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Oikawa used to think that time wasn’t relevant.
When you’re an ethereal being, incandescent, timeless, trivial things like a good night’s sleep and that adrenaline rush don’t really matter. Fascinated by the simplicity and idiotic complexity amongst humans, Oikawa spent his years learning about them, watching over head, finding out details from what fire is, to what seasons feel like.
He used to think like the others, snob nosed and superior, finding humans to be as low as insignificant ants, gross creatures that clambered over each other to gain tiny rewards that never kept any value. “Pathetic,” he used to call them. And then, he discovered more--curiosity taking over his bandwagoning--by one day peering into their lives.
Something as simple as a joke, that lifted spirits high in the room it visibly looked lighter. Oikawa adapted to that quick, bringing these new learned jokes back to friends and trying to make them laugh. Sometimes they worked.
He also found something else, aside from the changes in weather, the adrenaline in young children on swing sets, the trivial puns from comedic skits at the Apollo (Oikawa also learned that some humans love stars).
Oikawa discovered sadness, pain, loss. He discovered what tears were, these crystalline droplets like water vapor between meteor belts. He learned they were salty, and they burned, leaving eyes red and noses stuffed. A human life was so easy to lose, through so many ways. Some were missed, some weren’t. He’d never known pain in his heart really; he thinks he might have felt something when he watched a man die with no one even knowing his name.
He also learned that tears weren’t just for sadness, but for happiness, too. Childbirth, something so strangely gross and oddly terrifying but breathtaking all in the same instance. And this one emotion, painful, but blissful, so much that it made something in Oikawa’s body jump and twist.
Love.
“It’s gross,” Oikawa says with eyes glued to the tiny bundles of stars in his fingers, fascination written in a chestnut gaze, “but it’s beautiful.”
“Human emotion certainly is strange.”
Oikawa has only one that he holds dear. He looks up from the stars in his fingers, letting them float and fall back into place in the atmosphere, wincing as one bounces off and goes flying somewhere into space. “Sorry, Venus,” he mumbles, adjusting his position so he’s facing Earth again.
“Iwa-chan,” he breathes, looking to his right at Iwaizumi, who looks grumpy even through his luminescence. “I think I love you.”
“Hah? What’s with that?”
“I’ve studied it for almost three hundred years now. Love, I mean. And...if I know what it is--which I know what it is--then that’s how I feel about you,” Oikawa shrugs, and he reaches over, but stops when Iwaizumi sends him a look.
If only he could touch him.
“You know nothing happens,” Iwaizumi says, and he reaches out for Oikawa’s hand, but they just pass through each other like the void space they sit in. There’s no slight tingle of presence, validity of existence. Iwaizumi frowns when Oikawa’s eyes fill with an emotion he can’t place.
As much as he’s learned from Oikawa about his human studies, he can explain that it is sadness, but he can’t entirely understand why. And it bothers him, the sight of Oikawa not smiling, using stupid jokes and showing Iwaizumi constellation pictures of things that he’s learned. He’ll never forget the time Oikawa tried to explain what a king was using starlight.
His curiosity finally reaches a point that he joins Oikawa on his adventures, and they learn together, bit by bit. They both realize somewhere too many centuries later that they shouldn’t have explored what is considered human, because it must have unlocked something within them, and suddenly they feel different.
They feel something jump and churn in their bodies when they smile, and an ache when they frown or sigh. And when they look at each other between the constellations they’ve drawn for one another, they feel a warmth that can’t be explained, yet it’s tangible. And the forever law that they’ll never feel anything as they press fingers and foreheads together makes them feel an ultimate hole in their core.
“Iwa--no...Hajime,” Oikawa smiles. Somewhere down the line they chose these names, Hajime and Tooru, representative of something on Earth that tickled their fancy.
“I never thought I’d see the day that I’d envy a human,” Oikawa admits, showering himself in tiny suns, because he can actually feels those, like a fusillade of warm kisses on luminous skin that leave marks. To humans, they’d be freckles. Skin stars, Oikawa calls them. He didn’t make that up, a human did.
“Who created the rule that we can’t touch, I wonder,” Iwaizumi ponders, floating heedlessly through space.
“Maybe it’s because we can fly. Humans dream of flying, right?”
“I don’t think so.”
So in this sort of hell, this prison, the place they used to marvel at because they were Gods and they were ethereal deities, they remain, for many and more years to come.
Or so, they thought.
“Dying...?” Oikawa’s voice is small as he stands before his council.
“We don’t live forever, although many like to think that we do. You choose your reincarnation.”
