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“I’ll make a life for us - it’ll be grand, so grand.” His lips curve in excitement, and there’s a magpie’s greedy gleam in the shine of his eyes. “I’ll have a house built for you, and it’ll have marbled floors that we can dance across and a thousand hidden rooms for me to kiss you in. We’ll have a garden - I’ll have a rose bush trimmed in your visage. A fountain in the middle of a maze for you to wish on.”
His hands come up to cradle yours. “So won’t you wait for me?”
The party is in full swing by the time you pull up before the mansion in your best friend’s car.
“It’s as wild as the last,” Hiromi says breathily, and the night air teases the hem of her dress like a wandering hand. “Isn’t it beautiful?”
No, it isn’t.
“I don’t get why you had to drag me here with you,” you sigh even as the car door swings shut behind you. “You should know that I have no interest in such parties, especially ones thrown by Oikawa Tooru.”
(You’d seen him, in some before of the after. Just a glimpse of coiffed curls and a suit pressed so crisp that the lines burn themselves through sclera to etch onto the back of your moon-crater eyes and the back of your thin-atmosphere eyelids, a man-made constellation you see everywhere.
An arm thrown around a socialite. A practiced smirk for the businessmen. An easy joke for the politicians-
-Money enough for all.
Oikawa Tooru isn’t the boy you used to know. Not anymore.)
Hiromi is barely listening. A glance at her tells you that you’ve already lost her to the twinkling lights and the crescendo booming from the bowels of the mansion.
(She never used to be like this. You’re so tired of losing the ones you love.)
The wrought iron gates are open in invitation. Hiromi flings her arms wide like an offering, and you follow her into the belly of the beast.
The interior is dazzling - the moment you pass through the iron gates and set your feet onto the cobblestone path towards the mansion, you’re swept into the party, carried by currents that push and pull. Hiromi disappears into the thick of it, latching onto the arm of a man whose olive eyes flash at you in a glance over his shoulder.
You make an aborted motion to follow, but someone twines their arm around your waist like a grapevine around a trellis in Italy (a boy who lives only in your memory says, I’ll take you there someday) and you tug yourself away, only to find yourself in the arms of another. Champagne sloshes over the rims of wine glasses (a boy you remember more than you know is passing you a mug of coffee in the library and when your hands brush it’s like supernovae born of dying stars), which change hands with every pass of a lady’s chapstick and gloss over chapped lips.
Everywhere you turn, the party thrives - mad and uncontrolled, and you’re left stumbling from whirlpool to whirlpool, passed around like a child’s doll. Your vision swims with every swirl of sequined dresses and every pass of spotlights (there is a love where there is a boy and he is singing you a song with the stars bearing witness) over your upturned face. You trip over a fur scarf, discarded on the ground, and a man who has no face (there is a boy whose face you know but whose name you cannot speak, no matter how hard you try) catches you with his arm on the small of your back and-
-You heave. You push against the crowd, which teems against you like a sea, serpent-like and coiled. There is no edge to the party, and you’re tripping in the heels you borrowed from Hiromi, and you have never longed so earnestly for the courtly balls your mother used to push you into. Because now the party is too much, it’s pounding on the walls of your mind and every pass of a hand over yours is driving you towards the approaching horizon of insanity, and you don’t know-
The music, once a tidal wave swelling from crescendo to crescendo, quells. A sudden silence splits the air like a knife beneath a sweeping skirt, and as everyone holds their breath you catch yours.
Then a waltz begins, and as the crowd rearranges itself from depravity to adopted grace, you straighten.
(“Won’t you wait for me?” A hand over yours, a thumb on your cheek. A joystick between your seats like a heart between lungs. “I’ll make something of myself, and then I’ll come back for you.”)
You turn - and he’s there.
He’s made of new money - all glamour and fame and everything you’ve ever hated. His suit is as crisp as the day you’d spotted him buttering up politicians with that crooked smile of his.
Oikawa, the golden boy with a face made for the papers and a voice tuned to silvertongue, cocks his head, saccharine smile folding like the corner of a fresh magazine. “Well?” His offered hand hangs in the air between you like a feathered fan, like a swinging noose. “May I have this dance?”
(That’s not the boy you fell in love with. The smile isn’t the same.)
