Archive of Our Own

☆⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂☆

The day before departure

He starts grabbing things at random and shoving them into the suitcase. Shirts, pants, a sweater, another sweater, socks, underwear, a jacket he's not sure he'll need because Argentina is going into winter but Buenos Aires doesn't get that cold, does it? He doesn't fold anything properly. He just packs, fast and chaotic, trying to fill the suitcase before his mother arrives and sees the state of him.

A pair of sweatpants. A hoodie. Another jacket. A scarf. Do they wear scarves in Argentina? He doesn't know. He packs it anyway.

He's halfway through the pile when he picks up a shirt and realizes it's not his.

It's grey, soft, worn at the collar. Size large. Iwaizumi's.

He doesn't remember Iwaizumi leaving it here, but Iwaizumi has left clothes here before — after practices that ran late, after nights when they watched matches until 2 AM and Iwaizumi was too tired to go home, after mornings when Iwaizumi showed up early and stayed late and the hours blurred together until it was easier to just keep a drawer for him.

Oikawa holds the shirt. Brings it to his face without thinking. It smells like Iwaizumi's detergent, faintly of the cologne Iwaizumi wears that's so subtle Oikawa only notices it when he's close, and underneath that something else that's just Iwaizumi — the smell of a person he's known for so long that his body recognizes it before his brain does.

He should give this back. He should text Iwaizumi right now and say hey, found your shirt, I'll give it to you tonight. That would be the normal thing to do.

Instead, he folds it carefully. Puts it in the suitcase, tucked between two of his own shirts where it won't be visible.

He'll give it back eventually. Just not yet.

⠁☆⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄☆⠁

His mother arrives with enough food to feed a small army and a look on her face that says she knows exactly what state she's going to find him in.

"Tooru," she says, setting bags down on the kitchen counter and surveying the apartment with the practiced eye of someone who has been cleaning up after him for twenty-eight years. "This is a disaster."

"It's organized chaos," he says.

"It's chaos." She starts unpacking containers — rice, grilled fish, pickled vegetables, miso soup still warm in a thermos. "Have you eaten today?"

"I had coffee."

"Coffee isn't food." She hands him a bowl and chopsticks. "Eat. Then we're going to pack this suitcase properly."

He eats. The food is good, tastes like home, tastes like every meal his mother has made for him since he was a child. She sits across from him at the small kitchen table and watches him with that expression mothers have, the one that's part love and part worry and part something else he can't name.

"Are you scared?" she asks quietly.

He could lie. He's good at lying, at deflecting, at turning questions into jokes. But this is his mother, and she's looking at him like she already knows the answer, and suddenly he's too tired to perform.

"Yeah," he says. "I'm scared."

She reaches across the table and takes his hand. Her hand is small, warm, familiar. "That's okay. It's okay to be scared."

"I don't know if I can do this."

"You can." Her voice is firm, certain. "You've always been able to do hard things, Tooru. Even when you didn't think you could."

"What if I fail?"

"Then you fail. And then you get back up. That's what you do." She squeezes his hand. "But you're not going to fail. You're going to go to Argentina and you're going to be amazing, and in six months you're going to call me and tell me about all the wonderful things you're doing, and I'm going to say 'I told you so.'"

He laughs, wet and shaky. "You're very confident."

"I'm your mother. I'm supposed to be confident." She lets go of his hand and stands up. "Now finish eating. We have a suitcase to pack."

They pack together. His mother is efficient, ruthless, unsentimental. She holds up shirts and makes instant decisions: bring, leave, bring, leave. She folds everything properly, the way she tried to teach him when he was twelve and he didn't listen because folding clothes was boring and he had better things to do.

"You're bringing too many jackets," she says.

"I need options."

"You need three jackets maximum. Pick three."

He picks three. She folds them. They go in the suitcase.

She finds Iwaizumi's shirt tucked between his own and holds it up. "This isn't yours."

"I know."

She looks at him for a long moment. Doesn't ask. Just folds it and puts it back where he had it, tucked between his shirts, hidden.

By 3 PM, the suitcase is packed. Properly packed, everything folded and organized, the chaos transformed into order. His mother zips it closed and pats the top like it's a job well done.

"There," she says. "Now you're ready."

He looks at the closed suitcase. It looks so final, so complete. Like a period at the end of a sentence he's not ready to finish.

"Mom," he says. "Thank you."

She hugs him. Tight, the way she used to when he was small and scared of thunderstorms. Her arms stay around him a few seconds longer than usual, he counts them without meaning to, and when she finally pulls back, her hands move to his shoulders. She looks at him the way she's looked at him his entire life: like she can see through every performance, every deflection, every carefully constructed wall.

"Sit," she says. Not a request. "Eat."

"Mom, I already—"

"Sit."

He sits. She moves through his kitchen with the efficiency of someone who's been doing this for twenty-eight years, pulling more containers from her bag — tamagoyaki still warm, rice carefully packed, pickled vegetables in small portions — and pouring fresh miso soup from a second thermos into two bowls, as if she'd known one round wouldn't be enough.

The smell fills the apartment, displacing the stale air and the anxiety and the emptiness of a place that's already half-abandoned. She sets a plate in front of him and sits across from him with her own, picking up her chopsticks.

"Eat," she says again. Softer this time.

He picks up his chopsticks. Takes a piece of tamagoyaki. It's still warm, slightly sweet. She's made this for him a thousand times. Before school. Before matches. Before every important thing he's ever done.

"It's good," he says.

"Of course it's good." She takes a bite of her own food, watching him over the table. "You haven't been eating properly."

"I've been eating."

"Convenience store food doesn't count."

"It's food."

"Tooru." She sets down her chopsticks. "Don't."

"Don't what?"

"Don't perform for me. Not today."

The words land like a stone in still water. He looks down at his plate, at the careful arrangement of food, at the evidence of her care made tangible.

"I'm not performing," he says. But his voice is thin. Unconvincing even to himself.

His mother is quiet for a moment. Then she picks up her chopsticks again and takes another bite. When she speaks, her voice is gentle but unyielding.

"You've been performing since you were six years old. Since you decided you wanted to be a professional volleyball player. You learned how to smile when you were tired. How to act confident when you were scared. How to make everyone believe you were fine even when you weren't." She pauses. "You're very good at it. But I'm your mother. I know the difference."

