Work Text:
Approximately six months after Oikawa Tooru breaks up with you, comfort comes from the cruellest of thoughts.
You stand on a train platform, your cheeks nipped crimson by the sandpaper winds of winter. In your ungloved hand is your phone, the screen flashing an article on the final line-up of Japan’s Olympic Men’s Volleyball Team. It takes you all of five seconds to find his name, printed beneath a headshot you hadn’t seen before; one of him wearing the national team’s colours.
This does not come as a surprise to you. Greatness has always found Oikawa. It is as if the two are tethered by red string; a thread on which he had been pulling at since he’d first picked up a volleyball at the age of six and decided to conquer the world with it.
Comfort comes from the cruellest of thoughts. It takes shape in the form of a realization that maybe you were never meant to stand by his side. That maybe you were pretending all this time, like a child who wears their parent’s clothes and trips over the expanse of fabric they can’t even begin to fill.
Indeed, for as long as you can remember, you have never been your own person. You have always been the noun following his possessive. First it was Oikawa Tooru’s best friend, then Oikawa Tooru’s partner, and now Oikawa Tooru’s ex. Always him before you and never by name.
So it confuses you now, why you had ever thought you could carve a place in his life. Why you had ever thought you could stand as a monument amongst the cities he’d built and razed with his own hands. After all, you had known it back then. Tucked amidst the screaming of your classmates during his first Interhigh was the emergence of something great; the reveal of his godhead, shaking the polished gym floors as it sprang forth to raucous cheers.
Comfort comes from the cruellest of thoughts. It tells you that you are nowhere near divinity and that you would never be able to fathom life at the level of Oikawa Tooru. But it also tells you that it’s okay, that it’s alright to carry on as everyone else around you with your lives small and your eyes cast downwards. After all, greatness cannot exist without an excess of mediocrity.
However, as you watch the city slip by you, you allow yourself to think back to when you were sixteen and blissfully unaware. You had felt it then; the nervousness in his touch, the thrum of his pulse on your fingertips, quickened and human. You remember it clearly.
You remember how he had looked at you then, with a desire so strong that for a moment, you felt you could be great too.