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“I have,” Oikawa says slowly, his eyes steady on the wall opposite the bed rather than on Iwaizumi, pressed tight against him, “a kind of restlessness in me.”
And Iwaizumi is quiet. The moment feels fragile, like the wrong word—or even the right one—might shatter it. Might break it all down into a million pieces, each of them labeled with Oikawa’s body parts.
“And it’s like—” Oikawa cuts himself off, pressing the heels of his palms against his eyes so hard he can see little explosions in the black. They look like the things crawling around in the crevices of his chest. “There’s something wrong with me.”
“Oikawa—”
“And I can’t stop thinking about it,” Oikawa continues, barreling through anything Iwaizumi could say to try to comfort him.
His words are getting faster while his voice gets louder, a crescendo of fear and hatred. “I can’t stop thinking about how there’s something wrong in my head, like all my thoughts and feelings are programmed to go three times as fast as everyone else’s and like my heartbeat can’t quite keep up with my breathing and like everything about this is just—it’s out of my control and I don’t want it to be, but I’m also, it’s like there are things in my body making me wrong, making me fucking—fucking evil and I can’t explain it without fucking screaming!”
Oikawa stops, breathing hard. He hadn’t noticed himself getting louder until his voice was ringing through his dark, empty bedroom, until he felt Iwaizumi flinch against him.
“Sorry,” he whispers.
“Don’t apologize,” Iwaizumi says, soft as eiderdown and as hurt as the plucked bird. “Thank you for telling me.”
Oikawa’s breath catches in his throat and he feels sick. “Don’t say that. It sounds weird coming from you.”
Iwaizumi is supposed to be steady. Iwaizumi is supposed to be a rock, holding strong in the storm of a river. Iwaizumi is supposed to be quiet when Oikawa is screaming, and yelling when Oikawa isn’t listening. Iwaizumi is supposed to be what Oikawa isn’t, just as Oikawa is what Iwaizumi is not.
Iwaizumi is not supposed to be gentle with him. Iwaizumi is not supposed to hold him like he might break. Everyone else—his parents, his sister, even occasionally their friends—might have recently started touching Oikawa like pressing the wrong spot could shatter him, but Iwaizumi is supposed to know better.
Iwaizumi is supposed to know that Oikawa isn’t fragile, isn’t delicate, isn’t a fucking hazard to himself and others. Iwaizumi is supposed to know that he isn’t going to fall apart when pushed. Iwaizumi is supposed to believe he’s strong.
For a long moment, neither of them say anything. The sick feeling in Oikawa’s throat only grows; he didn’t mean to ruin this, this moment of sacred truth-telling, he didn’t mean to yell, didn’t mean to fuck up the only thing in his life that feels real. He just—he can’t help it. He gets scared.
“Okay,” Iwaizumi says slowly. “What do you want me to say?”
Oikawa wants an answer, he wants a reason, he wants—and the thing is that it is unexplainable, this monstrous thing inside of him. There are not enough words in the world to describe it to another person who has not felt it crawl into themselves and burrow there, growing to fit the mold of their body, then rotting inside of them. There are not enough languages in the universe to put explanations to this feeling that consumes and devours endlessly, insatiably.
No word, no language, no diagnosis, no label, no promise, no self-deprecation, no fucking synonym is ever enough. You cannot feel it, so it is unknowable. He is unknowable.
But this is Iwaizumi, and if anyone could ever understand him it is Iwaizumi. And if Iwaizumi cannot understand, then Oikawa is left adrift. Because if he cannot be known, how can he be loved? Because if he cannot be loved, how can he survive this?
Oikawa squeezes his eyes shut. He doesn’t know. He doesn’t know what he actually wants from this conversation, he doesn’t know what he needs. He’s just—
Imagine, for a moment: a hallway of mirrors. Oikawa opens a big, oak door, ornately carved in the image of all the things he loves. He closes the door behind him, and then he’s in the hallway of mirrors alone. He takes a step forward, towards the darkness at the end of the hallway.
The reflections take a step forward, too. He looks in the mirrors. He puts his hand up. The reflections all put up their own hands. But they aren’t him. The reflections are not of his body, are not of his face, are not anything that carries his name. He doesn’t recognize himself in these reflections. He doesn’t see himself in them.
Imagine, now: Oikawa and Iwaizumi, lying in Iwaizumi’s childhood bedroom, in this safe, comfortable space; Iwaizumi has his arm around Oikawa’s shoulders, pulling him close. Oikawa is telling him that there is something evil in his own body.
The reflections are so warped. He does not recognize them. They are not the best friend he wants to be for Iwaizumi, they are not the gentleness he could be, they are not the son and brother and uncle he wants to be for his family, they are not the setter he wants to be on his volleyball team at his junior high.
But maybe that ugliness is the real him. Maybe that arm—stretching long across all the mirrors towards the shadowed end of the hall—is the real shape of him. Maybe the coldness in those eyes is the reality of his heart. Maybe the slime of that mirror-image skin is what lives under the concealer around his eyes.
And then imagine: Oikawa is running. He is running down this hallway and the reflections are chasing after him, always a step behind, never tiring, always right there.
And he is in the gym and he is running in circles around the court, endless, endless, endless loops that become more than warmups and less than efficient training.
And he is in this bed with Iwaizumi and his head is off, galloping away from his heart. His stability, his intelligence, his self-control are all sprinting down a hallway made of inaccurate, grotesque, captivating mirrors, and they’re all leaving his goodness behind for Iwaizumi to hold for only as long as it takes a broken hourglass to lose its sand.
“I need you,” Oikawa says, voice cracking. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I don’t know.”
Iwaizumi exhales, long and shaky. “I’m here with you, okay? No matter what.”
“I don’t know,” Oikawa repeats, as if he hadn’t heard Iwaizumi speak. “I don’t get it. I don’t know. Everyone else—everyone else has it, like, has it figured out, you know? Figured out how to be happy. Figured out how to have bad days without wanting to fucking—to—to jump in front of a train or something, and everyone’s figured out how to be normal and I’m just getting worse at it as I get older.”
Iwaizumi’s hand on Oikawa’s shoulder tightens. Like he’s afraid that if he lets go, Oikawa will disappear. Disintegrate. Fade away. Jump in front of a train.
“And I can’t sleep, I haven’t been sleeping,” Oikawa admits. “I sit in my bed and wish I was asleep and I know I could be asleep and I still don’t—don’t choose to be, and I don’t know why the fuck I can’t just shut the lights off and lay down.
“But it’s like I’m, like, a puppet or something. A marionette, maybe. Because I can’t—I can’t turn any of it off. There are all these things in my head and they won’t go away no matter how many stupid calming breathing exercises I do that I thought were supposed to help. Like—I just can’t slow down.”
Iwaizumi is quiet. Oikawa is quiet. Everything is quiet.
“And I just want to destroy everything around me.” The confession is loud. “I want to put my teeth in the world and tear it apart. I want to take the sun in my hand and squeeze it until it bursts apart. I want to hurt me. I want to hurt you. Kageyama. I want to—”
With the two of them, there is breath. There is the wind’s brush of the fabric curtain against the glass panels of the open window. There is a car that drives by. There are cicadas, in the distance. Nothing is quiet. Everything is so loud. Everything is crashing in on Oikawa’s brain all the time; every sound is an apocalypse in its own right.
“I just want everything to pause for one minute,” Oikawa whispers. “I want to be able to turn it all off and on again, and when it comes back on, everything will be fine and beautiful and I won’t feel so wrong all the time. Because I won’t be.
“I’ll be stronger and smarter and nicer and I won’t hurt people and I won’t hurt myself and I’ll know how to breathe without panicking and how to hold a knife without losing my breath and I’ll know how to hold you without also holding a knife. And I won’t spiral so often and I won’t run away from home or from you ever again.”
Quiet, again. And, quiet, hours earlier: Oikawa in the gym, Iwaizumi standing at the door. Waiting. He’s always waiting. Waiting for Oikawa to catch up to him. Waiting in case he needs to turn around and catch Oikawa.
And in front of Oikawa in the gym is Kageyama, staring at him with so much innocence and the words will you please teach me echoing from his mouth around the empty, empty, gym—except it is not empty because Oikawa is there and Kageyama is there and these are presences so big they may as well be black holes—and it was never Kageyama’s fault, but Oikawa reaches out to hurt him. A backhand to his face, reaching, and—
And then Iwaizumi is there.
And the only sound is Iwaizumi catching Oikawa’s wrist in his hand. Oikawa’s numb, listless apology. Kageyama’s footsteps as he leaves.