Oikawa's throat tightens. He takes another bite of tamagoyaki, chewing mechanically, buying time.

"I'm fine," he tries.

"No, you're not."

"I'm excited. This is what I've always wanted."

"That can be true and you can still be terrified." She reaches across the table. Her hand covers his. "Both things can be true at the same time."

And that's what breaks him. Not the words themselves, but the permission in them.

His eyes burn. He blinks hard, trying to force the tears back, but they come anyway. Silent at first. Then his breath hitches and he has to set down his chopsticks because his hands are shaking.

"I'm so scared," he whispers. "Mom, I'm so scared."

"I know."

"What if I can't do it? What if I get there and I'm not good enough? What if—" His voice cracks. "What if I'm making a mistake?"

His mother's hand tightens on his. "Look at me."

He looks up. Her eyes are wet too, but her face is steady.

"You can do hard things," she says. "You've always been able to do hard things. Do you remember when you were eight and you broke your wrist?"

He nods. Falling off the jungle gym. The pain. The cast.

"The doctor said you wouldn't be able to play volleyball for three months. You cried for an hour. Then you asked me to teach you how to set with your left hand." She smiles slightly. "You practiced every day. Your left hand. For three months. Until you could set almost as well with your left as your right. You were eight years old."

"That's different."

"Is it? Do you remember high school? When your knee gave out the first time and the doctor said you might never play competitively again?"

He remembers. The pain. The fear. The physical therapy that felt endless.

"You worked harder than anyone I've ever seen. You did every exercise. You showed up early and stayed late and rebuilt yourself from the ground up because you refused to let your body decide your future." Her thumb moves across his knuckles. "That's who you are, Tooru. You're the person who does the hard thing even when it would be easier to quit."

"But this is different," he says again. "This is leaving everything. Leaving you. Leaving—" He stops. Can't say Iwaizumi's name. Not right now.

"Leaving Hajime," his mother finishes for him.

The sound of the name makes his chest ache. He nods.

"I know," she says. "And that's the hardest part, isn't it? Not the volleyball. Not the new country. Not the language. It's leaving the people who make you feel like yourself."

"How do you know that?"

"Because I'm your mother. Because I've watched you and Hajime for ten years. Because I know what it looks like when someone is your home." She pauses. "And because I did the same thing once."

Oikawa looks up, surprised. "What?"

"When I married your father. I left Osaka. Left my parents, my friends, everything I knew. Moved to Tokyo because that's where his job was. I was twenty-three years old and I was terrified." She smiles slightly. "But I did it anyway. Because sometimes the thing you want most requires leaving behind the things you love. That doesn't make it easy. It just makes it necessary."

"Were you scared?"

"Every day for the first six months. I cried on the phone to my mother every week. I got lost on the subway. I couldn't find the right grocery store. Everything was different and I was so lonely." She squeezes his hand. "But I survived it. And eventually Tokyo became home. Not because it replaced Osaka, but because I built a new life here. Because I learned that home isn't just one place. It's the people you carry with you."

Oikawa's tears are falling freely now. He doesn't try to stop them. "What if I can't do it?"

"Then you come home. But Tooru—" She leans forward. "You can do it. I know you can. Not because you're talented, though you are. Not because you're determined, though you are. But because you've spent your entire life preparing for this. Every early morning practice. Every late night in the gym. Every time you got back up after falling down. All of it was preparing you for this moment."

"I don't feel prepared."

"No one ever does. That's the secret they don't tell you. Everyone who does something brave feels unprepared. They just do it anyway."

They sit in silence for a moment. The miso soup is cooling. The rice is getting sticky. But neither of them moves to eat. They just sit there, hands clasped across the table, in the apartment that will soon be empty.

"I'm going to miss you," Oikawa says. His voice is small.

"I'm going to miss you too. Every single day." Her voice wavers slightly. "But I'm also going to be so proud of you. Every time you step on that court. Every time you set a ball. Every time you do the thing you've dreamed about since you were six years old."

"How do you let go?" The question comes out broken. "How do you watch me leave and just — let me?"

His mother's eyes fill with tears. "Because that's what love is. It's not holding on. It's knowing when to open your hands. It's wanting what's best for you even when what's best for you means you're far away." She takes a shaky breath. "And because I trust you. I trust that you'll call. That you'll come home for visits. That distance won't erase what we are."

"It won't," Oikawa says fiercely. "I promise it won't."

"I know." She smiles through her tears. "Because you're my son. And I raised you to keep your promises."

They sit like that for a long time. The food grows cold. The afternoon light shifts across the table. Outside, Tokyo continues its constant motion, unaware that in this small apartment, a mother and son are saying a goodbye that isn't really goodbye, just a transformation of proximity into something else.

Finally, his mother stands. Starts clearing the plates. Oikawa moves to help but she waves him off.

"Sit," she says. "Let me do this."

He watches her move through the kitchen. Washing dishes. Putting away containers. Wiping down counters. The quiet choreography of motherhood — cleaning up, making space, creating order from chaos.

When she's done, the kitchen is spotless. Oikawa feels something shift in his chest. Not the fear disappearing, that's still there, probably always will be, but something else settling beside it. Something that feels like courage.

"Okay," his mother says, drying her hands on a towel. "I should get going. Let me look at you one more time before I do."

She studies his face like she's memorizing it, the way he keeps catching himself doing to everything today. Then she kisses the top of his head, the way she did when he was small.

"That's what I'm here for," she says. "To feed you and fold your clothes and remind you that you're braver than you think."

She leaves at 3:30, taking the empty food containers with her, leaving the apartment cleaner than she found it. After she's gone, Oikawa sits on the couch and stares at the suitcase by the door.

It's done. He's packed. He's ready.

Except he's not ready at all.

⠁☆⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄☆⠁

The afternoon stretches. He tries to watch TV but can't focus. Tries to read but the words blur together. Tries to nap but his mind won't stop spinning.

He thinks about calling Iwaizumi. Picks up his phone. Puts it down. Picks it up again.

If he calls now, during the day, it means something. It means I need you in a way that's too vulnerable, too raw. Their friendship has always had rules, unspoken but understood: they can need each other at night, after practices, during matches. But during the day, during normal hours, they're supposed to be independent, capable, fine.

