Archive of Our Own

Two nights before the seventh years are set to graduate, it rains like Hajime’s never seen.

The weather had been looking suspiciously grey all week, which had already had his shackles up in anticipation for something stupidly unlucky. And of course, it was Oikawa who had insisted that nothing is going to happen, it’s just countryside weather, don’t be such a downer, Iwa-chan , and, well—

Well. In any case, it rains so bad it floods the Quidditch field, according to Sawamura who apparently heard it from Professor Ukai, and shows no signs of slowing for the rest of the day, and so Hajime resigns himself to a miserable, water-logged finale to his wizarding education.

“To us,” Hanamaki declares, the bottle of firewhiskey they had half-finished after taking their NEWTs held aloft over his head, the way he saw them do in The Lion King when they watched it on Oikawa’s DVR last summer, “goddamn kings of the hill.”

“Put that down,” Hajime says at the same time Oikawa lifts both of his hands in the air and whoops like he’s on a rollercoaster.

“In forty eight hours, we will cease to be boys, and become men,” Hanamaki continues on like he hasn’t heard him. “True members of the Japanese working class. We will be thrown out into the cruel, unfeeling world and become slaves to a system that will tear us down the way it has all the men before us. Gone are our years of comfort, of bliss. Gone are—”

“What the fuck,” Hajime says. At Hanamaki’s feet, Matsukawa is nodding along to him emphatically. 

“Would you let me finish?” Hanamaki glares. “ Anyways . My point is that the road before us is long, and shitty, full of trials and tribulations and—and like, taxes or whatever, but I actually have faith in us. Geez.” Hanamaki raises the bottle in his other hand like he’s toasting, then pauses. Lowers the bottle a little. 

“I love you assholes,” he declares. “I’m proud of us. Don’t ever ask me to say it again, because I won’t, and I will deny that this conversation ever happened, so remember it. Thank you for the best seven years of my life, because it’s all going downhill from here. That is all.” Then he brings the bottle up to his lips, throws his head back, and takes a long, long gulp.

“You’re so full of shit,” Hajime tells him. It doesn’t come out as steady as he wanted it to.

“Thank you,” Hanamaki says, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “Now let’s get wasted.”

They do not get wasted. It’s barely half a bottle of firewhiskey, so for the rest of the night the four of them taking turns sipping out of the dusty bottle while sprawled across the centuries-old carpet of their dorm, laughing about something or other and racking up noise complaints. At one point, Matsukawa tries to light a contained fire to warm up the room and almost burns the floor relic to ashes. Hajime barely thinks about seeking heat; he’s warm from the inside out, he’s with his best friends in this room that they’ve ruled together for seven years, and he doesn’t have to think about missing this just yet, not when that hurt is still a little ways out.

After Hanamaki hogs most of the whiskey and falls asleep drunk on Matsukawa’s bed, the lamps get snuffed out and Oikawa climbs into Hajime’s covers and presses his freezing feet against Hajime’s shins like he’s done since they were kids, only two seventeen year old boys were not meant to fit in a single four poster bed, and Oikawa is a bigger asshole about it than he was when he was nine. 

“I mean, Makki was sort of right,” he says when it’s become abundantly clear that neither of them are falling asleep any time soon and Hajime has to cast a silencing charm around the bed so as to not wake the other two. “Two more days, and then everything changes.”

“It won’t be so bad,” Hajime assures him, half for himself and half for Oikawa. “It’ll just be different.” 

“Yeah,” Oikawa agrees quietly. His voice is a delicate thing that shudders with the passing wind. A long silence, and then he laughs a little. “I just keep thinking about things.”

Hajime folds his arm behind his head and searches for the light reflecting off the tips of Oikawa’s hair in the dark. “What kinds of things?”

“Like...” He squirms in place, like he’s already anticipating Hajime to scold him for thinking about stupid, meaningless things. “Like all the things I didn’t do. I had seven years, but I still don’t know if everything was enough.”

Hajime frowns. It’s such an Oikawa notion to grasp onto, the enough of it all, even though it’s been Oikawa, out of all of them, who’s done more than enough. The prodigal Muggleborn of their year and the best Seeker Slytherin’s had in sixty years or something like that. Top of their class and Quidditch captain to boot and on top of it all, scouted for a foreign league right out of school. What’s enough, Hajime wants to ask, if you, of all people, don’t even have it?

But Oikawa says nothing else, just tucks his chin into Hajime’s shoulder and drapes his lean, sharp jointed arm across his middle, Hajime shifting to accommodate him, bodies fitting like puzzle pieces in a bed too small for the both of them, and something tells Hajime that Oikawa isn’t talking about Quidditch.

“If you could stay,” Hajime says after a while, voice barely heard over the heavy beating of rainwater against glass, “what else would you do?”

Oikawa thinks for a long time before Hajime feels him smile against his shoulder. “ Everything ,” he murmurs wistfully, and Hajime thinks to himself, yeah, he wouldn’t expect anything less.

The morning of the day before Hajime graduates, they get sun.

“Bummer,” Matsukawa drawls when someone mentions the light that’s been glinting off the edges of their breakfast plates for the better part of the morning. “Tomorrow we were going to sell umbrellas to first years that wilted when they got too waterlogged.” 

“Ten sickles each,” Hanamaki sighs to Hajime, dejectedly pushing his last piece of egg around with the tip of his fork. He’s still blinking the effect of the firewhiskey out of his eyes. “Imagine the profits.”

“You two literally eat Galleons for breakfast,” Hajime scowls at them. “You guys sugar daddy each other.” He gestures across the table at Matsukawa’s green sweater vest with the custom embroidered cursive M on the lapel, his parents’ Christmas present to him this year. “That is literal Gucci.”

“And with ten sickles from everyone in school, I could buy another one,” he shoots back.

“You guys are horrible,” Hajime says.

It’s only nine in the morning, but that doesn’t stop Hanamaki from throwing a grape at him and accidentally hitting a Ravenclaw third year girl sitting behind them in the back of the head, who was just trying to eat a hash brown.

Around them, the Great Hall swirls with casual commotion, the familiar chatter and clinking of plates carrying a certain excitement towards the promise of summer with them. Most students were, at the unusual slight emptiness of the hall, taking advantage of the improved weather to walk the grounds. The ones still lingering around breakfast are mostly underclassmen, kids who have no idea how lucky they are to get another five or six years here and don’t feel the rush to make the most of their last thirty six hours.

Hajime turns his face up towards the warmth and sighs. It’s difficult not to feel nostalgic, though bittersweet and unnecessary as it is. They have one more morning after this. One more breakfast, one more sunlit afternoon, before the train takes them back to the city. He glances across the table at Hanamaki and Matsukawa, feeding each other grapes and trying to get them up the other’s nostrils. 

They’ll have to make the most of today, Hajime thinks. And for that, of course, he needs to find...

“Where’s Oikawa?”

Matsukawa pauses and snorts, undignified, as Hanamaki manages to get a grape halfway in. They glance at each other. “No idea,” Matsukawa says slowly. “He was gone before we woke up, remember?”

“Maybe he saw the great weather and decided to take a stroll,” Hanamaki suggests, gesturing vaguely with a peach speared at the end of his fork. 

“Without breakfast?” Hajime says it out loud, and immediately knows it to be the case. He knows Oikawa—more specifically, knows that this is what he does best—moves without stopping. He sifts through his memories of last night, the four of them tipsy together in their dormitory, their combined laughter drowning out the howling rain that battered the windows, and can’t come up with anything that would’ve prompted Oikawa to run.

Or—maybe he can.

Matsukawa notices his shift in expression and hums. “Well,” he sighs, throwing his arm around Hanamaki’s shoulders, and Iwaizumi for the zillionth time, finds himself hating the way they cock their heads and grow smirks at the same time, “we’ve lost ‘em, Hiro.”

Hanamaki nods along smugly. “Right you are, Issei. Looks like the wild Iwaizumi-senpai is growing concerned over the absence of his mate, and is using the strategy of baiting to lure the wild Oikawa-senpai out of his hiding place and back into his waiting embrace.”

“He forages through the brush for his prey, and spots it up ahead: a-ha! A milk bread , the famed diet of the wild Oikawa-senpai, the perfect strategy for locating Iwaizumi-senpai’s beloved. He’s getting closer to it, one more step and it’ll be right in his—”

“Are you two done ?” Hajime snaps, having finished assembling Oikawa’s breakfast in a shaky pile.. He really regrets showing them National Geographic.

“Sure,” Hanamaki waves him off in a voice that really just means later . “Guess we’ll see you later tonight then.”

“Nah, we’ll be back in a bit.” Hajime straightens up, carefully keeping the plate balanced.

“ Nah , you won’t,” Matsukawa parrots. “It’s you two.”

Hajime scowls. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing at all. Just that you definitely will not be coming back.”

“The fuck are you going on about? It’s our last day, of course we’ll be back.”

“Dude,” Hanamaki grins, resting his head against Matsukawa’s shoulder and raising his eyebrows pointedly, like he’s in on a joke that Hajime doesn’t get. “It’s fine. We were gonna ditch you guys anyways. We got plans of our own, y’know?”

He wiggles his eyebrows in a way that’s meant to be suggestive, but Hajime knows what Hanamaki and Matsukawa’s plans really entail. He makes a mental note to watch out for any unusual smells for the rest of the day and turn in the opposite direction if he sees them in the halls, trying to remember in a panic if Matsukawa said he had Dungbombs left over from the incident last March.

“Relax, prefect,” the man in question snorts when he sees the deepening crease between his eyebrows. “We won’t need you to bail us out of any detentions this time.”

“You guys are horrible,” Hajime tells them flatly.

They both grin at him, shoulders leaned against each other in a gesture of aching familiarity. They do it all the time and it fills Hajime with that bitter taste in his mouth every time he notices, tries not to let that feeling rise in his throat, that terribly guilty, acrid stab, because they don’t deserve that. It’s not their problem that Hajime can’t get his own shit together. It’s no one’s fault but his own. 

They smile at him like they know all of that, though. It lacks their usual mischievous edge, softened by something Hajime can’t quite put his finger on, but it’s a good soft, at least. 