I have a kind of restlessness inside of me.
Quiet, except for where there is noise. Noise, except for where there is calm. Calm, except for where there is the endless looping of unbridled emotion.
“I’m sorry, Iwa,” Oikawa murmurs. “I’m scaring you.”
Iwaizumi is quiet for a long moment, thinking over his words. He gets like this, sometimes, when they’re having important conversations. He likes to think things through before saying them, likes to make sure they’re the right words with the right effect before he puts them to his tongue.
It’s not like how Oikawa is speaking right now, just spilling his guts into the silent nighttime between them until there is nothing left in him to spit up: not blood, not bone, not viscera, not veins.
“You’re not scaring me,” Iwaizumi says slowly. Oikawa does not look at him. The wall across from them is so interesting in the dark. “I’m worried about you. I want to help you. I want to be here for you. You’re saying things that are concerning. But I’m not scared of you.”
You should hate me, Oikawa thinks. I love you.
He blinks, staring at the shadows pasted to the wall. His reflections are after him, and he cannot quite escape their looming presence. He blinks, and then he’s crying. He’s crying and he doesn’t know how to stop because he is all at once so overwhelmed with hurt that there is nothing to do but cry and yet he also feels so fucking high on his own hurt that crying cannot align with his wings.
He’s so tired. He wants to keep his eyes open just to feel the burn when they dry out. He’s so hungry. He wants to open his jaw and swallow the Earth.
There is something inside of him that is burning so hot it threatens to turn his every organ to ash, and he does not know what’s going to be left behind. There is something so cold on his skin that it is making him freeze to death.
He is a breathing contradiction. A breathing problem of such grand proportions he cannot quite fathom how far out his hurt reaches. How many people he scares when he smiles with all his teeth.
“I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” Oikawa says. And again. And again. And again.
I am the cut. I am the blood. I am the consequence. You should hate me so much, Hajime.
“It’s gonna be okay,” Iwaizumi tries to say.
The words are not enough to stifle the exploding supernova of Oikawa’s head. They are not enough to rein in the break of Oikawa’s heart, which is shattering so loud and so big that the shards land in him and Iwaizumi both.
Iwaizumi has to say it anyway. He is fifteen and he does not know what else there is to say—Oikawa is well aware of that. He doesn’t think he’s looking for solutions, or for answers. Not from Iwaizumi, at least.
“I think something in my head is broken,” Oikawa murmurs. His eyes burn. This is what he wanted, isn’t it? “Or, or, different. From everyone else’s head. And it makes me evil.”
Iwaizumi takes a deep, steadying breath. His hand on Oikawa’s shoulder tightens again. “You’re not evil. Maybe something in your head is different. But you’re not evil.”
Oikawa swallows. He closes his eyes and pushes himself further into Iwaizumi’s side. “I just feel so out of control all of the time. I feel like the world isn’t spinning fast enough. I feel like I’m moving in molasses.
“I feel like I’m running red lights because I keep imagining in my head that they're green. I feel like there are vibrations in my muscles and they only ever stop when I’m tensing up. I feel like there is a mashup of a thousand songs in a thousand different tempos and they’re all playing at once in my head. I feel—I am—wrong. I’m—”
“Oikawa,” Iwaizumi starts, cutting him off with the gentleness of an old bruise. “None of that makes you wrong, okay? You’re still you, and that’s a good, strong, true thing.”
Oikawa opens his eyes. Still doesn’t look at Iwaizumi. He can hear Iwaizumi’s unsteady breathing. He wants to hold a knife. He wants to roll back his lips and bare his teeth. He wants to peel off his skin and dig his fingers into the ligaments left behind. He wants Iwaizumi to be the one to curl his fist around Oikawa’s heart and squeeze until it bursts like the sun. He wants someone to blame.
“I’m here with you,” Iwaizumi promises, as best he can. “We’ll figure it out together.”
“I don’t know what there is to figure out,” Oikawa says, something red hot and frustrated and angry in his voice. “I’m just fucking broken. That’s all there is.”
“You’re not broken,” Iwaizumi says sharply.
Oikawa takes a breath that does not fill his lungs. “Whatever.”
It doesn’t matter. It’s the way things are. A fifteen year old Oikawa runs through red lights because he decides they’re green and slips knives between his own ribs just to see the puncture wounds and backhands his underclassmen when they scare him so deep he believes they’re monsters. It doesn’t matter. The consequences have yet to burn.
But now fast forward, to something that does matter:
Oikawa, standing by the ocean. There is a full moon above him, and it is so bright that it masks all of the stars. The moonlight ripples over the waves, glittering and shimmering as the water rolls over itself again and again. The crashing of the ocean is loud and cacophonous, but it is also a symphony, or a dream, or a kind of litany of inexpressible feeling. Like a poem that leaves you breathless or a painting that makes you cry.
He raises his arms up from his sides, out like the wings of a bird, and he pulls himself onto his tip-toes and he closes his eyes and—
—and in his head, he can fly. In his head, he is surging upwards like a bat out of hell or a whale out of water. He is flapping his arms, only his arms have become wings with feathers as golden as molten Olympic medals, and he is strong and powerful and free. He can go anywhere in the entirety of the world, and he never has to return home.
He opens his eyes again, and he is still on land. His feet are buried in the sand. The sand is cold. The tide is receding. He is alone.
He should not have come to the ocean. He knows that. It’s dark, and he didn’t tell anyone where he was going. He left a cryptic note for Iwaizumi—now his university roommate—just in case he decided not to come back, and then he just…got on a bus with the cash wadded up in his pocket and left. Made his way to the end of the line and then walked thirty minutes until he reached the shoreline.
He should not have done any of this. He knows that. He’s well aware of that.
This does not change the fact that he is now standing at the seaside under the full moon and he thought maybe this would cleanse him, thought maybe this would fix all of the things that feel wrong inside of his body, but it has not fixed anything. It just makes him feel small.
He wants to scream. He wants the only thing to hear him to be the moon. He wants the moon to open up as a gaping maw in the sky and swallow him whole. He wants the stars to flicker out one by one like how champagne glasses shatter at the sound of an operatic call. He wants the sun to burn out, boil over. He wants this nighttime to never end, he wants to stay in the liminality of this space forever, where there are no consequences and no fears and no dreams. Just the sea and the moon.
Years ago, Iwaizumi told him that he wasn’t broken. Oikawa didn’t believe him then, and he believes him even less now.
And before this, before the ocean: he is looking for a summer job. He is not going to play volleyball professionally. This is something that was hammered into him again and again by doctor after doctor after the fourth knee surgery in his first two years of university. He is not going to go any further with volleyball. This is something he is going to have to be okay with. He doesn’t get a choice in it.
He can still play recreationally, casually, if he wants to. He does want to, eventually. Not yet, maybe, not while the wound is so fresh and the sutures are still in, but eventually. He doesn’t think he knows how not to play.
That being said, he also—he also thinks maybe it’s not as much fun as it used to be. And that’s why it’s okay. It’s okay that he’s never, ever going to play professionally like his life’s dream used to be.
His future looks a little different than it did before, and Oikawa is coming to terms with that. He has other things in his life. He has the ocean. He has the moon. He has Iwaizumi.
He’s been taking some creative writing classes, and he thinks he likes those. He likes baking a lot, and cooking, too. And he’s been reading more mystery novels recently. Those have been entertaining, even if he can always guess the ending.
He cleans the house every other day: sweeps and vacuums and fluffs pillows and wipes down the microwave. He does puzzles at the dining table, so he and Iwaizumi share dinners on the couch in front of the TV. He’s been re-watching The X-Files, but he’s seen all of it already so he’s watching it at twice the speed. It drives Iwaizumi crazy, but he only complains a little bit.
It’s fine. He’s doing fine.
He’s also looking for a summer job—maybe an internship in literary publishing or editing. Maybe waiting tables somewhere. Maybe he’ll take summer classes. He keeps getting rejected, and even though he thinks it's probably fine, he’s at the ocean at two in the morning, so maybe it isn’t fine.
The fresh air feels good against his bare skin though, and burying his feet in the sand is grounding in a way. He wants to stand here forever like an ancient tree rooted in the ground. He wants the ocean to crash over him and he wants to stay rock-still.
Rock-still. Reliable. Like the way Iwaizumi is steady in the storm of Oikawa: unflinching when Oikawa does the scream-cry thing, when his hands shake uncontrollably, when his words come too fast and too loud, when he wakes up at 3am and starts handwashing dishes only to drop metal pots and pans on the tiled floor. So fucking strong.