Calling now would break that rule.

He puts the phone down.

At 6:15, he orders takeout. Ramen from the place two blocks away, the one that knows his order by heart. It arrives at 6:40 and he eats it slowly, deliberately, trying to memorize the taste. In Argentina there will be different food, different flavors. This bowl, from this restaurant, will become a memory before he's even finished it.

At 7:30, he showers. Stands under the water longer than necessary, letting it run hot until the bathroom fills with steam. He thinks about all the showers he's taken in this apartment, all the mornings and evenings, the small routine of it. In Argentina there will be a different shower, different water pressure, different tiles under his feet.

Everything will be different.

At 8:00, he's sitting on the floor in front of the suitcase when the knock comes.

Three times. Soft but deliberate.

He knows that knock the way he knows Iwaizumi's footsteps in the hallway — heavy, unhurried, the rhythm of someone who moves like he knows exactly where he's going.

Oikawa closes his eyes, takes one breath, then another. Then he stands up and goes to open the door.

⠁⠂☆⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄☆⠂⠁

Iwaizumi is holding a convenience store bag in one hand and two cans of coffee balanced against his chest with the other, like he tried to carry everything in one trip and only sort of succeeded. He's still in his work clothes, sleeves pushed up, tie long gone.

"You're going to drop something," Oikawa says.

"I'm not going to drop anything." He drops the rice balls. Oikawa catches the bag before it hits the floor, mostly out of reflex, and Iwaizumi looks personally offended that gravity worked the way gravity works. "Shut up."

"I didn't say anything."

"You were about to."

He toes off his shoes in the entryway with the ease of someone who has done it a thousand times, sets the coffee cans down on the shoe rack, and steps past Oikawa into the apartment like he owns a corner of it. Which, in the ways that matter, he does.

"You ate?" he asks, already heading for the kitchen.

"Mom fed me half a restaurant."

"Good." Iwaizumi finds two glasses without having to look for them, fills them at the tap, sets one down in front of Oikawa on the counter without asking if he wants it. "You look like hell, by the way."

"Thank you, Iwa-chan. So supportive."

"I'm serious. Did you sleep at all last night?"

"A little." A lie, but a small one. Iwaizumi doesn't call it, just studies him for a second too long, the way he does when he's deciding whether to push. He decides not to. Not yet.

They end up in the living room, the suitcase pulled back open on the floor even though it's already packed, because Iwaizumi took one look at it zipped shut by the door and said, "You're not done, there's no way you're done," and Oikawa didn't have the energy to argue.

"I'm bringing too much," Oikawa says, watching Iwaizumi unfold a shirt his mother had folded that afternoon, inspect it, refold it slightly better.

"You're always bringing too much. Where's your charger."

"Front pocket."

"Both of them?"

"You only need one, dumbass, you have one phone."

"I have a laptop too."

Iwaizumi checks the front pocket anyway, finds both chargers exactly where Oikawa said they'd be, and doesn't comment, which is its own kind of comment. He's efficient in a way that has nothing to do with Oikawa's mother's efficiency — hers is brisk and unsentimental, a woman with somewhere else to be. Iwaizumi's is slower. Deliberate. Like he's trying to make the packing last.

"You didn't have to come check on this," Oikawa says. "Mom already did the whole suitcase."

"I know."

"So why—"

"Because I wanted one more excuse to sit on your floor," Iwaizumi says, not looking up from the shirt in his hands. It comes out flat, almost annoyed, the way Iwaizumi says anything that costs him something to say. "Is that not allowed?"

Oikawa doesn't have an answer for that. He picks up a pair of socks instead and rolls them together, badly, and lets the silence do whatever it's going to do.

They work like that for a while. Not talking, or talking about nothing — whether Oikawa packed enough socks, whether the jacket is actually necessary, whether Argentina really doesn't get cold in June the way Oikawa keeps insisting it doesn't. Iwaizumi looks it up on his phone at one point just to prove Oikawa wrong, and it turns out Buenos Aires in June sits somewhere in the low teens most days, and Iwaizumi holds the phone up in Oikawa's face with an expression of pure vindication.

"Fourteen degrees, Oikawa. Fourteen."

"That's basically not cold."

"That's a Tokyo October and you complain the entire month of October."

"I do not."

"You wear a scarf in October."

"Scarves are stylish."

"You wore a scarf to a barbecue in September once."

"That was an outdoor barbecue at night, Iwa-chan, there's a difference—"

"There's no difference, you're just cold-blooded, it's fine, you don't have to pretend you're not a lizard."

It's stupid. It's exactly the kind of nothing conversation they've had a thousand times, in this apartment and a dozen others, in gyms and cars and the back booths of restaurants that have long since closed down. But something about having it now, tonight, with the suitcase open between them like a wound that hasn't decided whether it's healing or not, makes Oikawa's chest hurt in a way that has nothing to do with the cold in Buenos Aires.

He must go quiet for too long, because Iwaizumi looks up.

"Hey," he says. Softer now. "Where'd you go?"

"Nowhere. I'm here."

"You're not." Iwaizumi sets the folded socks down. "You do this thing where your face keeps talking but the rest of you leaves the room."

"That's a very poetic way of calling me spacey."

"I'm not being poetic, I'm being accurate." He shifts, sitting back on his heels, watching Oikawa with the attention he usually reserves for reading a set before it's even been made — like he already knows where this is going and is just waiting to see if Oikawa will get there on his own. "You've been performing all day, haven't you."

"Everyone keeps saying that to me today."

"Because it's true. Your mom said it too?"

"She has a gift for it."

"She's not wrong." Iwaizumi reaches over, not for Oikawa exactly, just close enough that his hand ends up resting on Oikawa's knee, warm through the denim. "You don't have to, with me. You know that."

"I know."

"So?"

Oikawa looks down at the suitcase. At the shirts folded in neat rows, at the corner where his own grey — no, Iwaizumi's grey shirt — is hidden between two of his own, a small secret he hasn't confessed to yet and doesn't plan to.