“Seriously. If we don’t see you two later, that’s okay,” Matsukawa says. “Take your time. It’s not like we’re going to leave you two alone after this is all over, anyways.”

Hajime doesn’t doubt that for a second. He could let himself linger on take your time , but he doesn’t, just waves a goodbye, adjusts his grip on Oikawa’s food, and leaves the Great Hall to search for his best friend.

They are eight years old when Iwaizumi sees Oikawa Tooru for the first time, and almost mistakes him for a mermaid. 

It happens in a flash; Hajime has barely set down his butterfly net and dipped a toe into the river when the water about five yards away explodes, shooting into the air like a geyser, and deposits a person on the shore right next to him. Hajime is too shocked to yell. He just stares at the boy heaving for air a few feet away from him, lanky pale limbs askew on the dirt, his long hair fallen messily over his eyes, and the first logical explanation that Hajime’s brain comes up with is, mermaid . 

The boy eventually drags himself upright, delicately picks off a stray green plant that’s tangled itself around his ankle, and a flash of irritation goes through Hajime when he notices that he has legs. Stupid.

“Uh,” he says smartly, and the boy’s head whips around to finally notice him.

“Oh. Hello there,” the boy says, looking very much like he got caught doing something that he shouldn’t have been doing. 

“Hi,” Hajime responds slowly, and for a few moments, no one knows what to say.

“Hi,” the boy replies. “I can breathe underwater,” he offers as a means of explanation, and flips his hair out of his eyes with a haughty sort of gesture. It’s dry, Hajime realizes. His entire body is, in fact, even after getting catapulted out of the river a minute ago.

“Really.”

“I don’t even know how I do it so well. I know how to swim, but only a bit. And I don’t even get wet! It’s like magic or something.” The boy’s chest begins to puff up with every word, gesturing grandly with his hands, and Hajime gets the impression that this isn’t the first time he’s tried to impress someone with this.

“I can see that.”

The boy frowns, drawing his lips into a pout. “Aren’t you going to ask me how I did it?”

Hajime shrugs, picks up his butterfly net. He dips it into the shallowest part of the bank to disrupt the weeds growing there, searching for water beetles. “It’s like you said. Magic.”

The boy shakes his head and laughs. “I was kidding, silly. There’s no such thing as magic.”

Hajime looks up from the water and squints at him. “Aw, man. You really don’t know, do you?”

The boy blinks back. Hajime heaves a sigh. 

He stands up from the bank, taking his butterfly net with him. His mother should still be home. What a waste of a nice day. He can’t believe he managed to catch a whole Muggle before catching a single beetle.

He finds Oikawa by the water again, picking out his long angular figure sitting in the undisturbed area by the lake’s edge, his back to Hajime as he approaches. The lake glints pale and glittering in the morning sun, and the ends of Oikawa’s hair look like they’ve been dipped in it, as though the lake had just spat him out onto its shores moments ago. He’s wearing his house tie for some reason, even though they don’t have classes today, Hajime can see the bit of striped green fabric slung lazily over the back of his neck like a scarf instead of fastened in his usual picture-perfect-Oikawa fashion. 

Oikawa looks up when he hears his footsteps across the grass. For a moment his expression shifts into a look that Hajime cannot decipher quickly enough, before his eyes land on the milk bread balanced in his hands, and his face brightens.

“Iwa-chan! You shouldn’t have,” he croons, making grabby hands at the loaded plate that almost makes Hajime want to refuse him.

“Yeah, yeah,” he says instead, dumping the plate into his hands and crouching onto the grass beside him. “It’s your own fault if you die of malnourishment.”

Oikawa speaks through a mouthful of flaky crumbs. “Bold of you to assume that I’d die from something as boring as malnourishment.”

Hajime would never assume anything of the sort. When Oikawa goes out, he is certain that it will be the way Oikawa does everything— on his own terms. Which Hajime can also safely assume will be by way of fiery explosion and a blaze of heroism, somehow.

Instead, he says, “You’re right. The only way you’re dying is when I drown you in this lake myself.”

“Mean, Iwa-chan!”

Hajime lets him eat after that, the two of them settling into a comfortable silence as they stretch their legs out on the drying lawn. Hajime stares out across the lake, towards the distant rising hills, eyes unfocused. Clouds melt like butter across a carolina sky, and he can hear the sounds like laughter floating over the lawn, spilling from the castle with the mid morning. 

Oikawa knows why he’s here. In the same way that Hanamaki and Matsukawa knew that they weren’t coming back to the common room with them, even if he had sworn up and down that they would, Oikawa knows what Hajime knows, in that wordless kind of way they’ve always shared. 

I still don’t know if everything was enough.

Hajime squints out at the shimmering water, up at the sun now completely broken through the clouds. They’ll have to make the most of today.

“So,” he clears his throat and turns to raise his eyebrows at his best friend, who’s polished off his plate by now and is dusting his hands neatly against his pants. “What’s your plan?”

Oikawa looks up at him. “What plan?” he asks innocently.

“Don’t be fucking coy. You said you wanted to do everything, didn’t you?” Hajime takes the plate that Oikawa has finished and stands, patting the grass off of his jeans. He grins down at his best friend, still looking up at him with the smallest smile. “Was that just big talk, or what?”

“Iwa-chan wants to spend his last day at Hogwarts with Oikawa-san?” he purrs. 

Hajime shakes his head. “Don’t think I’d have much of a choice either way, Shittykawa.”

Oikawa does not dispute this, only stares up at Hajime with glinting eyes, the ghost of a knowing smile across his mouth. There’s also that something else —that thing that’s always just sort of been there, that they don’t say out loud—that lingers behind brown eyes, but it’s tinged with something that Hajime isn’t so familiar with.

“I have to warn you,” Oikawa says, “when I say everything, I mean everything . The stupid stuff too. Well, actually, it’s mostly gonna be stupid stuff—”

“When is anything with you ever not stupid?” Hajime raises his eyebrows. “What, you worried I can’t keep up with you?”

Oikawa actually scoffs at that, a chuckle that sounds like yeah, right . “Alright then, Iwa-chan.” He stands too, a little further down on the pitched lawn so that they’re eye to eye this time. “One last day of everything with Oikawa-senpai, just as you wanted.”

Hajime folds his arms across his chest. “Great. Where are we starting?”

Oikawa’s smile sharpens a bit at the edges. “Oh, not just yet,” he says, starting up the grassy slope back towards the castle. “We have to get my list first.”

Hajime has to jog a bit after him to keep up with his long strides. “You have a list ?” he asks in mild horror, his mind already sifting through the possibilities, and up ahead of him, Oikawa laughs again, tall and bright.

They are eleven years old with an entire compartment on the train to themselves, but Oikawa has abandoned his end of it to sit next to Hajime, curled up against his side despite the few centimeters he has on the other boy, sniffling into the wet patch on his shoulder. Comforting Oikawa is usually a methodical process on Hajime’s part, but today is proving to be… a bit of a challenge. The upended box of Bertie Bott’s Every Flavor Beans had only kept him entertained for a little while; Oikawa tasted one too many rotten egg flavored ones before completely giving into his nerves, magic beans forgotten.

“What if I can’t,” he wails, crinkling the dark fabric of Hajime’s robes beneath his nails. “What if I don’t know how to do any of it? What if I can’t do any magic at all and they kick me out?”

“Don’t be stupid,” Hajime repeats for what feels like the millionth time that train ride. “You do magic all the time. Just because you don’t have magic parents doesn’t mean you can do any less than me.”

“You don’t know that,” he insists tearfully. Hajime’s arm is starting to cramp where Oikawa clings to it like a leech.

“Shittykawa, you’re killing me here.”

“They won’t sort me,” Oikawa wails as a fresh wave of tears starts. “Or even worse, they’ll put me in the worst house and you in the best one and you’ll make better friends and leave me behind.”

It’s funny, Hajime thinks. I could say the same thing to you.

His mothers were both Hufflepuffs, prefects one year apart. Hajime knows what little they have told him about their house, but doesn’t consider himself to be very friendly or outwardly kind or a particularly good finder, so carrying on the legacy seems unlikely. That’s fine. He knows little about the other houses, so he doesn’t feel partial towards any one, except maybe in this one respect. Because he knows that Oikawa will be in Slytherin. No matter what his blood status, or his magical knowledge, or any of it— there’s nothing else he can be. It’s the only house that could possibly begin to contain Oikawa Tooru, in all of his ambition and cunning and thirst to prove himself, and all of that magical power that Hajime can feel like a lightning shock to his toes whenever they brush bare skin, the immensity of it. 

Oikawa is not the one who should be worrying about getting left behind. Hajime twists his lip between his teeth and prays to a god he hopes exists.

Please, when I get to Hogwarts, let me be able to keep up with him. Just let me run at his pace.

“I’m not going to leave you behind,” he says instead, because admitting all of this to Oikawa will do wonders for his ego and Hajime thinks he would rather launch himself out of the moving train than endure that. “There’s no way I’m going to be able to get rid of you that easy.”

Oikawa sniffles, nose full, and garbles something that sounds like a waterlogged variant of his name into the cloth of his robes. Hajime reaches over to flatten the back of Oikawa’s hair where it’s begun to come loose from the product, and then the door of the compartment slides open.

Hajime looks up to meet slanted, beady eyes and a head of strawberry-blond hair peering at them through the crack in the door. The eyes blink, swiveling between the two of them on the seat, before the boy says, “Oh. Hello. This might be a bad time to ask, but are either of you scared of snakes?”

Oikawa raises his head from Hajime’s shoulder and rubs his nose, despair forgone for confusion. “Huh? No.” 

Hajime shakes his head.

The boy brightens. “Oh, good. Do you mind?” At their blank-eyed stares, he turns back towards the corridor and calls, “Issei, in here.”

The door slides all the way open and the boy sidles in to hold it open with his foot, making room for his dark-haired companion to slowly back his way into the compartment, balancing a huge cage against his torso. 

