Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

They are seventeen years old when they’re told that they could change the world. Or, really, they are seventeen when they are given the opportunity to save the world.

When they are seventeen, a recruiter comes to Aoba Johsai and asks if any able-bodied and able-minded students would be interested in protecting Japan from the Kaiju. In saving people, in saving the only country they’ve ever been to.

Oikawa knows what they’re signing up for, in theory. He’s watched the same newsreels about the arriving Kaiju that everyone else in the world has watched with bated, tense breath; he’s read all the consent forms and listened to all the speeches about the danger of the world they’re going to be entering. He knows what their role is going to be, and he knows the risks.

All of this should be reason enough to stop him. But in the end, there was never going to be any stopping him. Not when Iwaizumi made his decision a long time ago—as soon as the Jaeger program became publicized, probably—and no one was ever going to be able to stop Oikawa from following him to the Jaeger Academy as soon as that decision had been put into action.

The two of them dropping out of high school to join the Jaeger Academy in Tokyo isn’t a decision that anyone else understands, not really. Bright futures, people say. All that potential, people say. They’ll either die or come back with tails between their legs, people say. What a shame.

Those whispers in the hallways of Aoba Johsai follow the two of them around in the days between the papers being signed and the arrival of the bus that would take them and any other recruits from Miyagi to Tokyo. The arguments he has with his parents about it and the same arguments with his sister, too, follow him around in those days; itching at the periphery of his thoughts and begging him to change his mind.

He knows that Iwaizumi has a similar experience, even if his mom is slightly more supportive of her son’s decision than Oikawa’s parents are. Iwaizumi’s mom has always let her son take the lead in decisions about his future, while the Oikawa family has aspirations for their youngest and only son that he himself doesn’t always agree with and definitely have nothing to do with Jaegers and Kaiju.

The decision to sign all those papers and to get on the bus is a fight. But in the end, despite his parents begging him not to and the chances that they might get hurt or die—and despite the fact that it had never really been in Oikawa’s plans until Iwaizumi ever so tentatively mentioned it—Oikawa gets on the bus to Tokyo.

So when they’re seventeen, Oikawa and Iwaizumi sign up to be heroes. Then, when they’re eighteen, they become the youngest pair of pilots to successfully Drift together. This is, in some ways, the beginning.

In other ways, this is the end.

“You two ready up there?”

“Ready,” Iwaizumi tells their Academy instructors, determined. It’s the first day of Pons training, and they’re sitting in a mock Conn-Pod, finally being allowed to Drift. “Oikawa?”

Oikawa licks his lips. “Ready as I’ll ever be, Iwa.”

“Initiating neural handshake, Iwaizumi, Oikawa.”

The lurch into Iwaizumi’s head is nothing like what Oikawa had prepared himself for. For all of his preparation, all that he had been taught, all that he had been told to expect—none of that was enough to prepare him for this. Not for the onslaught of everything that makes up Iwaizumi, for that everything to rush in and overwhelm him.

Not for the nostalgia and the muscle memory that floods over him: you are six years old, listening to rapid-fire Spanish and choppy Japanese, looking at wide eyes and open palms as you place a mason jar in them, a butterfly fluttering behind the glass.

Ten years old, blowing out candles on a birthday cake decorated for two best friends rather than just you alone. Thirteen or fourteen, maybe, in the school gym passing a volleyball back and forth; you’re laughing and laughing and laughing.

You’re a little older and kissing someone despite the inexplicable wrongness of the motions. You’re a little older still and your eyes are on your best friend, watching so carefully, ducking away to avoid being caught, a rush of blood to the head.

And not for the wave upon wave of emotion: hope—fear—determination—awe—steadiness—

—love—love—lovelovelove.

“Don’t chase after it,” comes Iwaizumi's voice, steady and reliable in the back of Oikawa’s mind. Always there, waiting for him to catch up. Always there, catching him when he’s about to fall.

Oikawa wrenches himself away from it—away from that riptide of knowing someone more intimately than humans were ever meant to know another person; away from the rushing waters so deep that your only desire is to go deeper; away from the ghost ache of another person’s feelings—and opens his eyes to look out at the Jaeger’s window.

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” he says. “I’m here, Iwa, don’t you worry.”

Iwaizumi snorts, and Oikawa isn’t sure if he does it out loud or if Oikawa is just hearing it in the back of his mind. It’s already so hard to separate reality from his head from Iwaizumi’s head. Outside of the simulation, a crowd is gathering.

“I wasn’t worried for a second,” Iwaizumi promises him. “I’ve never doubted that we could do this.”

Oikawa grins, glancing over to Iwaizumi only to find Iwaizumi already looking back at him. “We did it, didn’t we?”

“Hell yeah, we did.” Iwaizumi smiles at him, bright and easy. All the nervousness that had been wound up so tightly within him in the hours before getting in the mock Conn-Pod is gone. “Ready to try this out?”

“Oh, I’m ready.” They both turn away from each other to face out of the Jaeger.

One of their instructors’ voices echoes around the Conn-Pod: “You boys have the green light to move whenever you’re ready.”

Oikawa and Iwaizumi don’t have to exchange words or even glances before they’re moving in sync. Oikawa doesn’t have to think about it, doesn’t have to question it, before he knows how to move and before he knows how Iwaizumi is going to move. He feels whole, standing there in the Conn-Pod, like maybe he’s been missing a piece of himself his whole life and now he’s finally found it.

Being in Iwaizumi’s head is nothing like he thought it’d be. He had anticipated a kind of settling, a presence at his peripheral mind, some warmth that would steady him in the Drift. Before actually doing it, he had imagined his best friend’s mind to be something like the calmness of a lake in the mountains; a lake that churns at the coming of a hurricane, but a lake that comforts at the same time.

He had imagined Iwaizumi’s mind would fit in perfectly at his own edges, filling in the curves and blind spots in Oikawa’s vision. And this is true, in some ways. In some ways, Iwaizumi really does smooth over all his rough edges and fill in the blanks where Oikawa doesn’t have the words to explain how he feels or what he’s doing.

But what is also true is that Iwaizumi is strictly his own presence, one that is so distinctly Iwaizumi that Oikawa knows it’s him that’s there, that’s always been there and has promised to always be there in any future. It’s so warm and true and honest and bold that it cannot be anyone other than Iwaizumi.

And another thing that is true is that Oikawa, even before the Drift, did not always know where he ended and Iwaizumi began. It was hard to tell, sometimes, what thoughts came from him and which ones were impressed upon him by Iwaizumi. They’ve always been so close, always pushed at the boundaries of friendship, that Oikawa never questioned it.

Now, in the Drift, this is all the more true. Oikawa can feel that distinct presence of Iwaizumi settled in a corner of his mind, can tell that it’s him that’s there over anyone else in the world—not that it could have ever been anyone else. With that, with Iwaizumi’s presence, comes floods of feelings and ideas and plans that Oikawa doesn’t know how to separate from his own.

It scares him a little. How blurred the lines between their feelings are. How Iwaizumi’s heart in Oikawa’s hands feels so natural, like it has been meant to be there all along, Kaiju invasion or not. How easily Iwaizumi welcomed Oikawa into his mind, how easily Oikawa went at his call; how easily Oikawa did the same for Iwaizumi.

But more than scaring him, it’s enthralling. Drifting with Iwaizumi comes naturally, and they slip into that connection to each other with ease. Now that they’re there, Oikawa never wants to walk away from this. From Iwaizumi. He never wants to lose him.

This is one of the great stipulations, and also one of the biggest reasons, for Oikawa’s participation in the Jaeger piloting program. He does not want to lose Iwaizumi. Not to a petty fight, not to time, not to a fucking Kaiju.

The ultimate goal of all of this is to defeat the Kaiju, beat them back down under the ocean until they’re so small they can’t hurt anyone ever again. That’s the dream.

But privately, in the most secret of places in Oikawa’s heart, he just wants to keep himself and Iwaizumi alive. They could become heroes; Oikawa’s seen the articles about successful pilots. He won’t lie and say that it’s not appealing. But Oikawa is determined that they become heroes who survive. Who get to be happy at the end.

For now, though, he and Iwaizumi begin to experiment with the Drift and the Jaeger simulation for the first time. For now, they move the body of a metal god or a man-made monster together. They work in tandem, never doubting each other’s decisions and always, always carrying so much trust within them.

For now, they are successful.

After their first run through with the Drift simulation, they stumble out of the mock Conn-Pod laughing. It’s the brightest that Oikawa has seen Iwaizumi in weeks. Months, maybe—since they first came to the Jaeger Academy.

Iwaizumi slings his arm around Oikawa’s shoulder and Oikawa puts his own arm around Iwaizumi’s waist almost instinctively.

“Hey.” Iwaizumi’s voice sounds a little strange now that they’re back in real life and not communicating silently in the echo of their heads. The transition between the two leaves Oikawa reeling for a moment. “We did good.”

“We did,” Oikawa says, grinning.

“Let’s get to the debrief room, and then I need food. That was exhausting.”

Oikawa nods, leaning into Iwaizumi’s side a little bit. He can feel people’s eyes on them as they walk—their fellow pilots-in-training had all been watching their simulation, just as he and Iwaizumi had watched all of theirs—but for once, he couldn’t care less what people are thinking of him. He’s too caught up in Iwaizumi’s smile, in the feeling of his arm around his shoulder, in the press of their bodies together.

When they get to the debrief room, the head instructor, Keishin Ukai, rushes over to them. He had his one hand on either of their shoulders and he’s shaking them a little, eyes bright and talking a mile a minute.

“That was the fastest I’ve seen anyone—why didn’t you two tell me you were gonna be that good? I would’ve had you trying this earlier—and the way you’re moving so in sync already—”

He cuts himself off with a small laugh. “That was impressive, kids.”

“Thank you, sir,” Iwaizumi says, always remaining respectful but unable to mask the pride and excitement so clear on his face.

“Don’t know what else you expected from us,” Oikawa tells him, his smile bright and unconcerned with formality.

Ukai laughs again. “Well, we’ll do a more in depth review after dinner, okay? I’m thinking we get you two into a Jaeger sooner than planned.”

Iwaizumi and Oikawa exchange grins when Ukai dismisses them, like they’re children again and being shooed off to play by Iwaizumi’s mother when she needs to cook dinner alone in the kitchen rather than with two kids causing a ruckus around her. It feels a little like that: like they’re playing a game with each other, like they’re young again and invulnerable. It feels a little like nothing can touch them if they’re together and if they can pilot this Jaeger, just the two of them.

Oikawa knows that isn’t true. They can still get hurt and can still get killed. It happens to more pilots than it doesn’t happen to. He knows that this isn’t a game.

But for a moment, he allows himself to revel in the excitement of doing something great and big and important with his best friend. For a moment, he allows himself to be more proud of the two of them than he is scared for them.

Walking to the cafeteria, Iwaizumi seems to be feeling much the same way. There’s a lingering happiness written into his expression, no matter how much he’s trying to dampen it. They walk side by side, hands brushing every few steps. It all feels as natural as seeing him in the Drift felt.

After eating—a dinner that was so much more needed than Oikawa had thought—the two of them go back to their shared room in the living quarters of the Shatterdome. Without words, they get themselves ready for bed, the weight of the day heavy on their shoulders.

“Iwa,” Oikawa starts. Then he stops. Then again, “Iwa.”

Iwaizumi turns away from the dresser, his face soft and open. He looks somewhat pensive, or maybe he's just so exhausted that he looks pliable, like he’s willing to answer anything Oikawa asks of him. “Yeah?”

Oikawa sits down on the bottom bunk of the bed; technically Iwaizumi’s space, but they’ve lived in each other’s pockets for so long that Iwaizumi doesn’t blink an eye at Oikawa pulling his feet up on the mattress and wrapping his arms around his shins.

“You share each other’s memories, or, or emotions, sort of,” Oikawa says slowly, “when you Drift.”

“Yes.” The apprehension is already seeping into Iwaizumi’s voice.

Oikawa looks up at him. He’s not sure what he wants to hear, but he still feels like he has to ask anyway. He’s not sure why, but he needs to know, even if it isn’t something he’s prepared to hear.

There’s a pause between them, silent and heavy. Then Oikawa asks, “What did you feel? In the Drift?”

Iwaizumi sighs heavily, as if he was expecting the question. As if he was just waiting for Oikawa to gather the courage to ask for it. He walks across the small matchbox of a room to sit on the bed next to Oikawa. He leans forward, elbows on his knees, staring out at the opposite wall for a long, silent moment.

“You’re kind of scaring me, Iwa,” Oikawa says tentatively. “Was it horrible? Am I—”

“No,” Iwaizumi cuts in. He shakes his head slowly. “You always worry so much, Tooru.”

Tooru. The way he says Oikawa’s name is so gentle, so tender. Like it’s something precious. Like maybe the act of saying it is a secret that Iwaizumi is keeping, or maybe is sharing with Oikawa. These days, he only calls Oikawa by his first name when he’s feeling vulnerable, when he’s feeling afraid, when he’s feeling like he needs Oikawa a little more than usual.

Or maybe it’s something else. Maybe it’s more than that, or less than that, and Oikawa just doesn’t get it. After Drifting with him, Oikawa simultaneously feels like he knows Iwaizumi so much better, and like he doesn’t understand Iwaizumi at all.

He wonders if Iwaizumi feels the same way. Now that he’s been in Oikawa’s head, maybe he finds Oikawa to be something repulsive or something else awful. Or maybe he just now thinks of Oikawa as unknowable, as something that he can never reach—something that isn’t worth trying to reach.

Iwaizumi takes a long breath, glancing over at Oikawa and then back down to his hands, hanging between his knees. “I felt…it’s hard to explain, I guess. I felt warm. Safe. I felt comfortable, I think.”

“What did you see though?”

Iwaizumi exhales slowly, lifting his head to stare out at the opposite wall. “I saw us, by the ocean. As kids. Then from that trip in junior high. And then as teenagers, last year. Just…it was us. By the water.”

He pauses, then looks at Oikawa, studying him carefully. There’s more to it, Oikawa can tell by the worry lines at Iwaizumi’s eyes and forehead, but he isn’t saying it. Whether it’s because he doesn’t want to or because he doesn’t know how to, Oikawa doesn’t know.

“That’s all,” Iwaizumi says softly. Then he nudges Oikawa’s shoulder with his own. “It’s late, Oikawa. You gonna climb up the ladder or share with me?”

“You’re capable of climbing up the ladder too,” Oikawa says, shoving back at his shoulder. “You go up.”

Iwaizumi rolls his eyes. “Shittykawa, you’re the one who wanted that bed. We got here and you said you would fight me for it. Now you’re only using it half the time?”

“Whatever,” Oikawa mutters. He yawns, though, and decides that the argument isn’t worth it. “Goodnight, Iwa.”

It’s not until he’s gotten into the top bunk, eyes closed and slipping away into sleep, half in dream and half thinking of Jaegers and Kaiju, that he realizes Iwaizumi didn’t return the question. For all that Oikawa had wanted to know what Iwaizumi was experiencing in the Drift when looking at the world through Oikawa’s eyes and heart, Iwaizumi hadn’t at all wanted to know the same. He’s not sure why, but something about that bothers Oikawa more than he would like to admit.

It scratches at the back of his head, just a little bit. Not enough to ask, but enough to wonder. Like reading some mystery novel and not bothering to solve for the ending because you know it’ll come in due time. But even while you don’t want the answers quite yet, you’re seeing the clues and red herrings as they appear.

It’s not enough to bother him the next time that they practice entering the Drift, though, and it’s not enough to upset anything about the dynamic between them.

“Three. Two. One. Initiating neural handshake.”

You are twelve at the doors of a junior high school so much bigger than your elementary school, and you are afraid.

You are fifteen years old and standing at the beach. Staring out at the ocean, wondering what great things are hidden in those depths of water. Another boy comes from behind to stand next to you. He takes your hand, uncurls your fist, and places a shell in your palm.

You are thirteen and you are getting into real physical fights for the first time.

First, a punch to the nose of a boy who said something about your best friend, and you are sure that this is something you can never tell him about, but still, despite not knowing the reason, he is the one who wraps the bandages around your wrist and hand.

Second, a fist in the soft of another boy’s stomach. He’s been taunting you, laughing at you, humiliating you over things that you cannot admit to, things you cannot speak about, things you cannot bring yourself to admit yet. You defend yourself with the only language you can think of. The more you hurt them, the less they can call you weak. This is another thing your best friend can never know about, but he is still the one to wait hours after school just to walk you home from detention.

Third—

Oikawa tears himself away from the memories, from the rush of feelings that come with it. An all-encompassing fear and shame and anger that Iwaizumi has never told him about. A completely and entirely overwhelming hurt that Iwaizumi has never shared with him.

He thought he knew everything about Iwaizumi. But it seems like Iwaizumi had kept more secrets from Oikawa than Oikawa had ever been able to keep from him.

Something that they had impressed upon them over and over again while at the Jaeger Academy was that the people who are most often Drift compatible are people who go in with a pre-existing connection. People who share memories already, people who share experiences and feelings.

This is why Oikawa had been so sure that he and Iwaizumi would be compatible. They’ve shared more of their lives than not; Iwaizumi shares most of Oikawa’s memories. Even besides that, the love that Oikawa feels for Iwaizumi burns hotter than any affection he holds for any other friend or family member. He shares something untouchable with Iwaizumi. There is no one who knows him better; there is no one else who has seen all of Oikawa’s darkest moments and stayed with him anyways.

Oikawa had been so sure that Iwaizumi felt the same way. He trusts Iwaizumi, always has, and while this has not and will never change, he kind of wonders now if Iwaizumi trusts him in the same way. There’s so much in these memories that Iwaizumi hasn’t shared, or hasn’t known how to. Or maybe—and this is the worst option of them all—he just hadn’t wanted to share them.

“Tooru,” Iwaizumi says, loud and clear in Oikawa’s mind. “C’mon. You with me?”

“Here,” Oikawa says. He blinks a couple times, searching for the line between his and Iwaizumi’s heads. It’s blurred, it’s hard to find, but it’s there. He’s still him and Iwaizumi is still Iwaizumi. It’s just that, now, their connection is just a little more solid, more literal. “Always have been.”

Iwaizumi hums. “If you say so.”

“I do,” Oikawa tells him, just to be annoying. Iwaizumi laughs, an echo in Oikawa’s mind, but just as warm and kind as ever. “Let’s do this.”

At his side, Iwaizumi grins at him. Oikawa smiles back, and they wait for the go ahead from Ukai. For the moment, Oikawa allows questions of trust and fear to drift far away from him and Iwaizumi. Instead of questioning Iwaizumi, he’s going to believe in what he knows they have.

What they have: a partnership that cannot be put into words, memories that cannot be summed up simply in split seconds of a neural handshake, a friendship that cannot be broken by things like doubt.

So Oikawa will not doubt him. Not right now. Neither of them can afford that.

There are a million reasons, after all, that Iwaizumi might keep something from him. If he didn’t want to share these memories—the reasons for the fights back in junior high, the ones that had petered out at some point in their second year for reasons Oikawa never got to know; the general feelings of smallness that Iwaizumi had never shown before; the fear of weakness that Iwaizumi must have grown into and out of while Oikawa wasn’t looking—there must have been a reason for it.

Maybe it’s not that he doesn’t trust Oikawa enough; maybe it’s not about Oikawa at all. Maybe Iwaizumi just doesn’t know how to talk about it, or how to bring it up. Oikawa remembers junior high without any fondness. There were good moments, sure, there always are. But for the most part, junior high has just been rounded out with memories that he doesn’t want to talk about or think about. These days, he and Iwaizumi don’t talk about any of it, not really. It just doesn’t come up.

So there’s no use thinking too hard about it, about Iwaizumi keeping things from him. There’s no use driving himself in circles wondering about his reasoning. It’ll either matter eventually or it won’t. Still, Oikawa can’t shake the sense that it does matter, somewhere deep in the back of his mind.

For a while, he and Iwaizumi practice in the Jaeger simulation: learning to move around in the Conn-Pod, learning the mechanics of the Jaeger, learning what it feels like to work with each other in the Drift.

Their instructors are clearly impressed by what they’re accomplishing, and Oikawa gets it, preens under their praise, but also—this is him and Iwaizumi. Having Iwaizumi in his head and heart is nothing new.

He and Iwaizumi have always been able to work in sync; they’ve always been able to communicate this seamlessly. It’s not really a novelty to him, it’s just the way he and his best friend are. They love each other, plain as that. Nothing more to it. Nothing remarkable about it, not really.

Oikawa brings this up to Iwaizumi only once. He says, softly, to the quiet of their bedroom and the smooth dark of the ceiling, “It almost feels unearned.”

For a moment, he thinks that Iwaizumi hasn’t heard him, maybe already asleep. Then, “What does?”

Oikawa sighs, then lets the breath settle in the air before speaking again. “All this praise we’re getting from Ukai and the other instructors. It’s like…they’re so impressed. But I just—it’s you. I couldn’t do it with anyone else, but it’s you. There’s just—” he groans, frustrated with not being able to explain himself, pressing the heels of his palms against his eyes— “It’s us. There’s no one better to do this.”

“You’re so full of yourself,” Iwaizumi says, snorting. Oikawa rolls his eyes, unhurt. “But I…I know what you mean. It’s—I mean, we know that we’re close enough for this. But it’s a novelty for everyone else, I guess. What was Ukai saying? No one’s synced up faster?”

Oikawa rolls over in bed, pressing his cheek against the cool of the palm of his hand. “Yeah. I don’t know. I just—I don’t think I could do it with anyone else. But you make me feel…”

He trails off, not knowing how to finish the sentence. Or, he does know how to finish the sentence, he just doesn’t want to do it out loud. He wonders if Iwaizumi can hear them, those unspoken words, or if he can feel their intention somewhere in the ghost Drift. Sometimes Oikawa thinks he can feel Iwaizumi there, ghosting at the back of his mind, but he’s never quite sure if it’s real.

“Yeah,” Iwaizumi says roughly, and Oikawa thinks that maybe he does know. Maybe he does understand.

You make me feel brave. Important. Strong. Invincible.

Oikawa exhales long and slow. “Yeah.”

It’s not long after that when they’re put into an actual Jaeger and told to run it through a test range. The Academy is in a building nearby to the Shatterdome, with the living quarters in between the two, and so on a random Sunday in April, the two of them walk to the Shatterdome rather than the Academy classrooms and training rooms and prepare to Drift in a real Conn-Pod.

When they get to LOCCENT Mission Control, they’re greeted by Ukai and the Marshal—his grandfather—as well as three Jaeger techs. They’re a strange mismatched group: Ukai with his wild hair and a cigarette in his mouth; his grandfather with his arms crossed and a stern frown; an older Jaeger tech in a tracksuit that’s seen better days; and the other two Jaeger techs, who can’t be much older than Oikawa and Iwaizumi and who smirk at them when they approach.

“Welcome to the Shatterdome, kids,” the Marshal says. “You ready?”

“Always,” Oikawa tells him.

The Marshal grins slyly at them. “Let’s head in, then. Keishin tells me that you two are somewhat brilliant at this.”

Iwaizumi and Oikawa exchange a silent look before Iwaizumi shrugs. “We’ve worked hard.”

“Been friends for a while?”

“Our whole lives,” Iwaizumi says.

The Marshal hums. “Interesting. Well, Nekomata, I’m going to trust them all to you now. I’ll be upstairs if anyone has a need. Keishin, come with me.”

Ukai nods, clasps Iwaizumi and Oikawa’s shoulders tightly, then claps them on the backs and follows the Marshal down a different hallway. Meanwhile, Nekomata—the older Jaeger tech, apparently—stands in front of them with his hands behind his back.

“We’ve been working on this model for a while,” he says. His voice is a low grumble, but it’s calm and collected at the same time. “Hanamaki and Matsukawa—” he motions to the two people next to him, each of whom waves at his name— “came to us recently with the idea and some technical designs, and we’ve been refining them together since. After watching your simulations, we think she’s the perfect model for you two.”

Nekomata smiles, eyes narrowed on the two of them. “I trust that you’ll take care of her.”

“Of course,” Iwaizumi says immediately.

“Good. Hanamaki, Matsukawa, why don’t you give us the tour?”

Hanamaki nods. “Gladly.”

Without wasting another minute, he motions for Iwaizumi and Oikawa to follow him and Matsukawa, while Nekomata trails the group. Hanamaki does most of the talking, while Matsukawa interjects with corrections or pieces that Hanamaki has forgotten every now and then.

Hanamaki has a tendency to ramble, it seems, and he goes off on tangents about the design and purpose behind each decision. Nekomata coughs pointedly when he gets too far away from the point. Matsukawa snickers every time, and Oikawa gets the sense that he and Hanamaki are closer than he initially thought.

By the end of the tour, Oikawa knows more about the functions of a Jaeger than sixteen weeks of classes and other training have taught him. Hanamaki and Matsukawa are good teachers, even if what they’re doing is less teaching and more like dumping all of the information they can onto Iwaizumi and Oikawa.

It’s clear that this is a kind of passion project, one that they approached the PPDC with rather than one the PPDC came up with themselves. It explains how they’re so young and yet somehow so high ranking—they care. They care, and they’re invested, and they’re taking initiative. Oikawa can admire all of that.

It also scares him, just a little. How young they are, how young he and Iwaizumi are, how young everyone in the Academy is, how young the current pilots are. It scares him, too, how likely it is that they’re going to die.

But he can’t think like that right now.

“What’s the name?” Oikawa asks, at the end of the tour.

Oikawa has gotten the impression that he doesn’t do this often, but when he asks that, Matsukawa grins. “Blue Castle.”

Oikawa looks up at the Jaeger: a brilliant, beautiful, genius, miracle feat of engineering. It’s everything that Oikawa has always imagined Jaegers are supposed to be. He glances over at Iwaizumi, who is looking at the Jaeger with much the same wonder. They’re so young. So easily infatuated with the world around them. “She’s perfect.”

“Want to give it a try?” Nekomata asks. He’s smiling, just a little. “She’s all yours.”

Oikawa and Iwaizumi don’t even look at each other, don’t question the other’s answer at all, before they’re both stepping forward: “Yes.”

Chapter Text

A few weeks later, the two of them are at their usual table in the cafeteria—it’s next to the only windows in the building, and the bulletproof, reinforced glass opens the view up to a great wide ocean. The waves crash against the legs of the pier outside, giving the impression of the entire pier swaying. There’s no sand here, no real beach; and the shore, too, seems to give in and give way to the water every time a particularly large white cap crashes over the rocks.

Oikawa gazes out of the window while Iwaizumi eats, his chin in his palm and his eyes on the water. There’s a fishing boat in the distance—it’s dusk, but he can see the lights of the boat as they bob up and down in the waves. He can imagine the calls of the fishermen as they try to make it to shore before tonight’s predicted storm hits.

It’s strange to see a fishing boat out here, Oikawa thinks absentmindedly. They tend to avoid areas near the Shatterdomes around the world; no fisherman wants to get crushed by a monstrous Kaiju nor by a Jaeger chasing after it and stomping on every wave in its path.

“Oikawa. Oikawa. Oikawa. Oikawa.”

He blinks, lifting his chin and turning to look at the people who have joined their table. Two other pilots, Daichi and his co-pilot and sister, Kiko, have sat down next to Iwaizumi and across from Oikawa. Kuroo, a recent friend who works in the science and research division, has claimed the spot on the bench next to Oikawa.

“I was saying,” Kuroo tells him, cutting up the chicken on his dinner plate, “that Ukai is in a meeting with the world’s greatest minds and also some politicians singing your praises right now.”

Oikawa frowns at him. “Shouldn’t you be in that meeting? Aren’t you, like, their prodigy scientist or something?”

Kuroo snorts. “No. That’s Kenma. I’m just an associate. Which means he’s stuck in the meeting and I get to come here and bother you two.”

“I bet Kenma is loving that,” Daichi says, smiling wryly.

“Oh, you know he is.” Kuroo pauses to take a bite of his chicken. “You know, when he started posting his findings about the Kaiju online, I really don’t think he intended it to get him here. He was just doing it as a pastime.”

Iwaizumi snorts. “He started by posting theories on Twitter and now people are telling him he’s the best Kaiju researcher we have in Japan.”

“Pretty much. Sucks for all of us to be here, but at least we all signed up willingly.”

“I wouldn’t say willingly,” Kiko says, the corner of her mouth turning up a little bit. She looks eerily like her brother. “Daichi spent weeks talking me into doing this. He resorted to bribery—”

“I didn’t go that far,” Daichi cuts in, rolling his eyes. “I didn’t make you do anything you weren’t already considering.”