"I'm terrified," he says finally, quietly, like admitting it might make it more true. "I keep doing the math. Fourteen hours to Houston. Then Buenos Aires. Then I'm just — there. By myself. In an apartment I've never seen, on a team I've never met, and I don't actually know if I'm good enough for this, Iwa-chan, I know I say I do but I don't, not really, and there's no one there to tell me otherwise."

"I'll tell you otherwise. From here."

"It's not the same."

"No," Iwaizumi agrees. "It's not. But it's still true from here."

Oikawa laughs, short and wet. "You're supposed to argue with me. Convince me I'm being dramatic."

"You are being dramatic. You're also right to be scared. Both things are true, your mom probably already told you that too."

"She did, actually."

"She's a smart woman." Iwaizumi's hand is still on his knee. He doesn't move it. "You're allowed to be scared and still go. That's not a contradiction, that's just — that's what doing something hard looks like from the inside. If you weren't scared I'd be more worried."

"Why?"

"Because it'd mean you didn't understand what you were about to do."

They sit with that for a moment. Outside, the evening traffic hums faintly through the window. Somewhere down the hall, a door closes.

"Can I ask you something," Oikawa says, "and you have to actually answer, not deflect."

"I don't deflect."

"You deflect constantly, it's your whole personality."

"Fine. Ask."

"Are you going to be okay? While I'm gone."

Something moves behind Iwaizumi's eyes, quick, there and gone. "That's not a fair question."

"You said I could ask."

"I said you could ask, I didn't say it'd be easy to answer." He pulls his hand back from Oikawa's knee, not sharply, just enough to fold his arms over them instead, like he needs somewhere else to put his hands. "I don't know. Probably. Eventually. It's going to be weird not having you around to annoy me."

"That's not an answer."

"It's the honest one I've got right now." He meets Oikawa's eyes. "I've had you two streets away for ten years. I don't actually know what it's going to feel like when that's not true anymore. I guess we're both about to find out."

⠁⠂☆⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄☆⠂⠁

They order more food around nine, because the rice balls didn't hold either of them over and neither of them wants to stop sitting on the floor long enough to cook anything real. Curry, this time, from the place that delivers slow but tastes like it's worth the wait. They eat out of the containers with the suitcase pushed to one side, and Iwaizumi puts on an old match on Oikawa's laptop — some Adlers game from two seasons back, nothing important, just something to fill the silence that isn't uncomfortable so much as it's heavy.

Oikawa's phone buzzes halfway through a set. Group chat. Matsukawa.

Matsukawa: hey are you dead yet or is that tomorrow

Hanamaki: he's not dead he's probably crying into a suitcase

Oikawa: I am eating curry and watching volleyball like a normal person thank you very much

Matsukawa: is iwaizumi there

Oikawa: yes

Hanamaki: put us on call we want to say bye properly, not this texting bs

Iwaizumi reads over his shoulder without asking, the way he's always done, close enough that Oikawa can feel the warmth of him along one side.

"You want to?" Oikawa asks.

"Might as well. They'll just keep texting until you do."

Oikawa calls. Matsukawa picks up first, propped against what looks like his kitchen counter, and Hanamaki's face crowds in beside his a second later, too close to the camera, grinning.

"There he is," Hanamaki says. "The future international volleyball sensation."

"Don't," Oikawa says, but he's smiling despite himself.

"We're serious," Matsukawa says. "We looked up the team. You're gonna be good for them."

"You looked them up?"

"Obviously we looked them up, what do you think we do all day." Hanamaki leans further into frame. "Iwaizumi, tell him to stop looking like he's about to throw up on camera, it's stressing me out."

"He's fine," Iwaizumi says. "He's always like this before something matters."

"I'm right here," Oikawa says.

"We know," they say, almost in unison, and it's such a specifically them thing to do that Oikawa laughs for real this time, something in his chest loosening for the first time all day.

They talk for almost forty minutes. About nothing that matters and everything that does — Matsukawa's job, Hanamaki's terrible new haircut that he insists is intentional, a promise, half-joking and half not, that they'll fly out to see him play once he's settled. Iwaizumi mostly listens, arm braced against Oikawa's on the floor, occasionally cutting in to correct something Oikawa's exaggerating or to needle Hanamaki about the haircut, and Oikawa watches him more than he watches the screen. Watches the easy way he laughs at Matsukawa's dry jokes. Watches him go quiet, just for a second, when Hanamaki says, offhand, you're gonna miss him, huh, like it's not really a question.

"Obviously," Iwaizumi says, and doesn't elaborate, and none of them push it, because they've all known him long enough to know that's as much as he's going to give away with an audience.

Near the end of the call, Oikawa's throat goes tight without warning. "I'm scared," he says, quieter than he means to, and the three of them go still on the other end of the line.

"Yeah," Matsukawa says, gently, no teasing in it now. "We know."

"You're allowed to be," Hanamaki adds. "But you're also going to be fine. You've been fine every other time something scared you."

"Call us," Matsukawa says. "Doesn't have to be often. Just — don't be a stranger."

"I won't."

"You better not," Hanamaki says, and his voice cracks on it, just slightly, before he clears his throat and covers it with a joke about Oikawa needing to learn Spanish curse words so he can properly complain about his coach.

When the call ends, the apartment feels quieter than it did before, the way rooms do after they've been full of noise. Iwaizumi doesn't say anything for a while. Just closes the laptop, sets it aside, and looks at Oikawa in a way that makes Oikawa's skin feel too warm.

"What?" Oikawa asks.

"Nothing." Iwaizumi looks away first. "You're going to be fine, is all. Everyone who actually knows you can see it. You're the only one who can't."

⠁⠂⠄☆⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂☆⠄⠂⠁

The volleyball comes up almost by accident.

Oikawa's rearranging the closet, deciding at the last minute that he wants to bring one more box of old photos, and his hand knocks into a box of textbooks that hasn't been touched since university. Iwaizumi, digging through the shelf above it for a jacket Oikawa swears he owns and can't find, freezes.

"Is that—"

"What?"

Iwaizumi crouches, pushes the textbooks aside, and pulls out the volleyball. Old, worn, half-deflated, the Seijoh logo faded almost to nothing.

"I forgot you still had this," he says.

"I'd never throw it out." Oikawa takes it from him, turns it over in his hands. The leather is cool, familiar, and his thumb finds the loose seam automatically, like it's done it a thousand times, because it has. "You gave it to me, remember? Third year. After we stayed late running serves."

