Work Text:
It won’t come out.
Oikawa takes his sister’s nail polish and paints two coats of red onto his nails, admires his hands and scrubs off the excess around them under the steam of a warm shower. He doesn’t keep it on for long, but the next day, the blood around his index finger from his cuticles is almost an exact match to the shade of the polish. He wraps his fingers around his wrist and presses his nails against the healing cuts, and watches the blood bead at new ones as he holds a bloodstained blade with matching nails.
When he rubs it off, cotton pads stained pink and red and the alcohol burning into broken skin, it sits against his cuticles, around the edges and dark red and a reminder.
Red has always been a familiar colour.
He’s thirteen when he wipes red off his thighs, the skin broken from the sharp end of a compass.
And then this spirals into something more, and it’s such a familiar colour on his skin that he feels unnatural whenever it’s not broken. Oikawa’s used to the dry, textured scabs, and the new cuts forming before the old ones fully heal. He’s never clean long enough for them to fade away entirely.
Red becomes a comforting sight.
It feels like all the pain, all the wrongness is leaving his body when the red does. And maybe that’s why it never feels like enough anymore, because it runs too deep. It’s intertwined into every part of his body, and if he wants to be good, he’ll have to destroy himself entirely.
It’s in his bones and his lungs and his muscles and his heart. And most of all, his head.
Oikawa is always in pain, an ache in his shoulder or his stomach or his head. Something not right in the way his wrist moves, or how it gets so hard to breathe when he’s sad. He thinks too much, and pushes himself further into his misery with every bad thought.
And the red gives him something else to focus on.
He can justify it a hundred different ways now, and its only downside is its inconvenience.
Covering up, stinging in the shower, a dull ache every time he moves during the day. Washing the red out of his pyjamas the morning after when his arm rubs against his shirt during the night, or out of the sleeves of his uniform after school.
The red bleeds through the stark white of his shirt sleeve, tiny splotches of shame and misery. A 96% on a chemistry test back in the beginning of May, a 97% on a biology test from months ago. A meeting with the career advisor, where she praises his sureness, his confidence in his future.
He can’t make it through the day anymore, and goes to the bathroom twice in the span of two hours to feel cold metal split the skin on his wrist.
But with how much better it makes him feel, it’s worth it.
He has a sort of system, now. Or maybe it’s just a pattern, a recurring theme that he tries to control with logic and pretty words.
Every test that doesn’t go perfectly.
Every grade below 100.
Every bad volleyball match.
Every night.
It’s been almost everyday for more than a week now, and he learns not to hope for good days anymore.
It always ends the same way.
Oikawa always goes back to being alone, always ends up sitting by himself in a room full of people. Always ends up excusing himself to the bathroom in school, where he finds himself securing torn toilet paper to his wrist with hair ties.
Now, the lack of pain is unnatural, unfamiliar. His arms or his thighs are always stinging, aching, and he tells himself it makes him a better person.
It keeps his grades up, keeps his performance high.
It’s motivation, and the pain is just a reminder of what he deserves when he’s not good enough.
And he’s never good enough.
Oikawa will never be satisfied.
They say it’s a good thing, to have high standards for yourself. Aim high to achieve high.
But now full marks barely stops him from feeling worse, and anything less is a guarantee for bloodied wrists that night. Perfect sets and serves should be his baseline, and everything wrong is shame and guilt and an overwhelming disappointment, hatred in himself.
It’s draining, and every waking moment is spent thinking about how insufficient he is. He longs to be better, longs to be someone else.
Oikawa wakes up extra early to do his hair, practice his smile in the mirror and blink extra wide so nobody can tell the tears that had been leaking out of them the night before.
But lately he’s been sleeping at 3, and he wakes up late and has to rush to leave the house in time. He prefers staying up over lying awake in bed, finish chapter reviews for maths and rewrite all his notes from the first unit of science instead of getting the rest he so desperately craves.
There was never any hope for him.
He feels hollow,
like something’s been carved out from his insides and nothing he can do can fill the void that’s been left behind.
There is nothing to be done. There is nothing he can do but accept the fate that has been thrust into his hands.
He doesn’t know who he is anymore. He hasn’t felt like himself in months and he knows there’s no saving him now.
His grades are dropping, and he can tell he’s getting dumber with every test and assignment he gets back.
He hasn’t touched a volleyball in months, and he hasn’t stepped foot into the gymnasium or attended volleyball club for longer. Kageyama’s more than certainly surpassed him by now, if he hadn’t long ago.
He’s exhausted.
There’s nothing exceptional about him anymore.
He prides himself on his skill and his hard work and his talent. His excellence.
If he’s not exceptional, then what is he? He has years poured into this sport, hours spent after school hitting volleyballs over nets over and over again.
He has to be good.
So much of his identity is tied to his skill, his performance in volleyball. Without this, he just becomes… boring. Mediocre.
Unexceptional.
Irrelevant.
Oikawa decides to broaden his horizons, expand his skills.
He decides. He’ll be beautiful.
He stands in front of the mirror half-naked, analyses every inch of his body and picks out the parts he hates the most.