Oikawa laughs a little. “It’s okay, I get it. Iwa talked me into it, too.”

“I did not,” Iwaizumi says gruffly. “You followed me on your own. I told you it’s dangerous and to think about it before you did anything rash and you showed up anyways.”

Oikawa meets his eyes with a teasing smile and shrugs. “That’s not how I remember it.”

Iwaizumi heaves a sigh, and Kuroo laughs loudly. He’s about to say something, maybe about to tease Iwaizumi or Oikawa or both, but then the alarm goes off and all conversation in the cafeteria goes silent. It’s a shrill, awful sound that cuts through the silence like a knife to the fabric of comfort. Everyone at the same time looks up at the red alarm lights and takes a collective inhale, sharp and scared.

There’s a beep on the communication watches at Daichi and Kiko’s wrists, and Daichi takes a deep breath. He pushes his tray back a little, and then stands.

“Looks like we’re up, Kiko,” he says. He nods at the others at the table while Kiko wipes her mouth and stands. “See you guys on the other side.”

Oikawa gives him a salute and as he does, a beep goes off on his own wrist. He blinks in surprise—he almost never gets personal communications—and glances at the message on the tiny square screen. The message is short and curt, sparing him any details and just telling him to go to LOCCENT Mission Control ASAP.

He looks across the table at Iwaizumi, who’s staring at the message on his own watch.

“Time to go?” Oikawa says, trying to keep any nervousness out of his voice.

Iwaizumi takes a breath and looks up at him and oh, all the nervousness is gone. He’s going to be with Iwaizumi. What could go wrong if the two of them are fighting together? They’ll be fine. They know how to protect each other.

“Time to go,” Iwaizumi confirms, standing up. “See you later, Kuroo.”

Kuroo nods, stiff and unsure. “You guys ready for this?”

“Oh, I was born ready,” Oikawa tells him, clapping him on the back. “See you after.”

“See you both after,” Kuroo echoes. There’s no doubt in his voice, not exactly, but there is a kind of apprehension. “Be safe and send that thing back where it came from.”

“Will do,” Iwaizumi says. It’s a promise that’s easier made than kept and they all know it.

But still, here they are: climbing into Blue Castle with Iwaizumi taking the left, and Oikawa taking the right side. That had been an unspoken decision between them; they had stepped into the Jaeger for the first time and Iwaizumi immediately made for the left side, allowing Oikawa to have control of the dominant hemisphere.

Oikawa still hasn’t asked why Iwaizumi let him have this. They both know Iwaizumi is more physically intimidating than Oikawa is—even if they’re equally as strong as the other—and when everyone looked at the pair of them, they assumed Iwaizumi would be the leader in the Jaeger.

Then again, they also both know that Iwaizumi would follow Oikawa to the ends of the earth if Oikawa were to only ask. They both know that Iwaizumi would do what Oikawa asked of him, no question, if it came down to pulling the fail-safe in Blue Castle, and that’s what counts when it comes to piloting a Jaeger together.

Sometimes Oikawa worries that Iwaizumi doesn’t realize the reverse is true, too. Sometimes Oikawa worries that Iwaizumi doesn’t understand that he, too, would follow his best friend through the apocalypse and back. Surely Iwaizumi understands—he has to. He has to know all of the ways that Oikawa worships him. He must. Surely he must.

But whether or not Iwaizumi understands, Oikawa dismisses the thought and settles into his spot in the Jaeger with Iwaizumi covering his left.

“Get ready, Iwaizumi, Oikawa,” one of the Jaeger techs calls out into the Conn-Pod. “Initiating neural handshake.”

Oikawa takes a deep breath, readying himself for the rush of memory that’s about to flood into his brain. He squeezes his eyes shut as all of it crashes in: you’re seven years old and racing your best friend to be the first to jump in the pool; fourteen years old and he’s pressing a button into your hands when you both graduate junior high, a promise that’s been both kept and unkept; you’re fifteen and looking at him as he laughs and realizing you’re in love—

“Tooru,” Iwaizumi calls out. An echo amongst the tour of Iwaizumi’s memories; drifting in and out of all the emotion and the feeling and the lovelovelovelovelove. “Come back to me.”

“Iwa,” Oikawa murmurs, somewhat desperately, somewhat brokenly. In love. He hears his name again. Tooru. Tooru. He opens his eyes. He’s in the Jaeger. The walls of the warehouse encasing the Jaegers have been split open. He’s staring out at the impossibly wide ocean. The choppy waves and the white caps and the churning water in the distance. The horizon, dark and empty and just out of focus. “Iwa—”

Oikawa takes a breath, and he hears Iwaizumi take a similar rattling inhale. Iwaizumi calls out, “I’m here,” and Oikawa latches onto his voice and pulls himself out of memory and into the present.

“Okay,” Oikawa says softly. Then, stronger, “Okay. Okay, I’m here. I’m with you.”

Iwaizumi looks over at him, something uncertain written over his expression.

“Ready?” Oikawa asks. He doesn’t want to talk about it. He can’t talk about it. He doesn’t know how to deal with it, not yet. He needs—he needs time to think, time to process. He needs a moment out of Iwaizumi’s head to understand what the fuck he just felt from him as their heartbeats aligned.

“Ready as I’ll ever be.” Iwaizumi looks away again, like he’s found whatever he’s looking for in the way that Oikawa refuses to look at him. There’s a tension between them that’s never been there before and Oikawa hates it. “Let’s get this thing moving.”

Trying to recover, Oikawa snorts. “This ‘thing.’ Be nice to her.”

“To the giant non-sentient robot,” Iwaizumi says dryly.

“Yes, to the giant non-sentient robot.”

Iwaizumi sighs. “I’ll be nice to the giant robot.”

Oikawa laughs.

Together, working in sync, they get the Jaeger moving into a few test motions. After calibration is complete, Blue Castle is airlifted into the great wide ocean and left only to go further out.

Oikawa can hear the wind even inside the Conn-Pod, howling and angry as it pounds at the glass. The water bites at the legs of Blue Castle, hitting the metal and then spitting upwards. Every now and then a spray of water will come through the air ports in the Conn-Pod and mist over Oikawa’s body.

The world feels small with the two of them in the Jaeger. It feels like everything is beneath them. Oikawa feels powerful and strong. Iwaizumi loves him—he’s terrified—Iwaizumi loves him—he’s invincible. Iwaizumi is standing next to him and the two of them are a great god in a monster’s body, ready to fight—ready to survive—anything that comes at them.

Their instructions are to run back up for Daichi and Kiko, so they follow the two of them in their Jaeger, Ursa Juliet, as they make their way to where the Kaiju was alerted to be. Both Jaegers are capable of moving quickly—Blue Castle is the fastest Mark-2 built so far—but they move slowly as they work through the ocean and towards the Kaiju.

Oikawa can hear the Kaiju before he can see it. It almost blends in with the dark of the nighttime and the dark of the ocean and the dark of the new moon.

But he can still hear it. Neither the wind of nighttime nor the crash of waves nor the rippling tide can mask that awful sound. The guttural screaming of a creature that Oikawa is sure was never meant to live on Earth. The terrible scratching of a throat and the even worse gaping of a jaw and the glint of alien teeth under the searchlights of the Jaegers.

Ursa Juliet, Daichi and Kiko’s Jaeger, marches towards the Kaiju with confidence; Oikawa has to wonder how much of that confidence comes from being in such a miracle of machinery and how much of it comes from being next to the person you trust most in the world and how much of it is in their hearts alone. He knows that his own confidence would be faltering if not for the warmth of Iwaizumi’s consciousness in the back of his mind.

Oikawa and Iwaizumi stand back at a distance from Ursa Juliet and the Kaiju, tense as they watch the other Jaeger approach the creature. Ursa Juliet is huge; one of the biggest in the Tokyo Shatterdome. It’s made of titanium alloys and waterproofed-steel, weighing tons upon tons, each step forwards crashing in the water and causing waves in its own right.

Ursa Juliet stands strong in the dark of the stars, and the Kaiju lunges for it. The Jaeger takes its weight, stepping back to stabilize itself and then wraps its arms around the monster. The single sword embedded in its arm unsheaths, the lights of the metal glinting like the Kaiju’s teeth. Ursa Juliet lessens the grip of one arm and drives the sword into the side of the Kaiju; blood spilling blue and hot into the churning ocean.

It’s going as it’s supposed to, and then Oikawa sees it. He must spot it at the same time as Iwaizumi sees it, as Daichi and Kiko do. The fishing boat that Oikawa had noticed earlier is still there in the rocking waves, the light of the boat flickering as the power must struggle in the storm of Kaiju and Jaeger. It’s too close to the fight. They all know it’s too close. It’s going to get crushed; though whether by Ursa Juliet or the Kaiju, Oikawa doesn’t know.

“Iwa,” Oikawa says, and that’s all he has to say.

They don’t need to talk about it, the decision mutual and instant and unquestioned, as they maneuver Blue Castle towards the boat. They’ve barely taken two steps forward when the Kaiju roars again—awful, screeching, scraping rusted metal—and Ursa Juliet is thrown into the water.

The fall might as well send a tsunami over Blue Castle, the Kaiju, and the fishing boat alike. They all go crashing back into the water under the weight of Ursa Juliet’s fall, but the Jaegers are the first to get up. The injured Kaiju struggles in the water for a moment, and then it stills.

Ursa Juliet stands, solid and steady, and makes its way through the water to the fishing boat with as little disruption in the waves as possible. The boat as somehow miraculously stayed afloat, but the camera view in Blue Castle hones in on three men rapidly bailing the water out of the boat. It’s a fruitless effort, and the three men must know that, they must, but still: they are doing whatever they can to survive.

Ursa Juliet—a monster in its own right, with the bright floodlights for eyes and the fists embedded with titanium spikes and the water dripping from unrusted metal like blood—scoops the boat into its hands and then turns its back to the Kaiju. The boat is passed to the calmer waters away from the fight, and Oikawa watches as the power flickers back on, as the men must breathe a sigh of relief, and then—

Then Oikawa watches as Ursa Juliet crumples—as fragile as paper—under the weight of the Kaiju—alive and screaming—and as the Kaiju drags talons through the energy core of the Jaeger. As the Kaiju tears open the head—when did it get that smart, when did it get that bold, when did it get that strong—and the tiniest figure is pulled from the Conn-Pod.

Oikawa can hear her screaming. Can hear the terror in her as Kiko is wrapped tight in the fist of the Kaiju and then as she is tossed into the sky, into the water, into a distance that Oikawa cannot see. Into a place that she can’t come back from. A crash into water from that height is not the kind of fall where you come back up for air.

Ursa Juliet has fallen back into the water, and Oikawa can only watch, horrified, as Daichi goes down with it.

“Your escape pod,” Iwaizumi screams. It’s loud and verbal and it takes a minute before Oikawa realizes that Iwaizumi is screaming into the communicator connecting them to Ursa Juliet because the only answer is static. “Daichi!”

There’s no answer, and Oikawa half wonders if Daichi’s dead already. If he’s dead, or if he’s just given up.

Then there’s a burst of ocean spray and the escape pod comes free of the Jaeger, Daichi hopefully inside. Oikawa can feel Iwaizumi’s relief more than he can hear or see it. Of course he didn’t give up; of course he didn’t, because that’s not who Daichi is.

“Our turn,” Oikawa says quietly. “Iwa.”

“Let’s get this thing.”

He says it with determined bravery in his words that Oikawa wants to feel. He wants to feel it, but all he can muster up is fear. Despite himself, he pushes through it to raise his hands and work with Iwaizumi to take down the Kaiju.

It’s already been injured and weakened, and Iwaizumi and Oikawa have the advantage of speed and fresh energy. They’re not the ones who have already fought another Jaeger, who are bleeding from a gash down the side that should have been deep enough to kill.

This is the closest he’s ever felt to Iwaizumi, the most in sync that they’ve ever been. Drifting with Iwaizumi kind of feels like setting to him had felt: knowing by just the flick of a wrist or the glance of his eyes what his next move is and following him there, helping him get there. It feels like they’re one being combined, knowing every motion and thought and move that’s coming. In some ways, that is what they are.

They take down the Kaiju without much struggle now that it’s been injured. The Kaiju falls to one of their twin blades driven through its neck, and that’s the end of that.

Fuck.

That’s the end of that.

Blue Castle is carried back to the Shatterdome by Jumphawks. Helicopters collect the escape pod carrying Daichi. They’ll scour the water for Kiko’s body once the sun rises. If they don’t find her in a day, the memorial will be held without a body. They all know she can’t have survived, and they can’t search the entire ocean for her.

Oikawa remembers, once, a pair of pilots had died on a mission while he and Iwaizumi were still at the Academy. They had all attended the memorial for them, but only one body was found. Someone in their class asked why they didn’t try harder to find the other body, and their instructor had told them that it was a waste of resources.

Even at the time, it had sounded coldhearted. Oikawa is well aware that this is war, but still. Now, now that it’s the body of someone he considered a friend, it sounds downright cruel.

Oikawa and Iwaizumi leave the Conn-Pod shaken and exhausted but alive. Right now, “alive” is all that Oikawa can ask for. The two of them make their way towards Mission Control as they were told to do, but Oikawa isn’t sure that he can give a good report on anything that just happened. He feels out of focus, like everything is just slightly grainy and more than a little blurred. He doesn’t know how to move his mouth, his tongue. He doesn’t know how to explain how he feels.

Getting to Mission Control, Iwaizumi and Oikawa both stop in the doorway. The room is full of people moving around, checking in on the equipment, on each other; screens are blinking red and white and green; and there’s not a single ounce of stillness in the area.

Not a single still thing, except for Daichi. He’s in a plastic chair in the corner and he looks empty. Drained. Like all of the life has been pulled out of him. He’s leaning against the back of the chair but his head rests on the wall. He’s always been so strong, so brave; he never lets anyone see him falter. But this—this is him faltering.

Iwaizumi steps into the room, looking like he wants to go to Daichi but doesn’t know what to say.

Then someone is shoving past Oikawa and nearly knocking over Iwaizumi. Kuroo stands in front of them, looking desperately around the room until he spots Daichi in the corner. He rushes over to him, slowing only when he gets within a foot. Gingerly, he kneels down in front of him.

Daichi barely reacts to his presence, just looking down as Kuroo takes his hands. From where they stand, Oikawa can’t hear what he’s saying; he can just see that Kuroo is murmuring something. Oikawa wonders, really, what there is to say. What’s the right thing to tell a person after their sister dies? After they can feel her physically ripped away from them? After her mind is ripped out of theirs? Is there anything you can say?

Maybe there isn’t. Maybe you can’t say anything. Kuroo is trying though, whispering something as Daichi lingers in the Drift, searching for someone whose consciousness isn’t there.

After a few moments, Daichi finally looks at Kuroo and seems to be able to see him, to process that he’s there. He sees Kuroo and lets out a choked sob, wrenching his hands away from him to bury his face in his palms. Kuroo wraps his arms around him and Daichi looks so small sitting there that Oikawa wants to run. He doesn’t want to see his friend like this.

Kuroo says something softly, and Oikawa can hear Daichi crying through the chatter. A wrenching, awful sound. And his voice, wrecked and hoarse: “Tetsurou, what am I going to tell our mom?”

Oikawa can’t listen to this. He can’t see this. More than that, though, he doesn’t ever want to be like this. He can’t ever bear to lose Iwaizumi in the way that Daichi just lost Kiko. Just as badly, he cannot bear to die himself and leave Iwaizumi like this.

He willingly came to the Jaeger Academy when given the chance. As much as he jokes and teases, Iwaizumi wasn’t the sole reason he decided to become a pilot. Iwaizumi wasn’t the only influence here. He really did see the chance and want to take it.

But—but here’s a secret: he will do what it takes to win this war against the Kaiju, he will do what he has to in order to protect Tokyo and protect Iwaizumi, but, at the same time…Tooru Oikawa does not want to die. He doesn’t. He does not want to die.

Kuroo pulls Daichi’s hands away from his face and presses a kiss to the heel of Daichi’s hand. There’s something so tender in the movement that Oikawa cannot bring himself to keep watching it.

“C’mon Iwa,” he says hollowly. “We’re here to talk to Ukai.”

It’s so easy to be killed by a Kaiju. This is something that, across the world, between all the Shatterdomes, happens somewhat often. Oikawa knows this, and he knew that risk when he signed up for this. Seeing it happen hasn’t deterred him before, and it won’t now.

But he’s so afraid, and he does not want to die.

Iwaizumi has always been somewhat fearless. It’s something that Oikawa has always admired about him. He picked up the bugs Oikawa thought were gross, jumped off the swings no matter how high he had gotten, didn’t ever once worry about broken bones or skinned knees before diving against hardwood floor to get to a stray volleyball. He’s not an anxious or fragile person.

Oikawa wouldn’t describe himself as anxious or fragile either, but his strength comes in a different form, he thinks. It’s why they complete each other so well.

So it doesn’t surprise him that Iwaizumi isn’t looking at Daichi and feeling terrified of death. It doesn’t surprise him that Iwaizumi isn’t thinking only of how much and how easily everything could go wrong for them. But knowing that Iwaizumi isn’t thinking of those things kind of makes Oikawa need to think about those things even more. One of them has to be reasonable about death and dying.

“Yeah,” Iwaizumi says. His voice is low, unsteady. Maybe he’s more afraid than Oikawa wants to understand he is. “Yeah. Um. Ukai. Said we’d go see him. Let’s go.”

Their meeting with Ukai is short. Ukai is clearly distracted, clearly would rather be talking to Daichi or doing something to help him. He’s a man who’s good at his job, and one of the reasons he’s so good at his job is because he actually cares about it. He cares about the work, and just as much as that, he cares about the pilots who are doing it, who are taking the risks, who are losing their lives.

Oikawa has heard rumors of Ukai in his days of piloting Jaegers. He’s heard the stories about what a good fighter he was, before his Jaeger was destroyed and his co-pilot with it.

Oikawa doesn’t know the details of that, but he does know that Ukai understands. He understands what it feels like to face down a Kaiju and to flinch or not to flinch. He understands what it’s like to watch death just barely brush against your skin, and what it’s like to watch as death takes away those closest to you.

It makes Ukai good at what he does, and it also makes him sympathetic to the pilots who sacrifice more than what they can afford to lose. This is something that Oikawa has seen news and world leaders call weak; he’s heard the reports that the PPDC Marshal of Tokyo is lacking aggression, isn’t sending out enough forces per drop, is too focused on developing new tech and new research and new pilots, and isn’t focused enough on the physical fight.

While talking Ukai through the night, though, Oikawa realizes that whatever Ukai is, it isn’t weak. Caring about people isn’t weak. This is something that not everyone understands, sure, but it is something Oikawa doesn’t ever want to forget.

Eventually, Ukai dismisses them to go back to their room to sleep. The two of them walk in silence. Oikawa can’t think of anything to say. Most of him is still in the Jaeger, out in the breaking of the ocean, watching Kiko be torn out of the wreckage of the Conn-Pod. Most of him is still silently screaming for Daichi to get out get out get out get out.

They shower and ready themselves to sleep in silence, too. Oikawa climbs into the top bunk without arguing about it or needling Iwaizumi for space in the bottom bunk. He just lays on the mattress, staring up at the ceiling while Iwaizumi shuffles around in the bathroom.

It’s not until Iwaizumi finally comes out, warns Oikawa that he’s shutting the lights off, and slips into bed that Oikawa finds the words he wants to say: “Hey, Iwa?”

Iwaizumi hums, just the slightest acknowledgement that he’s awake and listening.

In the dark, the only light is the clock at the holograph screen blinking tirelessly at them. It’s 4:38am. Oikawa feels like a lifetime has passed since he last slept. Still, he doesn’t close his eyes. Just keeps staring up at the dark.

“I’m really glad we’re alive,” Oikawa whispers hollowly.

Iwaizumi is silent for a long moment, and Oikawa wonders if he’s fallen asleep. Then, finally, “Me too, Oikawa.”

Oikawa exhales, long and slow, and finally closes his eyes. “I love you.”

It’s not a revolutionary statement. They’ve always loved each other, and never really shied away from saying it in moments when it needs to be said. When it needs to be heard. After everything that’s happened today, Oikawa thinks maybe he needs something steady, something warm, something he can trust, to cling onto right now.

But still, despite the comfort of the words and the silence and the moment, Iwaizumi is silent for a moment that lasts much too long. Finally, “Love you, too, Tooru.”

Below him, Iwaizumi shifts on the mattress, the bedframe squeaking a little as it rocks, and then Oikawa remembers.

You’re fifteen and looking at him as he laughs and realizing you’re in love—

Iwaizumi is in love with him.

The thought isn’t world-altering or life changing, as Oikawa somewhat thinks that it should be. It comes less like an earthquake and more like the soft onset of light as the sun rises in the morning. If he thinks about it, it’s not even really that much of a surprise. There’s always been something in their relationship that pushes hard at boundaries that Oikawa knows his other friendships have never even brushed against.

Oikawa falls asleep like that, thinking himself into circle after circle of Iwaizumi loves me. Iwaizumi is in love with me. Iwaizumi wants me. Me, for some unfathomable reason. Iwaizumi, the best friend I’ve ever had.

The thoughts don’t disappear by the time the next morning rises. The alarm clock—a distinctly different tone from the Kaiju alarm in their room—goes off, and Oikawa mumbles something to Iwaizumi about shutting that damn thing off, and then he remembers. Iwaizumi is in love with him. And with that, he’s wide awake.

Iwaizumi stumbles out of the bunk bed to get to the dresser, where the alarm clock is. He presses a button, turning it off, and then stretches out his arms with a yawn. Oikawa finds himself unwillingly studying the length of his arms, the bend of his wrists, the sleepiness still lingering in his expression. Iwaizumi is handsome, always has been, no matter how much Oikawa teases him about his hair and resting grumpiness.

That doesn’t mean anything. It doesn’t mean Oikawa feels the same way.

Does he? Does he feel the same way?

He doesn’t know, and the daytime doesn’t make his feelings on the matter any clearer than they had been in his exhausted state the night before.

“Iwa,” he starts, voice hoarse with sleep and eyes only half open as he watches Iwaizumi start to move around the room in his morning routine. Oikawa is still lying down, his head resting on the back of his hand over the pillow, the other hand shoved between pillow and mattress. “About yesterday. We didn’t get a chance to—can we—”

Iwaizumi stops where he stands at the dresser. He takes a breath, his shoulders heaving up and down. “Yeah. Right.”

This isn’t a conversation for right now. He knows it isn’t. Kiko’s memorial is going to be held in only a few hours; there are more important things going on in the world right now than love. Besides that, it’s so early. The day is so young and the morning has barely started yet. Oikawa doesn’t think he’s thinking straight yet, and he’s sure Iwaizumi isn’t either.

But he forces himself to sit up anyways, hunched over to avoid hitting his head on the low-hung ceiling. He watches Iwaizumi carefully, but Iwaizumi’s back is still turned to him, his face hidden.

He says, quietly, “I saw it in the Drift. You’re in love with me.”

Iwaizumi lets out a shaky breath. “Yeah.”

Oikawa is silent. A moment that must last years hangs between them, heavy and uncomfortable. The room feels stifling all of the sudden, the air humid and the walls feeling like they’re closing in on him.

“I’m surprised it took you this long, honestly,” Iwaizumi continues quietly. “I was almost beginning to think that I was going to be able to hide it from you.”

Oikawa flinches; he’s not sure why it hurts, but something about that statement stings. They aren’t friends who hide things from each other. “Were you going to just hide it? Forever?”

Iwaizumi shrugs. “I guess.”

“You guess?”

“I always figured it’d pass eventually,” Iwaizumi says hollowly. He turns around, and his face is visible now but his expression is no less hidden than before. “It hasn’t yet, but this doesn’t need to—”

He stops. Swallows. Oikawa says, “It doesn’t change anything.”

“I know,” Iwaizumi says, hard and quick. He looks at Oikawa like there is something terrible about himself, about his words, but they have to be said anyways. He looks at Oikawa like he is seeing something precious, and like it is breaking his heart. Oikawa supposes it might be. “I don’t expect anything from you. I don’t.”

“Okay,” Oikawa says quietly. “Okay.”

“Okay.”

And that’s the end of that. That’s all there is to it.

It feels like there should be more. It feels like something else needs to be said: an apology, maybe; or an actual rejection, maybe; or some kind of summarization. There wasn’t enough of a conclusion for Oikawa. Not enough of an answer.

Part of that is his own fault. He knows that. He needs to sort out his own feelings. But right now his feelings kind of seem like a muddled ball of yarn that’s knotted and tied in strange places, tangled and caught up in itself. His feelings, really, are a great wide ocean that’s turning over and over itself, churning with an oncoming storm. He doesn’t even know where to begin with scouring the ocean for an answer. It’s too big.

But Iwaizumi is clearly uncomfortable with the conversation, and Oikawa doesn’t want to push it any further. So that’s all there is.

They go to Kiko’s memorial. They sit next to Daichi, with Kuroo and Kenma on his other side. Daichi, surrounded by his friends and coworkers and supervisors, looks impossibly alone. He looks so young, so scared. It looks like the loss of his sister has left him hollowed out, empty, just a body with no heart to show for it.

But his heart is still there, really, open and vulnerable and bleeding all over his insides. It’s traditional for the surviving co-pilot, if one exists, to speak at the memorial, and though Daichi makes it through his speech, it’s clear that the loss is beginning to hit him for real now. The numbness is beginning to fade and the grief is settling in.

What am I going to tell our mom? he had asked Kuroo.

Oikawa watches as Daichi steps back down from the stage to his front row seat, his hands gripping so tight to the piece of paper his notes are written on that it rips under his fingers. Iwaizumi puts a hand on his shoulder, squeezing tight, but Daichi doesn’t even look at him.

What would Iwaizumi’s mother say? If Oikawa came home but her son didn’t? What would he tell her? What consolation is there to possibly be had? The Kaiju was taken down, Tokyo was protected for just one more night, but at the cost of a life. A life that maybe doesn’t matter so much to the greater population, but that means everything to the family in a little house in a small town in Miyagi.

Kiko had friends too, probably, back home. Friends who get to say that they loved a hero, but they lost her, too. She slipped through their fingers like the river to the ocean, and there’s no coming back from it. But Tokyo is safe for another day, Oikawa thinks bitterly. Just one more day.

There’s nothing to say that this sacrifice will fix things forever—it won’t. They all know it won’t. Kiko’s sacrifice is a buffer, if anything. It’s just buying them time. Just a few more weeks. There will be more Kaiju and Tokyo will still be under attack and the world will still be in the progress of the apocalypse, despite her death.

For the first time, Oikawa wonders if any of this is really worth it. The goal has always been to defeat the Kaiju, but he’s beginning to think that the most they can do is hold them off. There’s no defeating them. The best that they can do is push them back just a few more months, weeks, days. But there will always be another one coming on the horizon. The clock will always keep ticking up, and then it will always reset.

Kiko died, and Tokyo will probably be attacked again in a few weeks anyway. And maybe in a few months, or a year, or a few years, it will be destroyed entirely. So what’s the fucking point?

And he knows, he knows because it’s been drilled into him from the start that the point is that they have to do something. They have to buy as much time as possible until they can figure out a more permanent solution, something to actually fix this. Oikawa knows that. But it’s so much easier to say that, to hear it, than it is to believe it.

They have work to do. They have so much work to do. It’s never ceasing work. It will go on forever, until it doesn’t. They will die in this war, and it will not do anything to save people a few years down the line.

It’s a horrible way to think of it, but Oikawa has always been one to catastrophize and think in black and white rather than shades of gray. He has never been good at compartmentalizing.

After the memorial service, the crowd disperses to their daily duties. One death cannot halt an entire war effort for too long. Daichi hangs back, staring at the photo of his sister with his arms crossed protectively around his chest. People keep coming up to offer their consolations, and Kuroo is the one to accept them for him, a hand protectively on his waist the entire time.

“I’m gonna go back to the room,” Iwaizumi tells him. His voice sounds hollow in a way that Oikawa can’t read. “You coming with?”

Oikawa hesitates, then shakes his head. “Gonna go to the gym for a bit.”

Iwaizumi studies him for a moment, then decides against arguing with him about overworking and overtraining and self-care and all the other things he’s constantly trying to hammer into or out of Oikawa’s psyche. “Okay. I’ll see you later?”

