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There are two things of which Iwaizumi Hajime is certain.
The first thing is volleyball, obviously. He knows nothing is guaranteed, especially in a match, but there’s something ingrained after all this time. No matter how the rest of his life is going—failed tests or lost tournaments or college applications—he knows volleyball. He knows the smack of the ball against his palm and his legs like a loaded spring against the gym floor, and he knows the toss will come to him, and he knows he’ll score when it does. It’s more than skill or routine or a love of the game; it’s innate, permanent, irreplaceable.
The second thing is that he loves Oikawa Tooru.
The first might have a lot to do with the second, and maybe the second is responsible for a lot of the way he feels about the first, but in any case, both things are clearly a part of him. No matter where his life ends up going, those two things will always be true. No matter what else happens, he’s always going to love Oikawa, because he’s been doing it too long to know how to do anything else.
If he had to pick a third thing, though—something so inherent to the fabric of his life that he knows he wouldn’t be himself without it–it would be that he also really, really fucking hates Oikawa.
“Ow, Iwa-chan!” Oikawa whines—high-pitched, like a dog, or a toddler—as Iwaizumi smacks him hard right at the base of his neck. “That hurts!”
“Good.” Iwaizumi huffs and lets himself sink further into his chair. “Glad something can get through your thick fucking skull.”
“You’re so mean to me, Iwa-chan. So mean to your poor, injured captain.” Even from the corner of his vision, Iwaizumi can tell Oikawa’s making that stupid, wobbly-eyed face. “Maybe I’ll never walk again. What if that’s the last thing you ever said to me before I keeled over and died, hmm?”
“Well, which is it? Are you dying or never walking again?”
“If I say I’ll never walk again will you go buy me one of those little yogurt drinks from the vending machine?”
Iwaizumi has no choice but to smack him again. “I’m fucking serious, shut up. What flavor.”
Oikawa promptly stops pretending to nurse the back of his head like he’s checking for blood to beam across the hospital room at Iwaizumi. He tilts his head and says strawberry, please in such a sickly-sweet tone Iwaizumi feels physically ill, and he sticks his tongue out the corner of his mouth like he thinks he’s a fucking manga character or something, and of course he doesn’t even motion to reach for his bag because fucking of course he expects Iwaizumi to pay for his stupid overpriced little drinks.
But the memory of Oikawa in practice earlier replays behind his eyelids like it’s projected there—an exclusive screening, just for Iwaizumi, of the shittiest movie he’s ever seen—any time Oikawa is out of his direct line of sight. One second he’s high in the air, one arm extended in front of him like he’ll be able to pull himself higher by sheer force of will, and in the next he’s on the ground. Iwaizumi watches Watari dive for the ball under his foot just a second too late, watches as he lands on the knee in slow motion, watches his expression shift from confused to scared to pained and back to scared again as he lies motionless on the floor, hands hovering just over his displaced kneecap like he’s afraid to touch it.
Matsukawa and Hanamaki had moved to Iwaizumi’s side before his brain had even really caught up, each of their shoulders pressing into his as Coach Mizoguchi had approached him with the soft tone of a man trying to calm a feral cat to explain that only one person was allowed to ride in the ambulance, and school policy said it had to be a coach.
They had let him go without a word when he had called his mother to come pick him up. Iwaizumi had only left practice early once before—first year, when he had thrown up in the middle of receiving drills—and even then he had received a short lecture on taking better care of himself before he had been allowed to leave. Iwaizumi doesn’t wonder on the silent drive to the hospital why leaving because of Oikawa’s injury warrants less scolding for him than an ailment of his own, mostly because he already knows the answer. By the time he finally reached Oikawa’s room, the doctor had been about to reset his knee, and when the nurse had tried to keep him out Oikawa had looked a little frantic, had reached for him with both hands outstretched and said no, please, let him, and so when Oikawa’s knee had clicked back into place Iwaizumi had one hand on Oikawa’s forearm and the other hand crushed like a vice grip between Oikawa’s palms, and when he had screamed Iwaizumi was close enough to feel the sound snap against his eardrum.
He’s ok now, Iwaizumi knows; his eyes are still a little red and his hands are a little shaky and he’s a little groggy from whatever pain meds they’ve put him on but he’s fine, and he’s not going to need surgery, and although he’s going to have to sit out of practice for a few weeks and Iwaizumi is going to have to pester him even more than he already does about wearing his brace afterwards he’s ok . But even though he knows all this, that stupid little movie still plays on loop in his head, and so with minimal grumbling he gets up out of his chair and goes to buy the stupid drink.
One of the nurses points him back out to the waiting room in search of the vending machines, and he pushes out through the double doors to find himself in the mostly-empty lobby. The notable exceptions to the emptiness–two figures in familiar white and teal athletic uniforms–cross the lobby towards him.
“Hey.” Matsukawa claps him on the shoulder as Hanamaki circles around to the other side of the vending machine and pouts visibly at the lack of melon sodas. “How’s it going in there, he ok?”
“Yeah,” Iwaizumi says, and Matsukawa’s hand doesn’t move from his shoulder. “Yeah, he’s fine. Just dislocated, and he’s not gonna need surgery or anything, he’s just gonna have to sit out for a few weeks.”
“Oh, good,” Matsukawa says, and Hanamaki nods in agreement next to him. “And are you ok?”
Iwaizumi pulls back. “What, yeah, of course? It’s not fucking contagious.”
Hanamaki snorts. “Yeah, whatever, man,” he says, and the way he scans Iwaizumi up and down as he slurps from the juice box he must have settled for makes him feel like he’s missing something important. “Glad you’re good. And Oikawa.”
Matsukawa shifts on his feet and shoots Hanamaki an entirely unreadable look as he sets his elbow up on Matsukawa’s shoulder.
“Hey, well, we just wanted to check up on him,” Matsukawa says. “But we have some stupid essay we gotta work on, so text us if you need something, yeah?”
“Why would I need something?” Iwaizumi calls to their retreating backs. They don’t respond, the dickheads, and although Iwaizumi can’t see their faces anymore he can still feel the stupid knowing smirk–knowing what , Iwaizumi has no clue–they’re undoubtedly both still wearing.
When Iwaizumi gets back into the room with a little yogurt and a pack of Skittles in hand, Oikawa is flirting shamelessly and horribly with the nurse readjusting his brace. She’s pretty young–can’t be more than a couple years older than the two of them at most–and although she’s rolling her eyes at him and Iwaizumi is pretty sure she was in the room when Oikawa had been crying like he’d never get the chance to cry again, her face is still a little pink in the cheeks, and Oikawa looks annoyingly pleased with himself.