It’s how his body dips and slopes and curves, wrong in all the ways he never knew before.
It’s the soft flesh of his thighs and his stomach, the repulsive amount of fat on his arms and the way his calves are too wide. His neck isn’t slim enough, his wrists and ribs and hips and spine don’t look the way other boys’ do.
He feels like the ugliest person in the world,
and the numbers on the scale don’t lie.
Or the numbers on the online BMI calculators, the ones that tell him what percentile he’s in and how shameful his weight is.
He skips breakfast and lunch and has two springrolls and half a bowl of noodles for dinner,
but his sister used to eat even less.
He won’t let himself finish a plate anymore, and leaves the dinner table filled with guilt even if all he’s had that day is pasta.
Every interaction is a reminder of his appearance, and he finds himself in a constant comparison with all the people around him.
He stands in a crowd and sees wrists thinner than his, slimmer calves and thighs and figures more slender than he’ll ever achieve.
Everyone is thinner than him and better than him and more beautiful.
There’s so much guilt and shame in this, a hatred for himself for this being the first thing he sees in people, now.
He doesn’t want to reduce someone’s worth to the way they look.
But it’s not just that.
Everyone is so much better than him.
More beautiful, more skilled, more talented, more anything.
But him?
There is something so inherently wrong in his existence. It’s woven into every fibre of his being, twisted in his bones and veins and lurking beneath his skin.
He’s so unloveable.
He disgusts himself, and most days he feels more like a monster than he does a boy.
Oikawa gets more notifications from emails from his tutor than he does from his best friend.
If he doesn’t text first, then nobody talks to him. When he goes to class early and avoids all his favourite people, they don’t care enough for it to matter. They’ll mention it, let it pass and brush it off and call him studious. Pity invites to sit outside with them, futile words with empty meaning.
He stops talking, and nobody really cares.
Nobody outside of his mother touches him anymore, and even Iwaizumi doesn’t throw playful punches or hug him anymore. Ironic, for physical touch being his love language.
Guess that just means Oikawa’s too unloveable.
Especially when Iwaizumi’s always slinging an arm around Matsukawa or Hanamaki, everyone else other than Oikawa. He watches him happy and smiling and laughing with all these people, and wonders what he did so wrong for their friendship to have faded so quickly.
He hates himself so much.
He cares so much and pours his all into everything, into everyone.
He’s too much.
Too loud and too quiet, too weird, too awkward. Not enough. Not pretty enough, not smart enough, not worthy enough to be Iwaizumi’s best friend anymore.
He’s tried to be happier, laugh more and smile more and care more and talk more. It’s always him initiating the conversation, always keeping this dying fire alive while it’s pouring rain. And Iwaizumi stands there and turns his back and tends to all the other fires, shelters them and covers them and nurtures them.
And Oikawa is left behind again.
He’s always alone in the end.
And he knows he’s not good enough at anything to be worthy of love or attention or anything at all, but how did it all end so quickly? Everyone always told him that friendships would change, that these people were only one part of your life. It’s a whole ocean, and there’s so many fish in the sea.
But he never thought that it would be them.
They were inseparable.
They texted every single day and called after school, walked to the school gates and parted ways with cheerful goodbyes. Met up over the holidays, had stupidly funny contact names for each other, sat together in every class. So many years of friendship and love and trust and warmth.
Or maybe not.
Maybe he was just being too hopeful, seeing something that was never really there.
After all, he’s never been the first choice.
Everyone has someone else they love more.
He’s asking too much, for wanting to be loved.
In the end, it’s always his fault. Iwaizumi has done nothing wrong. And he’s grateful for all the love he’s given him, knowing that he’s undeserving of it all. But he wishes and he wishes and he wishes
he wishes.
He wishes this never happened.
All these years of closeness had suddenly faded away in the span of just a few months. They’d text less and less and less once Oikawa stopped initiating conversations, spoke less and exchanged passing glances in hallways. And now Oikawa avoids everyone, and Iwaizumi won’t look at him anymore.
He’s sitting in a classroom for extra maths help one day, and he hears Iwaizumi’s familiar voice, speaking with Hanamaki as they walk down the hallway. They pass one door, and they both look at Oikawa. He feels like a deer in headlights, caught offguard by the memory of what they used to be. And then Iwaizumi turns to his new closest friend, and they burst into laughter and Oikawa’s left alone, his stomach sinking further and his heart breaking impossibly more.
Nothing’s a coincidence anymore.
They never pair up in sport anymore, and if Oikawa’s already in the classroom then Iwaizumi chooses to sit elsewhere, always with a buffer between them.
Iwaizumi just doesn’t want to talk to him.
It’s painfully obvious, and he hates how they go from barely looking at each other one day to best friends again the next.
They’ll laugh together over the stupidest things in maths and health, and then the next day Iwaizumi will barely lock eyes with Oikawa for more than a second. He keeps getting his hopes up, only to be crushed by the weight of what is now reality, normalcy.
He’s so afraid that all this was because of proximity.
They shared every class together, texted and called and never went a single day without speaking to each other. Iwaizumi would send endless clips or videos, and despite all the annoyance and exasperation, he treasured every one.
