Chapter Text
Can we skip past near-death clichés
Where my heart restarts, as my life replays?
All I want is to flip a switch
Before something breaks that cannot be fixed
Oikawa’s head bumps against the glass of the window as the bus traverses the highway. The air is stifling, warmed by yawns, exasperated breaths and tired sighs.
As the bus moves, he sways in sync with the bodies around him, watching the skyline pass by through the window.
The sky is a clear blue, no cloud to be seen, and he can almost feel the suffocating warmth of summer just by looking at the sunlight spilling bright and hot across the houses that begin to litter the landscape with more and more density as they reach his home town.
He shoots Iwaizumi another text when they enter, though the last three had been ignored.
There’s music coming from his headphones, meant to keep him company through the long drive but the drums don’t seem to match the guitar and the singer clashes with the melody. Where there’s supposed to be unity and harmony, Oikawa hears only disarray. Or maybe those are his thoughts plugging his ears so he can’t even be granted the relief of ignorable noise.
It’s his first time home in months since he’s started his second year of college.
The first year went by in a blur of studying, practicing, going out, dating, breaking up, repeating the cycle until the self-hatred grew bored and became just a permanent numbness. Either ashamed of the phantom hands he could feel traversing his body, the redness around his eyes and the unshakable ache squeezing his ever muscle, or because he was too exhausted from the same, he hadn’t gone home that summer.
Iwaizumi had video called a few times a week but then his household was getting renovated and he didn’t have internet. When he got it again, the connection was bad, image grainy, sound crackling and fading out, until all Oikawa had left of him was the static he left behind.
Video calls turned to texting, texting to texting occasionally, and then, suddenly, at the start of the second semester, radio silence.
Iwaizumi stopped replying. Oikawa stopped trying.
“It was bound to happen eventually.” Strangers who called themselves friends would comfort. His own mother had said as much when they were going off to college, hopeful and bright-eyed, promising to see each other every break and call every evening.
Oikawa had never believed them, refused to let himself be convinced his connection to Iwaizumi was something that would be broken by distance.
But they stopped texting.
Oikawa stopped trying.
His second year was over before he even registered it. Class, dorm, class, dorm – this was what his routine consisted of throughout it.
And now he’s back and he feels no less lonely than he had been miles away in a city where no one knew him or bothered to try to.
There has never been a sadder sound than the rhythmic thump of his volleyball against his bedroom wall, Oikawa thinks as he readily meets the ball with his palms and sends it softly forward to bounce off the wall again.
He repeats the motion until his mother knocks on the door in passing with a fond but exasperated, “Tooru, stop that.”
“Sorry!” He sets the ball down and flips onto his back on the bed.
His ceiling is incredibly dull.
The entirety of his room, really, feels grey and empty, too silent. There is a lack of motion, of volleyballs bouncing off the floor, sneakers squeaking, familiar voices calling out reprimands and compliments, and a significant lack of turquoise blue matched with white, only one such shirt hanging in Oikawa’s half opened closet.
He briefly debates the thought of going to bother his mother with his problems.
But Oikawa knows she’s tired, having to take care of a big house completely alone since he’d left, probably with no one to talk to save for a few friends who rarely come because they’re just as busy. It feels wrong to whine about his loneliness when she must be twice as lonely.
He’d let Iwaizumi know he was there the moment he walked through the front door but had gotten no response.
With the sun setting already, Oikawa doubts he’ll respond now.
Maybe Iwaizumi forgot about him. Maybe he never cared to begin with.
The shame he felt, a carnivorous plant with deep roots gnawing at his happiness, was perhaps strong enough for Iwaizumi to feel too and want to stay away.
Was Iwaizumi ashamed of ever knowing him? Had the stories somehow reached him? And did he still know Oikawa well enough to realize they were either fabricated or overly-exaggerated?
The self-destructive spiral of thought is effectively broken when the doorbell rings and Oikawa perks up, listens as his mother’s footsteps descend the stairs and the door opens with a click.
Muffled voices come from downstairs.
“Oh, Iwaizumi! How have you been?”
“Evening, Mrs. Oikawa. I’m fine. How are you?” A low, familiar voice answers, setting off a fluttering in Oikawa’s stomach he tries his best to ignore. Purposefully, he doesn’t go downstairs, instead making Iwaizumi come to him. He tells himself it’s payback and not terror, not prolonging the moment before they’re face to face again.
“Don’t you worry about me,” He hears his mother chuckle, “Tooru’s in his room.”
“Thanks.”
Heavy footsteps climb the stairs and Oikawa can physically feel the anticipation rising as they approach and then his door handle twists down and the door opens slowly.
Iwaizumi looks mostly the same, maybe a little more exhausted, a bit paler, but his hair is still spiky, face still set into an eternal frown and eyes still some incomparable mixture of green and brown, just as intense as the rest of him, always passionate and expressive.
Oikawa had learned fairly early on that most things to be known about Iwaizumi you could learn from his eyes even if his face seemed stone cold and expressionless. He’d always prided himself in being perceptive but not even he knows how to fully explain the way he understands Iwaizumi’s eyes, the way they shift, the colors they are based on the lighting, how his eyelids drop or widen, when his pupils dilate – he’s committed all this to memory on an instinctual level.
Alright, so maybe Oikawa has known for quite some time that he was in love with his best friend.
What a cliché.
