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When Hajime was little, before he can really even remember, his parents moved them into the house he’s grown up in. It was there that his parents befriended their new nextdoor neighbors, and, upon realizing they both had sons of a similar age, arranged a playdate.
They plopped both their sons into the same playpen and, according to legend- or rather, according to Hajime’s mom when she gets a little tipsy on wine and misty eyed about her son who is ‘just growing up so fast’- Oikawa Tooru had latched immediately onto Hajime and refused to let him go hours later when the Oikawas had tried to go home.
Hajime can trace all of his troubles back to that very moment, when his parents decided that a house next to the Oikawas was the way to go.
His troubles being many, and all of them involving Oikawa Tooru somehow.
Case in point:
“Iwa-chan, you rearranged,” Oikawa sounds betrayed and Hajime blinks tiredly at the idiot tangled up on his floor. “I can’t believe you put stuff under the window! How am I supposed to sneak in now?”
“If you came through the door like a normal person instead of climbing through my window this wouldn’t be an issue.” Hajime says with a shrug, “ Or, better yet, you could have waited until the morning when we walk to school instead of breaking in like a lunatic in the middle of the night.”
Oikawa waves him away with a vague, fluttering hand. “That’s so much less fun,” He says, and Hajime just knows that he’s imagining himself as some sort of spunky protagonist in a cheesy tv show, or maybe even the star of an old Taylor Swift music video and, well, what’s he supposed to do with that?
“I hate you,” Hajime says and Oikawa smiles in that way that means he absolutely does not believe Hajime, even for a second. Ugh. “Why are you here? We have practice in the morning and it’s like-” Hajime squints at his phone- “3 am... Tooru it’s 3 am what the fuck?”
“I was struck with a moment of genius,” Oikawa says and it’s such a blatant deflection that Hajime actually takes a good look at him.
He’s still on Hajime’s floor, though he’s sat up properly now instead of laying there sprawled out in the pile of junk he knocked off Hajime’s dresser while coming in. There’s shadows under his eyes, and a sort of anxious set to his mouth that means he’s had a nightmare, or maybe he hasn’t even been to sleep in the first place, stuck awake with his own thoughts or a stupid movie or, god forbid, dvds of their rivals.
“C’mon, if you don’t sleep you’ll drag us all down at practice tomorrow,” Hajime says, lifting the corner of his blankets.
Oikawa, looking like he’d merely been waiting for Hajime to offer, crawls under with a swiftness that would rival that of that freakish little Karasuno shortstack on the court. He wastes absolutely zero time twining his limbs around Hajime like some freakishly boney octopus, catching Hajime in a vice grip with their noses practically pressed together.
Hajime blinks at Oikawa where he’s too close, and Oikawa kisses him.
Wait.
Oikawa kisses him.
What the fuck.
“Oikawa, what the fuck?”
“Goodnight, Iwa-chan,” Oikawa says, closes his eyes, and smashes his face into Hajime’s shoulder, clearly intending to in no way answer Hajime’s question.
Hajime is suddenly very awake.
So. Yes. As Hajime was saying:
Every troublesome thing- every stupid idea- every batshit moment of Hajime’s life can be traced back to Oikawa fucking Tooru.
Here’s the thing: If someone had done what Oikawa had done the night before, Hajime would have normally told Oikawa about it. Because Oikawa, despite Hajime’s complaining and irritation, is Hajime’s best friend and always has been. He tells him everything. So it stands to reason that this is the kind of thing he’d tell his best friend about. Except he can’t. Because Oikawa’s the one who threw him into this predicament. The predicament being Hajime knowing intimately what Oikawa’s mouth feels like against his own and wondering if it was a fluke, why Oikawa had done such a thing, and whether they could do it again.
Wait.
Does Hajime want to do it again?
He doesn’t know! And he can’t figure it out because his best friend sprung a middle of the night kiss on him and is now ignoring it.