When he notices Iwaizumi in the doorway he turns his coquettish little grin onto him, and his eyes light up when he sees the little strawberry yogurt drink in his hand, as if there’s any reality where Iwaizumi would have come back without it.
“Thank you, Iwa-chan!” Oikawa trills in his little sing-song voice as Iwaizumi places the yogurt down on the tray table attached to the bed. He smiles again—a real one, this time, not the stupid flirty little smile he puts on when he’s bored and wants attention from whatever pretty girl happens to be closest—and Iwaizumi feels like he understands the nurse a little bit better, because even though he’s seen Oikawa in countless situations a hell of a lot more embarrassing than earlier, he feels his face pinken too.
“Maybe I should dislocate important bones more often, if you’re going to be so nice to me.” Oikawa sighs and falls backwards against the elevated backrest of the bed. “Maybe my shoulder next. Then I won’t have to wear this sweaty leg brace.”
Oikawa wrinkles his nose at that, as if he dislikes the idea hard enough, he might be able to get out of it.
“If you even think about not wearing that thing exactly long as they tell you to I’ll fucking strap it onto you myself,” Iwaizumi huffs. Oikawa just chuckles softly in response. “I mean it. And if you think you’re ever getting away with not wearing your regular brace for practice ever again—”
“Alright, alright!” Oikawa throws his hands up in surrender, one corner of his mouth upturned in amusement. “I’ll wear it, I will. So pushy, Iwa-chan.”
The room is quiet for a moment while Oikawa snatches up the yogurt and peels off the foil seal. He drinks it in delicate little sips, like he’s savoring it, although Iwaizumi can see him eyeing the half-finished packet of Skittles still in his own hand. He sighs and extends a handful towards him without looking—Oikawa only ever picks out the yellow ones anyways—and ducks his face into the side of the hood of his sweatshirt. Oikawa hums like his candy-pilfering is some sort of grand victory and not the result of years-long habit.
“You fucking scared me,” Iwaizumi says into the silence of the room, his voice muffled by the sweatshirt. “Don’t do that shit again, I mean it.”
Oikawa has the gall to blush at that, the little asshole. God , he can’t stand him.
“Aw, Iwa-chan,” Oikawa practically purrs. “You were worried about me?”
“Of course I was fucking worried about you, Shittykawa.” He doesn’t have time to regret the nickname before a stupid grin plasters itself across Oikawa’s face. “Of course I was worried.”
Oikawa turns his head away and becomes intently focused on a loose thread on his hospital gown. “Oh.”
“Which was stupid, obviously, since you’re fine.” Not a question, just a statement of fact. Oikawa Tooru is always going to be fine—he has to be—and of that much Iwaizumi is certain. “There’s nothing to worry about, you know that.”
Iwaizumi has his eyes carefully trained on some sort of instructional poster on the opposite wall as he speaks, waiting for Oikawa to say something that he’s certain will warrant another smack if he has his eyes on him, but instead Oikawa is uncharacteristically silent, and when Iwaizumi looks back up to him, his stupid, shit-eating grin is gone, and his face is blotchy and red, and he’s scrubbing at his eye with the back of his hand. He looks back, and his eyes are wide and wet and his bottom lip is trembling—not in the stupid pretty-boy pout he puts on when he wants something—but in ugly, raw, genuine fear.
“Iwa-chan,” he says, his voice thick and stilted in his throat. “Iwa-chan, I—”
Oikawa might be the most annoying asshole he’s ever had the displeasure of growing up with. He might be vain and self-centered and a total dickhead and he might even have just about the shittiest personality of anyone Iwaizumi’s ever met. But while hating Oikawa is pretty high on the list of things intrinsic to Iwaizumi, loving him is higher, and Iwaizumi couldn’t ignore the look on his face—scared and pained and completely free of any pretense—even if he wanted to.
“Oh, come here, you big baby.”
Oikawa can’t actually move very much with the big immobilizer strapped to his leg and the various tubes and wires he’s hooked up to, and so instead he scoots over on the bed as much as he can so Iwaizumi can climb up next to him. It’s not exactly a comfortable fit, but after years of knowing Oikawa, Iwaizumi is nothing if not stubborn, and if he has to dangle one leg off the side of the bed and keep the other folded under him so he can fit along with the brace, so that Oikawa can relax into his side and tuck his head to Iwaizumi’s chest and let out a long, shaky breath over his collarbone, then that’s what he has to do.
“You’re ok,” he says, moving a hand up to rest in Oikawa’s hair as Oikawa fists a hand in his shirt. “You’re ok, Tooru, you’re fine.”
“Tooru, huh?” Oikawa sniffles into his chest, and Iwaizumi can feel the pull of his smile even without seeing his face. “You must have been really worried about me, Iwa-chan.”
“You have the worst personality of anyone I’ve ever met.”
Oikawa laughs—wetly, and still a little choked, sure—but it feels like relief.
“I bet you cried,” he says, and Iwaizumi really has to resist the urge to shove him out of his own hospital bed. He settles for elbowing him sharply in the side instead. “Bet you made poor Iwaizumi-san leave work to come get you at practice because you couldn’t bear to be without me.”
“I’ll never call you by your name again then, you asshole.” Oikawa snorts—ugly and wet and unflattering and Iwaizumi’s absolute favorite noise to hear him make—and buries his head in Iwaizumi’s chest again. “You’ll be Shittykawa for the rest of your fucking life. And you’re gonna get your snot all over me, you dickhead.”
“Your shirt’s already disgusting anyways,” Oikawa retorts. “I can’t believe you came to visit me on my deathbed without showering first, Iwa-chan.”
“You never would have let me live it down if I hadn’t been here.” Iwaizumi brings a hand up to ruffle through Oikawa’s hair, which he wrinkles his nose at, even though his hair is already way beyond salvaging. “You would have whined for the rest of your goddamn life if I had waited for practice to end.”
“I do not whine,” Oikawa whines. “I’m an angel. I’m a perfect best friend and you’re lucky to have me.”
Iwaizumi rolls his eyes. “You’re a brat. And a huge pain in my ass.”
“You love me.”
“I can’t stand you.”
“You can do two things, Iwa-chan, don’t underestimate yourself.” Oikawa sits up to tap a delicate finger to Iwaizumi’s forehead. “I know it’s pretty empty in there, but I’m so lovable it can’t be too hard, even for a meathead like you.”
Oikawa’s smile is perfectly innocent–saccharine and childlike and so, so fake–so Iwaizumi responds the only way he knows how, which is to dig his fingers under Oikawa’s ribs as sharply as he can.