You purse your lips in a mockery of thought. “It would be a pleasure,” your smile has too many teeth and when you grasp his hand your fingers dig into the soft flesh of his palm and the inside of his wrist. Bruised fruit, wilted tree. There is no spring, not in this corner of the world. (There was a boy and there was a girl and they are now as dead as the love they used to sing).
He puts his hand on the small of your back and you loop your arms around his shoulders like coiled rope. “Trust me,” he purrs, “the pleasure is all mine.” His eyes are darker than you remember and under the harsh lights his grin is the polished edge of a guillotine.
You match his grin. “Is that what you tell the socialites you so adore wooing?” Your tone is sickly sweet, and your shoulders are squared against his palm.
Oikawa blinks at your words, and for a moment you see the facade fall. You can almost forget the five years that hovers between you.
“Y/n-” he starts, but the music rises and obediently, you wrench a hand from his shoulder to twirl away. He catches you when you turn back, and your faces are close, too close, before you turn away from him and take a step back to put distance (five years is so, so long; it is a lifetime and it is a blink and it is a sepia photograph and it is a fading film smile) between you again.
“Oikawa-san,” you say calmly, “I did not come here to be appeased by lies. It has been five years since you left - I could hardly have expected you to remain true.” You let your lips curve into a rueful smile, “Especially when you offered neither letter nor call.”
This mansion with the gaudy decorations and partygoers with sparkly miniskirts and crooked ties is hardly the elegant ballroom you’d grown up in in the West, but you hold yourself the way your mother had taught you and Oikawa dances like the gentleman he had trained himself to become, and it’s almost like the uncomfortable suitor balls you used to attend.
“Though I have to admit,” you say finally, when the waltz enters its final breaths, “I didn’t think you’d still remember the steps to The Blue Danube.”
The waltz ends. Your hands drop from his shoulders. You step away.
The noose snaps taut.
“I don’t suppose you’ve heard Strauss’ The Blue Danube?” At the interruption, you peer up from the pages of your book, warily eyeing the man who’d spoken.
“I have,” you say carefully, “why do you ask?”
He grins, playful and intentional. The precise kind of boyish smile your mother has warned you against. “Care for a waltz? A friend of mine is practicing for some concert or other, and I’m sure he’d like some company.”
You raise a brow in mock affront. “Asking for a dance, are you? And yet I still don’t know your name.”
The man - and he’s charming, you have to admit - smiles. “Oikawa Tooru.” He holds out a hand for you to take, a curl of brown hair falling into his eyes as the field behind your university stirs with a sudden wind.
The sunlight dapples your hand gold when you reach out of the shade to take his.
“L/n Y/n,” you reply, and it’s the beginning of every story your mother has told you, about handsome boys with pretty smiles and not a single penny to their name.
“You danced with Oikawa Tooru?” Hiromi hisses in disbelief, and you clap a hand over her mouth hastily, glancing around the room warily.
“Do you want us to get mobbed?” It’s no secret that Oikawa’s fans tread the tightrope of being manic fanatics. “And he caught me during the waltz, I had no choice but to go along.”
“You waltzed?” Hiromi’s squeal is muffled behind your palm, but you cringe as several table’s worth of patrons turn to look at you suspiciously. You offer them a strained smile.
“It meant nothing,” you assure your best friend, even as the memory of a turned page and a boy with a smile crafted from the same untouchable thing that sunlight is made of haunts the back of your mind. “It was just a dance. I didn’t see him after that.”
Her lips pout, and you can tell that she’s about to launch anew into protest, so you scramble for a distraction. “Not that you would know,” you say coyly, seizing upon the first thing you remember, “seeing as you went off somewhere with that man.”
Whatever Hiromi had been about to say is derailed by her blush. “Iwaizumi-san,” she says shyly, “the one I met at brunch the other day.”
“Oh, that’s a relief,” you smile, and listen patiently as Hiromi gushes.
“Y/n despises me,” is the first thing Tooru says to Hajime when he collapses into the seat opposite his best friend, nestled cozily in the corner of some high-end restaurant.
“Can’t say I blame her,” he thinks he hears Hajime grumble, but Tooru waves it off. He’s distressed enough as it is.
“I’ve got to win her back,” Tooru decides a few mouthfuls of his brunch later. “I’ve made a life for us like I promised - she’ll see that, and she’ll come back.”
Hajime eyes him warily over his cut of steak. There’s a glint of something uncomfortably mad in his eyes, the same brand of obsession that magpies holds for anything that shines.
“She has to see it,” Tooru says, more to himself than anything.
