Archive of Our Own ^beta

They say that love is a thing that makes a damn fool out of a man.

It’s the 2021 Tokyo Olympics, and Tooru’s just beat Japan after a grueling five sets as Argentina’s starting setter. Home soil. Homeland. A heart that beats blue blood.

Tooru feels like a fool. He’s just beat Japan, but the only thing that he can think about is Tobio across the net, his neck craned to the sky, sweat running down his neck in thin rivulets and a smile cracked wide across his face even though he’s not looking at anything in particular. How they’re supposed to fly back to San Juan after this where Tooru will show him the impossible mountains clawing jaggedly into the horizon and then lay him out on every surface in his apartment for a blissful few weeks so he can categorize him with everything that belongs to Tooru. The way he always wants Tobio close, close, closer, and that the eleven thousand kilometers between San Juan and Rome sound unbearable but it’s infinitely more tolerable than the stinging eighteen thousand separating Buenos Aires and Tokyo.

Tooru blinks, and then Tobio’s cracking at the edges, looking over at him through a tilted gaze with that wry smile he always gets whenever he knows he’s lost. Fond in that way that always breaks Tooru’s heart because he only ever gets to see it through a phone screen, but now that it’s before him, so impossibly, terribly near, he feels overcome.

Tobio’s ducking under the net, his movements elegant even though they’ve both just played hard, and the chanting of the audience in the stands falls away when he zeroes in on the closing distance. Tooru comes back to himself, then, turns away quickly and fumbles with the chain locked around his neck. The metal is warm, a little slick, and he curses at the way his fingers tremble while he tries to undo the clasp.

“What are you doing?” Tobio asks, amused, behind him, and Tooru breaks into a secretive smile because he can hear the grin in the other’s voice even though he’s not looking at him. It’s such impossible, intimate awareness, how Tooru knows the curve of Tobio’s grin in chords and angles.

“Be patient,” Tooru says, twisting farther away still in childish petulance as he finally undoes the damn clasp. He pulls it off, feeling the slide of the chain along his neck like the sweetest form of rope burn. Fumbles with the small object in his hands because it is tiny and thin and he’s still so fucking sweaty, both from the volleyball and the knowledge of what he’s about to do.

He used to think that the most precious thing he could set with his hands was a volleyball, but he knows better now. The answer lies within a boy turned man turned fleeting glimpse of light. A happiness that only comes colored in certain shades of blue. He wants it forever, forever. He wants it so badly he could choke on it—and he does, and he has been, but it’s an ache that comes up bright.

“Tooru?’ Tobio sounds behind him, and he’s so close he must not have listened to Tooru at all. Of course he hasn’t.

“Patience is a virtue, you know,” Tooru huffs, and then he finally turns around, and the beam on Tobio’s face is so bright that he has no choice but to mirror it, breaking into helpless laughter. It’s the Olympics. Tooru won. He spent nine years working for this. He thinks he has the right to speak about patience.

He’s waited for other things, too. Tobio advances, and he can tell that he’s going in for a hug, but Tooru dances away, the sound of his giggles coming across lovestruck even to his ears. That’s how he knows it’s bad. God, he has it bad. “You’re sweaty,” he pleads away, and he wonders if anybody has ever cracked their face open with the weight of their smile. If they haven’t, Tooru might be the first to do so. His joy fills his chest so tightly it almost brings him to his knees.

“You are too,” Tobio complains, but he stops a step away from Tooru anyway.

“Okay, okay, wait, don’t look at me like that,” Tooru laughs, bringing one hand up to cup Tobio’s cheek. He’d never believed that anybody could make him so gentle before he loved him. He brings his other hand up. “I’ll make it up to you.”

“Will you?” Tobio says. “You did just beat me in my own country in front of the world, you know. It’ll take a lot of begging to get back in my good graces.”

“Will it?” Tooru lilts, and he feels so ridiculous. He thinks it’s showing on his face. It’s so big and bright that he thinks for a second that it’ll burst through the domed ceiling above them and reach all the way to the moon—and then back, because he’s always been one for cliches. He unfurls his hand. “Even if I ask you to marry me?”

The most precious thing that Tooru has ever held within his hands is Tobio; the second was the first volleyball he ever picked up when he still had yet to lose all of his milk teeth and his cheeks were chubby with the joy of childhood, and the third is the engagement ring he strung on a chain around his neck right before walking onto the court.

Tobio’s staring at him, eyes wide, mouth parted, and Tooru wants to kiss him, but he’ll let him respond first. “Tooru, are you serious,” he says, and his voice is shaking. He’s tearing up, too. Tooru might be too. Feels brine line his eyelashes—definitely crying. “Are you—fuck, Tooru, in what world would I ever say no?”

“No world that I would ever want to live in,” Tooru swears, and then he presses the promise onto Tobio’s finger and pushes the rest of his oath into Tobio’s mouth, even though he can’t kiss him properly around the way they’re both crying, their tears smearing together into one amorphous salted mess. He thinks he can hear the yelling of his teammates around him and the dull roar of the audience as they witness not just one victory but two, and Tooru thinks that he will never need anything more than this.

Well, to be officially married to Tobio, but they’re getting there. He’s a patient man when it comes to the things that matter, and it’s actually patently absurd how long he’d wait for Tobio to chart the expanses of Pluto and come back to him. All of this honeyed, blue happiness, and it’s his.

The whole world has seen Tooru win today. His throat grows sore with the immenseness of it all. A man, and volleyball. How much more can he take? For how long will his greed go unpunished?

Not today. God, Tobio maps it into the cleaving ridges of his back when he holds him close, sweat be damned—it won’t be today.

“How long have you been planning this?” Tobio asks him while they’re still on the court. Tooru can feel his heart beating against his like a toy whittled out of raw muscle, and it sings, like a bluebird, like a music box that’s been wound up for thirteen tenuous years, the figurine that bursts out of the woodwork tapping lightly from inside his chest. It’ll tear the whole place down, the magnitude of his joy. A degree of triumph so severe it veers right off the edge of the Richter scale and comes right for Tooru, the pinnacle of his heart transformed into a haloed target.

Tooru smiles because he doesn’t know what else to do, what else to say, and he can feel the edges of everyone around them bearing down on the edges of their perfect, sculpted paradise built right onto the floors of a sport they love almost as much as they love each other. There’s nowhere else he could have proposed, no other place in the world that is as intrinsically tied to both of their identities as the court. There’s also the foolish, immature thrill snaking up his body that the tribute to their devotion is being broadcast all over the world; let it be known that Tobio belongs to Tooru. Just as much as Tooru belongs to him.

“Proposing? Long before I actually brought up the idea of marriage to you,” Tooru says, shrugging easily with an easy smile adorning his lips. “Doing it right here? Well. I had to make sure that our teams played against each other first.”

Their teammates swim around the periphery of Tobio and Tooru as if moving in slow motion—he can see them coming, congratulations on their lips and hands brought together in either applause or prayer. Hajime by the bench, who’d shot up with his fist pumped in the air as if Japan had won the match when Tooru slid the ring over Tobio’s finger. Shouyou just barely on the other side of the net, jumping so high that he clears the webbed mesh with a ridiculous grin on his face. A thousand other people that Tooru recognizes but can barely register: his captain, Tomás, Mateo, Carlos, the rest of his teammates blending into one smear of technicolor elation, all of those damn monsters he never got to face in Nationals while still in Japan.

“Did you bribe the judges or something?” Tobio says, and his voice wobbles right at the very end. Leaps backward off a cliff and trusts that the sea will rise up to meet him. “Or is the great Oikawa Tooru just good enough to haul his team this far into the game?”

“Oikawa-san can do anything,” Tooru sniffs, and then he laughs wetly, scrubs at his cheek with the back of his hands. It certainly feels that way. He’s gotten everything he wanted and everything he didn’t know he needed, and perhaps it took one hell of a homecoming—relearning what home came to be, after all—but it was worth it. All for that ring, a circle of polished silver and pink gold studded with a small diamond, the outsides flanked with two small blue gems that reminded him so awfully of Tobio.

“God, you’re so awful, Tooru,” Tobio says, but he’s breaking up while he says it, his smile so wide Tooru would have to take two years to chart the map of it, and he’s still tearing up as if he hasn’t run dry yet. The gods turn to each waterfall and beg for them to turn towards the ocean, follow the tide, follow the impossibility of it, the expanse of the sky that echoes its aquamarine sister, every fragment of happiness so complete it thinks back to grief, but the grief of somebody who knows they have gained so much that anything less would feel like loss.

“Yeah?” Tooru’s still laughing. The people—family—close in even more around them, the circle growing tighter as they seek to soak in their joy. He thinks he can even see Tobio’s old teammates from Karasuno, who have somehow made their way over the barriers and are sprinting full force toward them. “Well, you’re marrying this piece of shit, so this really isn’t a good look for you either. Loser.”

“I haven’t lost yet,” Tobio says, and the way he intones it makes it sound like a pledge. They haven’t even made it to the altar yet. They don’t even know which altar they’ll choose. “I don’t lose.”

The world comes up to greet them. Keeps greeting them, says, hello, good afternoon, how have you been? Good? That’s great. I’m happy for you.

I’m happy for you.

They make headlines. A ridiculous amount of them. The news about Tooru’s grand proposal before the world almost drowns out the coverage of the game itself, though there is a loud minority that complains about this fact more than they celebrate it.

He doesn’t care. Tooru celebrates loud enough to drown them out.

He’ll laugh about this later, how the nineteen-year-old version of Oikawa Tooru who could barely grow accustomed to the way Argentina felt beneath the soles of his feet compared to how the Miyagi soil gave way to his weight would be so downright indignant that his engagement to Kageyama Tobio would gain more attention than the fact that he’d made his way back to Japan just to show them up for giving him away. He would be so mad. He would be so, so goddamn mad.

But this twenty-seven-year aged Oikawa Tooru has an Olympic gold medal that knows both the indent of his teeth and the beating thrum of his heart and a man who taught him that victory could mean something outside of the sport. He became an Argentine citizen, and then he brought the man back to Argentina. He got to keep both. For the first time in his life, he got to keep both.

“I want a summer wedding,” Tooru says, tracing nonsensical constellations along Tobio’s bare back. It’s August in Argentina, but Tobio is built of so much muscle that he runs hot anyway, flopping stomach down on his sheets while they do nothing in bed. A luxurious, self-indulgent way to spend their afternoon. “Not that we have a choice, really, given our schedules. It’ll be hot. Maybe we could do a hotel.”

“Expensive,” Tobio mutters, the word the only thing he can heave out his mouth as if even that takes some great effort. They’re exhausted despite having done nothing. The sky is burning. Forty degrees Celcius fever. Tooru smooths back the forehead of the land and it stretches smooth and still, there is nothing to do, and they’re burdened by the luxury of longing and the price of a love stolen between the seasons.