Oikawa shrieks–equally as childlike as the smile but much more genuine–and tries to scramble out of Iwaizumi’s grasp, but thanks to the tiny hospital bed he can’t go much of anywhere, and instead only succeeds in headbutting Iwaizumi right under the chin and letting the metal of his brace clang sharply against the side rails of the bed.
“Oh, fuck.” Iwaizumi freezes instantly. “Sorry. Did I hurt you?”
“No, no, it’s fine.” Oikawa winces as he pulls the leg back. “It’s ok.”
“You sure?” Iwaizumi says as Oikawa tucks himself back against the side of Iwaizumi’s body. He’s more careful this time, though—more hesitant, like there’s something tender he’s afraid to disrupt—and Iwaizumi feels alarm bells ringing in his head. “If you’re not you have to say someth—”
“I love you, though,” Oikawa cuts him off, speaking directly into Iwaizumi’s chest, his voice muffled. “Even if you don’t love me. I love you.”
“Whoa, hey.” Iwaizumi tilts his head to get right in Oikawa’s line of sight. “I do love you. I was totally kidding before, of course I love you too.”
“What?”
Iwaizumi chuckles. “I don’t know what kinda person I’d have to be to not love someone I’ve called my best friend for my whole fucking life, Oikawa. You’re, like, the most important person to me. You know that.”
“Oh.” Oikawa stills against his chest. “Ok.”
“I’m sorry if I don’t say it enough or something.” Iwaizumi lets the soft of his cheek come down on the top of Oikawa’s head. “You’re my best friend. And I do love you. I can say it more, if you want.”
“No, no.” Oikawa shakes his head and lets out a short huff of air. “That’s ok. I know. Just a weird day, I guess.”
Iwaizumi hums in agreement, and Oikawa huffs again and stills against him, and for a moment Iwaizumi thinks that’s the end of it, but then he’s wrapping his free arm around Iwaizumi, pressing his nose to Iwaizumi’s chest and tucking his hand under the weight of him and squeezing . It’s not so much a hug as it is something strange and foreign and sad that Iwaizumi really can’t identify, and if anything can come close to scaring him as much as that stupid fucking stray ball did earlier, it’s the thought of not being able to read Oikawa like the open book he’s always been to him.
“Hey,” Iwaizumi says, soft and quiet. “Hey, what’s wrong? Did I say something?”
Oikawa tips his head up to look at him. His face is red and puffy again, and Iwaizumi has to resist the urge to swipe a thumb at the moisture under his swollen eyes. “No, it’s nothing, sorry,” he says, and when Iwaizumi frowns he only returns the expression. “Nothing, really. I’m fine, Iwa-chan, promise.”
“Are you sure your knee’s ok? I can go get the nurse–”
Oikawa squeezes him tighter as he moves to get up, and Iwaizumi freezes against him. “No,” he snaps. And then again, quieter, “No, it’s fine. I’m fine, I promise, just stay? Please?”
“Ok,” Iwaizumi says. He lets out a breath as Oikawa relaxes against him again. “Yeah, of course. Anything you want.”
Oikawa’s shaky breathing slowly calms, and Iwaizumi feels his heart settle in his chest along with it, and soon enough Oikawa’s eyes are closed and Iwaizumi is pretty sure he’s drooling on him, which, gross, but he doesn’t dare move. By the time Oikawa starts snoring, it’s getting late, and the lights out in the ER are dimming, and the room has darkened with their lack of movement. Iwaizumi can’t bring himself to free an arm to wave them back on.
The only thing that prevents him from falling asleep himself is Oikawa’s sister, pushing gently past the curtain into the room and letting the light flood in from the ER.
“Nee-san,” Iwaizumi says in greeting, and although his voice is barely above a whisper, Oikawa stirs against him.
“Hajime-kun,” she returns. Takeru trails just behind her, his hand in hers, as she approaches the bed. “How’s Tooru?”
“He’s good, I think.” He looks down at the sizable puddle of drool that’s accumulated on his practice shirt where Oikawa’s mouth is slack, but for some reason he can’t even really pretend to mind right now. “Yeah, he’s good.”
“Good.” She smiles at him, before looking back to Takeru and shooting him a reassuring smile, too. “Are you doing alright?”
Iwaizumi nods. He isn’t sure why people keep asking, not just because he’s not the one who was injured, but because the answer seems obvious; he’s ok because Oikawa’s ok, and any other factors seem entirely extraneous. The piling fear and stress and tension that have accumulated throughout the day–now threatening to bleed out that there’s a real adult present–are nothing against Oikawa, safe and tired and warm and here . Oikawa, sleeping against his sternum and wrapping himself around his chest and drooling on his gross, sweaty practice shirt like he belongs there.
“Ok, good,” Nee-san says with a soft smile. Knowing, like the look Matsukawa and Hanamaki–and Coach Mizoguchi before them–had given him earlier, albeit less annoying. “Let’s get you guys home then, yeah?”
Oikawa is weird the next day.
Not that weird–he still makes Iwaizumi carry all his bags through the hallways at school the next day, even though the crutches most definitely do not prevent him from carrying them himself, and he still shows up at practice to antagonize everyone who’s stupid enough to get within earshot, and he still sing-songs Iwa-chan~! across the cafeteria at lunchtime in such a piercing pitch and volume that Iwaizumi feels like his eardrums are going to burst–but still weird .
It takes Iwaizumi until lunchtime to realize that there’s too much energy behind everything, like Oikawa is performing for an unfriendly audience, like he’s waiting for some unseen other shoe to drop. Iwaizumi sits next to him at their usual lunch table and Oikawa practically jumps out of his skin when their knees brush; it’s a gesture so routine for Iwaizumi that he doesn’t realize how unremarkable it is to him until Oikawa reacts to it like he’s been burned.
He chalks it up to antsy-ness from the restrictions the brace is putting on him, or a general, instinctive protectiveness of his injured body, and resolves to make sure Oikawa isn’t drinking too much coffee for the next couple days.
Iwaizumi forgets about it entirely until Hanamaki comes up to him before afternoon practice starts and smacks him, hard, right between the shoulder blades.
“Ow, what the fuck, Makki?”
Hanamaki ignores his cries of pain and just crosses his arms. “What did you do?”
“What do you mean, what did I do? What the hell was that for?”
“You obviously did something.” Hanamaki looks him up and down, his eyebrows furrowed, like he’s scolding a particularly disobedient toddler. “Oikawa’s being weird. The only reason he’s ever weird is because you did something.”
“He’s always weird,” Iwaizumi says. “Last week he pouted all day because they didn’t give him enough whipped cream on his weird little pink Starbucks drink.”