“Yeah,” Oikawa promises. “I won’t work too hard, I swear.”

“Good.”

Then Iwaizumi leaves down the hallway, turning a corner and going out of sight. Oikawa stands there for a moment, among the chairs set up for the memorial and the low din of people who didn’t know her chattering about how much they’ll miss Kiko. Iwaizumi suddenly feels emotionally so far away, and Oikawa knows that it’s probably because of the conversation this morning, but knowing the reason almost makes it worse.

Trying to dismiss the thoughts—Iwaizumi in love with me, Iwaizumi loving me, Iwaizumi wanting to be with me, Iwaizumi, Iwaizumi, Iwaizumi Iwaizumi Iwaizumi—Oikawa makes his way to the training gym.

Back when he had been playing volleyball, his chosen way to handle stress was to practice serve after serve until his palms were stinging red and his wrist ached. He would work himself to the bone like that, jumping and hitting and landing and jumping and hitting and landing wrong. His torn patellar tendon is a testament to how much he had overworked himself as a kid.

These days, he’s taken to pounding punching bags until his knuckles bleed. It’s slightly healthier, if only because he knows when to stop now. It’s just as unhealthy, really, in the way that he drives himself insane trying to perfect each hit and the way that he pushes his body to its limits trying to expel himself of all his emotions.

Iwaizumi is in love with me. Punch.

I don’t know if I love him back. Punch.

Iwaizumi doesn’t expect me to. Punch, punch, punch—

I think I might. A kick and a hit and the punching bag swinging forward and back and another hit—

“You look almost as happy as Daichi does,” Kuroo says, the exhaustion clear in his words as he steps into the light and catches the swinging punching bag.

Oikawa rolls his eyes, dropping his arms to his side. “Thanks.”

Kuroo shrugs. “Anytime. Spar with me for a bit.”

Oikawa turns his back to Kuroo, walking wordlessly towards the sparring ring. They grab a bo staff each and step onto the mats. “First to five points?”

“Winner gets a favor,” Kuroo adds. “Loser can’t say no.”

“Deal.”

They stand apart from each, staffs in hand, and bow low. Then the fight begins.

It’s a kind of dance, really; it’s smooth and practiced, each of them well versed in the martial art. Kuroo may be in a K-Science division rather than a pilot, but he’s clearly trained just as hard as Oikawa in physical fighting. Oikawa isn’t sure why he did—he certainly wasn’t required to by the program; fuck knows Kenma would rather roll over in his grave than step into a sparring ring with Oikawa—but he’s grateful to have the sparring partner.

Oikawa lunges forward, but he mistimes his hit and Kuroo is able to dodge the blow and then spin forward to land a hit at Oikawa’s waist. Oikawa swears, knocking Kuroo’s staff away from him. Kuroo smirks.

“You’re slacking today,” he says, stepping back and twirling the staff in his hand. “What’s going on with you?”

“Same as what’s going on with everyone,” Oikawa says bitterly. “The world is ending and we can’t do shit about it.”

Kuroo steps forward, and Oikawa parries his staff, then pivots on the ball of his foot to land a hit at Kuroo’s neck. Kuroo grins wryly at him. “The end of the world isn’t quite as fun and exciting as I thought it would be when I was reading fantasy novels as a kid.”

“No,” Oikawa says through gritted teeth, “it’s not.”

He resets his stance then steps forward again, swinging the staff towards Kuroo again. Kuroo blocks it easily, knocking Oikawa off balance and then pushing him down with a foot to his chest. Kuroo brings the staff down to Oikawa’s heart, hovering just above touching.

Oikawa knocks the staff away, bitterly resigning himself to the lost point. He gets back to his feet and, before Kuroo has time to reset his stance, slams his staff just short of Kuroo’s waist.

Kuroo laughs, but there’s nothing humorous in the sound. They’re both so worn out, both so tired and angry and bitter and fucking sad, for the match to mean much more than a release of energy. Their usual friendly sparring is leaving a bad taste in Oikawa’s mouth, and though he knows they both have more than enough control to stay safe with each other, he also feels like he’s only pushing himself closer to the edge of breaking down.

“We’re so close to something,” Kuroo says, spitting out the words. He steps forward, then he’s snapping his wrist forward in a movement that lands a hit on Oikawa, his staff hesitating to the side of Oikawa’s head. “But we can’t figure out how to make it work for us, how to make us win this stupid fight, how to get rid of all the fucking—we’re so close, and it wasn’t enough to save Kiko.”

Oikawa knocks his staff away, then dances away from Kuroo’s next hit. He doesn’t see the third hit coming from the other side when Kuroo kicks out his ankles though, and he’s knocked to his knees as Kuroo lands another point at Oikawa’s neck.

“Fuck you,” Oikawa snaps. He’s out of breath and that takes away some of the bite of his words. “Playing dirty.”

Kuroo shrugs, panting a little. “So play dirtier.”

“Asshole.”

Oikawa steps towards him, his staff coming down in a swift arc towards Kuroo’s waist. Kuroo steps back, just out of reach of Oikawa’s staff. Oikawa swears at him, and then Kuroo is grinning slyly, snapping his staff towards Oikawa’s neck. He lands the point, the staff held just before it hits skin.

“I win,” Kuroo says. “You were too easy today.”

Oikawa resists the urge to growl at him, mostly just because he’s out of breath. His only consolation is that Kuroo looks no better.

“Whatever,” Oikawa mutters. He sits down on the mats, falling onto his back with his hands above his head. The ceiling is spinning a little. “It’s been a long day.”

“Yeah,” Kuroo says, suddenly subdued as he lies down next to Oikawa. “It has been.”

They lie there in silence for a long while, just listening to the sound of the other’s heavy breath and waiting for the world to still. It never does.

Then: “Daichi’s leaving.”

Oikawa blinks, sitting up straight to look down at Kuroo. “What?”

“Yeah,” Kuroo says quietly. His eyes are closed, his hands at his sides. His breathing is still irregular, though Oikawa isn’t sure if that’s because of the sparring or because of the conversation. “He told me just now. He’s going home.”

“Oh.”

Kuroo opens his eyes but he doesn’t look over at Oikawa, just stares up at the fluorescent lights of the gym. “He wants to spend time with his family, I think. Grieve with them.”

“He’s not coming back,” Oikawa says, and it’s not a question.

“No,” Kuroo agrees. “He’s not.”

“Ah.”

A beat. Then, “What are you and him going to do?”

Kuroo’s forehead creases. “What do you mean?” Then some kind of clarity, or resignation, falls over him. “Oh, that. You saw, huh? Nothing, I guess. We never had anything—I mean, it was real. It was. But there was never anything official. He thought—I dunno. That it was unfair to me, when he could die on any launch.”

“You didn’t agree.”

Kuroo licks his lips. “I thought having him, however briefly or however long, would be worth it. He didn’t agree. That’s all.”

It sounds harsh when Kuroo says it, but the thing is that Oikawa kind of agrees with Daichi. How can love be worth it if life is this fragile? If a Kaiju can take one of them out at any moment? How can that grief be worth the love you have for so brief a time?

“I get it,” Oikawa says quietly, looking away from Kuroo. He thinks about Iwaizumi, about the open and raw way he had looked at Oikawa when he said I don’t expect anything from you.

“I don’t,” Kuroo says, voice hard. “It was cowardly. And now he’s leaving for good.”

And the thing is, Oikawa is realizing, he does love Iwaizumi. He’s not sure yet if it’s romantic or if it’s just platonic—though the word just feels like a disservice to the depth of Oikawa’s feelings of friendship towards Iwaizumi—but he does love Iwaizumi. He loves Iwaizumi and he could lose him at any time. That fear, that fear of losing him after having him for only so little, is so all-encompassing that Oikawa cannot bring himself to even begin to imagine having anything more than he already has.

“Kuroo—”

“Thanks for the match,” Kuroo says abruptly. He stands up, smoothing out the wrinkles in his pants. He takes a deep breath, not looking at Oikawa. “Daichi’s leaving the Shatterdome tomorrow. You should say goodbye before then.”

Oikawa swallows. “Yeah, I will.”

Kuroo nods sharply. “See you around, Oikawa.”

Oikawa just nods. He wants to argue, wants to say that Daichi has a point about the temporality of love, of relationships, in the world that they live in; he wants to say that Daichi has a better understanding of death than Kuroo ever will; he wants to say that he himself isn’t a coward either. But he can’t bring himself to say anything at all, and so he just watches as Kuroo sets his staff back with the other training weapons and exits the gym.

Then he’s alone again. He’s alone again, and thinking about Iwaizumi.

In one of the first times they Drifted, there had been the memory of two boys on the beach. Oikawa only vaguely remembers the day, but he remembers with surprising clarity the specific moment Iwaizumi’s consciousness had led him to.

They had been standing with their toes buried in the sand, the waves lapping at their ankles every few seconds, and for a moment, everything had been calm. The water was gentle, the calls of gulls floating over the sea were almost musical, a strange but almost familiar harmony with a bell buoy in the distance.

Iwaizumi had stepped closer to him, and reached out and taken Oikawa’s hand in his own. He lifted his palm up between them and unfurled his fingers, then placed a conch shell there. He curled Oikawa’s fingers over the shell again, so tenderly that Oikawa thought he might be dreaming.

“I heard that you can hear the ocean if you listen to the shell, no matter where you are,” Iwaizumi had said. He grinned. “Let’s test it when we get home.”

The shell still lives on a shelf in Oikawa’s childhood bedroom. The memory comes back to him with bittersweet nostalgia, and with the nagging reminder that they never had actually ended up testing it. They had forgotten the idea by the time that they got back to the hotel, and—

—and two days later, the first Kaiju rose up from the ocean at that very same beach. They were lucky not to be there—they had left their hotel early, because Iwaizumi’s sister got food poisoning. If not for that, they might have died on the beach there.

So they never actually tested that theory—that the ocean is endless and the sound of the water can be carried kilometers upon kilometers away by the memory stored forever in a seashell—and never tried to listen for the sea in the shell. It’s such a small thing, such a brief memory, such an inconsequential loss, but it nags at Oikawa with an awful grief for all the things they’ll never do because of the war they’ve chosen to join.

Oikawa remembers, now, lying on the floor of the sparring ring, how Iwaizumi’s hand had felt in his. How gentle he had been, so uncharacteristic after a year of junior high in which he gave Oikawa at least three bloody noses. How he had smiled so small and vulnerable after saying, “If you can hear the ocean when you get home, you know you can keep this moment always.” How Oikawa had looked at him with a kind of unspoken reverence, in the same way you look at a dream come true.

He probably does love Iwaizumi. Probably always has.

But the thing about being in love when the world is ending is that there is not enough space nor time for such things as loving someone. There is not nearly enough time and not nearly enough bravery in the apocalypse to love someone when love will not—cannot—save them.

Iwaizumi may not believe this, but it is something that Oikawa cannot ever let himself forget.

Chapter Text

The next time that Oikawa sees Daichi, it’s been two entire years and they are losing the war.

Daichi looks better than he did the last time Oikawa saw him, at least. He looks older. More tired. But at the same time, there’s a kind of hardness to him now that says he’s not going to give up—not on this fight and not on himself. He looks like someone who has been to hell, and who is ready to go back if it means helping someone else. Helping the world.

Oikawa only catches sight of him in passing, when he’s walking with the Marshal through the Shatterdome, clearly giving two bright-eyed, hopeful, unafraid recruits a tour of the base. They’ll learn reality soon—if not from Daichi, then from experience. The red head is tiny and naively enthusiastic and the taller one is all bones and no muscle, and there’s no way that the two of them last, in Oikawa’s opinion. But Daichi waves at him briefly, and all Oikawa can do is stare.

“Did you know he was back?”

Kuroo, who had been hunched over a microscope in his and Kenma’s lab, lifts his head only to swallow visibly and stare blankly at the wall in front of him. Oikawa is standing in the archway of the door, his arms crossed, watching Kuroo carefully. It’s not that he expected Kuroo to share the information if he had known already, but he would have thought Kuroo would be happy enough about it to tell his friends.

Finally, Kuroo exhales—a very calculated, intentional release of the tension in his shoulders. “He’s been working to train some supposedly game changing pilots for the past week or so, yeah. Apparently Ukai was desperate for a trainer with actual experience and hunted him down.”

Oikawa stares at him. Waits.

Another exhale, and Kuroo continues, still looking at the wall blankly. “He told me before he came, but we haven’t gotten a chance to really talk yet. I don’t know if we ever will with how busy we both are. And honestly, Oikawa, I didn’t think you’d really care. You didn’t actually know him that long or well.”

But I know you well enough, Oikawa thinks, his expression hardening into a frown as he looks at Kuroo. Does he really come across as that heartless? Then again, maybe he does, because the only thing he can think to say is, “I don’t, I guess.”

Kuroo nods sharply. “There we go then. It doesn’t matter to you, and I’m fine, and Daichi’s fine, and so everything’s fine.”

“Except for how the world is ending,” Oikawa corrects. He steps further into the room, then walks over to where Kuroo is seated at a workbench. “Other than that, everything’s fine, yeah. What are you working on now?”

Kuroo leans back in his chair, stretching his arms out above his head. He cracks his neck then drops his hands into his lap. “Piece of a Kaiju’s brain. I think I can find a way to—”

“Doubtful.” Oikawa and Kuroo both jump a little at the new voice; Oikawa looks back towards the door to see Kenma wandering into the lab with an armful of notebooks in one hand and a coffee mug in the other. “Are you talking about your Drifting theory again? Don’t encourage him, Oikawa.”

Oikawa raises his eyebrows. “And what am I not encouraging?”

“He thinks he can Drift with a dead Kaiju brain.”

Kenma dumps his notebooks onto his own desk, a cluttered mess of papers and pencils and printed maps and empty coffee mugs. Oikawa stares at him for a moment while his words sink in, then he whips his head over to Kuroo. “You think you can do what?”

“It’s the same tech as what we use for two pilots,” Kuroo says, grinning a little wildly. “Kaiju have proven to have advanced consciousnesses. So if the brain is kept alive, there’s no reason that tech wouldn’t work on a Kaiju and a human. If we could—I could—just think about it, Oikawa, if you could look into the mind of a Kaiju, you could figure out exactly how to break through the Breach.”

“It’s not going to work,” Kenma mutters from where he’s sitting at his desk, gulping down the coffee between sentences. “And it’s stupidly dangerous, even for you, Kuroo. You have no idea what it would do to your brain.”

Kuroo snorts, shooting Kenma a look. “Aw, are you finally admitting that I’ve successfully annoyed you into getting attached to me?”

“No, I’m saying you’re being stupid if you think this is a good idea. You can’t afford to lose that many brain cells.”

Kenma has a vague, almost smile hanging at his lips though, so Oikawa figures he doesn’t mean any harm with his words. Time has mellowed out their arguing, it seems.

Kuroo opens his mouth to reply, but before he can say anything, he’s cut off by the blaring of an alarm—Oikawa flinches at the sudden, violent noise, instinctively looking down at his wrist for the summons to LOCCENT. But when the message doesn’t come, Oikawa is left frowning at the communication watch.

“Right on time,” Kenma says, something bitter in his voice, as he stands and stares at a chalkboard by his desk that Oikawa hadn’t noticed before.

“Must be someone else’s turn,” Kuroo tells Oikawa absentmindedly before getting up to look at the chalkboard with Kenma. He says, firmly, “This is the first one you’ve actually gotten right. It doesn’t mean anything.”

Kenma shrugs. “It will. I’m going to win that bet.”

“I can’t believe we’re betting on this theory,” Kuroo mutters, barely loud enough for Oikawa to hear. “This is literally the end of the world.”

Kenma shrugs again— “Gotta find entertainment in it somehow, you know—” and Oikawa finally blinks himself out of his surprise enough to go look at the chalkboard they’re both staring at. The chalkboard is full of numbers and arrows and circles and formulas that Oikawa can’t even begin to decipher.

“What are we looking at?”

Kuroo and Kenma both look at him like they had forgotten that he was there. Then Kenma sighs. He taps a number on the board. “At the start of this, the Kaiju appeared every 24 weeks.” He runs his finger along an arrow. “Then they were spaced by twelve, then six, then every two weeks.”

Oikawa stares at him, not getting his point despite Kenma looking at him like he’s supposed to get it just from that. Then Kenma sighs again, his shoulders sinking. “The spacing of the attacks is consistently getting smaller. Eventually, we could see a Kaiju every eight hours, then every four minutes. I’m predicting—”

“It’s just a prediction,” Kuroo cuts in. “That’s all it is. We don’t have facts.”

“We have statistics,” Kenma says, his voice full of more vitriol than Oikawa has ever heard it. “I’m right, I’m sure of it.”

Kuroo presses the heels of his palms to his eyes for a brief moment, then drags his hands down over his face. “I’m just saying—”

“What’s the bet?” Oikawa asks, cutting in before the two of them can start their strange brand of fond bickering.

“Seven thousand yen, more desk space, and he gets rid of whatever smells in here that in exactly a week, there will be a double event,” Kenma tells him. He’s still looking at the chalkboard rather than at Oikawa, and he taps a number circled three times: 7 DAYS. “I’m going to win.”

Kuroo rolls his eyes. “You say that as if it’s a good thing if you win. Proving me wrong at the cost of the fucking world.”

“Well, Oikawa and Iwaizumi—or those new pilots, the ones Daichi keeps saying are the best he’s seen since Oikawa and Iwaizumi—will just have to pull off a miracle,” Kenma says, voice dry.

Kuroo frowns at Kenma, asking, “You’ve been talking to Daichi?”

“Yeah. I’m not the one who had a weird fucked up implied secret almost relationship without the label with him.”

“You’re the worst.”

Oikawa sighs, tuning out their bickering as he stares at the chalkboard. Seven days to a double event; Kenma doesn’t have to define that for him. It’s obvious and it’s also so terribly appealing to deny that it’s even possible. He wants, desperately, to believe that Kenma’s wrong.

The problem is that every word he says is so convincing that Oikawa almost wants Kuroo to Drift with a dead Kaiju brain if it means figuring out a way to kill these things for good.

As it is though, Kenma’s science is a ticking time bomb and Kuroo’s science is nowhere near ready to defuse it. As it is, there is very little standing between Japan and the end of everything.

Amongst the little standing between home and destruction: Oikawa, Iwaizumi, and two new pilots.

Their names are Hinata and Kageyama. Oikawa hates them from the moment that they first meet. They, like Oikawa and Iwaizumi had been, are being fast tracked through the Jaeger pilot training program to become fully fledged pilots within a matter of a couple of weeks. Supposedly, their Drift compatibility is something of the likes which the Marshal hasn’t seen in years—since Oikawa and Iwaizumi.

It stings more than Oikawa thought it would, to be borderline replaced like this. They haven’t actually been replaced, because fuck knows that this war needs all hands on deck and Oikawa and Iwaizumi aren’t going to be shoved to the side just because two new hands have joined the efforts, but it feels a little like the threat is there. It feels like something—a trust, or a good reputation, maybe—that had been steady under his feet is no longer steady.

Iwaizumi doesn’t seem nearly as bothered by any of this as Oikawa is. They’ve always approached things like this differently, Oikawa supposes, now that he thinks about it. Iwaizumi is humble in a way that Oikawa knows himself not to be—Iwaizumi has always taken failure and critique with more grace than Oikawa thinks he himself has ever once been capable of in his life.

So he doesn’t like Hinata nor Kageyama. It’s not really either of their faults. He’s aware of that; he’s well aware of the unfair distortion in his thought process regarding them. They’re just kids, like he was, trying to do what they can to save a world that seemingly is refusing to be saved. They’ve done nothing against him, not really.

But Oikawa doesn’t know how else to respond to them. To these pilots that are taking everything he and Iwaizumi have worked for, have claimed, for the past few years. Even if they’re all on the same side, it doesn’t feel like it. It feels like a race that he’s losing.

Hinata and Kageyama’s first real drop comes a week after Oikawa’s conversation with Kuroo and Kenma. Oikawa has been watching the clocks religiously, counting the days that tick onwards until they reach what Kenma is predicting to be the first double event. When the clock halts and the alarm sounds exactly seven days later, Oikawa wants, terribly, to be surprised. But he isn’t.

He and Iwaizumi make their way to LOCCENT when they’re called, where they find Kuroo and Kenma both standing at the front of the room with tense looks on their faces. Kuroo is fidgeting anxiously with a pen in his hand, clicking it open and closed again and again. Kenma has his own arms crossed, and he’s chewing on the back of a pencil. They aren’t speaking, but Kuroo’s face says enough about all the worries Oikawa needs to know about. Oikawa moves to go over to them, but the Marshal beckons him and Iwaizumi over before he can.

“We’re sending Hinata and Kageyama out,” the Marshal says.

He has his arms crossed, the worry tight in his jaw and in the way he’s gripping his own biceps so tightly. He looks at the two of them like he’s seeing something from long ago, and he regrets it. Or, like he’s seeing something that hasn’t happened yet, and he’s terrified of it.

“Okay, sir,” Iwaizumi says, when Oikawa just nods silently, privately seething just a little. “What do you need from us?”

The Marshal takes a tense breath. “You’ve heard Kenma’s theory, yes?”

Oikawa and Iwaizumi exchange glances before nodding. As soon as Kenma had explained it to him, Oikawa had told Iwaizumi. They’re both well aware of the implications of a Kaiju appearing on Kenma’s timeline.

Somewhere in the remnants of the Drift, in the ghosting of it all, Iwaizumi’s heartbeat floods heavy and scared through Oikawa’s chest. It’s overwhelming how much of Iwaizumi is always in Oikawa’s head—these days they don’t need the actual neural connection to experience the effects of the Drift. It’s always in moments when Iwaizumi is scared that he feels closest.

“I want you two on standby,” the Marshal tells them. He looks away, towards where Hinata and Kageyama are announcing their Drift to be successful. Something on a monitor beeps, something turns blue, something flashes green. “Just…in case.”

“Do you think it’s likely—” Iwaizumi cuts himself off, then shakes his head. I don’t want to know. “Nevermind.”

The Marshal studies him for a moment, as if trying to guess at the end of the sentence. Then it seems he decides he has other priorities and just nods sharply. “Just stay alert and nearby.”

“Yes, sir,” they both say in unison. Then the Marshal is turning away to go talk to Matsukawa, who had graduated from Blue Castle’s Jaeger tech to a kind of catch-all tech. Matsukawa gives them a small wave, which Oikawa returns with a tight smile, and then everyone is focused on getting Hinata and Kageyama out into the great wide ocean.

The thing about the ocean is that it is endless. There are horrors beneath her waters, there are endless depths of horrors, there are things that no man was ever meant to see and things no man was ever meant to touch. There are things that Oikawa wishes he never had to have seen.

But in the water, too, are uncountable memories that he wants to bottle up and keep close to his heart forever. There is Iwaizumi by the water, laughing as he kicks up the waves onto Oikawa’s shins. There is the sea foam gathering around his ankles when they stand there together, two children watching the sunset.

And water—which comes from the ocean and goes to shore and rises to be rain and falls to the earth and drowns him in an endless cycle of remembrance—fills his every memory like a half empty glass.

Two young boys in a bathtub; a plastic toy boat floating and sinking and floating again. Climbing over the wire-linked fence to a community pool, jumping into the chlorinated water and coming up gasping for air. Water slicking back another boy’s hair and him laughing, all of it making him look just that much more youthful, that much more handsome.

These memories flood through him in the Drift like watching clips and snippets of his life on an old VHS player. In reality, he and Iwaizumi are standing in Mission Control in the present day, when the ocean and everything under it is an enemy. He watches on the holographic monitors as Hinata and Kageyama are dropped out towards where the Kaiju is, and as their newly minted Mark-3 Jaeger, Crow Sunrise, approaches the Kaiju.

All the sea and all the sky are yours for the taking when you’re in a Jaeger. All the world is yours to grasp, to hold in your open palms, to crush in your fists. But still: sometimes it’s barely enough to kill a Kaiju.

Hinata and Kageyama’s first kill isn’t pretty, but it’s successful. It gets the job done, even if not quickly. They limited the Kaiju to the ocean, no civilians were harmed, and the Kaiju was killed. Those are the points that mattered.

“They did good,” Iwaizumi says, startling Oikawa out of his thoughts. He looks over, noticing now that Daichi is standing on Iwaizumi’s other side. “You did a good job training them.”

Daichi shrugs. “They’re naturals.”

“This shouldn’t be something that comes naturally,” Oikawa says, and something about the vitriol in his voice scares him.

It disgusts him, almost, how easy it is for humans to become what they have. How easy it has become for humans to meld their minds and use that power, that gift of a bond, to kill things. And the worst, most terrifying part, really, is that he knows he and Iwaizumi are no different. He knows he and Iwaizumi are no better. If anything, taking advantage of the love they share for this is worse than when two strangers come together to do it.

Besides that, the idea of two strangers being naturals at this makes Oikawa angry, sick, and bitter. He can’t really pinpoint why, but he and Iwaizumi have spent their whole lives strengthening this bond and spent the past two years working their bodies to the bone to be stronger in the Drift. His hands clench into fists with the frustration of that—of working, impossibly hard, only for two strangers who mean nothing to be naturals.

Iwaizumi and Daichi both look at him—Daichi clearly surprised by his comment, Iwaizumi just looking tired. Like he understands exactly what Oikawa is thinking, and he can see the ocean of Oikawa’s head drawing back for the tsunami to begin, and he’s preparing himself for impact. That’s probably exactly what’s happening.

In the back of his mind, in the ghost drift, Oikawa can feel the warmth of Iwaizumi’s spirit prodding gently, as if trying to preemptively prevent whatever self-worth issues are about to come of this. Very pointedly, he looks away and ignores it.

On the monitors, Crow Sunrise turns back towards the helicopters that are encircling her. They can’t see into the cockpit, but Oikawa can only imagine the triumph in their heads right now. He remembers vividly his and Iwaizumi’s first drop and first kill, but he can’t recall any triumph back then. He can recall only the terror of seeing Kiko die, the grief at seeing Daichi’s escape pod, and the overwhelming burn of Iwaizumi being in love with him.

In the corner of his eye, he sees Iwaizumi shift his stance just slightly, like he’s remembering it all alongside Oikawa. Oikawa can easily believe that the ghost drift is making him recall those memories, too. Past him, Daichi has gone tense too, and Oikawa doesn’t get it, doesn’t see what he’s seeing, until—

“There,” Kenma says, and his voice is low, but it cuts through the room like a knife. “Fifty kilometers out, forty-five, forty—”

“Oikawa, Iwaizumi!” The Marshal isn’t a man who yells, isn’t a man who gets frantic or impatient, but he snaps their names and it feels like a strike to the face. “Get to your Jaeger, now.”

Oikawa stiffens. “Iwa. We’re up.”

Iwaizumi nods, taking a breath. He looks composed, looks unafraid, but Oikawa can see straight through all of it—he’s tired. He’s so tired. But still, this is Iwaizumi, and so he moves onwards. He gives Daichi a sharp nod, and then the two of them are sprinting towards the Jaeger launch room.

Iwaizumi isn’t egotistical in the way Oikawa knows he himself can be, but Iwaizumi is still confident in himself and his abilities. It leaves Oikawa a little awe-struck, sometimes, when he sees the way Iwaizumi will straighten his back and keep walking when everything around him is falling apart. It’s one of the strongest cases for why Oikawa trusts him so much: Iwaizumi is, above all else, dependable. He’s the steady stone in the storm of Oikawa.

“It’s a Category 4,” the Marshal is saying as they enter the Conn-Pod, his voice a strangely warped echo. “We’re calling it Mutavore. It’s gonna be hard to pierce through its armor, so go for the limbs and then through the maw. It’s fast, too, but doesn’t look especially strong.”

“Got it,” Oikawa says, taking Hanamaki’s hand as he helps him into the Pilot Motion Rig. Hanamaki squeezes it tightly just before he lets go, one last bit of comfort before they go out to fight in the Jaeger he had so lovingly designed with Matsukawa. The extensors lock into place around his feet and Oikawa jerks into place. He’s used to the process by now, but it’s still startling. “Fast but not too strong. Go for the mouth.”

“All’s looking good,” Iwaizumi tells him out loud, just for the benefit of the techs in LOCCENT Mission Control. Then, more thought than words, “Feeling good, Tooru?”

Oikawa hums, nodding. He thinks, I believe in you, you know.

To his side, he can see Iwaizumi smile to himself. In the back of the Ghost Drift in their heads, he can tell that Iwaizumi understood him. I believe in you, too. Always.