Neither Hajime nor Oikawa are traditionally afraid of snakes, but the sight of this one makes both of them jolt upright in their seats. An albino python longer than the length of Hajime’s entire body and thicker than his forearm makes its way into their compartment, looking irritated at the constant jostling of its cage, raising its head to glare at its owner. When its look goes unnoticed, the python turns its eyes onto Hajime and Oikawa on the opposite seat, blinking lazily.

Oikawa makes an undignified squeak.

“Cheddar, be nice,” the dark-haired boy scolds when he notices the snake’s redirected attention. “Sorry,” he apologizes to them, “everywhere else is full or deathly afraid of her.” The other two boys settle in the seat across from them with the snake’s cage balanced in between them. They both wear expensive-looking robes with satin cuffs, but the snake bearer’s is frayed at the edges and Strawberry Blonde sports yellowing stains on the left sleeve and around the hem. They make one of the oddest trios Hajime has ever seen.

He raises his eyebrows, initial surprise worn off. “You named your snake Cheddar?” he says in disbelief.

“Technically, in our archives, she’s called Ophiuchus the Twenty-third,” the snake bearer sniffs with a faux air of importance that soon sharpens into a sly smile, “but Cheddar rolls off the tongue better, don’t you think?”

Oikawa, still bundled at his side, snorts a muffled laugh into Hajime’s damp shoulder.

Strawberry Blonde narrows his eyes at him. “You’re the guy that was crying on the platform earlier,” he remarks flatly. He rolls one buttcheek off the seat to reach for something underneath him. “Oh, hey look, Bertie’s.”

Oikawa splutters, and Hajime grins at the two of them. They grin back. The snake is pretty cool. Things are already beginning to look up.

Hajime has been well acquainted with the impact of an Oikawa Tooru List over the course of the last decade or so. He knows his best friend to be structured, to prefer step by step guides to success over vague pushes in the right direction, or else he starts to flail. Hajime indulges him. He’s personally always done better with more freedom of movement, but Oikawa is so religious about the list keeping that it’s almost conditioned him to believe otherwise. 

It’s the way Oikawa’s structured his work weeks for the past seven years, long sheets of parchment tacked to the inside posts of his four-poster bed with bullet-pointed assignments that get checked off upon completion and a little smiley face flourish at the end of them, because he’s a detail freak. 

And the Quidditch plays—Merlin’s balls, the Quidditch plays . Scrolls upon scrolls upon scrolls of parchment. By the time they could take trips to Hogsmeade their third year, Oikawa was blowing almost as much money on stationary supplies as Hanamaki and Matsukawa were spending at Zonko’s. Hajime would not be entirely surprised if he found out that Oikawa kept all of them, pressed and stashed at the bottom of his trunk like a crazy person.

This Oikawa Tooru List, however, is not of the same prestige as its predecessors. It’s not even its own sheet of parchment. But it’s an Oikawa Tooru List, no doubt, with its thoroughness and haphazard train of thought evident from the very first glance: a few dozen bullet points scrawled in varying types of ink inside the back cover of his worn copy of A History of Magic.

“Damn,” Hajime mutters, catching sight of the monstrosity of color that’s sprawled itself across poor Ms Bagshot’s biography. “We’re not going to have time for all of that, you psycho.”

“Ah, that’s okay.” Oikawa forgoes the traditional quill and inkpot and pulls an honest-to-God purple magic marker out of his bedside drawer, uncapping it with his teeth and starting to draw bold lines through some of the points. “Some of these are stupid anyways. Like, we’re probably not going to find that basilisk skeleton below the lake, because it doesn’t exist and Makki likes to lie. And as much as I’d like to, we probably won’t catch Ukai-sensei and Takeda-sensei in the act today—oh, don’t look at me like that Iwa-chan, I know you have eyes —and I probably won’t find anyone this last minute to do it with on top of Professor Binns’ desk, unless prefect Iwa-chan is willing to—”

Hajime pushes him clean off the bed, face burning.

Across their dormitory next to Matsukawa’s bed, Cheddar blinks out of her mid-morning and hisses softly at the disturbance, perpetually annoyed. Hajime wonders how she makes it so obvious when snakes don’t have any expressive facial features.

“Alright fine,” Oikawa laughs, popping back up from the floor and reaching for his book again, “that leaves about. Twenty or so we can do today.”

“ Twenty ?”

“Didn’t take Iwa-chan for a quitter ,” Oikawa sings as he begins to rummage through his trunk, which shuts him up. “Alright then, first up on the list is swimming with mermaids!” 

Hajime stares at him.

Oikawa sighs, looks around the room, glares at the snake that somehow wears an eerily similar expression to Hajime’s. “Oh, don’t give me that look, Cheddar-chan.”

Because Oikawa is an idiot, Hajime is always right, and Cheddar should be classified as a prophet of their generation, swimming with mermaids does not go at all the way Oikawa probably imagined it.

“Well,” he spits a clump of seaweed out of his mouth after Hajime has dragged him halfway up the bank by his armpits, good and far away from the angrily churning bit of water that he was just tossed out of, “we can cross item one off the list now.”

“How are you going to live past twenty five,” Hajime asks him seriously. 

“Well,” Oikawa says again, in a tone that means Hajime’s about to hear some bullshit, “what else is being best friends with a future St. Mungo’s Healer supposed to be good for if I can’t break a few bones trying to swim with some mermaids every once in a whi— ow, Iwa-chan!”  

Hajime sighs. Cheddar told him it would be like this. He takes the mermaids as an unfortunate precursor to the rest of this day and dries Oikawa’s dripping clothes with a quick muttered charm, steadfastly ignoring the way his t-shirt clings to the flat planes of his stomach and chest and focuses on picking the seaweed out of his hair.

“You’re a menace to society,” Hajime tells him. “What’s number two?”

Morning stretches into the afternoon soon enough, and as it does, Hajime and Oikawa uncover the hidden corners of a castle they’ve called home for the better part of seven years. Oikawa has obviously paid more attention to the idiosyncrasies of this place than Hajime ever has, chattering excitedly about this rumor and that urban legend as they traverse its moving staircases and soaring towers and sprawling lawns, seeking, as he always does, another adventure. 

Oikawa moves like he wants an adventure, but what surprises Hajime more than anything else is the profound mundanity of it all. Oikawa had said stupid, and well, the mermaid thing had been the worst of it, but he’d classify most of their activities as harmlessly curious, vaguely nostalgic. They gather old star charts and Transfiguration essays and burn them on the lawn right underneath Mizoguchi’s office window. When lunchtime arrives, they take their usual secret passage behind the statue of the one-eyed witch and traipse through a peaceful Hogsmeade, grinning like thieves in a getaway. And when they still haven’t gotten enough of the sunlight, they take a plunge through the Forbidden Forest in a search of the unicorn pack’s grazing spot, the reflecting pool that dips out of the Black Lake. The pool is true to its name; light shatters against its surface and bounces like diamond dust across everything in the clearing—the trees, the moss covered stones, the flank of a unicorn foal that shies away from their hand, Oikawa’s hair, Oikawa’s eyes, Oikawa’s grin.

Number nine. Number ten. Number eleven.

If this is everything that he wanted out of this day, Oikawa Tooru List and Oikawa Tooru Ambition in all, then Hajime has no problem with keeping up. Oikawa holds onto their directory and drags Hajime back and forth across castle grounds with no abandon, hardly concerned with retraced steps and wasted time, and so Hajime pushes away all his worry of everything and turns his face up towards the sun.

Alright, almost all of his worries.

“Iwa-chan, you’re such a goody two shoes.”

Hajime takes an extra moment to make sure that the door is firmly bolted behind them before scowling at Oikawa. It doesn’t land as hard as he would like it to, since their faces are half obscured by dim candlelight in the near pitch darkness of the corridor, but he can still make out the self-satisfied gleam of Oikawa’s grin. 

“ You’re the one who explores forbidden corridors in your spare time, I’m the one that bails you out of your detention sentences,” he hisses. 

“Who’s going to give us detention on the last day of term?” Oikawa laughs, far too loudly in the echoing chamber for his liking. He narrowly dodges the punch Hajime swings at his arm.

“This is so stupid,” Hajime says, voice still low as they step carefully through the empty hallway, because he doesn’t have a death wish. “ Fuck . This is so stupid.”

“I told you it would be,” Oikawa sings. “Number twelve, Iwa-chan, c’mon.”

It’s comical, really, how fast that smug smile slides off of his face when they hear the tiny meow on their left. Hajime and Oikawa spin in tandem towards the source of the sound; an old tabby cat with slitted red eyes, perched atop one of the gargoyle statues lining the hallway, staring down at them.

“Ah,” Oikawa says.

“Mrs. Norris,” Hajime affirms faintly.

“ Shit ,” Oikawa says. He just remembered the one person who really would give them detention on the last day of term.

Hajime unfreezes first, grabbing onto Oikawa’s wrist and pulling hard. “Run!" 

They break into a sprint in the opposite way they came, echoing footsteps pounding against stone. Meows are following them down the hall and Oikawa is laughing , the idiot, wheezing nervous little giggles as they run, as if they’re not about to get their asses handed to them on their last day of school.

Hajime skids around a corner with Oikawa still in one hand, and reaches for the first door latch he sees with the other. When it doesn’t budge on the first push, Oikawa is the one to draw his wand first and throw out a wordless unlocking charm and almost hit Hajime in the face when the door springs open in his haste. Not a moment too soon; they’ve barely caught their breath when they hear a voice around the corner. Professor Naoi speaks to his cat in low, inquiring tones for a few bated moments, before the footsteps fade and a faraway door closes.

“ You ,” Hajime wheezes, sinking onto his butt with his back against the wall, “I hate you.”

“Okay,” Oikawa agrees, punctuated with a noise that sounds like air escaping a balloon. He’s still laughing. “That’s fair.”

Hajime swipes a hand at him half-heartedly, Oikawa almost falling on his ass trying to lean away from it. He makes another limp attack; Oikawa dances away from it, taunting, scooting further away towards the center of the empty classroom, and that’s when they both catch sight of the mirror.

It’s pushed all the way up against the far end of the room and almost reaches the ceiling, tall and ornate, its surface dusty with neglect. There’s an inscription at the top of the frame, but Hajime can’t recognize any of the ancient looking symbols. He frowns at it, the oddity of a mirror kept in the forbidden corridor, but Oikawa, true to form, wanders over to it like it has a gravitational pull, hands already pulling at his mussed hair.