"I remember." Iwaizumi sits back against the closet door, watching him hold it. "You cried about it, if I recall."

"I did not cry."

"You got very quiet and your eyes got shiny, which is your version of crying."

"That's slander."

"It's observation." Iwaizumi's mouth curves, but his eyes stay soft, watching Oikawa's thumb trace the seam over and over. "I meant it, you know. What I said back then."

"That I'm not doing this alone."

"Yeah." He reaches out, not for the ball, just to rest his hand briefly over Oikawa's where it's holding it. "Still true. Doesn't matter how many kilometers you put between us."

Oikawa doesn't trust his voice enough to answer that directly. "I'm bringing it," he says instead. "The ball."

"Obviously you're bringing it. What kind of question is that."

"It's not practical."

"When has that ever stopped you." Iwaizumi's hand is still over his. "Bring it. Keep it wherever you end up. Let it be the stupidest, most sentimental thing in an otherwise professional athlete's apartment."

"You say that like you're not the one who gave it to me because you're the sentimental one."

"I never said I wasn't sentimental. I said I don't announce it." He pulls his hand back, finally, and stands, offering a hand down to Oikawa, who takes it and lets himself be pulled up. "Come on. Suitcase isn't going to finish packing itself, and it's almost midnight."

They finish around 12:20, the volleyball tucked into the outer pocket of the carry-on where it'll be easy to reach, and by then neither of them is talking much, the tiredness and the weight of the day catching up all at once. Iwaizumi checks his phone, sees the time, and something in his posture changes — the shift of a person remembering that they have to leave eventually, and that eventually is now.

"I should get going," he says, not moving.

"Yeah," Oikawa says, not moving either.

Neither of them moves for another few minutes.

Eventually Iwaizumi stands, stretches, offers a hand to pull Oikawa up from the floor one more time. They walk to the door together, slower than the distance requires, and at the threshold Iwaizumi stops, turns back.

"I'll see you tomorrow," he says. "Before you leave. I want to see you off properly, not just — this."

"You don't have to."

"I know I don't have to." He says it like that settles it. "I'll be here."

"Okay."

He lingers a second longer than a normal goodbye requires, hand on the doorframe, like he's deciding whether to say something else. Whatever it is, he doesn't say it. Just reaches out and squeezes Oikawa's shoulder, firm and brief, and says, "Get some sleep, idiot," before he turns and heads down the hall.

Oikawa watches him go until the stairwell door swings shut behind him. Then he closes his own door, leans his forehead against the wood, and breathes. ⠁⠂⠄☆⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂☆⠄⠂⠁

Alone in the apartment, waiting for whatever the rest of the night is going to be, Oikawa lets himself sink backward through a decade he's about to put an ocean between himself and.

He thinks of sixteen. The Seijoh gym, everyone else gone home for the night, Iwaizumi catching set after set without once complaining about the extra hour even though Oikawa knew he had homework waiting, a mother worrying, better things he could've been doing with his evening. He never left first. Not once, in three years of extra practices. Oikawa used to time it, privately, a small superstitious ritual — however long he decided to stay, Iwaizumi stayed exactly as long, like leaving before him was a rule neither of them had agreed to out loud but both of them kept anyway.

He thinks of nineteen. His university dorm room, two in the morning, a single question mark texted with no context because he didn't have the words for what he actually needed and didn't think he'd need to explain it. Iwaizumi showed up anyway, no explanation asked, climbed into a narrow dorm bed built for one person and stayed until morning, close enough that Oikawa could feel him breathing, steady and certain, a reminder that some things don't require distance to prove they're real.

He thinks of twenty-two. Graduation. Standing outside the gym after the ceremony, watching everyone else take photos with their families, and Iwaizumi appearing at his elbow with two convenience store coffees and the understanding that sometimes the important moments happen in the margins, not the center. They sat on the curb for an hour, not talking about anything that mattered, and it mattered more than any of the official celebrations because it was just them, the way it had always been just them, even in rooms full of other people.

He thinks of twenty-three, drunk at Hanamaki's birthday party, Iwaizumi's arm slung heavy over his shoulders, saying you're my best friend like it was a revelation instead of something they'd both already known for years, said out loud only because the alcohol had worn down whatever kept it unsaid the rest of the time. Oikawa remembers laughing, remembers saying something deflective and stupid back, remembers wishing, even through the haze of it, that he'd said something truer.

He thinks of twenty-five. The knee injury that should've ended his career. Three months of physical therapy that felt like drowning. Iwaizumi showing up to every single appointment, even the ones Oikawa told him not to come to, sitting in the waiting room with a book he never actually read because he was too busy watching the door, making sure Oikawa didn't leave early, didn't give up, didn't let the fear win.

He thinks of twenty-seven. The contract offer from Argentina. The email that changed everything. Sitting in this apartment, staring at the screen, unable to move, unable to think, unable to do anything except call Iwaizumi and say, "I don't know what to do," and Iwaizumi saying, without hesitation, "Yes, you do. You've always known. You're just scared to do it."

He thinks of last year — Iwaizumi asleep on this exact couch, mouth open, shirt riding up at the hip, and the very deliberate decision Oikawa made not to wake him. Just got a blanket instead, draped it over him carefully, failed to keep him asleep anyway. Thanks for letting me stay, Iwaizumi had mumbled, already half back under, and Oikawa remembers thinking, with a clarity that scared him a little, as if I would ever make you leave.

And he thinks of tonight. Iwaizumi showing up with convenience store food and the determination to sit on Oikawa's floor one more time, to repack a suitcase that didn't need repacking, to fill the hours with the kind of nothing that's actually everything, because that's what ten years looks like when you strip away all the performance and pretense: it's showing up. Over and over. In the big moments and the small ones. In the celebrations and the failures.

Ten years condensed into a handful of nights, all of them adding up to the same simple fact: Iwaizumi has never once needed to be asked to show up. He just has. Every time. Without being asked, without complaint, without ever making Oikawa feel like his need was an imposition instead of just a fact of their friendship, as ordinary and unremarkable as breathing.

He picks up his phone. Types out a message.

