Chapter Text
Iwaizumi Hajime isn’t much of a talker, but that doesn’t mean that he has nothing to say.
In fact, Iwaizumi has always had quite a bit to say, but he’s spent most of his life being best friends with someone who runs his mouth pretty much 24/7, so it’s hard to get a word in edgewise at the best of times.
It isn’t like he minds, though. He likes to hear Oikawa talk.
So he writes, instead. He starts with essays, argumentative by nature and unsurprisingly skilled at making a point, taking on any topic that interests him and researching it into the early hours of the morning just to write it all down again with a bias that he makes sound like a fact. He’s really, really good at it, even getting selected by his school district to be put in an advanced language course, but he doesn’t make a big deal out of it. Volleyball is more important.
He writes some short stories for a class in his first year of high school, loving the difference in creativity needed to write fiction over nonfiction, and his teacher tells him offhandedly that he should consider looking into writing as a potential career path. Iwaizumi just laughs and shakes his head. He’s going to play volleyball professionally and stay partners with Oikawa forever, so what’s the point in considering anything else?
In his second year, he takes a poetry class, and he falls in love. He’s started to think that maybe volleyball isn’t his everything, that he’d like to explore some other career paths, but he’s afraid to tell Oikawa that their dream might not look the way it always has, so he channels that into his writing. He spins syntax and imagery like fine silk, putting feelings into words that he didn’t even know he had. He writes poems about uncertainty and loss, odes to truth, and ballads of betrayal. He writes prose about honesty, and he writes metaphor after metaphor about how life isn’t always the way it seems to be, about how the sun makes the world seem brighter, but it blocks his view of the stars.
He tells Oikawa that he thinks he wants to go into sports medicine the summer before their third year, around the same time Oikawa has started talking to recruiters. Oikawa mentions Argentina. Iwaizumi doesn’t understand the way that makes him feel.
He takes a college-level creative writing class in his third year, and his teacher submits his work in secret to an international writing competition based in the United Kingdom. He wins.
They send him a cash prize and a letter of recognition, and his parents are so, so proud. Everyone is. Especially Oikawa. His best friend — even after all these years — starts to cry over the phone and, about four and a half minutes later, comes bursting through Iwaizumi’s bedroom door to give him the most bone-crushing hug he’s ever gotten. Iwaizumi can’t keep the smile off his face, but it’s not about the writing. It’s never really been about the writing.
He doesn’t tell Oikawa that the poem that won him first place was about the two of them. He doesn’t tell him that he wrote about the air that fits between them on the nights they stay over at each other’s houses; he doesn’t tell him that he wrote about the dip in the mattress that he hopes will never disappear.
They graduate — finally on their way to the Americas — and Iwaizumi doesn’t tell Oikawa he’s in love.
He majors in sports science and he minors in poetry, eager for the reprieve that it provides him to write down the things he’d never be able to say. He chases his dreams, and he laments the ones he left behind. He’s happy, overall.
The language barrier means that he sometimes can’t get into words the things he wants to for his classes, but he tries, and he gets better. It takes him almost a year, but he gets better, and now he’s dual-wielding languages like single-handed swords. He writes in English for his studies and Japanese when he can’t quite find the words he wants, and by the end of his second year, he’s professed his love to various pages in notebooks over two hundred times and counting.
It’s almost half as many poems as he and Oikawa have spent hours on the phone.
This whole time — after two years of following their hearts in separate corners of their shared universe — they’ve never lost touch. Somehow, with four hours and more than five thousand miles between them, neither of them has ever run out of things to say.
In January of Iwaizumi’s third year in Irvine, he visits Oikawa in San Juan. It’s the first time they’ve seen each other in person since high school, and Iwaizumi has never seen Oikawa smile so wide. He pulls Iwaizumi into a hug that blows the one from after the writing contest out of the water, laughing wetly into the skin where his neck meets his shoulder, and Iwaizumi doesn’t even try to pretend he doesn’t cry. They both leave the airport with red-rimmed eyes and sore faces, their smiles brighter than the summer sun, and just as warm.
Iwaizumi can’t sleep that night, so he writes, as he always does.
