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“Do you ever rest?” he had asked one day over coffee.
You glanced over at him, your eyes darting from the orange-red mug cupping over your nose bridge to the man sitting in front of you — his black shirt tight across his chest, his brows furrowed into a concerned frown.
You had never been too big a fan of the question. It was rather rhetorical in your opinion: only asked to follow up with a reprimanding to rest more — to slam on the brakes before you crashed head first into catastrophe.
And so you remained wordless, offering a small shrug as you set your mug down onto the tabletop. You turned your head over, looking out the window with a bored expression as you rested the weight of your head into the palm of your hand.
Rest — you rested, you supposed. With eyes closed amidst a blacked out room, your mind would momentarily pause for a handful of hours before the sound of your alarm went off. You laid in bed each night, your fingers crossed over your stomach, waiting for the interface to change from the real world to the barren land of your dreams. On the rare occasions that what awaited you wasn’t a decrepit wasteland, they would mirror the next day — reality and illusion turning over itself to blend into one. You had found yourself on one too many nights jolting up, your head cradled in your hands, struggling to distinguish between the fine line of the real and the imagined.
A finger slipped underneath your eyes to scratch at the thin skin of your eye bags, and you looked down with a frown at the concealer caked underneath your nail.
Rest — you had thought you rested, to be honest. And yet it seemed as though no matter how many hours of illuminating moonlight you sacrificed, you’d wake up more and more fatigued the next day; the vessels underneath your skin broken from overwork and the hemoglobin released oxidizing into the dreaded darkness that was now covered by layers upon layers of makeup.
Too often did it feel as if there were not enough hours in a day — as if idling would translate to wasted efforts. Your goal was clear and laid directly in front of you, and you knew you remained within only a couple feet from the finish line. All the preparatory work to aid you towards success had been done; all you really had to do was hang on for just a little longer.
Your eyes snuck a glance at the man with the worried expression sitting across from you — his back straight, his shoulders squared, his face bright and alert. He was the textbook example of someone who was deep in restful slumber by two-thirty in the morning, undergoing all four stages of sleep properly as outlined by the leading experts in the field. There was no doubt that the difference in appearance between the two of you resided in the hours of rest you had received, but admitting that number would mean proving the man’s point — something which you weren’t too keen on doing.
You had a mission and a deadline — two things that went hand in hand, mutually exclusive with one another. To give up on one would mean to give up on the other, and you weren’t sure if you were prepared to do so for either. To admit defeat and succumb, or to remain stagnant and to remain as nothing but a statistic in the grander scheme of things.
No, you had to persevere. Just a little bit more.
Rest — who had time to rest when the seconds kept slipping past the opening of the hourglass, transported within the blink of an eye from the top half of the vial straight down to the bottom? You were in too deep to start over, too far from shore to return back to the starting point. It was the point of no return: you had no choice but to keep persevering through, marching on ahead in spite of the injuries crawling across your backside.
Rest was a luxury you would look forward to when the appropriate time appeared; when you completed all that you needed and when you could kick your feet up and finally relax in your chair with your eyes closed and with the sun streaming into your room from the opened window on the side. It was a reward for all the hard work — all the blood, sweat, and tears — you had poured in since the beginning.
After all, rest came only to those who have earned it.
“I’ll find some time to rest soon,” you murmured in the end, your gaze still waxy and lost in the landscape outside. The sun’s rays streamed down directly into your line of sight through the glass, and while it stung in irritation, your face made no indication of discomfort with your eyes still unblinkingly fixated at the scenery just past the window.
Your companion shifted uncomfortably in his seat, and he let out a defeated sigh in response.
“If you say that, that means you haven’t been taking proper care of yourself,” he grumbled, his hand reaching out across the table to wrap around yours. “It’s not a debt you can pay back all at once.”
You rescinded your hand from his, your fingers now tracing the rim of your coffee mug instead.
“Not just yet,” you uttered, your fixed gaze on the outside indicative of your disinterest in the man’s warning. There was neither room nor time for counter arguments, only time to check off the boxes on your to-do list. Your head lolled back over, your eyes returning back onto the athletic trainer sitting in front of you.
The upper corners of your lips lifted up, a pained grimace of a smile stretching out across your face.
