Work Text:
It has always been like this:
Tooru watches Iwaizumi the way Iwaizumi watches bugs in jars.
When they were kids, they'd spend summer mornings exploring the way only kids can, and summer afternoons escaping the sun – Tooru laying on Iwaizumi’s bed like it was his own, watching Iwaizumi but pretending to do anything else, Iwaizumi at his desk, staring so intently at his subject that he never noticed Tooru’s eyes on him.
The only difference between then and now is ten years of growing pains and the fact that Iwaizumi is bent over an English dictionary, not a beetle.
But the intense focus and concentration is the same. The way his teeth play absentmindedly with his lips is the same. The way his eyebrows scrunch just a little bit in the center of his forehead is the same. The way his chest expands with each breath, the way his hair spikes up in the back, the way Tooru can’t do anything but love him – it’s all the same as it has always been.
Tooru has been trying to memorize these little constants in his life with increasing desperation.
He’d had a startling moment of clarity that morning – the kind that only comes when standing on your best friend's front step, waiting for him to open the door. The kind of liminal moment ripe for realizing the little things you’ve taken for granted all this time aren’t actually constant after all. They’re as fleeting as bugs in jars, and must be observed in full before it’s too late and they’re out of reach.
So Tooru stood on his best friend’s front step and tried memorizing the feel of the concrete under his feet, the look of the flowers in the window boxes, the sound of Iwaizumi-san calling her son’s name, letting him know that Tooru had arrived, because soon, this step and these flowers and his best friend’s mom will be half a world away.
Those first few months after graduation, Tooru had been so focused on what comes next he hardly had time to appreciate his rapidly dwindling present. His and Iwaizumi’s lives had been consumed by the final preparations needed to uproot themselves and replant in foreign soil. There had been no time for nostalgia. No time to waste standing around, soaking in the minute details of a life they’ve always been surrounded by. There were passport photos to take, apartment rentals to secure, languages to learn.
But this morning, Tooru woke up gasping for air and grasping onto the fast fading remnants of a dream – a nightmare – of Iwaizumi dissolving into nothing, fading more and more the harder Tooru tried to hold on.
Tooru woke to the sight of his ceiling, glow in the dark stars and alien stickers from some long ago act of childish rebellion stuck to the white plaster. He also woke to an email reminder from Japan Airlines.
Time is slipping through his fingers like water. Like the remnants of a dream, dissolving into nothing the more he tries to hold on.
Tooru leaves for Argentina in exactly one week.
Seven days isn’t enough time for anything, let alone memorizing the shape Iwaizumi has left in Tooru’s life and preparing for his sudden absence in it.
Needless to say, Tooru’s own dictionary sits forgotten in his lap. He’d come over to Iwaizumi’s house under the pretense of some last minute studying, but he can almost feel the language he’s been trying to cram dripping from his ears. Or maybe that’s just sweat. The summer heat is brutally oppressive, which makes trying to memorize anything, even the subtleties of Iwaizumi’s body, a herculean task. Iwaizumi’s desk fan is doing little to combat the humidity. Just like nearly everything in his bedroom, it’s an ancient relic he’s had since they were kids.
The white noise of faint electric whirring and chirping cicadas makes Tooru feel eight years old again.
The only difference between eight year old Iwaizumi’s bedroom and eighteen year old Iwaizumi’s bedroom is evidence of an imminent departure. There may be open suitcases on the floor, halfhearted attempts to pack half his life spilling out, but Iwaizumi hasn’t stripped his sheets or taken down his Godzilla posters, so it still looks and sounds and feels largely like the same bedroom of Tooru’s childhood.
Tooru wonders if the posters are being left behind. If American College Boy Hajime is too grown up for posters of his favorite monster movie.
Tooru tries picturing Iwaizumi’s room without Godzilla posters, but it’s impossible. He tries for something that should be easier – Iwaizumi in America, studying for a test at his desk. Tooru’s only frame of reference for American colleges is movies, but they never really show a lot of studying happening, just parties where everyone gets absurdly drunk and dances on tables; something Iwaizumi has never seemed inclined to do. For this reason, among others, Tooru’s imagination struggles to translate Iwaizumi Hajime, lifelong resident of Miyagi prefecture, into American College Boy.
To be fair, it has also been struggling to translate Oikawa Tooru, lifelong resident of Miyagi prefecture, into Argentinian Volleyball Player. The plane ticket in his inbox still feels like a dream.