“Who, Oikawa?” Matsukawa says, walking up with a ball tucked under his arm and entirely ignoring Iwaizumi’s glare. “He’s being weird today. Did you do something, Iwaizumi?”
Iwaizumi resists the urge to throw the ball in his hand right into Matsukawa’s stomach and settles for smacking his arm instead.
“Ok, so what?” Iwaizumi cries in protest. “So he’s a little restless. He has a giant fucking metal brace strapped to his knee, I feel like that’s probably more likely to make him a little jumpy than some hypothetical thing I said.”
He looks for Oikawa across the gym, but he hasn’t seemed to make it in from the club room yet—probably still antagonizing Yahaba, the poor kid—so it takes a second for him to notice that Matsukawa and Hanamaki are both looking at him like he’s just grown an extra arm.
Iwaizumi frowns, which is something he feels like he’s been doing way too much lately. Oikawa would probably tell him he’s going to give himself wrinkles. “What?”
“Dude,” Hanamaki says. “Seriously? I was gonna say he’s been quiet today. Like, crazy quiet.”
Matsukawa nods. “Yeah, he didn’t say a word to us before you showed up at lunch. Just pushed his food around in his bento until you sat down and then he started acting normal again until you left.”
“I thought he was gonna fall asleep or something before you got there. He seemed, like, depressed.” Hanamaki punctuates the sentence with another sideways glance at Matsukawa, who seems to know exactly whatever the fuck that’s supposed to mean.
As if on cue, Oikawa hobbles into the gym behind Yahaba, who is in fact looking antagonized even though Oikawa is silent as he follows him. Oikawa, silent with his head downturned, like he’s apparently been all day, except when Iwaizumi is around. Oikawa, who has apparently been stewing in some sort of weird sad cloud, and who evidently has been trying to hide that from Iwaizumi, all of which definitely means that Iwaizumi did something.
“Oh,” is all Iwaizumi says, and if his friends’ exasperated eye-rolls are enough to go off of, it’s all he has to say.
“Yeah, oh ,” Hanamaki mimics. “You should talk to him.”
Iwaizumi plans to. He really does. Not during practice, of course, because even if Oikawa’s not playing today he’s still captain, and Iwaizumi doesn’t think his captain would appreciate him trying to take time out of practice for personal talks. But afterwards, he really, really means to.
After practice though, Oikawa is nowhere to be found, and by the time Iwaizumi showers and changes Oikawa seems to have disappeared entirely. He’s not in the gym, and he’s not in the club room, and he’s not sitting on the bench he always waits for Iwaizumi on before they walk home together like they have every day for the past 3 years. Iwaizumi opens his phone to see if Oikawa’s texted him, but all he gets for his trouble is a typing bubble that disappears as soon as he opens the chat and doesn’t reappear for the next five minutes, which Iwaizumi knows because he stares and waits for it to come back until he’s startled out of it by Matsukawa and Hanamaki shouting behind him.
17:07
iwaizumi: hey, where are u?
iwaizumi: if youre trying to walk home right now I will kick your ass for real you know my mom said she could pick us up today
oikawa is typing…
oikawa is typing…
17:09
oikawa: sorry iwa-chan~!! nee-san came to get me ill see u tmrw!!
“He left,” Iwaizumi says when Matsukawa and Hanamaki reach him. “He left without me.”
This time, when Matsukawa and Hanamaki look at each other, Iwaizumi can read their expressions of blatant concern clearly.
“He’s never left without me before.”
“Hey, he’s never dislocated his knee before either,” Matsukawa offers. “I’m sure he just didn’t want to walk home on it, right?”
Iwaizumi shakes his head, feels a lump rise up in his throat to choke out the words. “My mom was coming to get us.”
“Ok, so just crossed wires then,” Hanamaki says, although from the look on his face Iwaizumi can tell he doesn’t believe it either. “I bet everything will go back to normal tomorrow, don’t worry.”
The next day is arguably worse.
Oikawa is still the same—jumpy and on edge and seemingly ready to crawl out of his own skin—but now Iwaizumi knows that he’s apparently the cause. Now he knows that as soon as he leaves, Oikawa will go back to being horribly sad about some unknown problem that, for whatever reason, he feels like he can’t tell Iwaizumi about.
He watches Hanamaki and Matsukawa watch him from across the lunch table, watches them whisper to each other at practice when they think he can’t see them shooting worried looks between him and Oikawa.
It feels like an end—Iwaizumi thinks miserably, as he hurries to change out of his gym clothes after afternoon practice in hopes of catching Oikawa before he leaves—because Oikawa’s a pain in the ass more often than not, but he’s never been evasive, not with Iwaizumi. Oikawa’s arrogant, untouchable, aloof personality is a performance for other people, never for him, and if something’s changed after all this time Iwaizumi doesn’t know if it’s fixable. He watches the empty bench outside the gym for the second time in as many days and thinks that possibly the only thing worse than losing Oikawa entirely is being other people to him.
When he climbs into his mother’s car for the third day in a row without Oikawa in tow, she tries to talk to him about how friendships can end just like relationships sometimes, tries to compare it to when that girl from his middle school math class didn’t so much dump him as she did stop talking to him entirely, and it makes him angry—not that it’s his mother’s fault, of course, but all the same—because losing Oikawa is nowhere near comparable to losing a girl he had some passing infatuation with as a preteen.
By the time he gets home he’s decided that it better be fucking fixable, because he won’t accept anything else. He tells his mother that he’s going to Oikawa’s, ignores her puzzled frown, and walks across the street with enough determination to last him up to the front door. He knocks twice, quickly, before his nerve fades entirely.
Oikawa’s mother opens the door.
“Hajime-kun, is everything alright?” she greets, in a way that indicates exactly how well she knows that everything is very much not alright.
“Oikawa-san,” he responds with a bow of his head. “Is Tooru here? I really need to talk to him.”
“Oh, honey, I’m sorry but he said he’s not feeling well tonight,” Oikawa-san says. Iwaizumi is sure that she’s known him long enough to know he won’t believe it—as long as she’s known her own son, as long as Iwaizumi’s known his own mother—but she says it anyway. “I’ll tell him you stopped by though, alright?”
“Ok,” Iwaizumi says. “Thank you. Please do. Apologies for the intrusion.”
“You’re never intruding here, Hajime-kun, you know that.” Oikawa-san shoots him a melancholic little smile that somehow feels almost as bad as the near-identical smile Oikawa gave him hours ago. “I hope we see you back here soon, honey.”
“Yeah,” Iwaizumi says. The walk back across the dark street to his own house feels more impossible than 25 straight service aces. “Yeah, me too.”
