Archive of Our Own

A week before the end of summer break, as Hajime is slowly making his way through the breakfast his mother left on the table before she went to work, Oikawa sweeps into the kitchen and produces a sheet of floral stationery from his pocket.

“No,” Hajime says.

As expected, Oikawa begins protesting in the whiny, nasal voice he reserves for these occasions. He also sits down in the chair next to Hajime’s, presses a thigh against Hajime’s thigh, and puts his face into Hajime’s personal space bubble. Hajime tries to keep him quiet by feeding him rice and tamagoyaki, but Oikawa complains between bites about how rude Hajime is and tries to stick the paper into Hajime’s hands.

After several fortifying gulps of coffee, Hajime takes the paper.

“Scavenger hunt, part one,” he reads. “Find the following. One, butterfly net.”

He quickly scans the list, and then he crumples it up and puts it on Oikawa’s head.

Oikawa catches the list before it can fall onto the floor. He protests about how hard he’s worked on it.

Hajime says, “We’re not kids anymore, Oikawa. Who has time for those childish games? And why does that say part one?”

“But, Iwa-chan, you seem to have plenty of time. You look like you’re planning to go back to bed.” Oikawa raises his eyebrows at Hajime’s boxers and then rubs a thumb over the stubble on Hajime’s face.

“I’m trying to relax. I just got back to Miyagi last week because my shitty boss wouldn’t give me vacation time before then! While you were having fun at volleyball camp.”

He hadn’t meant to say that last part. Oikawa is now looking at him with wide eyes. Hajime glares at him.

Oikawa blinks, smiles, says, “But a week is plenty of time to rest! You’re becoming a boring middle-aged man, just working and sleeping all the time. I’m beginning to think you love your bed more than you love me.”

“You’re right, I love my bed more,” Hajime replies, and then he leans over, cups Oikawa’s face in both of his hands, and kisses him.

When Oikawa kisses him back tenderly, almost too gently, Hajime pulls back, frowning. There was something like sympathy in that kiss. The sympathy is both surprising and unwelcome. He hates it when he can’t read Oikawa’s moods, and this has been happening more and more often since their last volleyball match of high school, that match where Oikawa had really surprised him by holding it together after their loss and being very mature.

“Why are you looking at me like that?” Oikawa asks, taking Hajime’s cup of lukewarm coffee. He finishes it in three gulps, continues, “I mean, you’re usually glaring at me, true, but I’ve been good today! Are you worried about something? Are you worried about what you’re going to say when Oba-chan tells you to find a girlfriend at uni and bring her home on the next break, hmm?”

“Kaa-chan already knows about us, dumbass.”

“Ah, yes. You were being very loud while I was blowing you in her library room a few months ago. Iwa-chan, you can’t sound that enthusiastic around eighteenth-century literature without people getting suspicious.”

“You can blow me now. She’s not coming home until noon.” Hajime spreads his legs, leans back against his chair.

Oikawa wrinkles his nose. “No thanks. Your boxers look dirty. You’ll have to wash your dick before I put it anywhere near my mouth. Let’s do the scavenger hunt instead!”

He smoothens the list out on the table and looks at Hajime again, his brown eyes bright. Hajime was going to yell at him, but he sighs instead and looks at the list again.

Oikawa has written:

His handwriting is nice for once, the kanji neatly formed. No spelling errors.

“Asskawa,” Hajime says, “What kind of shitty scavenger hunt is this? I won’t have to search for anything because I know exactly where everything is.”

Oikawa beams. “Well, I couldn’t make it too hard because I didn’t want you to think too much and hurt your head.” He gets up, still smiling gleefully. “Remember, twenty-hours! Starting now! Call me when you’ve found everything.”

“But why am I the only one playing this game? Scavenger hunts are competitions between groups of people. The first person to find all the stuff gets the prize.”

“That’s okay.” Oikawa curves an arm around Hajime’s shoulders, kisses the side of his head. “You don’t have to compete with anyone for my attention.”

“Who said I want your attention?”