“Good afternoon, kids,” Matsukawa calls out, echoing into the Conn-Pod from where he sits by a microphone in LOCCENT.

“You’re not any older than us,” Iwaizumi reminds him.

“Okay, okay, okay.” Matsukawa pauses for a moment, and Oikawa can feel Iwaizumi’s amusement in the back of his head. “Alright, Iwaizumi and Oikawa, retracting the floor panels and booting up the HUD.”

Iwaizumi and Oikawa ready themselves as the HUD screens flicker once, then the cameras steady on the world around them. They have a four-way view of their surroundings, and Oikawa glances around all of the screens to make sure everything is working.

“And…sending you off,” comes Matsukawa’s voice.

With a lurch, the Jaeger begins to roll forward through the Alley and outside. It’s a bright, sunny day, and Oikawa hates thinking of the daylight this way, but it’s good conditions to fight in. They’ll be able to see the Kaiju easily—though it will also make it easier for the Kaiju to see them—and they’ll be able to see any nearby ships easier, too. And it’s more of a bitter thought, but the clear conditions will allow for easier cooperation with Hinata and Kageyama, especially since they’ve never actually worked together before.

“Initiating neural handshake,” Matsukawa says. “Six seconds—”

The AI built into Blue Castle clicks on. “Pilot-to-pilot connection protocol sequence.”

“Four, three—”

“Neural handshake initiated,” the AI calls out, and it’s only an instant before Oikawa is slipping into Iwaizumi’s head.

The first time they had done this felt like a riptide. Now it kind of just feels like he’s wandering further and further into the depths of the ocean, all of his own volition. It’s a little more controlled now; he knows how to hold himself and how to move within the Drift while he and Iwaizumi’s minds sync up. He knows how to let the memories pass him by rather than getting caught up in them.

You are standing on a grassy hill with your best friend; the hill overlooks the local playground, but there’s no one there except the two of you. You’re going off to fight tomorrow, and that knowledge hangs over you both as much as the sky does. The sunset is glowing over the clear skin of his face and light is caught in the choppy spikes of his hair. He’s looking out at the approaching dusk. You’re looking at him. You’re always looking at him.

Six years old. You pick up a volleyball for the first time. Your best friend looks at you with wonder as he talks about how to play the game. You want him to never stop looking at you like that.

Fourteen years old, landing a spike through a triple block against Shiratorizawa. Feeling in control. Feeling, for the first time in your young life, like you fit in your body, like your hands are doing what you want them to do, like your body is moving the way you want it to. The junior high school awkwardness of limbs and lankiness is gone in the face of one point in one match in one tournament.

And later, too, passing the ball with your best friend after losing a game. Just bumping it back and forth. Gentle, easy. Working together. No stakes, no consequences. Just the two of you together, in one place. Safe.

Here, in the Drift, you remember: before the Jaegers, before the fighting, before the Kaiju, before all of it, there was just you and him.

Oikawa takes a breath. “You with me?”

Iwaizumi exhales. “With you.”

Iwaizumi seems more rattled by this run than he has in a while. In most of their previous neural handshakes, Iwaizumi takes it all in stride, letting it slip past him, just a neutral observer like he’s supposed to be. But this series of moments—which are most likely the same as or eerily similar to the ones Oikawa had seen—seems to have gotten to him somehow.

Oikawa isn’t sure why, but he’ll have to talk to Iwaizumi about it later. Secrets, as they found out so quickly when they first Drifted, don’t stay secrets for long. They’re not worth hiding.

“Right hemisphere calibrating,” Oikawa says, looking away from Iwaizumi and telling himself that it’s a later conversation.

“Left hemisphere calibrating,” Iwaizumi echoes.

The two of them each raise their left arm, then the right. Make a couple of simple movements. They breathe in sync. In, out. In, out.

The screens blink in front of them: CALIBRATION COMPLETE.

And then they’re ready; then the mission is underway. It’s not the most complicated of jobs: they just need to kill the fucking Kaiju.

“Here we go, Iwa,” Oikawa says. The adrenaline that always comes with being in the Jaeger is starting to kick in. “Let’s do this.”

Together, they move out into the ocean. The Kaiju rises from the waves, working its way through the water to get to shore: something like a kraken, something like a myth from long ago, something like a tidal wave, or maybe not like any of that at all. Maybe it moves just like what it is: a monster, destroying for the sake of it. Maybe it is nothing more than what it looks like, maybe there is no greater plan or greater reason that this is happening—maybe it is happening just because it can.

Kuroo, after all his years of studying them, has this theory about Kaiju. In his head—that stupid science-smart mind of his, the one Oikawa sometimes fails to keep up with—the Kaiju are more than just monsters crawling up from the depths of the Earth to destroy them. According to him, they have a purpose here. They have a reason for what they’re doing; they’re intelligent, can make plans, can work together.

Oikawa can admit that some of them are intelligent, he can accept that it sometimes feels, due to the timing of attacks, like they’re all working in tandem. But he can’t quite figure out the reason why they do it, and Kuroo, despite all his research, doesn’t have an answer to that one.

Sometimes Oikawa looks at them—at the living Kaiju among the waves and under the fists and swords of their Jaeger; at the Kaiju specimens living in the K-Science labs, floating in ammonia or dried up on workbenches; at the Kaiju Blue that lingers in the water long after the Kaiju has been taken down—and some part of him understands there’s no greater purpose to this. They’re doing it because they can. Because they want to be everywhere that humans are, and so humans have to be destroyed.

They’re doing it because they’re hungry. They’re doing it because they’re thirsty. Because, even if humans are standing in their way, they have a want, and it is a wanting that consumes. That devours. That destructs.

Oikawa, who has a wanting of his own, can understand this. How terribly strong the riptide is when it crashes over you, and how helpless you are as soon as you lose a centimeter of footing against it. How much you want to be allowed to fall. How, the more salt water you drink, you just get thirstier.

The Kaiju in front of them lunges through the water towards the Jaeger and Oikawa is barely given a warning shout before Iwaizumi is launching one of their missiles towards it. The missile barely punctures the Kaiju’s chest, but it does knock the thing back.

So hunger and thirst are things that Oikawa can understand. He, too, wants things he cannot have without breaking them. He, too, has a million dreams that cannot be realized without losing everything else. He, too, wants things so badly that it could ruin everything around him. His heart is a monster who hungers and his hands are meant to kill.

The difference, though, is that Oikawa is scared. He is scared of dying and of the people he loves dying. He is scared of losing the people he loves—scared of losing Iwaizumi. He is scared of the Kaiju and the sudden rush of guts, glory, and pride that comes with killing one. He is scared that, one day, he will not be good enough to win against one. He is scared that someone will be stronger, and he is scared that no one will ever be strong enough.

The Kaiju plow on, taking down everything in their path. They tear down everything they reach. They do not fear things like being stopped. Perhaps it is this that makes them monsters.

But Oikawa is barely twenty and he has so much more to lose.

Once, after a volleyball game that they lost, Iwaizumi told him that he’s grateful to have him as a partner, always, whether or not they lose. He had said that Oikawa can’t give up now, because of one game. He had said that Oikawa must charge forward and never look back, never regret anything, because the ambition and hunger he has is the thing that makes him the strongest.

The words come back to him now, while staring down this Kaiju: climb to the top, and never look back.

He has always been ambitious, has always clawed his way up mountains in search of something more. Taking the longer path has made life impossibly harder, in some ways, but it has also made life so much more interesting. It’s fun and almost satisfying, he sometimes thinks, to push at something until it gives, to try at something until you win.

His ambition paired with Iwaizumi’s drive has brought them here. Taking down this Kaiju with minimal trouble. Working together as a pair, as a unit, as one body. It has given them their friendship—the one Oikawa treasures so much he has fallen in love with it—and it has given them respect, honor, pride. It has brought them medals and awards and recognition.

It has brought them so many things that they both once longed for, but still, still—

—before the Jaegers, before the fighting, before the Kaiju, before all of it, there was just you and him.

Still, there has to be something more than this. More than fighting for the sake of it. Maybe Kuroo is onto something, or maybe Oikawa just has to believe that he is in order to accept that they might never stop fighting. There has to be something more than fear, more than the fight.

Or, a better way to say it: there has to be some reason for it all, something that will make all of this hurt worth it. There has to be an end to this, a kind of coming out the other side. There has to be a future that Oikawa can hold in his hands and say, This is all mine, and it is safe.

The Kaiju roars, an awful sound that resonates through the Conn-Pod and makes both of them wince. In the back of his head, Iwaizumi’s thought process echoes, a simple plan on how to pierce through the Kaiju’s jaw. Oikawa doesn’t have to say anything before they’re both moving together, taking advantage of the Kaiju’s roar and gaining the upper hand.

At the end of the day, though, Oikawa doesn’t have the answers to those questions. No one has answers, not really; not Kuroo with all his research, and not Kenma with all his theories. All that Oikawa knows is that he hungers for something he cannot have, something he fears taking, and he refuses to try until there is no possibility of losing it—and not a minute earlier.

Together, they finish taking the Kaiju down with ease. Another kill on Blue Castle’s record breaking count. There’s some amount of pride that comes with that number, but at the same time, there is something bleak about it. Crow Sun—Hinata and Kageyama—stand behind them, not having needed to help at all before the Kaiju was out.

Oikawa is breathing hard as he stares down at the Kaiju’s body floating in the water; the Kaiju Blue floating in the water like oil. He wonders if it would burn like oil, too, if he were to light a match and drop it down. He wants to burn the waves alive, wants even the cold and salty waves to be hot and aflame. He wants the entire ocean to feel the fear he does.

It’s just that—it’s not fair. It’s not fair that he has to be so afraid all of the time and the Kaiju just emotionlessly persist. It’s not fair that Oikawa seems to be the only one who understands the risk—the consequences—of falling in love. Iwaizumi, Kuroo—both of them are so bold and vulnerable with their feelings, while Oikawa has nothing but walls wrapped tight around his heart.

You can’t lose what you never had. You can’t mourn something that doesn’t break. So Oikawa can never have what he fears fucking up, what he fears losing so much.

By the time that he and Iwaizumi get back to the Shatterdome, Oikawa has reminded himself of this so many times that he almost believes it to be true.

Iwaizumi is quiet as they walk back from the Jaeger launch room to their own room. Iwaizumi’s silence isn’t exactly uncharacteristic, so Oikawa wouldn’t be too concerned if not for the undercurrent of disorganized thoughts in Iwaizumi’s mind that’s echoing into Oikawa’s head through the Ghost Drift.

The Ghost Drift is always stronger in the moments after stepping out of the Jaeger. It’s as if their minds know that these are the moments in which they need to hold onto each other the tightest. These, after all, are the moments in which they are the most disconnected: torn out of the mind meld and placed back in bodies too small for their strength and ambition. The steps out of the Jaeger are always disorienting and the Ghost Drift—clinging to it, to Iwaizumi—sometimes feels like the only thing that can ground him.

So he can feel it, Iwaizumi’s anxiety and confusion while they make their way back to their room. It feels wrong in the back of Oikawa’s head, like something normally so compartmentalized has been misplaced. The inherent sense of something being off nags at him, itches at the back of his brain. It’s like he can hear Iwaizumi calling out to him, calling out for help, calling for comfort.

I love you, Oikawa thinks silently, desperately. I can’t say it, I can’t, but—but still, I can’t make myself stop feeling it.

It’s not comfort enough. It’s not comfort at all. Oikawa knows that. This riptide of feeling hangs between them in the Drift, like a mirage of gold at the bottom of the ocean. He himself is certain of his own love, but he spends so much time pretending it doesn’t exist that maybe Iwaizumi has only been receiving uncertain ripples of it.

I love you, Oikawa thinks, and it’s not enough. It will never be enough.

“I’m gonna go for a walk,” Iwaizumi says abruptly, breaking the silence as they reach the door to their room. “Come with me?”

Oikawa glances between the offered respite of the bedroom door and Iwaizumi. Something on Iwaizumi’s face makes the decision for him. Maybe it’s the open, unsure glimmer in his eyes. Maybe it’s the tight line of his lips. Maybe it’s the unconfidence in the shifting of his weight from foot to foot.

“Yeah,” Oikawa says. “Let's get some fresh air.”

They’re not technically supposed to leave the Shatterdome without permission. That’s one of the first official things they tell new recruits when they get there. The first thing Oikawa and Iwaizumi’s peers taught them, though, was that the alarm on the emergency exit door at the end of the hallway to the left of the cafeteria is broken. Going through that door leads you to a pier that stretches out into the water, and sometimes that’s a much needed respite.

Oikawa and Iwaizumi make their way down there in silence, both of their hearts beating much too loud for it to truly feel quiet. Oikawa is keenly aware of Iwaizumi’s presence next to him: warm and solid and alive; their hands brushing every few steps when they come too close to each other.

Despite the chill to the breeze that hits them when Iwaizumi pushes open the emergency exit door, the fresh air is more than welcome. Oikawa follows Iwaizumi down the pier, the wooden planks beneath them rickety under their feet.

For a long moment, they stand at the edge of the pier, just staring out at the sea. It’s calming, in a way. It reminds Oikawa how small they are. How little their lives matter. The sea is so great, so uncontainable, and they are so little. Who is he to complain about having to keep his love quiet?

Then Iwaizumi heaves a long sigh, and the calm is broken. He sits down at the edge of the pier, his feet dangling over the side. It’s low tide, and there’s a good amount of space between his feet and the water. Oikawa joins him in sitting, and when he looks over the edge of the pier he likes to imagine he can see the bottom of the ocean. It’s probably just shadows, but he squints his eyes and imagines boulders and fish and crabs and seaweed and barnacle-covered stones.

Iwaizumi exhales again, slow and measures. “Hey.”

Oikawa hums. “Yeah?”

“Can we—” Iwaizumi coughs, clears his throat. “I need…I need you to be serious for a moment.”

Oikawa swallows, a bad feeling thickening in his throat. “Okay. I’m listening.”

“Two years ago, I told you I loved you.” Iwaizumi closes his eyes. “And I told you it would pass.”

Oikawa watches him, and everything else in the world—the ocean in front of them, the wood planks of the pier they sit on, the brilliantly pink and red watermelon of a sunset above them—is blurred around Iwaizumi. “Yeah.”

There’s a beat, and then Iwaizumi opens his eyes. “I don’t think it really did, Tooru.”

Oikawa inhales sharply. This is something he knew, to some degree, even if he refused to acknowledge it. Iwaizumi’s feelings for him warm the experience of Drifting every time; they’re so clear and obvious in Iwaizumi’s presence that Oikawa may deny them in words but he still feels them.

“And the—the thing is,” Iwaizumi continues, looking firmly at the ocean instead of Oikawa, “the thing is that I think you love me too.”

“Iwa—”

“You forget that I know you.” Iwaizumi turns to look at him, and he’s beautiful in the sunset and Oikawa wants to spill all his secrets right at that moment, he wants to, but—but his mouth stays closed, and Iwaizumi keeps talking. “I can see you when you look at me, when you think I’m not paying attention. And I can feel you in the Drift, I can see in your head, I can—”

Oikawa shakes his head, crossing his arms right around his chest. The centimeters of space between them feel like an ocean between continents. “Stop, Iwa, stop it, I can’t—”

“You can tell me to fuck off if I’m wrong,” Iwaizumi says quietly. Something in his gaze is open and vulnerable, raw and already hurting, as he bares his beating heart out for Oikawa to break. “I won’t be mad. I’ll—I’ll give you whatever space or silence you need. I will.”

I don’t want space, Oikawa thinks desperately, and then wonders if Iwaizumi can hear it in the Ghost Drift between them. I want you. I always want you, and I only want you.

But he says, instead, “I’m sorry, Iwa.”

Iwaizumi turns away from Oikawa, going still. His breaths are as shallow as the water, as even and gentle a lull as the waves. The sunset is tangled in his hair, making him glow. If Oikawa could, he would pull the moment all together into a single bottle and then he would cap it and toss it into the drifting, wandering sea to be forgotten.

“Okay,” Iwaizumi murmurs. “I—okay.”

Oikawa nods, slowly, and then fast. He takes a long breath, trying to steady himself. He wants to confess everything, wants to explain himself, wants to tell Iwaizumi that he’s not alone in this feeling, that he isn’t reading Oikawa’s every memory wrong. He wants to tell Iwaizumi that they’re going to be okay, that they can live happily ever after together.

But he can’t make himself speak. He doesn’t know how.

He loves Iwaizumi. He does. He’s just so afraid. The Kaiju and the ocean and the Jaegers and the turn of the Earth—all the ways that he can lose Iwaizumi, and all of them so out of his control. He cannot allow himself the luxury of a relationship with Iwaizumi because he can lose him so fucking easily. There is no escaping that fact.

So Iwaizumi nods, just once, when Oikawa looks over at him; and that’s all there is to it.

Iwaizumi knocks their shoulders together lightly. “It’s okay, Oikawa. Don’t stress about it.”

“I won’t,” Oikawa says, and the lie is bitter to his tongue. He knows it’s unconvincing, and he’s grateful that Iwaizumi doesn’t call him out on it.

Iwaizumi puts his hands on his knees, takes a deep breath, then relaxes all the tension in his body. He stands up. “I’m gonna head back. I’ll see you later, okay?”

“Yeah,” Oikawa says, somewhat hollowly. I love you. “I’ll see you later.”

Iwaizumi reaches down to squeeze Oikawa’s shoulder tightly. I love you too, so it’s okay.

And that’s the thing: Iwaizumi has always been so good. He’s always been too good for Oikawa. He’s been rejected—despite being so sure that Oikawa loves him back, and despite being right—and he’s never going to hold it against Oikawa. He’s never going to carry it into their friendship or into their dynamic in the Drift. He’s too kind for that, at the end of the day. They argue and fight and needle each other, but Iwaizumi would never actually, truly hurt him or their friendship in such a way.

With that, Iwaizumi turns around and walks away, just the sound of his shoes against the planks echoing around the cove. Oikawa doesn’t look behind him, doesn’t watch him walk away. He doesn’t want to see Iwaizumi disappear.

Chapter Text

Oikawa, these days, can mostly be found in the gym. He’s gotten good with the bo staff—sparring with Kuroo or Iwaizumi is one of the few things to bring him any kind of exhilaration these days. Not joy, not really. Satisfaction, maybe. But not joy. Not happiness. Not pleasure. It’s something, but it’s not fulfilling in any way that matters.

He’s there now, though neither Kuroo nor Iwaizumi are anywhere to be found. Instead of sparring, Oikawa has taken to a punching bag and started taking out all of his problems on it. He’s so fucking tired, is the thing. He’s so fucking done.

He doesn’t want to fight anymore. Not against the Kaiju, not against Iwaizumi, not against himself. He doesn’t want to live in this awful in-between state of waiting: for the next Kaiju attack, for the next call to fight to come, for the next quiet unspoken confession from Iwaizumi, for one of them to get injured or to die. He doesn’t want to live his life in anticipation of the ending. He just wants to live.

But his brain isn’t letting him do that. The world isn’t letting him do that.

He punches the sandbag with a fury that would send professional boxers flying. He’s breathing hard, trembling, and he lets out an awful scream as he hits the bag again. He throws all his pain and hurt and exhaustion into the punch, his fist closed and all the strength he owns in the one movement.

“Are you okay, Oikawa?”

Oikawa flinches at the interruption, at his name. He spins around on one heel to see Kageyama standing there. He has a bo staff in hand and he’s staring at Oikawa with wide, innocent eyes.

Being caught in the moment of vulnerability and fear has Oikawa practically trembling with anger, with frustration, with shame. He’s fucking scared, all of the time, and Kageyama is just standing there, just staring at him and saying are you okay are you okay are you okay—

The words reverberate in his head with a strange echo, like Kageyama asked the question ten times instead of once. Oikawa stares at him, this physical manifestation of everything that he had been before all this. Kageyama is who he had been at the start of all of this, isn’t he? Bright eyed, a bo staff in hand, determined to prove himself, determined to prove that he and Iwaizumi are special, determined to save the world.

Kageyama is who he had been before Iwaizumi’s confession went and made Oikawa rethink everything about his own feelings. He is quiet but smart, always thinking, always strategizing, always taking control of every situation. He is who Oikawa was before Oikawa lost control of everything in his life and in his world. He is who Oikawa still wants to be. With Hinata at his side and no hard battle experience yet, he has what Oikawa still wants: that feeling of being invincible.

“Fuck off,” Oikawa snarls. Kageyama doesn’t flinch, doesn’t move, doesn’t even change expressions, and for some reason that lack of acknowledgement makes Oikawa even angrier. “Don’t come near me!”

He lunges towards Kageyama with a ferocity that scares him, but before he can reach the kid, someone is wrapping their arms around his waist and hauling him back against them.

“Oikawa! What the fuck are you doing?” Iwaizumi yells, and Oikawa lets out a hoarse sob before collapsing against him.

Iwaizumi tugs him closer and Oikawa clings to him, fingers clutching the fabric of his shirt, burying his face in his chest. The two of them sink to the floor, sitting in front of the punching bag and gripping tight to each other like the other is the only thing keeping them afloat.

He hears, vaguely, “It’s dinnertime, Kageyama. Go eat. I’ve got him now,” and footsteps retreating until the door swings open and shut again.

Then, there, alone with Iwaizumi, Oikawa lets himself fall apart.

Oikawa feels a kiss pressed against the crown of his head, but no words are spoken. Iwaizumi just lets him cry into his shirt for what feels like hours. Iwaizumi runs one hand up and down Oikawa’s back in smooth strokes. The other hand threads through his hair in a soothing motion. When he finally calms down, he stops crying but doesn’t pull away from where he’s hiding his face in Iwaizumi’s chest.

“Hajime,” Oikawa murmurs, the start of a prayer-like litany. “Hajime, Hajime, Hajime, Hajime.”

“What the fuck happened, Tooru?” Iwaizumi asks, pulling back slightly to force Oikawa to look at him.

Oikawa closes his eyes, the shame washing over him in incessant waves and unable to face Iwaizumi as he is. His voice is blank and emotionless when he says, “I’m just so tired.”

Iwaizumi exhales measuredly, closing his eyes. “Kageyama didn’t do anything to you.”

“I know.”

“Nothing that’s happening is that kid’s fault.”

“I know.”

Iwaizumi opens his eyes. “Okay.”

Oikawa nods sharply. Don’t try to look at me. Don’t try to see me. Don’t try to love me like this.

But as always, Iwaizumi defies his self-loathing. As always, Iwaizumi looks at him, and sees him, and loves him anyway. He pulls Oikawa back into his hug, and they sit there silently for a long, lonely time.

It’s not for another week that they see Kageyama again, and even then, it’s through the armor of the Jaegers between them.

“—a two Jaeger drop,” the Marshal is saying. “Code name is Sawhead. Category 3. It’s 8,700 metric tons—the biggest Cat-3 we’ve seen yet.”

Oikawa blinks blearily at him. “It’s two in the morning, they can’t choose a better time to kill us?”

Next to him, Iwaizumi snorts. He looks just as tired, if not more tired, than Oikawa feels, but he manages to straighten his back and turn to go to Blue Castle’s storage bay anyways. “C’mon, Shittykawa. Let’s suit up.”

The process of getting into a Jaeger is complex: it takes time, patience, and a strangely important attention to detail. These are things that can hold you back and slow you down when you’re trying to get to a Kaiju that’s actively crawling through the ocean to kill tens of thousands of people.

Iwaizumi and Oikawa and their ground crew have made it into a kind of game. Oikawa has gotten suited up in circuitry suits and then the armor layer faster than Iwaizumi has twenty-two times, so twenty-two points are notched into the running tally they have. He wins again in this round, leaving Iwaizumi grumbling as Watari sets the last piece of the armor layer across his chest. Finally, the spinal cord attachment and the helmets are put on both of them simultaneously.

“Data relay gel dispersing in circuitry suit.” The AI’s voice echoes through the communication system, startling Oikawa briefly before the sight of the yellow-orange fluid sinking through the layers of the suits calms him again.

And then they’re moving towards the Pilot Motion Rig. Yahaba’s hand is tight on Oikawa’s hand as he helps him step up onto the foot stands and then when the extensors clamp around his feet. As always, Oikawa flinches a little at the feeling of being locked in place by his feet, and then by his wrists.

“Good morning, kids,” Hanamaki calls out. “Up and at ‘em bright and early today, aren’t we?”

“It’s not even bright yet,” Oikawa mutters.

Hanamaki’s laugh reverberates throughout the Conn-Pod. “But it certainly is early. Let’s get this show on the road.”

“Engage drop, Hanamaki,” the Marshal says, his exhaustion clear in the words—though if that’s the hour or having to deal with Hanamaki specifically at this hour, Oikawa doesn’t really know. The second idea cheers him up just a little, though.

“Release for drop,” comes Yahaba’s voice, from a distance.

“Prepare for the neural handshake,” Hanamaki warns them. Then he begins his countdown, slow and steady as he reads the numbers from one of his many screens.

“Ready, Oikawa?” Iwaizumi asks. He doesn’t look over at him, but the trust is warm and evident in his voice alone.

Oikawa nods firmly. “Ready as ever.”

Then, in the thoughts which are no longer private and no longer his alone, if they had ever been: I believe in you.

He can feel Iwaizumi’s smile in the back of his mind more than he can see it through the glass of Iwaizumi’s helmet’s shielding.

You’re fourteen or fifteen, one of those ages where everything feels impossible and your body is too strange to feel like you can move it properly and your mind is going everywhere all the time, but right now, you’re on the beach and the sunset is making all your insecurities melt away.

You’re playing volleyball, kicking up sand as you struggle to dive for the ball that your best friend just hit in your direction. You miss, landing hard on your chest in the sand, and landing on the sand is forgiving but the distance of the fall is not; you roll over onto your back, the ball landing silently a few feet away, wind completely knocked out of your chest.

“Don’t hurt yourself,” your mother calls out from a distance—but your best friend is laughing, and you linger on the sound as he walks over—he offers out a hand to help you up, and you stare at him there for a moment like you’ve lost all sense; the sunset frames him with a watercolor halo and you love him so much that it leaves you as breathless and brave as the dive, as the leap, as the fall—

“Left hemisphere calibrating,” Iwaizumi calls out, and Oikawa yanks himself out of the memory cycle. It’s been a long time since the Drift has been this rough, since he’s gotten so caught up in it like this. “Tooru?”

“Right hemisphere calibrating,” Oikawa echoes, taking a breath. It’s always strange to breathe in the armor’s helmet, and he suddenly feels like he can’t get enough air. In the back of his head, he feels Iwaizumi’s concern prodding at him, asking if he’s ready for this. He doesn’t answer. “Ready and waiting for instructions, Marshal.”

It’s silent for a moment, and then the Marshal’s voice comes through the comms, clear as water. “You’re dropping alongside Crow Sunrise. You’ll be taking point and they’ll be there to fill in the gaps. Protect each other, but above all else, get the Kaiju down. Keep it from the Miracle Mile and kill it.”

Oikawa wrinkles his nose at the announcement that they’ll be working with Hinata and Kageyama, but he doesn’t complain out loud. Iwaizumi, though, is definitely rolling his eyes at him.

“Sounds simple enough,” Iwaizumi says out loud, even if Oikawa can feel the nervous anticipation in the back of his head.

The nervousness always comes before the adrenaline of a fight against a Kaiju—no matter how many times they do this, it never loses the sense of immediate danger, of walking into the dark without knowing what’s in front of you. No matter how much they know about a Kaiju in advance, no matter how much they prepare, there’s really no knowing what a fight will be like until you’re in it. You don’t know what you’re going to have to do—or what you’re willing to do—until it’s actually happening and you only have two choices.

Blue Castle is brought out into the ocean, not too far from where the Kaiju—Sawhead—is marching through the choppy waves. It’s still dark at this hour, from both a raging thunderstorm and the early hour. The sun has yet to rise, but he wouldn’t be able to see it through these clouds if it did.

Crow Sunrise comes just behind them—Oikawa can see the massive Jaeger on the rearview visuals. Crow Sunrise is a Mark-3, and while Oikawa loves their own Jaeger like a part of himself and has no desire to ever step in a different one, he can admit that the Mark-3 design is a sleek, impressive looking machine.

Sawhead, on the other hand, is the opposite of a sleek machine. Instead, it’s a mass of shell-like armored skin with gold veins running through the armor in the way kintsugi art might hold together a broken heart. Oikawa and Iwaizumi step forward in unison, dragging Blue Castle’s feet through the water, and they will break it all over again.