21:36
iwaizumi: hey please tell me what’s wrong
iwaizumi: if I said or did something im sorry I hope u know that I don’t ever want u to feel like you can’t tell me something
23:04
oikawa: you didn’t do anything iwa-chan! 💙 nothings wrong just a long week 😓
oikawa: ill see you on monday?
iwaizumi: oh cmon oikawa dont bullshit me
iwaizumi: you’re my best friend and I miss you and I cant fix whatever this is unless you tell me what’s going on
oikawa: you saw me earlier today
iwaizumi: you know what I mean. I miss you
oikawa is typing…
oikawa is typing…
[Read at 23:06]
The next morning marks the start of the weekend, and Iwaizumi has never been so miserable to have a day off.
There’s a brief, glorious moment right when he wakes up where he lets his brain trick him into thinking this whole stupid charade is over. It’s 7:45 in the morning, his phone buzzes on the bedside table, and he tells himself it has to be Oikawa, texting him with some elaborate plan he’s already concocted for the weekend–probably some campy old movies, almost definitely a sleepover, always volleyball, and never a question, because up until this past week there was never a doubt that either of them would have any plans besides each other, and volleyball, and whatever else came out of that.
But then it’s 7:46 in the morning, and Iwaizumi checks his phone to see he’s received a weather alert–scattered rain, all day–for his morning run, and Oikawa is still a question.
He ducks his face into his pillow and lets himself cry, muffled, into the fabric. It should be cathartic, Iwaizumi thinks, as he feels the pillowcase dampen under his cheek. It should be like a release of pressure, like opening a steam valve on his chest and letting himself deflate into an Iwaizumi-shaped puddle on the floor. But the longer he cries the more the pressure builds, because no amount of release can bring more oxygen into a vacuum, and because his pillowcase smells a little bit like Oikawa’s shampoo.
At 8:02 his phone buzzes again–his mother, informing him she’s made breakfast–and he hauls himself up and makes his way to the kitchen. By 9:30 he’s managed to get himself into his running clothes, and almost half an hour later he actually gets out the door. He leaves his phone face down on the kitchen table, partially because of the rain but mostly because of Oikawa, because an admittedly irrational part of his brain has convinced him that if he leaves the phone alone for long enough it might actually give him something he wants.
He returns home at 10:49 soaking wet, to a quiet house and a quiet phone, and he finds no comfort in peeling off his wet clothes and climbing into a hot shower.
At 12:14 he gets a text from Matsukawa, asking if he and Hanamaki can come over to study, and almost exactly an hour later there’s a knock on the front door when they show up anyways, despite the fact that Iwaizumi had entirely ignored the text in favor of letting himself fall into a volleyball tape-induced stupor on the couch in the living room.
He thinks, distantly, that maybe the real sign of everything falling apart isn’t his best friend of 17 years ignoring him, that maybe it’s Matsukawa trying to make him do his homework instead of the inverse. The thought makes him laugh, once, loud and a little removed from his body, when Hanamaki sets his English workbook down in front of him and puts a pen on the table next to it. His friends look at him like Iwaizumi imagines they would look at him if he started choking on his corn chips and neither of them knew the Heimlich.
At 15:28 Hanamaki clears his throat. Pointedly.
“Can I help you, Hanamaki-san?” Iwaizumi says, as patronizing as he can manage. What he can manage isn’t great, because he hasn’t really spoken all day and his voice is pretty strained, but he figures Hanamaki knows him well enough to get the idea.
“Yeah, actually,” Hanamaki says. “I think you need to talk to Oikawa.”
Iwaizumi thinks he deserves some sort of award, probably, for not dissolving into a pile of ash right then and there.
“Gee, thanks, Makki, I hadn’t thought about that,” Iwaizumi deadpans. “Where would I be without you.”
Hanamaki rolls his eyes, entirely unamused. “You need to talk to him about how you feel, Iwaizumi.”
“How I feel? What, that I’m pissed?” Iwaizumi slumps back against the couch so that his friends won’t see his face going red and puffy already. “That it’s been less than a week and even though I’ve seen him every fucking day I miss him so bad I feel like I’m going crazy? Is that what you want me to say?”
“No, dumbass,” Hanamaki says. “That you love him.”
“Did he say—is this about the conversation at the hospital? I told him—”
“No, Iwaizumi, listen.” Matsukawa puts a firm hand on his knee, and Iwaizumi looks at him. “You’re in love with him. You’re in love with Oikawa. You fucking idiot.”
Iwaizumi wishes he could say it’s some big revelation. Like a grand, cosmic moment where the last puzzle piece shifts into place and some universal truth is revealed and suddenly the whole picture is clear. Like a prophecy, or an omen—whichever is more romantic—finally coming to fruition.
Instead, Iwaizumi feels like this whole time there’s been a handful of puzzle pieces on the floor under the table and Iwaizumi has been trying to force the puzzle together without them. He feels like a witch gave him a prophecy foretelling his entire life, and he took an expo marker to it and blacked out a bunch of the words. He feels like he’s been in love with his best friend for probably his whole fucking life and he’s been too stupid to pay any attention.
What comes out of his mouth, as a summary of all this, is “Oh, fuck.”
“Which is really fucking embarrassing for you, honestly,” Matsukawa says, casually, like he hasn’t just forcibly shifted Iwaizumi’s entire world one degree to the left. “But it’s more embarrassing for us as your friends if you’re walking around doing those lovestruck puppy eyes at each other all the time without even knowing, so we thought we would put you out of your misery.”
“For our sake,” Hanamaki says, and Matsukawa nods in agreement. “Just to be clear.”
“Shit. What the fuck.” Iwaizumi might pass out. “At each other? Is that what you said?”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Matsukawa says with a dismissive wave of the hand. “You’re an idiot, we’re the best friends in the whole world for putting up with you, et cetera.”
“You’re a jackass,” Iwaizumi says, but he imagines the volatile sentiment is probably dampened quite a bit, since he kind of owes Matsukawa and Hanamaki his whole life now. “I hate you both so fucking much.”
“Uh huh.” Hanamaki smirks. “You’re never living this down, I hope you know that.”
“Shut up. Fuck off.” It’s halfhearted, because Iwaizumi is frankly preoccupied with recontextualizing every Oikawa interaction he’s had for the past week, and then for the past four years, and then for the past 17. “Fuck, I need to talk to him.”
“Glad you agree,” Hanamaki says, but Iwaizumi is already up off the couch, pulling his shoes on in the entryway and not bothering to check if it’s still raining.
It is still raining, but Iwaizumi thinks it helps his case, because even though Oikawa’s house is maybe ten meters away, by the time Oikawa-san opens the door for him he’s soaked, and he probably looks a little pathetic, and she lets him inside with very little hesitation.