“Merlin, I look like a mess,” he says with a click of his tongue.

Hajime says nothing to that, since it’s terribly untrue, just goes over to him like Oikawa’s got a gravitational pull of his own. The breathless, panicked burn in his chest is fading, eased by the long bout of silence and what feels like the first moment of calm Hajime has felt since breakfast this morning. They’ve packed a lot into the last few hours.

He watches Oikawa with vague amusement, with his fingers combing through the nonexistent mess of his hair, looks at himself, and has to do a double take.

It’s them, but—it’s not. Hajime stares back at a version of himself that looks carved out of a mid morning daydream, distinctly him with lines drawn darker and longer in places, somehow more recognizable than the person he sees every morning in the bathroom mirror. He knows him and yet he doesn’t—it’s his face with the adolescent roundness lost, the five o’clock shadow that Hajime’s always wanted to grow in place of it, the revered x-cross stitched over the breast pocket of fern green robes. His reflection smiles at him, ajar, knowing, and it widens as Oikawa enters his field of vision and hooks his chin onto the ledge of Hajime’s shoulder.

Oikawa . Hands no longer in his hair but around Hajime’s shoulders as he drapes himself over his back in the way he does, a line of warmth along his side that Hajime can feel just from watching it. Oikawa is different in the bulk of his upper body and the lines in his face, more defined like they are in Hajime’s, but still boyish in the gleam in his eyes. They’re almost the same height, Hajime notes a little giddily, evident in the way Oikawa has to tilt his face up to get his chin over. He’s stunning. His Quidditch robes are sky blue.

“Oikawa,” he breathes, not daring to look away from the reflection. “Oikawa, look, it’s us .”

“Hmm?” Oikawa’s hands leave his hair with reluctance and find purchase in his pockets as he steps backwards to stand parallel with Hajime. “I mean—yeah. It’s a mirror.”

“You can’t see it?” 

Oikawa glances at him, wholly confused. Reflection Oikawa digs his chin a little deeper into Reflection Hajime’s shoulder and winks at him. Something lodges itself in his throat. 

“We look older, you’re wearing the uniform, I’ve made Healer—here, come stand here—can you see it now?”

It’s like watching a home video on a Muggle camera, grainy and far off, settling like a film over his eyes and nose and teeth. Hajime blinks quickly like he’s worried the video will glitch out. His hand moves, before his mind can catch up to what he wants, the tips of his fingers brushing where the pressed line of their connected arms should be.

Oikawa keeps looking back and forth between the mirror and Hajime, worry lining his brow. “Iwa-chan, are you sure you didn’t actually hit your head on the door?”

“ Yes . You really can’t see anything?” Oikawa shakes his head. 

Reflection Oikawa is whispering something into Reflection Hajime’s ear, his neck tilted slightly back as they share their secrets. Hajime feels like he’s intruding, almost. His reflection’s hand is settled in the curve of Reflection Oikawa’s hip. 

“Merlin, it looks so real,” Hajime laughs. “It’s even got that scar on your ear.” He feels sort of off-kilter, his center of balance thrown. He can’t stop staring at the hand on his hip. “Maybe—” He stops. Dares to voice his deepest, most intimate hope. “Maybe it tells the future.”

Oikawa can’t see the press of their hands in the mirror, so it feels like a safe enough suggestion to throw out there. Doesn’t watch the skim of Reflection Oikawa’s mouth over the shell of Reflection Hajime’s ear, doesn’t feel the tug in his chest that feels half painful now, so it feels safe to say this time.

“It can’t.” The frown is evident in Oikawa’s voice, even when it drops and he sounds far away. “I don’t see any of that. I just see us.”

The winter of their fifth year brings about a particularly heavy snowfall, the birth of the MatsuHana union and the start of Hajime’s everlasting suffering, and an accidental Bludger that smashes into Oikawa’s right knee during a match against Hufflepuff, cutting his season drastically short. 

Losing Oikawa is more crushing than any of them want to admit. It’s an entire team upset. Yahaba’s good, he’s a solid substitute, but he doesn’t have Oikawa’s speed, or his finesse, or any of the things they need to edge out Kageyama or Miya for the Cup that year. That’s fine. In the twenty four hours after they lose the match, Hajime doesn’t concern himself with much beyond the crushing grip of Oikawa’s fingers, the smell of the hospital wing so stale it burns the inside of his nose, and not hurling at the sight of his best friend’s leg, bleeding and open against stark white sheets. Hajime doesn’t think about Quidditch much in the hours, even the days following.

Oikawa does.

The winter of their fifth year brings flu season, Slytherin’s silent resignation of the House Cup, and Hajime’s and Oikawa’s first real argument ever. Hajime is jolted awake in the dead of the night to the sound of their dormitory’s door shutting, Oikawa’s bed warm and empty, his broom missing.

“I can play on it,” he insists. Oikawa looks like an idiot, standing out there shivering in the hallway, three jackets pulled over his UFO-print pajama pants. He sounds like an idiot, too. “They don’t know—I can play on it.”

“You’re being stupid,” Hajime says sharply. “And reckless.”

“I’m not being stupid. They fixed it,” he hisses, gesturing sharply at his newly-repaired knee. The bandages are off, he’s slept off the Skele-Gro, he can walk on it. Hajime doesn’t count that as fixed. “Wasn’t that the whole point? They fixed it, so now I can play.”

“You heard what Kuzuri-sensei said.”

“All due respect,” Oikawa says in a voice that definitely does not mean respect, lip curled dangerously, “Kuzuri-sensei can go fuck herself.”

“You’re acting like a child,” Hajime snaps. “Merlin, don’t you give a shit? That thing shattered your entire fucking kneecap, Oikawa. You fell fifty feet in the air. You could’ve died .”

He waves a dismissive hand. “Oh, spare me the dramatics.”

“ You spare me the dramatics.” Hajime steps forward and jabs a finger into Oikawa’s sternum, pushing him backwards on his heels just a little. The motion doesn’t bring Hajime any satisfaction in the slightest. “What the fuck isn’t computing here? Magic isn’t perfect. It’s not fixed all the way. If you play on that knee for the rest of the season, you’re never gonna get to play again ever .”

“You don’t get it,” Oikawa sings shrilly, turning away from him. “Iwa-chan’s too simple minded.”

“You’ll only sit out for half of a season,” Hajime glares. “We have two more shots at the Cup after this. Stop acting like this is the end.”

“You don’t get it.”

“I don’t think that I’m the issue here.”

“Iwa-chan is so motherly,” he jeers. “Iwa-chan cares sooooo much—”

“ Of course I fucking care!” Hajime explodes. He’s so over worrying about who hears them, can’t think about anything else besides the white noise in his ears and Oikawa, stupid Oikawa . “Who else here is gonna care about you when you’re trying to run yourself into the ground? You won’t!”

People only look at Oikawa when he’s moving. When he’s climbing fast and high and people take their eyes off of their own shit to squint at him through the sun and say, what a remarkable young man . They look at him like a thing in a display case. Prodigy Muggleborn. Best Slytherin Seeker in sixty years, or something like that. 

Hajime just looks at him all the time. Hajime’s always fucking looking.

“You don’t get it,” Oikawa repeats, tight through his teeth, gripping the handle of his broomstick so hard his knuckles turn white. He’s favoring his left, even as he’s just standing up. “I just—I know I can play.”

The worst part about it is that Oikawa knows exactly why people look at him. He likes it when they do. A little too much, probably.

“I have to,” he continues, voice cracking just slightly over it. “What else am I supposed to do? What else do I have if I don’t have this?”

You have me gets lodged inside of Hajime’s throat, slides back down, sickly sweet.

“If I catch you sneaking out after curfew again, I’ll report you to Irihata,” he says instead, balling his hands into fists and shoving them into the pockets of his jumper. He doesn’t look Oikawa in the eye. “Don’t make me. But I’m not going to watch you do this shit to yourself, Oikawa. It hurts more than just you.”

And it’s here, with three feet of space and a thousand miles between them, that Hajime thinks, inexplicably— I love him . 

And then— that’s never going to be enough.

“The first floor girl’s bathroom,” Hajime repeats doubtfully, quickening his steps to keep up with Oikawa’s longer strides. “The one out of order.”

“Yep.”

“Has a ghost.”

“Yep.”

“And Matsukawa told you this?”

“Mm-hmm. Our first year.”

“And you believe him?”

Oikawa’s nose crinkles ever so slightly. “Well— maybe . Isn’t that the whole point of this exercise? To figure out what’s real and what’s not?”

“For you,” Hajime rolls his eyes as he floats ahead of him, the tips of his fingers tracing the grooves of the stone wall. Hajime’s never really been one for conspiracy theories, much less magical ones, though he supposes that Oikawa’s penchant for them stems from the lack of them from the first eight years of his life. “I thought you were scared of ghosts after the one you saw in my basement that summer.”

Hajime watches the tips of Oikawa’s ears flush pink. “Not anymore! I was ten, anyways.”

Ten years old and tearing up the steps of Hajime’s house, screaming at the top of his lungs that he’d seen the grim reaper and he had risen out of the Iwaizumi’s icebox to claim Oikawa for the underworld, tackling Hajime around his middle like a rugby player and sending them both into the grass of their front lawn. It had taken Hajime’s mothers a half hour to calm him down and another ten for Hajime to stop laughing. Shame that Oikawa’s first ghost had been Eyeless Eric—he was rather nice if you could ignore the bloody sockets, and he only messed with their plumbing sometimes—but Oikawa had steered clear of ghosts ever since. A wondrous feat in and of itself, with the amount of specters that rose out of the milk bread every morning. 

 “Anyways, if you’re not here to find out some truths,” Oikawa’s pouting now, walking backwards with his fingers laced behind him as he talks, “then what is Iwa-chan doing here with me anyways, hmm?”

It’s rhetorical, but Hajime opens his mouth to answer anyway. To keep your dumbass alive , reflexive. Then, third wheeling with Hanamaki and Matsukawa is a goddamn nightmare , true but irrelevant, and then, haven’t got anything better to do , not true at all, and then, because you’re here, why else?