“A garden wedding would be pretty, but it’ll be so goddamn hot,” Tooru muses. “There’s got to be some workaround to it, no? Imagine we’re wearing these black suits and we’re burning up under the sun.”

“Do we have to decide this now?” Tobio murmurs sleepily. Tooru bites back a smile; they’d woken up only a couple of hours ago at most, the clock’s hands waving them on through the day, and the afternoon light knifing through his apartment was just enough to take them from the kitchen back to bed. “How long does it even take to plan a wedding?”

“Half a year. A year. I don’t really know, but I’d imagine it would take that long.”

“Then we have all the time in the world,” Tobio groans. “Next summer before national team matches start. It can’t be that long.”

“I can’t believe I have to wait an entire year to marry you,” Tooru says. It’s an exercise in irony. He’s waited longer for many more things—the horribly slow nine months while his sister tied together magic with her fingers and came out on the other end with Takeru, each bitter day since he leaped into the air his third year at Kitigawa Daiichi and the ground came up to meet him before he grazed the sky, the twenty-two hours spent in limbo, untethered, unbelonging, as a plane took him from Sendai to San Juan. Seventeen thousand kilometers fanned out into the impossible ache that is nine years.

And each terrible moment in which Tooru did not know if Tobio was his or if he had the right to make him so. Forgiveness, a paring knife. Until Tobio took his knife-hands and excised every bruised spot and blackened apology out of Tooru’s rotten guilt.

“You’re the one who told me that patience is a virtue.” It’s always such an awful thing when Tobio takes every word Tooru gives him and shelves it away like it’s gospel, as if it’s truly that important, even back when Tooru never gave him anything at all. Tooru feels it humming inside of his body and he stares at his plain old ceiling and thinks of the sky and the ocean and a cliffside. Thinks of jumping and trusting that the tide will be kind this time around.

“And besides, we have all the time in the world,” Tobio says again, and the funny thing is that it isn’t true, not in the least, and the ridicule of it rises in Tooru’s throat like shampoo bubbles thrust between unforgiving knuckles, but he thinks that they deserve to be naive for once. For a world that thrust him into reality before he could have the chance to live his boy-dreams, it can at least grant him the illusion that this will never end. It won’t end. Tooru steeples his fingers and folds the promise upon itself and magicks it into the ring wrapped around Tobio like a premature vow. They have all the time in the world because Tooru makes it so.

“Are you even capable of liking anything without giving it everything you have?” Hajime asked him once, long ago, when they were still in middle school and the most important thing in the world to Oikawa Tooru was the outcome of next week’s match and the coupon he cut out from a magazine for two-for-one milk bread deal and if he’d do well enough on Tuesday’s literature exam to earn higher marks than Hajime.

“Obviously,” Tooru snorts because it feels like an accusation of some kind, though he’s not sure what crime he’s being attributed to. “I like math just fine, but I’m not going to spend my whole career studying it.” He kicks a rock before him because they’re walking through their neighborhood on the way back from practice and the sidewalk before him is the same old dilapidated Sendai suburban landscape, and then he kicks it harder because it hadn’t rolled very far and Oikawa Tooru doesn’t do things by halves.

“Well, you don’t like math, you’re just good at it,” Hajime points out, and Tooru frowns terribly even though his sister tells him that it’ll get stuck on his face and then he’ll have to walk around for the rest of his life with an expression more fitting of Hajime than Tooru. “You like things like—like volleyball, I guess, but I don’t think you just like it. You’re weirdly obsessed with it, and it freaks me out.”

“Don’t be rude, Iwa-chan,” Tooru says, indignant, and then he sniffs and flips his hair to the best of his ability. “Volleyball is different because I’m actually going to play volleyball until I die, and then when I do kick the bucket, I’ll be buried with a Mikasa volleyball. Historians can write me in their textbooks as Japan’s best setter in the history of ever.”

“This is exactly what I mean, by the way,” Hajime says, and Tooru pointedly stares ahead at the melting egg yolk of a sun sinking into the horizon instead of acknowledging him. “You’re such a weirdo, Oikawa. It’s like you can’t be normal about anything.”

“I am normal. It’s you that’s the weirdo between us, actually.”

“Oh yeah?” Hajime challenges. “Aliens.” A childhood spent with his sister boredly flicking on the science fiction channel whenever she had to babysit Tooru resulted in fifteen posters hung up around his room and a slew of extraterrestrial-related merchandise whenever his birthday rolled around. “Grades.” Before volleyball took up all his time, the best form of satisfaction he could find came in the form of exam scores and teachers’ praise, and being described as gifted still hasn’t left his psyche or his academic portfolio. “Kageyama.”

“Okay, what?” Tooru stops right in his tracks, feet scuffling awkwardly against the pavement in his surprise. He’d let the others slide because they at least contained a morsel of truth, but—Tobio? “I do not like him, and therefore the basis of your entire argument is wrong.”

“But you’re obsessed with him,” Hajime shoots back, and the accusation makes Tooru’s face twist into an unflattering mix of a frown and pure befuddlement. “You won’t shut up about how he’s going to take your place or how he asks for your serve or how he still doesn’t sync with the team the way you do, which, by the way, is completely natural because you’re been here three years and he just arrived—”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Tooru says loudly. He looks everywhere else but at Hajime—the sun that’s already given up on daytime, the weeds pushing stubbornly through the concrete, Kimura-san’s lemon tree that always grows so heavy with fruit she sends him off with arms smelling of citrus. “It’s not an obsession; Tobio-chan is just very, very annoying, and I’m rightfully concerned about volleyball which you’ve already designated as something I’m abnormal about, so you can stop, thank you very much.”

“I’m just saying,” Hajime says, and the words sound strange in his boyish voice, the edges of it tinged in petulance, “that there are only so many things you can give your all to before you run out of yourself to have.”

“That doesn’t even make any sense,” says Tooru, pushing Hajime with the last word as he shoves him aside and continues marching home, feeling unsettled for some reason. The sidewalk is hot under his heels and so is his childish insistence. He’s not old enough to know anything about obsession yet, not when he’s only harbored three real crushes and the latest one, Rika-chan in the classroom next to his, was only because she listened to the same kind of music as him. “You only say things that you think sound cool because you don’t have the grades to show for it.”

“Nuh-uh!” Hajime says crossly, stepping up to keep pace with him. Tooru hears the familiar patter of his footsteps until he catches up beside him, and he’s wearing that familiar scowl under his spiky hair. “I did better than you on the science quiz last week.”

“That was a fluke,” Tooru says, and then, “Can you show me how you did it when we get back to my house?”

“Yeah, whatever,” Hajime grumbles, and then they forget about love and obsession as easily and as fervently as it had come to a flame.

Still, a candle hisses into light in the deep recesses of Tooru, and he remembers it later, much later, when obsession is the only thing that takes him from the smooth wooden floors of his gym in San Juan to the merciless sanded beaches in Rio.

Tooru never runs out of things to give away.

At one point, he comes close, but a certain Hinata Shouyou unknowingly snatches him away from the edge, and then he never comes back.

He gives everything to Tobio, anyway. And then more because Tooru doesn’t know anything else but how to be helpless, and he thinks he’ll die, maybe, all woeful and shriveled up and much, much too far from his fiance.

Fiance. It has a nice ring to it, though it has nothing on the circlet coiled around Tobio’s finger.

“‘Celebrity Couple Oikawa Tooru and Kageyama Tobio: Will They Be Able To Stand The Test Of Time And Distance?’” Tooru reads off his phone, Tobio on call a tiny rectangle in the corner of his screen. “What do you think? Will they?”

Tooru exits out of the article—the cover of which is the same image of Tooru sliding the ring onto Tobio’s finger on court that every headline copies and pastes; a very good photo if he says so himself—and expands Tobio’s pixelated face, which is looking upon him, unimpressed.

Tobio’s eating his dinner in the flat he’s leasing while he’s in Rome, and Tooru’s just returned from practice. He hasn’t showered yet, but that’s at the back of his mind even as the sweat drying on his back comes off with the sticky powdery touch and his hair sticks up in strange clumps because this is the only time has to catch Tobio before he goes out with his teammates in the evening.

“They’ve been standing the test of time,” Tobio grunts, and then he returns to his plate, shoveling food into his mouth with all the gracelessness he’s always held for things that weren’t volleyball. Behind the dark curve of his bowed head, Tooru spots the impossibly white cupboards with their stainless steel handles and a refrigerator that’s already been sparsely dotted with a few random magnets Tobio had received from his Adlers teammates. The most notable of the bunch is the Olympic rings, though Tooru’s favorite is the gag gift he’d bought that says I Heart San Juan.

“And distance,” Tooru says, staring at Tobio before him. It’s just half past three in San Juan, but watching Tobio eat is making him hungry, too, so he pulls his languid limbs from the couch he’d been melting into and makes for the kitchen, one hand listlessly holding his phone while he rifles through a cardboard bakery box filled with medialunas. “Can’t forget about that. There’s food on your chin, by the way,” he adds because he’s too used to staring. He wants to thumb it away for Tobio but as many miracles as Tooru has managed to thread out of thin air, he can’t bridge the distance through his phone screen.

“Oh. Thanks.” Tobio roughly rubs it off his dimpled skin and then takes his leave from the dining table, Tooru’s view filled with his back as he scrubs his plate over the sink, the water a persistent hush. Tooru hasn’t been to Tobio’s apartment in Rome yet, but he’s familiar with this view, and of the one in Tobio’s bedroom, his gray stretched canvas headboard and the deep navy blue of his sheets.

He’d gotten a video tour when Tobio moved in. Peered through his camera and tried to imagine how the space would bend around his weight, too, the pulsing indent of his body on the couch beside Tobio. But still, Tooru doesn’t know Rome the way he’d shown Tobio around San Juan and made sure that every paved road and shuttered establishment knew of his presence double fold. Not yet, at least. There’s a promise tucked into the folds, the thick of it. Not yet, but one day.

“Where are you going again?” Tooru asks, propping him up against his kitchen counter while he bends over the box, flakes of pastry escaping from the graceful curve of his back running long. “Don’t go meeting anybody cute, okay, Tobio?”

At that, Tobio snorts, turning and padding back to his phone even as his hands drip damply against his studio floors. Tooru pretends to hate that habit of his, always pushing a towel into his hands at the nearest instance, but secretly he likes the wet press of his hands up against the back of his shirt and the way Tobio presses his fingers into Tooru’s neck to annoy him. Skin so cold and waterworn it folds Tooru’s cramping, searing desire into something more manageable.

“There’s nobody to meet,” Tobio says pointedly. “Besides, I’ll be with my teammates the entire time. That’s as much of a turn-off as the engagement ring. Hey, are we inviting our teammates to the wedding?”