Oikawa knows that Iwaizumi is worried about him. It’s obvious in the way that he’s been looking at Oikawa recently, like he’s double checking every word he says, like he’s examining every decision, like he’s ready to put together some kind of fucking intervention if Oikawa does one more thing he deems worthy of concern.
Oikawa isn’t sure what the line is for that, but he doesn’t want to cross it. He doesn’t want to push Iwaizumi any further than he already has. Iwaizumi is worried now, but he’d probably lose it if he knew that Oikawa was getting on a bus to a beach in the middle of the night without any plan on how to get back.
At the beach, Oikawa has his phone in his pocket and the sea at his fingertips and the moon in his eyes. If someone were to ask him to grapple with a god and wrap a noose around the moon and tear it down, he thinks he would be able to. He could reach up and touch it, that full, full moon, so easily. It’s right there. So close.
He read somewhere that tonight is a supermoon. That it’s much closer to the Earth than it usually is, or something. Now is the night, then. Now is the night for taking in the moonlight and not breathing it out.
His phone vibrates in his pocket. Oikawa digs his toes deeper into the sand. It’s Iwaizumi, it has to be. He knows it is. No one else would be looking for him at this hour. No one else would be wondering.
It takes another three calls before Oikawa picks up the phone. He doesn’t say anything at first, just lets Iwaizumi yell into the speaker for several minutes straight. He’s angry, but really, that anger is masking worry and terror and anxiety and concern and so much fucking love that it makes Oikawa sick.
Iwaizumi has always been too good for him. Oikawa runs away and Iwaizumi pretends to be mad that Oikawa did it in the first place, but really he’s just terrified that Oikawa isn’t coming back. Oikawa fucks up yet again and Iwaizumi pretends to be angry with him, but he’s just—he’s just scared that Oikawa is one day going to fuck up in a way he can’t come back from.
To be fair, it’s not like it hasn’t happened before. To be fair, Oikawa jumped too high only a few months ago and broke his knee and future beyond repair. To be fair, Oikawa is at the beach alone in the middle of the night and anything could happen and he would just have to survive it. Or not.
Finally, Iwaizumi quiets.
Ah, yes. The fear.
“Oikawa?” A beat. “You there?” A beat. “You listening?” A beat. “Oikawa.” A beat. “Are you coming home?” A beat—
And then Iwaizumi is breaking, too. He lets out the tiniest of sobs and this is not what Oikawa wanted at all, this is the opposite of what he wanted, but he supposes that reckless actions have wrecking consequences and this is what he deserves. But it is not what Iwaizumi deserves.
“I don’t have my wallet,” Oikawa says hollowly. “I can’t get a bus.”
“I’ll come get you,” Iwaizumi says, immediate and unquestioning. “Just tell me where you are, Oikawa.”
“I’ll share my location.”
Iwaizumi exhales, long and shaky and painfully weak over the phone speaker. “Okay. Stay right there. I’m coming.”
The thing is that Iwaizumi always comes. He always comes, always finds Oikawa when Oikawa calls out for him and sometimes even when Oikawa isn’t calling. He’s always known Oikawa best: when he needs help, when he needs a hand to hold, when he needs someone to talk with, when he needs someone to listen, when he just wants the comfort of silence.
Iwaizumi has been the core of Oikawa’s heart for as long as Oikawa has had one. He has been everything good that Oikawa knows about the world since the day Oikawa realized that he himself is not good. He has been the one true, trustworthy thing in the world that Oikawa has never once doubted. He’s never been given reason to doubt him, after all.
Iwaizumi loves him. Oikawa loves Iwaizumi. There is nothing new about this. This is how it has always been. This is how it will always be. There is no reason to question it.
Except: Oikawa is on the beach and Iwaizumi is coming to get him and only two days earlier, Oikawa had said, I’m in love with you, and Iwaizumi had dropped his eyes so fucking slowly and said, Oikawa…
And Oikawa—he didn’t really know what he expected by saying it. For Iwaizumi to tell him the same? For his feelings to be returned? For Iwaizumi to say he loves him too, maybe, like he’d dreamed of for so long? For some kind of forgiveness or absolution or deliverance or, fuck, maybe just a kiss?
He didn’t know what he expected, but the fucking grief in the sound of his last name was not what he wanted. It wasn’t pity, not quite, and it wasn’t really the rejection that it could have been, but still. Still, it hollowed out something in Oikawa’s chest and he couldn’t look Iwaizumi in the eye.
Sorry. I shouldn’t have said anything.
Oikawa—
And at the beach, again, here is Oikawa staring into the water at the shifting of the waves so bejeweled by the moonlight. Oikawa is thinking of Iwaizumi again—as he often is—and it doesn’t fill him with the warmth that usually comes with the thought of his best friend. Instead, there is a kind of hurting and a kind of aching and a kind of yearning that he can’t quite put into words.
He’s not mad at Iwaizumi. That wouldn’t be fair to him. That wouldn’t be fair to either of them. It’s not Iwaizumi’s fault that Oikawa is too fucked up to date. It’s not Iwaizumi’s fault that dealing with Oikawa’s bullshit is too much work in a romantic relationship. It’s not Iwaizumi’s fault that Oikawa will never be the perfect one for Iwaizumi.
Because Oikawa knows that Iwaizumi is in love with him, too. He just can’t let himself be with Oikawa because of any number of the plethora of reasons that Oikawa has come up with when thinking about this. And Oikawa might have had his own heart broken when he confessed, but that’s his own fault.
So he’s not mad at Iwaizumi. He’s not. But he is hurt, still. He’s still hurting. His heart is bruised all over and his pride has been cut down a size. He doesn’t want to face Iwaizumi now, not when he’s like this.
For a long time, the only person that Oikawa would let in his head when he got in one of his moods was Iwaizumi. Iwaizumi was the only person who could see the change, really, when Oikawa started to check out of reality. He was the only one who really noticed when Oikawa started getting fucked up about something.
It’s so easy for everyone else to excuse: Oikawa is just a teenage boy growing up; he’s just grieving his career; he’s just frustrated by losing a game; he’s just a kid figuring it out.
His moods, as his mother calls them, make him temperamental and annoying and hard to be around. His sensitivity, as his father calls it, makes him difficult. His issues, as his sister calls them, make him a problem child at home even while being a child star at school and on the court.
Iwaizumi is the only one who’s been able to see through all of that. He’s the only one who notices the way these moods come and go, the things that trigger them. He’s the only one that gets that maybe there’s something more to it than just teenage hormones. He’s the only one who’s ever listened when Oikawa said there was something wrong in his head.
The problem with this, though, is that now Oikawa is in love with him and Iwaizumi, knowing him, knows that dating him would never be worth it. The problem with knowing someone as well as Iwaizumi knows Oikawa is that Iwaizumi understands better than anyone that Oikawa is not worth the issues dating him comes with.
The girlfriends he’s had before this have never lasted long. They don’t like how dedicated he is to volleyball, how much time he spends on it instead of with them. They don’t like how self-centered he can be sometimes, and how self-deprecating he can be at other times. They don’t like how energetic he is some days, and they don’t like that he gets into moods where he doesn’t want to get out of bed.
They break up with him in the end, is the point. Oikawa thought, somewhat naively, that Iwaizumi would be different. He’s stuck around this long as a friend, after all. But dating is a completely different story, Oikawa supposes.
Then again: Iwaizumi finds him. Iwaizumi comes to the ocean and finds him. He gets up at four in the morning and he blinks away his sleep and he gets on a bus prepared for the drive and he finds him. He walks along the shoreline until he finds Oikawa halfway down the beach.
“Oikawa,” Iwaizumi says, breathless as he jogs over to him. He stumbles a little on the sand, his running shoes not made for the beach. But he rights himself and reaches Oikawa only moments after Oikawa notices his figure coming down the shoreline. “There you are.”
Oikawa hums, not looking over and still staring at the ocean. “Here I am.”
Iwaizumi is quiet for a long moment, just standing there and staring at Oikawa. Studying him. Oikawa wonders what he’s seeing, and then decides he doesn’t want to know. He doesn’t need to know what he looks like standing there, hair tousled by the wind and breathing hard despite not moving and, in the refreshing ice of the wind, shivering.
“Are you cold?” Iwaizumi asks.
“No,” Oikawa says.
Iwaizumi falls silent again. He takes a step closer to Oikawa, his hand half reaching out, like he wants to touch but isn’t sure if Oikawa would flinch. Then, “Do you want to go home?”
“No,” Oikawa says.