“Brat,” he says instead. “Wouldn’t kill you to be grateful about the breakfast I brought you.”

“Tsundere Iwa-chan,” Oikawa sings, making Hajime’s entire face go a matching shade of pink as they round a corner and approach the entrance to the girls’ bathroom, “wouldn’t kill you to admit that you like having the attention of the illustrious Oikawa-sama.”

Hajime wants to ask him why he does that—why he feels the need to verbalize the things that they both know Hajime’s thinking when it aches so much less to not say them. But then Oikawa’s waving his wand to push the caution tape across the door to the side, pushing it open, and Hajime runs straight into his back when he stops abruptly in the doorway.

“Oi—”

But then he gets a look over Oikawa’s shoulder at what’s stopped them in their tracks, and falls silent. 

Hanamaki and Matsukawa are sitting with their backs against one of the yellowing-tiled walls, leaning against each other, fast asleep. It looks as though they’ve been there for a while, dress shirt sleeves rolled up over their elbows, oxfords kicked off and lying in a heap a ways away from them. There’s a quietly bubbling cauldron on Matsukawa’s left that’s sparking faintly, which normally would peak Hajime’s anxiety, but this time he’s more taken in by the matching scorch marks on their cheeks and the sunlight coming in through the opposite window that turns them into smudges of gold, and the miraculous way in which Hanamaki and Matsukawa have somehow turned a bathroom into a safe haven. 

“Ah,” Oikawa says, subdued. “I get the ghost thing now.”

And it’s here, for the first time all day, that Hajime feels the weight of time upon them. It aches the more they run, turns bitter on his tongue the longer he refuses to swallow. It was easy to ignore when it was disguised under lists and lake water and cat caretakers and magic mirrors, but he watches his best friends sleep, fingers tangled, with all the time in the world, and realizes that no matter how fast they try to run, time will always catch up.

“Let’s go,” Hajime whispers, tugging on Oikawa’s sleeve. He can’t stand in that doorway anymore, not with that phantom pressure on his windpipe. “Let’s leave them alone.”

Oikawa follows without retort, is uncharacteristically mindful of the door’s soft clicking latch as he pulls it shut, and they start back the way they came.

“Ah, it’s better that we didn’t get caught up in their plans,” he says breezily when they’ve almost made it to the end of the corridor. “The stuff they were brewing looked nasty .”

“Don’t care what they do,” Hajime grunts. “As long as it doesn’t set anything on fire or they don’t turn it on us, I don’t care.”

They turn the corner and step onto the staircase right before it dislodges from the floor and begins to move leftwards.

“Oh I wouldn’t worry about that,” Oikawa says as they descend. “It’s not going to be so terrible this year.”

Not for the first time that day, Hajime feels annoyingly, confusingly, uncomfortably left out of the loop on something. He blinks the sudden hurt out of his eyes and tries to remember the last time Oikawa, of all people, kept him in the dark about something—such a seldom occurrence that the feeling of it in his gut is practically visceral—because usually when he’s out of the loop, he can bet that his best friend and his big fat mouth are out of it, too.

But Hajime watches Oikawa pull on the joints of his fingers as they wait for the staircase to settle, lost in his own head, and the uncomfort in his stomach continues to churn, acidic and unpleasant. 

Let me in , he thinks desperately. Let me in your head, just this once. Just say it. Don’t do this to me today.

Say it say it say it say it say it —

“Come on,” Hajime forces himself to speak, before the clanging in his head got any louder and he ended up doing something stupid, like actually act on it. “How many do we have left?”

Oikawa digs out the book and consults their list. Hajime watches him do it, the scrunch of his nose and the elegant slant of his limbs as he tilts the book higher into the light, and feels like ramming his head through a portrait.

“A few,” Oikawa answers after a beat. He smiles strangely, files the list away again. “Only a few more, Iwa-chan.”

He almost acts on it. Just once.

It’s right after Oikawa’s closed his fingers around the Golden Snitch a half a second before Kageyama’s hand would’ve reached it, jolting forward on his broom and getting thrown off and almost breaking his stupid neck as he rolls three or four yards in the dirt before struggling to stand, raises his fist towards the screaming crowd of green in the stands, a pair of golden wings fluttering weakly between his fingers. Right after Oikawa wins Slytherin the House Cup in their seventh year.

Hajime sees him fall forward on his broom and sees the glint of gold in his hand from his perch in the sky. He’s by no means the closest to Oikawa in that moment, but he gets there the fastest, jumping off of his broom in his own neck-threatening move that has Professor Ukai shouting in alarm from the sidelines and abandoning it hovering four feet in the air to crash into his best friend, almost taking them down into the dirt again. 

“You did it,” he keeps repeating, hoarse and disbelieving, in Oikawa’s ear as he wraps a hand around the back of his neck. “You did it, you did it.” 

He doesn’t know if Oikawa even hears him. The stands are going wild above them and Konoha is yelling a slew of incomprehensible words from the commentator’s booth, the rest of the team has caught up and are screaming like madmen around them, a tightening circle of limbs and arms and sweat, and Hajime’s chest feels tight, backed up like a dam about to burst with too much happiness, too much relief, too much love, too much fucking pride for this one stupid, stunning boy.

And then Oikawa’s hand is at the back of Hajime’s own neck, fingers threading through the sweat-soaked hair there and squeezing wordlessly, and he knows he hears him.

Hajime pulls back from their embrace to grin. Oikawa’s hair is a mess, he’s going to go berserk when he sees it like this, but he looks like a dream anyways, eyes alight and mouth fallen half open as he tries to say words he can’t quite form around his shock. The Snitch is still clutched in his right hand, which he presses into the back of Hajime’s knuckles.

“Look,” he breathes, fumbling with their gloved hands until he can place his fist into Hajime’s open palm and drop the Snitch into it. “Ours.”

Hajime can’t fucking help it. He smiles so wide his face feels like it’ll split open, a perfect line down the center. “You caught it, dumbass,” he yells over the noise. “It’s yours.”

Oikawa shakes his head. He’s closed his mouth now and he’s smiling too, so open and genuine, Hajime’s favorite kind. “Ours,” he says again, and this time Hajime can only make out the way his mouth forms the word, it’s lost over the din of the crowd. “Ours.”

Over the summer, when Hajime and Oikawa had stayed at the Hanamaki manor for a week, the four of them had talked extensively and concretely about what happens after. The careers they discussed and the apartments they had looked at in the city had all felt like inevitabilities to Hajime; warm, exciting promises of a future they would enter into together. Hanamaki and Matsukawa had cushy desk jobs lined up for them in the Ministry, Hajime would enter St. Mungo’s as a Trainee Healer, and Oikawa would finally accept a damn professional offer and start training somewhere in the city. 

And so Oikawa says ours , and Hajime thinks, obviously . A House Cup is everything, and yet it’s nothing at all, with Oikawa at his side. They’ve got the world at their fingertips, and they’re going to take all of it on together.

Hajime can’t remember who looks at whose mouth first; Oikawa’s gaze is a line of fire that leaves him hard pressed to notice anything else. But someone does, and it sends a bolt of lightning up his spine as he thinks now , finally , because what better timing than this? Oikawa has won the goddamn House Cup, he’s won the goddamn House Cup for Hajime, and they’re right on the cusp of the rest of their lives. They’ve got all the time in the world.

But then Oikawa’s smile is freezing in its place, its fluttering edges pinned to the sides like butterfly wings. Hajime doesn’t even have time to ask why as he moves out of his space with a firm grip on his shoulder, smile pressed so perfectly into his features it looks as though it might crack open upon impact. The Snitch still pressed into Hajime’s open palm. The moment’s over.

He doesn’t get it until later. Later being dinner that night, when Oikawa breaks the news of him accepting an offer from Jose Blanco to train for a spot on the team he’s coaching in Argentina to the entire Slytherin team, and somehow becomes the man of the hour twice. That fake, frozen smile of his has not left his face all afternoon, he hasn’t looked at Hajime in hours, and he gets it.

It’s more that Hajime doesn’t know how he didn’t see this coming. Going to school with and being friends with Oikawa has always been about keeping up, in stride with him, because Oikawa moves without stopping. What kind of a fool was Hajime to think that he could keep at his pace forever? 

In any case, the news is broken, their focus moves from Quidditch to final exams, Oikawa is quietly written out of their apartment plans, Hajime is happy for him, and life goes on. He does not act on it again. 

How else are you supposed to act, when the love of your life is moving across the globe in search of a dream that isn’t you?

Hajime is spending his last day at Hogwarts with Oikawa Tooru, so really, it was only inevitable that things turned to Quidditch.

“I thought you’d want your last moment on the field to be when we won the Cup,” Hajime tells him as they head to the center of the pitch, broomsticks retrieved from their dormitory. 

“Poetic,” Oikawa smiles, “but even I’m not that sentimental. Besides, I had another idea.”

They kick off the ground together and Hajime relishes in the familiar cold whip of air that curls across his cheeks. Oikawa tosses the Snitch he caught at their last game (because he nicked it from the trunk, of course he did) into the air, waits for it to zip away, then hurdles after it with the speed of a gunshot. Hajime laughs when his trajectory almost sends him barreling into the side of one of the teacher’s stands, the sound of it echoing through an empty stadium. He only catches the flash of Oikawa’s white smile back at him before he takes off again, completely in his element.

It’s quiet, miraculously so, with most of the students gone to dinner by now. Hajime’s probably spent more time on this field than he has in his dormitory or the Great Hall or in any of his classrooms, and doesn’t think he’s ever seen it so quiet. 

He figures that the everlooming concept of lasts might have something to do with it. 

Farther down the pitch, Oikawa lets out a whoop of triumph as he catches his prize, and Hajime silently agrees with the earlier words of his best friend; he’s not that sentimental either, to leave his last moment on this Quidditch pitch to their Cup win. Unlike Oikawa, Hajime won’t be spending the rest of his life traversing the world’s professional pitches. This is the last one he gets. And he’d much rather have his final moment be something like this: the sun barely a half crescent in the sky, bare fingers close to freezing themselves around the handle of his broom, Oikawa in an alien print t-shirt and a Snitch in his hand, always, and just the two of them, suspended in the air with the sunlight and the silence.