Oikawa winks in reply, and then he walks jauntily out the kitchen while humming under his breath.

***

Hajime has better things to do than go on a scavenger hunt, but he’ll probably be disappointing Oikawa next week by not returning to Tokyo with him, and this might lead to the end of their relationship, so he might as well indulge Oikawa’s whims one last time.

He doesn’t really want to drop out of university after having worked so hard to get there, of course, but his first semester has been a massive disappointment. The classes he was most excited about, the ones specific to his pharmacology major, have been extremely difficult, and he doesn’t even know how to begin to improve in them.

And he’s had to get a part-time job because money is tight, and the job sucks ass. He works in a gift shop at the Ueno Zoo and has to spend hours listening to tourists and old men complain about high prices and capitalism. He never gets to hang out with the animals.

Furthermore, the more time he spends on coursework and his job, the less he has for volleyball, which is also becoming a pain in the ass. The wing-spikers on the university team are on an entirely different league from him. He’ll probably be a benchwarmer forever. He’ll probably never have a chance to make up for his failure in his last official match. Hajime is not sure what’s bothering him the most: knowing that he might never be able to play in an official match again, the 80s he’s been receiving on his exams, or his job.

He’s spent his entire summer break thinking about finding another profession. Many of his relatives are plenty successful without having ever stepped foot in a university. His parents shouldn’t get upset. All he has to do is not go back to Tokyo for the start of the fall semester, mail the appropriate resignation and withdrawal forms, find some other work, and be good at that other work. Simple as that.

But first, the scavenger hunt.

Hajime finds the box marked “Toys that Belong to Hajime-chan” in the storage closet and takes out a net and the first volleyball he ever owned. The ball was bought after Oikawa got interested in volleyball and started nagging at Hajime to play with him.

Next, Hajime goes outside and finds a jelly jar in a corner of the front yard. There is still some dirt in the jar from when he had made a home for an earthworm.

He puts the things he has collected next to his old mountain bike. The Godzilla figure is on his bookshelf. He can get that later. He needs to go find Oikawa’s toys now.

It’ll be okay, he tells himself as he walks over to the Oikawa residence. He opens the front door and walks in. Everything will be fine. The Oikawa family will probably think he’s a failure when they see him hanging around town after the semester starts, but they’ll get over it once he starts up a business or becomes successful in some way.

And they won’t get mad at him about the failed relationship with Oikawa either. Things like this happen. Childhood friends experimenting with love. Growing up and apart.

And Oikawa will forgive him one day. Oikawa might not be very understanding about it at first, considering how his new philosophy is that geniuses are made not born, considering how hard he works to reach his goals, but he might later, a few years down the line. After all, he was able to change his attitude about volleyball.

And they’ll always be friends, the two of them. At least, to Hajime, Oikawa will always be his friend. Oikawa Tooru was his first real friend, and has been his friend for almost two decades, and that’s not something you can forget.

And Oikawa will be fine in Tokyo without him. He is in his element at their university. He has many fans and new friends, is a regular on the team, and only annoys Hajime half as much as he used to. They haven’t been spending as much time together lately, neither in Tokyo, nor in Miyagi. They’ve only had sex once since Oikawa got back from volleyball camp, and they had to be really fast because they were fucking in Oikawa’s bedroom and were worried one of his family members would walk in.

Oikawa isn’t even in the house at the moment. His house slippers are lined up neatly on the shelf by the door. He’s probably out visiting Hanamaki and Matsukawa.

Hajime puts on the slippers that are reserved for him and goes into Oikawa’s room. It’s as clean as always, and smelling faintly of the lavender pillow mist Oikawa uses on his pillows and sheets. The scent always ends up in Hajime’s hair when he sleeps over or when he takes a power nap on Oikawa’s bed back in their dormitory.

The only noticeable change in the room is that Oikawa has lined up the alien and the spaceship on his desk. Well, Hajime isn’t going to complain. Less work for him.