Iwaizumi takes a long breath. Oikawa doesn’t look at him, just moves so that he’s sitting in the sand. He doesn’t care that he’s getting sand all over his pajama pants. Oh, he’s wearing his pajamas, isn’t he? Iwaizumi must think he’s crazy. Maybe he is crazy.
“Okay,” Iwaizumi says. “Let me know when you’re ready to go.”
Then he sits down next to Oikawa and takes deep breaths. In and out and in and out to the time of the waves. Oikawa doesn’t know how long they sit there.
The last time they went to the beach together, they went as a celebration of their high school graduation with Matsukawa and Hanamaki. It was a good trip. Oikawa felt good. He felt normal. He felt in control.
These days, the only time he feels in control is when he’s playing volleyball. When he’s orchestrating an entire game from his place on the court, when he’s winning games with his team, with his best friends. When he’s serving and the ball goes exactly where he wants it to faster than anyone can keep up.
But he doesn’t have that anymore. He’s lost control over everything. Jumped too far and too fast without looking, and bet on a losing dog.
In his head, he hears Hanamaki say something stupid, and laugh. He hears Matsukawa laugh, too. He hasn’t spoken to them in a while—he hasn’t spoken to a lot of people lately; he’s been focusing all his attention on volleyball and, when he lost that, he started focusing all his attention on ignoring the people that would make him confront it all.
In his head, Iwaizumi’s soft, lilting, Oikawa…
He hears Iwaizumi’s gentle regret when he lets Oikawa down easy. He hears Kageyama, too, when he yells Hinata’s name and sets the ball to continue the rally that ends Oikawa’s high school career. He hears his world ending, and then he hears Iwaizumi’s laugh when they get into the same university, and he hears his world beginning again.
The world is just beginnings and endings and beginnings and endings and beginnings and endings. And that’s all there is to it: this long, impossible-to-win cycle, just finding things and then losing them and then finding new things and then losing those too. He’s constantly in the process of losing things.
“Oikawa,” Iwaizumi starts. Hesitates. Then, “I’m going to say something and you need to just hear me out.”
Oikawa doesn’t answer.
“I want you to see someone,” Iwaizumi says softly. “You’re not doing okay, and I want you to do something about it instead of just letting yourself spiral. I can’t watch you do this to yourself any longer.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Oikawa is lying. He knows he’s lying. Iwaizumi knows he’s lying. He’s so tired.
Iwaizumi takes another deep, calming breath. “I made you an appointment. All you have to do is show up and tell the truth.”
“You had no right to do that,” Oikawa growls, turning on him. “You had no fucking—”
His voice cracks, and he knows he’s falling apart, he knows he’s spiraling, but fuck, fuck, fuck, he hates that Iwaizumi knows that too. He hates that everyone around him knows he’s so weak. He broke his body and now his head is broken as well. Though, maybe both have been broken the whole time. Maybe he never stood a chance in the first place. Maybe he was biologically destined to break: weak bones, weak brain.
“You had no right,” Oikawa says again, but it’s almost a cry.
“I know,” Iwaizumi murmurs. “I just—I’m worried. I’m worried, Oikawa.”
“Don’t be.”
Oikawa takes a sharp breath, and he can’t get enough air into his lungs, can’t quite figure out how to breathe in a way that feels complete. He doesn’t know how to make himself feel steady when the world is spinning so fast around him, when the ocean is so fucking vast and he is so small.
Oikawa says, quietly, “I don’t—I’m not—”
He’s about to tell Iwaizumi that he’s not actually mad at him, but he is. He is mad at Iwaizumi, because this is not Iwaizumi’s business, because this is not Iwaizumi’s problem, because Oikawa is not Iwaizumi’s problem, because Iwaizumi didn’t want him. He is mad at Iwaizumi, because Iwaizumi is trying to fix him and Oikawa doesn’t want to be fixed. He wants the world to be fixed around him.
“I know you’re mad at me,” Iwaizumi starts. He’s trying to sound steady, but his hands in his lap are trembling until he curls them into fists. “But I—I don’t know how to help you right now.”
“I don’t want your help,” Oikawa spits. “I didn’t ask you to do that. I didn’t ask you to come here. I didn’t want you to. I didn’t want you.”
Next to him, Iwaizumi stiffens. Oikawa’s own heart drops and he wants to take it back, wants to undo everything he said, but he can’t—he can’t unspeak words that have already reached Iwaizumi’s heart. He can’t even bring himself to apologize.
“Fine,” Iwaizumi snaps. It’s harsh and angry and Oikawa guesses that he’s reached his limit. “I guess I’ll just sit and watch while you kill yourself then. That what you expect me to do?”
“I’m not killing myself,” Oikawa says hoarsely. “I’m fine without you. I’m fucking fine.”
“Which is why we’re here. On a beach at midnight. In your pajamas. Freezing. Because you’re fine.”
Oikawa’s heart clenches, some coil of livewire in his chest tightening. He’s scared and angry and he’s so fucking tired. He looks away. “I am.”
“You’re not,” Iwaizumi says, voice rough, leaving no room for argument. “I know you when you’re fine, and this is not you when you’re fine. You’re not sleeping, you’re not eating, you’re not showering, you’re not leaving the house except for class. None of that is you when you’re fine.”
You when you’re fine.
Oikawa, when he’s fine, is not at the beach at midnight in his pajamas, saying horrible things to the person he loves most in the world. Oikawa, when he’s fine, is in his apartment with his best friend and they’re laughing and throwing popcorn at the terrible B-rated movie on the television screen and they’re pressed close and warm.
Oikawa, when he’s fine, is bright and laughing and passionate and determined and ambitious. Oikawa, when he’s fine, is not neon in the dark so much as he is sunlight in the dawn. Oikawa, when he’s fine, is not letting tears roll down his cheeks without showing any sign of noticing them.
Next to him, Iwaizumi takes a deep breath. Oikawa can feel him staring. Can feel his eyes boring into Oikawa, burrowing under his skin, trying to see everything that he’s hiding, trying to unravel the things that make him tick.
But Oikawa feels like he’s already been unraveled. He’s already pulled out every string that’s balled up inside of him and they’re all just dangling out of a hole in his chest, strewn about the beach surrounding him, leaving a hollow spot bare and vulnerable and opening straight into his heart. And his heart, too, has been unraveled: veins spilling out, tangled amongst each other, like yarn or strips of paper, maybe, or like grass and straw.
You when you’re fine. That hadn’t been too long ago, had it? Weeks, maybe. Not days, definitely not days, but not months either. Long enough ago that it’s hard to remember but recent enough that Oikawa can still cling onto the feeling of it. The feeling of being strong and bright and invincible; and the way that feeling slipped through his hands like sand or water in a sieve.
Weeks ago, when they had been about to win the National Collegiate Championship. Weeks ago, when they had been training for the final game of the year. Weeks ago, when Iwaizumi had been so care-free when he laughed, when Iwaizumi hadn’t spent so much of his time worrying.
They’re getting ice cream. It’s after practice, and they’re stopping at the convenience store just off campus. Iwaizumi buys him his ice cream and Oikawa buys Iwaizumi his drink. It’s the same as it always is. It’s good. It’s good.
They’re in the weight room of the gym, Iwaizumi lifting and Oikawa spotting him. Iwaizumi’s arms falter just for a moment and Oikawa catches the weights with a groan. Iwaizumi exhales a breathy laugh. “Thanks. I think that was a bit much for me.”
Oikawa hums. “You’ll get it next time.”
And he will, Oikawa knows he will, because Iwaizumi has never given up on this kind of thing. When he wants to do something, learn something, try something new, he goes for it, pushes at it, controlled and methodical in his efforts, until it happens.
Oikawa, on the other hand, when he wants something, pushes until the walls caging him in snap and crumble. He forces his way through, manic and desperate to succeed. He takes and takes and takes until there is nothing left to give. Until he has won. Is that winning? Sometimes it feels more like it than other times. Sometimes it works better than other times.
Then, days ago, when—
Oikawa’s body is paper. He is a paper doll, and he is folding in at the creases. He is getting torn up by hands too big and strong for him to fight against. He doesn’t know whose hands they are. Some greater force of the universe, maybe. Iwaizumi, maybe. His mirror self, maybe.
He is fragile in all the places that have been cut before, like the paper has been taped over again and again, a temporary fix to hold it together. But the tape only lasts so long before he peels it away and leaves himself bare and vulnerable for the shredding.
Oikawa’s body is rock. He is strong, solid. He is made up of bone and other matter. He is not built for breaking, but somehow he ended up here anyways. Oikawa’s body is coal. It has a diamond deep inside, but it must be destroyed before anything beautiful can be found in it. He is on fire. He is lighting up the world with his burning, with his self-immolation. Oikawa’s body is a martyr protesting the tyranny of the evils in his head.