“Alright, come on,” Oikawa says breathlessly once he’s reached Hajime’s point of elevation. “If you were worried about sentimental, Iwa-chan, wait til you see this .”

Hajime doesn’t play Keeper, so he’s never given the Quidditch hoops much thought apart from if he wants the Quaffle away or through them at the given moment. Until Oikawa leads them towards the tallest most one and he gets a look at all the scratches on the metal ring, and he tells him:

“Number eighteen,” he grins, “leave my mark.”

Hajime veils his fondness with a poorly executed look of exasperation. “You do remember the entire trophy we got with our names on it, right?” 

“Yeah,” Oikawa agrees with a gleam in his eye. “But I guess I just wanted something a little more, I don’t know, juvenile.”

It’s incredibly juvenile. Hajime holds the back of his broom steady and takes the wand from Oikawa to put the finishing flourish on ‘H + T WUZ HERE! RULE THE COURT!!!’ and feels like a kid stealing candy out of a jar.

But he runs his thumb over their cooling chicken scratches and accepts the arm Oikawa leans against his shoulder, wind on his face, the sun a brilliant, dying spot on the horizon, and thinks yeah , he’s good with the way this one ends.

They lose track of time there, as they’ve done a million times before, missing dinner completely as they instead opt to play one on one until their lungs burn and they’ve lost count of who’s winning. They play through the sunset, until the pitch is covered in darkness, until all Hajime is playing off of is the swooping rush of Oikawa’s broom and the shadows that dance in his vision. 

This is probably the last time you’ll play together like this, his traitorous brain supplies quietly as Oikawa dives for the Quaffle in his hand and almost takes the both of them down, but Hajime banishes the thought. Some things aren’t meant to be dwelled upon because of how absolutely fucking ridiculous they are. Even across time zones and oceans and just—life, he wouldn’t ever allow that to be true. In the dying light of the daytime, Hajime burns the edges of Oikawa’s wind ruffled grin into the foundation of his memory.

They put away their brooms and head down to the kitchens, hoping to catch the night’s leftovers. It’s almost about to be curfew, though Hajime doubts that anyone will be enforcing that tonight, and they’re seventh years anyways, so their leisurely pace doesn’t even come close to matching that of the pre-teens that they catch hurtling through the hallways with just minutes to spare.

“How many do we have left?” Hajime asks as they descend the staircases to the kitchens. “On the list?”

“Don’t worry,” Oikawa says easily. “We’ve got time.”

Do we? he thinks. Oikawa’s overly relaxed gait and easy smile are not the most telltale signs of him telling the truth, but it’s not like he can call him out on it. Oikawa’s insisted that he hold onto their list for the entire day since he “already knows what’s on it, so now Iwa-chan can be surprised!” so Hajime can’t decide how much time to allocate for their last few items, nor can he use that estimate to decipher the look on his best friend’s face. 

They reach the bottom of the stairs, and Hajime opens his mouth.

“Hey! Iwaizumi, Oikawa!”

Hajime shuts it abruptly. Sugawara is standing near the painting of the bowl of fruit, grinning at them; he makes an odd sight, standing alone in the dimly lit hallway. It’s not seeing Sugawara at the kitchens that is the unusual occurrence, since it happens often now, ever since he and Hanamaki and Matsukawa started using their dormitory bathroom to smoke, and they’d inevitably shown Sugawara their secret to munchies relief. It’s not Sugawara’s general presence that’s surprising—it’s the sheer amount of food that he has balanced in his two arms, struggling to keep aloft with his lean frame.

“Koucchan,” Oikawa says, visibly and audibly surprised. Hajime raises a hand in greeting. “What are you…”

“I’m on food duty for the Gryffindors.” He smiles good naturedly. The platter of pastries at the top of his pile shudders dangerously. “They offered to send someone to help, but, y’know. I’m the only one who won’t get busted for being out after curfew.” Sugawara makes a vague motion with his chin towards his chest, to the Head Boy badge he’s pinned rather haphazardly to the front of his t-shirt.

Hajime nods. Only Sugawara would get himself mixed up in pulling status to pick up food for a party hosted by a House that he’s not even in. 

“Are you guys coming?” Sugawara asks. “ Everyone’s there. It’s the last party of the year!”

Hajime’s been to a lot of parties in the last seven years, some better than others, always a shot in the dark, but the ‘last party of the year’ bit is what guilts him into putting up with inebriated teenagers in an enclosed space more than anything else. 

“Could be fun,” Hajime admits. Oikawa hums. 

“Well, think about it,” Sugawara says, breezing past their lack of answer. “Hey, I hate to ask, but since you guys are here, do you think you could help me take these up?”

They agree, each grabbing something out of his arms and following him up the stairs. It takes Hajime a few turns down foreign hallways to realize that they’re going up , a concept lost on him since getting to their common room has always been a matter of down .

The moment Sugawara utters the password and they’ve climbed through the portrait hole, the Silencing Charms surrounding the tower fold around them, and the cacophony that greets their ears compared to the muffled silence outside is like breaking the surface of water. The Gryffindor common room is packed to the gills ; Sugawara hadn’t been kidding when he said that everyone was here. Hajime barely gets a look around, but the press of the crowd makes it feel like everyone from their year and at least the next three down are present. That combined with the thrumming, bass-heavy music that’s being blasted at full volume but still kept submerged beneath the chatter makes it feel even more like a bubble, dense and fizzling with sound. It’s suffocating. It’s addicting in the weirdest possible way.

They may be their rival house, but even Hajime can admit that the Gryffindors know how to throw a party.

The crowd parts for Sugawara, or more specifically, the food. A long table has been set up against one of the walls with a piece of parchment taped to its surface reading, NO bags NO brooms FOOD ONLY!!! in impressively neat block letters and the last two words underlined three times, which Hajime figures must also be Sugawara’s doing. The three of them set their haul down and veer out of the way just as the masses of students descend upon the table like vultures. There’s a cooler beside it; Sugawara flips it open and hands them each a bottle of Dragon Scale.

“What is this, a bribe?” Hajime grins at him, cracks the seal on his bottle. 

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Sugawara smiles back. “I’m just being a good host.”

“This isn’t your House.”

“Su casa, mi casa,” he shrugs, gesturing randomly to the rest of the room. Somewhere out in the crowd, one Sawamura Daichi sneezes. “Anyways, you don’t have to stick around, I was totally kidding. It’d be fun though! I know a lot of people would love to see you guys!”

“Well, we sort of have to—” Oikawa scratches his head just as Hajime says, “Yeah, we’ll stay.”

They turn and look at each other at the same time. Sugawara clears his throat.

“Oh, Oikawa,” he says brightly, “Daichi mentioned there was something he wanted to ask you about? Blanco’s training regiment, or something, he started rambling after a while and I stopped listening, if I’m being totally honest. He’s around here somewhere, if you want to…”

Oikawa is looking at Hajime but his gaze is slightly off center as he stares, like he’s looking into the distance, eyes a little too wide. He’s got that pinned butterfly wing look on his face again. “Sure,” he says brightly. A little too bright.

Hajime frowns. “We don’t have to—”

“No, no,” he flaps his hands hurriedly. “ You want to stay, Iwa-chan, I’ve been—it’s only fair! Let’s—it’ll—oh, look, I think I see Dai-chan over there!” And then he’s gone. His bottle of Dragon Scale is still on the table.

Sugawara blinks. “Huh,” he says like he’s noticing something for the first time.

“What the f—” Hajime reaches instinctively for his arm but Oikawa’s slipperier than a fish, ducking into the crowd just as a group of Gryffindor fifth year girls jostle their way into the empty space he left behind. “Find me later!” Hajime calls out instead, even though it most likely gets lost beneath the din, and he ends up yelling in the poor girls’ ears more than actually reaching Oikawa. “...I guess. What the hell is his problem?”

“You have to ask?” He swivels to find Sugawara grinning at him, an odd combination of amusement and exasperation on his face. “I figured you’d know best.”

Hajime squints. “Huh?”

“You know.” Sugawara gestures vaguely with both hands. He’s always doing that; it makes communicating with him a genuine struggle sometimes. When Hajime continues to look blankly, he raises his eyebrows pointedly. “It’s you two,” he says like that’s supposed to make everything obvious.

“What?”

Sugawara opens his mouth to respond, but someone behind him cuts him off with a, “Yo.” A familiar looming weight settles behind Hajime’s shoulder. “What, is everyone and their grandmothers here?”

Hajime cranes his neck backwards; he still hates that he has to look up at all of his friends. Matsukawa arches an eyebrow down at him. “Oh. It’s you.”

He scowls back, but can feel the tension in his shoulders physically lift. “Don’t sound so excited to see me.”

“Hey, I’m excited.” Hanamaki’s face appears on Matsukawa’s other side as he looks upon Hajime gleefully. “Iwaizumi-senpai,” he simpers, pressing a swift kiss to his cheek and causing Matsukawa to squawk. He switches subject focus. “Koushi, dearest.”

“Takahiro, love,” Sugawara replies in the same voice. “Trade you?”

“Gladly.” They clasp hands; Hajime catches sight of a plastic baggie filled with a suspiciously green substance that passes into Sugawara’s sleeve, and a glint of gold that drops into Hanamaki’s.

Matsukawa meets his eyes with a flat stare. “You seein’ this shit,” he states more than asks. Hajime shrugs and takes a long sip from his drink.

“Mind your business,” Hanamaki shoots back. He hooks a hand behind Matsukawa’s neck and leans across his chest towards Hajime, eyes bright. “Anyways. Didn’t think we’d be seeing you any time soon.”

He rolls his eyes. “I know. I’m disappointed too.”

“Hmph. Where’s your other half, then?”

“Ran off,” Hajime replies. He purposefully and graciously neglects to rise to the ‘other half’ bait. 

Hanamaki blinks. “Oh?”