“Tooru?” she calls down the hall as Iwaizumi kicks off his shoes and pulls off his jacket with an urgency that he feels is probably as-of-yet unmatched in his life. “Hajime’s here, I’m letting him in!”
Iwaizumi makes his way to the living room and finds Oikawa reclined on the couch. One leg is propped up on a stack of pillows, the brace around it loosened but not entirely removed, and the other dangles off the couch, swinging back and forth lazily. There’s some old sci-fi movie on the TV, louder than it needs to be, and a practically untouched bowl of popcorn resting on his stomach. His head is propped up by an arm behind his head. His hair is messy and unwashed. His glasses are low and crooked on his nose. He’s wearing one of Iwaizumi’s shirts.
Iwaizumi feels stupider every second that he looks at him, because looking at him now that he’s found the missing puzzle pieces make it that much clearer that he must have been viewing the world through some sort of weird, fucked-up fisheye lens to ever mistake this for anything besides what it is.
But even that’s not really true, because Oikawa has always looked like this, and he’s always been to Iwaizumi exactly what he is now, and what he is now is everything. It’s always been him and Oikawa and then everyone else, in two distinct groups. Iwaizumi hopes it still is. He hopes it always will be.
Iwaizumi doesn’t realize he’s been staring until Oikawa starts resolutely staring back.
“Iwa-chan,” Oikawa says, propping himself up on his hands. “Hi.”
“Hi,” Iwaizumi echoes. “Can we talk?”
Oikawa just stares at him for a moment longer, and Iwaizumi realizes he doesn’t really have a plan of action if Oikawa says no or asks him to leave, but then in the next moment Oikawa says “Ok,” and swings his leg up and around to make room for Iwaizumi on the couch, and Iwaizumi realizes he doesn’t have a plan for this either.
Oikawa keeps his eyes trained on the TV. “What did you want to talk about?”
And, well, this is somehow worse than if Oikawa had asked him to get out, because instead of an outright rejection that could maybe be transformed into some sort of teary confession, Iwaizumi is just reminded that Oikawa has been avoiding him, on purpose, has been hiding something from him, and whatever his own feelings are don’t change that.
“You’re not serious. Don’t be stupid, Oikawa, come on.”
“You’re the one who came to my house, Iwa-chan,” Oikawa says. His voice is clipped and quiet. “Excuse me for expecting you’d have something to talk about when you said you wanted to talk.”
“You know exactly what I want to talk about. Don’t be so dense.” Iwaizumi shifts on the couch to try and force himself into Oikawa’s line of sight. “You’ve been ignoring me all week.”
“I am not ignoring you. I’ve seen you at practice every day. And at lunch.”
“It’s different! You know it’s different.” Iwaizumi feels the tightness growing in his throat the longer he speaks. “Something’s off. Tell me what it is so I can fucking fix it. If I said something, or did something, I–”
“You can’t fix everything, alright?” Oikawa snaps. Iwaizumi freezes, and Oikawa finally looks at him. “Just leave it alone, Hajime, please. It’s not your problem.”
At that Iwaizumi can only splutter, watching as Oikawa’s face goes red with tension. “Since when have your problems ever not been my fucking problems? What’s changed since we’ve been fucking five years old that you think that I don’t–”
“Maybe I don’t want that anymore, ok?” Oikawa is practically shouting now, and Iwaizumi is confident the wetness of his eyes isn’t just an illusion behind the lenses of his glasses. And then, quieter, “Maybe I don’t want that.”
“Oh.”
He feels like time is moving through syrup as Oikawa turns away from him again and tucks his head tightly to his chest. His fists are clenched tightly at his sides and he’s shaking–the way Iwaizumi has only ever seen him shake after losing to Ushiwaka, or to Kageyama–and normally Iwaizumi would reach out. Normally he would put one hand on his shoulder and the other on his thigh and pull him in and jostle him a little violently until he laughed and coughed up a frankly disgusting amount of phlegm and let Iwaizumi squeeze him until he wasn’t shaking anymore. But Iwaizumi has never felt further from normal in his life–because Matsukawa and Hanamaki were wrong, and he was wrong, and not only does Oikawa not love him but he apparently doesn’t even like him very much anymore either–and so Oikawa shakes alone.
“I think you should go,” Oikawa says. His voice is thick and choked in his throat, and Iwaizumi imagines his own probably wouldn’t be much better. “I’m sorry. Please go.”
The drizzle from earlier has kicked up into a full storm, lightning snapping across the gray sky like the starting shot opening the way for a downpour. Iwaizumi crosses the street with his still soaked-jacket slung over his arm, and if he’s cold he doesn’t feel it. He doesn’t feel his heart beating in his chest, and he doesn’t feel the rainwater soaking through his sneakers, and he doesn’t feel his hair plastering itself to his forehead with each deliberate step. When he opens the door to his own house he doesn’t hear Matsukawa and Hanamaki shouting at him from the living room, and he doesn’t feel the rapid-fire pace of his lungs pushing short, shallow breaths from his nose, and he doesn’t feel any warmer when he tugs off his wet clothes and replaces them with sweats.
Oikawa still has his favorite shirt, and so he flops down across the bed without one and lets himself focus on the strain of breathing through the pillow stuffing.
After a couple minutes Hanamaki calls through the door and asks if he’s ok.
Iwaizumi is getting really sick of that question. He feels like the answer has always been obvious.
On Monday morning, Iwaizumi wakes up 20 minutes later than he usually does to the sound of his mother shouting up the stairs at him and a headache pounding through his sinuses. He’s miserable because of the headache, and because he’s late, and because of the yelling, and because the fact that it’s his mother yelling up the stairs instead of Oikawa means that everything is exactly as miserable today as it’s been all week. He doesn’t bother texting Oikawa to see if he’s already left for school, because he knows he’ll receive nothing in response, and that would only make him more miserable. At morning practice, he doesn’t bother to look over to the bench to see if Oikawa is watching him, because knowing either way will only make his headache worse as he tries to hold back tears until he can cry in the locker room about it. He remains carefully neutral–brushing off his teammates’ questions and concerned glances as best he can without actually responding to them–little cracked pieces held together with scotch tape and string until he can escape to the relative safety of his classroom where no one knows him well enough to ask.
He doesn’t bother going to the cafeteria when the lunch bell rings, because he doesn’t think he could handle whatever pitiful, curious looks Hanamaki and Matsukawa are already planning to give him, and so instead he goes straight for the club room. The club room will be dark, and quiet, and even though it will make him think of Oikawa, Oikawa won’t actually be there, which is an improvement.