He has been pushing himself too far. He knows this. He stands on the precipice of something greater, but one wrong step will send him tumbling back down the cliffside. There will be no catching himself this time. The doctor who performed his third surgery only half a year ago assured him of that much, simple and matter-of-fact and so, so devastating.
“You’re going to hurt yourself again,” Iwaizumi tells him, dragging him off the court and towards the benches so he can drink water while Iwaizumi cleans up. “Don’t be fucking stupid, Oikawa.”
“Aw,” Oikawa coos, feeling useless and helpless and, above all else, angry. He tries not to let it bleed into his voice, but fuck, he knows he sounds like a knife when he says, “So you do care about me.”
Iwaizumi doesn’t say anything. He just methodically collects the balls that Oikawa had been serving wildly out of bounds, putting them in the cart and not looking at Oikawa.
“Ha. I knew Iwa loved me deep down inside,” Oikawa continues, when Iwaizumi doesn’t say anything. “How cute.”
He wants to sound teasing, but there’s a darkness in the back of his throat that doesn’t allow for teasing. He sounds angry, he sounds hurt, he sounds bitter, he sounds mean. He sounds like he’s taking Iwaizumi’s feelings—because, really, they both know the truth of what they are—and crushing them in his fists.
“Shut the fuck up,” Iwaizumi says, and he’s hurt, Oikawa knows he’s hurt and he knows why and still Oikawa can’t bring himself to fix it. He’s angry and he wants the entire universe around him to be in just as much pain. If the apocalypse isn’t going to come on its own, Oikawa is going to ruin the world himself. “Just because you’re messed up right now doesn’t mean you have to hurt me, too.”
Oikawa flinches, gaping at the words. Iwaizumi has frozen, like he’s realizing what he just said. “Oikawa—”
“No,” Oikawa cuts in, lethal in the cutting edge of his voice. “I get it. I’m just messed up right now. Whatever, Iwaizumi.”
“Oikawa—”
And later, in the therapist’s office:
“I’m messed up right now,” is what Oikawa says, eventually. He pauses. Stares out of the window that’s to the left of the leather couch he sits on. The doctor is sitting across from him in a rocking chair, a notebook on her lap. She has yet to take any notes. “That’s what my friend says.”
She hums quietly, and waits for Oikawa to continue. When he doesn’t, she hums again. “Your friend—the one who made the appointment?”
“Yes.”
“He’s a good friend,” she says, as if Oikawa doesn’t already know that. As if Oikawa doesn’t thank the universe every day that Iwaizumi is there, is still there, as if Oikawa isn’t horribly aware that he has the best person in the world, his favorite person, right there in his hands and yet he pushes him further away every day. “He cares a lot about you.”
Oikawa shrugs. Outside of the window, a car drives by. It’s a blur of a black vehicle, the wheels roaring against the concrete. It makes him flinch. He looks back at the therapist’s notebook. “He thinks I’m messed up right now.”
“You keep using that phrase,” she observes. “‘Messed up.’ What makes you messed up right now?”
She has a pen tapping against the page of the notebook, but it’s not even uncapped. She’s just tapping away, a rhythmic, uncomfortable sound. Oikawa wants to rip that pen out of her hands and throw it at the stupid eggshell white walls.
As a younger child, naive in his wanting, he dreams of the apartment that he and Iwaizumi will share when they’re older. In the dream, the walls are an off-white and covered in framed photos. All their friends, all their family members, all their best memories and moments. Framed and hung on the wall to keep forever. Things that he will never have to let go of. Things that no one can take from him.
The dream, now, has come partially to fruition. He lives with Iwaizumi, even if they have two separate bedrooms with two separate beds. Even if he’s resolutely refusing to talk to Iwaizumi at the moment, even if Iwaizumi practically dragged him onto the bus to get him here anyway. Even if Iwaizumi makes him coffee in the morning that Oikawa isn’t drinking. Even if they don’t have their movie nights anymore because Oikawa keeps locking himself in his room to obsessively watch old game tapes and study teams he’ll never play.
He lives with Iwaizumi, and most days, Oikawa clings to that fact like a lifeline. Iwaizumi has yet to leave him. Iwaizumi has yet to leave him. Iwaizumi has yet to leave him.
There are things that Oikawa refuses to let go of. Whether or not he and Iwaizumi are on speaking terms right now, Oikawa cannot bear to lose him.
He will return to Iwaizumi, he knows. Eventually, when the hurt and betrayal has worn down and away. He will return to that dream of the apartment with only a few cracks in the ceiling and no water damage in the bathroom and all the framed photos on the wall and maybe a little black kitten to dote on.
No, Oikawa refuses to move on or away. Everyone he loves carries the bruise of his teeth bitten deep into flesh. Everything he wants has come so tantalizingly close to his reach, and it has slipped from his grasp with rope burn skinning his palms. But still: he wants it all.
“I want too much,” Oikawa tells the therapist.
He refuses to think of her as his therapist. There are many things that are his. There is his bedroom. There is his volleyball jersey. There is his injury. His terrible, unanswerable desire. There is his best friend. His best friend who loves him enough to make this appointment with the woman who is not his therapist. She is just someone he's trying to be civil with, for Iwaizumi’s naively hopeful sake.
“What do you want that’s too much?” she asks.
Oikawa exhales, long and slow. He feels full of jittery energy, and he bounces his knee in an attempt to quell the itch that longs to run. That longs to get out into a volleyball game and leave everything in him out there on the court.
He says, “I want to sleep.”
Finally, the therapist writes something down. He sees this only out of the corner of his eye, because he’s turned to face the window again. There’s a tree branch that hangs low and partially blocks the glass, waving a little in the wind.
Oikawa wants to wrap his hands around the branch and swing like a child again, dangling from the tree branches and pretending he could fly. Iwaizumi could always climb so much higher up towards the canopy than he could make himself go, so Oikawa would just grip tight to the low hanging branches and bend his knees and lift his feet and swing there while Iwaizumi climbed up and up and up and up—
There’s a bird’s nest up there, Tooru, I want to see! I wonder if there’s eggs in it.
Don’t fall, Iwa, don’t fall!
I won’t, I’m not a baby like you—
“Are you not sleeping enough?” the therapist asks. Oikawa shrugs. “Are you tired?”
Oikawa shrugs again. “I’m not tired, exactly. I’m just…empty. There’s not enough. Not enough around me, or maybe not enough in me. I just don’t want to deal with that feeling anymore. I want to run away from it. I want to be rested again.”
The therapist hums again. Oikawa hates her. Hates Iwaizumi for making him do this. Hates himself for letting Iwaizumi drag him here with some kind of misplaced-almost-hope that it would solve all his problems.
“How long has this feeling lasted?” she asks. “This restless energy?”
She asks it clinically, like she’s reading questions off some kind of a test booklet. Oikawa knows there’s a right and a wrong answer to this, and that there’s a truth and a lie, and that his choice of words is going to change everything.
So he says nothing. He just shrugs. She writes something down again.
“If I were to ask your friend, Iwaizumi, what would he say about you right now?”
Oikawa looks at her hand, tapping that pen again. She has a gold band on her ring finger. Her nails are painted yellow. He looks up at her, not sure what she wants to hear. “What do you mean?”
“If I were to ask him if you’re acting differently, or out of character, would he say yes?” She pauses. Rephrases—she must see Oikawa’s face shutter closed. “If I were to ask him if you seem like yourself lately, would he agree?”
I know you when you’re fine.
Oikawa looks up at her and finally meets her eyes. They’re a nice steel blue. Oikawa wants to take the pen and gouge—
“I don’t know,” Oikawa lies. Then he remembers Iwaizumi asking him to do one thing in the appointment he’s forcing Oikawa to go to. He remembers Iwaizumi asking him to tell the truth. He exhales and the breath rattles his lungs, shakes his whole body, makes his hands tremble. He clenches them into fists. “He would say that he’s scared for me right now.”
Not scared of Oikawa. Never of. But scared for him. Scared that he’s going to do something he regrets. Scared he’s going to hurt himself in the process. Scared he’s going to hurt the people around him, and unforgivably this time—scared that he already has.
“What reason do you think he has to be scared?”
Oikawa closes his eyes. Behind his eyelids, he sees the moon.
He sees Iwaizumi sitting next to him, just a silhouette in the dark. Nothing more than a shadow and a warm body with a precious, fragile heartbeat.
He sees the ocean, the waves rocking forward and back, white caps cresting in the distance, the moon pulling her back and forth.