Tooru pauses, half a medialuna sticking out of his mouth, and then he quickly severs it with his teeth and swallows down the butter of the pastry and the lingering sweetness from the promise of wedding cake. “I mean, sure?” he says thickly, thinking. “I think a lot of my teammates want to be there ever since the Olympics—”

“You brought that upon us.”

“—But they’d have to fly out. It’s a destination wedding, I guess. For me, at least, and the people I know here.” He pauses, the implication striking him over the head with a dull roar. “Wait, we are getting married in Japan, right?”

“Um,” Tobio says, and the slightly constipated look that floats over his face tells Tooru that he hasn’t thought about it either. They’re both so terrible at this. It’s one thing to agree that they’re ready for marriage and another to think about the logistics of it, especially when all Tooru can think about is the date in the future when he’ll be tied to Tobio in every way possible, even name. It’s the last tautly held thread between them from continent to continent, and the moment he can knot it around the harbor he calls home he’ll finally feel tethered.

They’re so awful at this, but it’s kind of on-brand. Tooru and his assumptions and Tobio who hasn’t thought of little else that is not volleyball. His hands itch; he’s already thinking of running down to the store down the street to purchase a big binder, the heavy-duty kind, so he can write all of this down and then plan out every other detail they will come across and those that will remain irrelevant.

“Miwa’s in Tokyo, but Tsukishima, Hitoka, and Tadashi are all still in Miyagi,” Tobio says, his trailing voice an afterthought. “Hinata’s in Brazil, so he’ll just have to fly out. Everyone’s split between Tokyo and Miyagi, actually, even my upperclassmen.”

“Same here,” Tooru says, mind drifting to Hajime and Hanamaki out in Tokyo along with a few of his underclassmen and the rest of them, Matsukawa and his family included, still out and around his hometown. Same old Sendai—for a while, he hadn’t been able to tell if the edges couldn’t stretch to contain him or if he had to fight his way out of its grasp, but now returning, even if it is to see his parents, who are now less enthused to get on a plane just to see their son, feels like trying to fit into a pair of stretched jeans that he’s outgrown. He fits, but only barely, and his movements are stiff, uncomfortable.

It fills him with aching bitterness to see the family-owned konbini a few blocks down from Aoba Johsai that he used to frequent for post-practice onigiri replaced with a standard Lawson. An udon shop switched out for soba. A great oak tree in the park once documented in a framed picture of Tooru grinning from its outstretched arms now chopped down and chipped away. Each block of Sendai feels like a puzzle piece that’s been shoved into the wrong slot, the cardboard edges riding up against its chafing interior, and the strange malformation of his familiar childhood scene only emphasizes everything that he left behind.

Tooru switches over to a new tab; there was a hotel in the central part of Sendai that he remembers having been renovated all through his years in middle school and high school, and from the looks of it, it’s just been refurbished and expanded. He swallows around a lump in his throat at the strikingly odd sight of it, attempts and fails to replace the memory swathed in caution tape and shoddy wooden paneling in his mind.

“Maybe Tokyo, then,” Tooru hedges. “It’ll be easier for incoming flights, anyway. It would be very extravagant. Think of it: a wedding in the middle of an urban paradise, the hub of Japan’s business. Everyone would have fun there.” If the scenery will be unfamiliar anyway, they might as well pull out the big guns. That way, Tooru can preserve the image of Sendai in his head. Mentally, he begins calculating the Shinkansen fare for his parents, sister, and nephew.

“I thought you said garden wedding,” Tobio says, but he’s distracted now, the camera trained up to his chin as he walks toward his bedroom and begins rifling through his closet. Tooru bites back a grin at the ridiculous, unflattering angle. “Would it be more expensive in Tokyo? That’s not even a question.”

“We’ll only get married once,” Tooru says, leaning onto his elbows and sighing gustily. Every time he says the word, it’s like a bright spot opens up on the horizon, real estate out in space under their name and in their honor. “Besides, I was right. It’d be too hot. Your sister’s already there, too, so she can do your hair in case you make a mess of it.”

“Tokyo, then,” Tobio says. There’s the telling clatter of clothes hangers rattling against a metal bar, and then the screen goes black before it abruptly bursts into light again, the angle focused on Tobio’s furrowed eyebrows and nose held right in the middle of the screen. “I’ll call you when I get back. I think I’m running late.”

“Of course you are,” Tooru says, smiling, and then he picks himself back up to give him a proper goodbye. “We’ll talk more about the guestlist another day. Don’t drink too much, Tobio, or you’ll never master that serve!”

“I’ve already mastered it,” Tobio grumbles, eyes flicking upward, but he sounds fond. Begrudging about it, but fond. “Bye, Tooru. Love you.”

“Love you too,” Tooru says softly, and then the call cuts, the last image of Tobio’s bright and honest grin echoing in his mind long after his phone screen goes black. He grips the counter, suddenly unmoored by the depth of the distance between them. Five hours and eleven thousand kilometers. Marriage logically won’t reduce the gaping maw between them, but he wants it so badly it makes his teeth ache, and he gives up on eating any more pastry.

He’d gone through half the box, but still, Tooru remains hungry. A scarcity that he can’t fill with food but only the answer to his want that slots between his lips like a fish’s mouth to a hook.

Argentinian summer bears down upon Tooru like the scalding heat of holding your hands just close enough to a kettle over the stove to bring sweat to condensation, and time melts away under the pressure too, its wax form whittling down under the steam.

It gets away from him. Flees to the peripherals of his mind and then stays there, dancing, waiting, a dandelion that holds itself in anticipation of spinning into the breeze before its release. Tooru knows, theoretically, that there’s still more to be done regarding the wedding, but the insistent glimmer of it peeters off the more the court demands his attention instead.

Tobio understands. It’s how it’s always been with Tooru and volleyball and Tobio, too, so there’s nobody at fault when their plans, so far in the future and just out of arm's length, get pushed even further out of the limelight. They’ll get there. Eventually. One day. One summer, when the sun is just right and Tobio’s jaw is so soft beneath his hands and everyone can make it to Tokyo. Tokyo, because Sendai is too precious for the bumbling mass of celebrity athletes and friend of a friend’s, and the streets of Tooru’s childhood neighborhood were never built to withstand such a hefty weight. So; they’ll get there, to Tokyo.

That is a promise in and of itself, and Tooru holds the fluttering hope of it close to his chest, even when his heart flops over pathetically and whines and makes a general mess of him. Because somewhere in another continent, Kageyama Tobio is wearing his engagement ring and they’re going to get there one day. That faith becomes a kernel that he pushes away for safekeeping, hibernating during the cold months. Tooru, waiting for salvation, bushy-tailed and wide-eyed. Tobio, the solstice moon, so very round and blue.

They make a silently mutual agreement to let their plans frost over as the slip-slick month of December skitters past them (while the sun bakes overhead Argentina soil), and then it doesn’t stop, the unfurled length of the volleyball season coiling up with a neat zip as they collide headfirst into March. CA San Juan wins as many matches in straight sets as they lose, and the entirety of Tooru’s world narrows down to the pen-point that is volleyball and exhausting the rest of his energy keeping up his relationships not just with Tobio but also his friends and family. It scribbles an inked image that has no room for wedding talk, least of all the reservation with a florist that he keeps pushing back and pushing back until he cancels it altogether.

Tooru emerges from the season with another year of league volleyball under his belt, and then he boards a flight straight to Rome.

Italy steals Tooru’s breath and returns it to him halfheartedly, and still, he hardly has the oxygen to suck in his gasp when Tobio takes him around the city to play tourist before they return to his flat and christen it that night as a new home, a new bed. Tooru mouths all the Italian words he learns into the bruising splotches blooming over Tobio’s skin.

They remind him of flowers, which reminds him of the florist that he’s left on read for the past three months, and he groans and flops back onto Tobio’s silken pillows, one arm thrown dramatically over his eyes. “What are we thinking for the floral centerpiece?” he asks, eyes still closed. In the dark, he sees the deep blue of Tobio’s gaze and the warm part of his mouth. “Minimalistic ikebana or the whole shebang? We could do roses and vines exploding out of vases. An artfully placed fan, if you will.”

“I’m allergic to pollen,” Tobio says doubtfully, and a snort escapes Tooru before he can restrain it in his chest, one hand blindly reaching out to slap him lightly across the head. “Ow.”

“We can’t not have flowers, Tobio,” Tooru teases. “It’s a whole thing. I think my mother would throw a fit if we didn’t have them.” He’s beginning to piece it together in his mind; a banquet hall, large enough to hundreds of guests he’s starting to realize will have to be included, most out of obligation, a select few because neither of them can imagine their marriage without them present. Tablecloths with scalloped lace instead of hand-woven silver wire. An ikebana centerpiece, the petals delicate white and a pale dyed blue.

Tobio turns on his side and looks up at him with his soul-shattering, solstice moon eyes, and the image in Tooru’s head goes shaky, dissipating altogether when Tobio pulls him closer until their skin presses so close it erupts into bright blue flame. “Don’t talk about your mother when you’re in my bed.”

“We’re never going to get anything done,” Tooru whispers, but he lets himself be pulled away anyway, closing his eyes to the gentle swell of the moonlit tide. Tobio in Rome, a shore, a point of salvation. The only harbor in the world where Tooru is willing to sink his anchor deep into the trenches of the earth. Scattered, surfing, driftwood, all slowing to a stop before a man whose gravitational force exceeds that of the stars.

“We have all the time in the world,” Tobio says again, and it’s the cusp of April, a spring that will totter right into the summer that marks one year since their engagement. For a man like Tooru who has spent his years sprinting toward the first promise of success and somebody like Tobio who has a fickle attention span for patience when it comes before his dreams, it’s nice, for once, to allow something to drift toward them instead of having to ache for it. They have time. They’ll always have time. They’ll have the rest of their lives.

There’s never enough time in each other’s presence, however, and after they spend all of their stolen time pointedly forgetting about the wedding, Tooru’s eyes fly open right as they’re kissing in front of airport security at Fiumicino, a surge of panic as bright as his bone-deep longing lancing through him.

“The guest list!” he gasps, eyelashes fluttering when he pulls away and Tobio comes back with a slightly grumpy look on his face. “We never decided on a guest list—”

There’s a hand over his mouth and what is definitely petulance sparking in Tobio’s eyes, the curve of his lips set into a frown. “Draft it on the plane and send it to me when you land,” he says, rolling his eyes, and then he shuts Tooru up before he can talk any longer about inane things when he can work his desire into the inside of his jaw. Scrambles his brain too while he’s at it, so the entire flight back, Tooru’s thinking about Tobio’s fingers drumming against the inside of his thigh instead of whether he’s supposed to invite the janitor of his apartment building in Buenos Aires to their wedding or not.