The toys are so ridiculous, he thinks, as he picks them up. He puts them in the bag, Alien-chan more carefully than Orion III because its antenna is wobbly. Hajime had been too rough when he and Oikawa were playing Alien vs. Godzilla years ago, and the antenna had fallen off, and Oikawa had cried until Hajime found a glue gun in the house and glued it back on. Then Hajime had been grounded for using the glue gun without permission.

Oikawa probably still believes in aliens, Hajime reflects, looking at the astronomy books lined up on the bookshelf. He used to make fun of Oikawa for believing in aliens when they were kids. And Oikawa would ask him, eyes round, looking tentatively up at the sky, “But how do you know there aren’t any, Iwa-chan?” And sometimes he would cover Hajime’s mouth and whisper, “No, no, they’ll hear you and take you away and put you on a planet very far, far away from here, like Neptune.”

Hajime feels a little short of breath all of a sudden. He walks out of the room quickly and closes the door. As he walks back to his house, he texts Oikawa to let him know that the first part of the scavenger hunt is complete.

***

The second part of the scavenger hunt looks shorter on paper, but it seems even more annoying than the first. “Why are we doing this again?” Hajime asks, glaring down at the new list.

“Because it’s fun,” Oikawa says, climbing onto Hajime’s bike. “Hey, Iwa-chan, you want to ride on the handlebars? We used to do it the other way on your first bike, but since I’m much taller than you now, haha, this will be safer.”

“There’s nothing safe about this, and being taller isn’t an achievement,” Hajime says, as he climbs onto the handlebars.

He is a little apprehensive at first, but Oikawa pedals carefully, staying close to the side of the road, so he lets himself relax. It’s nice to just hold onto the bars and look up at the bright blue sky and feel the chilly afternoon breeze against his face, while Oikawa does all the work.

But after Oikawa has gone up and down the road once, Kaa-chan comes out of the house to yell at them. They have to put the bike back and apologize to her.

After Kaa-chan goes back inside, Hajime asks Oikawa, “When are you going to tell me what the real point of this scavenger hunt is, huh? Is it so that we can have a nostalgia fest? Are we taking a trip down memory lane?”

“That’s part of it, yes,” Oikawa says.

He bends down to tie his sneakers. The ends of his thick, wavy hair flop up and then down again. He beams at Hajime.

“Why do we have to be nostalgic?” Hajime asks.

“You tell me.”

Hajime is tired of this game. He considers telling Oikawa about his decision, just saying the words: “I’m not going back to Tokyo.” He was good at being direct, before. He was good at a lot of things that are harder for him to do now.

He can’t say the words.

So he glares at Oikawa, waves the list at him, and says, “This is the last one I’m doing. There better not be a part three.”

“No part threes,” Oikawa agrees.

Hajime looks at the list again. It says:

He says, “Nothing on here makes sense.”

“They’ll make sense soon enough,” Oikawa says. “You can start tomorrow morning, alright?”

Hajime folds the paper and stuffs it into a pocket. “Want to have dinner with us tonight?” he asks.

“Sorry, but Nee-san already asked me to have dinner at her house.” Oikawa gathers his alien and spaceship into his arms. “But we can have lunch together tomorrow, while you’re doing the second part of the scavenger hunt. Bye-bye, Iwa-chan. Hugs and kisses. Mwah.” He blows a kiss.

“Yeah.”

Hajime waits until Oikawa has walked into his house before he turns back to his own.

***

It’s been awhile since he visited Kitagawa Daiichi. He looks at the gleaming walls of the school building and can’t help smiling. Junior high had been such an awkward time. Everything was always such a big deal, all those petty fights with classmates, the school festivals, and the embarrassing crushes, first on girls and then, confusingly and with growing dread, on his best friend.

“Remember when you headbutted me, Iwa-chan?” Oikawa asks. He rubs his nose. “You have such a hard head. How do you keep it upright on your shoulders?”

“Weren’t we going to think about the good times?”

“That’s next! We have to think about what you said to me when I was feeling like shit and almost hit Tobio-chan.”