However, the club room is neither dark nor quiet, because when he pushes the door open Watari is sitting on the floor, a sandwich wrapped neatly in his lap and all his belongings strewn gracelessly across the floor around him.
“What are you doing here,” he says, and Watari jumps.
“Hiding from Yahaba and Kyoutani,” Watari says. Iwaizumi raises an eyebrow, and he sighs. “Weird sexual tension there I don’t want to bear witness to, yknow?”
Iwaizumi does know, unfortunately, and so he nods and sits down on the other side of the club room floor.
“Iwaizumi-san?” Watari asks. “Are you ok?”
“Not really.”
“Oh. Do you want to talk about it?”
Iwaizumi’s phone buzzes in his pocket.
12:06
oikawa: are you coming to lunch?
Watari looks at him curiously.
“No,” he says. “Sorry.”
“No, no!” Watari throws up his hands and almost scatters his sandwich across the floor in the process. “You don’t have to, of course. If you do ever want to, though, well. I’m here.”
“Thanks, Watari.”
“I know you have Oikawa-san for that.” Watari smiles brightly. He’s a sweet kid. Iwaizumi wants to get out of here as fast as he can. “But, y’know! I’m your friend too. If you want.”
Iwaizumi smiles. It feels weird and fake and Watari is definitely observant enough to pick up on that, but he doesn’t say anything, and he just smiles back.
It’s kind of nice, Iwaizumi thinks, to eat with someone who will just let him be. If he had done any sort of fake anything in front of Oikawa, Oikawa would have pounced, would have pestered him and poked at his arms with his long fingers and would have sprawled himself across Iwaizumi’s lap to prevent him from eating his lunch, the bony protrusions of Oikawa’s shoulder blades digging sharply into his thighs, until Iwaizumi finally caved and told him what was wrong. It’s good, probably, that he’s being allowed to just sit with his own thoughts for once in his goddamn life. It’s good that Oikawa isn’t here to throw his arms around Iwaizumi in a dramatic hug that Iwaizumi would have pretended to try and shrug off but that they both would have known would make him feel better. It’s good that Oikawa isn’t here to bully him into sharing his feelings, pick on him for it, and then pass him half a milk bun torn directly down the center anyways. It’s ok . It’s good .
Watari opens his mouth like he’s going to say something, his brows furrowed in concern and his sandwich completely forgotten in his lap, but Iwaizumi doesn’t have time to panic about whether the moisture he feels on his face is sweat or tears before Hanamaki and Matsukawa are busting down the door to the club room.
“Dude!” Hanamaki says, some sort of scolding in his tone that Iwaizumi does not care for. “Where the hell have you been all day?”
Iwaizumi frowns. “Avoiding Oikawa, dumbass, what else?”
“Wait, what?” Watari says. Hanamaki ignores him to step closer, Matsukawa hovering closely behind him and wearing an eerily similar expression of disdain.
“What did you do?” Hanamaki says.
“ Jesus , why is it always–I didn’t do anything!” Iwaizumi lets himself slump back against the wall of lockers and doesn’t bother to stop his head from hitting the cold metal. “He told me he didn’t want to see me anymore and he kicked me out, alright? So sorry if I don’t want to act all fucking peachy and cheerful at lunch today.” Hanamaki and Matsukawa raise an eyebrow in unison. “Just leave me alone, will you?”
“Oikawa-san said that?” Watari says.
“Yeah, are you sure?” Matsukawa sits down on the bench in front of Iwaizumi and kicks at his foot. “That doesn’t sound like him. Dude has been trying to jump your bones since first year at least ."
Watari chokes on a sip of water. “Yeah, well,” Iwaizumi says. “I guess you were wrong about that, so, thanks a lot.”
“No, I don’t think so,” Hanamaki muses, much too casual for what Iwaizumi is starting to identify as the worst conversation he’s ever been a part of. “It’s gotta be something else. Did you reject him on accident or something? Maybe told him you were coming out as straight?”
Iwaizumi groans miserably. This sucks. This already sucks and now he has to talk about it and he can’t even talk about it with Oikawa, who is the only person he ever wants to talk about anything with. “This sucks . Leave me alone.”
“Run me through it one more time,” Hanamaki says, sitting down next to Matsukawa on the bench. “There’s gotta be something we’re missing.”
“There’s nothing else to tell, Hanamaki,” Iwaizumi bites out. He lets his head fall forward into his palms. He wishes he could keep falling forward so he could fall through the floor and out of the club room. “I went over there, I tried to talk to him and then he told me to leave. That’s it.”
“Ok, then before that,” Hanamaki says.
“This isn’t some fucking mystery novel that you’ll solve if you find enough clues, Makki!” Matsukawa and Hanamaki give each other another one of those looks–the ones they’ve been giving each other all week–and Iwaizumi is sick of those looks as much as he’s sick of this whole thing. “He doesn’t want to see me or talk to me or tell me whatever it is he’s so upset about and there’s nothing I can do about it anymore.”
“Iwaizumi, do you honestly believe that?” Matsukawa says. Iwaizumi looks up at him. “Do you really think he’s just decided all of a sudden he doesn’t want you anymore, right out of the blue?”
“I have no fucking clue, dude,” Iwaizumi says, muffled into his palms. “I have no clue what’s going on anymore.”
Matsukawa kicks at him again, but this time it’s more of a friendly nudge than a real kick. “Oikawa’s a bitch and a huge pain in the ass–”
“And a menace,” Hanamaki adds.
“And a menace,” Matsukawa repeats. “But he’s not stupid. And he’s not impulsive. And he wouldn’t just drop you like that and you know it.”
“He loves you too much for that, dude,” Hanamaki says.
“He doesn’t lo–”
“Ok, whatever, not like that, then,” Matsukawa says. “Maybe me and Makki and everyone else on the team and both of your moms and everyone else who’s ever met you both have been wrong about that. But he does love you, even if it’s not like that.”
Iwaizumi picks his head up. “You talked to my mom about this?”
“Didn’t have to.” Matsukawa says, at the same time Hanamaki says, “She texted us.”
Iwaizumi frowns. Hanamaki waves a hand dismissively.
“Not the point,” Hanamaki says. “There’s gotta be a reason, and if we find it we can figure this all out, so stop pouting and tell us about the hospital.”
“Nothing happened at the hospital either,” Iwaizumi grumbles. “He was a little high on painkillers and he made me go buy him a yogurt drink and then he fell asleep and he drooled all over me.”
“Gross,” Matsukawa says.
“You didn’t talk about anything ?” Hanamaki questions.