He’d been content for a long while with keeping it to himself. Contrary to popular belief, Oikawa wasn’t much of a ladies – or otherwise – man. Through his youth, there had always been bigger priorities than romance.
Not that he hadn’t noticed his feelings for Iwaizumi. He just wasn’t particularly troubled by acting on them. A younger Oikawa was a stupid one, thinking time would always bend for him, there would be a way for him to steer it to his will and the moment for their picture-perfect romance would come after the practice game, after the competition, after winning nationals, after finishing school, after the first year of college, after…
“What’re you staring at me for?” Iwaizumi exclaims, a hint of pink dusting his cheeks, making Oikawa jump as he smacks him over the back of the head.
“Sorry.” Oikawa breathes, voice uncharacteristically soft, making Iwaizumi’s frown deepen.
“Oikawa, are you okay?”
“Yeah! Yeah, sorry. Just tired from travelling all day. With all the fans I have, it’s hard to spend so much time in public, you know?” He winks, composing himself. “Hi.”
“Hey.” Iwaizumi sits gingerly on his desk chair. He looks like he no longer belongs in it. It’s too small, tilts awkwardly under his weight. Oikawa can’t quite remember him ever doing his homework in it though he swears it’s happened.
“You’ve been MIA for a while.” He says, gaze drifting from Iwaizumi’s clumsily folded body to his sour face.
“Yeah. I guess we did kinda lose touch.”
Oikawa would’ve screamed at him for that once. They didn’t lose touch. Iwaizumi just stopped replying.
But he doesn’t feel the need to yell now.
He used to imagine a tide between him and Iwaizumi, a back-and-forth of emotion and its reciprocation, a connection that resulted in how they were on the court and off, an understanding not despite the differences but through them. It was a fair game.
The tide is gone now. Oikawa feels like a stubborn wave slamming into the same cliff over and over like its measly strength would ever break it.
So he says, “How’d that happen?”
Iwaizumi shrugs. “Not sure. I guess we got preoccupied with all these new things.”
“New things?”
“Yeah, you know, relationships, and school, and shit. There was a lot going on.”
Oikawa nods. “Quite overwhelming, yeah. Why’d you come over?”
“I saw the light in your window.” Iwaizumi says, shifting in the chair, folding one leg over the other to try and make more room for himself. It just barely works.
It’s humorous, really, how huge he is compared to the chair, but Oikawa doesn’t have it in him to laugh.
“Remember when we taught ourselves Morse code?” He asks, the thought hitting him out of the blue. “And we communicated with flashlights through the window.”
The ghost of a smile brushes across Iwaizumi’s sharp features as he nods. “Yeah.”
“Yeah.”
Silence.
Iwaizumi’s eyes land on the ball Oikawa had discarded earlier and his face lights up with challenge. “Wanna see which one of us got better since the last time we played?”
It takes them little more than a minute to find their rhythm.
Oikawa relishes in the familiarity of it all – the breath Iwaizumi takes before he jumps, the grunt he lets out when he sends the ball flying, his backyard and the way the street lights across the street slowly flicker to life as the sun sets fully beneath the horizon, the humid air finally growing cooler, a subtle breeze tickling his sweat-dampened skin.
They play until they’re both panting, muscles aching, and then they sit on the back porch, each with a bottle of ice tea Oikawa fetched from the kitchen.
He remembers the day he’d learned Iwaizumi’s favorite flavor was peach.
There hasn’t been a different kind of tea in his fridge since.
“You’re getting rusty, Iwa-chan.” He teases in a sing-song voice, falling back into his old self with ease.
Iwaizumi frowns at him. “Probably because you’re overexerting yourself now that you don’t have me keeping you in check.”
There’s genuine concern in those words, one he tries to mask with an indifferent face but Oikawa can tell, he could always tell. So he assures, “Don’t worry, you’ve been pestering me for long enough that your voice echoes in my head even when you’re not there to yell at me.”
“Good.”
It was always nights like this, after they’d exhausted their bodies so much they could no longer control their minds, that Oikawa and Iwaizumi had their best talks. And their hardest ones.
One such conversation had always been stuck in the back of Oikawa’s throat on these nights, a confession beneath a starlit sky after hours spent together doing what they both loved, a kiss that tastes like peach, their flushed cheeks caressed by the breeze.
But he never lets it happen.
“Don’t think too hard, you’ll hurt yourself.” Iwaizumi’s voice drags him back to the present.
Oikawa goes to answer, to taunt back, but that never-had conversation turns to a lump in his throat, his lungs refusing to inhale as if the smell of sweat mixed with grass would bring back memories too painful to process.
“Oikawa?”
He opens his mouth again but nothing comes out.
What’s he supposed to say now? His opportunity was wasted years ago and all his cliché confession would bring them now was pain and embarrassment. He couldn’t look Iwaizumi in the eye after all this time and tell him there’s been a part of him yearning, softly grieving what was never his to begin with, a part of him lying every time they spoke, hugged, played.
Oikawa is a bad person.
He’s manipulative and bratty, spoiled and greedy. But, worst of all, he’s a liar.
A liar because he is a coward and because by the time he’d begun to understand himself, an image of his face was already plastered on the cover of every sports magazine and his supposed personality already made into a thousand quizzes and articles.
And then, what else could he have done other than lived up to the image?
“Hey,” Iwaizumi’s arm is heavy on his shoulders and the touch burns him from the inside out. “What’s wrong?”
His mind floats through the memories in a sensation reminiscent of laying on his back in a pool of tepid water.