He’s so busy freaking out about it that he takes a volleyball to the face during practice and ends up on the sidelines with a broken nose and paper towels pressed to his face while Oikawa pretends he’s not worrying by yelling at Hajime about how he needs to be more aware of the ball in a game dedicated to knowing where the fucking ball is Iwa-chan it’s not like it’s hard .
“This is all your fault,” Hajime says, muffled by the wad of paper towels against his face.
Oikawa makes a squawking indignant noise like some sort of wounded pigeon and Hajime’s face hurts too much to even begin to make fun of him for it.
“How is this my fault?!” Oikawa’s voice is doing that thing where it gets progressively higher and more squeaky and Hajime takes a silent pride in being the cause of it, “I’m a model friend, a perfect student, a dedicated captain! I give and I give and I give and this is the thanks I get? Being blamed for a crime I didn’t commit!”
“A perfect student?” Hajime asks, tipping his head down to fix Oikawa with a skeptic look.
“Better than you,” Oikawa says with a sniff.
“Liar.”
“Did you hit your head? Do you have a concussion? I think you have a concussion. You’re delusional,” Oikawa says, “Guys, Iwa-Chan is delusional! We should send him to the nurse, stat.”
“I hate you so much,” Hajime says, toothless. “You want a matching concussion? Cause I can make that happen, Shittykawa. It’d be real easy.”
“Liar. You love me, ” Oikawa says and makes a kissy face at Hajime before going stock still, as though he’s finally having the first moment of self awareness of his life. Incredible.
Oikawa shakes it off and turns back to the rest of the gym, “Alright, let’s get back to practice! Iwa-Chan can be our very own cheerleader while he recovers from his grievous and very much self inflicted injury. We should get him pompoms, maybe one of those flippy skirts. Oh a megaphone! It’ll be great...”
Oikawa texts him to come over that night and Hajime tries to insist he needs to sleep but relents after the second text because he’s weak. They lay in Oikawa’s back yard, shoulder to shoulder, and Oikawa pretends he knows the names of each and every star they can see.
“I want to beat them,” Oikawa says, breaking a silence that’s settled over them.
“Hmm? Shiratorizawa? Or Karasuno?”
“Both,” Oikawa says seriously, “I want to see them both cry.”
“You’re such a shitty person,” Hajime says, mostly out of habit, and Oikawa grins at him and jostles their shoulders together.
“What does that say about you then, considering I’m your very best friend.”
“It says I’m an innocent victim, a blameless bystander, an unwilling party to every crime you’ve ever committed.”
Oikawa laughs, bright and with his head tipped back and Hajime makes the mistake of looking straight at him, forgetting that when Oikawa’s like this he’s like the sun.
“We’ll beat them,” Hajime says finally, when air has filled his lungs again, knocking their elbows together. “And if we don’t then it doesn’t make you any less of a volleyball player, you know?” Oikawa needs to know that. Oikawa must know that, right?
“Whenever you’re nice to me I worry that you’re just buttering me up to murder me later.” Oikawa says, perching himself up on one elbow so that he can stare suspiciously down at Hajime.
Cute, Hajime thinks and then screams at himself internally because what the fuck, Hajime. What the fuck.
Oikawa is still talking, something about “Don’t think I’ll go quietly into the night, Iwa-chan!” and Hajime isn’t paying attention because Oikawa’s features are soft in the light that spills out of Oikawa’s backdoor, and his hair is rumpled and sticking up in the back from laying in the grass, and his shirt is soft and ratty with a cartoon alien making a peace sign on the front and Hajime was there when he got it, back when they were still in junior high, and Hajime-
Hajime is fucked.
He’s at least halfway in love with his best friend and he didn’t even notice it happening.
He is so fucked.
They lose. They lose, and just like that volleyball is over and Hajime feels like he’s rattling around in his skin without it.