During the weeks of training inching up to the full-blown season, Tooru makes a little more headway. Tobio does, too, perhaps out of some misguided sense of obligation to relieve some of the planning on Tooru’s end, who insists that he likes it, and it helps. Sometimes he’ll wake up at his keyboard, the whole alphabet stamped over his face, and when he wipes his sleep-sticky eyes to attention he’ll find a chain of increasingly exasperated texts from Tobio that cumulate in a single link to a high-rated suit rental service located midway between the two hotel venues they’re thinking of booking.

But the twelve hour time distance is brutally exacting, and they hardly have the time or opportunity to catch each other on the outskirts of their already busy schedules, let alone once their matches begin again with brightened vigor and the traveling takes another toll on their plans. Tooru watches the wedding vision, one that had come in a little more color like a flickering, malfunctioning radio jumping through stations, go entirely blank.

“I don’t think we’re going to get married this summer, Tobio,” he warbles drowsily over the phone, his eyelids heavier than the weights his personal trainer makes him lift.

He’d woken up at four am before practice in revenge for having to miss the past two days of calling Tobio due to schedule conflicts, and the sun hasn’t even begun to think of lifting above the world, but the bright laughter that crackles over his phone chases the shadows out the corners of his room. He smiles, unbidden, the way flowers burst into bloom under the offering of daylight.

“It’s June, and we haven’t even picked a venue, let alone put down a deposit,” Tobio says, and that just makes Tooru groan while the other peers down at him over the screen with a grin on his face, the streets of Rome sliding past him while he’s driven back to his flat from practice by a teammate who lives nearby. “It’s already summer. It’d take a miracle to pull that off.”

“And miracles don’t just happen to people,” Tooru grumbles, succumbing to the voice in his head lulling him back to sleep. The world pulses. If he’s dreaming, he’s thinking of Tobio. “I know. But I make miracles; I don’t wait for them to come to me.”

“Really?” Tobio’s being indulgent. He’s probably still fucking smiling, and Tooru inwardly nurtures a pebble of envy that he’s not the one who gets to see it in person. Mentally laser beams the driver to infinity so he can skip across the world and settle into that seat, see that smile for his own hapless self. “What miracles have you made, then?”

“I’m in Argentina, did you know that?” Tooru half-slurs into his pillow. It’s probably a good thing that he’s not across the world in Rome driving Tobio back to his flat because he’d run them right off the road. “I used to be deathly afraid of planes when I was a kid. We flew to America to visit family and I cried the whole way there and back, and now I fly regularly! Tell me that’s not a miracle, Tobio.”

“Maybe that’s just you, growing up,” says Tobio. Tooru hopes that he’s wearing earbuds or something. In the same fashion that his voice would be contained, he almost wishes that there was a similar contraption on the speaker’s end so that all the words for Tooru remain his alone. Childish, foolish, lovestruck sentiment. Four am half-baked thoughts and Spanish love songs warbling over the radio for late-night lovers. Early morning. Whatever. Lovers; everywhere. Across the world. On Tooru’s phone screen. In a car in Rome.

“I got an Olympic medal, too,” Tooru adds as an afterthought. “Sounds like a miracle to me.”

“It’s not a miracle if you put in the hard work to get there,” Tobio says reasonably, except his reasoning sounds suspiciously as if he’s arguing with Tooru just for the sake of it. Just because he’s so sleepy and so half-lucid and so terribly, unfathomably in love. Four am on a Tuesday and he was up until twelve, picking out wedding rings. Fuck.

“I got you to accept my proposal!” Tooru says triumphantly, his gotcha. It’s almost been a year, just two months shy of a full revolution around the sun, but the tan on his skin still hasn’t faded. Nor has the heatstroke he’d been afflicted with that day in Tokyo when he pressed Tobio close enough to his chest to burn the fuck up. A chronic affliction, that one. Perennial.

Tobio’s eyebrows furrow on the screen, and his face angles closer to the camera. “‘A surprising and welcome event that is not explicable by natural or scientific laws and is therefore considered to be the work of a divine agency,’” he reads aloud. “That’s Oxford’s definition of a miracle. Which god did you get in touch with to rig this, Tooru?”

Grumbling, Tooru peels open his eyes and switches over to his search browser, squinting. “Alternative definition: ‘An amazing product or achievement, or an outstanding example of something.’ Listen, with the history we have, let it be known that locking you in will be the achievement of my life. I suppose. Though there was that one setter award back in middle school.”

“Even greater than the Olympic medal?” Tobio’s face is wrought with skepticism, which makes sense because he’s Oikawa Tooru and that’s an Olympic medal, but also—he’s Oikawa Tooru. This is Kageyama Tobio. Duh.

“Even the Olympic medal,” Tooru swears, because he’s got another one of those gearing in his joints for 2024 but there was only one match in Tokyo where he could show his birthland just how he never needed it to win. Victory singing in his veins. A ring on his finger. Who needs gold when all he’s ever known is blue?

“Really?”

“Really.”

“Are you sure?”

“Certain.”

“Even if—”

“God, can’t you ever tell me you love me back in a normal way?!”

There’s an article from a vapid but popular tabloid in Tokyo.

It’s first found by a certain Akaashi Keiji, who Tooru hears works somewhat in the realm of editing or publications or something, and he sends it to Bokuto, who has such a big mouth that he shares it with Miya Atsumu, who emails it to Hajime because he’s the nosiest person possibly in the entire country, and that’s how it ends up blinking back at him on his screen, which he then texts to Tobio. Because it’s about them.

RADIO SILENCE ON WEDDING BETWEEN CELEBRITY ATHLETES OIKAWA TOORU AND KAGEYAMA TOBIO: IS A GRAND CELEBRATION TO BE ANNOUNCED, OR IS A SPLIT ON THE TABLE?

“This is so fucking stupid,” Tooru hisses into his phone because, as he so elegantly put it, it is incredibly fucking stupid. Did it seem like he and Tobio were broken up when he flew to Rome at the tail end of March? What about when they were photographed together in Kyoto, their heads bowed together in such perfect synchronicity they didn’t notice the camera shutter going off behind them? Or what about Tobio’s latest Instagram post after his latest win with JNT, where Hoshiumi and Shouyou (hilariously enough) lifted him over their heads, victory buoying their spirits and the engagement ring on a chain around his neck the sparkling centerpiece of the damn photo?

“People will find a story wherever they think to spin one,” Tobio says, but he’s also frowning. It’s the same put-out look he gets on his face whenever his setting isn’t up to par until he’s analyzing the root of the problem, trimming his nails into careful crescents or turning into bed a half hour earlier. For something like this, however, there’s no way to chase the issue to the root—or make it any more obvious that they’re still together. On the topic of their wedding, well. They’re getting there.

“If we plan the biggest, most spectacular wedding that Japan has ever seen, then they’ll all eat their words,” Tooru hisses, navigating to his abandoned planning spreadsheet with renewed vigor. There’s nothing like a lack of faith in him that gets his blood pumping like this. He became a naturalized Argentinian citizen to snatch opportunities before could leave him behind—hell, a gossip magazine looking for a quick buck isn’t going to get the best of him.

“I think that’s just confirming one of their two guesses,” Tobio points out, but he has that tiny curve tucked into the corner of his mouth that means he’s pleased whenever Tooru goes to bat for them, as if Tooru wouldn’t swing, wouldn’t send the ball spinning. Home run out of the fucking park.

“No, no, I’m going to be so good at this,” Tooru insists, slender fingers moving up to massage his temples and get the blood in his brain moving. He’ll need it for all the research he’s about to embark on. The blaze of his computer screen in the dark room—it’s night now, morning in Japan—is the first tiny beacon of light that declares to the world that they’re going to make it through despite society’s perennial pessimism, and they’re going to have the best wedding to boot. It’ll break records. Guinness will be calling them up before they’ve walked back down the aisle. Eat shit, world.

“Alright,” Tobio drawls, clearly only half-listening, half-believing. “There’s a couple of other articles saying the same thing, by the way. Maybe it’s a rumor going around.”

“Let them!”

Tobio snorts all of a sudden, the sound breaking Tooru out of his intense enthrallment with his computer. He softens, then, because they may be the victims of petty gossip and clickbait headlines, but they don’t know anything about Tooru and Tobio and every other wedding they attended before they got their heads out of their asses and realized they wanted to marry each other. “Actually, there’s one reporter in Singapore who’s tremendously convinced that we’ll be in love for the rest of time. They’re linking the Tokyo article in her comments, and she’s responding like she knows us.”

“Well,” Tooru huffs, oddly vindicated. “It’s good to know that it’s not just me and my Notion page against the world.”

It’s been a year, but who cares? What’s one year compared to the promise of decades? An entire lifetime plus whatever bits and pieces they manage to scrounge here or there. In sickness and in health and all that jazz.

Eat shit, world. Well, world minus a few choice individuals.

In the nature of Tooru’s neuroticism that drove him to study videos of his opponents' matches instead of sleeping, he takes to this wedding planning business with all the gravitas of a fated Olympic match-up. With all the free time he can afford to thieve away, he assembles a cohesive list: hotel options to rice crackers for the hikidemono to transportation fees, tracing threaded lines across the globe from South America to Europe to Japan.

At some point, he’s going to have to think about wedding vows, but brushing the mere idea of that, even with a feather-light touch, is enough to make his breath seize in his lungs, so he doesn’t. It’s a problem for later Tooru, who is going to have to attempt to summarize nine years of wingspan in a couple of minutes. An impossible feat. One on par with winning an Olympic gold or stretching a fitted sheet over an unforgiving mattress, even.

There are dates to choose and dinner courses to pick through and venue sizes to consider and a photographer to hire, but still, he keeps coming back to the vows, even though the idea of it might kill him, and for a couple of days everything he does comes through in script.

KAGEYAMA TOBIO

Tooru, wouldn’t it be easier to hire somebody to do all of this for us?

OIKAWA TOORU

Tobio-chan, you think I would take the chance of a lifetime just to put it in the hands of somebody I don’t even know?! Do you even know me?

KAGEYAMA TOBIO

Right, I forget that everything you do is carefully orchestrated. Like that one Christmas when you got Hoshiumi-kun and Ushijima-san to take me to the mall, where you were dressed as Santa-san.

OIKAWA TOORU

I had to give you a gift for the holidays! And the kids loved me.

KAGEYAMA TOBIO

Your hair never looked better.

OIKAWA TOORU

I’m going to pretend you didn’t say that, Tobio-chan. Besides, I’m a setter. What else would you have expected?

KAGEYAMA TOBIO

I’m a setter and I’m not nearly as obsessive as you are.

OIKAWA TOORU

That’s because you have a concerning lack of brain cells.

(Oikawa Tooru clicks onto Notion spreadsheet on his computer)

Say, do you want to go the traditional tai meshi route or French-inspired dishes for the dining course?

KAGEYAMA TOBIO

(silence)

OIKAWA TOORU

Or should we just serve milk?

