Work Text:
On his first day in the office, Kageyama sees Iwaizumi for the first time in ten years. He's sitting at his desk by the window, his profile catching the light of the morning sun, shadows bending around the bow of his lips. It's a little too early in the morning to be frowning, but the way Iwaizumi does it makes it seem like it's part of his everyday routine. The muscles on his arm clench every time he clicks on his mouse. He looks older for sure – with more muscle on his bones and a sharper jaw line. Yet despite the differences, there are some parts of him that remain the same. Does Iwaizumi still remember him? Should he go say hi? Or maybe-
Standing in front of him, his supervisor coughs faintly, his features falling into a familiar expression of resignation. "Kageyama-san."
"Yes," Kageyama replies instantly to appease him, to show that he's paying attention. He's been thinking about the first day of work since the day before, mulling over his outfit over yesterday's lunch, thinking about his self-introduction over dinner, and just before going to bed: all of the worse case scenarios. So what if he only managed four hours of sleep?
His supervisor stares at him expectantly for a few more seconds.
"Your documents," he finally asks, pointing to the binder under Kageyama's right arm.
"Oh," Kageyama almost yelps in surprise and hands it over to him.
His supervisor continues talking while he flips through the pages in the binder, occasionally pushing up the glasses sliding down his nose bridge. He says something about the day's schedule, and somewhere along the line Kageyama catches the keyword Microsoft Excel . Concentrating is hard, especially with Iwaizumi sitting in his line of sight. It almost feels like a joke, like he's expecting his old friend Hinata to jump out from one of those cubicle partitions and yell, with both his index fingers pointed at him, jokes on you ! To think that the mere sight of Iwaizumi could cause years of suppressed feelings to surface again.
His supervisor leads him to his new desk. It is underwhelmingly bare.
"Ta-da," he has the audacity to say, "Your own desk."
Kageyama nods uncomfortably and sets his briefcase down on the table.
"I'll send someone over to pick you up when it's time for the meeting," he assures him. "First meetings are always exciting!"
"I'm looking forward to it," Kageyama offers weakly, and hopefully convincingly , and when he's sure that his supervisor has left, he sinks into his chair and buries his face into his hands. His cheeks burn with a dull heat, and through his skin he could feel the obnoxious drumming of his heart pulsating through his veins.
The years between Kitagawa Daiichi and university were nothing more than a blur, a disappointing and careless smudge, summed up by the few pages of photographs in his mother’s photo album. Pictures of graduation after graduation, after graduation, and nothing in between. In each of his photos Kageyama wore the same expression, his face bent in odd angles as he tried to appease the photographer, who had shouted at him from the bottom of the stage to put on his best smile. Despite the fact that those were three different graduation ceremonies, his parents had still managed to put him in the most uncomfortable clothing. University was no exception; that time, it was entirely Kageyama’s fault.
He had tried to bury years number thirteen to fifteen, repressing them to the depths of his core, but sometimes they would spring up on him like a gag reflex every time someone touched a raw nerve, or whenever he decided, at two a.m. in the morning, that he needed to feel bad .
He met Iwaizumi at his first club practice. They had made all the first-years stand in a line in front of the upperclassmen, each in their squeaky white shoes and ill-fitting uniforms. Down the row, they introduced themselves with ten different variations of the same sentence. By the time it was Kageyama’s turn everyone had pretty much lost interest, the other first-years fidgeting and the upperclassmen looking everywhere else but him. Only the captain, third-year Oikawa-san, was paying attention, his stance a little too intimidating for a fifteen year old. And in the corner, watching intently as if waiting for something good to happen, sat the vice captain he would later come to know as Iwaizumi-san.
At the beginning of each practice, Iwaizumi would do a roll call; Kitagawa Daiichi Volleyball Club, while huge, wasn’t by definition large enough for anyone to slip through the cracks. Even the absence of a non-regular player, one who remained on the bench for the entirety of his junior high career, could be felt – a gaping hole in a piece of finely threaded cloth, the missing space in a box of color pencils. Kageyama , Iwaizumi would call as he went through the roster, pacing along the edges of the court while the others were busy warming up. He would look up from his list and scan the room until their eyes met. And then he’d nod, a fleeting smile gracing his lips, before quickly returning to the stern front he put on.