With that in mind, it’s no wonder he finds himself at the house next door later that night, where Mrs. Oikawa smiles like Hajime’s presence is some sort of relief and says “Oh good, you’re here,” and “Tooru’s in his room,” and propels him in the right direction like Hajime’s legs wouldn’t carry him there already.
Oikawa’s bedroom is dark, the only light from the open laptop and the streetlights outside, Oikawa a gloomy looking lump of blankets in front of it.
Hajime plops down beside Oikawa and snaps his laptop shut.
“I was watching that,” Oikawa insists, glaring ruthlessly at Hajime, like it’s ever had any effect, like there’s any way it could ever have an effect when Oikawa is wrapped up like onigiri, his face and a mop of disheveled hair poking out from the blankets.
“There is literally zero reason for you to watch old Seijoh games right now.”
Oikawa makes an irritated noise and Hajime knows it’s more about how Hajime is right and Oikawa hates that he is than it is actual irritation with Hajime himself. At least he’s pretty sure it is. “How are you even here?”
“Your mom let me in. When I knocked on the door. Like a normal person. One who doesn’t commit minor acts of breaking and entering every other week.”
“It’s called making an entrance, Iwa-Chan.” Oikawa says with an exaggerated, haughty sniff.
“It’s called a petty crime.”
“Your face is a petty crime,” Oikawa says, which makes zero sense but Hajime still punches him in the shoulder for it and everything very quickly devolves into a shoving match that ends with Oikawa on top of him and Hajime swearing he’s going to kill his best friend and Mrs. Oikawa’s voice drifting into the room telling them to knock it off before they break something.
It’s familiar, well trodden ground, and something twists in Hajime’s chest at the thought that there’s not long until this all ends. Volleyball is over, and soon highschool will be too. They’ll go off to college and Hajime will insist that he’s been waiting years to get some peace and quiet without Oikawa clinging to him, but it’ll be the biggest lie he’s ever told and they’ll both know it.
“C’mon, do passes with me,” Oikawa says, getting to his feet and tossing a volleyball at Hajime’s head when the silence has apparently dragged on too long.
Hajime does not spike the volleyball back at Oikawa’s face, but only because he respects (and more importantly, fears) Oikawa’s mom too much to do it in the house.
Oikawa keeps Hajime outside, passing the ball back and forth in the dark until Hajime’s arms are sore and sweat is prickling the back of his neck, for what feels like an eternity and also not long enough.
Somehow, despite the fact that this is normally the best sort of distraction for Oikawa, whatever mood he’s in settles back over him like an oppressive cloud that makes Hajime want to strangle him. (He also wants to fix it, because Oikawa is his best friend, no matter how obnoxious he is, but the strangling urge is pretty fucking strong honestly.)
“Okay, are you going to talk about whatever the fuck your issue is?” Hajime finally snaps when he doesn’t get his hands up in time and the ball slams into his shoulder with too much force for what feels like the millionth time but is actually only the fourth.
“Problem? I’ve got no idea what you’re talking about. Are you sure it’s not you? You do keep missing, Iwa-Chan.” The carefully crafted look of innocent concern on Oikawa’s face is blatantly fake and Hajime throws the ball right at it, feeling dimly satisfied when Oikawa squawks and ducks and yelps “ Not the face, Hajime! It’s my most valuable asset!”
“You’re being a dick,” Hajime says, and then, when Oikawa opens his mouth to retort, “More of a dick than usual, dumbass.”
“I’m fine,” Oikawa says, moving to pick the ball back up and tossing it back towards Hajime.
He is not fine.
Hajime, with all the patience that more than a decade and a half of friendship has taught him, takes a breath and says, “Okay, Trashykawa.”
Hajime passes the ball back- once, twice, a dozen times, waiting Oikawa out as the lack of Hajime pressing somehow does the exact opposite and lays the pressure on even thicker. Hajime knows how this works, knows that deep, deep, deep down in the thing Oikawa calls a heart, he does want to talk about whatever’s bothering him, whether it’s just that they lost or something else he’s cooked up in that genius crackpot head of his. He’s a liar and a pain in the ass, but he’s never been good at keeping secrets from Hajime.