KAGEYAMA TOBIO

Milk?

The reason that he doesn’t just hire a wedding service who will take care of everything there is to possibly housekeep, like pay-per-head catering services and purchasing cardstock for the announcement sign that’ll go up in the reception room, and also everything that doesn’t matter, like whether they should serve fifteen or twenty-five grams of caviar with the fifth course and whether the lace tablecloths should be scalloped or threaded with silver wire, is because he is Oikawa Tooru and he is a micro-manager. It’s his job to decide between scallops and silver, and then if he chooses silver, there’s still copper to consider.

Because he is Oikawa Tooru, there are a million and a half affairs to sort through, and none that he would trust to leave in another’s sketchy opinion, even somebody who’s been trained in this field as long as he’s been playing volleyball. Besides, it feels more personal this way if he handpicks the floral arrangements, the petals still warm to the touch.

He leaves fifty messages on Tobio’s phone while the other is asleep in Japan about meticulous things like baby’s breath and color schemes shaded in cerulean, spiraled navy, and Alice blue, and then resolves it by the time Tobio wakes up for nine am practice and Tooru is huddled over his computer, eating his dinner.

“Seating arrangements,” Tooru says once, like an epiphany, coming to a halt right in the middle of a supermarket aisle. He’s stopped right by the baking equipment, surrounded by heavy paper bags of sweetener and flour and vanilla extract imported from Madagascar. Tobio’s on the phone with him, voice coiled through his earbuds and tucked away in his back pocket. “We need to do that. Imagine if we sat Takeru next to Natsu? Those two have had some sort of beef ever since I went up against Shouyou in Sao Paulo. This is why we can’t hire a wedding planner for these sorts of things. It’s intricate.”

“A wedding planner wouldn’t have sat them together because Takeru is technically family of the groom and Natsu’s just there because she’s Hinata’s sister,” Tobio huffs, his voice coming across tinny. The connection cuts spots into his words like the hitch in his throat whenever Tooru snakes his hand up his thigh. “Are we even inviting her?”

“Well,” Tooru says, and then comes up short. “I mean. Should we? I’ve signed her jersey before.”

“So have I,” says Tobio, sounding amused, the words curling up faint and warm at the edges even though he’s so far away and the phone speaker does no justice to him. “But isn’t the guest list getting a little big? Who are we even supposed to invite? If we invite Natsu, does that mean we have to invite Tsukishima’s brother? What about everyone on JNT?”

“We got invited to a few of their weddings,” Tooru grumbles, resuming his search through the supermarket as he spins glass bottles of ground cinnamon on their feet, examining the brand names. “It wouldn’t hurt to return the favor. We know a lot of people, don’t we?”

“Don’t I know it,” Tobio mutters. “Who else are you going to add to the list at this point? Taylor Swift? Hatsune Miku? Lewis Hamilton?”

Tooru barks out a laugh, then covers his mouth immediately afterward and offers his other hand as an apology when an elderly woman in front of him turns at the sharp sound. Tobio has always had this ability to make him unbearable. White-hot. The pith of a flame where it burns bright and blue before it scalds over into orange hunger.

“Might as well,” he says, amusement leaking into every movement he makes and breath he takes. What a privilege it is to be planning a wedding with the love of his life in a supermarket. “I’d like to announce our union to the entire world if you’d let me.”

“Please don’t embarrass me,” Tobio says over the line, and from the sound of it, he’s muffling his voice. Tooru immediately forgets about baking soda and Dutch-processed cocoa powder and cinnamon sun freckles in favor of picturing the canned tomato red blush on the other’s face, in another country, continent, longing nutmeg-warm dream.

Tooru’s fingers still, their dance between spice bottles coming to a halt. “There’s nobody even there to see your embarrassment!” He can imagine Tobio, alone in his flat at this angle of the clock’s hand, hunched over his journal, or maybe carefully applying that cuticle oil he insists helps him set better but really just makes him smell like lavender. Like singing. Like kissing his knuckles and coming back powdered in periwinkle blue. Maybe he’s smiling. Maybe they’re both smiling.

“Right, well,” Tobio huffs. “Don’t tell anyone this, but I don’t care who you invite as long as I get to marry you at the end of the damn night.” And then the phone cuts with an incriminating beep, that same, familiar, childish mortification that has Tobio killing calls and ducking out of nose kisses and Tooru always, always laughing.

All the sugar in the supermarket could have spilled before his feet with how sweet the world is humming. Tooru presses his simple, earnest words between the palms of his hands like flower petals and mails them off in envelopes so he can keep them forever. And ever, and ever, and ever.

OIKAWA TOORU

So, does this mean I can invite Watanabe Ken or not?

KAGEYAMA TOBIO

What is this, the Oscars? This isn’t a movie.

OIKAWA TOORU

With the way the press is covering our every move, you’d think we’re stars, Tobio.

KAGEYAMA TOBIO

Well, then. Invite whoever you like.

OIKAWA TOORU

Will you fall out of love with me if I invite Robert Pattinson? You know a lot of people think he’s attractive.

KAGEYAMA TOBIO

In what world would I ever fall out of love with you?

OIKAWA TOORU

(silence)

KAGEYAMA TOBIO

Tooru?

OIKAWA TOORU

You can’t make me want to kiss you when you’re eleven thousand kilometers away.

KAGEYAMA TOBIO

If this is a film, it’s not a very good one.

OIKAWA TOORU

Boo. Tomato. Tomato. Shut up and marry me already, Tobio.

The season at CA San Juan waxes and wanes and across the world, even with Tooru and Tobio tucked into the far corners of their respective foreign leagues, and rumors swirl of the newest it couple reaching out to Japanese patisseries for cake designs, silk from Chinese vendors for a high end blue and white ribbon ensemble swathed over the walls, and an alleged booking with Hotel Gajoen for the most expensive hotel wedding bundle available.

Tooru isn’t entirely sure how the press knows all of this, actually. He’d be more concerned if he wasn’t over the moon every time he got in touch with another vendor and they confirmed another minor detail, settling the puzzle pieces that make up the wedding that inches slowly out of the tired dregs of imagination.

Like—

OIKAWA TOORU DELIBERATES BETWEEN TRADITIONAL BLACK ATTIRE AND BLUE AND RED STRIPED SUITS TO PAY HOMAGE TO BOTH HIS HOMELAND AND HIS NATURALIZED COUNTRY

“In what world would I ever do that,” Tooru says in disgust, sneering down at the offensive headline swimming across his screen with a hyper, biting font and a disgusting mock-up of what the suit would look like, and then he turns to his computer and books a fitting with the tailor for the next time Tobio and Tooru are in between professional and international leagues. Just to dispel the rumor that he’d settle for anything less than elegance. It’s a wedding, not a circus.

Or—

ARGENTINIAN SETTER OIKAWA TOORU REPORTEDLY GETS INTO CONTACT WITH UENO ZOOLOGICAL GARDENS TO HIRE EXHIBITION ANIMALS FOR GRAND WEDDING TO JNT STAR, KAGEYAMA TOBIO

They seem to still think that they’re putting on a circus. “Just how insufferable do they think I am?” Tooru says, striking an idea off his list in incriminating red ink that reads how many doves are too many? will they shit on black suit? It’s inhumane, anyway. God, to think that the media would believe him to cater in pandas.

And—

VOLLEYBALL PLAYER OIKAWA TOORU ALLEGEDLY UNLEASHES VIOLENT RAMPAGE UPON AN ASSISTANT WORKING FOR JAPAN’S TOP BOUTIQUE IN PREPARATION FOR WEDDING TO FAMED KAGEYAMA TOBIO

“Okay, why are they always targeting me and not Tobio?” Tooru says crossly, nearly baited into throwing his phone half across the room even with the knowledge that it’d shatter on his kitchen tile. He’d been cooking dinner until Hajime sent him a screenshot of the article accompanied by an insufferably neon yellow emoticon that seemed to laugh at Tooru instead of at the distasteful column, shedding the tears that Tooru wanted to cry at the insulting image they’ve painted of his reputation. Perhaps this is punishment for canceling on his florist so many times; he reschedules their appointment for the following Thursday.

The pot on the stove boils over in angry, blooming red and hissing oil, and his phone clatters onto the countertop. “Shit—”

Tooru’s used to media attention, especially as a starter on the Argentinian team as an obvious foreigner. And when that wave of scrutiny drew back, it rushed back with the fierce eagerness of a monsoon the minute Argentina won gold at the Olympics and reporters dug up the story that he’d played for Japan and never once made it to nationals—old news, by the way, and who even cares.

So this isn’t his first rodeo, nor is it his second, but even with the bull rampaging around the arena, steaming at his heels, it’s the first that he’s felt so utterly discomfited by it. It’s strange. He’s been the victim of far worse press than petty comments about his attitude and how he treats customer service representatives. It’s not the end of the world if somebody across the map muses that he has worse fashion taste than he’d ever be caught dead in.

But it’s the fact that it has to do with his marriage to Tobio, this quiet, gorgeous thing that he can’t announce to the world without multiplying its grandeur several times over that makes him want to burn every news publication that’s ever written about the two of them, even though everything is largely digital now instead of existing in print. He’d still do it, somehow. Purge the internet of any reference to the two of them that isn’t reverent, still.

So Tooru makes his plans and he bides his time, silently moving the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle that is their union on his own, and if Tobio notices what he’s doing, he doesn’t say a word about it. Watches it slip past them with all the grace of a star slowly reaching its expiry instead of going out with a bang, until the press gets bored and lets them be. To the quiet bubble where Tooru can truly breathe, even though its saline skin reaches across the world map and lands in Rome. Tobio breathes with him. The engagement ring sits habitually on his ring finger, even though it wouldn’t have been typical of him if he were still in Japan. But this feels like endurance. Like a promise that could hang twenty years heavy and never even dream of breaking.

Twenty years is a long time, but so is two, even with all its sage-tipped evergreen glory, and by the time another summer puts an impossible twelve hours between them, Tooru feels his patience stretch out like bubblegum, a thin thread that can only be held by a careful mouth and the epitome of faith.

Faith, Tooru has plenty of. Patience? Perhaps he is not the virtuous man he supposed himself to be.

“I want to marry you now,” Tooru whispers to his phone, cheek laid down upon the stained wood of his dining table in a rare show of true melancholy. Haplessness. Poor, poor Tooru, who just wants to marry his fiance already if not for the sport that they both could never give up inserting layers of distance between them of the like they’d never had to wring out before.

They’d overcome the rivalry before. The resentment. The hiss of breath through teeth and curdled admiration. If anything, he should be grateful that they’ve reached a point in their relationship where the only thing he has to be vexed about is their time difference instead of complicated feelings and inner conflict, but that would be downplaying the issue.