“I’ll rest properly when the time comes,” you promised, your hand returning back onto the ear of the mug as you picked it up. You looked down into your drink, the surface of the black coffee you had ordered reflecting an expressionless face tainted by endless late nights back at you.
“You better,” Iwaizumi grumbled as he tilted his own mug up, finishing the last few drops of his drink.
You closed your eyes and nodded, humming in agreement.
(You’re close; you’re mere inches away)
“Have you got Tylenol on you?”
“Those headaches are coming more frequently, aren’t they?” Iwaizumi remarked, reaching into his backpack to find the white bottle in question. His touch lingered behind against the back of you palm as he handed you the medicine, and you hastily retracted your hands from the warmth of his fingertips upon noticing the troubled expression that had unknowingly leaked through onto his face.
A quiet word of thanks escaped from your lips, and your eyes trailed down to the bottle now resting in your hands, staring straight down at the red label stuck neatly onto the side. Your thumbnail prodded at the edge of the sticker, trying your best to ignore the mockery that the bolded, italicized letters of the words “EXTRA STRENGTH” seemed to impart on you.
There was a bit of shame associated with your reliance on painkillers to numb the pounding in your head, you supposed.
You pressed down the bottom of your palm against the lid, your fingers wrapping around the edges, and gave the bottle a forceful twist. You tilted the plastic container over, the clatter of pill hitting pill ringing through your ears before a bright red tablet fell into your palm.
You sighed lightly as you popped the drug into your mouth, and took a sip from the glass of water sitting on your right to wash it down.
After all, the migraine that had managed to infect every conscious thought crossing through your synapse — the one that had forced you to ask the one person you had wished to hide your condition from in order to address — was of your own creation in the end.
“Caffeine withdrawal,” you reasoned, setting the glass in your hand back down in its original spot by your side. Your hands moved back over to the pile of papers directly before you, your finger hooking underneath the corners as you flipped through the sheets of the printed document. Landmarking a paragraph with your index, you brought the tip of your red pen over to circle the statistic that had piqued your interest. You could feel Iwaizumi’s eyes drilling into you, and you looked up, raising an eyebrow in question.
“What? You’ve seen how much coffee I drink everyday. It’s the consequence of cutting back so suddenly.”
Lies disguised as excuses, excuses transformed into truth. Truth so deceitfully concealed that the fine line between fact and fiction could no longer be perceived, having blurred and faded away through erosion by the flood of lies escaping from your lips. For a second, you too had believed that the headache gnawing away at your sanity was one induced by your reduced caffeine intake.
Though that too was a lie in itself. You had downed a cup before leaving the house to meet with Iwaizumi today.
His chair screeched against the floor as he got up from his seat, and you looked back up to see your companion move across the table to sit down next to you. You unconsciously scooted your chair over to maintain some sort of distance between the two of you for fear he’d discover the truth if he looked close enough, though he stopped you almost as soon as you started with an arm snaked behind your back to rest against your hip.
“You don’t have to cut back completely,” he sighed, his hands woven with yours as he brought you into his embrace. His tone was hesitant and resigned — as if conceding to defeat in a battle that you were not even aware existed. “Heard that a bit of coffee before you sleep helps you wake up more alert too,” he later mumbled into your shoulder, the wool of your sweater rubbing against his cheeks.
He looked back up at you, his hand trailing up from your fingers to stroke at your cheek with his thumb.
“Just take it easy, alright?” A phrase uttered more like a plea rather than a request — rather than the lip service of a worried loved one, as if he knew that his words would ultimately fall upon deaf ears in the very end. “I know it’s busy for you, but your well-being is more important.” He paused, his hand moving down to your neck to guide your head to rest against his shoulder. “You’re more important,” he added on in a hushed whisper, his arms wrapping loosely around you as he cradled you in his hold.
You couldn’t find it in you to confess that the reliance was founded upon unending nights of insomnia, invisible forces clinging onto the edges of your eyelids prying them open as your mind sent shockwave after shockwave to keep your body alert and awake. Your parasympathetic system went into overdrive as your sympathetic system remained suppressed to the point beyond recognition, your mind constantly berating you for a choice between fight or flight.
You rested the pen in your hand down, setting it next to the neglected document in front of you.