To Kageyama, this was something special, something that only he and Iwaizumi shared like a secret. He wrapped this observation, this fact , around his thirteen year old head, thinking about the deeper implications, if any. To some extent it was true; he never saw Iwaizumi speak much to the second-years, let alone the first-years, save for the casual small talk he made in the club room, or on the bus to competitions. So whenever he stayed back a little later to help Kageyama with his receives, shouting advice from across the court, Kageyama had no choice but to see it as something more .
Clenching this feeling tight in his calloused palms, careful to not accidentally let it go, Kageyama strove to improve so that he could stand on equal ground with his upperclassmen. Volleyball served as a means of forgetting – about school, his parents, and sometimes, even himself.
On one night, about a month away from the third-years’ graduation, he asked Oikawa to teach him to serve. Oikawa must have perceived this as some sort of threat, Kageyama wasn’t sure to what exactly, and fueled by his misguided anger he had raised his fist to Kageyama’s face.
Iwaizumi had appeared then, looking ten times angrier, and he came between the two and pushed Oikawa back. He pulled Kageyama out of the gym by the crook of his elbow until they reached the shoe racks. There, his expression seemed to soften, and he scrubbed his face with his right hand and groaned. It was dimly lit where they were standing, but Kageyama somehow found it impossible to look directly at him, instead casting his attention to the stray pairs of shoes lying haphazardly at the door. “Go home, kid,” he finally muttered, his voice steeped in exhaustion, weighing heavy on the shoulders of them both.
The third-years’ graduation eventually came, the day slowly creeping up on them until it finally arrived unceremoniously. Kageyama stood with the other first-years at the farewell party, conveniently hanging around the snack table. Iwaizumi came around later to personally thank each first-year for their support and commitment to the club. He ruffled Kageyama’s hair with his hand, his eyes bent in crescents as he wished him all the best. This was the first and last time Iwaizumi did that. Kageyama felt his skin grow hot, glowing with heat like a radiator, and nothing he did could stop the blush rising up his neck.
Things went to hell from second-year and beyond.
The vice-captain still took attendance at the beginning of every practice, trailing along the large room as he read the names down the list. Everyone’s here , he would shout to the coach once he’s done, but Kageyama could justify, with every bone in his body, that he was wrong.
“Are you okay?” His colleague sitting across him is bending over, his head peeking out behind his chunky monitor.
Oh right. Kageyama forgot that the company adopted an open space concept, forgoing all elements of privacy for the benefit of space. He adjusts himself in his seat and waves it off bashfully, assuring his colleague that he’s totally okay.
He reaches over to shift his briefcase onto this lap, unbuckles it, and pulls out the few items he had brought for his first day of work. Some stationery, for practical reasons, and a picture frame that held a picture of his high school volleyball team, back when he was in his first year. That was the rotation he liked the best; the years after Daichi, Suga, and Asahi left were never the same. The following years were not bad , but it was like tasting the best ice cream in the world for the first time; everything that followed thereafter just paled in comparison. He wondered if the three of them felt this when their rotation changed too.
Someone comes to get him ten minutes before the meeting, and they have to travel to a different floor. Other than a brief rundown of what to expect, his colleague doesn’t offer anything extra, finding it immensely more engaging to play with his phone. They sit in the conference room like that for a few minutes until people show up.
It’s a minute before the meeting’s about to start when Kageyama hears pounding footsteps, a familiar cadence, and then someone bursts through the door and slides into his designated seat at the large table. Their eyes meet then, a moment of confusion that morphed into recollection, and Kageyama can hear his stomach churn. Of all the possible scenarios for a reunion – at a volleyball game, at the train station, anywhere at all in Miyagi – and it’s come down to this, an unknown on a map, a swerve off the well travelled track. Kageyama finds himself at a loss.
“Ah! Is that you, Kageyama?” Iwaizumi finally says something and he chuckles, half in surprise and half in disbelief.
The meeting starts immediately after Iwaizumi’s settled down. They talk about monthly budgets, the impending quarterly report, and consumer feedback – fairly boring stuff by Kageyama’s standards, so he can’t help but drift off in thought. It had taken Iwaizumi such a long time to recognize him, but all it took Kageyama was a single glance.
The same colleague pokes him in the rib with a pen to make sure he’s paying attention.
In the years following his graduation from Kitagawa Daiichi and transition into Karasuno, Kageyama saw Iwaizumi a handful of times, mostly during his first year of high school. Across the net and mere meters away, Kageyama watched Iwaizumi’s gaze follow the ball. It passed through Oikawa’s hands, and he set it to Iwaizumi with a determined look in his eyes. “Left! Left!,” Daichi shouted from behind him, and slow to recover from a temporary state of paralysis, his block missed the ball a fraction of a second late.