“Things are changing,” Oikawa says finally.
“That is what tends to happen when you’re about to graduate high school, yeah.” Hajime says even though, yeah, he’s maybe, possibly, spiraling from that a little bit too. Who isn’t, though?
“You don’t get it,” Oikawa says, and Hajime can tell that they’re finally getting to the point of all of this, exactly why Oikawa is being a mopey bastard outside of their crushing defeat from Karasuno, “Everything’s changing and we lost, and you’re- You’re going to run off to- to- to another country! And I’ll never see you again and you’ll forget all about me, even though that should be impossible because I’m me, and one day, years and years from now you’ll be surrounded by your grandchildren and your beautiful wife and you’ll reminisce on when you used to play volleyball with your dear friend whose name you can no longer remember but who betrayed you by ending your last ever season in a crushing defeat and-”
“Tooru,” Hajime says, grabbing onto Oikawa’s shoulders tightly and Oikawa stops talking, his stupid mouth hanging open, “I need you to understand something very clearly.”
“What?”
“You are such a pain in my ass that I couldn’t forget you if I tried.”
“Yeah?”
“I swear.” He gives Tooru a shake, hoping that with enough rattling it’ll sink into his best friend’s thick skull. “Not in a hundred fucking years. Not in a thousand years.”
“Good,” Oikawa says, and then, seeming to regain himself again, “ Good . That’s good. Because I’m very unforgettable Iwa-chan and you should know that. Afterall, I’m your best friend. You can’t shake me that easily!”
“Ugh, I take it back. I’ll be forgetting you as soon as possible,” Hajime says, sighing a sigh of the truly long suffering when Oikawa laughs at him, his eyes crinkling and his mouth open and ugly.
He thinks about shutting him up- thinks about putting his mouth on Oikawa’s, like Oikawa had done to him weeks ago, about what it would feel like to be on the other side of that. And then, because Oikawa turns him into a fucking crazy person, driven by some unseen force, he does just that.
Oikawa is still for a moment before he seems to- there’s no other word for it but melt- into Hajime. It’s different than the last time, when Hajime isn’t the one being taken by surprise, when his brain doesn’t have to rush to catch up, Oikawa moving past the moment before Hajime even got there.
It’s- It’s good. At least, Hajime thinks (hopes) it’s good, and when he steps back Oikawa looks addled enough that it must be. Right? Right.
“Goodnight, Shittykawa,” Hajime says and turns to go back home, laughing when Oikawa’s indignant squawking noises follow after him.
Later, when Hajime is safely tucked into his bed, his phone buzzes next to his head, lighting up with a picture of Oikawa making a truly horrifying face while riding Snow White’s Adventures at Disneyland.
Oikawa changes his contact picture in Hajime’s phone at least once a month, and Hajime changes it back every time in a perpetual war over what Oikawa claims is his “right to dignity, Iwa-Chan!”
“What the fuck Iwaizumi?” Oikawa half shrieks when Hajime picks up, sounding like he’s been working himself up about this since Hajime left his backyard.
“Oh, I’m sorry, was that confusing for you ?” Hajime asks, “Was your best friend kissing you out of nowhere and then refusing to fucking talk about it confusing for you, Oikawa?”
Huh. He’s not sure he realized how indignant about that he really was until now.
“Yes!” Oikawa yells into his ear and Hajime hangs up on him.
Oikawa texts him a string of exclamation marks followed by an exploding head emoji followed by a screaming emoji, and then, when Hajime fails to respond for an entire two and a half minutes he sends a frowning cat emoji and then, after another two minutes, six crying emojis.
Hajime sighs, and because he’s weak , and is 99% positive Oikawa is six seconds from spiraling if Hajime doesn’t respond, takes a photo of himself screwing his face up into a ridiculous, over dramatic frown and sends it with a ‘go to BED, Crappykawa.’