With sharp fin-like bones lining its spine, it looks something like the ancient stegosaurus skeletons on display in a science museum he had gone to as part of a childhood vacation with Iwaizumi’s family, but with a sharp bone protruding from its head like a serrated knife or a saw of some sort. The muscles of its arms and legs are almost lizard-like with the way the skin bulges and sags and tenses and moves as it walks towards the Wall of Life on the shore.

That serrated knife or saw or whatever you want to call it, Oikawa figures, would cut through the Wall like butter. Sawhead looks like it was built specifically to cut through fragile concrete walls built by unsteady hands. So many people have worked on that wall, so many people have fallen from its height, so many people have worked themselves to the bone to get it together, and this one Kaiju could probably rip through the whole thing as if it were a child knocking over a Lego structure and not a feat of solid concrete.

In his head, Oikawa can feel Iwaizumi’s thoughts—still a little disjointed with exhaustion but somehow still alert and conscious and as observant as ever—forming.

Alongside the plan they’re making together, in the back of his mind, there’s a flash of memory of that stegosaurus skeleton in the museum. Iwaizumi had stared at it in awe for hours as a child. Oikawa had been mostly bored by the whole display, but Iwaizumi rattled off facts about the dinosaur for the entire car ride to and from the hotel and museum.

Its brain was so small, and its head was so small, but the body was so big, it’s, like, nine whole meters long.

Sawhead is huge. Oikawa and Iwaizumi approach with the intention to kill anyway. Oikawa is keenly aware of Crow Sunrise following behind them, then shifting to take it on from the far side while Blue Castle approaches from the front.

The museum was huge, too. According to Iwaizumi’s mother, it would take them two whole days to go through the whole thing and they really shouldn’t spend more than twenty minutes staring up at one dinosaur skeleton. Oikawa remembers, vaguely, that the museum was at the edge of a park with grass so green it felt like something out of a storybook. Then they had ventured into the building itself, a thing of stone and brick and towering, vaulted ceilings.

Oikawa doesn’t think he’s ever felt as grounded in history or in reality as he felt on that day. He and Iwaizumi had wandered the halls of the museum, captivated by the greatness of history and the impossible, terrifying scale of all the time in the world.

There had been a time before humans, Oikawa recalls thinking, and there will be a time after humans. Maybe that time has come, he wonders faintly now. The thought comes unbidden and unwanted, and almost immediately, Iwaizumi is shoving it out of his mind with a litany of, We’re not here to have nihilistic thoughts, Shittykawa, we’re here to do something good, something important.

In that great, huge museum, amongst the bones of all history and the skeletons of all time, Oikawa had almost been reveling in how insignificant he felt. Iwaizumi was fascinated by the science of it all, but Oikawa, even as a young child, was entirely struck by how small he is compared to everything else.

The dinosaurs had been huge, and had been infallibly strong. Something—an asteroid, an apocalypse—destroyed everything they were. It happened as if they had never run an entire dynasty of history. And Oikawa was just one small life in one small country in one small town in one small junior high school.

He matters to the people who love him. But in the grand scheme of things, the worth of his life weighs as little as a feather floating in the great ocean of history.

Maybe that’s why he wanted to save the world back at seventeen years old when following Iwaizumi into the jaws of the apocalypse. Maybe that’s why he wanted to do something good, as Iwaizumi put it just now. Because his life is so little and the world is so big.

Sawhead roars, a terrible, grating sound, and Oikawa is wrenched back into the present. He’s been working on autopilot; he and Iwaizumi are running perfectly in sync as they drive the blade extending from the back of their wrist into the underside of the Kaiju’s jaw. It pierces through the weak spot there and when they pull the blade out, Kaiju Blue spills freely into the ocean.

The water is churning and crashing and breaking over both the Jaeger and the Kaiju’s bodies. Both are built to withstand tons upon tons of force against them, but even still, Blue Castle stumbles a little at the combination of a particularly strong wave and Sawhead lurching towards them.

And the plates on the back are attached to the skin, not the skeleton, so they can be ripped out, did you know? No one really knows what they were used for, though.

As if he heard the thought—and probably he did—Iwaizumi moves his far arm out to grab at the fins on the Kaiju’s back. It’s likely that these fins are used for swimming, guiding the Kaiju from the depths of the ocean upwards to the shore, and Oikawa sees immediately what Iwaizumi is trying to do.

He moves his own arm to grab at the fin below where Iwaizumi is aiming for, and they wrap the Kaiju in a kind of bear hug and then they tear in opposite directions. The Kaiju screams—and it looks like Iwaizumi was right, like the memory is serving them well—as the fins are ripped cleanly from where they are embedded in skin rather than bone and it collapses into the water.

Maybe it’ll drown. Maybe it’ll just sink to the bottom and be unable to get back up.

Oikawa is well aware of how unlikely that is, but the collapse of the Kaiju allows them a moment to breathe before it surges upwards again. Kaiju Blue is painting the water a strange, holographic neon color in the dark of the nighttime.

Sawhead makes that grating sound again, something straight out of a nightmare, and lunges towards them. Oikawa clenches and unclenches his right hand, Iwaizumi moving with him, to extend the tungsten-carbide claws from the Jaeger’s fists. They drive the bladed claws through Sawhead’s sides and rip downwards.

Sawhead sinks into the water again, struggling to get up, and with barely a nod to Iwaizumi, the two of them begin to charge the Plasmacaster. One last blow, Oikawa guesses.

They detonate the left arm’s plasma cannon, landing a solid hit against Sawhead’s abdomen. Behind the monster, Crow Sunrise steps through the howling wind to land a hit on its back from their own Plasmacaster. The Kaiju makes a sound that can only be described as a pained scream, trying to steady itself on its feet. Thunder booms high above them.

Then it booms closer, as if all around them, as if behind them. At first, Oikawa thinks that the storm is just moving closer and it’s nothing to worry about.

Except—and he and Iwaizumi register what’s happening at the same time, but they’re both too slow to respond.

It only ate plants, but it was so strong, and its tail had spikes that it could fight with—

The spiked tail whips around the Kaiju, so much more nimbly than a monster of its size should be able to move, and the hit lands directly at Blue Castle’s head. The spikes break through the armor, through the steel shielding, through every layer of protection in the body. It tears it all open, leaving the thunder and rain to echo through the Conn-Pod.

A flash of lighting brightens the world for one sharp, blinding second as the longest spike breaks through the Pilot Motion Rig and tears Iwaizumi cleanly apart from every failsafe. Oikawa screams, pain as blinding as the lightning ripping through his head as Iwaizumi is torn out of the neural connection they share. The bond between them is broken as easily as ripping paper and in as jagged a cut as the serrated bone that the Kaiju bears.

Iwaizumi’s feet are ripped out of the extensors and he’s left hanging by his wrists, his head dropped backwards, lips parted in a soundless scream. His eyes are shut, but there’s blood dripping from his nose and from his ears and Oikawa can’t even hear himself screaming anymore, so entirely overwhelmed by the silence of Iwaizumi’s presence in his head—or, so entirely overwhelmed by the emptiness that he’s been left with.

Iwaizumi—Iwa—Hajime—Hajime—Hajime—

The screens and monitors all black out then, the blue glow they had cast suddenly plunging them into the darkness of two in the morning. He can barely see anything, but the white of Iwaizumi’s suit is bright even in the dim thunderstorm of a morning. The shattered glass of his helmet still sends the light of the lightning refracting into prisms with jagged edges. The blood on his face is such a deep, wounded ruby that it looks like that space on his skin has been carved open and left a void.

Oikawa thinks he might still be screaming, a horrific harmony with the Kaiju’s own yells. Rain pelts the glass of his helmet with the same violence as bullets. The wind is a cacophonous symphony of untuned instruments, overwhelming in their screeching strings and sharpened drums.

Distantly, Oikawa registers Sawhead still charging closer. He can’t think, can’t breathe, can’t move. He’s not strong enough to move Blue Castle by himself, he’s not strong enough to do this without Iwaizumi, he’s never been strong enough for anything when he stands alone—

He forces himself to move an arm, to punch away the Kaiju as best he can without Iwaizumi there to move the Jaeger with him. It’s so much harder than it’s ever been before; everything that had come naturally to him when connected to Iwaizumi is suddenly the hardest thing he’s ever done.

He can feel warm blood dripping from his nose; that must be the remnants of their neural connection—Hajime, he needs to be okay, he has to be okay, I can’t lose you, I can’t lose you—

The screens flicker back on, fuzzy at the edges, static breaking over the image and then coming sharp into focus again every time Oikawa blinks. They’re only a few kilometers from the Miracle Mile. This is the point of no return. A little more lost ground and Tokyo is as good as done.

Crow Sunrise is charging through the water to get to them, only they look like they’re moving so slowly, or maybe everything is just moving in disjointed slow motion in Oikawa’s mind right now. Everything is so loud around him but so silent in his mind and the disconnect there threatens to break him.

He could detonate the nuclear reactor. He could take down the Kaiju and Crow Sunrise and maybe a little bit of the shoreline and definitely himself and—

Iwaizumi groans. It’s distant, quiet, but it’s to his left and it’s in his head and Oikawa knows that Iwaizumi is alive. He can’t let himself be relieved yet, can’t let himself hope; and oh, hope is such a dangerous, addictive thing.

He will not let Iwaizumi die. Not here, and not like this. Oikawa lets out a guttural yell as he manages to slash the right arm’s blade across Sawhead’s shoulder. It’s a weak hit now that he’s moving the Jaeger alone, and blood drips further, down to his chin. Sawhead barely stumbles, as if it knows that it’s winning this fight. Behind it, another monster, this one made of metal with searchlights for eyes and nuclear weapons for a heart, breaks through the clouds.

Kageyama, Oikawa thinks. Then, I’m sorry.

Sawhead turns, angling itself towards the second Jaeger. Here, while it’s distracted, Oikawa could take it down. He could do it. He could move the left arm and drive the blade through the back of the Kaiju. They’ve been backed up past the Miracle Mile; the shoreline is clear in Oikawa’s line of sight and all the Kaiju has to do to get to land, to get to human life, is turn back to Oikawa and topple the paper mountain over into the water.

But the force of motion every time Oikawa moves the Jaeger rocks Iwaizumi’s limp body just a little more. The arms of the rig and the clamps around his wrists were never meant to hold up human weight on their own, just to keep it in place and connect it to the Jaeger’s movements. When Oikawa moved the right arm, Iwaizumi had jerked forward and the right arm had snapped, leaving him dangling by one wrist.

It’s a physical pain, everything that Blue Castle is feeling and everything that Iwaizumi is feeling. It stabs through him, an unbearable slice through his every nerve. He feels like he’s been set alight with pain, an electrified brain or a livewire in a pool where two boys had once jumped in and laughed. What did Iwaizumi’s laugh even sound like? Will he ever laugh again—

And Oikawa knows he can’t do it.

He could kill the Kaiju right now with one last blow, but it would cost everything. The force of the movement would snap the last remaining arm of Iwaizumi’s Pilot Motion Rig and that final imbalance would topple the Jaeger over into the water.

Oikawa would survive; the escape pod seems to still be intact and a blaring message on the monitors is telling him to activate it. He would survive, but he wouldn’t be able to bear it. Iwaizumi would be gone, would be dead, and his life is so much more than a feather floating in the great ocean of history.

You don’t know what a fight is going to be like until you’re in it. You don’t know what you’re going to be willing to do until you do it. You don’t know what you’re going to be willing to lose. And Oikawa knows—a realization that both has always been there and has never needed to be a reality—that he is not willing to lose Iwaizumi. Not even if it means sacrificing all of Japan.

Crow Sunrise is still too far. It’s making noise, getting Sawhead’s attention, attempting to draw it closer. Oikawa wants to appreciate the try, but he can’t bring himself to think about anything other than the sudden, lurching absence of Iwaizumi in his head.

The ocean is angry today, it wants its daily cut of the sacrifices from this stupid war, and Oikawa wants to let it take him. If it would end the pain, end the silence, he would drown.

Sawhead seems to realize that Crow Sunrise is too far away to do anything before it gets to shore at the same time that Oikawa realizes. It also seems to realize that Blue Castle is no more a danger to it anymore than the rain is.

So it just moves on. It turns and makes its way to shore. Oikawa lost their—his—only chance at taking it down before it got to the land. Iwaizumi is dangling by his wrist and he’s so still, but there’s a second heartbeat echoing in the rush of blood in Oikawa’s ears which means Iwaizumi is alive and that’s all he can think about right now.

Crow Sunrise charges past Blue Castle towards the Kaiju without even sparing them a glance. The Kaiju is still injured, dripping that toxic blue blood into the ocean. It slices through the Wall of Life just like Oikawa thought it would.

Crow Sunrise is there now, reaching it, but Sawhead has broken through the Wall and there’s only so much of a fight that can happen on shore without hundreds if not thousands dying. And despite the sacrifice, there’s only one heartbeat in his head now and that’s when Oikawa passes out.

Chapter Text

The Jaeger named Crow Sunrise, piloted by two new PPDC recruits, is being used as the greatest justification to continue the costly Jaeger program—

The Jaeger was only able to stop the Kaiju after major destructions to seaside Japan—

A second Kaiju—

The question remains—

Over two thousand dead after latest attacks by two Kaiju, with countless more injured or missing—

The Jaeger called Blue Castle, which so many have relied on until this moment, failed to defend the coastline; is this a failure of the technology or the pilots—

Oikawa slams his laptop shut, cutting off his view of the news reports he’s been clicking through. He’s in his assigned room in the Shatterdome, alone. Iwaizumi is still in the hospital wing; there have been no updates on his status. It’s only been a few hours, but ever since waking up in the hospital wing, Oikawa hasn’t been able to stop thinking about him.

He would know, wouldn’t he? If Iwaizumi were to die—he would be able to feel it. Oikawa is certain of it. He’d be able to feel it if Iwaizumi were to die, because he had felt that tear, that awful ripping of Iwaizumi’s consciousness out of his own head. He had felt it as a physical pain, and so surely he would know if Iwaizumi was dead.

Out of the destroyed Jaeger and hiding away from the world in his room, Oikawa can feel nothing but his own heartbeat. His own pulse of blood in his veins. His own thoughts in the back of his mind. There’s no trace of Iwaizumi.

He presses the heels of his palms against his eyes, squeezing them shut and trying to block out the rest of the world. Trying to pretend that the rest of the world isn’t there at all.

Being alone in this room hurts. He rarely spends time here without Iwaizumi. But being around other people would hurt more. Oikawa isn’t sure that he can take the shame of facing anyone else in the Shatterdome.

They all know what he did by now, he’s sure. They all know how he chose Iwaizumi over the fate of Japan. It was right there—the ability to stop the Kaiju, the ability to save the world, to be the hero. The lives of thousands were in his hands, and Oikawa opened his fists and let them fall into the ocean all for the sake of one life that he decided mattered more.

No, he can’t face anyone right now. The shame of his choice burns so deep in his psyche that it almost mimics the warmth of Iwaizumi’s love in the Ghost Drift.

The worst part of it, though, is that he can’t bring himself to regret it at all. He can’t make himself regret what he did, no matter how hard he tries. If Iwaizumi is alive—and Iwaizumi is alive, he must be, and he will be—then it was all worth it. Over two thousand for the sake of one and Oikawa can’t regret it for a second.

He’s always been selfish. He knows that well—he’s always been selfish and needy and he’s always wanted more than he should be allowed to take.

At the top of the list of things Oikawa is selfish about wanting to keep for himself is Iwaizumi.

He groans, falling back onto the mattress and dropping his hands to his side. He’s lying on Iwaizumi’s bunk, enveloped in the scent of him, in the memory of him pressed against Oikawa’s side when neither of them could sleep well.

Turning his head to the side, Oikawa can see a scattering of photos that Iwaizumi has taped to the walls. Most of them are of his family; photos that his mother has been mailing to him over the past few years to keep him in the loop about what’s happening in their family. His older sister had a baby. His younger sister just graduated high school. Their youngest sister has taken up volleyball.

Between those photos, though, are photos of his friends. Their high school volleyball team, before they dropped out to come here. Oikawa and some of their high school friends on New Year’s Day, caught mid-laugh as they all opened their fortunes.

And then there are several of just the two of them. Iwaizumi and Oikawa, after one tournament or another, with Oikawa holding up an award and Iwaizumi tugging him close against his side with a beaming smile. Him and Oikawa as children on the beach: they’re captured from behind in the photo, but it’s clearly them, racing each other to the water.

That must have been the same day that Oikawa saw in the Drift all those years ago—two days before the appearance of the first Kaiju. Oikawa hadn’t realized there were any pictures from all that time they spent on the beach; he hadn’t realized they were special enough for Iwaizumi to want to keep them here. He wonders what it is that Iwaizumi thinks about at night, when he rolls over to see these photos.

Then he decides that train of thought hurts more than it helps, and he rolls over onto his other side. The motion knocks the laptop off of his lap and onto the floor, but he can’t bring himself to care. Not when Iwaizumi could be—anything could be—

They had already whisked him away into surgery by the time that Oikawa woke up in the hospital wing. Oikawa had forced himself into stumbling out of the bed, ripping the IV out of his arm with a painful, sharp sting, and tried to get to him. Tried to break past the door leading into the surgical unit of the hospital wing and had found himself getting pulled back by strong hands digging into the scratched and bruised skin of his biceps.

He screamed himself hoarse calling out for Iwaizumi, as if that would help at all, trying to stare through the solid doors, trying to feel him in the Ghost Drift, trying to just get to him, but eventually he lost all his will and let himself be dragged back to the bed. He let himself go limp and let the doctors put him back on bedrest.

Only a few minutes later, as soon as everyone had their backs turned, Oikawa was scrambling out of the bed and darting out of the hospital wing. He couldn’t stand being there, wallowing in his own misery and guilt and not knowing if Iwaizumi was going to be okay. Not that he’s really doing anything much different here, but at least he can do it without the combined pitying and concerned glances from the doctors and nurses.

The thing is that piloting a Jaeger comes with risks—risks that don’t just come from the fight with the Kaiju.

There is a risk when it comes to Drifting at all with someone else; creating a bridge between you and another person in a place where no bridge was ever meant to exist is dangerous. There is also a risk when it comes to connecting with the Jaeger itself in the first place. It’s a strange, alien feeling, and it’s not quite like feeling pain exactly, but you can almost feel a pseudo-pain when the Jaeger gets significantly damaged. Like a phantom bullet wound in a missing limb.

All of this boils down to the fact that every part of piloting a Jaeger is centralized around a neural pathway: connections from the brain to another person and to a mecha. Messing around with the brain is a dangerous game; it always has been and, no matter how advanced the science gets, it always will be.

Oikawa and Iwaizumi both knew the risks when they went into this. They listened to the lectures on the science behind it all. They read and signed the consent forms. They both felt the strange burn of forcing that connection where there was never meant to be a connection between humans the first time that they Drifted.

While he hadn’t wanted to admit it at the time, too caught up in the exhilaration of Drifting successfully so easily, he can admit now that it hurt. It had hurt to open a part of his brain up to a neural pathway that the human brain was never meant to open up. It had hurt to let another consciousness dig its nails into his own and then brand itself onto him.

It had been Iwaizumi he was doing it with, so it had been a welcome pain. It had been a pain that Oikawa invited into himself and never once regretted. It had been a pain that Oikawa never doubted would end in a soft, loving recovery. As risky as it is to mess with the brain, Iwaizumi has always made Oikawa feel safe throughout it all.

And now Iwaizumi is in surgery, is in the hospital, and fuck knows what’s happening to him there. Oikawa has no updates on his life, but he can’t feel him at all, and—

Being ripped out of the Drift had been painful for Oikawa in a way that nothing has ever felt before, so he can scarcely imagine what it must have felt like for Iwaizumi to be ripped both out of Oikawa’s head and out of the connection with the Jaeger and to be torn open by the claws of the Kaiju. If Oikawa felt like he was dying, like the pain would never cease, like his heart was going to flare out of his chest, then how could Iwaizumi possibly bear what Oikawa barely pulled through?

Then again, Iwaizumi has always been the strong one between the two of them.

Oikawa tries to roll onto his back again to lie flat on the bed, but he twists something the wrong way when he moves and he lets out an unwilling groan of pain with the reminder that he’s basically been beaten up on all fronts within the last twelve hours. He rubs at his ribs as if that will make him feel better, but it just hurts more when he touches the tender area.

He tries to remember what the doctors had told him when they read from the clipboard hanging at the foot of his bed: nothing broken but everything bruised some amount, which probably explains why it hurts to breathe, need to take it easy for much longer than you’ll reasonably be able to stand, a concussion of some degree, unknown side effects of being ripped out of the Drift, tell us if you feel anything off at all, we need to know so we can…

Even in the very attempt at remembering it, he zones out of the lecture they had given him. Oikawa stares straight up at the underside of the top bunk. He wants, desperately, to be with Iwaizumi. He wants to curl against his side and he wants to hold his hand and he wants to kiss—

And now—

Now he may never know. He may never get the chance. And it’s the stupidest, smallest of things. He should be concerned about a thousand other things right now. There are half a dozen other apocalypses to worry about. There are so many other things he should be giving his attention to, so many other things that should be hurting, that kissing Iwaizumi should barely make the top ten on the list.

But it does. It’s such a small thing, but he loves Iwaizumi and Iwaizumi might be gone without ever getting to hear those words out loud. Even if he somewhat knew from their connection in the Drift, Oikawa never said it and they never did anything about it, and while that love still matters, still existed, still was felt—it was always denied and it was never spoken. And that fact is going to haunt Oikawa for the rest of his life.

He’s beginning to understand what Kuroo meant, two years ago, about being a coward. He’s beginning to see his point that having someone for any amount of time at all would be worth it. It’s just that, while Kuroo might have been right about love being worth it even in times of violence, it was Oikawa who was right that he would one day lose the person he loves to that endless fight.

Squeezing his eyes shut, Oikawa refuses to cry. He refuses to cry over Iwaizumi, who is not dead. He refuses to mourn someone who is not gone. He will not grieve. He will not fucking cry.

He needs to leave. Needs to get out of this room. He sits up, nearly hitting his head on the underside of the top bunk, and then gingerly steps over the fallen laptop—which he just kind of prays isn’t broken but doesn’t bother to check—and slowly puts his shoes and coat on, wincing with every movement.

Fresh air will distract him, at least a little bit. Maybe it’ll even wake him up from this nightmare. Maybe he’ll step out into the wind and sun and all of this will be over. It’ll melt away into a dream that ends. That he can escape from.

Ten minutes later, though, he’s stepping out through that door with the broken alarm and into the crisp air that comes after a storm, and he does not wake up. He shivers and he tugs his jacket closer around himself, digging his fingernails into the sides of his arms, and still the world is the same. Iwaizumi is in the hospital, upwards of two thousand strangers are dead or injured because he didn’t have the guts to make a sacrifice—because he was too in love to make a sacrifice—and he is alone.

Oikawa steps out onto the rickety old pier, making his way to the edge and then hopping off onto the rocky shore that lines the space between ocean and Shatterdome. He kind of wants to just step into the water and float away. Not in a suicidal way, just—he wants to close his eyes and let the waves carry him somewhere else. He wants to be anywhere but here. He wants to be anyone but himself.

The beach—if it can really be called that—is nothing more than a few feet of rocks and boulders that break the water before it crashes into the concrete walls of the Shatterdome. Oikawa stumbles a little on the unstable terrain, sending smaller pebbles scattering down the slight incline of the beach and towards the water.

The waves are so calm now. Compared to the hurricane of waves earlier that morning, this feels almost insultingly peaceful.

Oikawa wanders, aimless, along the shoreline. He kicks at a rock and it goes careening into a pile of shells, rocks, and broken crab shells. Left over from the gulls, probably. He stops at the pile, shoving it around with his toe for a moment. The movement reveals a small conch shell, barely large enough to sit comfortably in his palm.

“If you can hear the ocean when you get home, you know you can keep this moment always.”

Oikawa leans down, wincing at the pain in his ribs when he angles himself in just the wrong way. He picks up the shell, brushing off what little sand is stuck to it. There’s a small crack at one edge, but it’s otherwise in beautiful shape.

Slowly—almost afraid of the answer—he holds the shell up to his ear. He closes his eyes, trying to search for the sound of that beach from all those years ago. The memory of standing there is conjured up easily in his mind.

It’s just him and Iwaizumi, in that memory. The sun is burning into his shoulders and leaving a deep tan over his skin. The sand is cold and wet around his feet. The waves are lapping at his ankles. Iwaizumi’s hand is curled over his own fist, the shell tight in Oikawa’s own palm.

Iwaizumi had been so uncharacteristically somber at that moment. He had been so soft, so tender in a way that he so rarely is—in a way that Oikawa treasures being allowed to see, both because it’s so rare and because so few people have the privilege of being with him like this, at his most vulnerable. His grip had been warm with the sunset, a few grains of wet sand stuck to his palm and rough against the back of Oikawa’s hand.

And right then: oh, how Oikawa wanted to keep the moment always. How he had wanted to hold onto it forever.

He clung to that memory throughout the rest of their last year of junior high. He held it tight to his chest whenever he needed the memory that someone loved him. When things got hard that year, he could recall the feeling of the salty air, of the shell cold and wet in his hand, of Iwaizumi touching him like he’s something precious to keep safe. He could recall the sound of the ocean all around them.

It was one of those sacred, special moments that he and Iwaizumi share sometimes. One of the ones where teasing each other just won’t cut it. Where needling at each other would hurt more than make them laugh. Where both their friendly, lighthearted banter and their more serious arguing ends and something raw, something deeply human, some desperate grasp for a loving bond, a real connection, begins.

Now, holding the shell up to his ear, all of this comes rushing back. It’s overwhelming, for a moment, the memory coming to him similarly to how Drifting feels.

Then—there it is.

The sound of all the sea rushing around them. Impossibly vast and terribly deep. Terrifying in all its unknowns, alluring in all its mystery. Then calming just for the two of them standing there on the shore; a gentle lapping of water over his feet. The waves brush over the sand like watercolor paint brushes smoothly over a paper. His heartbeat is in his ears. The blooming of a sunburn over his cheeks that might double as a blush.

Oikawa takes a deep breath, sinking into the sound of the ocean around him in the present, in the memory. Iwaizumi is on his mind all the while, but for the first time since everything fell apart, the thought of him is comforting instead of terrifying.

After a moment, he opens his eyes again and reality comes back to him. The floodwaters of the truth of himself and the truth of the present moment break against the seawall of his memory, and a single crack opens up in the comfort he had gotten for just a brief moment. He pulls the shell away from his ear, pocketing it as he continues on his walk.

He eventually stops at a boulder to rest for a moment, his breath starting to come in shorter, painful bursts. Staring out at the water brings back that strange desire to disappear. To sink deep into the water and close his eyes, then wake up on the other side of the globe somewhere that no one knows his name nor what he’s done.

He sits down on the boulder despite the dampness from remnants of the high tide. He doesn’t care all that much about anything right now. He searches, again, fruitlessly, for Iwaizumi in the back of his mind.

Feeling nothing, Oikawa closes his eyes and tries to remember how to breathe without it hurting. Between the bruises around his ribcage and the open gashes against his side, he does not succeed. He leans back on his palms, trying to ground himself against the slippery rock, which, despite the water, is solid and firm beneath his hands.

“I thought I might find you here.”

Oikawa opens his eyes, startling at the sound of the Marshal’s voice. He glances over, seeing the Marshal approach him slowly. He looks at ease on the uncertain terrain, like he’s walked what isn’t really a path many times before. Oikawa says nothing, just turning back to the ocean.

Eventually, the Marshal reaches him and sits down next to him on the boulder with a heavy exhale. They sit in silence for a few moments, just letting the waves fill the quiet between them.

Then: “The man who invented the first Jaeger technology once said something that I quite like. He said that humans are born as neither gods nor heroes, so we have to build our own ways to fight monsters.”

Oikawa looks at him, not saying anything, but he doesn’t seem discouraged by his silence.

“I think that quote can mean a lot of things,” he continues, “but I think that the most important one right now is that it’s a reminder. A reminder that we’re just humans. And we humans—born neither gods nor heroes—are not infallible. We build our metal monsters, and then make choices. And sometimes those choices have consequences that aren’t pretty. Sometimes our choices don’t end like a legend or a fairytale.”

“Ah,” Oikawa murmurs.