What would he say in response to learning that you had spent your nights in bed aware and staring up into the darkness, your eyes tearing up in response to the dryness of the air and keeping you awake for longer than you need be? What would he say in response to knowing that you had resorted to bringing documents to bed — the fine line between work and play vanishing in an instant as they blurred and coalesced into one another — since you “might as well do something with the extra time”?
You reached an arm around Iwaizumi’s side to rest your hand on the small of his back, and leaned further into his hold.
Perhaps it was the fresh citrus of his laundry detergent, or just the warmth of his skin, but a tugging of your heartstrings reminded you that you had no choice but to keep up your ruse — the ruse that everything was fine and that you were doing well. You closed your eyes, letting your chest expand as you took a deep breath, the faint scent of Iwaizumi’s soap caressing you in its embrace.
A touch more concealer — the color correcting variety, you reminded yourself. A little more energy in your voice, a little extra effort into acting interested and engaged. A hop in your step, and an extra coffee in the morning. A forced smile that stretched past your eyes. Yes, those were the things that would have to supplement for the supposed luxury of ‘sleep’ that everyone else seemed to possess until you could attain it as well.
Just a couple more weeks to keep up with the lies and the trickery, and then you could bid farewell to the endless deceit and the plethora of lies you had been feeding your partner. After all, the sickening and nauseating feeling of having him realize the truth was something you had wanted to avoid at all costs. This was your burden and your burden alone to bear — you knew that he would be inflicted with nothing but heartbreak and agony if he were to realize the helplessness of your predicament.
You nodded, your cheek brushing against the warmth of his palm.
(You’re but mere steps away from the finish.)
“What’s on your mind?”
You grunted lightly, and shook your head in disdain — a silent signal to your companion that you’d much rather not talk about the problems plaguing your life as of late.
“It’s nothing,” you lied, rolling your eyes as you let out a dejected sigh, one hand reaching up to the base of your neck, holding the skin taut as you moved your head in the opposite direction to stretch out the knots that had accumulated from hours of hunching over your laptop. You picked up the waiting mug to your right, tilting it slightly against your lips as you took a cautious sip of your scalding hot coffee.
Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock. As the seconds hand slowly circled its way across the circumference of the grandfather clock sitting by the door of the coffee shop you were in, the gnawing restlessness of your lie — your whole charade — slowly crept up into your consciousness until it flooded your thoughts, dissolving in-between the words of the document you were working on and marking its presence with each and every press of your keyboard.
You glanced over from the edge of your laptop screen to spy a peek at Iwaizumi.
“I know you want to talk about it,” the man said, placing the book he had been reading down with the spine towards the sky, the midnight blue cover of the book facing the ceiling. He leaned back against the white chair he was sitting in, and crossed his hands over his stomach. “And you know I’m always here to listen.”
“There is nothing to listen to,” you insisted, reeling back away from the table as you realized how forceful the statement must’ve come across. A quick apology whispered in passing — empty, just like all the other lies you had come up with to reassure your partner of your well-being — and you trained your gaze back down at the black keyboard of your laptop, your fingertips lightly brushing away nonexistent specks of dust.
After all, what right did you have to spill out all of the petty complaints — all the cynical criticism, the grievances you so badly wished to vocalize but could never find the courage to, the protestations and the objections you had that would amount to nothing save for skyscrapers of discontentment. If you yourself remained powerless — shackled and restrained back by the very forces that granted you the power in the first place — what could there be for Iwaizumi Hajime, an outsider in every right, to do? You would simply be dragging another casualty into the war zone.
No, it wouldn’t be right to pull him down into the same hell you were buried in.
“It’s nothing,” you insisted again, the words coming out softer, sounding less like a statement and more like a prayer — as if it would come true as long as it was faithfully repeated like a mantra at every waking hour.
“Alright,” he conceded, a worrisome smile on his face as he reached back out for the novel he had been reading before. “If you insist.” Iwaizumi tucked the pages back between the crevices of his fingers, and then looked back up, his gaze fixed onto the seemingly permanent furrow of your brows as you continued clacking away at your keyboard. “But just remember that my offer still stands anytime.”
You could. It wouldn’t hurt to.
“Offer?” you asked, feigning cluelessness as you stretched up the corners of your lips, ensuring that the insincere smile would reach to your eyes and be written off as sincerity instead.