“I don’t feel in control anymore.” The words spill out of their own accord. Out of control. “And every time this has happened, this out of control feeling, this restlessness, I’ve crashed down eventually. And he’s caught me. He always catches me. Puts me back together. But right now he’s scared that this time I’m not going to come back to myself again.”
The therapist—not his, not his, just a woman he’s been forced to talk to, just someone he agreed to see once and hopefully never again—nods slightly. She doesn’t write anything down, just stares at Oikawa intently.
She says, “Have you heard of the term hypomania?”
Oikawa has. Of course he has. He went down a rabbit hole of Internet searches from the hours of 3am to 7am when he was fifteen and terrified. He whispered his search terms to Iwaizumi at a sleepover the next night. Iwaizumi had tugged him into a hug and Oikawa had tried not to feel suffocated by his arms, but all he really felt was in love and that’s maybe the same thing in some ways.
“No,” Oikawa lies. Then, “Yes.”
“Then you know, maybe, what I’m going to say.”
This time, there’s no point in lying. Oikawa looks down at his hands. At some point he had unclenched his fists and now his sweating palms lay weakly over his knees.
“Yes,” he says. “I think I know.”
She nods again. “How about you come see me again in two days? Maybe we can find a way to help you rest. You and Iwaizumi both.”
Oikawa swallows. There’s a thick lump in his throat that won’t quite go down. He’s suddenly desperately thirsty, his mouth feeling impossibly dry. He wants to bite down on his lips and taste blood.
He wants to deny her. He wants to tell her he’s never coming back. He wants to march out into the waiting room and drag Iwaizumi to the bus stop, telling him this was a stupid idea and it’s not going to do anything and he hates him for trying.
Instead he says, “Okay.”
They’re in Iwaizumi’s bedroom. Oikawa isn’t quite sure how long they’ve been there. He’s not quite sure what day it is anymore.
Time seems to pass by strangely these days, and he feels a little like he’s not a part of it anymore. Not a part of this timeline. Daytime versus nighttime is meaningless if you aren’t sleeping. Hours disappear like water in a sieve when you get too involved in a project of some sort. Days pass as easily and as unnoticeably as grains of sand in an hourglass count down the seconds to disaster.
Oikawa is lying down on Iwaizumi’s bed, tucked under the blankets. He’s not sure how Iwaizumi got him to sleep. He doesn’t feel rested so much as he feels weighed down. Maybe the blankets are heavier than usual, or maybe there are sandbags where his muscles should be. He hasn’t been working out lately. Maybe that’s what it is. Maybe this is what it feels like to be weak.
Iwaizumi is lying next to him, but he’s blinking awake. He looks at Oikawa for a long time, just letting the morning wash over him as he wakes up.
“How’d you sleep?” Iwaizumi murmurs, his voice still hoarse with exhaustion.
Oikawa is looking at him so carefully that he thinks maybe he’s seeing an Iwaizumi that he’s never known before. The cracks in his dry lips, the shadowed laughter lines at his eyes, the curve of his jaw. He looks tired. He looks sad. He looks lonely. None of those are words Oikawa ever wanted to associate with his best friend.
“Are you still not talking to me?” Iwaizumi asks. The sleep hasn’t gone from his voice, but it does nothing to mask the sound of depressed resignation. “I’m not saying I’m sorry. I’m trying to help you and I know you know that.”
Oikawa closes his eyes. He’s suddenly so tired. He says, quietly, “I know.”
“Are we going to be okay?” Iwaizumi sounds so wrecked, so small, when he says it that Oikawa flinches at the words. He opens his eyes to look at Iwaizumi, to try to read that awful expression on his face, but he’s finding only a mix of hurt and guilt and he can’t bear to see it anymore. “Oikawa, please talk to me.”
Oikawa rolls onto his side to fully face Iwaizumi, placing a hand on top of the pillow and under his own cheek. The cool touch of his skin is grounding. “I’m not mad at you anymore.”
“You’re not?”
“I know you want to help,” Oikawa murmurs. Iwaizumi is looking at him intently, giving him his full, single-minded attention. “I know that.”
Iwaizumi swallows visibly. “Will you let me?”
Every time that Oikawa falls, Iwaizumi catches him. It’s the same in reverse, too: when Iwaizumi falters, Oikawa is there to help him stand again. This is how they work. They hold each other steady. They keep each other safe. They make each other strong.
This time, though, Oikawa isn’t sure it’s possible for Iwaizumi to steady him. This time, Oikawa is pretty sure that it’s something he has to do on his own. He thinks all he needs from Iwaizumi is someone to stay while he learns how to do that.
Oikawa meets his gaze. He wonders how he looks to Iwaizumi—can Iwaizumi see the bags under his eyes? Can he see the wreck he’s made of his life written over his face? Can he see all the regret pooling into tears at the waterlines of his eyes? Can he see the unrest in him? Can he see the settling Oikawa dreams of?
“I just want you to stay with me,” Oikawa whispers hoarsely. “I know I’m crazy. But I just want you to choose to stay with me anyway.”
Iwaizumi looks like he’s about to cry too and the view of him begins to blur beyond the veil of Oikawa’s own tears. “There’s nothing you could do to make me leave.”
Oikawa squeezes his eyes shut and opens them again, trying not to feel so fucking pathetic. But Iwaizumi isn’t turning away. “Nothing?”
“Nothing,” Iwaizumi confirms again.
“Okay.” He should apologize, should thank him, should tell him he loves him, should promise his own everlasting friendship. There are so many things that he should do, so many things that Iwaizumi deserves. But Oikawa can’t bring himself to say any of them. He just has to hope that Iwaizumi understands somehow. “Okay.”
That’s not how communication works, he reminds himself, days later. He’s sitting at the table, working on his puzzle. He can’t figure out where this one fucking piece goes and he wants to upend the table and flip the entire project onto the floor. He wants to give up.
“Just hoping that someone will understand isn’t enough to make them understand,” the therapist says. “You have to talk to them. Communicate. What are you so afraid of, Tooru?”
Oikawa swallows. Looks out of the window. He can hear a bird singing beyond the cage of glass he’s in—maybe there’s a nest in the tree. He doesn’t know if it’s the right time of year for eggs; just knows that the bird must fly home somewhere. Iwaizumi would know. Maybe he should ask.
“Rejection, maybe.” He looks at the therapist’s nails again. Today, they’re bright pink. “Misunderstanding.”
The therapist doesn’t say anything to that, so Oikawa keeps talking. “I’m worried—” he does not say scared, though that is what he is— “that there will never be enough words in the world to explain how I feel, and so no one will ever understand what I’m saying.”
“Have you let them try?”
It starts with Iwaizumi, as most things in Oikawa’s life tend to do. It starts with Iwaizumi cooking dinner for the two of them while Oikawa sits and watches The X-Files. He’s watching it at a normal speed this time, curled up under two blankets and lying with his head on the arm of the couch and his knees tucked up to his chest. He feels small. Feels warm.
When Iwaizumi calls for him to come get food, Oikawa unravels himself from the blankets and heads over to the kitchen on quiet feet. He walks a little ghostlike, he thinks, making no sound until Iwaizumi is in sight.
“Hey,” he says softly. “Thanks for cooking.”
Iwaizumi hums, not turning around. He’s serving rice and tofu into two cracked ceramic bowls. Oikawa always drops things when he handwashes dishes, so almost all of their dishes have some kind of chip or crack in them.
Iwaizumi has never gotten mad at him for it, somehow. It’s not a symptom of anything—or, it’s not something Iwaizumi can’t blame him for—it’s just a failing of Oikawa’s own, and yet Iwaizumi has only ever rolled his eyes and said Clumsykawa, what did you break now?
Oikawa leans against the arch of the doorway, watching Iwaizumi from behind. Iwaizumi moves gracefully in the kitchen, intimately familiar with where everything is and how Oikawa likes his food to be prepared. He knows Oikawa so well. That’s the problem, Oikawa supposes, just as much as it is a blessing.
“Do you like doing this?” Oikawa blurts out. “Are you okay with this?”
Iwaizumi turns around, offering him a bowl. “Cooking? Sure, I like it. It’s kind of relaxing, when nothing’s burning. I’m getting better at it now.”
“No, I mean…” Oikawa takes the bowl in hand, exhaling through his nose. In and out. “You spend so much time taking care of me because I don’t do it myself. Are you really okay with that?”
Iwaizumi stares at him for a moment, raising his eyebrows a little. “Two decades of friendship and now you’re asking me this?”
There’s half a joke in his voice, but it’s half serious, too. Oikawa shrugs uncomfortably. “Better late than never?”