He sees the Marshal’s point, but he hates it. He wants to be able to save everyone. He wants to be able to have the pretty ending. He wants all those civilians to be alive again and he wants Iwaizumi to be safe in his hands and he wants and wants and wants and, still, he is not infallible. He does not get the happy ending tied up in a bow.

The Marshal nods, looking out at the ocean, something distant in his gaze. Like he’s seeing different waters. “But I think it’s also important to remember that we don’t have to be unflawed in order to be loved. We can make mistakes and still be worthy of making choices again. Of continuing on.”

Oikawa swallows, following the Marshal’s eyes out to the water. It’s a calm afternoon, but the darkening horizon hints at yet another storm. The tension of the oncoming thunder prickles at his skin and hums in the air.

For the first time, he gets the sense that the Marshal, too, has something awful in his past. For the first time, he gets the sense that the Marshal knows what it’s like to be in a Jaeger and to fuck up. For the first time, he sees not his superior, the one in charge of every life on the base, but instead he sees Ukai. A man who has seen too much and made too many hard calls.

Oikawa blinks rapidly, something growing barbed wire in his throat and choking him. He’s so tired. He doesn’t want to fight anymore. He doesn’t want to have the fate of the world in his hands.

“I don’t know if I can go back,” Oikawa murmurs.

He looks down at his hands: hands which held the controls of a Jaeger, hands which allowed a Kaiju to take on a city in exchange for a life which may be lost anyway.

Hands which once touched Iwaizumi’s hand: running together as children, Oikawa dragging him to one thing or another; Oikawa taking his hand and pressing a button to his palm in secret, a promise to be best friends forever, though both of them knew what it really meant; Iwaizumi curling his fingers around the shape of a conch shell on the beach at sunset.

“I signed up for this because I thought I was going to be doing more good than harm and—and now people are dead. Because of me. Because of what I did. And I—”

I don’t regret it, is the end of the sentence. Not if it saved Iwaizumi. But he can’t bear to admit that to Ukai.

Ukai exhales, long and slow. “Part of my job as the Marshal is to make the strategies, give the commands, make the hard decisions. Hard decisions like who gets to fight and who has to die for the cause.”

Oikawa looks up at his hands, glancing over at Ukai. He’s never looked young, not since Oikawa’s first days in the Shatterdome so many years ago, but he’s also never looked this old before.

“When I first started this job, started being in charge, there were these two pilots who were the best we’d ever seen,” Ukai starts. He takes another long, measured breath. “Twin brothers. Ran a Jaeger called Canine Gold. Oh, they loved that thing. And she was beautiful. First of the Mark-2 series, one of a kind.”

The name of the Jaeger sounds vaguely familiar, but Oikawa can’t quite pinpoint the story to any recent memory. In training, they had to study every previous Jaeger and every previous Kaiju and every previous drop, but studying had never been Oikawa’s forte and only a few of them had really stuck in his mind.

Ukai continues. “A Kaiju had come up a little ways out from the shoreline. It was the first Category 2 that we’d ever seen. Three times the size of the Jaeger that they piloted. I sent them out to fight anyway.

“We all knew that it was a suicide mission. We all knew they weren’t coming back. And they went and fought, because I told them to. In the end, it took them and two other Jaegers to take down that Kaiju. I chose to keep sending people out to fight. Like lambs to the slaughter, for the sake of the Miracle Mile. We lost all our Mark-1 Jaegers, and two of the greatest pilots to ever do it. None of those pilots survived.

“And I will carry that with me every day of my life for the rest of my life. I will always carry the weight of their lives—and deaths—with me. Just as I carry the lives of every pilot who lives on this base and who dies out in the Pacific.”

Ukai closes his eyes, tilting his face up to the cloudy sky. A breeze drifts past them, and Ukai sways a little with the push of it. Oikawa wonders what he’s seeing behind his eyelids at that moment: those brothers, maybe. The other Jaeger pilots. The Kaiju. The great, wide ocean as it swallows them all up whole.

“Sometimes I want to be someone who didn’t make those decisions,” Ukai tells him. “Sometimes I want to be someone who didn’t have to. But the fact of this world, of this life, of this body I carry, is that I did make those calls. I am the person who gave them their last commands. This is not something that I will ever remember lightly.”

Oikawa opens his mouth, though he’s not quite sure what he wants to say. The story is beginning to sound more familiar to him now, but he’s never heard it told like this. With gravity and grief more than heroics and awe.

Ukai looks over at him, something piercing in his gaze. “You made a decision out there. People died. I’m not going to tell you that this is something easy to bear. It’s not. But the truth is that the decision was made. You have to learn to survive it, or you’re no better off than them. And the world needs you. Iwaizumi needs you.”

“What makes me any more important than them?” Oikawa chokes out. “I should have made a different call. I should have hit the manual override and killed us both and we all know it.”

“Nothing makes anyone more important,” Ukai says softly. “But you made the decision for a reason. Hold onto it. Remember it. If you allow yourself the luxury of regretting what you did, you will never be able to forgive yourself. You will also never be able to forgive the person you did it for. So honor your own life—and Iwaizumi’s life—as much as you will honor theirs going forward.”

Oikawa squeezes his eyes shut, feeling the tears swelling in his throat and behind his eyes. “Okay.”

Ukai hums—a soft, low, comforting sound. “But what I was saying earlier: We’re human. We’ll always be human, no matter what machines we build that make us feel otherwise. And Oikawa, you don’t have to be anything more than that. Humans do stupid things, and valiant things. We’re brave and we’re reckless sometimes, and we fall in love, and we make mistakes.

“But right now, that’s all you have to be. Being that version of yourself is enough. Sometimes the strongest version of yourself makes decisions that end in victories. Sometimes that best, truest version makes decisions that end with casualties. Being human more than god or hero does not mean you cannot be loved. And whatever you are or do, you have to keep fighting.”

Keep fighting, Ukai says, as if it’s easy. As if it’s something Oikawa knows how to do. As if it’s a simple step-by-step instruction to surviving in a world on the brink of an apocalypse. Oikawa opens his eyes. The ocean is so blue in front of him.

Ukai looks over at Oikawa, smiling just a little for the first time in their conversation. “Besides, Oikawa, whatever decisions you may make, I really do think you’ll be loved either way.”

“Maybe,” Oikawa says hoarsely. “Maybe.”

Ukai nods, putting a hand on Oikawa’s shoulder and squeezing gently. “Breathe, Oikawa. Survive it. That’s all you can ask for some days.”

Oikawa barely manages a soft, “Okay,” before he’s letting out a sob. Ukai gathers him in his arms, tight and warm, and all Oikawa can think is that he’s so weak. That he can’t handle this alone. That he can’t handle the end of the world without Iwaizumi.

Survive it. Survive it. Survive it. Survive it.

When he’s finally done crying, Ukai pulls away, his hands on Oikawa’s shoulders. He looks Oikawa in the eyes, steady and unruffled. “Don’t be a hero. Be human.”

Oikawa rubs at his eyes, trying to wipe away all evidence of tears. Now that he’s cried about it, he feels marginally lighter; as if his body had just needed to physically expel all of the exhaustion and guilt and self-loathing that’s been swirling around in him since they had gotten back to the Shatterdome.

“If you want an honorable discharge, or a different position in the PPDC, you can have it,” Ukai tells him, dropping his arms to his lap. “But I don’t think you do. And I don’t think Iwaizumi will want that either.”

Oikawa takes a shaky breath. “I’ll think about it.”

Ukai hums. “Alright.” A beat. “It looks like thunder soon. We should head inside. Besides, I’ve heard a rumor that Iwaizumi is asking for you.”

Chapter Text

Iwaizumi is asking for you— that’s all the information that Oikawa needs in order to get him scrambling up and heading back to the Shatterdome. Ukai follows behind him, a little slower and more carefully, stumbling over the rocks much less than Oikawa is. 

Back inside, Oikawa makes a straight line to the hospital wing without stopping to talk to anyone along the way, or to glance at any of the publicly available monitors on the walls. The Coastal Wall is standing strong elsewhere in the world, there have been no sights of any Kaiju since the one Hinata and Kageyama took down, and Oikawa cares about none of it.

He makes it there in record time. There, he hesitates in the doorway. He spots Daichi sitting in a chair at the back of the room, his back towards Oikawa. Iwaizumi must be in the bed there, farthest from Oikawa. Oikawa takes a deep breath, staring at the place where Iwaizumi is just out of view, blocked by Daichi’s presence.

He can’t do this. He can’t face Iwaizumi.

The thing is that Iwaizumi has always been braver than him, always been willing to do whatever it takes to get the job done. Oikawa has always looked at him and seen someone fearless. He doesn’t know if he’s capable of sitting there with him, knowing that he himself is not the same, is not worthy of being there when he is not fearless in the same way.

Still, he forces himself to step forward and make his way towards the opposite end of the room. Steady breaths. One foot in front of the other. Iwaizumi is at the end of the road, and Iwaizumi has always had safe arms to land in. There is nothing to be afraid of, not right now. Later, elsewhere—there is so much to fear. But not with Iwaizumi.

After what feels like kilometers upon kilometers of walking, Oikawa stands at the foot of Iwaizumi’s bed.

He looks terrible: scratches over his face and neck from miscellaneous falling debris; a bandage wrapped over his head to cover some deeper gash; his chest bare but for more bandages wrapped around him to cover almost all his free skin; one wrist with gauze running up and down his forearm and bicep; his opposite leg propped up on a stack of blankets with his ankle bound tightly by a brace.

And fuck, he’s alive, and he’s beautiful. He’s alive and that’s everything. Oikawa tracks the slow, even breaths of his rising and falling chest; sees the twitch of his fingers when he spots Oikawa standing there, as if he wants to reach out for him. Oikawa can’t feel him in the Ghost Drift, but he can see him here and that’s everything.

“Tooru,” Iwaizumi breathes out. Daichi, too, turns away from him to look at Oikawa with a small smile. “You’re okay.”

“I’m okay,” Oikawa says softly. “You’re alive?”

It comes out as half a question, even though the truth is right there and clear. Iwaizumi gives him a little lopsided smile. “Thank you.”

Oikawa blinks. “For what?”

“For keeping me alive,” Iwaizumi says simply, as if it didn’t come with a terrible, unforgivable cost. As if he has forgiven Oikawa for it already.

Iwaizumi and Oikawa both shoot Daichi a pointed look, and Daichi snorts, standing up. “I have to get going. Should probably check on my recruits at some point. Talk to you both later?”

“For sure,” Iwaizumi says, nodding. His voice is a little hoarse. “Good seeing you, Daichi.”

Daichi gives him a smile, and Oikawa waves a little as he walks away before he himself takes Daichi’s place at Iwaizumi’s bedside.

That’s when Iwaizumi’s gaze turns a little wary. “You weren’t here when I woke up.”

Oikawa takes a shaky breath, shoving his hands in his jacket pockets to hide his clenched, shaking fists. One hand wraps around the conch shell he had put there and forgotten about.

“I was outside,” Oikawa says quietly. “I needed some air.”

Iwaizumi nods slowly. “I—” he stops, looks down at all the broken parts of his body and grimaces— “Do you regret it?”

“Regret it?” Oikawa asks, blinking.

“I heard how many people…” Iwaizumi trails off. He looks up at Oikawa, studying him carefully. “You didn’t have to do that. Just for me.”

Oikawa stares at him, not comprehending what he’s saying for a long moment. Then something pinches at his expression, hurting like a bruise. “Just for you?”

Iwaizumi doesn’t say anything, but he also doesn’t look away from Oikawa’s gaze trying to pierce into his every thought, every insecurity, every anxiety.

“Don’t be fucking stupid,” Oikawa hisses. “‘Just for you’—you’re everything. I don’t regret it for a damn second. We’re a team. I’m not—giving up on you.”

Iwaizumi swallows hard, staring at him with wide, surprised eyes. “Oikawa—”

“We’re doing this together,” Oikawa snaps, leaving no room for argument. “I’m not just letting you go like that. That easily.”

A beat of silence. They stare at each other for a long moment, processing the weight of Oikawa’s words. I would let the world burn for you. I would choose to burn the world for you. And I wouldn’t regret it.

“I would have done the same for you,” Iwaizumi says quietly. “Daichi told me how it all happened, after I passed out. And I would have done the same for you. You know that, right?”

Oikawa carefully unclenches his fists and takes a slow breath. He nods sharply, just once. He does, somewhere in him, know that. He knows that Iwaizumi loves him to the point of sacrifice, loves him to the point of destruction, loves him to the point of living, but it’s still difficult to conceptualize in reality.

Iwaizumi nods in return, somehow satisfied with that response. “Good.”

“I’m glad you’re alive,” Oikawa whispers, a tender, whispered secret shared with the guilt of Catholic confession. “I don’t care about anything else. Not right now.”

“We can care about other things later,” Iwaizumi tells him. “Yeah?”

“Yeah,” Oikawa agrees. “Right now though. I—”

I love you, he wants to say.

I need you, he wants to say.

I love you and I need you and I’m glad I have you, he wants to say. I’m glad that I could keep you for now.

“I’m glad I’m alive too,” he murmurs.

Iwaizumi breaks into a small smile. “Me too, Oikawa. Me too.”

It feels like the kind of confession that no one but Iwaizumi can or ever should hear. It feels like the kind of confession that only Iwaizumi could ever understand. It feels like the kind of confession that only Iwaizumi would ever want or try to understand.

“Can I say it?” Iwaizumi asks quietly. “Can I say that I lo—”

Oikawa looks away, down at his lap, and Iwaizumi cuts himself off. Another beat of silence, this one horrible and pained and lonely. “I thought I was going to lose you. And I was so fucking scared, Iwa. I thought it was all over.”

In the corner of his eye, Iwaizumi stares at him unreadably. “Me too. I was scared too, and—”

“My last thought before I passed out,” Oikawa cuts in, “was that I couldn’t feel you. In the Drift. I couldn’t feel you. And—”

“Excuse me?”

Oikawa breaks off, flinching when he sees the nurse standing at Iwaizumi’s other side. He and Iwaizumi both stare at her for a long, tired moment. They’re on the cusp of something that will make or break them, a conversation that has the potential to either create them or ruin them. And Oikawa—Oikawa doesn’t know how this conversation ends. He doesn’t know where they go from here.

“I’m glad you came,” the nurse says, directing her attention to Oikawa, “but visiting hours are over. He needs his rest.”

Oikawa looks between her and Iwaizumi for a moment, no words on his tongue. He has no idea how the sentence finishes. He has no idea where he was going with that meandering thought. He thinks it either ends in I love you or I can’t, and he doesn’t know which feels more fitting, or which feels safer.

“Right, okay,” Oikawa chokes out. “I’ll go now.”

He looks at Iwaizumi, who isn’t looking at him. He’s staring at his unbroken hand, clenching and unclenching his fist.

“I’ll see you later,” Oikawa mutters. Then he stands and, like a damn coward, he turns away.

It terrifies him. The hesitancy of the conversation, the fear of the next sentence, saying it anyway, and the terrible and hopeful pause between words—it leaves him trembling and terrified. He doesn’t know how to take it, hold it in his hands, be unafraid of what’s beating in his pulse. He doesn’t know how to move forward.

He had stopped Iwaizumi from saying it. He had stopped Iwaizumi from saying it to either say it himself or to tell him to never bring it up again. He doesn’t know which he would have said, and both options leave him even more scared than he had been when on the brink of a violent death.

There’s no plan as to where he’s going next. He ends up, eventually, in the K-Science lab. He’s not really sure why he ends up there, just that he steps inside and is hit immediately with the sight of Kuroo on the concrete floor of the lab, some kind of blinking and glowing contraption stuck over his head. He’s shaking, convulsing, eyes squeezed shut as Oikawa sprints over to him and rips the helmet off.

Immediately, he goes still, and the only sound in the room is a heavy and terrified breathing. Oikawa’s heartbeat is in his ears as he shakes Kuroo’s shoulders, stuttering out his name, his hands trembling, he’s on the brink of losing someone else and he can’t, he can’t, he can’t—

“Hey, hey, Kuroo, Kuroo, c’mon, don’t leave, don’t let go—”

Kuroo’s eyes snap open. His hands go to Oikawa’s biceps, gripping him so tight that it hurts. “I did it,” he breathes out. “I did it, fuck, shit, Oikawa—”

Oikawa stares at him, his breath catching in his throat. “You Drifted with a Kaiju.”

It’s not a question.

“I said it would work,” Kuroo stutters out. “I said it would work, I said it, I told you, it was going to work, I said—”

“Fuck, Kuroo, slow the fuck down, shit, what did you see?”

Kuroo grips Oikawa’s arms even tighter, his fingernails digging into Oikawa’s flesh. “It was a—a fragment of a brain, and it was, I don’t know, a series of—of impressions, like stop motion, you know—”

Oikawa holds him tighter; he’s sitting at Kuroo’s side with his hands around either shoulder and he thinks his own hands are shaking. Kuroo lets go, dropping his arms to his side.

“They’re—” Kuroo takes a shaking breath, his words coming out fast and trembling— “they’re attacking us, like, under orders. They’re colonists. They take worlds, they consume them, and then they go to the next.”

“Kuroo!”

Oikawa startles, turning to the door of the lab where Kenma is rushing towards them.

“You fucking idiot, you tried it, didn’t you—” Kenma stumbles a little, dropping to Kuroo’s other side. His hand hovers over Kuroo’s chest, over his heart, but not quite touching. “You fucking idiot. I told you not to. I told you.”

“I succeeded,” Kuroo points out, trying for a happy look; it’s weak and a drop of blood slips from his nose down to the corner of his smile. “Didn’t I?”

Kenma is practically shaking in the anger that masks his fear. “Why the fuck would you try?”

“Iwaizumi—” Kuroo breathes out the name like it answers every question, and to Oikawa, it kind of does— “Iwaizumi. I can’t let anyone else—I can’t lose anyone else. Not like this.”

Kenma squeezes his eyes shut, taking a steadying breath. His face is still pale. “Did you at least get anything useful, you insufferable—”

“Course I did,” Kuroo says. “It’s me, isn’t it?”

“I hate you so much.” There’s scared quiet, there’s dry exhaustion, there’s frustration, but there’s not a trace of hatred in Kenma’s voice. “Can you sit up?”

Kuroo nods, shifting to take Kenma’s offered hand. He smiles, and it looks a little more real this time. Oikawa takes his other hand and together, he and Kenma haul him up to a sitting position.

“Go you go, uh, go get the Marshal?” Kuroo asks Kenma. “I need—I need to tell him.”

Kenma swallows, squeezes Kuroo’s hand, and then nods sharply. “I’ll be right back.”

He looks over Kuroo again, like he’s making sure that all his body parts are still there and he’s still breathing. Then he lets go of Kuroo’s hand and stands up. He tells Oikawa and Kuroo, in a way that refuses to be argued with, “Don’t move.”

“We’ll be here,” Kuroo says, giving him a weak salute.

Kenma rolls his eyes, a little color coming back to his cheeks. Then he turns and leaves the room, all but rushing towards LOCCENT, or wherever Ukai could be found.

As soon as Kenma is out of the room, Kuroo lets go of any strength he has left and slumps back against the leg of the table closest to him. “How the fuck do you guys do this Drifting thing all the time? That was exhausting.”

“Helps when the other guy is human,” Oikawa informs him. “What the fuck were you thinking, Kuroo?”

Kuroo sighs, closing his eyes. He takes a moment. Then he opens his eyes, his gaze on Oikawa piercing, like he sees straight through him. He sounds exhausted when he explains, “I was thinking that people are dying, my friends are dying, and if I have any shot at helping, I need to take it before I lose anyone else. And what happened happened, so don’t bother arguing with me about it, Oikawa.”

“And if we lose you?” Oikawa snaps. “How the fuck is that worth it?”

“And if it works? Which it did?”

“Iwaizumi wouldn’t have wanted this.” Oikawa hasn’t let go of his hand yet, he realizes as Kuroo grips his hand tighter. “So don’t you dare do it in his name.”

“It wasn’t just for him,” Kuroo says, “if that helps.”

“It doesn’t.”

Kuroo sighs, looking away from Oikawa. “You know, I still haven’t talked to Daichi. And I’m realizing right now that if I had died right there, I would have died with that. That was the last image I saw in the Drift. Him holding my hand on the dock and me not letting myself say I love him.”

Oikawa tenses, drawing his hand away from Kuroo’s tight grip.

“And when I was a kid, I used to live by the ocean.” Kuroo takes another deep breath, staring towards the ammonia-filled basin with the Kaiju brain in it. The lab is so silent—the room is overflowing with his miscellaneous failed experiments, but it feels impossibly empty. “Saw that too. I was, uh, fifteen? Sixteen? Somewhere around there when the first Kaiju showed up. It came up a way out from the shore, but it probably reached us in minutes. You know how fast they can be sometimes.”

“Yeah,” Oikawa says slowly, unsure where the change of conversation is going to go. “I know.”

Kuroo nods, exhales, looks back at Oikawa. There’s something piercing in his gaze, like he’s looking straight through Oikawa and seeing something Oikawa doesn’t want visible to anyone. “And you know how fifteen year old boys can be. I was going through a, uh, a rebellious phase, I guess. My parents wanted a lot from me and I just wanted to play volleyball and hang out with my friends.”

“I know the feeling.”

“Figured you would,” Kuroo said, snorting. “But anyways, that first Kaiju showed up in the middle of the night. The only person in my family who was awake was my mom.”

Oikawa nods. He can guess where this is going, and what awful truth and what terrible memory Kuroo is about to share with him. It’s a familiar story to many people who have lived in seaside towns over the past number of years. But it being familiar does not make it any less painful.

“And I know she was awake, because I had snuck out of the house earlier that night to take the train to a friend a ways away.” Kuroo looks away, staring down at his hands. “She had woken up at some point and some gut instinct told her to check on me, and I wasn’t there. She called me a dozen times. Left voicemails, texted me, tried anything she could to make sure I was okay and hadn’t been kidnapped or run away or whatever.”

He stretches out his arms in front of him and splays his fingers apart, studying the back of his hands, maybe just for something to look at that isn’t the pity in Oikawa’s gaze. “And I ignored all her calls. We were watching bad B-rated movies and flicking popcorn at each other, and I kept denying her calls. I didn’t want her to tell me to come home.”

Oikawa is looking at Kuroo intensely, trying to unravel him from the outside. So this is why he’s so dedicated to figuring out what makes the Kaiju tick, what makes them want to kill and destroy. Because he’s lost something that he can’t get back, and the one thing left that’s in his control is finding the answer to why he had to lose it.

Kuroo continues. “She left this voicemail, and it’s panicked and scared and she ends it by saying she loves me.”

“I’m sure she did,” Oikawa says quietly when Kuroo pauses.

“I know,” he says. “I know she did. But by the end of the night, by the time I woke up the next morning and the news came on in between the morning cartoons, she—she was gone. My entire family was. My dad. My older sister. My grandparents. And all I had left were these voicemails begging me to come home.”

Oikawa swallows. “I’m sorry” doesn’t even begin to cover the depth of mourning for Kuroo’s family and his childhood. Oikawa himself hasn’t lost his family like that, but he can see in the glint of Kuroo’s eyes that this is a grief and guilt that has not and perhaps will never fade.

“The only reason I’m alive today, that I survived that Kaiju attack,” Kuroo says slowly, like this is something he’s thought through extensively and come to the same awful conclusion every time, “is because I was so mad at my parents, so full of hate for them, that I ran away. And now I can never tell them that I’m sorry for it.

“Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad I’m alive,” Kuroo says quickly, looking up at Oikawa. “I just—I have so many regrets about what I left them with. My mom died thinking I ran away and wasn’t coming back. I didn’t say goodnight to anyone before I went to my room and slammed the door and climbed out of the window. I didn’t tell them that I would always, at the end of the day, want to come home. And now I can’t.”

“I’m sorry,” Oikawa murmurs, because what else is there to say? This is not nearly enough, but it is also all that there is. “I didn’t know.”

Kuroo shrugs. It’s loose and unconcerned, but it’s a practiced movement, too; there have been too many condolences and none of them have undone what went wrong. “It happened. All I can do is hold onto what I have.”

“That’s why you wanted to be with Daichi, even though you knew he could die at any moment.”

“Yeah.” Kuroo takes another long breath, tipping his head back to the ceiling. “I loved him. Still do, really. I want to get to be with him, whether or not our time is limited. Sure, he could die at any moment. So could I. So could Kenma. So could you. So could Iwaizumi. But that doesn’t mean we can’t hold onto what we have while we’re here. I don’t want to have any regrets. And I’m realizing that would be one of them.”

Kuroo looks back down at Oikawa. There’s worry written into the lines at his forehead and eyes, and something like grief. Whether it’s for himself or for Kiko or for Iwaizumi or for the relationship with Daichi that never happened, Oikawa doesn’t know. Maybe it’s none of those things.

“Do you get what I’m saying?” he asks.

In the lab, something gurgles and something in the old, old walls groans with the weight of Kuroo’s words. Oikawa closes his eyes, trying to imagine the world beyond the Shatterdome again. The full moon so bright it feels like sun. The rocks of the shore so steady against the encroaching tide.

Everything he thinks of—and everything he dreams of both at night and in the Drift—is right there in the palm of his outstretched hand. The ocean, the horizon just waiting to be filled with dawn, a shell in his fist, two boys in love. It’s all right there in Iwaizumi’s smile. He does not want to lose his grip on it.

“Yeah,” Oikawa says, mostly to himself. Then, louder to Kuroo, “I just—if he dies or I die and one of us is left behind, I don’t think I’d survive having lost what we had. I don’t want to know what I could lose.”

It’s a weak argument, and he knows it’s a weak argument. He knows that it doesn’t make sense when it's said out loud, when it’s come so close to reality and it’s no longer just a distant fear in the back of his mind. But still, he has to say it, because at the end of the day it’s not their feelings for each other that he’s afraid of. It’s losing them that terrifies him.

Kuroo chuckles a little. “You’re so convinced you’re going to die, Oikawa. What happens if you live?”

Oikawa blinks. “What do you mean?”

“I get that any of us, anyone out there on the shore, too, could be attacked at any moment, and you can’t always do anything to stop it,” Kuroo says. “And maybe that could happen tomorrow. But maybe it happens in five years, or ten, or twenty. That’s so much time, really. And maybe it doesn’t ever happen to you at all—maybe we beat them. Maybe you get to survive this.”

“What’s your point?”

“My point is that maybe you’ll die with all these fears, sure, but maybe you’ll live.” Kuroo’s gaze makes Oikawa want to flinch. He looks away. “Maybe you’ll live but you’ll have lost your chance and all you’ll have is regret.”

Oikawa swallows, rubbing his face with the heels of his palms. “I don’t know.”

“Yeah,” Kuroo says, his gaze softening when Oikawa drops his hands to his lap. “It’s hard. I know it’s hard. So I’m gonna cash in that favor.”

“What favor?”

“The day of Kiko’s memorial, I won a sparring match against you,” Kuroo reminds him. “I won a favor.”

Oikawa frowns. “That was years ago.”

“And I’m cashing it in.” Kuroo sits up straight, leaning forward a little. “I get that you’re scared of losing him. I really do get it. But do me the favor now, Oikawa. Stop being a coward. Stop living life like you’re going to lose him. You know you might, and you know you’ll regret never saying it. So tell him you love him now.”

Oikawa swallows, unsure and unsteady. “I can’t, Kuroo. Ask me—ask me for anything but that.”

“Explain to him everything you just explained to me,” Kuroo pushes. His words are like fingers digging into bruises. His eyes are fixed on Oikawa, all the certainty in the world in his gaze. “Tell him you’re scared. Let him help you be brave.”

A deep breath in. A long exhale. The uncertainty seems to clear away like the morning fog over the ocean sometimes dissipates as the sun rises. Oikawa breathes. Let him help you be brave.

“Okay,” he says quietly. “I’ll tell him.”

Kuroo nods resolutely. Out of the corner of his eye, Oikawa can see him smile: small but genuine. “I should talk to Daichi, I suppose. Stop being a hypocrite. Get to know him again.”

Oikawa hums. “You should.”

“Fuck, my head hurts.” Kuroo coughs a little, bending over himself. Then he sighs, and settles back to his previous position. “When he would go out to fight, we had this code. The Jaeger searchlights are manually controlled—I couldn’t see him from LOCCENT, but I could see the searchlights on the camera feed.”