Across the net, Iwaizumi was surrounded by his teammates, their large bodies obscuring his view of Iwaizumi, only leaving a part of his number ‘4’ peeking out from between the cracks of bodies.
Ukai called for a timeout immediately. Drowned out by the deafening cheers in the gymnasium, Kageyama could only imagine what Iwaizumi was saying to his teammates. He saw Iwaizumi give Kindaichi a slap on the back in encouragement and Oikawa lean into him, resting his head on his shoulder as they took a rest on the bench.
He felt a sharp pain in his cheek, turning towards the source of discomfort and coming face to face with Hinata, who stared at him in accusation, because he knew that Kageyama wasn’t playing at his best. Slapping away Hinata’s grubby hands, he stalked toward the basket of water bottles and gulped half his bottle down, the sports drink tasting like nothing but the sour sting of jealousy.
A year later, he heard from an anonymous source (or: when he accidentally eavesdropped on a conversation between Kunimi and Kindaichi in the bathroom) that Iwaizumi had decided to go to a university in Tokyo. And he thought, his back to the inside walls of the bathroom stall door, that maybe this was a good thing. It was what he needed – to move on, to stop fixating on a single point in his life that had long left him, receding away into the distance like the stars at the edge of the universe.
“Oh, it’s you,” Iwaizumi says as soon as Kageyama steps into the pantry, his voice so flat and neutral that Kageyama can’t tell if he should stay or leave. Iwaizumi eases into a soft smile, setting his stirring spoon in his cup still.
Kageyama returns the smile, a little hopeful.
He goes to the counter to examine what the company has to offer: packs of 3-in-1 coffee, sachets of creamer, and a tin of assorted biscuits. He uses the end of a spoon to pry the tin can open, and then makes himself a cup of coffee. His movements are slow, even though he should be worried about taking a long break on his first day. A part of him is imagining Iwaizumi staring from behind, and the mere thought is just enough to make his palms sweat.
“Come sit with me when you’re done,” Iwaizumi says from behind him. Kageyama keeps his eyes trained on preparing his cup of coffee. The sound of Iwaizumi’s voice continues to ring in his ears, growing distorted as the seconds pass until it’s drowned out by the stillness enveloping the room.
Kageyama sits down across Iwaizumi with his cup of coffee and a pack of plain crackers. On his first sip he mouth contorts in a shape he had not known was possible until that very moment, and he takes a large gulp to force the rancid fluid down this throat. Iwaizumi chuckles, his line of sight focused on something in the distance, and then it finds its way back to Kageyama like a spotlight.
“You get used to it after a while. Believe it or not, it used to be worse,” Iwaizumi takes a sip of from his own cup effortlessly, as if he was just drinking water.
Kageyama stares at the silhouette of his reflection in his cup and feels strangely hollow. “I haven’t seen you in years,” he finally says.
“You talk! Great. You haven’t spoken all day, so for a second there I thought it wasn’t you. I was under the impression that you were more talkative, more loud. You were always shouting and all,” Iwaizumi laughs, bring his hands up in front of him as he gestured loud like an explosion. Kageyama blinks in surprise, and Iwaizumi continues, “But yes, it’s definitely been years.”
Here, Kageyama takes a good look at the Iwaizumi sitting right in front of him. If he focuses hard enough, he can imagine this Iwaizumi in his old volleyball uniform.
Iwaizumi turns his wrist over and looks at the time, then downs the rest of his coffee. “I’ll see you later,” he says, and then leaves abruptly, the same way he had up and left from Kageyama’s life once before.
Despite not having been in contact with Iwaizumi since he graduated from Kitagawa Daiichi, the Iwaizumi that he sporadically saw retained the essence of his personality. Not that he’d talked to Iwaizumi since his first-year – he didn’t have any good reason to. In his mind, Iwaizumi was kind, always giving more than what he could offer, taking the initiative to shoulder the burdens of others even when his own problems were heavy enough. He understood the essence of a team , and it was a pity that Kageyama only understood this joy years later.
And then Iwaizumi disappeared. Like a hurricane, he took everything away with him, leaving fragments of his passing behind.
Do you know how Iwaizumi is doing?
I heard he got a scholarship for -
He remained in the memories of those who knew him, and the only way Kageyama could find out about his well-being was through the mouths of others.
His understanding of Iwaizumi was a sum of approximate knowledges: that he had gone to a university far away, that he was going to be an engineer, and that after he graduated he was going to return to Miyagi.