The issue being: Tooru wants to marry Tobio now, but that would mean flying to Rome and applying for marriage there and then having to deal with his captain chewing him out for ditching and spitting him out as a bedraggled—married, yes, but chastised—hull of a being.

“We haven’t even put down the deposit for the hotel we were looking at,” Tobio reminds him gently. It’s a blow that has Tooru sinking even deeper, if that’s possible, into the oak grains. Like rain soaking through wood until it’s nothing at all, the press of a finger coming back damp.

“Then I’ll do it right now,” Tooru threatens, but he doesn’t mean it, doesn’t lift his head from the smooth sanded timbered surface because it’s two am in Argentina and it’d be a poor decision to spend that much money at the drop of a hat, even if that hat is two years heavy and has spent an even more indiscernible amount of years in free fall.

Besides, there’s something inescapably grand feeling about the hotel, almost as if it’s too overbearing for a quiet love like theirs, and it’s not even the outrageous expenses that he’s now able to cover with his professional volleyball salary. Just the ink-soaked silhouette feels as if it eclipses their shadows, who have never needed anything more than a court and a phone to bridge the distance and the time to untangle all their twisted misunderstandings.

It feels—wrong, almost, as if they’re trying to paint their marriage in something that it’s not—pastel watercolors and Monet water lilies and gilded edges, when in reality, the canvas of their relationship bears an ugly, jagged cut right down the linen middle and the irony of stitching up a knife wound with a silver-pointed needle. They haven’t always been grand. They haven’t always been beautiful. And there’s a part of Tooru that doesn’t believe that they have to do anything— anything —to prove it to anybody else.

So what are they trying to prove? The legitimacy of their union, paid in silver and glory? And to whom? Themselves? The press? The world? The past two years they’ve spent in bated breath, the ikebana specialist he has no real answers for, a sleepy neighborhood in Miyagi that bears no promises and certainly not legends?

Tooru doesn’t know. He does not pay the deposit for the hotel.

The uncertainty pulls a taut string through the summer and stays in its dry and hollow chest, coiling around the slow and steady heartbeat that hovers just below the resting pulse. They lose the summer to the merciless jaws of time again; they’ve made peace with it this second time around, succumbing to the hectic frenzy of international flights and jetlag and warped time zones.

They thieve away hours in Rio and spend them like currency on the honey-sweet gift of each other’s presence. In Manila, Tooru kisses the ring he’d put around Tobio’s finger and inlays it with yet another promise, glistening beside its diamond sister. Bangkok finds them exchanging glances as they pass courts, heated things that they follow up on later in the night.

But the unease that rattles through Tooru like a bone-deep chill has nothing to do with any hypothetical apprehension about marrying Tobio and everything to do with the wedding preparation that exists on another plane of existence, somehow still looming like a threat despite being so far removed from their everyday life. They don’t have the luxury to deliberate about it, but even still, Tooru can’t make himself choose which suit design he wants to go with for the ceremony, how many heads the catering company should expect for the event, and he still hasn’t paid the damn deposit for the hotel waiting for his call.

They’d agreed on a summer wedding, and they may have all the time in the world, but summer only comes once every year, and he can’t help the feeling that they’re sliding through his fingers the longer he’s not married to Tobio. It’ll have to be next summer. Fitting, then, that he’d proposed at the 2021 Olympics, and they’ll be married when 2024 finds itself in Paris.

Three years is not a crime, but it is not a mercy. He feels his throat grow dry. Next summer will arrive as salvation. Next summer will mark the most important promise Tooru has ever made to Tobio. Next summer make the give of the knife taste sweet.

Next summer.

In the midst of cooking lunch in his apartment in San Juan, Tooru is struck by a terrible thought.

“One of us is going to have to give up our name,” Tooru says, spatula stilling in the air even as a droplet of darkened soy sauce slips off and drips sticky sweet into the flame, where it sizzles around the intrusion. Tooru feels the neat hiss of it like a zap through his entire body, shocking him into calcification right there on his kitchen tile.

Tobio squints at his newly made statue of a boyfriend over the screen. “Uh, yeah? Isn’t that the general consensus when couples get married?” Oh, sometimes it’s sweet how he never thinks.

“But which one of us is taking whose name,” Tooru says pointedly, shaking flaking cement off his feet while he unroots himself, pointing the spatula sternly in Tobio’s direction. A fleck of minced garlic leaps forward onto the screen and lands on Tobio’s pixelated cheek. “You do realize that this will change the name on our jerseys, right?”

His chest floods with searing heat at the idea of seeing Tobio in a uniform that’s been printed with the name Oikawa, the same possessive, needy thing that’s just as eager to be joined to him not just in hand but by law. Vicious want. It lances through his mind and leaves him reeling with images of Tobio marked with both his mouth and his name.

“Oikawa Tobio sounds stupid,” Tobio says peevishly. Tooru frowns deeply. “Imagine that getting announced overhead during a match. It sounds odd.”

“You sound odd,” Tooru shoots back childishly for lack of a better comeback, crossing his arms over his chest and frowning deeply at the phone. On the other end, Tobio doesn’t seem to notice, busy prepping his own dinner five hours shot forward into the future. Chopping bright red tomatoes into neat and pulpy slices, every movement careful and methodical the way he is with anything concerning his hands.

Tobio has always been conscientious like that, afraid that a small papercut or a poorly wrapped bandage would upset his play. The only time he isn’t as meticulous is when he places his hands into Tooru’s hold, which is as good as giving over his body to him. It takes a certain amount of trust to give up power to the fingers that trace out his lifeline.

“Do you really think that Oikawa Tobio is more flattering than Kageyama Tooru?” Tobio asks as he tosses a handful of spinach into a pan, the ensuing hushed whistle painting an image of leavy bunches shriveling down into emerald green hearts. Shrinking down under heat and pressure until each stem finds itself curling toward the center, heart meeting hand meeting mouth. “I’m a fan of the latter, personally.”

“That’s—” Tooru starts, and then he finds himself unable to continue, tongue halting before his teeth and melting back, formless. Each rebuke that pearls up in his throat wisps backward. He feels a little weak at the knees, actually, a little bit sick, just the slightest part lightheaded, as if an earthquake with an epicenter of Oikawa Tooru has rumbled through the world that only he sees. His linoleum tile cracks a little bit under his feet. He takes a step forward to recenter himself and almost crumbles when his limbs decide to go boneless, those, too, losing faith in his ability to stand before the idea of being claimed in Tobio’s family name.

Oh.

Oh.

“What’s so wrong with the name Oikawa?” Tooru says feebly, just because. He wouldn’t be Oikawa Tooru if he didn’t put up a bit of a fight. “It’s very respectable. I hear it belongs to this big-time athlete over in Argentina who’s won an Olympic medal and a few titles if you care about those things.”

“Vain idiot,” Tobio huffs. Because he always has to insult him even when he appears endlessly endeared, a smile breaking over the gentle slope of his mouth. “You know, it’s not such a bad thing to call surrender once, Kageyama Tooru.”

A choked sound escapes Tooru’s mouth before he can wrangle it back, and he starts, hand flying to his mouth as if he can contain the memory of the noise post-humously. It’s too late. He’s already laid in his grave.

Tobio squints at him over the camera, and Tooru feels the coffin lid slam shut when he sees the disbelieving grin on the other’s face. “Did you like that? Kageyama Tooru?”

“I don’t even know what you’re talking about,” Tooru lies around the bars of his fingers jailing any more betraying sounds from escaping his mouth. His lungs feel as if they’ve given up on pulling oxygen from the air. Maybe he’ll just suffocate. For the record, let it be known that Oikawa Tooru died happy, loved, and at the hands of his fiance.

“Imagine my name stretched across your jersey,” Tobio muses, and Tooru lets out a high keening sound at the thought. He’d always wondered what the name Kageyama would look like against the sky-loving Argentinian blue. Not like this, though. He’d never thought of it in that way. Perhaps it was his brain instinctually protecting him from an image that would throw him into immediate cardiac arrest. “This is my husband, Kageyama Tooru.”

I’m going to die, Tooru thinks with devastating clarity.

A high-pitched beeping sound fills the air, and he tears his gaze sharply off the kitchen tile he’d been steadfastly scrutinizing to see smoke rising in billowing black clouds from his pan, sugary honey soy sauce glaze turning from sticky caramel to acrid char, and he curses, leaping into action just in time to take the pan off the heat and onto another burner, his heartbeat once again restored.

“Fuck,” he whispers, peering into the blackened mess and wondering if his cheeks are steaming in a similar fashion.

Oikawa Tooru died hapless, smitten, and a fool in the face of love.

In the end, after two and a half years of indecision, they are delivered a three-month deadline to marry.

Not because summer is coming upon them with the swell of a tidal wave crashing, even though it does feel like that, the promise of the ocean glittering far in the distance. They’d planned to marry after the Olympics, their own personal award ceremony, but three months from now gives them until the beginning of June.

The horizon is set upon them like this—

“I want to marry you now,” Tooru says over the phone, spinning around in his office chair before his computer. It’s a familiar mantra now, but not well-worn; he could say it as many times as he wanted and it would never get old just by virtue of marry and any iteration of Tobio being included in the same sentence. He could want to marry him forever. They could go through with their wedding and he’d always want to profess to the world just how much he loves him.

“We’ll see each other in a few weeks,” Tobio reminds him, and then his voice drops lower, as if confessing a secret. “I want to marry you already too. I like this ring, but I think a different one would make for a nice change.”

Tooru closes his eyes, the rings that he’d bought appearing before his darkened gaze automatically. A matching pair with the same slender, platinum curve but slightly altered in the gemstone placement, different enough that they can be told apart but still noticeably belonging as a pair. A line of white diamonds and a larger, centered piece. The white gold would go well with his tanned skin. It’d fit snugly around his neck on a chain during his matches.

“You can’t just say things like that because we can’t just fly to Tokyo tomorrow and sign for a marriage right then and there,” Tooru says, his frustration bubbling over until he feels overcome with it. Incandescent, champagne fizz, seafoam crawling onto the shore with all the gravitas of an orderly tsunami. He steadies himself before his desk, putting an end to his mindless circles with a rush of vertigo that he blinks away in determination as he logs onto his computer.

“What are you doing?” Tobio says eventually after a considerable amount of silence has welled up between them. He sounds suspicious. “Are you plotting something unwise?”

“I don’t know why you’re so convinced that I’m up to some sort of crime,” Tooru huffs, not even peeling his eyes off the screen as he navigates through the Argentinian government website he’d found himself on.

He needs to make an appointment. The next available time slot is fifteen minutes from now; he submits the request and then leaps to his feet, snatching his phone while he lets the screen blink out of existence and jamming his shoes on as he makes for the door.

“Are you going somewhere? I thought you were turned in for the evening,” Tobio says, but the sound is somewhat lost on Tooru, who’s only half-present as he briskly walks through the hallway and makes a sharp right for the stairwell that he takes whenever he has somewhere to be and little time to do it.

