know how it is, doctors always work late—”
“And what more when you have children!”
He pushes the door open with his shoe. “Oh, I think our phone is ringing!” he announces, giving her an apologetic smile as he quickly shuffles inside, the groceries knocking against the doorframe. “Sorry about that, Iriyama-san, good night!”
“Oh, good night!”
As soon as the door closes behind him, he leans against it and lets out an exhausted groan he feels he’s been holding in for the entire day. He also considers passing out on the floor and calling it a night, but remembers the pint of ice cream in the bag. He kicks off his shoes, shuffling over to their kitchen to empty out the groceries into the cupboards and fridge. He fills their kettle with water for his ramen and takes a quick shower while it boils. By the time he’s done, the water is just about finished, and after pouring it into the noodles he takes out his phone while he waits for them to cook.
Iwaizumi Hajime: Iriyama-san says you work too many late nights.
Iwaizumi Hajime: She says our future children will suffer.
Mizuki Hana: I am so sure that she waits by her door to hear when you come home.
Mizuki Hana: I think she has a crush on you.
He scowls at the thought, then sets his phone down to eat. He feels his muscles relax at the savory seafood smell alone, and by the time he’s cleaned up for bed, he still feels the warmth of his food throughout his body. As soon as his head hits the pillow he’s fast asleep, and his dreams are of volleyball and late night practices from a long time ago.
– – –
Iwaizumi’s phone rings, jerking him awake. He had put it on silent before going to bed which can only mean it’s the hospital. He rubs the sleep out of his eyes with one hand while the other moves around the bed in search for his phone. When he finds it, he lets out one big yawn before pressing it to his ear.
“Yes, hello?”
“Ah, Iwaizumi-sensei, sorry to call so late.”
It’s one of the evening nurses in the ER. He quickly pulls his phone away from his ear to squint at the clock. 11:38PM. He hasn’t been asleep for more than two hours.
“It’s fine,” he mumbles, stifling another yawn by pressing his face to his pillow. “What is it?”
“You see,” she pauses. “Ah, um, sorry to bother again, but we need you to come in. We have a… patient, in the ER. And we’ll need someone of your specialty to address it.”
“Oh, what’s wrong?” he asks, although he’s already getting out of bed. He pulls out a shirt from one of the drawers and looks around for his wallet. There’s already a set of doctors assigned to the ER during this time, so he knows it must be a special case if they need him to come in.
She pauses again, and he hears someone beside her, saying something he can’t catch. There’s a soft shuffling as the nurse returns to the line.
“Ah, sensei, you’ll see when you get here, um,” another pause. “I’m not allowed to divulge details over the phone.”
What the hell?
He wants to ask her why not, but he knows this nurse, and she’s never had this issue before. So it must have to do with whoever’s with her in the hospital.
“Okay, I’m on the way.”
It’s too late in the evening to take the bus, and given the urgency, he takes a taxi to the hospital and asks to get dropped off at the ER. He there in under ten minutes and checks his reflection at the glass doors to make sure he doesn’t look like he had just gotten out of bed. As he’s shrugging on his coat, he sees the nurse standing by the ER’s front desk.
“Oh, you’re here!” she says, rushing over to him.
“What is it?” he asks.
“The patient is waiting inside,” she says, pointing to one of the private rooms. She hands him the clipboard with the patient’s vital signs and personal information, and he’s about to scan through it but something about her body language feels off. There’s a smile she’s trying to keep from her face and she seems extra hurried as she leads him to the room. But instead of a nervous air around her, she seems more… excited?
“So what's the issue—”
She opens the door and gently pushes him inside, and the conversation inside the room goes quiet. Iwaizumi clears his throat and straightens his back.
“Good evening,” he says, finally scanning through the patient’s information. Male, twenty-eight years old, healthy blood pressure and oxygen levels. Nothing out of the ordinary so far. “Sorry if you had to wait, I’m—”
His eyes go back to read the patient's name and he stops.
He looks up from the clipboard.
“Oikawa?”
“Iwa-chan?”
– – –