Oikawa: thank you for tonight

Oikawa: for all of it

Oikawa: for ten years of all of it

The reply comes almost immediately, like Iwaizumi was waiting for it.

Iwaizumi: you don't have to thank me for that

Iwaizumi: that's just what we do

And that, Oikawa thinks, is exactly the point. It's not a favor. It's not a debt. It's just what they do, what they've always done, what they're going to keep doing regardless of how many time zones end up between them.

He sets the phone down and lies back on the bed, fully clothed, staring at the ceiling. Tomorrow he gets on a plane. Tomorrow everything changes. But tonight, in this apartment, in this moment, he lets himself hold onto the shape of the decade that came before it.

Ten years of a person who shows up. That's not something a plane ticket can undo.

⠁⠂⠄⠄☆⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁☆⠄⠄⠂⠁

The apartment is quiet in the way it gets late at night when you're the only person awake in the building, or at least the only person awake who's thinking too loud to sleep. Oikawa lies on his bed, still fully dressed, staring at the ceiling and trying to convince his body that rest is a thing it's allowed to do.

It doesn't work.

At 12:47 he gives up, gets up, and starts moving through the apartment one more time. Not packing (the suitcase is done, zipped, final) but checking. The way you check a door three times before leaving even though you know it's locked.

He checks the bathroom. Toothbrush, packed. Razor, packed. The small toiletries bag his mother insisted he needed even though he was planning to just buy everything when he got there.

He checks the kitchen. Empty now, the fridge unplugged, the counters wiped clean. It already looks like a place nobody lives, which he supposes is the point.

He checks the closet. Most of his clothes are in the suitcase, but there are still hangers with shirts he decided not to bring, jackets that didn't make the cut, the accumulated evidence of a life that's about to be put on pause.

His hand brushes against something soft. He pulls it out. Another shirt. Grey, worn, definitely not his.

He stares at it for a long moment, confused, because he already packed Iwaizumi's shirt, he knows he did, he remembers folding it carefully and tucking it between his own. But here's another one, hanging in his closet like it's been here all along and he just didn't notice.

How many of Iwaizumi's shirts does he have?

He brings it to his face without thinking. It smells the same as the other one — detergent, cologne, the underneath smell that's just Iwaizumi, a decade of proximity that Oikawa's body recognizes before his brain has time to name it. Ten years of a person condensed into the memory of what he smells like.

He folds it anyway. Opens the suitcase. Tucks it in next to the first one, hidden between his own clothes where nobody will see.

Two shirts. He's bringing two of Iwaizumi's shirts to Argentina.

He zips the suitcase closed again. Pats it once, like that makes it official. Then he sits on the edge of the bed with his phone in his hand and doesn't call anyone.

There's a knock at the door.

Oikawa's head snaps up. For a second he thinks he imagined it, because who knocks at 12:51 AM, but then it comes again. Three times. Soft but deliberate.

He knows that knock.

He's at the door before he's fully decided to move, hand on the knob, heart doing something complicated in his chest. He opens it.

Iwaizumi is standing in the hallway, still in the same clothes from earlier, looking like he walked here without fully deciding to, like his body made the choice before his brain caught up.

"I know I said I'd see you tomorrow," Iwaizumi says. "But I got halfway home and I couldn't — I didn't want the last time I saw you to be me leaving. I wanted it to be me staying."

Oikawa steps back. Iwaizumi comes in. The door closes behind them and suddenly the apartment feels smaller, more full, like it's been waiting for this.

They stand in the entryway for a moment, neither of them quite sure what to do now that Iwaizumi's here.

"I don't know what I'm doing here," Iwaizumi admits.

"That's okay," Oikawa says. "I don't know either."

"I just needed to see you one more time. Before—"

"Before I leave."

"Yeah."

They end up on the couch, close, not quite touching everywhere, the space between them measured in inches and years and everything they've never said out loud.

"You didn't have to come back," Oikawa says.

"I know."

"You already said goodbye."

"I know."

"So why—"

"Because I didn't want to." Iwaizumi's voice is quiet, rough around the edges. "I didn't want the last thing I said to you to be 'get some sleep, idiot.' I wanted — I don't know what I wanted. I just knew I couldn't leave it like that."

Oikawa's throat tightens. "Iwa-chan—"

"Let me finish." Iwaizumi turns to face him, and there's something in his expression Oikawa's never seen before, or maybe he has but never let himself look at it directly. "You're getting on a plane tomorrow. You're going to Argentina. You're going to be amazing. I know that. Everyone knows that. But I need you to know something else too."

"What?"

"That this—" He gestures between them, a small, helpless movement. "Whatever this is. It doesn't change because you're getting on a plane. It doesn't change because there's going to be an ocean between us."

"I know that."

"Do you? Because I need you to actually know it, not just say you know it." Iwaizumi's hands are clenched in his lap, like he's physically holding himself together. "I need you to know I'm not going anywhere. That you can call me at three in the morning your time, some ungodly hour here, and I'll answer. That you can have the worst practice of your life and I'll listen to you complain about it for an hour. That you can need me. From there. And it doesn't change anything."

"You've been my constant for ten years," Iwaizumi goes on, before Oikawa can answer. "You're the person I call when something good happens. You're the person who makes everything make sense, even when you're being an idiot about it." He laughs, but it sounds broken. "And tomorrow you're getting on a plane and I'm supposed to just be okay with that."

"Iwa-chan—"

"I'm not done." His eyes are bright, close to tears but not quite. "I need you to know distance doesn't change anything that matters. We've been us for ten years. We're going to keep being us for the ten after that. Geography doesn't change that."

"How do you know that?"

"Because it's us." He says it like it's obvious.

"What are we?"

The question hangs between them. In ten years, through everything, he's never asked it.

Iwaizumi's hand slides from his shoulder to the back of his neck — that gesture, the one that's meant I'm here, you're not alone for as long as Oikawa can remember.

"We're us," Iwaizumi says simply. "We've always been us."

It isn't an answer. It's everything.

"I'm so scared," Oikawa whispers. "I'm so scared of losing this. Of losing you."

"You're not going to lose me. I'm not going anywhere." Iwaizumi's other hand comes up, both hands framing Oikawa's face now, thumbs brushing under eyes that have started, without permission, to burn. "You think an ocean is going to make me stop caring about you? That's not how this works."