So: Iwaizumi didn’t end up becoming an engineer, given the fact that they were both working in marketing. Kageyama spent the first three years out of university working for the government, and fed up with the inefficiency of regulations and administration, he left the job for something in the private sector. Sending out applications to an array of companies that piqued his interest, he waited approximately two weeks before someone got back to him about an interview for a post in Tokyo.
By then, he hardly thought about Iwaizumi. The demands of adult life didn’t allow for it. But in the days leading up to his departure, he thought, in a brief lapse of restraint, where in the world could Iwaizumi be?
Now that Kageyama’s found him – in a small marketing firm nestled in the crook of Nihonbashi – he doesn’t know what to do. Everything from his past started to come back to him, like the waves that washed up treasures and trash onto the shore. This recollection was indiscriminate and presumptuous, and all it did was give him a headache.
“I never saw you at university tournaments,” Kageyama comments offhandedly, not even making eye contact. Instead, he stares out onto pavement, distracting himself by watching the last bits of rain drizzle down, making small ripples in the puddles.
“Iwaizumi-san,” a colleague nudges Iwaizumi’s elbow, sticking out a half-empty pack of cigarettes. Kageyama turns to see Iwaizumi shake his head no, then sticks his hands in his pockets. It’s at least another fifteen minute wait until their party of six gets a table in the restaurant. They’re standing backs against the wall to avoid getting wet.
“Well, I never saw you at tournaments either,” Iwaizumi justifies. There’s a long pause; Iwaizumi runs out of things to say, since he’d exhausted his arsenal of small talk on the train ride to Tsukishima station, and Kageyama was never one for two-sided conversations. After a while, Iwaizumi feels the need to correct himself, “I didn’t quit, if that’s what you were thinking.”
Kageyama bites his lower lip, mumbling, “I wasn’t.” He pauses briefly to adjust his collar. “We did play you once though, in a friendly. I didn’t see you there.”
He can hear Iwaizumi playing with the coins in his pocket.
“Were you looking for me?” Iwaizumi quips, unexpectedly cheeky, and then he sinks back into seriousness. “I stopped playing competitively. There was an injury, and in the interim months my internship really took off. And well,” he stretches out both his arms and shrugs, “here I am.”
He makes it seem like his life was easy, a straight line from point A to point B, ending it off with a casual shrug. No big deal.
“Yeah, funny how life works,” Kageyama replies, and he shifts a little in his place.
“Remind me again of the result of that game,” Iwaizumi eases into a smile, and Kageyama groans, loud enough for one of his colleagues to look over in concern.
“You guys won. 2-0,” he replies in a heartbeat, surprising himself with how he remembered it with such ease.
Iwaizumi grins gleefully, his eyes curving up into little crescents. He reaches over to ruffle Kageyama’s hair, seemingly on instinct, and then he pauses, looking at his palm. “You use hair gel now,” he states dumbfoundedly.
Someone comes over to tell them that their table will be ready in a few moments, and one of his colleagues (the one that had poked him in the rib with a pencil) almost screams in anticipation.
“Tsukishima,” Iwaizumi blurts out, the word oddly placed between them, like the moon hanging in the sky when it’s still bright. “There used to be a guy named Tsukishima in your high school, wasn’t there?”
Kageyama nods, unsure where this conversation is heading.
“How are they doing?” He asks. Kageyama turns to look at Iwaizumi, only to find him staring at nothing in particular.
Kageyama thinks for a while, then says, “I don’t really know.”
Their table is ready a few minutes later, and they head inside after his colleagues stamp their cigarettes out. Dinner is a casual state of affairs, although it takes Kageyama a while to relax. He had kept worrying about saying the wrong thing, but after rounds of beer and a countless number of expletives woven into their stories, Kageyama found them to be people he could trust. Iwaizumi, his face blooming red even though he insists he’s sober, regales them all with the story of how he argued with someone from Sales and won . Kageyama takes it all in: the story, the rise and fall of his tone, the clarity of his voice in a sea of restaurant chatter.
Kageyama drinks about two mugs of beer that night. It’s enough to give him a warm, gentle buzz and a rosy glow on his cheeks, as Pen Poker points out. Ah, newbies , a coworker in his late thirties remarks. On the other hand, Iwaizumi, the supposed heavyweight amongst them all, was fighting a losing battle against gravity. He and another colleague had tried to outdrink each other, and things happen when you pit competitive people against each other.