‘you’re so mean to me (╥﹏╥) ’ Oikawa texts back, and then ‘ok ok OK i’m GOING’ and ‘you can never say i don’t listen to you now!!!!’
Oikawa is waiting in front of Hajime’s gate when he leaves for school.
They fall into step, shoulders bumping, and Hajime starts a mental timer. He’s just reached 57 when Oikawa says “So.”
“So…” Hajime says.
“So,” Oikawa says again, and Hajime glances down at where Oikawa very deliberately brushes their hands together.
“You’re such an idiot,” Hajime says and grabs Oikawa’s hand, slotting their fingers together before he can think too hard about it.
Oikawa smiles, wide and more than a little smug, and Hajime questions his own taste deeply.
“You’re holding my hand,” Oikawa sing-songs, “You kissed me. You like me! You want to hug me and kiss me and marry-”
“God, you really are the worst,” Hajime says, stopping in his tracks and tugging at Oikawa’s hand until he stumbles, taking one step and then another until he’s fully in Hajime’s space.
“Says the guy who kissed me last night,” Oikawa says, eyes bright.
“You started it.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Oikawa insists, all fake innocence, “I’m but an innocent bystander, subject to the whims of my best fr- mmph -”
Whatever else Oikawa was going to say is lost because Hajime slides his free hand into Oikawa’s hair and tugs him down to kiss him.
“You like me,” Oikawa says when they’ve pulled apart, this time a little less smug and a little more hopeful.
“No, I kiss all my friends like this,” Hajime says, all sarcasm, and then, because Oikawa is a freakish genius and also a complete and total idiot who needs things spelled out for him occasionally, “Of course I like you, dumbass.”
“You should be nicer to me then,” Oikawa says, starting to walk again, backwards with his hand still curled through Hajime’s, tugging him along. “I might stop kissing you if you’re not.”
“Liar.” Hajime says.
Oikawa sticks his tongue out, makes a rude face and says, “Yeah, what does that say about you that you like a liar?”
“That I have truly terrible taste,” Hajime says, and it doesn’t come out nearly as cutting as he wants it to, because Oikawa is beaming at him and Hajime can’t quite help the way he smiles back.
God, he’s so screwed. He’s so into this idiot that it makes him stupid.
Later, when they’re getting steam buns with Matsu and Makki, and after Oikawa crashes the volleyball club’s practice and makes their kouhais endure an incredibly dramatic speech- Later, Hajime looks at Oikawa paying for their steam buns and foisting an extra one onto Hajime while pretending he’s not, and he thinks I want to kiss him and then I can kiss him.
So he does.
It’s stupid, to start this now, when highschool is hurtling towards an end and everything is changing, but Oikawa smiles after, and Makki is grumbling about losing a bet while handing money to a triumphantly crowing Matsu, and suddenly Oikawa is indignant and chasing after them with shrieks of “You bet on us!? ” and “This is a violation of my rights as a captain and a human being!” and-
It’s worth it. It feels worth it.
When Hajime was little, before he can really remember even, before volleyball or high school, or university decisions, or any of it, his parents moved them into the house he’s grown up in. It was there that his parents befriended their new nextdoor neighbors, and upon realizing they both had sons of a similar age, arranged a playdate.
According to legend, and according to Hajime and Tooru’s moms when they get tipsy and misty eyed and start reminiscing at the shared family dinner the night of Hajime and Tooru’s graduations, Tooru had latched immediately onto Hajime and refused to let him go, shrieking like a vicious, particularly bitey hell demon when the Oikawas attempted to go home.
Holding Oikawa’s hand beneath the table while their moms lean against each other and Mrs. Oikawa launches into a dramatic rendition of the time she caught them attempting to dig a tunnel between their backyards when they were four, it turns out that Hajime doesn’t want to let go either.