He’d researched the roster of his future team as soon as he’d received confirmation that it was real, it was happening, he was going to play overseas. He’d tried imagining himself among these established athletes, with their facial hair and strong jawlines and foreign names.
All he’d walked away from the experience with was a feeling that he was so impossibly old, and somehow still so impossibly young at the same time.
Now, fingers clutching the worn blankets on Iwaizumi’s bed, watching Iwaizumi flip through his dictionary and pretending to read his own, Tooru wonders if any of his future teammates ever felt like this; trapped between childhood and adulthood, between nostalgia and a world of new experiences, between the constants of the past and the unknowns of the future.
There’s a framed picture on Iwaizumi’s desk, of him and Tooru after their first ever tournament. They’re both smiling, arms over each others’ shoulder, cheek to cheek. Tooru is missing a tooth. Iwaizumi is missing two. It feels like only yesterday. It feels like a lifetime ago.
Tooru wonders if this is another thing that won’t make the flight. If American College Boy Hajime is too grown up for a framed picture of his best friend to accompany him while he does schoolwork.
Iwaizumi sighs heavily, startling Tooru out of his thoughts. He leans back in his chair, rocking it onto two legs and stretching out his arms. His head nearly tips back into Tooru’s lap. Tooru averts his gaze before it can catch on the stretch of skin between the hem of Iwaizumi’s shirt and the waistband of his shorts.
Tooru stares intently at the open Japanese-Spanish dictionary in his lap and tries to ignore the way Iwaizumi’s gaze is lingering. He pretends that he is diligently studying. He fails.
After a few more agonizing seconds, Iwaizumi finally sits upright in his chair again and slams his book shut. “Get up,” he says. “We’re going out.”
“Huh?”
“It’s too fucking hot and your staring is creeping me out. We’re going for a walk.”
“I wasn’t staring at you!” Tooru retorts instinctually, which is a blatant lie and Iwaizumi knows it. Iwaizumi doesn’t even respond, he just rolls his eyes and leaves his room, expecting Tooru to follow. Tooru closes his dictionary and scrambles after him.
He wonders if Iwaizumi knew all along that he’s been watching him, and if so, why he just let it happen. Iwaizumi’s not usually one to let Tooru get away with anything.
He wonders if Iwaizumi’s feeling the same melancholic nostalgia that Tooru is. If Iwaizumi has been trying to memorize the shape of Tooru in his life the same way Tooru has been trying to memorize him.
Iwaizumi leads Tooru to the river. They walk in silence, the only sounds the scuffing of shoes on sidewalk and the gentle rush of slow moving water over stone. It’s not far, but they walk at a slow, leisurely pace. Like they have all the time in the world.
It strikes Tooru that this might be the last time they do this.
The banks of the Hirose River have been another constant in Tooru’s life. He’s seen the river in every season and in every stage of life. He’s seen it swollen from heavy rains and frozen in the depths of winter. He splashed in it as a little kid, jogged alongside it as a teenager. The river has seen Tooru take girls on dates, and has seen him broken up with just as often. And he’s walked this path countless times with Iwaizumi, in every season and in every stage of life. Tooru could walk this path in his sleep. Tooru has walked it in his sleep. The river haunts his dreams almost as much as Iwaizumi does. Some nights, when Tooru feels like he’s drowning in the waking world’s expectations, the river swallows him whole in his sleep and he wakes up gasping for air.
Now, he’s seeing this river a week before he and Iwaizumi get on planes headed to different countries.
Maybe that’s why imagining Iwaizumi in California is so impossible. Why imagining himself in Argentina feels like a dream.
Because the furthest that he and Iwaizumi have ever been apart is the 40 days and nights between their births.
The river of Tooru’s life has been carved into the landscape of Miyagi. It has never before escaped its rocky shore. But there’s no more room for it here. It must flow out to sea or else jump its banks, drowning everything it touches in its death throes.
Tooru suddenly finds it hard to breathe. He crouches down and touches his hands to the ground, trying to memorize the feel of it.
“What are you doing?” Iwaizumi asks.
Tooru’s fingers scramble for an explanation, and he stands up with a flat rock in his hand. “I’m skipping rocks.”
Iwaizumi raises an eyebrow, but doesn’t question it. He bends down and picks up a rock too. “Alright. Let’s do this.”
Tooru smiles. This is better. This is familiarity. This is something solid and steady he can hold onto long enough to catch his breath.
Iwaizumi has always been better at skipping rocks. When they were younger, Tooru always joked it was because Iwaizumi had rocks for brains.