“I’m going to get my affidavit of competency to marry signed so that we can get legally married in Japan and I can finally feel like I’ve made a significant step toward finally going through with our wedding,” Tooru says. The city sidewalk comes up to his feet with each slap of his shoes—and then he’s jobbing, running, breaking into a sprint with his head down and a silly grin stretched across his face. Tobio, a blurry mess on the phone still in his hand, loses his responses to the wind, which buoys Tooru all the way to the nearest bus station.

Tobio’s face glitches into pixelated segments before it refocuses, his own stupid smile on his face when Tooru brings the screen back up. He can see himself in the corner. He looks like an idiot. He looks as if he’s been built by glee, brick by brick of white-hot adrenaline. The kind hands of a love that takes impossible distances and compresses them until they can fit in the palms of their hands. And when push comes to shove, those hands, no less kind but still, not unforgiving in their insistence, push them stumbling into the light. Toward each other. Somehow, across the ocean and from Japan and through the paved roads of Italy, always toward each other. A sunflower that thirsts for the sun. A compass with hands that always gravitate to a man.

Tooru gets the affidavit signed. He also learns that once it’s been signed, the paperwork is only valid for three months.

He isn’t even upset when he hears the news. How could he be—it only makes it that much more final, a gap that closes before its merciless jaw can hinge around them wholly. They’ll have to be married. It’s real. It’s happening.

Tooru fumbles for his phone outside of the embassy, his hands shaking with seismic trembles so insistent that he almost drops it onto the gray cracked sidewalk, and he’s still shaking when Tobio answers, hooking his phone between his ear and shoulder as he wanders down the street, directionless, wanting to go nowhere but toward his fiance.

“Hello?” Tobio says over the phone, and the sound of his voice, even as slightly different in tone as it is while funneled through an international line, makes a part of Tooru sink into himself with relief so potent the trembling stops altogether. Salvation. Mercy before reprieve can ask for forgiveness. “Did you get it signed?”

“Yes,” Tooru says, and then he laughs, the sound of it breathless, as if he’s been running a great distance. He stops in front of a shop that he doesn’t recognize in a quiet block of the city with a great blue door the color of the ocean and a tiny pot of maturing sunflowers twisting around each other, and he drops into a crouch, unable to keep himself up. He laughs again, because it’s silly, because it’s ridiculous, because they’ve spent two and a half years in deliberation and now that they’ve been forced into a time frame impossible to plan an entire wedding all he can feel is relief.

“What’s so funny?” Tobio says, and his voice sounds far, far away. Tooru wants him closer. Impossibly closer. Close enough that he can grip his hands and look him in those eyes when he says his next words.

“It’s only valid for three months,” Tooru says, grinning at the potted flowers before him. They’re just like him; yearning for the sunlight. Facing a direction that stretches east and loves in blue, blue, blue.

“That’s not enough time for a summer wedding.”

“I know. How do you feel about April?”

In the end, canceling his appointment with the ikebana specialist Tooru has been avoiding for over a year feels good. It would have been an expensive investment, anyway. He could make something similar with the flowers sold at the supermarket in the block over from his neighborhood in Sendai.

He also closes his spreadsheets for the last time—though it’s only after carefully going through and salvaging the vendors that he could still possibly need, though it limits itself to things like potential tailors and small catering services and one patisserie that he had his heart set upon.

Instead, he talks to his family. He cancels his appointments with Hotel Gajoen. He purchases the rings that have been existing at the forefront of his mind for the past year, and he has them mailed to his parents’ house in Sendai.

At the end of his season with CA San Juan, Tooru flies into Miyagi with all the ease of a puzzle piece slotting into place. One click and the glossy board runs smooth. And even though his blood now runs Argentine blue, Japan fixes a place for him on its horizon, where he can dream of the stars and the solstice moon and Kageyama Tobio.

If the world were a jigsaw puzzle, Tooru would trace every maddening, jagged edge until he found his way right back beside Tobio. It’s what he does, anyway—follows the contours of the globe over the telephone line until they’re able to meet once again, corner to corner to dead set center.

Tooru is back in stretched-out, tight-fitting Miyagi, and he does not even think about a grand hotel wedding in Tokyo. The capital is too big for them, anyway. Too grand. Too much space to even think about filling out its city lines that ache in lightning-shaped stretch marks.

Sendai is better. Sendai isn’t nearly as unfamiliar feeling when he focuses less on how it’s changed as opposed to the same shaped houses and the crack in the sidewalk outside his neighbor’s lawn that he’s been tripping over since he was five years old.

And it has Tobio now. After his season with Ali Roma is over, in the few weeks that they have before national training begins, he flies into Miyagi, takes his things from the stately home his grandfather left him and Miwa in the will, and then moves in alongside Tooru in his childhood bedroom.

Tooru’s room is a snapshot of the person he was when he was in high school, like stepping into a time capsule that’s been expanded and elongated. The billboard above his desk is studded with photos of Tooru and the Seijoh ensemble, wrinkled and yellowed at the edges with time. A hefty layer of dust sits atop his mirror, whose warped reflection reminds him of carefully coiffing his hair in the mornings before school even though he would throw it all to the wind during practice.

It’s surreal to look at the same background that featured in all of his old photos and superimpose his new self over it, with its fuller muscles and stretched-tight face and a chin that has a bit more of a confident set to it. Brown hair trimmed shorter. Grin that sits upon a mouth with smile lines that follow the shape of the crags of the Argentinian shoreline instead of the faultline that Japan sits upon.

Tobio appears behind him, and the illusion shatters completely when the hand donning the ring clasps over Tooru’s shoulder, and the glint of its reflection distracts him enough to tear his eyes away from the malformed version of his childhood self.

“Tooru,” he says, quiet as he always is when he’s inside family homes, a habit that Tooru has learned that he picked up from the signature silence of his childhood. “It’s April.”

Tooru beams, and he doesn’t have to look in the mirror to see how it erases two and a half years off his face, one decade, a lifetime of love. “It is, isn’t it?”

One of the first flutters of nerves Tooru ever experienced was a flight of butterflies that made a home in the empty cavern that was his empty stomach during his first volleyball match.

He remembers the adrenaline spiking through his veins, each electrical current jumping out of his skin. The way his heart skipped right over its usual rhythm to form a strange beat that fell out of harmonization with its usual tempo. And most of all, the cloying, clawing hunger for victory that saturated his need all the way to the bone.

It was a difficult thing to shake, but he eventually figured out how to shed the scaly skin of anxiety by the time he arrived at Kitigawa Daiichi through pure will and the conviction that all of the players he looked up to simply did not have the space for apprehension. If they had no need for it, then neither did Tooru, and with that firm belief, he stepped onto the court every day and played as if he were already a world-renowned star.

It worked, for a little bit. For a while. For many, many years, until one sharp point at the age of twenty-nine lodges itself into Tooru’s throat like a fishbone.

The thing is, as a setter, Tooru doesn’t wait for opportunities to come to him. He forces them out of thin air. Miracles out of matter. But his only job at the end of the aisle is to wait, and he may have had his share of that for the past couple of years, but now, standing at the altar, he has no choice but to let the butterflies in his stomach claw into the ravenous extents of his desire.

The fishbone knifes further into his throat. Cleaves apart his careful want until it splits open, raw and starving and red, and suddenly Tooru doesn’t care that he never had his destination wedding in Tokyo when all he wants is for Tobio to join him by his side.

Tobio steps forward from the trees flanked by Miwa, and the cardinal red fades over to deep, dark, consuming blue. The nerves bleed out, slowly, gently, clean and filtered. Tooru swallows and remembers nothing but the absence of a blade—and he can’t, for the life of him, remember what there was to be so worried about.

It’s just Tobio. That’s how it’s always been. When the world narrows down like this, to one lesser-known city in a Japanese prefecture with only their most trusted loved ones in attendance, there exists nobody else but Tooru and Tobio.

When Tobio starts down the aisle, the rest of the world succumbs to white noise except for the faint trickle of the piano filtering through his ears, a classical pianist named Charles Leclerc whom Tobio met while traveling around Italy. Still, that barely seeps through his consciousness even though he’d spent hours deliberating over which piece they’d want at their ceremony, already knowing that they wouldn’t go the traditional route.

Tooru swallows and finds his throat dry. Cracked land that’s had all its water chased out of its veins by the gentle touch of love, pooling instead at the heart, at the riverbed. He’s lovesick, delirious, head swimming in the lake that is his own salvation, the mercy that Tobio extended to him with a pruned and giving hand.

“Hi,” Tobio mouths, and then suddenly he’s in front of him, and the flood at Tooru’s feet almost destabilizes him. If he moved, he’d trip forward. Tobio smiles then, a small, secretive gesture that’s clearly meant for Tooru and Tooru alone, and he’s helpless when he returns it, as if he could know nothing else, succumb to nothing else. The white collared shirt underneath Tooru’s suit shines like a flag of surrender.

Speaking of which—

Tooru reaches out over the distance between them and adjusts Tobio’s lapel, the right side of it being slightly folded over awkwardly. And then, because it’s as if his fingers are drawn by a magnet, his hands drift upward and fuss with the bangs floating over his forehead, pushing them back so that his knuckles brush against his warm skin, anchoring him in the current. Thumbs at a smear of concealer swiped over Tobio’s undereye so that it melts into his flushed cheek.

“Sorry,” Tooru says, a laugh escaping his bitten lips. The blush on his face erupts like the sunrise in Sendai—it always breaks over the city line as if the jagged knife-edge of the skyscape cracks open the solar egg yolk. He tucks his hands behind his back, fidgeting fingers tucking into the negative space. There’s a light titter from their small audience but most notably an answering grin on Tobio’s end, the sun reflected in the swimming blue depths of the glittering sea.

And now they’re back, in Sendai. The place where it all started. In a way, it almost feels like fate—as fanciful and romantic as that reads, but even still. A circle that continues in on itself. A thankless luck that people like them don’t often have the chance to grasp while traveling between oceans and fault lines. Who else has the privilege of crossing a hill and finding a home that they do not have to construct with their bare hands on the other side?

Tooru clears his throat and tears his eyes away from Tobio because he knows that he won’t be able to unfasten his gaze if he lets it remain any longer. It settles in like hot glue and stays there, but while he’s buoyed by white-hot adrenaline and the knowing stare of Hajime’s eyes on him from the audience, he remembers where he is, if only for a moment.

That moment spins out and unspools itself into minutes that slip by like years until all that’s left to do is exchange their vows. If this were a romantic comedy, it’d go like this:

OIKAWA TOORU

I loved you from the moment I set my eyes upon you back in Kitagawa Daiichi, when I first spotted you with the pink cherry blossoms falling around your face, and even though we had a tumultuous few years during which I confused my passion for intensity, I never stopped loving you, not even for a moment. At every temple I visited, I prayed for faith.