“Won’t you wait for me?” A hand over yours, a thumb on your cheek. A joystick between your seats like a heart between lungs. “I’ll make something of myself, and then I’ll come back for you.”
You pull your hand from his and cup his cheeks between your palms. Tender, tender, tender. “You already are,” your lips know the shape of these words by heart, “We love each other, isn’t that enough?”
(Please let it be enough).
When he smiles it’s heartbreak. “You deserve to be more than a poor man’s wife,” Tooru tells you, and you know that he doesn’t hear you.
I don’t want that, you want to say, all I have ever wanted is you. But the boy you love is looking at you with a dream between his teeth (ready for sharpening, bared for filing) and a promise that aches into you from the point of contact of his fingertips so you say, “I love you.”
I love you, I love you, I love you.
(You wish it could be enough, even as you know that it is not.)
Despite what you may tell Hiromi, that night was special. A midsummer’s night's dream, even.
It’s bittersweet, in a way - seeing him again after five years. You have never deceived yourself into thinking that you no longer love him.
You hadn’t expected how cathartic it would be to see him. It’s not closure; you love him as much as you miss him and it doesn’t matter what suits he may wear now - you’ll always see the image of the rouged-hair and messied-smile boy you fell in love with overlaid over this new version of Oikawa Tooru.
It’s not closure, but it settles something in your once-restless heart, anyway. It’s less of a door closing and more of a door ajar, a sliver of light slipping through. It is enough for you to know that he still remembers the steps to The Blue Danube.
Oikawa throws more parties. You attend them, when Hiromi drags you along.
Iwaizumi Hajime is the very definition of a gentleman, if a little gruff. You’re delighted when Hiromi snakes her arm through his, and he presses a kiss to her temple. Chaste, a treasuring.
(You remember what it was like to have a love like that - a love you had thought would last.
All you have left are memories.)
It is only at Iwaizumi’s - and by extension, Hiromi’s - insistence that you agree to meet Oikawa again.
He’s dressed all in white, save for a teal tie. It’s raining outside but the silence of your home exists separate from the world. There is only the boy whose memory you love and the flowers he brought you - and you, with your meticulously moored heart, your hands folded in your lap like the letter you never did receive.
“I love you,” the boy whose face you know but whose first name is so lost in the barbed wire of the war (you had thought he had died in) that it can no longer leave your tongue says, “I have always loved you.”
Oikawa’s eyes are blown wide and imploring, his hands resting a heart’s length away from yours, trembling hand on knee like a leaf in a beak. “I have never touched anyone - socialite or not - the way I once had the privilege of touching you, I-”
“I know,” you say quietly. “Iwaizumi-san told me.” He shuts his mouth at that. He looks as helpless as you remember feeling, that first week after the war, when no boy with his face had gotten off the train, and you had received no letter.
I love you, I love you, I love you, you want to say, but it comes out as, “I miss you.” Not that it matters - they’re synonymous, now.
“Then-” A hitch in a voice like a crescendo, a lifting chord.
“I miss you - present tense. You may be here,” and at this you meet his eyes for the first time, “but how will I know which version of you it is?”
(A boy asked you for a dance, cradled in the shade of some great tree on the campus of your university.
The same boy left for the war, and left you with nothing but a dream and a promise you knew he would have to sacrifice to keep.
You still don’t know if he came back.)
“I waited, like I said I would.” You tear your gaze from his, landing on a sole hydrangea in the bouquet he had brought you. “But I never wanted this,” and here you pause, gesturing vaguely at him, at the distant silhouette of his huge mansion through the window, “having you would have been enough.”
You give him the same rueful smile that you had on that dream of a midsummer night. “I never stopped loving you, Tooru.”
The boy with the face you had once cradled between your palms hangs his head. You hesitate, before gingerly putting a hand over his, rested on his knee. “Won’t you come home, now?” Your voice is soft, tender, a bird’s nest in the making.
Something wet falls like a heartbeat onto the back of your hand. It traces the divot between your knuckles like an old lover returning.
When Tooru looks up, the hand uncovered by yours coming up to rest lightly on your jaw like a butterfly, you see that he’s crying. There’s a tear-stain for every letter you should have received, little heart-stains like the daisies whose petals you used to pluck. I love you, I love you not, I love you.
“I’m home,” he chokes out.
The corners of your eyes are wet with dew drops, “Welcome home, Tooru.”