It’s a testament to something, he thinks distantly, that people continue to be surprised by this. Maybe they’re not as aware of Oikawa’s needless running tendency as Hajime is, maybe they’re just reacting to be assholes, maybe they don’t know anything at all.

“Don’t worry, he’ll pop up again,” Sugawara says with a flip of his hand. I’m not worried , Hajime almost retorts, until he realizes with a flush that yes, he sort of is. “I’ll give Daichi and co. a time limit on Quidditch talk and tell him to send him back via return address.” 

Before Hajime can reject the implication that he’s an Oikawa drop box, Sugawara smiles with an approximate level of suniness akin to, well, the sun, and says, “Always a pleasure, Slytherin. Now, if you’ll excuse me—”

He shakes his newly acquired baggie purposefully, and pitches them one last wave goodbye before ducking back into the crowd, making his way towards the stairs to the dormitories.

He’s gone for two and a half seconds before Hanamaki rounds on him, Matsukawa mirroring the motion. “You did something,” he says more than asks. Hajime decides that he doesn’t like it when they do that.

“I thought you guys had something to do,” he shoots back. “Nuisances to be. Other people to harass.”

“Yeah, he did something,” Matsukawa drawls, ignoring him, leaning forward to study the steady creep of self-conscious pink that Hajime can feel collecting in his face. “Look at him. That’s the face of a guilty man.”

“I will kill you—"

“C’mon Iwaizumi-senpai, you can tell us,” Hanamaki croons, cutting him off. “What’ve you guys been doing all day anyway?”

“ Merlin . Just—” What have they been doing? Hajime wets his hand on the melting condensation of his bottle and runs it through his hair. “Exploring,” he decides on.

Hanamaki’s fantastically tiny eyebrows go up. “Exploring,” he repeats slowly.

“Mm.”

Matsukawa studies him in silence, frowning at him the same way Hajime frowns at them when they vandalize something, which is frankly appalling to think about. “Is that an innuendo for something?”

“Innuendo for my foot up your ass —”

“Okay, but no, seriously,” Hanamaki laughs, forcibly shutting Matsukawa’s mouth with his hand on his jaw. “ Just exploring? All day?”

It’s just teasing, far from off brand for either of them, but it forcibly pokes at something irritating in Hajime’s brain and does not settle. They’ve been—they’ve been what? Have they really been wasting time? Hajime had just followed the light of Oikawa’s smile after he said everything and told himself that there was nothing better to do on his last day than this, and he’d been happy to do it, but...

“I don’t know what you want me to say,” Hajime says, hates the way his frustration bleeds into it. At them, at this day, at Oikawa, at himself. 

“Iwaizumi.”

The teasing lilt in his tone has dropped. Hanamaki meets his gaze steadily, uncharacteristically serious. “You’re running out of time,” he says. No bullshit, no cutting corners. He says what Hajime’s been trying to ignore all day and drops it right in his lap, where he can’t ignore it, and—fuck.

He pushes the heel of his palm into his eye and grits his teeth. “I know.”

He knows, and yet he really fucking doesn’t. He knows there has to be a conversation, some level of acknowledgement, but the worst part about all of this is that for all of the reciprocated things that Hajime and Oikawa feel for each other, it’s been close to ten years . It’s glass that has yet to be shattered. He thinks about how he might say it— hey, so I love you, I think I’ve loved you my entire life, but you’re moving across an ocean in two weeks so I just thought I’d tell you now —and sort of feels sick. There’s no good way. The notes of it fall flat and short and insignificant to the way that Hajime wishes it could play out. But something has to give. 

He thinks back to the Quidditch pitch from a few weeks ago and considers, briefly, that maybe Oikawa would prefer to leave it unacknowledged because of exactly this, and feels even sicker.

“Oi,” Hanamaki says sharply after Hajime has been silent for a while, “stop thinking so hard. I can feel your brain cells burning up.”

“Listen,” Matsukawa says, reaching out to clasp his shoulder. He doesn’t look sympathetic, just pointed. “We gotta head out. Nuisances to be, or whatever. But—get it done, yeah?”

“Yeah,” Hajime parrots uselessly, fixing his eyes on the chandelier behind Matsukawa’s ear. “I—yeah.”

“Good man,” Matsukawa bobs his head at his side, smiles crookedly at him. He doesn’t say good luck or offer any other kind of sentiments. They all know they’d be useless anyways. “See you later, vice captain.”

A flick against his shoulder, a hand in his hair, and then the two of them are gone.

Hajime lingers in that spot for an embarrassingly long amount of time before he finally gathers the courage and the energy in him to push off of the wall and begin his search for Oikawa in the fray. He knows he’s with Daichi and a few others on the Gryffindor team over where all the sofas and armchairs have been pushed into a tighter circle facing the fireplace, where the concentration of bodies is highest, the laughter loudest. Oikawa, ever the life of the party, is so definitely in there somewhere. 

He should go look. He really should.

He doesn’t. Hajime ends up shuffling his way around the edge of the room, half heartedly scanning the people that jostle past him, unable to coax himself any further into the crowd. He probably looks pathetic, but he can’t really bring himself to care.

He ends up finding a pocket of open air on the first step of the staircase leading up to the boys’ dormitories, just slightly elevated above the rest of the writhing mass, shielded a little from them by the narrow stone passageway. He’s in the process of looking around for familiar, fluffy brown idol hair, when a body breaks free from the crowd and joins him on the stair. 

“Iwaizumi!” she greets, sounding pleasantly surprised.

“Yamaka, hey,” he smiles back, momentarily thrown from his search. A slight pang of guilt goes through him when he realizes how welcome of a distraction it is from facing a conversation he isn’t sure he wants to have. “Crazy out there, huh?”

“Crazy,” she agrees. Yamaka flicks a sweaty bang from out of her eyes, and moves closer to him on the stair as someone squeezes past them to get up to the dormitories, her bare arm brushing against his with the movement. Up close through the dimness of the stairway, the sweaty smudge of her eyeliner is noticeable, messy, but bold in a way that Hajime has never noticed on her before. She looks very pretty.

Her presence sort of pulls Hajime back down to earth, in a way. Yamaka is truly nothing but nice; she’s not argumentative or a Quidditch freak or anxiety-inducing, like many of the friends that Hajime has decided to keep, for reasons he’s still trying to rationalize in his head. Yamaka’s just cool—pulls her own weight, pleasant to take late night patrols with. She’s the furthest thing from what Hajime is beginning to label ‘The Oikawa Dilemma’ in his mind, and in this moment, that’s all he’s really asking for.

“How is Daishou-san?” he feels compelled to ask. “He’s writing for the Quidditch Times now, right?” Hajime had liked Daishou just about as much as everyone else had, which hadn’t very much with how much of a brownnoser he was, but he likes Yamaka, and they’ve been dating for so long that not asking feels rude, somehow.

Yamaka, surprisingly, frowns just slightly at that. “I guess,” she says evenly. “I wouldn’t know. We broke up a few months ago.”

Hajime has never wanted to die faster. “Oh. Sorry.”

She waves it off, thankfully. “Don’t be,” Yamaka smiles reassuringly in a way that feels practiced. She must get the question a lot. “I’m moving on, believe me.”

Hajime’s focus is pulled momentarily by a small roar of noise from the middle of the room. Someone is doing a handstand on a keg and has involuntarily begun a chug, chug, chug chant. He can’t see their face, but judging from the sculpt of their slightly quivering calves and the Kuroo Tetsurou that’s holding them upright by the ass, he can deduce that it’s probably Bokuto.

Oikawa is probably over there. Oikawa is definitely over there.

He sighs.

“Looking for Oikawa-kun?” Yamaka asks out of nowhere, and Hajime nearly jumps out of his skin.

“Ah,” he chuckles, sort of startled out of him. “How'd you know?”

Yamaka shrugs. “I mean, this is probably the first time I've ever seen you two apart. Except for prefect things.”

He blinks. “Oh.”

Before he can unpack that one, she speaks again. “Everyone thinks you two are together,” she says.

“Ah,” Hajime says again with a forced little laugh, says “no, no, we aren’t,” because it’s the truth. It’s the truth, even if it doesn’t feel like it all the time.

Yamaka hums. Her fingers dance up the neck of her bottle. “Is Oikawa-kun excited to move? Argentina’s so far away.”

Miles. Oceans. Hajime’s so aware of it, he feels it in his chest as it twists. “Yeah, he is.”

“And you’re staying here in Japan?” Yamaka’s voluminous brown eyes have not left him during this entire exchange.

“I—” He’s not entirely sure what’s happening here anymore. “Tokyo, yeah.”

Yamaka has gotten so close now. Her cheeks are flushed and her face is swaying a little, up, up, leaning into him.

“What a coincidence,” she smiles, “so am I.” And then she kisses him.

He doesn’t even move, stunned completely frozen. Yamaka moves her lips against his anyways, sweet and earnest, either unnoticed or uncaring. Her free hand is on his bicep now and she tastes like firewhiskey and peach chapstick. It’s—for a second there, it’s kind of nice. Hajime has kissed girls before, but Yamaka’s probably the first one who's really known how.

And then there’s a lull in the noise around them. Someone whistles— loud —and Hajime’s stomach plummets. He grabs her by the shoulders and pulls her off.

“Ya-Yamaka,” he wheezes.

She blinks up at him through pretty lashes. “Iwaizumi,” she says back with the smallest curve of her lips.

“Yamaka—” he says again, stronger this time. “—I can’t. I’m really sorry, but I just—I can’t.”

She blinks, takes a step backwards on her own. Hajime feels the space between them like he’s coming up for air. Her face morphs through a series of quick expressions, too fast to follow. Hajime’s always been quite shit at reading girls. Reading anyone, really. 

He can see the moment she realizes it, though. “But you’re not together,” she says slowly.

Hajime shakes his head. “No.” He doesn’t have a better explanation to give.

He loves him, and that’s it. That might not be enough, but it’s true all the same.

Yamaka blows a heavy sigh out of her nose. Disappointed, but not exactly surprised. “Right. Well. Guess it was worth the try.”

Hajime stares at her shoulder. “I’m really sorry,” he says again. 