He continues, “Two short blinks and a long blink meant he and Kiko were alright. A short blink and a long blink meant they were beaten up but going to be okay. Three short blinks and a long one means I love you. He only used that one a couple times—he was always so worried about being too much. I know we didn’t date, but…I wonder if he still remembers…”

Kuroo exhales slowly, a long and resolute sigh. He closes his eyes, settling against the leg of the table again. He looks exhausted and worn out, like he hasn’t slept in days. He looks like he could sleep for the next hundred years and it still wouldn’t be enough.

Oikawa sits with him only as long as it takes for the Marshal to rush into the room. As soon as he starts interrogating Kuroo about what he had seen and once Kenma is settled at Kuroo’s side, he gets up and slips away unnoticed.

He wanders away, everything Kuroo had said weighing on him in the same way that the Drift weighs on him in the moments after they pull out of the neural connection. He hears, distant through the concrete walls of the Shatterdome, thunder booming over the sky. The sound of it rumbles through the walls, through the floors, vibrating in the wiring and plumbing of the building.

The storm rages, and Oikawa somehow feels, for the first time in a while, a kind of stillness within himself. Like he’s come to terms with something that he didn’t know he was fighting within himself. Like, with his promise to Kuroo, he’s set himself free to follow the path he’s been resisting for years now.

With that realization settling over him, Oikawa makes his way back to the bedroom. Iwaizumi will be released soon, Oikawa guesses. It looked like, now that he was out of surgery and all bandaged up, he would be up on his feet soon enough. If there’s one good thing to come out of this Shatterdome, it’s the wonders of their medical care. Too many people get hurt—and too often—not to develop miracles in their hospital wing.

He gets himself ready to sleep, hoping that Iwaizumi will be there when he wakes up.

In Oikawa’s dreams, there are two boys and they are in the waters of the ocean. They’re a little further in than waist deep; particularly heavy and strong waves plunge their shoulders underwater. They’re laughing, splashing water at each other; one boy lunges at the other and pushes him underwater. The second comes up gasping for breath and laughing.

Then: lightning. Oh, the lightning. It snaps over the sky in a flash of hot white. The formerly sunny day is plunged into sudden darkness, into terrible, terrible subdued grays. The sun has burnt out, gone dim behind the storm clouds. The only light comes from the illumination brought by snaps and sharp screams of lightning.

Oikawa recognizes the other boy only now, in the brief glare of the lightning. He sees himself standing there—seventeen years old, shivering in the water as he looks up at the storm coming on like a riptide in the heavens. He’s trembling as rain starts to pelt down on them.

And here, the thunder. Horrible, terrible thunder that rolls over the sky and makes even the storm clouds tremble with the force of its cry. Thunder that roars like an animal from his worst nightmares, something with sharpened teeth and a rabid, foaming mouth. Something that grows bigger than the whole sky, blocking out the sun with the shadows of its body.

They need to get out of the water. Now. Oikawa wants to say it, needs to say it, but he can’t figure out how to open his mouth. It’s not his mouth that he’s trying to move. It’s not his voice that he’s trying to scream with.

He looks down at the hands of the body that he’s in, unable to recognize these palms he wears, unable to place the heartlines, unable to recall with any familiarity the pulse of these wrists.

Trying to say his own name, trying to call out to himself, Oikawa parts his lips and no words come out. Another flash of lighting. The boy who is himself, so young, turns away from him and out to the endless sea. He stares out, wide-eyed, watching as the waves grow and grow and grow. They build up taller and taller, until a single wave towers over the both of them.

Another flash of lighting, and then thunder. It breaks open the sky, cracking it in two. The rain shatters over them as the wave crashes down.

Then, in a moment of stillness, the boy who is Oikawa starts to walk into the sea. Deeper and deeper and deeper. Until he’s up to his neck in the ocean.

Oikawa can do nothing but watch. He keeps walking, until the lighting breaks open the sea and he disappears under a tumultuous wave.

That’s when he can finally scream, and he screams out his own name. He lunges towards the place that seventeen year old boy—the one who was so fucking scared—had disappeared to, but reaching out, his hands grabs only water that slips through his fingers. That seventeen year old boy—scared of the sudden appearances of the Kaiju, scared of the feelings for his best friend that build up in him with an intensity he can only confront by repressing, scared of the future that’s coming so much faster than he was ready for—disappears into the sea.

Oikawa looks down at the hands he wears and he sees water gathering in the lifelines of his palms. Rain or tears, he doesn’t really know, but he thinks maybe he is crying. He thinks maybe he’s crying for the fate of that seventeen year old self. He’s crying for letting go of him, or maybe he’s crying for holding onto him for so long.

He looks up at the sky, but no answer to the unasked question comes. The lighting cracks the heavens down the middle, splitting the clouds open in a haze of smoke and gray. The thunder roars again, like a Kaiju or like a bomb or like a heartbreak.

Oikawa closes his eyes. Drinks in the feeling of the rain against his skin. Thinks of the boy who had been afraid of dying, of losing, of failing. A roar, and this one sounds like a Kaiju. And in the back of his mind: before the Jaegers, before the fighting, before the Kaiju, before all of it, there was just you and him.

He wakes up in a cold sweat, shaking and gasping, his shoulders heaving for breath. The world around him solidifies slowly as he comes out of the dream, out of his head. He’s in the bottom bunk of the bed; Iwaizumi’s bunk. The wall across from him is blank, but he can see the wall to the left of him covered in photos. The lights are still on, but they flicker at the groan of thunder beyond the safety of the Shatterdome. The world around him is still.

A breath. Another breath. Another breath. Survive it. Survive it. Survive it.

Pushing the mess of blankets away from himself, he manages to detangle himself from the bed to turn and place both feet firmly on the floor. He hunches over himself, elbows on his knees, hands at his face. He’s sweating, hair sticking to his forehead and the undersides of his knees sticky.

It’s like that that Iwaizumi finds him: sitting with his feet flat against the floor and his head in his hands, hanging over his knees. Iwaizumi enters quietly, and the only sign that he comes is the click of the door shutting.

“Oikawa?”

Oikawa looks up, finding Iwaizumi standing there like something out of a better dream. He looks so concerned about Oikawa, but Oikawa doesn’t want to think about that right now. He doesn’t want to linger on his own fear, on his own anxiety. He wants to let go of all of it. He wants to sink into the ocean, fully immerse himself in it. He wants to love Iwaizumi out loud.

“Hey,” Oikawa says, just as quietly. “You’re out of the hospital.”

Iwaizumi nods. “Medical miracle, honestly. I always forget just what they can do there. Still limping and exhausted and everything’s a little sore, but…I’m okay.”

“Good,” Oikawa says definitively. “Take it slow for a while, though, yeah?”

“I will, I will.”

“Really, Iwa—”

Iwaizumi laughs, and it’s such a beautiful sound that belongs only to him and Oikawa allows himself to smile a little in return. “I will, honestly, Oikawa. I’ll take care of myself. You okay, though? You look…”

Oikawa snorts. “Thanks. Just a bad dream.”

“Ah.” Iwaizumi walks over to the bed and sits down next to him, nudging his shoulder a little. “Tell me about it?”

Oikawa is quiet for a moment, staring out at the opposite wall of the room. They’ve lived here for years now, but it still doesn’t really feel like home. It still feels like a dormitory he’s in temporarily—and that’s what it is, honestly, because they’ll only be here as long as the war lasts—until Iwaizumi steps in the room. As soon as Iwaizumi is there with him, it feels comfortable again. Less like a dormitory and more like the only safe space in the world.

“Do you ever think about what comes after all this?”

Iwaizumi is looking at him, he’s sure of it, but Oikawa can’t bring himself to look back. “After what?”

“Like, if we defeat the Kaiju. If we knock them back to wherever they came from and they never come back. What happens after that?”

Iwaizumi hums in understanding. He turns, looking out at that same blank spot on the wall. “I suppose we go home.”

“It will be different, won’t it? Home, I mean. It’s been years. Your sisters will have grown up. Our friends have graduated and moved away. Our parents’ houses will have been rearranged and redecorated.”

“Maybe,” Iwaizumi says uncertainly. “But I don’t think there’s really anywhere else to go. I don’t think I know anywhere else.”

Oikawa nods. He looks down at his hands again, flexing his fingers and stretching out his wrists. “And it will be strange to never Drift with you again. To never experience that…connection.”

“Is this your roundabout way of telling me that you don’t want to quit yet?” Iwaizumi asks, a note of amusement in his voice. “Ukai mentioned to me that we have the option to step down honorably.”

Oikawa turns his whole body to face him, pulling one foot onto the bed and folding his leg against his chest. “What do you want?”

He is selfish, he is greedy, he has so much that he wants and so much that he takes. But he has lines he won’t cross, too. He won’t do this if Iwaizumi doesn’t want to. But, he’s realizing, he doesn’t want to quit. He wants to keep fighting. He wants to make this right again.

Iwaizumi tilts his head up, thinking. “I want to see this through, I think. Finish what we started.”

“Me too,” Oikawa says softly. “If you’ll stay with me.”

“‘If?’” Iwaizumi asks incredulously, turning to look at him. “Is that really a doubt? I’d follow you to hell and back, Oikawa. You know that. You know that I…”

Oikawa looks away, unable to bear the vulnerability and trust and honesty on his face at the moment. Unable to bear the fact that he hasn’t been able to give all those things to Iwaizumi in return. “Don’t say that.”

Iwaizumi is quiet for a long moment. He takes slow, labored breaths, as if the movement is still causing some kind of pain in his chest. Oikawa wasn’t the one who was seriously injured, but he understands the sentiment. Every breath hurts.

“It’s still true,” Iwaizumi says quietly. “Whether or not you want to hear it, it’s still true.”

“Iwa…” Oikawa trails off, not sure where he’s going with that sentence.

Iwaizumi beside him is so still and so silent, but his presence is screaming at Oikawa to just say something. Anything at all. Anything that could make that terrible subdued note of his voice go away. He can’t think of anything that would make this moment easier though, and so he just stays silent, his head hanging over his knees.

They sit in silence for a long moment, their breaths the only sound between them. Iwaizumi sighs, not like he’s disappointed but like he’s tired, and Oikawa finally lifts his head. At the corner of the room out of the periphery of his vision, he sees the shell he had placed on top of the dresser the night before.

It sits there as an unwanted reminder of everything that Oikawa had been thinking yesterday. It sits there like a haunting of the ocean, a memory from long ago and from only a day earlier. Has it really only been a day since the Kaiju attack? It can’t have been only a day. Everything about the world has changed since then.

Oikawa stands up, practically holding his breath with how tense he is as he walks over to the bookshelf and picks up the shell. He rolls it over in his palm, then walks back to the bed and sits down next to Iwaizumi. He can feel Iwaizumi’s eyes tracking his movements across the room; he’s always so aware of Iwaizumi’s movements that this feels second nature, but he’s starting to wonder how much of it comes from the Drift and how much of it is just that he’s so deeply in love.

Once he’s sitting, he holds the shell out in front of him. Traces the lines of it with his other fingers. Presses it against his palm, harder and harder, until the sharp edges of the shell bite at the soft of his life line, his heart line, his fate line. He takes a deep breath, then exhales all of the tension from his shoulders.

“It’s not that I don’t want to hear it,” Oikawa says quietly.

He lifts his gaze, looking at Iwaizumi. Iwaizumi is looking at the shell in his hand, expression unreadable. “You just don’t want me to be the one to say it.”

“That’s not it either,” Oikawa murmurs. He keeps his voice quiet, soft; low enough for secret telling. “That’s not it.”

“Then what, Oikawa?” Iwaizumi asks. The confusion is clear in his expression now, but just as there is confusion, there is a tentative, unsure hope. As if he already knows what Oikawa is going to say. As if he already understands, has always understood. He probably has—better than Oikawa ever did. “What are you so afraid of?”

Oikawa curls his fingers around the shell. Thinks back to that moment on the beach back when they were kids, before the Drift, before the Jaegers, before the first Kaiju, before the end of the world. He thinks of how Iwaizumi had smiled. How Iwaizumi had loved him then and always.

“Losing you,” Oikawa whispers. Slowly, he places the shell in Iwaizumi’s palm, then wraps Iwaizumi’s hand around it. “I’m so fucking terrified of losing you. Of losing us. I can’t do—”

“Bullshit,” Iwaizumi snaps.

Oikawa flinches at the harshness of the word, of his tone, and he meets Iwaizumi’s eyes. “What?”

“You can’t,” he mocks. “That’s bullshit. Oikawa, you’re plenty strong without me. I do not make or break your strength. This—the connection we have when we Drift—isn’t the only strong thing about you. We’re a team, but a team is made up of individuals, isn’t it? Made stronger by the fact that they’re individuals with their own skills and talents.”

“I—”

Iwaizumi shakes his head and Oikawa cuts himself off again. “So don’t go giving me that crap, that you can’t survive without me. Drifting makes us capable of being strong enough to pilot a Jaeger as a pair. It doesn’t make us useless alone, and it doesn’t leave us entirely alone when we’re out of the Drift. When this is all over, I’ll still be with you. You’re my partner, always will be, but I know you can and will fight without me in your head. Just like I would do.”

For a long moment, Oikawa is silent. Iwaizumi hit the nail on the head, of course he did, he always does. He has always known Oikawa so well. He’s known maybe from the start what Oikawa has been struggling so much with: that he’s not alone. That he never has been, and he won’t be any time soon. Death can’t take away from him—from them—the fact that there is still and always will be love between them.

The Drift does not make you invincible. Neither does being in a Jaeger.

Love—loving Iwaizumi and being loved by him in return—will not make him invincible either. But maybe it will make a vulnerable life a little more worthwhile than a vulnerable life without it. However fragile and however unsafe this life may be, maybe allowing himself to love to the fullest extent of his heart will make that fragile life a little more gratifying.

Oikawa looks away, swallowing. “You’re right.”

“I am?”

That makes Oikawa laugh. “Yeah. You’re right.”

Iwaizumi is looking at him a little strangely. “I don’t think you’ve ever said that in your life.”

“Oh hush. Just…let me talk for a minute.”

Iwaizumi nods, slowly, unsure where Oikawa is going with this. Oikawa isn’t sure where he’s going with it either, not really. All he knows is that Iwaizumi is there with the ocean and Oikawa’s heart both in his hand, and he’s not looking away from the horror of it. He’s not pulling back with the fear of it. He’s there, with him, holding on.

“I think…do you remember that vacation, when we went to the seaside before the first Kaiju showed up?” Oikawa’s voice is still low, but growing in confidence, in volume, in speed. “Do you remember how we spent all day there, until sunset? And then we stood in the water and you gave me a shell. And you told me I could keep the memory forever because the sound of the ocean is kept in conch shells. Do you remember that?”

Iwaizumi nods, slowly. He opens his mouth to speak, but Oikawa gives him a small shake of his head and he closes his lips wordlessly.

“I’m so fucking scared that one day all I’ll have left is a shell of a memory,” Oikawa blurts out. “And fuck, I came so close to losing you, Iwa. It was so close. And I don’t think I could have ever recovered from it.”

“Oikawa—”

“Let me finish.” Iwaizumi goes silent and Oikawa takes a breath. “I didn’t want to tell you—and I didn’t want you to say it—because I didn’t want to have something I might not be able to keep.”

He falls quiet again, and the two of them sit under the horrible shadow of those words for a long moment. Iwaizumi is looking at the shell in his opened hand, and then he clenches his fist around it.

“I’m not going to say that isn’t a fair fear,” he says, finally. “Because it is real. Maybe this isn’t something we’ll be allowed to keep in a world that’s constantly trying to pull bullshit like the Kaiju and Jaegers and tsunamis. I just…doesn’t it matter that it’s there for as long as it can be anyway? Don’t you want to live without holding back?”

Oikawa looks over at him. Studies the long cut that’s been driven into his cheek, the split in his bottom lip, the bruise over his cheekbone on the opposite side. Slowly, he puts a hand over the shell in Iwaizumi’s hand. Then he places the tips of his fingers against Iwaizumi’s jaw, guiding his face to look him in the eye.

He stares at Iwaizumi and feels a little like he does in the Drift. Like there’s something shared between them that cannot be touched, that is entirely invincible. He sees himself in Iwaizumi’s reflection—afraid, unsure, hesitant, but so plainly in love—and wonders if this is what Iwaizumi sees, too.

Slowly, giving Iwaizumi so much time to back away, Oikawa leans forward and kisses him.

There is so much to talk about now, so much to question, so much to doubt, so much to fear. There is so much he could lose, both now and later. He could be ruining everything about their relationship right now. He could be ruining himself with this one kiss. He doesn’t think, now that he’s tasted Iwaizumi, that he’ll ever be able to move on from him. From this. From what they share.

Iwaizumi sighs a little, falling into the kiss as easily as breathing. Like he’s been waiting for this a lifetime. Maybe he has been. Oikawa thinks he himself has been waiting an eternity for it. For the bravery to do this. For the moment to come.

Losing Iwaizumi would ruin him. Would break him beyond repair. Whatever Iwaizumi believes about Oikawa’s personal strength, losing Iwaizumi would snap something in Oikawa that isn’t capable of recovering from that kind of injury.

That being said—knowing the truth of that devotion doesn’t mean Oikawa has to live his life in fear, just waiting for the break to happen. Because, as Kuroo reminded him, maybe it won’t.

Maybe he will lose Iwaizumi. And maybe he won’t. But either way, he’ll carry on because Iwaizumi believes he can. Because he isn’t alone in any of this. And so Oikawa wants to know, in the meantime, what it feels like to be really, plainly, truly loved by him.

When they pull apart, Iwaizumi keeps his eyes closed for a beat longer than Oikawa does.

“Can I say it now then?” Iwaizumi asks, voice rough, and then he opens his eyes. “Can I say I love you?”

Oikawa swallows. “Can I say it first?”

There is so much to actually be afraid of in this world. Why is he wasting so much of his fear on this one thing that really is not so scary at all?

Now that he’s here, having kissed Iwaizumi, he doesn’t know what he was ever afraid of. Surely not Iwaizumi. Surely not himself. Surely not love.

The sheer potential of losing this is nothing, Oikawa thinks, compared to the dizzying importance of trying to hold onto it.

Iwaizumi breaks into a smile, his cheeks a little rosy and his eyes bright. “Fuck no. I’ve been waiting years for this. I love—”

“I love you,” Oikawa cuts in, overlapping his words—

And then they’re both bursting into laughter and falling into each other. Iwaizumi’s hands go to Oikawa’s waist and shoulder as he tackles him back onto the bed, the two of them rolling onto the mattress and determined to be as close as they can be before they’re forced to face the world again. Oikawa’s hands cup Iwaizumi’s face tenderly—careful not to upset any of his injuries—feeling like he shouldn’t be allowed to touch something so precious, so treasured, so holy.

But he is. He is touching Iwaizumi, and he’s allowed to, and he’s wanted there, and so he’s going to.

As they move, the shell falls onto the floor with a clatter. Oikawa hears it happen without even glancing down. He doesn’t need a memory. Not now. Not while he’s here in this moment. Not while he has Iwaizumi in his hands. 

Chapter Text

With the information Kuroo was able to take from Drifting with the Kaiju, an attack on the Breach is planned. The Kaiju come from some kind of portal deep in the Pacific and they’re going to drop a nuclear bomb inside of it. This, in theory, will kill all the Kaiju on record and, as Ukai put it, will “cancel the apocalypse.”

The problem that then comes with this plan is that, to get the bomb to the Breach, three Jaegers have to work their way underwater to the bottom of the ocean, fight their way through the Kaiju surrounding it, and get the bomb through a gate that only allows Kaiju DNA to pass through. The problem that then comes with this plan is that it sounds—to put it simply—near to impossible.

“It’s a suicide mission,” Iwaizumi says quietly. They’re sitting in the briefing room with the Marshal, Kuroo, Kenma, Daichi, Kageyama, and Hinata, but his voice is low, words murmured only to Oikawa. “The pilots who volunteer for this are going to die.”

Despite the optimism Oikawa is striving—and failing—to find within himself, he can’t help but agree. In the cold fluorescent lights of the briefing room, just the quiet of eight people’s breathing to fill in the silence, it feels impossible. The pilots who go on this mission are going to die. He nods, just slightly, at Iwaizumi’s words, but doesn’t look over.

He keeps his eyes on the maps that are layered over the screens in front of them, instead. He stares at the blinking dot that labels the Breach, and thinks about the awful scream of a Kaiju in the dark. He thinks about Iwaizumi’s face after his helmet shattered, shadowed and bleeding, the glint of a shard of glass impaled in his cheek. He thinks of how he could have saved so many people, but he chose Iwaizumi over all of them.

Most of all, he thinks of how he does not want to die.

In the past few days, he’s found something brilliant that fits perfectly in his hands. He’s allowed himself just the tiniest glimpse of happiness in a world that does not want happiness to flourish. He’s stopped punishing himself for things that haven’t happened yet, and he’s starting to work on not punishing himself for the things that have happened and the choices that can’t be undone. He’s allowed himself to love, and to be loved.

He does not want to die. Not here, not now, not like this.

But Ukai says, “The people in this room are the only pilots I trust to take this on,” and he knows that the choice has already been made for all of them. Not by Ukai, though he is the one offering. No, by themselves—all of them already know how they’re going to respond to the question Ukai is about to ask.

“You can turn this job down if you would like,” Ukai adds, voice steady and certain. He already knows all of their answers. “But this is our best shot at ending the war for good. This is what it’s all been for, this whole time.”

“You think this is going to work?” Kageyama asks. He’s clearly talking to Ukai, but his eyes are on Hinata.

Ukai licks his lips. “Yes. I do. And I wouldn’t ask you to do it if I weren’t willing to do this myself. I’m not sending you four down there to die without fighting for you.”

Across the table from Oikawa, Hinata frowns, brow furrowing. “You’re going down there?”

“I do have experience in a Jaeger, you know,” Ukai says, the corner of his mouth quirking up a little. “Daichi, if you’re willing, I’d like you to pilot with me. There’s an old Mark-2 that’s been restored. Nuclear power. Old, but strong. Sierra Flight.”

There’s a moment of silence where all eyes turn to Daichi, sitting at the opposite head of the table. He drums his fingers against the wood, taking a heavy inhale as he looks down at his hands. Oikawa is expecting him to say he needs to think about it, or to even flat out deny Ukai. He’s expecting Daichi to walk out. Whether or not Ukai is willing to put money where his mouth is, this is still a suicide mission. Just because he’s willing to die for it doesn’t mean the rest of the group won’t all still die too.

Then Daichi exhales slowly. He looks up from his hands, and his eyes find Kuroo. “I’m in. I’ll do it. For my sister.”

Ukai’s smile widens, just a little. It feels almost sadistic, but there’s too much hope in it for it not to be genuine. “Good.” He turns to look between the rest of them. “And you four?”

“This is our best shot, isn’t it?” Hinata murmurs. He looks down at his hands, clenching his fists tightly.

“This is the endgame,” Kuroo says quietly. His eyes drift away from Daichi, towards Oikawa and Iwaizumi, and then finally to Hinata and Kageyama, sitting down the line from him. His voice steadies, grows in confidence. “This is our only option left. Higher ups want to shut down the Jaeger program to fund the Coastal Wall, and we all know how well the wall is working. This is our last play. And I’m certain of what I saw in the Drift.”

Kenma sighs, eyes flicking across the screens behind Ukai—the maps, the game plan, the specs of their weapons, the advantages of each of their Jaegers.

“You have to understand what you’re going to face down there,” Kenma says, voice low. “Around the Breach will be what are effectively guards. Kaiju with stats we’ve never seen anything like before. Our data predicts Category 5 strength. This is going to be a fight like you’ve never had before. But…but I think it might be possible.”

But I think it might be possible.

Coming from anyone else, that wouldn’t be reassuring at all. It would make the whole thing sound just the slightest bit above hopeless—it’s not a guarantee, it might not be effective in any way at all, it might just make the Kaiju angry and the whole thing worse.

But coming from Kenma, who relies on facts and figures, who runs his life on things he knows he can trust, who doesn’t take leaps of faith on hypotheses but rather calculates and considers every reality before jumping? Coming from Kenma, Oikawa can almost find some semblance of hope. It’s a small hope, the tiniest light in the wreckage of his past. But it’s a light nonetheless.

“You think it’s possible?” Iwaizumi asks, staring at Kenma intently.

Kenma looks up, meeting his eyes. “I do.”

Iwaizumi lets out a slow breath. He looks over at Oikawa. When Oikawa looks back at him, he thinks of how brief their lives have been. Twenty years old, and going out on a suicide mission. In love for so many of those years but dating for only a few days of that time.

Still—this is the first time in a long time Oikawa has seen everyone in a room look so hopeful even as the grim realities keep their chokehold on them. This is the first time he’s heard a plan and thought it might actually work. It’s an insane plan, but it’s also been thought through and it’s thorough, and it feels real.

“What are the chances we all survive?” Kageyama asks. He sounds hesitant as he asks the question they’re all thinking.

Ukai and Kuroo exchange a look. Then Ukai sighs. “I wouldn’t say it’s a guarantee. But it’s not impossible either.”

“Not impossible,” Hinata repeats. He sounds doubtful, like he doesn’t believe anything being said—which Oikawa does understand. “Not impossible.”

“No,” Kuroo says. He’s clearly trying to keep his voice soft, but there’s an edge of anxiousness to it. Whether that’s an anxiousness that they’re all going to say no or an anxiousness that they’re all going to die, Oikawa isn’t sure.

He continues, ignoring Oikawa narrowing his eyes at him. “Things probably won’t go the way we talk about them on the whiteboard, I’ll be the first to admit that. Getting a Kaiju carcass and using it to mask a nuclear bomb and then shoving it through the gate? It’s not going to be easy. But you’re all experienced, and you’re well trained, and you can think on your feet. That’s why you’ve been chosen for this mission. It’s not impossible to survive this—and it’s not impossible to be successful.”

Kuroo takes a breath, looking around the group, as if to dare them to change his mind about this. As if to dare them to question his belief that this could work.

And here’s the thing: Oikawa and Iwaizumi were seventeen when they were told that they could change the world. Now, a lifetime later, maybe they actually can.

“I’m in,” Oikawa says, voice shaking just a little. He looks at Iwaizumi, and though he speaks loud enough for the room to hear, his words are for his best friend, his partner, and his lover alone. “If you want to do this, I’m with you.”

Iwaizumi licks his lips, searching Oikawa’s face for any trace of hesitation. He won’t find it, though, because this for once is a decision that Oikawa is sure of. He wants to do this.

He does not want to die. But living like this—and this, ultimately, is the only way he can live until the Kaiju are gone—isn’t the kind of living he wants either. He wants a better world, an easier world, a more peaceful one. He wants to never have to kill again, and he wants a small life with Iwaizumi by the ocean.

These are not things that he’s ever going to get without taking a risk. These are not things he’s ever going to get without trying to fight for them. Because this is what they’ve been fighting for the whole time, isn’t it? This—beating back the Kaiju for good—is what the end goal has always been, because Oikawa so desperately wants to have that life near the water with Iwaizumi. He’s fought so hard for it—and this will be the last push. This will be the last dream.

Iwaizumi nods firmly. “I’m in too. We’ll do it.”

Ukai exhales, as if in relief. As if there has been a doubt that they would say yes. He turns to Kageyama and Hinata. “And will Crow Sunrise be with us?”

Kageyama and Hinata exchange looks. Oikawa wonders if they can feel each other in the Ghost Drift yet, given how short of a time they’ve actually been working together in real Jaegers.

Whether or not they can, they’re in perfect unison when they both nod. “We’re in.”

“Alright,” Ukai says. The smile he had been wearing has faded to a thin, grim line. “We have our team then. Let’s get ourselves ready.”

With that, the meeting is adjourned. They’ll head for the Breach in four hours, and they’ll either come back or they won’t. They’ll either die at the bottom of the Pacific, or they’ll breathe the fresh air again. They’ll either drown in their Jaegers in their brave, foolhardy attempts to save the world, or they won’t. There’s no predicting the end, is the thing about life. There just isn’t any predicting the end.

Iwaizumi squeezes his shoulder when he stands up, a wordless comfort, before he starts out of the briefing room behind Ukai. Everyone else files out after him.

After a moment, it’s just Daichi and Oikawa left. Daichi has stood up, and he’s staring at the screens still blinking wearily at the front of the room. There’s no one left who understands the math displayed on them, but Daichi seems to be getting some kind of comfort about staring at the specs of the Jaeger he’ll be piloting with Ukai.