“Oh my god, they’ve done it again,” Late Thirties laments, slapping the side of Iwaizumi’s face.
Iwaizumi narrows his eyes and groans, but the annoyance quickly dissolves into an uncharacteristic giggle.
“So. Who’s going to take Iwaizumi home tonight?” Late Thirties scans the table for volunteers. Pen Poker is the first to say no.
“I’ll take Nakamura home again. It’s a misfortune being his neighbor,” one of them offers hesitantly.
“Okay. What about Iwaizumi?” Late Thirties waits a little longer, before his slaps Kageyama’s back. “Newbie! You have been chosen for this great honor!”
Kageyama’s face shrivels up in horror.
“Think of this as a rite of passage,” he adds.
Outside the restaurant, Late Thirties hands an unsteady Iwaizumi over into Kageyama’s arms, and Iwaizumi drapes an arm around Kageyama’s shoulders easily – too easily. Kageyama waves his colleagues goodbye, watching them descend the steps to the subway until they disappear among the crowd.
Kageyama had decided that he’d rather not deal with hauling a drunk man home on the train, so the both of them stood on the sidewalk as he tried to hail a taxi.
“I can go home by myself,” Iwaizumi says, leaning his weight onto Kageyama’s frame, his warmth oddly comforting.
Kageyama’s arm was still supporting Iwaizumi by the waist. In the distance, he hears the rumbling of train tracks, or he thinks he does. He presses his fingers harder on Iwaizumi’s waist, as if to make sure he’s still there. “This is probably the first time I’ve heard you suggest a bad idea.”
Iwaizumi scoffs, his head bending back in a laugh, “You’re the one taking care of me now… Wow, how the tables have tabled.”
Kageyama suppresses a sigh of resignation.
They eventually flag down a taxi after ten minutes, and Iwaizumi recalls his address for the taxi driver. A classical piece was playing on the radio, something that sounded like snowflakes drifting through the wind, light and gentle. It was wholly unfitting for the season, what with the 35 degree celsius weather and all, but Kageyama could imagine it still: a lonely summer’s day in one of the large, vast fields in Miyagi, dandelions carried on gusts of wind until they vanished into nothingness.
The taxi cruises smoothly down the Tokyo Metropolitan Expressway, and judging from the look on the driver’s face, the good traffic seems to be a real surprise. Iwaizumi knocks out as soon as the car starts moving, his cheek pressed against the door and his arm carelessly draped across his lap. Driving through the city at night was vastly different from driving through the countryside, everything from the feel of tires grinding on asphalt to the streaks of neons as the car whizzed past the bright lights.
Kageyama pays for the fare and hauls Iwaizumi out of the car, half-awake and digging through his coat pocket to find his keys. There’s a red mark on the side of his cheek, and it deepens when Iwaizumi rubs that foreign feeling on his skin. Kageyama watches him jab the key into the keyhole the first time. He rotates the key and tries again. Letting out an extended sigh, he rotates the key another 180 degrees and it slots in perfectly.
“You should come in,” he offers, but his words get lost in the thick air.
“What?” Kageyama jerks, catching the end of Iwaizumi’s sentence. Past the doorway and already halfway down the hall, Iwaizumi beckons him over. Kageyama kicks his shoes off and leaves them by the door. He checks his watch – fifteen minutes to midnight; at this rate he’ll likely miss the last train.
He sits himself down in Iwaizumi’s living room and takes it all in – pieces of Iwaizumi’s life, as represented by the things he owned. He hears Iwaizumi fumble with the glasses in the kitchen (an impending disaster, Kageyama can feel it in his bones), and then he hears the kettle go (hot water, another drunk hazard). The coffee table in the center of the room has binders haphazardly piled on top of one another. Kageyama is careful not to disturb its balance. Iwaizumi’s wall is bare, save for a framed University of Tokyo volleyball jersey. On the top of a set of drawers Iwaizumi had put out several photo frames, and Kageyama examines each one sequentially. Most of them were from Iwaizumi’s college days and beyond, except for a picture of his family (and Oikawa, who had forced himself into the picture) and a picture of his high school volleyball club in his third year.
There was nothing from his junior high school days.
Kageyama returned to this couch when he heard Iwaizumi’s shuffling, so that when he emerged from the kitchen a few seconds later, he wouldn’t realize that Kageyama had been snooping around his living room. Iwaizumi sets down the two cups of green tea on the edge of the coffee table, skillfully avoiding the mountain of papers. Reclining onto his couch, Iwaizumi pulls one of his throw pillows and hugs it, staring at his uninteresting white ceiling.