Tooru’s old enough now to understand the truth. When Iwaizumi’s rocks sink into the river, he doesn’t blame the rock or the river or himself. He doesn’t agonize over the perfect shape, the perfect angle, the perfect toss. He simply picks up another rock and tries again.
Tooru throws his first rock. It skips over the surface of the water three times before sinking.
Iwaizumi’s reaches six.
Familiar competitiveness floods Tooru like oxygen. He takes a full breath, fills his lungs with it. His next rock skips eight times. He turns to face Iwaizumi with a satisfied grin.
Iwaizumi, who up until this point has seemed tense and on edge, softens at the sight of Tooru’s smile. His lips twitch upward, but then he seems to remember himself. “You got lucky,” he says gruffly.
“That wasn’t luck, that was pure talent,” Tooru counters, sticking out his tongue for good measure.
Iwaizumi laughs and winds up for a toss. His rock skips across the surface once, then twice, then nine more times. He doesn’t hide his grin now. He looks triumphant. He looks radiant.
Tooru never wants this day to end.
Tooru watches Iwaizumi skip rocks the way he watches Iwaizumi study bugs, or English dictionaries. He studies his perfect form, the way his arm pulls back, the way he always follows through until the last moment.
He wonders if he’ll even be able to memorize all of Iwaizumi before he leaves. There’s too much of him. Too many angles to examine him from. Too many ways his life touches Tooru’s that he hadn’t even noticed until he went looking.
They skip rocks until Tooru’s arm starts getting tired and the risk of straining his hard earned muscles a week before he’s supposed to prove his worth outweighs both his need to beat Iwaizumi, and to memorize what beating him feels like.
“I’ll let you take a break,” he says after his last rock plops pathetically into the water without skipping at all. “Wouldn’t want you to get injured trying to beat my record.”
(Tooru miraculously achieved fourteen skips a few tosses ago after a long streak of threes and fours.)
“How considerate of you,” Iwaizumi says, rolling his eyes. (Iwaizumi consistently broke at least six skips with every rock since his first.)
Iwaizumi sits on a nearby boulder, still holding the last rock he’d picked up. His thumb rubs across its smooth surface. Tooru’s own fingers twitch, aching to hold something, to fill the open air between them, because suddenly it feels less open, and more empty.
Tooru squeezes himself onto the boulder next to Iwaizumi. It’s a tight fit. When they were younger, this boulder would have been big enough for two kids to pretend it was a pirate ship or a spaceship or a submarine or the back of a dinosaur or Godzilla.
Now, Tooru sits hip to hip with Iwaizumi, his knee pressed against Iwaizumi’s knee, his shoulder bumping against Iwaizumi’s shoulder. It’s too hot to be this close, but neither of them move. Iwaizumi watches the river. Tooru watches Iwaizumi. Iwaizumi lets him.
Iwaizumi’s thumb keeps rubbing against the stone, back and forth, back and forth. The clock keeps ticking, closer and closer to departure time. The river keeps running. The Hirose flows into the Natori flows into Sendai Bay.
Eventually, it will reach the ocean.
At what point does that water forget where it came from? When does it forget that it was birthed from Miyagi’s soil, etched itself into the bedrock of Miyagi? When the Pacific Ocean bumps into the Americas, does any part of it remember that it used to be the Hirose River, that two boys named Oikawa Tooru and Iwaizumi Hajime spent their childhoods alongside it?
Tooru’s chest feels tight. He’s filled with a sudden nebulous desperation. He can’t place where the source lies, but it’s a feeling as familiar as the competitiveness that buoyed him earlier. It always feels like this in his dreams. The ones where Iwaizumi is just out of reach. The ones where the river drags him down and he can’t escape and he drowns, trapped in one place, the river rushing over his head and out to sea without him.
“Don’t forget me while you’re in California,” he says. He tries to say it like it’s a joke, but the desperation bleeds through like an open wound.
Iwaizumi’s thumb stops rubbing against the rock as he tears his gaze from the water to look at Tooru. “You are so–” Iwaizumi huffs in frustration. “That’s such a stupid thing to say, idiot.”
“No it’s not,” Tooru says defensively. He feels a sudden need to explain himself. To make Iwaizumi understand. Time passes around him like a river around a rock, but he is not standing in the middle of it. He is the river. There’s no stopping him. No changing his course. He will reach the ocean or he will die. “You’re going to be so far away. It’s like… a river stops being a river when it leaves the land behind. Well I’m the river, and you’re the land, and I’m leaving you so that means–”
“That’s a dumb fucking analogy. If you’re a river…” Iwaizumi takes a few seconds to gather his thoughts. Oikawa watches Iwaizumi as he looks out to the Hirose. His fingers tighten around the rock in his hand. Finally, he asks, “Can a rock forget the river?”