"How does it work?"

"I don't know. We're going to figure it out. Together. From different continents." His voice is steady, certain, the way it always is when Oikawa needs it to be. "Because that's what we do. We figure things out."

Oikawa laughs, wet and broken. "That's a terrible plan."

"It's the only plan we've got." His thumbs are still moving, gentle, repetitive, grounding. "But it's going to work. Because we're stubborn. Both of us. And we don't know how to quit things that matter."

The tears come fast now, hot, and Oikawa doesn't try to stop them. Iwaizumi's hand stays on his face, keeping him there, keeping him present.

Oikawa's hand finds Iwaizumi's free hand. Their fingers tangle together, and it isn't just holding anymore — it's something new and ancient at once.

Iwaizumi's thumb moves, tracing a slow line across his knuckles, deliberate, careful, like he's mapping terrain he needs to remember.

"What are you doing?" Oikawa asks.

"Memorizing," Iwaizumi says. "The shape of your hand. So I can remember it when you're gone."

"Let me have this," he adds, quieter, when Oikawa doesn't answer. So Oikawa lets him — stands still while Iwaizumi maps his palm with deliberate touches, finding every line and callus, every place the skin is rough from years of setting a ball into the exact space someone else needs it to be. And Oikawa memorizes too — the warmth of Iwaizumi's hand, the small scar on his thumb from a kitchen accident two years ago, the calluses that mirror his own.

"I don't want you to go," Iwaizumi says, into his shoulder now, arms wrapped around him. "I know that's selfish. I know this is your dream and I should just be happy for you, and I am — I'm so proud of you I don't have words for it. But I also don't want you to go."

"I don't want to go either."

"Liar."

"I'm not lying." Oikawa's voice is thick, unsteady. "I want Argentina. I want the dream. But I don't want to leave this. I don't want to leave you."

"And when you get there," Iwaizumi says, pulling back just enough to look at him, eyes fierce now, "when you're playing in front of crowds, doing everything you've dreamed about — remember something. You earned this. Not because you're talented, though you are. Not because you worked hard, though you did. You earned this because you never gave up. Even when your knee gave out. Even when it would've been easier to quit. You kept going. That's why you're getting on that plane tomorrow."

"I mean it," he says. "Don't you dare get to Argentina and start doubting yourself. You belong there. You always have."

"I'm not brave," Oikawa says, wiping his face.

"You are. You're just also an idiot who doesn't realize it."

Oikawa laughs, wet and broken but real. "Asshole."

"Yeah." Iwaizumi's hand tightens on his neck. "But I'm your asshole."

They stay like that a long time — Iwaizumi's hands on his face, then his shoulders, then just holding on, until Oikawa's breathing evens out and the tightness in his chest loosens enough to let him breathe properly again.

"I'm also excited," Oikawa admits into his shoulder. "Is that terrible? That I'm sad and excited at the same time?"

"No. That's just what it means to be human. You can feel two things at once. They don't cancel each other out."

"Okay," Oikawa says finally. "Okay. I'm okay."

Iwaizumi studies him, then nods. "Yeah. You are."

"You should sleep," Iwaizumi says, after a while.

"I can't."

"Try anyway."

"Will you stay?"

"Yeah." No hesitation at all. "I'll stay."

They move to the bed without discussing it, the same way they've done a hundred times before — after late practices, after matches, after nights when one of them needed the other and didn't have to explain why. Oikawa lies down first, and Iwaizumi lies beside him, close enough that Oikawa can feel the warmth of him along his side.

"Iwa-chan," Oikawa says into the darkness.

"Yeah?"

"Thank you. For coming back."

"You don't have to thank me for that."

"I know. But I'm going to anyway."

Iwaizumi's hand finds his in the dark, fingers threading together, holding on. "Get some sleep. Tomorrow's going to be hard enough without you being exhausted."

"I don't think I can sleep."

"Try anyway. I'm right here."

And somehow, with Iwaizumi's hand in his and the steady sound of his breathing beside him, Oikawa does. Not deeply, not peacefully, but enough. Enough to make it through the night. Enough to face tomorrow.

Enough to believe that maybe, just maybe, they're going to be okay.

⠁⠂⠄⠄☆⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁☆⠄⠄⠂⠁

At 6:00 a.m.

He doesn't sleep, not really. He tries — lies still beside Iwaizumi, who falls asleep almost immediately the way he always does, the enviable ability to just shut off when his body decides it's time — but Oikawa's mind won't stop spinning.

He thinks about the flight. Fourteen hours to Houston, then another ten to Buenos Aires. Twenty-four hours of being suspended between two lives, neither here nor there, just in transit.

He thinks about the apartment waiting for him. Fourth floor, furnished, near the training center. He's seen photos but photos don't tell you what a place smells like, what the light looks like in the morning.

He thinks about the team. Names he's memorized from the roster, faces he's studied in photos and videos. But knowing names and faces isn't the same as knowing people, and he's going to have to learn them all over again from scratch.

He thinks about his mother. About the way she hugged him today, holding on just a little too long. About the way she gave him permission to be scared and brave at the same time.

He thinks about Matsukawa and Hanamaki. About their faces on the video call earlier, trying to be funny and supportive and failing to hide how much they're going to miss him.

He thinks about Iwaizumi, asleep beside him. About ten years of showing up. About the volleyball with the loose seam. About the two shirts hidden in his suitcase, the quiet comfort of having something that smells like home even when home is about to be ten thousand kilometers away.

The sky outside starts to lighten. Not sunrise yet, but the pre-dawn grey that means morning is coming whether he's ready or not.

At 6:00 his alarm goes off, and it feels less like waking up than like being handed a verdict.

⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂☆⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁☆⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁

He sits up slowly. The volleyball, which he'd set on the nightstand before lying down, catches the early light. Iwaizumi stirs beside him, not quite awake but getting there.

"Morning," Iwaizumi says, voice rough with sleep.

"Morning."

"You sleep at all?"

"A little." A lie, but a kind one. Iwaizumi probably knows it's a lie but doesn't call it, just sits up and runs a hand through his hair, making it stick up in three different directions.