The less he knew, the better.
“That I’m here to listen.” Iwaizumi stared directly at you, his brows knitted and his lips drawn into a straight line. Your smile quivered for a second, and you shifted in your seat as you diverted your gaze down to the floor. It was the look in his eyes — the way it seemed to see all absolutes, exposing the tender fragility of your truth — that had clued you into the realization that you had so much dreaded.
“I’ll keep that in mind.”
You took another sip from your coffee, your lips resting against the edge as you quietly watched the man sitting before you return to his book and flip to the next page, his eyes seemingly engrossed in the make-believe world of fiction. A return to normalcy — an avoidance of a discussion the both of you knew you didn’t want to dwindle upon. Iwaizumi’s efforts to ease the tension in the air were to be commended, for his full attention appeared to be offered up to the world the printed lines on the page had strewn together.
Yet you knew better. You knew that though his eyes flitted across the width of the page, the rest of his body ultimately betrayed his act, with each muscle tensed and ready to jump at a moment’s notice should you make any indication of wishing to speak.
Perhaps just for a little bit. To throw him off the scent.
“These people don’t fucking know how to do their god damn jobs properly,” you spoke up, scowling as the thoughts tucked away nearly in your mind finally spilled out. Without a second to lose, you slammed the ceramic mug in your hand down onto the table, a shrill bang ringing out in the silence of the coffee shop, as you highlighted the paragraph your cursor had been hovering over with your other hand, and loudly slapped on the ‘delete’ key to eradicate the absurdity that you had just read.
Your companion shot you a worried glance from where he sat, your peripheral vision catching the exact moment he lifted his eyes off the book to devote his attention to you. You ignored the concerned glance he had shot, your hands frantically slamming against the letters of your keyboard, as you continued in the same cynical tone, “You’d think people who made it this far in life would know how to pull their weight by now.”
Iwaizumi folded the receipt tucked underneath his saucer and slipped it in-between the pages of his book before setting it down for good, his forearms resting against the table as he leaned in towards you. With a hesitant sigh, you glanced over from your screen to your partner, offering him an apologetic glance for having launched into a maddening flurry of insults directed at your computer screen without as much as a warning.
“You shouldn’t have to be the one cleaning up their mistakes. Send them an email and let them know that they need to fix their parts,” he suggested, his fingers tiptoeing across the table to brush against your hand.
“Then it’d go from trash to flaming trash,” you muttered, your tone venomous, overflowing with a concoction of equal parts scorn and disdain. You let out another sigh, lifting your hand off your laptop to meet the hand Iwaizumi had put forth. “And I can’t have that. It has to be perfect. It can’t afford to be anything less.”
Perfection was not the end goal; perfection was the minimal expectation. It was neither the key to unlock the door, nor was it the answer to all the mysteries of the world. It was necessary though not sufficient for living — it was the oxygen outside of the biological hemisphere. Your very existence required it, and yet it was perfection itself that oxidized and tarnished the might that you had once stood proudly with, compromising you into the empty shell that you had since become.
“You can’t do this alone, (f/n)…”
“What do you know?”
You paused.
“I’m sorry,” you immediately whispered in the afterthought, your eyes widening in absolute regret as you pushed aside your laptop — your hands desperately reaching out in search for Iwaizumi's own. “I spoke too soon. I didn’t mean that. I’m sorry. I—”
“Breathe.”
You nodded as you tightened your grasp on his hands, your fingers curling to entwine around his. The edges of your laptop lightly poked at the side of your palm, and you looked up to find Iwaizumi pushing your computer back in your direction with a nod of his head.
“I didn’t—”
“I know,” he said, his tone soft with the timbre of his voice caressing you in its hold. “Just do what you need to do. I…” He breathed in, and his smile lost its tenderness in favor for melancholy as he looked back up at your eyes. “I know I can’t help you with this, but I’ll be here with you. I promise. So just do what you need to do. I’ll stay here with you.”
A wistful smile — genuine or forged you didn’t know — a nod of your head, a tapping away at your keyboard. Iwaizumi’s eyes remained trained on you as you worked away with your eyes flitting across the screen, and he expelled a shaky breath, leaning back against his chair with his hand reaching back out for the book on the table.