He writes about how Oikawa’s laugh sounds like music. He writes about how Oikawa smells like orange, vanilla, and childhood, all wrapped into one. He writes about how Oikawa’s eyes sparkle in a way they haven’t since before they were teens, about how he seems happier than he’s ever been, and about how, despite never having been here before, walking into Oikawa’s apartment felt like coming home.
Iwaizumi falls asleep out on the balcony, curled up in a plastic lawn chair, his notebook open on his lap. The next day, when he wakes up to the sun rising over the city, only two of those things are the same. He reaches out lazily for the table next to him, but it’s bare. He checks the ground. Nothing. Under his chair. Still nothing. His notebook is gone.
He scrambles to his feet, looking all around him, hoping he’d just missed it, somehow, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. Maybe he’d put it away before falling asleep? Is that possible?
He slides open the glass door as quietly as he can, steps inside, and closes it with just as much care. He kneels down beside his backpack, but before he can look too hard, Oikawa’s voice trickles in from the kitchen.
“For love do I yearn, yet it is eternity that I seek instead,” he says, his voice quiet but strong. Iwaizumi freezes in place. “For romance do my dreams plead desperately in the hours that the sun can’t see, but what would I be should the sun never rise?”
Iwaizumi stands, slowly, and takes his first few steps on autopilot.
“Honesty comes easier in the night, it’s true, but out of the sun’s watchful eye, I might wither,” Oikawa continues, “for with it comes happiness, warmth, and life. Is truth so necessary that those be sacrificed?”
Iwaizumi rounds the corner of the kitchen, and Oikawa sits at the table facing him, the notebook in his hands.
“Can I choose love over loss if the love is lowercase?” Oikawa reads, his eyes never leaving the page. “Can I choose happiness without a capital H?”
Iwaizumi sits carefully across from him, his eyes glued to the tear that falls down Oikawa’s cheek.
“Would the world grant me peace of mind in place of my desires? Is the universe so kind?”
The world stands still.
“And, lastly, above all else, might the sun ever know how brightly he shines?”
Oikawa looks up and smiles, but it’s sad. Iwaizumi gulps. He’s fighting back tears of his own.
“Who is he?” Oikawa asks.
“What?”
“The sun.”
Iwaizumi’s jaw drops. Nothing makes sense. In all the years that he had feared this very moment, never in his life did he think he’d have an out to take. Never in his life did he think Oikawa wouldn’t understand.
“You don’t know?” he asks, and his voice cracks. “You… you can’t tell?”
Oikawa laughs bitterly. “You’ve never said anything about a crush,” he says, looking back down at the notebook and flipping through the pages. “Or an unrequited love, it seems.”
Iwaizumi makes a sound even he can’t put a meaning to — some strange combination of a chuckle and a sob — and he leans forward, pulling the book from Oikawa’s hands. He turns to a page near the front where he knows his intentions lay bare.
“There’s something special about summer nights,” Iwaizumi reads, though he knows this one by heart, “with the fan on and the blankets off, the air an extension of your skin.”
He glances up. Oikawa is looking right at him, his expression masked behind uncertainty, so Iwaizumi continues.
“You lay next to him and you wonder when he’ll notice that your breathing is too rhythmic for you to be unconscious. You stare at the black of your eyelids and you wait, because you know, at some point, his arms will seek you out in his sleep.”
Oikawa inhales sharply, but Iwaizumi pushes on.
“It should be uncomfortable, and there are moments when it is, but in the heat of your best friend’s embrace, you’re in love.”
“Iwa-chan.” It’s quiet and raw, but it’s full of understanding, so Iwaizumi smiles.
He looks up. “Yeah.”
Oikawa is bathed in the light streaming through the kitchen window, making him glow like a lighthouse, calling Iwaizumi back to shore. “How… I mean…”
“They’re about you, dumbass,” he says, effectively dropping the other shoe.
“All of them?”
He nods.
“Hajime.”
Nothing could have prepared Iwaizumi for what Oikawa’s lips would feel like on his. There are no fireworks, no gospel singers, and no relieved crowd of friends and family coming out from behind the walls, but Iwaizumi is a poet, he’s in love, and Oikawa tastes vaguely of mint, so he knows he’ll have something to say about this later.
For now, though, and for the first time in his life, words escape him. It’s to be expected. It’s never really been about the writing, after all, and when the love of your life is finally yours, what else is there to say?