Kageyama reaches for his cup of tea, cupping it for a long time as he searches for something to fill the silence.
“Tonight was really fun,” Kageyama says, finally.
Iwaizumi tilts his head over, smirking, “You think so?”
Kageyama nods, and then takes a sip of his tea. Iwaizumi turns on the TV and changes the channel until he lands on something he likes. He eventually settles on a late night soap opera. It looks like something his mother would love to watch. Occasionally, he makes a snarky comment, his words a long drawl under the influence of fatigue. Kageyama chuckles in response, even when it’s not funny.
It sinks into a peaceful quiet when the show finally reaches the end credits. For the past forty minutes many thoughts popped into Kageyama’s mind, all unrelated to the show he was watching. There were so many things about Iwaizumi that were still unanswered.
Kageyama takes a sharp breath and turns, “Iwaizumi-san.”
And Iwaizumi’s already fast asleep, mouth hanging open and arms still hugging his throw pillow. Kageyama’s shoulders slack in defeat. He returns his attention to Iwaizumi’s living room and at this point, after already spending close to an hour there, does he realize that he is the odd one out. His eyes scan over the room once more. There is nothing on Iwaizumi's walls, nothing in his photo frames, that was from the distinctive period when their timelines overlapped. There’s nothing that suggests that junior high was a precious part of his childhood, or if the people in that era were of any importance. Kageyama’s mind flashes back to his first day on the job, when Iwaizumi’s expression was more of coincidence, rather than expectation.
All this time spent thinking of Iwaizumi, and Iwaizumi probably never thought about him.
Closing his eyes, he takes a slow inhale.
All of the past ten years coalesced into a dense and heavy ball in his stomach, and Kageyama’s hands slowly balled into fists. He wanted to be angry for many reasons. First, at Iwaizumi, and next, at himself. He thinks about the time he wasted on extrapolation and imagination, and how, whatever he did never seemed to help him move on. He wanted, desperately, to shout at someone, but looking at Iwaizumi, soundlessly asleep and blissfully unaware, his anger dissolved into a sense of emptiness.
He realizes, to his dismay, that the Iwaizumi he had always known was never Iwaizumi to begin with. And this Iwaizumi – he was never his .
He gathers his coat and his briefcase and leaves soundlessly, slipping out of the apartment without so much as remembering to turn off the TV.
“Where do you see yourself in ten years?” Tsukishima asked, his hands tucked behind his ears as he looked at the night sky. It was close to midnight, and the four of them were on the roof of Karasuno.
“What, getting all sentimental on the last day of practice?” Kageyama teased, to which Tsukishima clicked his tongue in disgust.
“Probably paying off my student loans,” Yamaguchi offered unhelpfully after a momentous pause. “Hopefully employed.”
Hinata shoved Yamaguchi’s waist in attempt to get him to brighten up, even if he had to do it physically.
“I think,” Hinata started, reaching his hand out to catch a star, “I’m going to try to be as happy as I can possibly be.”
Kageyama remembers scoffing at that comment Hinata made ten years ago, all wide-eyed and optimistic. He closes his eyes and breathes slowly, imagining a mysterious force enveloping his mouth and his heart, bearing down on it with furious weight. And then all at once it disappeared, the pain so harsh that it left a subdued throbbing in its wake. He waits for the wave to pass, and opens his eyes once his heart has calmed down, stray tears welling in the corner of his eyes.
He raises his arm out every time he sees a taxi drive past, eventually managing to flag one down ten minutes later. Climbing into the back seat, he’s met with blaring, loud jazz coming from the car’s speakers. It isn’t what he needs now – in fact he was thinking of emo slow rock, or just plain silence – but he doesn’t want to be rude. He shifts a little closer to the window.
Kageyama blinks his tears away, insisting to himself that he isn’t even crying. Crying is what sad people do, and he’s anything but sad right now. He had been selfish, building an image, an idolization, of Iwaizumi, only to hold him up to this idealized construct. Of course he would end up disappointed. He pushes his palm down his pants and hard on his knee, as if trying to push away everything he had known, repulsed and afraid.
Once this has all left him, he feels boundless, floating on the notes of the smooth jazz that surrounded him.
“This is in English,” the taxi driver chimes in, and Kageyama looks confused until he realizes that he had been smiling. They converse by making eye contact through the rear view mirror. “One of my favorites, this one. It’s called As Time Goes By , sung by a fellow called Dooley Wilson.” He has trouble with the English pronunciation, but makes up for it with a toothy grin.