“I fucking told these dipshits to fix this before I read over the report…” A scowl settled onto your features as you clenched your hands into tight fists, your nails digging deep into the skin of your palms. “Useless. Inadequate. Worthless. Pathetic.” The last word slipped off your tongue with an icy chill that had slowly intensified and solidified itself in your voice with each additional word uttered.
Warning bells rang out in your mind, the bright lights of a siren flashing through your head as you grew cognizant of your actions and words alike. You needed to stop — no matter your irritation, this was unfair. This wasn’t you — this couldn’t be.
Yet the dulling sensation that had been drumming on the edge of your mind grew louder, each beat successively stronger until you could no longer fight back against the noise. You could give in — surrender all emotions to apathy for long enough to just finish your damned report.
“Do you want another coffee?” Iwaizumi suddenly asked, changing the topic near immediately as he discarded his book off to the side. “Maybe something sweet to give you a little energy boost? I know you always cheer up a bit when you get to eat—”
“No.” Curt and callous; kept direct and unambiguous to intentionally end the conversation. A tone you had never once used with Iwaizumi. Up until now. Half of your mind had been overrun with the same guilt and regret as before, but the other half — the half where all your frustrations, all your irritation, all your rage had settled in — couldn’t find it in itself to fathom even an ounce of remorse.
You didn’t want another coffee. You were short on your time. It was justified.
You returned to glowering at the screen: someone reused the same word twice in the same sentence… Delete. A snarl. A furious clacking away at your keyboard — your nails striking hard against the plastic of the keys. The chair in front of you let out a pained shriek, stealing away your focus from the screen.
You looked up. Iwaizumi stared back down.
“I’m getting you a mocha,” he explained, shifting uncomfortably in the tension that clouded the atmosphere between the two of you. You silently offered him a raised eyebrow in response — you hadn’t asked for that.
“Just a mood boost—”
“I’m fine.”
Iwaizumi slowly nodded and pulled his chair back out, taking care this time to lift the legs off the floor and avoid the ear-piercing screech of metal against floor. He took a seat back down, his forearms returning back up against the edge of the table, his hands clasped together into a tight fist. You watched as he looked down at his hands, noticing the clenching of his jaw as his frown deepened.
The athletic trainer looked back up at you, a face of worry and trepidation masked by the forlorn smile he wore on his lips. A brave front to hide his fears behind as he charged headfirst towards calamity of his own volition.
“Look, I—”
“Just leave me alone so I can finish this.”
You diverted your eyes back down to your screen. A sneer, an expression of livid contempt. Redundant. You slammed a finger down onto your keyboard as you deleted the sentence you had been reading. Pointless. A clench of your jaw, a running of your hand through your hair.
Annoyance, exasperation, indignation, infurati—
“(f/n).”
You looked back up.
“I’m sorry,” your partner continued with a breathy whisper, the frown on his face dissipating, replaced by one of surrendered acceptance. His hand reached up to his neck, rubbing the skin of his nape as his other clutched tightly to the side of his chest. His eyes — the olive green of his irises that you had once likened to a forest filled with the mystery of the shadows and the jubilance of life — stared down onto an indistinct point on the floor, searching around as if a solution would appear in writing by itself onto the wooden floorboards of the cafe. He let out a sigh, throwing his hands back onto the table at once, and leaned in closer towards you, his gaze reigniting with rejuvenated resolve.
“I’ll let you carry on with your work. I’m here for you if you need me, alright?
You casted him a skeptical glance, and nodded shortly after. “Alright,” you said, returning back to the sentence you had last left off.
Tired by the motions of the living, you briefly wondered if you could surrender all control and let your subconscious take over — to absolve yourself from your suffering, operating on autopilot with your emotions detached and the frustrations dispatched. It would be nice, you thought, to be able to shrink away out of public perception of your existence. No one to judge, no one to compare — an existence so faded away that it blended in with the backdrop of the night.
You clicked your tongue behind your teeth, your annoyance making its presence known once more to the man sitting in front of you. He casted yet another worried look in your direction, and you merely stared back expressionless in response before diving back into the document open on your laptop as your hands resumed its dance along the letters of your keyboard.