Iwaizumi snorts. “I guess.” He pauses. Looks down at the bowl in his own hands; mixes the rice around a little with his chopsticks. He says, firmly but quietly, “You’re my best friend. Helping you isn’t, like, a chore. I want to do it.”
“Oh.”
“Besides,” Iwaizumi says, his voice turning to something softer, “you take care of me just as much, you know.”
Oikawa looks away, down towards his feet. He’s wearing Godzilla print socks, the ones Iwaizumi had gotten him as a joke Christmas gift one year because the two things Oikawa told him not to give him were anything related to Godzilla or socks. Iwaizumi had gotten him something actually nice that year, too, but Oikawa secretly treasures the socks even more.
“It doesn’t feel like that,” he says. He can barely hear himself when he says it, but Iwaizumi clearly catches the words because he takes a minuscule step back, reeling with the sentence.
“You do,” Iwaizumi insists.
“You cook me dinner every night.”
Iwaizumi shrugs. “You do the dishes.”
“I break them.”
“They’re replaceable. As long as you don’t hurt yourself, I don’t care about the dishes.”
Oikawa swallows, looking back up at Iwaizumi. He looks dead serious about what he’s saying, but Oikawa isn’t quite sure how to believe him. “You remind me to shower. Make me take the—my medication. Walk me to class to make sure I actually show up. Go with me to therapy sessions twice a week and then wait until I’m done.”
“You forced me to stop using 3-in-1 body wash and shampoo and conditioner, and now my skin is healthier. You make sure I cook at dinnertime instead of hours later when I’m finally done studying. You help me with the homework I don’t get. You go with me to go grocery shopping and to the laundromat because you know I hate those things and would never do them otherwise.”
Oikawa thinks he’s stopped breathing, maybe. All of those things that Iwaizumi listed are just—they’re just the way that he and Iwaizumi are. He’s never thought of them as routine taking care of Iwaizumi before. They’ve always just been little habits he does because he loves him. He didn’t really even think Iwaizumi had noticed any of it.
“I have,” Oikawa says slowly, “a kind of imbalance in me. And there’s maybe no fixing it.”
His every word feels like a warning, but he presses on and keeps talking. Iwaizumi deserves the truth of his mind and body.
Oikawa continues, “I might get out of control sometimes. I might not be able to get out of bed other times. It comes and goes. The—my therapist said that I need time. To get better. But even with time, it won’t always be easy. I won’t ever be right. Or—or normal. I’ll always…there will always be something unbalanced in my head.”
Iwaizumi is hanging onto his every word, warning or threat or promise or fear or otherwise. When Oikawa goes silent again, he exhales slowly. “Okay. That doesn’t change how I feel about you. Imbalance and restlessness and all.”
I have a kind of restlessness in me, Oikawa had said, so many years ago. He didn’t think Iwaizumi remembered that. But he does—he’s paying attention in a way Oikawa didn’t know anyone ever could. He’s always paying attention to Oikawa. His eyes are always somehow on him, no matter how fast he runs.
“Don’t you get it?” Iwaizumi asks. His voice is a little rough, like it’s taking everything brave in him to say it and even then he doesn’t really know how to. “I love you. I’m not going to stop caring about you, and doing things to show it. And I’m not going to leave.”
There is something choking him, some suffocating hand around Oikawa’s throat. He doesn’t have the right words for this. Doesn’t know how to navigate this vast ocean of feelings on a boat that is so, so small.
“Don’t say that,” he murmurs. He looks down again, feeling his heart and lungs clench tight. He feels breathless, feels weightless. “Don’t tell me that.”
For a moment, Iwaizumi is silent and Oikawa almost thinks he’s going to walk away. He almost thinks that Iwaizumi is just going to let him deny it, and pretend this conversation had never happened. Had never broken his heart.
“Why not?” Iwaizumi asks. His words are slow, even, but Oikawa can hear the anxiety in his voice. “It’s true.”
“It can’t be,” Oikawa tries, because Iwaizumi’s rejection, his lilting Oikawa… still rings awful in his ears.
Iwaizumi puts his bowl on the nearby table, just next to a pile of puzzle pieces that Oikawa hasn’t figured out yet. He asks again, “Why not?”
“You rejected me,” Oikawa says, something in him suddenly snapping. He doesn’t understand this game that Iwaizumi is playing with his feelings, this game where he’s everything Oikawa wants but has said explicitly he can never have and yet, here, now, Iwaizumi is saying things like I love you. “Don’t act like I’m the crazy one here, when you were the one who told me no.”
“You say things when you’re hypomanic,” Iwaizumi says quietly, sounding both desperate for forgiveness and somewhat ashamed of asking for it. “Oikawa, sometimes I don’t know—”
Oikawa’s stare hardens into steel, but it’s just to mask the hurt and they both know it. He sets his bowl on the table next to Iwaizumi’s food. “You thought I didn’t mean it. You thought I’m too fucked in the head to mean it.”
“Oikawa—”
“No,” Oikawa cuts in, stabbing a finger against Iwaizumi’s chest. Iwaizumi lets himself be pushed a step back, his breathing heavy and ragged. “You don’t get to decide that, Iwaizumi. You might know me well but you don’t know my feelings better than I do, whether or not I’m screwed up in the head. You’re not a fucking mindreader. When I tell you I love you, it’s because I love you.”
Iwaizumi looks at him with wide, scared eyes. Oikawa sees the moon in them. Sees a starless, black sky.
Iwaizumi’s voice is quiet but his words are harsh when he says, “And when you tell me you don’t want me? When you sit on the beach in the middle of the night and tell me you don’t want me, what the fuck am I supposed to do with that?”
Oikawa is the one, now, to reel back with a flinch. He had said that, didn’t he? He had wanted to hurt Iwaizumi, had wanted to make him feel his own stupid pain, and he had said the thing he knew would cut the deepest. And it had worked just as Oikawa knew it would.
He wants to deny it, wants to tell Iwaizumi that he had never said such a thing, would never say something that is so deeply untrue. But he can’t bring himself to spit out the lie. It wouldn’t be fair to Iwaizumi. As shitty a person as Oikawa knows he can be sometimes, he’s not going to gaslight his best friend into loving him.
“I shouldn’t have said that,” he murmurs, hollow.
“No,” Iwaizumi says. “You shouldn’t have. But you did.”
Oikawa closes his eyes. He can’t bear to see the consequences of his own actions, of his own lashing out at the person who has always cared the most and the best. “Yeah.”
Iwaizumi is quiet for a long moment. Oikawa keeps his eyes closed, but he can hear Iwaizumi shift and can hear him take a few small, hesitant steps forward. He can feel it as Iwaizumi’s hands go gently to Oikawa’s hands, taking them slowly into his own.
“I know why you said it.” Iwaizumi takes a deep, audible breath as he squeezes his hands. “I know you were lashing out, because you were scared and hurt and felt betrayed. I know you. But it—”
He cuts himself off, clearing his throat as if trying to chase away a sob. Oikawa opens his eyes, staring down at their clasped hands. Oikawa finishes the sentence for him. “But it still hurt.”
“Yeah,” Iwaizumi whispers hoarsely. It’s like he can’t bear the admission that he’s been hurt by Oikawa, that Oikawa’s words had consequences that they haven’t spoken about until now. It’s like he’s ashamed of his pain, this pain that he’s been holding in himself, never pushing and so unwilling to ask for an apology. “It did.”
Oikawa tries to swallow around that lump in his throat, but he can’t quite finish the motion without feeling like he’s choking. “I’m sorry, Iwa. You didn’t deserve that. You—”
—at fifteen, Oikawa learns the steps to a good, genuine apology. He has a burning, painful kind of need to figure it out, figure out how to say he’s sorry without making excuses and without making himself into the victim. He needs to learn. Needs to be better. Needs to. He can’t keep making excuses for his behavior and pretending that everything’s fine.
This is his first step to the crash down from the high he has been on this past week. He opens Google and he types in how to say a real apology and he memorizes the list. In his head, he writes a mental apology to everyone he has ever hurt.
And then he breaks down. He starts crying and he doesn’t stop. He throws himself into his bed and he pulls the covers over his head as he trembles, pressing his face into the pillow for as long as he can until he can’t breathe anymore. He tugs at his hair, pulling like he could tear it all out with his weak, weak fingers.
In the end, he doesn’t actually voice any of the apologies he had written out in his head. They never leave the shameful privacy of his thoughts. They just live there, and they haunt him.