It’s an unlikely match, but Kageyama likes the music. He listens to it carefully for the remainder of the song, imagining a hotel lobby, a ballroom, a bar, and then he lets it stop. He doesn’t let it get any further than that.
Imagination, after all, is a dangerous thing.
Kageyama has the rest of the weekend to compose his thoughts. He sorts them into categories and boxes and stores them away so that he doesn’t have to look at them again. He shows up at work on Monday convinced he’s a new person and avoids Iwaizumi like the plague, remaining at his workstation at all times. He even avoids going to the pantry to get a serving of that rancid instant coffee, which he supposes is a good thing in retrospect. Iwaizumi does walk by, however, and he starts talking as soon as they’ve made eye contact, so it’s not like Kageyama can run away.
“Thanks for taking me home the other day,” he says, looking infinitely more sober than he was on Friday.
Kageyama shrugs, words wavering on the ending, “No problem.” He turns back to his laptop screen and starts typing random words to make it seem like he’s busy, since Iwaizumi won’t be able to see.
On Tuesday, he doesn’t see Iwaizumi at all. It has something to do with end-of-the-quarter reports, judging from the flood of emails in his inbox. It takes him almost two hours to go through them. Wednesday passes like a daze, and then Thursday comes along like an uninvited guest. He gets handed a shit ton of work to do, and he contemplates taking work home. Grumpily, he shoves the binders into his briefcase.
The warm, suffusing glow from the streetlights seemed to blur under his tired, hazy eyes. He ducks into an alley, taking a shortcut to a hole-in-a-corner bar a couple blocks down from the office. He had been there once with several of his colleagues after work and liked the quiet, brooding atmosphere. It is perfect for a Thursday night.
He thinks this until he steps through the door and sees Iwaizumi inside. He’s sitting at the bend of the L-shaped counter, tilting his glass in a clockwise rotation as the amber liquid swishes over the ice. Kageyama freezes at the entrance, his feet rooting to the ground and his mind going blank. Iwaizumi catches him before he can escape and waves, smiling fondly, and Kageyama finds himself walking blindly, sliding into the adjacent seat on the other side of the bend, so that he’s facing Iwaizumi. By the time he feels like he’s regained control over his body, the bartender’s standing in front of him waiting for his order.
Kageyama regrets not having paid attention to alcohol names. He gives a discouraging cough. “I’ll have, uh, whatever he’s having.”
The bartender repeats as a question, eyeing Kageyama down warily, “Jameson on the rocks?”
“Just get him the damn drink, Yuto,” Iwaizumi groans, and the bartender rolls his eyes. After the bartender’s walked away, Iwaizumi directs his attention onto Kageyama now.
“Happy Thursday!” He says exaggeratedly.
Kageyama raises his eyebrows. “Yay, misery!” He replies jokingly, even though he’s actually speaking the truth.
The bartender slides him his drink, and he and Iwaizumi exchange middle fingers in each other’s faces.
“So… you probably come here often,” Kageyama comments on this observation. He takes a sip of his drink and his face scrunches up.
At this sight, Iwaizumi stifles a laugh with the back of his hand.
“Usually on a Friday. Being here on a Thursday is just sad,” Iwaizumi swirls the amber liquid in his glass again, the ice clinking on the sides.
“But you’re here on a Thursday,” Kageyama replies.
Iwaizumi explains, “And thus, I am sad.” He raises his glass and clinks it against Kageyama’s.
“I haven’t seen you in days,” Iwaizumi sighs into the glass, before taking another sip. He does it without even flinching.
Kageyama pushes a stray strand of hair out of his forehead, keeps his hands busy by clasping and unclasping them to distract him from other, more pressing issues. “I’ve been busy with stuff. That third quarter report.”
“Bullshit,” Iwaizumi corrects immediately. “I’m the one that has to write that. Newbies like you don’t even have to touch it.” He looks at Kageyama over the rim of his glass, waiting expectantly. “You’ve been avoiding me,” he continues. Like a cat that had forced a mouse into a corner with nowhere else to run, no more excuses left to make, he presses Kageyama on to speak the truth.
Kageyama takes his time, tracing the circle of water around his glass, then following the line of soft blue lights lining the walls. He takes a sharp inhale, almost choking on the air, “I was being stupid, I-” he pauses, knitting his eyebrows to compose his raging thoughts. “I thought I knew you, but I actually don’t,” he continues. I thought you were mine , he doesn’t say, but you never were .