A head filled with shame, your soul nothing but a sham. You were far from perfect, and yet you only had yourself to blame. Here you were, deceiving everyone around you, spooning lie after lie into the hungry mouths of expectation that people had regarded you with. You could not measure up — no, you never could to begin with.
You couldn’t find it in you to reveal that you had been kept up with performances of midnight soliloquies — the stage illuminated by the moonlight as you debated with both everyone and no one about the insidious thoughts ravaging your mind. It didn’t take much to push you off the edge these days, you’ve noticed. You teetered the line between friendliness and animosity, finding it increasingly more difficult to act out diplomacy, your self-control threatening to shatter at any second.
You reached ahead and slammed your laptop shut.
“Sometimes I wonder if I should just up and leave,” you mumbled to yourself, turning your head over to the window. The shoddy filtration of the blinding sun left rays of light searing its presence onto your retina, and you groaned in frustration as your hands shot up to cradle your head in your grasp.
“It’s been your dream since you were young. You’re just going to give it all up?”
You had wanted nothing more than this since the days of your youth, yet you found in that moment that resignation and submission to your own self-described inferiority had since pervaded your mind, infecting all naivety and childish hope you once harbored. If you found yourself at a crossroad, it was neither route A nor route B that enticed you. No, it was rather the option of sitting down and relinquishing your existence back to nature that seemed the most desirable choice at the moment.
“I have some more work to finish,” you curtly said as you left your seat and headed for the door.
“(f/n), wai—”
The bell hung by the door rang out once, twice, then a third and final time as you pulled open the glass door and exited through it, not bothering to turn around to look back at the worried man standing up by his chair.
(Just keep moving for a little bit longer.)
“I did it,” you sighed, your head swung back as you stared up at the metallic ceiling of the train station. Your days of misery and nights of restlessness culminating into a presentable product, your shackles and restraints undone now that everything had been submitted — freedom so close you could taste it in the air. Yet rather than the release and the escape from the suffocating burden of expectations laid upon you for so long, what had greeted you instead when you exited through the company doors were waves upon waves of nausea and vertigo that threatened to rip your consciousness from your grasps.
You faltered momentarily in your descent down the stairs of the train station, your hand blindly fumbling for the metallic railings fixed onto the walls to regain your footing.
It was the breaking point of the braking point. Rest was no more than an alien, foreign and unaccustomed to the customaries of the Earth. Your speed long past the threshold to even be privileged enough to fathom a halt, your mind imprisoned in its seat as the vehicle of your body continued accelerating faster and faster until its gears and composition withered away into debris. You had clawed your way to the end of infinity just to realize your own pre-destined futility. A pointless journey to confirm your own despair, exhausting all resources just to find yourself with your feet rooted down to where you had begun.
You took a step forward with your left, succeeded soon after by your right. The amalgamation of movements choreographed and rehearsed into the memory of your muscles, your brain not even sparing a second thought to coordinate the pattern of left-right-left.
The whirring sounds of the train rushing to a stop at the station; the vibration from the disruptions from the sheer unparalleled speed of the bullet train. Chatter — a clamoring cacophony. An orchestrated disruption of madness. Lights — lights were everywhere, flooding your vision with disorganized arrays of splatters of red, blue, green, and everything in-between.
“(f/n).”
You made out a figure — dark haired — wearing a black polo headed in your direction. He tapped his Suica card on the window of the gate, a loud beep ringing out before the hands of the gate retracted to let the man through. You winced at the noise, your hands clutching the side of your head to drown out the piercing pain.
“(f/n),” the man repeated, this time more urgent, more distressed — more desperate. You could make out forceful expulsions of air and controlled inhalations from the sound of his breathing. He had been running, but what for?’
“(f/n).”
There it was again: your name. Your first name, even. Whoever was calling you must have shared a close relationship with you. Close enough to run for.
“Iwaizumi Hajime.” A name slipped out from your lips as dictated by your subconscious, but your vision had since blackened — your consciousness stripped away along with it. Perhaps the name had held some significance long before, but you could barely tell left from right, north from south. You could no longer recall even your own name, now that you thought about it — figuring out who this label belonged to would have to wait.
You closed your eyes, falling forward into his chest as something deep and ancient from the crypts of your mind yanked away the loose grip you held around the reigns of your mind.
(And then forever you may rest.)