He makes a habit of it, though. When he fucks up, he runs down that list of ways to say he’s sorry. He acknowledges what he did. He explains why it was hurtful. He expresses his regret, his shame, his remorse. He promises to do better. He promises to try to fix what has broken.
The problem with this is that he never actually says any of them out loud.
Maybe it’s time to—
“I fucked up,” Oikawa murmurs. He can’t look Iwaizumi in the eye. “I said something I didn’t mean, and I’m—I’m scared I broke your trust forever. Because what I said hurt, and I know that. There’s not an excuse for it. But I—I’m sorry. I want to take it back. I want to do whatever I can to gain your trust again. I wish I had never said anything that night, I wish I had never done what I did in the first place. But I—I did. And I can’t undo it.”
Iwaizumi squeezes his hands. His voice is hoarse, like he’s about to cry, when he says, “No. You can’t. But not being able to take it back doesn’t mean I can’t move on.”
Oikawa swallows, looking up at him. His eyes are wet and he wants to rub at them but he’d sooner roll over in his grave before letting go of Iwaizumi’s hands now.
“I said that,” Oikawa starts, “and you stayed. Why did you stay?”
“I told you—” Iwaizumi cracks a small smile— “I love you.”
Oikawa inhales deeply. It didn’t feel—not until just then, with those words—real. It didn’t feel like it could be possible when Oikawa is the way he is and has done the things he’s done.
A few weeks of therapy hasn’t fixed his head. He doesn’t know if it really ever will, but still: it’s worth trying some introspection, worth some trying to get better. Yes—he’s trying. He’s trying. He’s trying.
“You’ve kind of got me wrapped around your stupid little finger,” Iwaizumi tells him. There’s the hint of a laugh in his voice, despite the tears Oikawa can see in the corners of his eyes. “Yeah, you said something that hurt. But everyone does that, sometimes. Fuck knows I’ve hurt you before, gone too far with an insult, or punched a little too hard.”
Oikawa laughs a little, wet and small. He doesn’t know if that’s true; Iwaizumi has always known his limits and his insecurities so intimately. But even if it’s not exactly the same, it might be just true enough. “I guess.”
Iwaizumi hums. “So let me forgive you, okay? Let me love you a little more.”
But first, to rewind, briefly:
They’re eighteen. They’re walking home after the last volleyball game of their high school careers. Not the one they lost against Karasuno, when that ball had gone careening off Oikawa’s wrists and echoed its landing against the floor and wall behind him. Not the one where he and Kageyama faced off and Kageyama won.
No, they’re walking home after a game between the Seijoh third years, just one last game that they play for no other reason than that it’s fun. No other reason than that they don’t want to let go yet.
They’re walking home after that game. One with their friends, the people they’ve spent the past three years with: laughing, bickering, joking, pushing each other around, playing volleyball. Always, always, there is volleyball. A game just for the group of them.
It doesn’t count for anything official. It should barely even count as practice, because most of them are too busy laughing to receive and half of them have stomach cramps after eating so much ramen earlier. But still: it was fun. When Oikawa thinks of his last game of his high school career, he’s going to remember that one.
There will be other games, he knows. He’s going to continue practicing with the team for the rest of the year just to keep his muscles warm, but he’s not going to be the focus of training in the way the underclassmen will be. So there will be other games, but none like this. None played just for them, just for the sake of it.
Weren’t we going home?
They had been. They had been walking home, and all of them turned the corner into the Aoba Johsai gymnasium. They didn’t question it, not really. They just stretched—at Iwaizumi’s insistence—and they started playing. As if there was nothing to lose. And at that moment, there wasn’t. At that moment, it was just fun.
Now, they’re walking home, him and Iwaizumi. They’re walking in silence, until Iwaizumi finally breaks it, cuts through that glass-quiet with a red hot poker. He tells Oikawa that he’s proud of him, proud to be his partner. He tells Oikawa that he'll still do great things. He tells Oikawa that, when the time comes for them to play against each other, he’ll give it his all.
For a brief moment right there, Oikawa considers confessing. He thinks maybe Iwaizumi would accept it, his love confession. He thinks maybe this is the night for it: with the moon so big and heavy above them, with the short-lived cicada song in the bushes, with a streetlamp casting a yellow-ish glow over Iwaizumi’s skin, with their fists bumping against each other in some great, small show of love.
He doesn’t. He can’t bring himself to ruin the moment, not when it feels so sacred. But he thinks about it. He thinks about what he would say. He thinks about how he could put into words the most secret of his feelings. He thinks about how he could ever explain them. He thinks about how he would try to get Iwaizumi to understand the depth of those feelings.
“When I think about home,” Oikawa says quietly, staring down at his Godzilla print socks in the apartment they share, “I think about you. I think about how I don’t care where we are, where we live, because I know that I can make a home out of it if you’re there.”
Iwaizumi swallows. He drops one of Oikawa’s hands and lifts his own to Oikawa’s cheek. His palm presses gently against his jawline, his fingers cradling his face. The movement is so tender, so sweet, that Oikawa wonders where Iwaizumi found the courage to do it.
There is a roll of thunder outside, and it shakes the apartment. There is a storm oncoming, and Oikawa braces himself for the impact. He braces himself for the ruination of everything. He speaks.
“When I think about my future,” Oikawa continues, “I have no idea what I’m seeing. It looks different every day. Working in an office. Waiting tables. Watching other people’s volleyball games on TV. But the one thing that stays the same is that you’re there. You’re there, and we’re just sitting together and talking or other times we’re holding hands and taking long walks on the beach or sometimes we’re falling asleep in the same bed.”
Iwaizumi steps even closer. They’re close enough that Oikawa thinks he can feel Iwaizumi’s breath on his lips, just the ghost of a touch. “So what you’re saying is that I’m never getting rid of you. And you’re never getting rid of me.”
“I wouldn’t ever want to,” Oikawa whispers hoarsely.
Iwaizumi takes a shaky breath. He’s nervous, Oikawa realizes. All of this, and he’s still nervous. A flash of lighting electrifies the room for a split second, and Oikawa burns with it. It’s a spark in his chest and he lets it warm his whole body.
He wants to drive right into the storm, chasing after the lightning, foot on the gas pedal headed straight into a tsunami. He wants to drown in this feeling, in the anticipation for what comes next. He wants it, wants more. He always wants more. He wants whatever Iwaizumi will allow.
But he’s in control of himself now, he thinks maybe, in a way he hasn’t been recently. He lifts his foot from the gas pedal and slows, stopping just short of the ocean. He doesn’t barrel forward and take without asking, pull and prod and push without permission. This time, he takes a breath, steadying himself. He feels the spark of lightning in his chest and he revels in the surge of confidence.
As it becomes clear that Iwaizumi isn’t going to say anything more, Oikawa leans into the palm of his hand and closes his eyes to ask the question for him. Oikawa asks, breathlessly, terrified of how hopeful he is, “So is this where I finally get to kiss you?”
“Yes,” Iwaizumi breathes out.
It’s raining on the evening when they kiss for the first time. Oikawa can hear the rain drumming against the window panes, and every now and then, a roll of thunder will shake the entire apartment building, making the picture frames on the wall rattle a little. Outside, there is a downpour.
Inside, there is just Oikawa and there is just Iwaizumi and there is a moment of stillness. There is a moment of perfect balance between them. A balance upon which they are steady, and they are equals, and they are unafraid of falling.
They kiss, and it’s more than Oikawa dreamed of. The rain is heavy outside, and when Iwaizumi pulls apart, his lips thoroughly kissed and his eyes bright, the light in the kitchen flickers off and on again, just briefly. Another flash of lightning casts Iwaizumi in a golden light, just for a second.
Oikawa doesn’t care that the power could go out at any moment. Rather, he cares that Iwaizumi looks ethereal, like this. He looks like a daydream. Oikawa just cares that he wants to kiss Iwaizumi again, and he cares about the revelation that now he’s allowed to do just that.
A moment of perfect balance, hidden in this sanctuary away from the storm outside. A moment where it’s just the two of them, and their love. Just a moment, one that Oikawa could happily live in forever.
The world—the rain, the wind, the thunder—can come crashing in through the windows and flood the tiny seventh floor apartment later. For now, Oikawa has no room for the apocalypse in his head. For now, there is just him and Iwaizumi and their small, bashful smiles, and the great and impossible beginning of something.
A kiss isn’t going to fix him. Iwaizumi isn’t going to fix him either. Nor is being in love, nor is being loved.
But he’s holding on to this, clutching it tight to his chest like a hand clasped around his heart. Bring on the thunder, bring on the storm, bring on the tsunami. He’s still holding onto hope. He’s holding on.