Oikawa made his decision. It hit him like a meteorite--the concept that deities didn’t live forever--he’d been here for thousands of years. Maybe longer. He hadn’t kept track until now, and suddenly every moment mattered. He rushed, he panicked, he made mistakes.
Although he was growing tired of living as a being above the world, amongst the sun and the stars and planets; he would stay forever if it meant Iwaizumi would be there.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t tell you sooner,” Oikawa admits, glaring hard at the stars between fingers. He and Iwaizumi lie together on a bed made of starlight, because touching each other through these little marbles of wonder make it seem like they can actually hold one another.
“So, you’ll become a human, yeah?”
“Mhm... although it’s rough down there, I want to feel. I’d give anything to just feel,” Oikawa sighs, and he bites his lip, hard, wishing to every power in the expanse of the universe to grant him the ability to cry. “I just wish I could do that with you.”
“I’m not gonna forget you. I swear it,” Iwaizumi grips tight on a handful of stars around Oikawa’s hand; it has become easier, natural to pretend that it’s really him.
“I asked the council to let me keep my name, so you can find me,” Oikawa says, and Iwaizumi looks at him in silence. They stay like that for a while, because they both know what’s coming, and Oikawa made Iwaizumi swear to spend his last moments just like this.
“How much longer?”
“I dunno. The one thing I never learned from humans...was to tell time.”
“Dumbass.”
“Sorry. I love you.”
It hurt. In ways Iwaizumi couldn’t put into words.
He watched Oikawa turn to stardust, the last thing he heard being his name, and suddenly Iwaizumi was alone, and there was something bittersweet about it, because for the first time, he could feel him, warm through the stardust covering his body, before it faded, dropping into a dark void that would never come back, no matter how hard he screamed.
The first thing Iwaizumi did was learn to tell time. And then he waited, counting the seconds, the minutes, the days, the years until he found Oikawa.
He did eventually, a healthy ten year old who had a knack for sports and a smile so big he might split in half. Iwaizumi watched him, every day. He watched him join a volleyball club. He watched him go on his first date--and knock his soda all over the girl. Iwaizumi laughed for a good hour over that one.
He watched Oikawa turn seventeen and become a captain. He watched him win, and lose. He saw him laugh, and he saw him cry.
But the best thing, out of every little thing that Oikawa did in his daily life, was at night, when he would sit outside and stare at the stars. Once he was old enough to form a coherent sentence he asked his dad for a telescope, and he asked for books on the stars.
Oikawa would always look up, mapping out constellations, naming them effortlessly, like he’d made them himself--some of them, he did.
It was the best thing, because Iwaizumi felt like he was looking at him. And that nobody else between the entire earth and space could interfere.
He watched Oikawa turn eighteen, and he decided to study astronomy in college. He upgraded his telescope again--some habits never change--spending every night outside, looking up, through his telescope.
Iwaizumi watches Oikawa lift his eye from his telescope and look up, before he points, drawing his fingers like connect-a-dots across the sky. Iwaizumi holds still, eyes filled with a curiosity of this unexplained behavior. His eyes widen when Oikawa smiles, and murmurs, “Hajime.”
Something in his chest--at some point Iwaizumi started calling it his heart--jumps around and tightens and feels like it’s about to burst. “I’ve been looking for you,” Oikawa sighs, and he jots down the stars on his page.
“You’re perfect, my own personal constellation. I dunno...where I got the name from. It’s silly, but I can’t get it out of my head.”
Iwaizumi feels a smile tug at his lips so hard he doesn’t even try to fight it. Though they still can never hold hands, they have this, with Oikawa reaching for him, his name on his lips while he can’t explain why he’s so happy, why he’s crying, and why he feels inexplicably warm.
And Iwaizumi showers him with starlight, murmuring the sweet nothings Oikawa can’t hear but he can feel, because this is as close he can get without breaking any rules.
So he takes that set of stars to the council, asking for them to approve it as an official constellation, named after him. And he asks for another, he begs and pleads for another, a tiny one, right by his.
And the next night when Oikawa steps outside, Iwaizumi turns his attention to the duo of stars next to each other, Hajime and Tooru, and Oikawa feels like his heart is going to burst from his chest from memories he can’t claim, and feelings he can’t explain, but he’s happy.
“I love you, so much,” Iwaizumi whispers, hugging stars tighter to his chest.
“Someday I’ll be up there,” Oikawa reaches up to the skies, “I know it.”
Iwaizumi meets with the council as his time draws near.
“I want...to be reincarnated as a human. But...I have a request.”
The council watches him as he picks up a hand full of stars and spreads them out, the way Oikawa did when he was about to teach them something.
“Have you ever heard of soulmates?”