“What?”
Iwaizumi flushes. “I don’t know, it’s your stupid metaphor! I just–” Iwaizumi runs a hand through his hair. It somehow makes it stick up even more than it already is. It’s endearing. Tooru’s fingers twitch again, aching to run through Iwaizumi’s hair and fix it.
And then Iwaizumi grabs Tooru’s hand and presses the skipping rock he’d been holding into Tooru’s palm. His fingers curl around Tooru’s, pressing so tight his calluses are indistinguishable from the stone.
“Listen to me. Get this through your thick head, okay? Even if you take this rock to the other side of the planet, you can’t take back the time it spent with the river. The smoothness of the stone is proof of the time they spent together, right? That can’t be undone. We can’t be undone, Tooru.”
Tooru’s thoughts are swirling, white water rapids slamming against hard, immovable stone. He clings onto the only steady thing he can –
“So… you’re saying you’re a rock?”
“Like I said, it’s your stupid metaphor.”
“No, no, let’s go with it. You’re a rock and I’m a river and if we’re together long enough…” Tooru hops off the boulder, suddenly restless. He paces between Iwaizumi and the water, Iwaizumi’s rock gripped in his palm. Iwaizumi really knows how to pick them. It’s the perfect skipping rock; smooth and flat and perfectly molded to fit in his hand.
The Hirose flows into the Natori flows into Sendai Bay, but before that, it passed over this rock. It wore it smooth. Like Iwaizumi said, the river permanently altered it. As it is now, it’s perfect. If Iwaizumi had not picked it up out of the water, eventually, it would have worn down to nothing.
If Iwaizumi is a rock, and he is, not just because Tooru once joked about him having rocks for brains, but because more than anything else, even more than volleyball, Iwaizumi has been the most steady constant in Tooru’s life, and if Tooru is a river, not just because he has never once stopped in his entire life, but because from the moment he was born he has been rushing ahead, faster and faster, pulling everything he touches along with him, leaving scars on the landscape–
The science of it all is clear as day.
When a rock spends too much time in a river, it begins to erode. In a river, even something as constant as a rock has no choice but to give in to the stronger force of nature and be forgotten. Rivers take, and they don’t look back. They can’t look back.
Tooru slides Iwaizumi’s perfect skipping rock into his pocket for safekeeping and bends down to pick up another one. This one is jagged and rough. So many sides yet to be worn smooth. He walks back over to the boulder and stands in front of Iwaizumi. He holds out the rock. He tries and fails to smile.
“Look, it’s you!”
Iwaizumi takes the rock. “Ha ha,” he says flatly. “Because it’s spiky. Very funny.”
Tooru shakes his head. “No, because I’m saving you from the river.”
Iwaizumi’s eyes narrow. Tooru can tell that the gears in his head are turning. That he understands the words that Tooru is too afraid to say out loud. Because of course he does, they’ve been speaking the language of each other their whole lives.
“I thought you didn’t want me to forget you.”
“I don’t,” Tooru insists, and it’s the truth. “But maybe it’s better if you do. Maybe we were always supposed to part ways. Maybe, if we’re around each other for too long, I will wear you down. I will make everything about myself and make you nothing in the process. I don’t want that, Iwa-chan. I want you to stay pointy and–”
Iwaizumi hurls the rock into the river. He turns and looks at Tooru with such fierceness that it nearly knocks him over.
“I will love you until the river wears that rock down to nothing, do you understand? It will take thousands of years. Thousands of years and I will still love you even after. I don’t fucking care if your goals are selfish or whatever other bullshit you’ve convinced yourself of. Do you want to know why? Because when the edges of that rock wear away, that just means the rock has become part of the water. Forever. And when that rock wears down to nothing, and when the river runs dry, when my bones are all that’s left of me, mine will be a fossil in your ancient riverbed. And even when everything in the universe turns to dust, my dust will mingle with yours. You can’t get rid of me, Tooru. Even if you tried. Even if you wanted to. It’s too late. You think I could ever possibly forget you? You’ve altered me on a molecular level. There’s no coming back from that. There’s no forgetting. Not for me.”
And that’s when Tooru, standing between a rock and a river, between the immovable past and the unstoppable future, has his second startling moment of clarity.