KAGEYAMA TOBIO

(with a theatrical sniffle)

Oh my god! Kiss me and make me your husband right now!

But this is not a movie, and there is no grand film to be made out of simply being human, and there is nothing comedic to poke fun at when the only thing that Tooru finds himself doing as he opens his mouth is wiping away the tears welling at his eyes in selfish pools.

KAGEYAMA TOBIO

It took me a while to realize that admiration can give way to feelings stronger than that. Like, a good five years. But I got there, eventually. I think there’s a lot to be said about the journey that we’ve taken over the years; it might be easy to cross the ocean by plane, but it’s nowhere near as simple to explain how we made it from country to country. All of that chasing, and following, too. Cat and dog.

I remember once that you told me you were afraid that I loved volleyball more than you did. I also remember thinking, well, that’s strange, because I’d never thought about measuring love in capacity like that. In some ways, we’re very different people. And that’s why it works, because sometimes when you’re too in your head about everything, and vice versa.

The first time I ever brought you with me to visit Kazuyo on the anniversary of his death, I was nervous. I don’t think I ever told you this. I was nervous, inexplicably, that he wouldn’t like you, even though you’ve managed to charm everybody you’ve ever come across who isn’t Tsukishima and Kazuyo couldn’t even really meet you. I think I snapped at you that day when we were getting ready to leave. You were packing things in the car, and I wouldn’t speak because one of the flowers’ petals got crushed in the commotion.

You told me that it didn’t matter, that when the plants decomposed and leached down into the soil, he wouldn’t know the difference between a flower in bloom and one that’d been sliced in all sorts of pieces because my love would reach him either way, no matter the form it would take, no matter how deep the roots had to dig into the soil. And all I could think at that moment was that all my fears were unfounded because Kazuyo would have had no choice but to fall for you too. He would have wanted to be here. I wish he could have seen us now, but I know that he’s here in each of the flowers that you hand-picked for the ikebana.

That day, I realized what you meant when you spoke about measuring love because I felt so full that I didn’t know how to put it into words. I still don’t really know. But I think I can get the point across by telling you that I never threw out any of those dried flower petals you gave me as cheesy gifts, even though you kept doing it wrong and they turned out shriveled and brown. They’re ugly and cliche and I keep every single one of them in a shoebox in the back of our closet.

I think we all have our idols. Yours was Blanco, but mine is you. Not just because of volleyball, but also because you taught me love in shades of blue I’d never seen before. I didn’t think I could love you more than when we were in middle school and I saw you set for the first time, or when you were sick with the flu and insisted that we couldn’t kiss because you didn’t want to get me sick too, or when you cooked me curry for the first time five years into the relationship and admitted you were scared it wouldn’t be as good as my grandfather’s.

It isn’t, by the way, but I think I love you more because of it. There’s no way to stop once you’ve started. But I’m all in. I’m in it until the end, forever. And one day we’ll be old and you’ll complain about your hair graying and I won’t care if all of your roses turn brown because it doesn’t mean that you love me any less.

(Tooru turns face away to hide crying. Tobio guides him back with one hand Audience ducks heads to hide their own expressions. After a minute, scene continues)

OIKAWA TOORU

When I was little, I thought I couldn’t love anything more than I loved milkbread, and then I thought the same of my parents, and then volleyball. I was right for many, many years. I knew nothing but the feel of slick leather under my fingertips or the gritty, chalky feeling of sweat after a long match. I didn’t want any more than that, any more than playing volleyball with my best friends on a court where I could carve out my own space in the wood and belong there more than any other home.

And then I met a boy. I didn’t think that anything could be more important to me than the sport was, and I figured that nothing as trivial as a person could deter me from any path. We all know how this story ended. I never went to Nationals, and as shocking as this punch to the gut was, it was nothing like the realization that there exists an intersection between man and volleyball in the space between your splayed and calculating hands.

I couldn’t untangle you from the sport for the longest time, and eventually, I gave up on trying, and I’m sure we all know that I don’t just give up without a fight. It almost sunk me with you when I realized that the extent of my feelings for you threatened my love for volleyball by a long shot. Is threat really the right word for it? I don’t want you to think that I ever thought it was dangerous. Maybe, for a little bit, I was scared. I’m still scared. I’m standing on this altar, and my hands are shaking. But I wouldn’t take any of it back, not even for another Olympic medal.

You know how I said that the best day of my life was the day that I signed onto CA San Juan? And then I said that the best day of my life was when I scored the winning point in my first game as a starter? When I made the Argentina national team? When I kissed you for the first time, tipsy in a storage closet? When I won an Olympic medal? When you accepted my marriage proposal?

I think this has to be the best day of my life because I finally get to marry you. God, it’s been a long time coming—two and a half years of waiting, and I think I can be patient for everything except when it comes to you—so this has to be it. The moment I slip that ring onto your finger. But I think that tomorrow will also be the best day of my life because I’ll get to wake up next to you after a wild night of wedding sex, and the day after will be the best because I’ll be by your side as your lawfully wedded husband, and the day after that is another lucky day of being married to you. I don’t think you realize that everyone in your life receives the privilege of loving you. That’s okay. I’ll cherish it every day for you.

I love you. I’ve loved you every day since I got the sage advice to count my blessings, except I’m a volleyball player, so I’m not the best at math, but trust me when I say that it’s been a long, long time. They’ll have to invent a number for the days I’ll love you for eternity. I’m beyond excited to have the best day of my life, every day, with you.

(They kiss)

They kiss. It's wonderful. Tobio's smiling against Tooru's lips. It's the best day of Tooru's goddamn life; god, if it gets better than this, he can't wait. It'll be better soon. Now. Here. There. He loves him with each winding shore on Japan's island coastline and the hungry want of an interstellar black hole. He doesn't know how else to say it; he loves him. There'll never be anything greater than it, that love.

Tooru breaks the kiss, and then, unwilling to part from his husband for a second longer than necessary, takes him firmly by the neck and presses their foreheads together, that bright, bright blue the only thing he can see through the technicolor smear of his tears. “I love you,” he whispers so that only Tobio can hear it, as if it’s a secret, as if he’s confessing something terrible, as if he hasn’t been proclaiming it the world for as long as they made their relationship official.

But this one is for Tobio only. Tobio pulls away, rolling his eyes as he says, “You’re alright, I guess,” but he’s laughing, and Tooru’s laughing, and the happy spots in Tobio’s smile make every excruciating moment of the last couple of years worth it. Who knew that happiness could be so blue? How could it possibly get greater than this?

Maybe tomorrow.

Maybe it'll be better then. Maybe it'll be the best day of his life.

The only difference between the announcer currently booming over this loudspeaker and all of the other ones Tooru has heard over the years is that this one is speaking for the Paris Olympics. 2024 only comes around once, and he relishes the feeling of it, grounding himself in the slip-slick grip of his shoes against the flooring and the gleaming lights fixing needles into his gaze. The net yawns before him like a monolith before which players like him go to rest.

“In another legendary match-up that usually only happens once in a lifetime, we are seeing Argentina go up against Japan, a repeat of the rivalry carried over from Tokyo, 2021.” The announcer’s voice echoes around the hall; Tooru’s team is milling around the entrance in restless spots of blue, waiting for the go-ahead to enter the court. “Starting setter Kageyama Tobio of Japan is going up against Argentina’s Oikawa Tooru once again, a rivalry that is rumored to have roots in middle school and has since gained global attention for the relationship between the two that has persisted for many years. In fact, we have the special opportunity to see two fiances play each other at such a high level of sport—the two got engaged three years ago after Argentina beat Japan in Tokyo. There’s been a lot of noise around their relationship, but they still haven’t tied the knot.”

“The media has been pretty poor at doing their job of finding out everything there is to know about us celebrities, eh, Toto?” Tomas laughs by Tooru’s side, clapping one large, warm hand on his shoulder that instinctively makes a grin break out on Tooru’s face. He already feels ready, but his captain’s touch makes him feel more grounded, the contact going through the searing heat and bringing him right back to where he should be. Game ready. Prepared for each flick of the wrist.

“I can be good at secrets when I want to be,” Tooru insists, knowing full well that Tomas is about to bring up the year they played long-distance Secret Santa and Tooru spoiled it by unknowingly posting the name he received in the background of an Instagram post of his watch a week after they pulled from the hat.

“What about—” Tomas begins, but he’s cut off when the announcer declares Japan’s entrance, and they all peek out to see red flooding the court; Shouyou’s bouncy gait, Bokuto’s ostentatious appearance, Atsumu’s stately wave, and then, of course, Tobio in the center, eyes trained upward as he acquaints himself with the court. Tooru lets a knife-sharp grin slide across his face. They’ve long since learned how to keep the blade from leaving any lasting damage.

“And introducing Argentina!” the announcer shouts, the team spilling out of the corridor. “Headed by their captain, Tomas Gallo, who led them to victory in 2021 and intends to do the same in 2024!”

Tooru takes his first step out of the hall and feels the overhead lights wash over him as if he is being remade.

“Number thirteen, starting setter, Oi—”

Tooru meets Tobio’s eyes across the net. His smile is no longer a weapon. It’s echoed on Tobio’s face, and it may not be as flint-edged as a blade, but it still does its job in unseating Tooru, who feels the ground shift ever so slightly under his feet when he sees it. The ring on a chain around his neck pulses with his heartbeat, a living reminder of his love.

“It seems that Argentina has undergone a uniform change, though it seems to only apply to number thirteen—Kageyama… Tobio?”

The stunned silence, quickly swallowed by the shouts of the audience coming over him like a wave, makes every moment of secret-keeping worth it. Tooru lets his head tip back, joy ripping out of his chest like an indomitable force, the laughter that escapes him a wild thing. One that chases him, gnawing, tearing around in shades of blue.

“The Paris Olympics will be known not just for phenomenal sports, but also for the marriage reveal of the decade! Kageyama Tobio and Kageyama Tooru, who announced their relationship in the late 2010s, have made sure that when one side loses, the defeat will be drowned out by the happy news of their union. Now, that’s what we call good sportsmanship!”

A reporter from the sidelines breaks free from the crowd and runs up to Tooru, thrusting a large foam microphone in his face. “Kageyam Tooru, can you let us know when you married Kageyama Tobio, and why you two kept it a secret for so long? The world has been on its toes for the past three years, waiting for the news of the grand wedding in the works that never came to be.”

“Not right now,” Tooru says, not even looking at her, his gaze still fixed upon the one set of eyes across the net that hasn’t left him since the moment he stepped onto the court and into the light. They’ve sculpted this reveal with the thin edge of the clock’s hand and an incredible amount of patience. The grin on his face is fierce; he feels it like a dream that clawed itself out of liberation. “I’ve got a game to win against my husband.”