Hajime frowns. He can’t remember the exact words he used because he has spent most of his years trying to keep Oikawa in line and has had to give a lot of encouraging pep talks.

“You said, with six people, the strong are even stronger,” Oikawa says. “And you said, all of that I, I crap is annoying. And it has helped me so often since then. But, Iwa-chan, I’ve been wondering, when did you stop believing your own words?”

Hajime takes the list out, glares at it, and starts walking towards the restaurant where they serve the best agedashi tofu in all of Japan. He’s not going to answer Oikawa.

Or, at least, he wasn’t planning on answering Oikawa until much later, like next week, but after they’re served the tofu, and he’s eaten half of it, he says, “I haven’t stopped believing that. Obviously a team is stronger than the individual players that make up the team. But the individuals have to be strong themselves. You were always strong. I wasn’t in our last high school match.”

“Iwa-chan,” Oikawa begins, his gaze soft.

“Take that pity, and shove it up your ass, Oikawa.”

“I’d rather have something else up there,” Oikawa replies, and sticks his tongue out.

Hajime goes back to his tofu.

Oikawa says, tone neutral, “Okay, I know you don’t want to talk about that match, but I want you to know something before we agree not to talk about it ever again. You were strong during that match, alright? You were magnificent. And I’m not just saying that because I love you. I’m telling you as your former captain and the setter of the team.”

Hajime swallows a mouthful of ice water to wash away the embarrassment he’s feeling. Oikawa smiles at him, and then thankfully, finally looks away.

***

The second item on the list requires him to go to Aoba Johsai. And also find a kouhai. “We’re going to be disturbing practice,” Hajime says. “We might not even be allowed inside.”

“No way, Irihata-san loves me,” Oikawa says.

“Let me guess,” Hajime says as he follows Oikawa to the doors of the gym. “I have to play a match against a kouhai so that I can rediscover my love for volleyball.”

“Maybe?”

Hajime highly doubts that winning against a kouhai will help him in any way. But when he steps into the gym and sees the familiar faces, sees the smiles, sees that everything is going smoothly, that everyone is working hard, he feels a weird sense of contentment. It feels a little like coming home.

He is about to go talk to Kindaichi when Kyoutani comes over, looking simultaneously gruff and shy. Kyoutani played well in this year’s Inter-High, didn’t have to be reprimanded even once. Yahaba seems to have in on a tight leash. Hajime remembers that he promised Kyoutani an arm-wrestling rematch.

“Hey, Oikawa,” Hajime says, “I found a kouhai.”

***

It’s late by the time they leave the gym. Their shadows are lengthening over the road they’ve walked over so often to and from school. Back then, they had been so eager to grow up.

“The team is doing well, isn’t it?” Oikawa says. “They might win at Spring High this time. We raised them right.”

The current regulars had insisted on a match, so Hajime and Oikawa had teamed up with several reserves and played against them. The regulars won, as they should, but it was close. They had questions about the university team afterwards, and Oikawa answered them, making the whole university experience sound better than it is.

Kindaichi had looked at Hajime with a great deal of admiration while Oikawa was talking, and Hajime had felt guilty. What kind of example is he going to be setting for Kindaichi and Kyoutani, who had asked for another rematch after their rematch, by quitting volleyball?

When they are a block from their neighborhood, Hajime takes out the list and waves it in Oikawa’s face. “Okay,” he says, “that’s all three. I found the first two, and you’re right here. What prize do I get?”

“Correction, Iwa-chan, you haven’t found me yet.” Oikawa beams.

Hajime puts a hand on Oikawa’s forehead. “Are you okay? Are you hallucinating, Asskawa? It says Tooru on this list, and you’re right here.”

“But you call me Oikawa,” Oikawa says. “So you haven’t found Tooru yet.”