He never needed to memorize the shape Iwaizumi Hajime left in his life. Iwaizumi is going to California and Tooru is going to San Juan but neither of them is leaving the other because there’s nothing to leave. Remembering Iwaizumi isn’t like learning a foreign language. After a lifetime together, it’s not something that takes practice, and it’s not something Tooru could ever forget. Iwaizumi is an immutable part of him. No matter how far apart, no matter how long.
“There’s no forgetting for me, either,” Tooru says. “In case you were worried.”
“I wasn’t.” Iwaizumi says easily. “Oikawa, if there’s one thing I know, it’s that you will die still chasing your dreams. And if there’s two things I know, the other is that you’ll die still loving me. That was never in doubt.”
“I hate that you know me so well.”
“Well I hate how sappy this whole conversation has been, so I guess we’re even.”
And because Tooru hasn’t said it yet, and because Iwaizumi already beat him to it, and because this moment – however sappy it is – is fleeting, and because, above all else, it is the truth, Tooru says, “I love you.”
“I hate you,” Iwaizumi says, but it comes out like an automatic reflex, not a genuine statement.
Tooru smiles. “No you don’t, Iwa-chan. I said I wouldn’t forget, didn’t I? Your very beautiful speech about rocks and dusty fossils is ingrained into my memory forever.”
“Shut up.”
“Maybe you should rethink your career path, become a poet. My dust will mingle with your dust…”
“I’m going to throw you in the river.”
“I’ll drag you in with me.”
“I’ll kill you.”
“I’ll haunt you.”
“Fuck. You would, wouldn’t you.”
Tooru laughs, weightless and easy. And then he grabs Iwaizumi’s hand, just because he can. Iwaizumi doesn’t shake him off. He lets Tooru pull him off the rock, lets him drag him toward the water, and when they’re both standing ankle deep in the Hirose River, Iwaizumi tugs Tooru towards him.
They do not crash against each other like violent water on violent stone. Their noses touch. Their foreheads rest against each other. Their fingers twine together. It’s too hot to stand this close, but neither of them pulls away. Cool water rushes around them. They slide around each other, fill the empty spaces between each other like water around a rock. Like it has taken a lifetime for their bodies to fit this perfectly.
Tooru’s lips find Iwaizumi’s lips. River water caressing a stone. Iwaizumi’s lips part. Stone surrendering itself to the water.
Tooru has never felt lighter. There’s a perfect skipping rock in his pocket but it’s not weighing him down. He’s not going to drown. Not by clinging to the past, not by the weight of his own expectations, not by fighting against the current.
He is going to flow out to sea like he was always meant to. Because this river has never been a constant in Tooru’s life after all. The water has never been the same water. It has always been moving forward.
Tooru has not been constant either.
In one week, Tooru will get on a plane, and he will fly all the way to San Juan, and he will begin the enormous task of carving himself into the heart of Argentina. He will change, but that doesn’t undo the lifetime he spent in Miyagi. There will be new constants in his life, but he will always have a piece of home with him.
Because Iwaizumi is not a fragile, tiny pebble, easily swept away or dissolved into nothing.
If the rock is big enough, if it is strong, and stubborn, and persistent, it can affect the course of a river. It can permanently alter the river’s life, just as the river alters the rock.
Iwaizumi has not been sitting passively while Tooru carves his hopes and dreams into him. He threw himself into Tooru’s life with enough force to change it. And there’s no undoing that. No forgetting.
It’s like this:
There is a rock at the bottom of the Hirose River. The river will carry pieces of this rock forever, even when it leaves Miyagi. Even when it is no longer the Hirose river, even when the Pacific Ocean crashes into the Americas, some small piece of it will always remember that it once touched a rock picked up by Oikawa Tooru and thrown by Iwaizumi Hajime. Some part of it will remember the rock that now rests in Tooru’s pocket. Some part of it will be those rocks.
There are two boys standing in the Hirose River. They love each other. They will always love each other. Their love is not immovable stone or unstoppable water, but the product of their collision. Something perfect that can only be created when the rock and the river spend a lifetime together. Even when they are no longer Iwaizumi and Oikawa, residents of Miyagi prefecture, even when they become American College Boy Hajime and Argentinian Volleyball Player Tooru, they will remember this truth:
A rock cannot forget the river that shaped it. A river cannot forget the rock that altered its course.
It has always been like this.
Iwaizumi Hajime will not forget the boy that shaped his hopes and dreams. Oikawa Tooru will not forget the boy that altered the course of his life
It will always be like this.