Yamaka smiles at him without a trace of bitterness, pats his arm. “Don’t be. I’m drunk and we’ll leave it at that.” She looks at him, understanding in her eyes. Hajime remembers Daishou and how Osaka is two and a half hours from Tokyo by train, almost four from where they are now, and wonders vaguely if she really does understand. She really is pretty. “You should probably go find him now.”

Hajime doesn’t need to be told twice. He hightails it out of there and makes a beeline for the couches by the fireplace, ignores the stares he collects on his way there. By the time he’s in front of the three people he wanted to see, they’re all already looking at him.

“Hey.” Hajime scratches the back of his neck.

Hinata smiles at him brightly, still a little wide in the eyes. “Hel- lo , Iwaizumi-san!”

Miya’s raised eyebrows are half hidden behind his piss-yellow fringe. “ Dude .”

“Oikawa left,” Sawamura says without preamble, pointing at the now closed portrait hole, thus cementing himself as the only bitch in this joint that Hajime respects. “Went to the bathroom,” he adds without having to mime the air quotes, which then cements Hajime’s complete and utter dread.

“Right,” he says, cringing.  The green jacket that Oikawa pulled for himself after the mermaid incident is still laid over the back of the couch, forgotten in its owner’s haste. Hajime grabs it without thinking. “See you later, then.”

“Uh huh .”

“Buh- bye , Iwaizumi-san!”

“Good luck,” Sawamura calls after him, which, despite everything else, somehow leaves him lighter as he climbs out the portrait hole. He hears it swing shut behind him and Hajime breaks out into a run, ignoring the shrill calls of the Fat Lady behind him, his feet just carrying him.

His legs ache, but he runs anyways. He runs and runs and runs, past staircases and corridors that they’d taken earlier that day, past all the things that he knows, and towards all the things that could be.

The things that he knows: the last ten years and a boy that cannot drown and what it’s like to live knowing someone longer than you’ve lived without them. He knows Quidditch; he knows winning and he knows losing and everything in between. He knows eleven thousand miles, as well as one can know them just as numbers on a map, knows how badly he doesn’t want to actually know them. And he knows why he and Oikawa saw different things in that mirror—why he wanted so badly for that to be their future, why Oikawa didn’t see anything at all. Why he didn’t see anything different, might be more accurate.

He knows, and he runs. Hajime chases it the way he’s been chasing all his life, and trusts himself that this time, he’ll catch up.

The door to the Astronomy Tower has been left slightly ajar, as if opened and slammed shut with so much force that it bounced off of its hinges. It’s a sight that Hajime is well acquainted with, but the feeling that comes with it now—that nervous, butterfly rhythm against his throat—is not so familiar. 

He nudges the door open further with his forearm and finds Oikawa sitting with his back against the damp stone next to one of the telescopes, knees drawn up to his chest, the bottom half of his face hidden between his tucked arms as he stares up, gaze empty, at the night sky. True to Hajime’s guess, he had forgotten a jacket in his haste to leave the Gryffindor tower; he can see him shivering ever so slightly from where he’s standing. The ancient wooden door creaks with the slow movement Hajime puts behind it, and Oikawa looks up at the sound. 

When Hajime crosses the length of the tower to get to him, Oikawa doesn’t look surprised or panicked to see him at all. “You know Iwa-chan, if you start making a habit of ditching girls at parties, you’ll soil that good prefect reputation of yours,” he says with an easy smile, but it’s the fake one, and it crumbles at the edges with Oikawa’s lack of motivation to keep it glued together.

Hajime sits down beside him and yanks the green cardigan over his shoulders, tucks it aggressively around his arms and knees. “You know it wasn’t like that,” is all he says.

The exhale out of his nose that Oikawa lets out is of shaky amusement, because yes, he knows that Hajime would never kiss a girl like Yamaka Mika, no matter how pretty she is, no matter how many times she breaks up with her boyfriend. Hajime would never chase after her all the way up to the Astronomy Tower and manhandle her into a jacket he brought on an impulse because he knows that she doesn’t take care of herself properly, and isn’t that just a laugh. Isn’t that everything.

“Sorry we didn’t get to finish your list,” Hajime says belatedly.

Oikawa just keeps staring at the sky, like if he stares hard enough, he can draw new constellations and rearrange the cosmos to fit his Astronomy homework charts. “It’s just a list, Iwa-chan,” he says softly. “Besides, that wasn’t the point of it anyways.”

It’s his turn to talk, they’re both keenly aware of it and the way it hangs in the centimeters between them like a finally tangible thing. He could reach out for it now, sure, but Hajime’s been waiting for seven years; seven years in limbo, probably even longer than that, now that he’s thinking about it, so he lets Oikawa map his new constellations, and waits.  

“You wanna know the stupid thought I had last night?” Oikawa finally says. His hands, now pulled through the thick woolen sleeves, are still trembling in his lap. Hajime takes them between his own and it seems to ground Oikawa just enough for him to keep going. “I was really mad at the rain at first, because who doesn’t want their graduation day to be perfect, right? I wanted a perfect send off, because these past seven years have been—been hell , you know, but at the same time, they were kind of—perfect. For me, at least.” 

Hajime nods in understanding, even though Oikawa is still looking down at their hands. “And then at some point yesterday, maybe when I was a little drunk, I kept thinking: maybe someone will feel bad enough and let us stay for a little bit longer. Maybe if these days keep sucking enough, they’ll take pity and let us wait out the storm so we can have a perfect graduation.” 

He laughs at himself, a small, fragile noise. “Because then I can stay here with Iwa-chan for just one more day, and we can just keep doing this.”

This being exquisite, terrible limbo. This being sharing beds and catching Snitches and calling them ours without acknowledging what that even means. This being pretending that calling it best friends cuts it. This being happiness halfway.

“Idiot,” Hajime hears himself say over the low volume white noise in his ears. “They would’ve just had it inside.”

“I know,” he whispers, laughs weakly and insincere. “But I wished for it anyway. I guess I really am an idiot, huh Iwa-chan?”

He doesn’t know what to say, so Hajime just shakes his head, even though Oikawa isn’t looking at him. They’re both idiots, really, but it hardly matters now. 

“It wasn’t supposed to be like this,” Oikawa whispers. Hajime barely hears it muffled between the sleeves of the jacket and over the whistle of the night air around them. “Why’d you go and make this so hard .”

Hajime could laugh, really. “You haven’t exactly been making this easy for me, either.”

“I know,” Oikawa breathes. “I know.” Hajime can see the whites of his eyes when they go wide with sudden realization. “But I—I could make it easy.”

“Oikawa…”

“I could!” Oikawa’s gaze is made of glass—reflective and sharp and so, so transparent. “I could write to Blanco tomorrow, it doesn’t—I can take one of the other offers, I—I could stay. If you wanted—if you asked—”

“ Oikawa .” He stops him before Oikawa can even finish the thought, even entertain the idea. “Don’t.”

He knew, in that unexplainable way of theirs, that Oikawa would say some shit like this, and that he would refuse it. And that’s love, in its twisted, ironic little way—the refusing, and the knowing, too. Hajime loves him, has loved him for a long time, which is why he can take the words right out of his mouth. Oikawa loves him, has loved him just as long, which is why he understands the rejection, and thanks him for it.

Oikawa gnaws his bottom lip and pulls at the sleeves of his jacket, silent with frantic energy. He eventually asks anyway, pulled by the tiny part of him that still wants to hear something else. “Don’t you want me to?”

Hajime shakes his head, and in a blinding moment, realizes just how much he means it. “ You want to go,” he says gently, “which means that I want you to go.”

“But I want you, too,” Oikawa whispers. Quiet, but brazen all the same. It rocks Hajime to his core.

He breathes in deep. The air in his lungs is thrumming. “You don’t need to stay to have me. You’ll always have me.”

It’s exactly what he needs to say and not enough all at once. Oikawa just looks at him for a long time. “Okay,” he finally breathes. “And—me too. However many people you save and however many smart doctor friends you get. You’ll always have me, too. You can’t forget about me. I’m so serious, Iwa-chan. I will never let you forget it.”

Hajime remembers being fifteen years old, Oikawa standing there in alien print pajama pants and a stitched up knee and his heart in his throat and asking him what he had if he didn’t have Quidditch. He’d had an answer, so close to springing forward, half prepared to beg with it.

“Alright,” he grins. “Alright, geez, I won’t.”

Hajime is always looking at Oikawa. Turns out Oikawa has been looking back all this time.

There is a long, barely sated silence until Oikawa speaks again. “Hey. Hey, Iwa-chan.”

“Hm?”

“Can I show you something?”

Hajime angles his body towards him in silent response. Oikawa reaches behind him to retrieve something. A History of Magic is pressed into his hands, and automatically Hajime flips to the back cover, to the list they’ve been working through all day that’s almost been completely crossed out.

At the bottom of the list, squeezed into the very last strip of white space and written with bulky, purple magic marker, are two more bullet points. 

19. Tell him you love him. 
20. Hope that he tells you the same.

“I love you, Iwa-chan,” Oikawa says. He smiles. “Sorry for not saying it earlier.”

The sky lifts, expands, and then explodes. The boom shakes the ground and the inside of his chest; Hajime looks up and is blinded by the shower of green and silver light that’s falling over the castle spires. 

A silence. The faint sound of shrill laughter somewhere beneath them. And then the whistle of another rocket being launched, a boom, green, green, green, and it’s never ending. 

The fireworks rattle every window pane in the castle and each explode into golden, green hope. Hanamaki and Matsukawa have lit them on their final day at Hogwarts because they are crazy bastards, Hajime will still probably have to pull strings to get them out of a last minute detention, and Oikawa loves him. He exhales.

“That’s okay,” he says. It’s probably lost over the din, but it doesn’t matter.  “That’s okay.”

He shuts the door behind them, takes Oikawa’s hand, and they go back to the party. In the end, it’s a shoddy bit of wandwork on both of their parts, but it’s still more legible than the mess they left on the Quidditch hoops. Nothing more than an unassuming loose brick at the top of the Astronomy Tower, flipped over on its blank side, never to be turned over or exposed to another set of eyes.

Hajime and Tooru . Dauntless. Unafraid of the future.