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"One, two, three."
His breaths are slow as they pass his lips. They're broken exhales, shattered, they're just shards that his lungs are throwing into the air. Not that impressive, he supposes, but Iwaizumi still wishes he could give them to someone else.
"Are you ready?"
The snow is cold around his coat, but that's not something that he would know. It can't be, because the brand is one Tooru recommended, and he never recommends shabby quality.
(Then why can't he can't stop shivering?)
When he tips his head back and looks at the moon, he just about hits the ground. It hurts to look at, almost, so painfully bright against the darkness that it makes everything pull away. It reminds him of someone.
"I'm always ready."
##
"It's sad."
Tooru had been laying on his back, covers tucked under the edge of the bed but fallen across the floor. His shirt was hiked up past his hips, his bare stomach exposed, skin and skin and skin. Blemishes never loved him and he never loved them either, which was why he was a map without pinholes. Iwaizumi's lips had charted that map, once. Twice. A few times. A lot of times.
(He'd gotten the taste of his bones and flesh and he didn't think he could ever love anything the way he loved how his heartbeat made Tooru's chest tremble.)
"What's sad?"
His hand was on top of Tooru's. Thick fingers, rough, calloused and clumsy. Enveloping the long ones, slender and pale and marked with one freckle between the second and third knuckle. His thumb brushed over the back of his hand, dragging a messy sprawl of stars along with it, and Tooru closed his eyes.
"The way people keep living for things and living for things but never really living."
His voice was soft, naked. Stripped bare of the layers of grace and laughter and attempts at everything he wanted people to think he was. It was raw, it was the wind before the storm, and Iwaizumi could feel it blowing him into the ground.
"What do you mean?"
Tooru took a deep breath. His chest moved up, mounting air between the lines of his ribs, just to flood from his lips. His eyes opened again, half-lidded and dark under the light of only the stick-on stars on the ceiling.
"We live right now to go to college. We'll get to college, and once we're there, we'll start living so we can finish college and get a job. We finish college. Get a job. Now we're living to get married and have a family. We get married, have a family, and it's not anything that's really bad enough to leave, so we don't. Now we're living to retire. We retire. Now what are we doing? Living to die?"
Iwaizumi could see his lower lip catch between his teeth, and his eyes squeeze shut harder. His forehead creased under the strain, folds and lines falling just above the bridge of his nose.
(He wanted to kiss them away.)
(Just a kiss wouldn't make it better.)
(Not when he was like this.)
Tooru took another breath, shallower this time, and he opened his eyes. He turned to Iwaizumi, rolling to his side and pulling his knees to his chest.
"I'm scared, Iwa-chan."
"Hm?"
"I don't want to... to keep living for something. Living for this, living for that, living for things until my time is gone and I didn't really even live at all."
Iwaizumi frowned, lips pulling down as he curled his fingers around Tooru's palm.
"I don't want to end up like that," Tooru breathed, and he shivered closer to Iwaizumi, edging forward until his head was tucked under his chin and the arch of his back was beneath his hand.
Iwaizumi was quiet for a few minutes, his eyes closing tight too, and he let his heartbeat thrum against Tooru's cheek. His thumb was running across his back now, bare skin against bare skin as he traced the notches of his spine.
"Well," he said softly, finally. He pulled away slightly, slipped a finger around Tooru's chin and lifted it up. He kissed his eyelids, one by one, until he opened them.
"Well," he said again, "Look at the clock."
Tooru looked at him, slight confusion tangling behind his eyes, but he sat up just enough to see the clock and laid back down.
"What time is it?"
"About three in the morning."
"Don't give me an 'about.' Tell me the minutes."
Oikawa was back on his side, eyes tacked to Iwaizumi, and he spoke quietly. "It's 3:09 am."
Iwaizumi pulled him back to his chest, resting his cheek on feather-soft hair.