He just wishes he cherished it more while he had it.
Now they never talk.
Now Iwaizumi sits with all his other friends, now Oikawa sees sharpener blades more than he does his best friend.
Were all those late-night conversations, uncontrollable laughter in the back of their classes, hours spent on birthday gifts and whispers of their darkest secrets to each other just something that happened?
Did it all mean nothing?
Their timetables have changed so much this year, and now they only have two classes together.
And Iwaizumi doesn’t talk to Oikawa in either.
If they don’t see each other every day, are all those years of friendship just reduced to nothing?
Were they only close because they saw each other every day, shared the same interests at the same time and found a couple of commonalities between them?
Maybe Oikawa’s just not good enough for anyone to stick around.
How is it just a coincidence that when he’s at his lowest, all his friends have left?
He’s only worthy of love when he’s performing at his best, high grades and perfect games and always smiling and responding to every message.
He’s not worth it anymore.
Iwaizumi likes all his other friends better, anyways.
They pair up in sport for the first time this whole year, and sit back to back and breathe in sync as a piano plays in the background and a yoga instructor speaks, voice soft and calm and peaceful.
He feels close to Iwaizumi.
And it’s not like just twenty minutes earlier Iwaizumi had been dragging Matsukawa to the bathroom with him, no thought at all about Oikawa left behind in that dark room. He feels at peace, despite his wrist stinging from not even an hour ago. He’s sitting with his best friend, and there’s no one else in the world but them.
Then twenty minutes after they touch for the first time in what feels like, is, months, Iwaizumi’s facing the other way completely and talking and laughing with Matsukawa. He stares at the back of his head, and that’s all he sees of his best friend nowadays.
That used to be him.
But now, he’s all alone again.
He’s so confused.
It’s the highest highs and the lowest lows, the joy and elation and the world crashing down after every happy moment.
It’s all or nothing,
and he wants it all.
It’s logical, rational, and Oikawa decides that if he’ll just be let down every time he gets his hopes up, he’ll just end it all first.
He avoids everyone and removes his messages app from his homescreen so he won’t reply to anyone.
Not that he even gets any messages anymore.
Oikawa isolates and leaves all his friends behind before they can finish leaving him. He hurts himself before anyone else can hurt him.
And he tells himself he likes being alone, repeats it like a mantra when he’s sitting alone in maths with Iwaizumi beside him.
Nobody wants to sit with him anymore. Or talk to him, be around him, look at him. Love him. And he doesn’t care.
He doesn’t care.
He doesn’t -
he wants to cry.
He thinks too much, feels too much, to put any of this into words.
He doesn’t want to think anymore.
He doesn’t want to feel anymore.
It’s weak, he knows, and everyone else has it worse and there’s nothing really wrong with him. The only cause of his unending sadness is his own inability to be loved. His awful personality, his ugly face and body and his overly weak heart. He makes it impossible for anyone to love him.
He’s just being pathetic, making himself out as the victim as usual,
but it hurts so much.
He nearly cries in a maths class because everything is just too much, and the only way he can fix it is with a blade in the bathroom.
He can’t do a single test or assessment without opening his skin afterwards, can’t think about exams or his future or anything at all without wanting to die.
Everything hurts all the time, and his heart feels so heavy and fragile and he doesn’t want to live the rest of his life feeling like this.
He wishes it had worked. Iwaizumi wishes it had worked. Everyone does, and he can tell even if they don’t say it. It’s silent whispers in the air, screaming messages and signs in every interaction. A blaring, telltale sign in how he always ends up alone.
Nobody would have even cared if it had worked. And it makes no difference anymore; whatever way he goes, wherever and whenever he does it.
He knows his friends won’t mourn him for very long, if they even would.
A part of him, this strange monster that’s merged itself with him, crawls and twists around his body and whispers, they wouldn’t even notice. Who would care? He looks at himself through unfiltered lenses for once, ignores everything everyone says and praises him for and understands. There’s nothing about him worth missing.
And he can’t help but feel that the love he’s given from his family is purely out of obligation, and he hates how true it is.
It’s been a whole year and not a single thing is better. Not his grades, not his skill, not his friendships. Not him.
Maybe he’s not being grateful enough.
He has so many opportunities, an amazing education, the sweetest friends and the most caring, giving family. He doesn’t want another life, wouldn’t change anything about the people he loves. He has everything he could ever ask for.
But he can’t bear to be alive anymore.
He wakes up and the day’s over before it even begins. Every morning is the same. Oikawa barely wakes up in time, rushes through his routine and forgets half his things. His legs feel like lead, and the cold threatens to drag him back into bed.
The headaches are back and he can barely keep his eyes open in class, barely make it through the school day without excusing himself to the bathroom to open his skin.
He can’t even live a day without wanting to die. Without thinking of his inevitable ending, his final moments and how everything will lead up to it.
If the rest of his life is going to be like this, then he doesn’t want it.
He can’t do this anymore.
Nothing is worth it anymore.
The red’s coming back, and maybe, soon, the red will be all he knows.