“I don’t know!” Iwaizumi feels like if his sinuses get any tighter they’ll pop right out of his skull. “He cried a lot, I guess. He smacked his leg into the side of the bed and then he got all sappy on m–”
Oh.
“Iwaizumi?” Matsukawa says.
I love you, though. Even if you don’t love me.
“Do you think he got it?” Hanamaki asks from what might as well be a million miles away.
I love you. I love you. I love you.
“Maybe he’s still trying to get rid of us,” Matsukawa muses.
“He told me he loved me.” Iwaizumi buries his face in his palms again. “Fuck. He told me he loved me.”
Iwaizumi doesn’t need to look at them to know Hanamaki and Matsukawa–and probably Watari, too, for good measure–are looking at him like he told them he and Oikawa had gotten married over the weekend and he forgot to mention it. That might actually be less embarrassing than this, actually.
“He told you he loved you,” Hanamaki repeats, slowly, like the words don’t quite fit in his mouth. “And you forgot about it? ”
“No, no!” Matsukawa huffs in disbelief, and Watari has stopped trying to inch his way out without anyone noticing. Iwaizumi feels like he’s going to die or throw up or both. “I said it back! I just didn’t think he meant it like that!”
Hanamaki scoffs and stands up from the bench, pointing his body entirely away from Iwaizumi and towards Matsukawa. “I don’t think he deserves our help, Mattsun. We’ve been too kind to him, but he’s just too stupid.”
“What, am I not allowed to love my friends all of a sudden?” Iwaizumi throws his hands up, exasperation momentarily distracting from the embarrassment. “You guys are my friends, I love you guys.”
“Gross,” Hanamaki says. “We love you too. Now get the fuck out of here and fix this or else I’m never speaking to you again. I don’t want to risk rocks-for-brains being contagious.”
“Fuck off,” Iwaizumi says, but he’s already standing and moving towards the door.
It’s a beautiful day out–breezy and warm and just a little cloudy–which means that Oikawa is certainly inside, sulking in his classroom during lunch like he thinks enjoying the nice weather would ruin his perfectly cultivated bad mood. Iwaizumi feels almost fond when he finds him exactly where he expects– almost , because he’s still pissed, at least for now–staring gloomily out the window with his head propped up on one hand, lazily putting grapes into his frown-pinched mouth like he might be able to will it to start storming spontaneously if he feels it hard enough. Iwaizumi shifts into firmly fond when Oikawa turns to look at the creak of his footsteps and Iwaizumi can see a perfectly torn, half milk bun in each of his hands.
“Iwa-chan,” he says. “I thought you’d want to eat with Mattsun and Makki.”
“Yeah, well, they’re pissing me off,” he says. Oikawa watches him like he might bite as he pulls out the chair at the desk next to him and sits down. “I want to eat with you.”
Oikawa frowns. “Wh–Iwa-chan, I–”
“If you really wanna get rid of me you’re gonna have to try harder than that,” Iwaizumi says, steadier than he feels. Oikawa blinks, once, before turning his head back down towards the picked-at lunch on his desk.
“I don’t want to get rid of you.”
“I know.” Iwaizumi sips at his water bottle. “Yeah, I know.”
Oikawa watches carefully as Iwaizumi pulls out his own lunch and sets it on the desk. He has to lean across the gap between the desks to snag half the milk bun from Oikawa’s hand, dropping a fistful of shrimp crackers in its place, and although Oikawa is frozen and stiff in his seat he lets him make the swap.
“At the hospital, when you said you loved me,” Iwaizumi says. “You didn’t mean it like how I thought you meant it, did you?”
Oikawa dumps the shrimp crackers and the remaining half of the milk bun back into his bento and shifts in his seat. “It doesn’t matter anymore anyways.”
“Don’t be stupid, ‘course it matters,” Iwaizumi says. “It’s you, of course it matters.”
Oikawa huffs out a sharp breath. Someone who hasn’t known him since he was born might think it meant he was angry, but Iwaizumi knows it means he’s holding back tears. “Don’t–don’t just say stuff like that. You can’t just say stuff like that, Iwa-chan.”
“Wh–like what?”
“Like that . I’m not gonna ever get over it if you keep saying stuff like that.”
“Who says you need to get over it?”
Oikawa looks at him straight on, for the first time since Iwaizumi hovered in the doorway, and there’s something scared and fragile there that makes Iwaizumi feel a lot like he’s back in the hospital with Oikawa nestled into his side. “What?”
“Did you mean it like that?” Iwaizumi stares back. “Like, in love?”
“Yeah,” Oikawa says. “Yeah, I did.”
“Ok.” Iwaizumi pushes out from the desk chair. “Good.”
Oikawa might be the most annoying asshole he’s ever had the displeasure of growing up with. He might be vain and self-centered and a total dickhead and he might even have just about the shittiest personality of anyone Iwaizumi’s ever met. But kissing Oikawa—leaning over the desk and watching exactly how close he has to get before Oikawa stops trying to dissect him like a science project and instead just leans in to meet him, feeling Oikawa’s sharp inhale against his mouth when their lips brush, the body-warm metal rims of Oikawa’s glasses digging into his cheeks when Oikawa grabs at the lapels of his uniform and drags him closer—feels like more than he can describe. It feels like opening the door to a home he never knew he had but had been waiting for all the same. It feels like getting to pluck the last missing puzzle piece from between the wall and the table and slotting it into place. It feels like kissing Oikawa Tooru when he’s been in love with Oikawa Tooru his whole life.
“I was totally lying about being able to get over it, by the way,” Oikawa says, not so much in words as in hurried breaths against Iwaizumi’s lips. “I would have withered away and then I would have died alone and it would have been all your fault.”
“You are such a drama queen.”
“I would have been beautiful until the end, of course,” Oikawa says, ignoring Iwaizumi’s teasing in favor of kissing him again, even though he’s smiling too wide to avoid letting their teeth clack together. “Horribly, miserably, lonely. But beautiful.”
“I’m still pissed at you,” Iwaizumi says, and if Oikawa’s returning smile was any fonder Iwaizumi thinks the electricity crackling under his skin would probably reach voltages high enough to kill. “Seriously, Shittykawa, I mean it. This has been the worst week of my whole goddamn life.”
Oikawa skims a thumb over his cheek. “Mmm,” he hums sympathetically. “Me too. Kiss me again?”
“You’re the worst.”
“You love me.”
“Yeah,” Iwaizumi says. Oikawa pauses on the lean-in to brush a careful, reverent gaze over Iwaizumi’s whole face, like he knows he’ll get to do it again. He’s always been smart like that, at knowing what comes next. “Yeah, I do.”