Hajime wants to yell at him for being annoying, but a part of him wants to try saying the name, feel it on his tongue out here in the open. He’s only said “Tooru” a handful of times before: either in accompaniment with the family name, with others when they were cheering for him during volleyball matches, as part of an insult, and once when they were fucking. He’s not sure why it’s so hard to think of Oikawa as “Tooru” even after all the time they’ve spent together, even after Oikawa kissed him for the first time at midnight on New Year’s Eve and said, “Let’s start this year in the right way.” Maybe a part of him has always been ready to say goodbye to Oikawa, who is sometimes so frustrating Hajime wants to tear his own hair out, and who is sometimes amazing and perplexing and out of reach.

“Tooru,” Hajime says.

He likes how the name sounds. He loves the way Oikawa is smiling at him, soft and sincere and with so much affection. It’s a good look for Oikawa. Hajime looks at that smile, and he can’t believe he’s been considering giving up on their university dreams so easily.

He knows now what he has to do. He will have try one more semester, for Oikawa. And if he can’t make it, he will have to first talk to Oikawa about his plans before dropping out.

“Congrats on completing the scavenger hunt, Iwa-chan,” Oikawa says. He grasps Hajime’s right hand, twines their fingers together. “Come on, I’ll give you your prize now. Come with me.”

Hajime lets himself be led to Oikawa’s front yard. When Oikawa pulls him towards the door, however, Hajime says, “I’ll wait out here.”

Oikawa releases his hand, promising to be “right back.” Hajime sits down on the top step of the veranda. His right hand is still warm with the heat from Oikawa’s hand. He runs his hands through his hair.

“Here you go,” Oikawa says, stepping out of the house. He has a folder in his hand. “Congratulations, Iwaizumi Hajime-san, you are the winner of the scavenger hunt! Please accept this prize.”

Hajime takes the folder. It is surprisingly heavy. The folder is bulging with papers. He opens it up to see a large collection of pharmacology exams.

“What the fuck,” he says.

“No worries, I didn’t have to bribe anyone or sleep with any professors to get those,” Oikawa says. He squeezes into the space between Hajime and the railing of the veranda, puts an arm around Hajime’s shoulders.

“But how did you get them?! You’re a psych major.”

“You seemed unhappy about your exam scores.” Oikawa pats Hajime’s arm. “Can’t imagine why. I was happy to get seventies on my finals. But anyway, I’ve been talking to older students in your department, and they were happy to lend me those old exams. They said that the first year is a bit overwhelming, but it gets easier. They also said you should go talk to them. I told them that you’re a little on the shy side sometimes, but that you’ll make friends with them this semester.”

“I’m not shy,” Hajime says, for lack of a better thing to say.

“Well, what was I supposed to say? You’re very closed-off and fiercely independent outside of the court?” Oikawa frowns. “Really, Iwa-chan, what am I going to do with you. You never talk to me about the things that are upsetting you, but you know all of mine. That’s not fair.”

“Well, you seem to figure them out anyway, so what’s the point.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment, Hajime-chan.”

“Fuck no, you’re not calling me that.”

“Hajime.” Oikawa leans his head against Hajime’s. “We’re a team, alright? You’ve always looked out for me, and for us. When you can’t carry me, I’ll carry you. So keep trying, okay? I believe in you.”

Hajime can feel his ears burning. He hopes that he doesn’t spontaneously combust right where he is.

He can’t believe Oikawa has gone this far for him. That’s what Oikawa must have been doing, all those times Oikawa was hanging out with people who weren’t from their volleyball club. He was collecting these exams to make studying easier for Hajime. And then he planned this scavenger hunt to help Hajime make the right decision.

“Are you blushing, Hajime?” Oikawa asks, rubbing his cheek against Hajime’s.

Hajime grabs the wayward strands at the top of Oikawa’s head, says, “When did you become this cool, Crappykawa, huh? I feel like I’ve lost to you.”

Then he kisses Oikawa, no, Tooru, and Tooru wraps his arms around Hajime and pulls him close.

“Hey,” Tooru says in a low voice, smiling, “you sure you don’t want to come inside? My parents are going out for dinner. We’ll have some time for you-know-what before they come back.”

Hajime stands up and says, “Alright, lead the way.”

Tooru holds out his hands, and Hajime pulls him up.