“Why’d you agree?” Oikawa blurts out. He’s staring at Daichi’s turned back, frowning a little as he watches Daichi sigh, his shoulders slumping.

Daichi shrugs. He doesn’t turn around. “Felt like the right thing to do.”

“Is that really all there is to it?”

Daichi is quiet for a moment, and this silence feels almost suffocating in its unsureness. Then he turns around, and there’s a grief in his eyes that Oikawa doesn’t even want to begin to understand. Just coming close to losing Iwaizumi had been enough to make him fall apart; he can’t imagine what Daichi has felt.

“Kiko died for this,” Daichi says quietly. “For a chance like this. A chance at winning. If I have it…I have to take it for her.”

Oikawa nods slowly, but Daichi isn’t done. He continues, voice low, his eyes downcast to the papers still scattered over the table: plans and agendas and Jaeger specs and Kaiju stats.

“And I…I want to live for her, too. I want to live because that’s what she would have wanted.”

Oikawa nods. He can understand that much—and he can fill in the blanks, too, about how Daichi must have questioned his life, once. About how he must have landed on this justification for his own life because there was no other way to forgive himself.

“But this…is this really life, Oikawa?” Daichi softens his words, pulling out a chair and sitting down heavily in it. “Pretending not to love people because you’re scared you’re going to lose them? Fighting every second of every day just to get to the next morning? Always so tense that you forget what it’s like to breathe? This just…this can’t be all there is. It can’t be. There has to be more than this.”

“There has to be,” Oikawa echoes, voice listless, afraid. “There has to be.”

He doesn’t know what shape or form that life takes. But he knows that it must exist. There must be a version of life out there where they are not fighting for their lives, where they are not constantly in a state of loss. There must be an alternate, parallel universe in which everything is different—in which they have not done the things they have done, and they have not had to; in which they have not sacrificed what they love, and they have loved without sacrifice.

Daichi nods a little, staring down at his hands with his fingers gripping the edge of the table tightly. “I don’t want to hold anything back anymore. I don’t.”

And just like that, it clicks. Oikawa exhales slowly. “You want to be with Kuroo again.”

“I know it’s been a long time,” Daichi says quietly. “But we’ve been spending time together again recently, and just…it all came back. It all came back to me, except this time, I want to do it right. I want everything, this time. The coffee dates, the evenings out, the holding hands on beach walks, the white picket fence, the dog. I want everything. I don’t want to hold him at a distance anymore because I’m so damn afraid.”

Oikawa nods, looking away from him. On the blinking screens, a red light turns green. Words roll past the screen like captions on a news reel; something about the category listings of Kaiju they might see at the bottom of the Pacific.

“But you don’t know how to stop being afraid either,” Oikawa says quietly. “I understand.”

Daichi closes his eyes, tilting his head back as if to try to clear his head. “I thought you would.”

Oikawa snorts. “Because I’ve been stupidly pining for Iwa for longer than you’ve known me and only did something about it three days ago?”

“Yeah, pretty much. That sums it up.”

“Well.” Oikawa laughs a little, though he’s almost surprised that he has the ability.

Daichi cracks a smile too, and he lowers his head to open his eyes and look at Oikawa. There’s a kindness, and a wisdom, in his eyes layered over the grief that Oikawa doesn’t know the source of. How can he find such deep wells of these feelings in a world that has never given them back to him?

“It was worth it?” Daichi asks quietly. He sounds almost timid, a far cry from his usual rock-steady, solid confidence. “Telling him that you love him? Even though it could all end tonight?”

Oikawa doesn’t hesitate in his answer. “Yes. It was worth it. It was so worth it.”

Daichi nods stiffly. “Okay. I think that’s all I needed to hear.”

“Are you going to tell him?”

Daichi takes a breath. They both look at the screens, where the likelihood of success blinks back at them: a simple, quantified number; a percentage that represents their lives or deaths. Oikawa wonders what he’s thinking of then—of the way Kiko died, of how he could die tonight, or maybe of how Kuroo once smiled at him, of how Kuroo tried so hard to love him, of how Kuroo is still trying.

“Yeah,” Daichi breathes out. “I think I’m going to.”

“Before we die?”

Daichi laughs. “Before we die.”

Oikawa nods, a small smile dancing over his lips. “Alright, Daichi. Good luck then. I’ll see you in the water.”

“Thanks, Oikawa.” Daichi smiles back at him, and then takes a steadying breath. “I’ll see you in the water.”

With that, Oikawa gives him a nod and then stands up to find Iwaizumi. He wants to spend the last few hours of his life outside of a Jaeger with him. Iwaizumi, in addition to now being his boyfriend, is his best friend at the end of the day. When push comes to shove, there’s no one that Oikawa wants to give his time to more than him. When the end comes, he wants to know that he and Iwaizumi had a few last moments of respite before it all—and it’s certainly looking like the end is rushing towards them.

Oikawa finds Iwaizumi in the gym. He’s sitting in the middle of the sparring ring with Kuroo, both of them with their legs outstretched and bo staffs on the ground on either side of them. There’s a sheen of sweat over the stretches of their exposed skin.

“Kuroo,” he calls out. “Daichi was looking for you. I think he went to the lab.”

Kuroo glances behind him at Oikawa, a question in his eyes. Oikawa shrugs, not wanting to give away the things Daichi has to confess to him. Then Kuroo shrugs, standing up. “I’ll go find him. Thanks for the match, Iwaizumi.”

“Let’s do it again sometime,” Iwaizumi says, and they all pretend there isn’t a note of finality and of apprehension to the words. Kuroo just gives him a small salute and then makes his way to the lab to talk to Daichi. With his leaving, Iwaizumi stands up to turn and face Oikawa. “Match?”

“We have a big night coming up,” Oikawa says, raising his eyebrows. Usually, if they’re planning on a hard training session or they know they’re on deck to fight, Iwaizumi prefers to conserve his energy.

Iwaizumi shrugs. “This could be our last chance to do it. And we haven’t sparred in a while. I miss it.”

It doesn’t take much more than that to convince Oikawa. Iwaizumi picks up Kuroo’s discarded staff and hands it out to Oikawa, and Oikawa takes it.

Sparring like this is not unlike Drifting. There’s a connection there; there’s a predictability to it. Oikawa knows what Iwaizumi’s next move is going to be, and he knows Iwaizumi knows what Oikawa’s next move will be. There’s almost a comfort to sparring with Iwaizumi: it’s familiar, it’s something he knows and understands, and it’s something that he knows he’s safe doing. He knows he’s safe in Iwaizumi’s hands.

“First to ten?” Iwaizumi asks.

Oikawa nods sharply, and then they begin their dance.

You are seventeen years old and you are standing next to him as you both sign consent forms to join the PPDC. You are trying so hard to be brave, but you are afraid. You are so afraid. You wanted this, you did. You know that this is what you have to do. This is a choice you want to make.

But you are so afraid.

He turns and he looks at you, and there is a weight to his gaze that has never been there before. He tries to smile, and you know that he is scared too. You are both so young, and the fragility of your lives has never felt so real as it does at this moment.

You are eighteen years old, and you have taken down a Kaiju. You have killed something living, something breathing, something that had a life, and at the heart of your pain is that you thought it would feel better than this. You thought there would be a sense of triumph. You thought there would be a sense of victory. There is, instead—

You are nineteen years old, and you love him, you love him, you love him. You are safe with him. In the Jaeger, you are in more danger than you could ever be anywhere else, but with him at your side, you have also never felt braver. You have never felt stronger.

You are—

Back in the gym, Oikawa breathed out as he swung the bo staff towards Iwaizumi. Iwaizumi parried it easily, pushing Oikawa back a step. It was an easy back and forth, a push and pull that he has long grown comfortable with. The mental and emotional binds that tie them kept them so in tune with each other that every hit was met with a hit, every point was met with a point.

Iwaizumi knows him so well; he knows Oikawa’s every favorite move and his every dirty trick. He knows how Oikawa likes to fight.

He knows that when Oikawa steps forward with one leg, he must make the second step. He knows that when Oikawa extends the sword from the back of Blue Castle’s wrist, he must clench his own arm into a fist and ready himself for the fight. He knows when Oikawa turns on the search lights, it’s his cue to close up the oxygen flaps. He knows that when Oikawa is afraid, he must be brave; he knows that when he is afraid, Oikawa will be brave for him.

In the Jaeger, they swim to the bottom of the ocean by fighting against gravity, by fighting against the water, by fighting against the will of nature itself. They are inside of a man-made monster, and they are going to take on the old gods. They are going to win. The thing about being in a Jaeger is that, outside of it you are at the mercy of the riptides, but inside of the Jaeger, you can win against them.

At the bottom of the Pacific, they take steady, thundering steps towards the Breach. Their searchlights can only illuminate so far in front of them, but it’s enough. It’s going to have to be enough. Crow Sunrise is to their left; Sierra Flight is to their right.

Something in the distance shifts in the water; a shadow or an omen. The current ripples around them. In the suit, Oikawa shivers.

“Ready, Iwa?” he asks quietly.

“Ready as I’ll ever be,” Iwaizumi says back. It’s more of a thought than a voiced comment; a kind of acknowledgement of their neural connection, of their bond.

Back when they had been sparring in the gym, Iwaizumi had swung his staff towards Oikawa’s hip, coming up just short of actually hitting him. Oikawa didn’t flinch at the movement, at how close he came to pain. He knocked the staff to the side and they reset to go again.

“You trust me so much,” Iwaizumi had said, and it sounded almost like it was a marvel. It sounded almost like he had doubted it before, despite how many times they’ve sparred before. “Don’t you?”

In response, Oikawa had taken his own staff and slammed it towards the crown of Iwaizumi’s head. He stops just before hitting him, barely four inches between staff and skull. Iwaizumi barely blinks.

“And you trust me,” Oikawa countered, and Iwaizumi laughed.

The first Kaiju comes up to them roaring, the sound traveling with bubbling anger through the water. It’s a terrifying sound; a screeching anger that sets every instinct in Oikawa’s body to flight mode. But he and Iwaizumi stand steady in Blue Castle, and they take on the Kaiju.

It thrashes around in their grip when they get their arms around it, going limp only when Sierra Flight drives the sword through its back and out of the other side of its chest. Blue Castle drops it, then leans over the twitching body. It’s dead: Kaiju Blue is spilling out into the sea and making the already foggy, unclear water even grimier and more difficult to see through.

“Alright,” Oikawa says, exhaling slowly to try to steady his heart rate. “Let’s do this for real.”

“Everyone’s ready. And I’ve got your back,” Iwaizumi murmurs. “Love you, Tooru.”

Oikawa inhales, a steady motion for a steady pair of lungs for a steady heart. “Love you too, Hajime.”

When they were sparring, Iwaizumi met him motion for motion. He had pushed Oikawa’s staff out of the range of hitting him, he had backed him into the corner of the ring, and then had gotten himself backed into the opposite corner. He had been driven to his knees only to swipe Oikawa’s feet out from under him.

They spar in perfect synchronicity, in perfect trust. They know each other in and out. How could they have ever been afraid of loving each other when loving each other is all that they know how to do?

They move the Jaeger, too, in perfect synchronicity. The harmony with which they work is not a thing of legends nor fairytales, though. It is a product of time, and of trust, and of love. It is a product of simple understanding, and of seeing.

“Category 5, coming up a hundred meters ahead.” Kenma’s voice echoes over all of the Jaegers’ communication systems as a strict, terrifying warning.

“Standard two-team formation,” Ukai directs. “Crow Sunrise, continue to the Breach with the payload, we’ll keep this thing busy for—”

Then a scream, and the searchlights from Sierra Flight blink out. Static over their comms. Oikawa’s breath halts in his throat. Everything is still for a moment, for the briefest of moments, and then out of the shadows in the rippling, sand-thick water comes a Kaiju lurching towards them. Blue Castle is knocked backwards, grappling against the monster that’s attacking them.

There’s a blast of light and a pounding in Oikawa’s ears; he recognizes Crow Sunrise’s Plasmacaster going off on the Kaiju and the thing is propelled off of their Jaeger. He silently thanks Kageyama and Hinata, and then he and Iwaizumi get themselves standing up again.

“Fuck, that hurt,” Iwaizumi mutters, and Oikawa is viscerally reminded that Iwaizumi had been nearly dead only a few days ago. Then he snaps to attention again as Iwaizumi yells out, “Crow! 12 o’clock! Get the fuck out of—”

He’s cut off, drowned out by the roar of a Kaiju. His voice is hoarse and breaking, trying to be heard over the sound of the Kaiju as it snaps at Crow Sunrise with deadly sharp, blackened teeth. The Kaiju circles the Jaeger in the water—it is a thing made for the sea and the Jaeger is not a thing meant to exist at all—and then lunges towards them.

Before it’s able to crack the metal of the Jaeger, though, Sierra Flight surges back to life with a blinking of searchlights and a determined cry out of Kageyama and Hinata’s names over comms—Daichi’s voice. The gigantic, silver and gold, gleaming, dirty, Mark-2 Jaeger pounces onto the Kaiju, dragging it away from Crow Sunrise.

Iwaizumi’s relief is palpable in the Drift—Daichi, at least, is alive.

“The release is jammed—” Kageyama’s voice, for the first time that Oikawa’s heard it, carries a horror and a panic. “We can’t deliver the bomb, the hull is compromised, we can’t—”

“Get out!” Daichi snaps, and this is adrenaline fueling him, not panic. This is determination, not fear. “Hinata, Kageyama, get to your escape pods, now! My escape pod’s release is fucked, but you can all—”

Blue Castle stumbles under the weight of another Kaiju surging towards them from behind, and something in Blue Castle snaps. The shin of the right leg, Oikawa is pretty sure. They’re taking on water.

“All systems critical,” the AI voice calls out over the Conn-Pod. Oikawa doesn’t have to acknowledge it to know that Iwaizumi hears it and that Iwaizumi knows how few options are left for them. For them, and for Daichi.

Still, on one bended knee—

When they had been sparring, Oikawa had knocked Iwaizumi to one knee. Another kick would have thrown him off balance. He doesn’t know why he hesitated. But Iwaizumi looked up at him from where he was on the ground, and he grinned. An honest, real grin. The kind of grin that only comes from joy, from love, from trust. From the intimacy of being on bended knee in front of the man you love and knowing he loves you too.

Blue Castle takes down the Kaiju rushing them in a smooth, easy motion. Too easy, but Oikawa can’t be bothered with overthinking that right now.

“Daichi!” Oikawa calls out over the comms in a desperate hope that the communications systems, at least, are working.

Ukai is dead, he’s pretty sure by now, but Daichi is somehow managing, even if he’s moving slowly. But there’s not enough strength in any human being to get a Jaeger to rise from the bottom depths of the Pacific alone. With Ukai dead, the only way for Daichi to get back above water is through the escape pod. The escape pod whose release has been damaged—

And then Oikawa understands. With a terrible, dawning certainty, he understands what Daichi is about to do. Daichi will not leave this ocean, and he can either wait to run out of oxygen or he can go down fighting. Sierra Flight is an old Mark-2, much like Blue Castle, which means he can detonate his nuclear reactor. Like Oikawa was supposed to. He’s a walking bomb.

“You know what I have to do,” Daichi says, and there’s not a trace of hesitation in his voice. “Right, Oikawa? Iwaizumi?”

You are seventeen years old, and there’s a man and his sister who became pilots just before you, who you look up to so much. They’re both smart, strategic. They work more on the defensive than the offensive, but the man knows how to strike when it matters. He knows how to make the sacrifice.

And later: you watch her die. And you watch him fall to pieces in grief, but you do not watch him die, and that matters. That matters.

And later: he comes to you in your hospital bed and tells you that he loves someone and he wants to learn how to be brave. You tell him that you yourself are still learning, but you believe—you do, you do, you do—you both can get there some day.

“We have to try to live,” Iwaizumi said while sparring, when he landed a hit against Oikawa’s side. “We have to try to survive this.”

“Iwa…” Oikawa knocked the staff away and then uses it to knock him entirely off balance and stumbling back. “This—it’s—”

“I know it’s a suicide mission. But we have to try.”

We have to try.

Iwaizumi’s words from earlier that day echo in Oikawa’s head as they push the Kaiju carcass towards Daichi. Somehow, Sierra Flight manages to catch it in both hands and clutch it to its chest.

“Daichi,” Iwaizumi chokes out.

“Oxygen main left and right hemispheres at three-quarters capacity,” the AI calls out, and Oikawa wants to punch something. This is too much, this is all wrong, this isn’t how he needed it to go, everything needs to slow down right now—but Iwaizumi’s breathing is getting labored, and Oikawa feels his own vision growing spotty, and this is reality.

Crackling over the comms, Kenma’s voice comes through: “Blue Castle, get out of there. Your escape pods. And Da—”

The comms crackle and turn to static, but before they go out, all Oikawa can hear is a brokenness in his voice that will haunt him forever, if he survives this. Then the smallest of hairline fractures cracks over Blue Castle’s shielding. The smallest, tiniest of fractures, but a break nonetheless. Something had been hit critically at some point—the Jaeger is breaking down.

Sierra Flight’s searchlights blink at them. A repeated pattern, again and again.

“It’s a code,” Iwaizumi thinks, and Oikawa hears it in the back of his head. Hears Iwaizumi’s thoughts, and then his own memory. Kuroo, talking about he and Daichi’s way to communicate after a fight. “His comms must be down too—he’s saying something to us.”

Three short blinks. A long one. Three short blinks. A long one. Three short blinks. A long one.

“Not to us,” Oikawa murmurs aloud.

With that, Sierra Flight’s searchlights go out. In the shadows, the Jaeger turns towards the haunting glow of the Breach.

“Escape pods,” Oikawa whispers. “We need to go before the whole thing blows.”

There’s nothing they can do for Daichi now. It’s over.

Chapter Text

The escape pods come up somewhere in the Pacific. They bob in the water for a moment of stillness, of quiet. Deep below them, the Kaiju are dying in a vicious explosion. Daichi is dying with them. The world is ending—and above all of that, on the surface of the water, the world is beginning again. On the shore, in the Shatterdome, a clock stops its count to the apocalypse. In a little town in Japan, two families will soon receive news of their losses.

Then the world bursts into motion again. Iwaizumi’s escape pod had come up not too far from Oikawa’s, and it takes only a breath before Iwaizumi is diving into the water and swimming over to Oikawa. He climbs onto Oikawa’s vessel and then tackles him in a hug.

Oikawa doesn’t tease, doesn’t joke; he doesn’t think he has it in him. He just hugs back. He just holds Iwaizumi, warm and soaked in the ocean and so alive in his arms. He buries his face in the crook of Iwaizumi’s neck and just breathes in the smell of sea salt already drying on his skin in the hot daylight.

“We’re alive,” Oikawa murmurs.

“We’re alive,” Iwaizumi whispers back.

And that’s all there is to say for a long, long time.

The helicopters come for them eventually. They get picked up and brought back to the Shatterdome alongside Hinata and Kageyama. There is no conversation on the ride there. At the doors of the Shatterdome, Oikawa gives Kageyama a respectful nod, and then they both turn away from each other.

There’s a gathering in the cafeteria—the only place big enough to really fit everyone. Ukai’s second in command, whose name Oikawa can’t actually remember, gives a speech. Some politician has flown in to observe, and is asked to say a few words.

Most people are celebrating, but there’s also a sense of hollowness that echoes through it all. They came out of the other side of this war, but the price they’ve been paying for years now can never be rewon. They emerged victorious, but they can never undo the things they’ve done, nor can they save the things they’ve already failed to protect. So much has been lost.

Iwaizumi and Oikawa hold tight to each other the whole time. They’re being hailed as heroes—them and Hinata and Kageyama and Ukai and Daichi—but at the moment, Oikawa can’t stomach the attention. He hides out in the K-Science lab with Iwaizumi, Kuroo, and Kenma instead of dealing with the media, with the higher ups of the PPDC, with the other pilots and other workers.

Oikawa asks Kuroo how he’s doing only once. Kuroo shrugs listlessly, not looking up from where he’s tinkering with some mechanical thing. He’s been working on any project he can get his hands on—doing everything from adjusting old forgotten mecha designs, to taking blood samples from Kaiju body parts frozen in ammonia, to fixing broken clocks and the squeak in Kenma’s desk chair—and no one, especially not Oikawa, seems to have the heart to tell him to stop.

“I think one day I could be okay,” he says quietly, looking at the slight tremor of his hands. “But today is not that day.”

That about sums it up, Oikawa thinks. One day, they could be okay. But today is not that day.

One day, things will maybe even be better. One day, things will be normal again; if any of them can even remember what normal means anymore. One day, they’ll all have moved on. One day, they’ll be alright again. Grief won’t feel so present, so overwhelming, so all-encapsulating. Fear won’t permeate every waking moment. The instinct to fight won’t take precedence over the instinct to love.

Yes, one day, they could be okay. But today is not that day.

The memorials are beautiful. Kuroo—regardless of their romantic relationship status—had been closest to Daichi, and he manages to stumble through a speech without crying once. When he sits back down after speaking and the rest of the memorial commences, Oikawa pretends not to see when he wipes at his nose and eyes and then buries his face against Kenma’s shoulder.

Ukai’s grandson, who had trained almost all of the pilots in the Shatterdome, gives a speech for his grandfather afterwards. He’s somehow holding it together, just long enough to get through a speech and the rest of the memorial, and Oikawa has no idea how he’s doing it.

After the memorials, Oikawa, Iwaizumi, Kuroo, and Kenma slip away from the cafeteria and out of the emergency exit door with the broken alarm. Stepping out onto the pier, the salt of the sea air hits Oikawa’s face immediately. It’s refreshing just as much as it is a terrible reminder of all that they’ve been through. The slight breeze washes over them in harmony with their collective sigh. Next to him, all of the tension seems to bleed out of Iwaizumi’s body.

Slowly, the four of them wander towards the edge of the pier. They walk in silence until they reach the end, where Kenma immediately sits down. He takes his shoes and socks off and sets them carefully behind him, then dips his bare feet into the water. The tide is just high enough for the water to come up to his ankles.

Iwaizumi does the same next to him, leaving Kuroo and Oikawa standing behind them staring out at the sea. They stare out at the ocean quietly, all of their individual thoughts already much too loud to be put into spoken words. Or Oikawa knows his, at least, are screaming out in the back of his mind. He doesn’t have nearly enough energy to put them into words other people can understand.

He sighs, stuffing his hands into his jacket pockets and clenching them into fists. The last time he was here, Iwaizumi was in the hospital and he had gotten over two thousand people killed only hours before. The last time he was here, he was crying into the now deceased Ukai’s shirt, and the now deceased Daichi was sitting at Iwaizumi’s bedside. The last time he was here, the world was still ending.

The ocean is calm today, and something about the rhythmic lull of the waves is calming to Oikawa too. The melody of the crashing water is simple and light today; a nocturne for a single piano rather than an entire symphony. It’s gentle, almost. It’s strange, Oikawa thinks, that such a thing can be gentle.

“Do you ever think about what life would be if this hadn’t all happened?” Kuroo asks. His voice is hoarse with grief, with exhaustion, but none of them point it out.

Oikawa turns to look at him briefly, then looks back out at the ocean. There’s something distant on Kuroo’s face, something that says he’s unreachable at that moment. That, of course, has never stopped Iwaizumi from trying to reach someone.

Iwaizumi says, quietly, not looking up from where he stares at his feet submerged in the water, “I think about it all the time.”

Humming in acknowledgement, Kuroo nods just once. “Yeah.”

“Me too,” Kenma says quietly. He’s sitting on his hands, staring down into the water like Iwaizumi is. He kicks his feet, a small splash of water reaching upwards on his ankles. “But it did happen. And there’s no undoing it.”

“No,” Kuroo agrees.

Oikawa swallows, keeping his eyes steady on the horizon. The group falls into silence again, just sitting with the weight of their thoughts. With the weight of the past few days. With the weight of reality. At first, the whole thing had felt impossibly unreal; he had been numb to the truth of it all. But then Daichi didn’t greet them at breakfast and the shadows under Kuroo’s eyes deepened impossibly so and Iwaizumi still limped and winced when he moved throughout the day and there were memorials and celebrations alike and—

And then it was real. It was so horribly, beautifully real. It was everything he prayed for and everything he dreaded most.

Now, he’s not really sure how he feels. He’s just been feeling so much lately that he doesn’t know how to separate his gratitude from his grief nor his joy from his regret. There are feelings and hurts and wants that are all much too big for his body, much too big for his heart, and much too big for his head and he doesn’t know how to deal with it. He just doesn’t.

“I’m leaving the Shatterdome tomorrow,” Kenma says suddenly, breaking the silence. “They don’t need me anymore, now that it’s all over.”

“What will you do?” Iwaizumi asks, glancing over at him.

In the corner of his eye, Oikawa sees Kenma shrug. “No idea. University, maybe. I bet I could kill any kind of science-based entrance exam.”

Kuroo gives him a weak, tired laugh. “You could.”

“And what will you do?” Iwaizumi asks, turning to look up at Kuroo.

Kuroo sighs heavily, moving to sit down next to where Oikawa stands. He sits with his feet at the very edge of the pier, knees pulled up to his chest. He tilts his head back a little, the breeze combing through his hair as he wraps his arms around his ankles.

“Kenma invited me to follow him home for a bit,” he says, finally. He looks down, sending Kenma a wry smile from down the line. “So I’ll go back to his hometown for now. Bother him a little longer.”

“You’re not a bother,” Kenma mutters, rolling his eyes.

“Maybe not.” Kuroo shrugs, turning back to the ocean. That unreachable distance is washing over his face again like cloudy sunlight. “Anyways, I’ll do that until he gets bored of me. Maybe I’ll go to university too. Could probably get in somewhere.”

Oikawa tries to smile, but he’s so tired and worn out that he can’t quite muster up the whole expression. “You could.”

Kuroo shrugs again. “What about you two? What are you going to do?”

Oikawa looks down at where Iwaizumi sits at the edge of the pier. He thinks back to when he asked Iwaizumi this very same question. They could go home. They could see their families again. They could rest for a little while in their neighboring houses.

But everything will be different now. Everything will have changed. It’s not their home anymore, not really. It’s not home at all.

Home, these days, isn’t really a room or a house or a city or a country. Home, these days, is the warmth of the Drift and the comfort of the person you love most making a home right there in the backrooms of your heart. Home, these days, is the smell of Iwaizumi’s bedsheets and the touch of his calloused palm against Oikawa’s cheek and the press of his lips to the crook of Oikawa’s neck. Home, these days, is less about the world and more about the people in it.

“I don’t know,” Oikawa settles on, eventually.

Iwaizumi looks up at him for a moment, and then back down at the water. The waves are so gentle, slow and lazy, that Oikawa almost doesn’t recognize it as the ocean he knows. This is the ocean of his childhood, of a conch shell and a promise to carry the moment forever. This is the ocean of his old memories, not the ocean that overtakes and overwhelms and drowns.

“We’ll be together,” Iwaizumi says, “wherever we go.”

Oikawa swallows. The prospect is comforting—wherever they go, they’ll be together. At the very least, they’ll have each other. In their hearts and in the backs of their consciousnesses. In their physical presence, too. In their held hands.

“Yeah,” he agrees. “We’ll at least be together.”

With a long, steady sigh, Oikawa sits down between Kuroo and Iwaizumi. He unties his laces slowly and takes his shoes off, placing them behind him. He dips his toes in the water, wincing a little at the harsh cold of it. In the distance, at the very far end of the horizon, the sun is a pale orange and a light pink. Dusk is falling over the ocean, and everything is still.

For that great, tiny moment, after the war is over, everything is still. Oikawa looks out at the ocean, and there is no great threat left to be afraid of in its depths.

Here, now, it is still, except for the roll of the waves. It is silent, except for the gentle breaths of himself and his friends. It is beautiful, except for the grief.

They will carry all of this with them for the rest of their lives. They will not forget—Oikawa swears that to himself right now, staring at the water. He will always remember this moment, and he will remember all of the people who gave their lives so that he could sit by the water and breathe peacefully. He will move forward, but he will never forget.

This will, eventually, stop feeling like a fresh wound. Rather, one day it will be a scar. A scar that reminds him of what they lost, a scar that reminds him to take life and love with both hands and hold tight and never let go. One day, this break will be a bruise, and one day that bruise will just be a color.

Next to him, Iwaizumi puts his palm over the back of Oikawa’s hand. Oikawa closes his eyes, breathing the sea air in deep.

Yes, one day, they will be okay. Today is not that day, but tomorrow might be.