Staring back at him, Iwaizumi blinks, his face etched in confusion. “... You thought you knew me, but you actually don’t?” He parrots slowly, haltingly, accentuating the strangeness of Kageyama’s words.
Kageyama presses his lips together in a thin line. His right hand, which was up till this point wrapped around his glass of alcohol, is now numb, so he wipes the water off on his slacks. He debates on whether to lie, to brush it off, or to say what was on his mind. He takes a swig of whiskey for courage. He gets his voice to work, “I had built you up… built you up into something I thought you were all these years.”
Iwaizumi scoffs, “Huh. Did I not meet your expectations?”
“No! I mean, not that. Seeing you again after all these years was a shock. I mean, yeah, of course it was a shock. I hadn’t seen you in ten years!” Kageyama’s thigh was shaking now, and he kept kicking the leg of his stool. “What I thought I knew about you was based on nothing.”
Leaning into his open palm, Iwaizumi thinks about what Kageyama’s words meant. He imagines the same words leaving his lips and rolls them over his tongue. “Well, you’re not wrong. We were only ever in the same place for a year. You could flip this situation around and say the same thing though; I barely know you too.”
Iwaizumi doesn’t look particularly surprised, and Kageyama can’t tell if that a good thing or not. Kageyama looks away; instead of meeting Iwaizumi’s eyes he chooses to focus on the rest of his whiskey. The air between them, just like the atmosphere, weighed down on them thick and heavy. Kageyama turns to him slowly, meeting his eyes. The Iwaizumi he had known – the one he had held onto like an anchor – was now cast away into the ocean, irrevocably lost. And somehow, he was okay with this. He let go. This Iwaizumi, the one sitting right before him, the one looking right at him with his eyes in the shape of crescent moons – it’s this Iwaizumi who’s in his life right now.
“So get to know me,” Iwaizumi says abruptly, his voice standing out against the indistinct background chatter. He’s sitting ramrod straight, looking at Kageyama dead in the eye with some sort of unfound determination.
“Wha-”
“Let’s start over. A new beginning,” he replies. He sticks his drink out to Kageyama.
Kageyama snorts, but complies. “A new beginning.”
Their glasses clink, loud and bright.
Sunset is Kageyama’s favorite time to be out on the roof of his office building. Up in the sky the thick clouds, shaped by the shadows from the setting sun, look like molten gold. The large, blue, glassy office buildings in the distance look like giant mirrors. His favorite thing about being at the top is the silence – no incessant hum of the power lines radiating with heat, an absence of city traffic and the blaring of car horns. If he listens carefully, eyes closed, all he can hear is the distinctive drumming of his heart – a slow, heavy rhythm.
The sunset lasts for a fleeting moment before the cityscape is engulfed in darkness. The clouds, which moments ago seemed so carefully etched, now blended into the sky.
“Thought I might find you here,” he hears a familiar voice call.
He turns around to greet him, “Hey, Iwaizumi.”
“Here,” Iwaizumi greets, holding out a chilled can of Sapporo draft beer. “I remember you said this was your favorite.”
Kageyama takes it, saying, “I said that I hated this the least.”
Laughing fondly, Iwaizumi shrugs, “Sounds about right.”
He stands next to Kageyama, his chest leaning against the ledge. Kageyama does the same, his spare hand winding around the metal bar that ran across the railing. He stared out into the open space ahead of them. The red lights at the top of each office building seemed to blink in time with his own.
Iwaizumi opens his can of beer and takes a few gulps. When he’s done, he wipes his lips with the back of his hand. Kageyama watches Iwaizumi from the corner of his eye, his gaze lingering on the frown on his lips. This Iwaizumi who left Miyagi behind to shake away the expectations tagged on him, who fell in love with the bustling city, who, when presented with an opportunity, never refused it – this is the Iwaizumi he knows.
“After this is over – the quarterly report, the presentation, the review – how about we go grab something to eat?” Iwaizumi asks. Quickly after that he looks in the other direction. Iwaizumi’s always had a pretty obvious asian glow.
Kageyama feels his lungs swell. He tightens the grip around his can of beer, in case he accidentally lets go.
“Yeah?” Iwaizumi turns to look at him in affirmation.
Kageyama’s lips curve into a smile so instinctively it startles him. Releasing the breath he hadn’t realized he was holding, he replies, “Yeah.”