"3:09 am. That's right now. Twelve hours from now, it's gonna be 3:09 pm. That's gonna be then." He swallowed hard. "In twelve hours, that then is gonna be our now. And we can... We can either choose to think about that, to think about what then is gonna be like and what we're waiting for and what it is that we have to do when it's finally that time, or..." He pulled Tooru closer, fingers graphing the curve of his bones, and he dropped his voice to press his lips to his ear. "Or we can think about now. We can think about how warm it is when we're this close together. We can think about how the rain outside sounds. We can think about how it feels to do this," he presses a kiss to his forehead, "and this," to his nose, "and this." His lips fell over Tooru's, crushing soft and sweet against his mouth, pulling a small note from the back of Tooru's throat. They moved together, slow and far from hesitant, and Iwaizumi splayed his fingers across his back.
When he finally pulled away, he leaned his forehead against Tooru's, and he didn't feel any lines between his eyebrows anymore. His words went easier, breathed out with a few rays of light, and he moved his hand to rest on Tooru's waist.
"We don't have to be living for anything as long as we live in the now, Tooru. And as long as I'm here, I'm gonna keep you in the present. Right here, right now, with me."
Tooru opened his eyes then, and they were soft, so soft. Blankets of brown, fragments of gold splattered in between, like they'd been flossed with a constellation. His lips were parted, just enough for him to lean forward and speak into Iwaizumi's ear. When they brushed against his skin, he felt his bones being pulled right from his body.
"Thank you, Hajime," he'd said so quietly, and Iwaizumi pulled the covers back up from the floor over their heads.
##
The first time Oikawa Tooru touched him, he could've sworn that his hand was willing to fall off just to stay in his.
It wasn't any different the last time around.
##
"Remember what I said, Iwa-chan?"
They'd been holding hands up until the very last minute. Up until Tooru's stupid shoe had caught in a stupid hole in the stupid crosswalk. Up until his ankle twisted to the right, and his feet pulled him to the ground and his fingers fell out of Iwaizumi's grip.
"About not wanting to live for things waiting to happen."
Iwaizumi doesn't even remember hearing the screaming of brakes. Maybe there hadn't been any. Maybe Tooru had been knocked to the ground the way Iwaizumi was knocked to the ground by his eyes, his eyes and his skin, his skin and his hips and the curve of his lips and the dip of his neck and everything else that made him a walking hurricane.
(God, he misses the days when he was just the wind before a storm.)
"Of course I remember."
Iwaizumi's hands used to sweat all the time. They used to be boyishly clammy, warm and hot, just right to couple with a pair that were cold and cold and cold.
(A pair that were pale and slender, with a freckle between the second and third knuckle of the left hand.)
"Good. When I'm gone-"
"Don't talk like that."
"Listen to me, Hajime."
Tooru either had insomniac nights or he was near dead for ten hours straight. He either gave up or he worked until his fingers were unraveling and bleeding. He either shouted, boisterous and claiming, or his voice was so small that you had to trip over your own nerves trying to hear him. His kisses were either gentle and soft or they were blinding fire, flashes and burning bone. He didn't know what gray was. He never did.
"When I'm gone, don't sit around and live for something that you don't have. Don't breathe just because you feel like you don't have a choice. Live in the now. Look at the trees and the flowers and the grass and the stupid neighbor's stupid dog and know that there's always something out there, okay?"
Maybe it would have hurt less if he'd been gray sometimes.
"Okay."
But then, he wouldn't have been Oikawa Tooru if he'd been gray. He wouldn't be the stumbling beat of your heart when you miss a step on the stairs. He wouldn't be the galaxies spun together so dizzyingly that you wondered if you were just small or if everything else was just big. He wouldn't be the sort of pain that hurt so nicely that it made you wince and see a new color.
"Good. I love you, you know that?"
"Yeah. I love you too."
That's exactly what Tooru had been. He'd been a new color. He'd been a sunshine recorder, he'd been stars across wristbones, he'd been flowering veins and a crescendo of pulse rates and everything that made you want aspirin. He himself had been now, he was the present, he was the moment whose seconds you're always spiderwebbed in between.
"Thank you, Hajime."
"Hmm? For what?"
"For giving me a now to live for."
##
"Any time, Tooru. Any time."