They move through the morning in quiet synchronization. Iwaizumi makes coffee while Oikawa showers. While Iwaizumi checks the suitcase one more time, making sure nothing got left behind, Oikawa walks through the apartment slowly, saying a quiet goodbye to it — the kitchen counter, wiped clean of every trace of last night's coffee cans; the couch, still faintly holding the shape of where they'd sat; the doorframe by the bedroom, smooth under his palm from a decade of hands passing through in a hurry.

"Goodbye," he says out loud, to the three years he spent here. It sounds small in the empty room.

At 7:30, Oikawa's mother arrives. She takes one look at Iwaizumi and doesn't ask why he's there, just nods like she expected it, like of course Iwaizumi would be here for this.

"Ready?" she asks Oikawa.

"No," he says honestly.

"Good. If you were ready I'd be worried." She picks up one of the bags. "Come on. The taxi's waiting."

The ride to Narita is quiet. Oikawa sits in the back between his mother and Iwaizumi, watching Tokyo pass by the window — the convenience store where Iwaizumi bought coffee last night, the ramen shop they've eaten at a hundred times, the train station where he's caught the morning train for three years. The streets he's known his whole life, becoming memory in real time.

His mother holds his hand. Iwaizumi's shoulder presses against his. Neither of them says anything, but they don't need to. Their presence is enough.

At the airport, his mother hugs him first. Long, tight, the kind of hug that's trying to say everything words can't. When she pulls back, her eyes are wet but her smile is steady.

"Call me when you land," she says.

"I will."

"And eat properly. Real food, not just convenience store meals."

"I will."

"And don't forget to—" Her voice breaks slightly. She takes a breath, steadies herself. "Don't forget that we love you. All of us. No matter how far away you are."

"I won't forget." His own voice is unsteady now. "I promise."

She kisses his forehead, the way she did when he was small, and then steps back, giving him space to say goodbye to Iwaizumi.

Iwaizumi doesn't hug him. Not here, not in public, not with Oikawa's mother watching. But he grips Oikawa's shoulder, firm and steady, and looks him in the eye.

"You've got this," he says.

"I don't feel like I've got this."

"You do anyway." His hand tightens slightly. "And if you don't, call me. I'll remind you."

"Iwa-chan—"

"Go. Before you miss your flight." But he doesn't let go of Oikawa's shoulder. Not yet. "And Oikawa?"

"Yeah?"

"Make them wonder how they ever played without you."

It's nearly the exact thing Iwaizumi said last night, but hearing it again, here, in the airport with his suitcase at his feet and his future waiting on the other side of security, makes it feel more real. More possible.

"I'll try," Oikawa says.

"Don't try. Do." Iwaizumi's hand finally drops from his shoulder. "Now go. I'll see you in August."

"August," Oikawa repeats, like saying it makes it real.

"August," Iwaizumi confirms.

Oikawa picks up his bags. Takes one last look at his mother, at Iwaizumi, at the two people who have been his home for as long as he can remember. Then he turns and walks toward security, each step feeling heavier than the last.

He doesn't look back. If he looks back, he won't be able to keep walking.

At security, he shows his passport, his ticket. The agent waves him through. He puts his bags on the conveyor belt, walks through the metal detector, collects his things on the other side. And just like that, he's through. In the part of the airport where only people with tickets can go.

⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁☆⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂☆⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁

Narita is chaos at 8:47 in the morning. Families with too much luggage, businesspeople moving with the efficient speed of people who do this every week, tourists trying to figure out which line they're supposed to be in. Oikawa finds his gate on the departures board — NH1187 to Houston, connecting to Buenos Aires, boarding at 13:00 — and does the math without meaning to. Twenty-three hours of travel, total. By the time he lands, it will already be tomorrow.

His phone buzzes. Group chat.

Matsukawa: you on the plane yet

Oikawa: not yet. gate's a five hour wait, apparently

Hanamaki: don't forget to text when you land

Hanamaki: both times

Hanamaki: all three times? how many times do you land

Matsukawa: houston and then buenos aires so twice

Matsukawa: unless the plane crashes in which case zero times

Hanamaki: HELPFUL

Oikawa: very reassuring thank you

Matsukawa: seriously though. text us

Matsukawa: iwaizumi's going to be weird if we don't hear from you

Hanamaki: he's going to miss you

Hanamaki: we all are

Hanamaki: but like. especially him

Oikawa: I know

The conversation trails off. Oikawa stares at his phone, at the messages, at the way his friends are trying to take care of him from a distance. He types out a response, deletes it, types another one.

Oikawa: thank you

Oikawa: for everything

Oikawa: for being you

Matsukawa: oh god he's getting emotional

Hanamaki: OIKAWA NO

Hanamaki: save the emotions for when you're actually on the plane

Oikawa: too late

Matsukawa: we love you too

Matsukawa: now get on the plane before we all start crying

Oikawa: I love you both. even when you're idiots

Hanamaki: ESPECIALLY when we're idiots

Matsukawa: go. we'll talk when you land

Oikawa puts the phone away. His eyes are wet. He wipes them quickly and takes a breath.

With five hours to fill, he wanders without much direction. Buys coffee he doesn't taste from a chain that exists in every airport in the world. Ends up, eventually, in a bookstore, standing in front of the sports section without really seeing it. His eyes land on a volleyball manga he read in high school, the one that made him want to work harder, be better, prove something. He picks it up, flips through familiar art, thinks about buying it for the flight. Puts it back instead. He doesn't need someone else's story about wanting this badly enough. He has his own to write now.

In the toy section, a small stuffed bear in a volleyball uniform catches his eye. He buys it and has it shipped to his sister's address without really deciding to.

"For your son?" the cashier asks.

"My nephew."

"He'll love it."

He hopes so. Hopes Takeru opens it in a few days and knows his uncle in Argentina hasn't forgotten him.

Around noon his mother calls. He tells her he's fine, that he's eaten, that he's just waiting now. She asks, carefully, if he's talked to Iwaizumi today.

"We said everything already. Last night, and again at the gate this morning."

"Good," she says. "That's how it should be."

The gate area fills slowly and then all at once. Boarding starts at one. Oikawa stays seated through the first two calls and stands only when his own zone is announced, joining the line with his carry-on slung over one shoulder, the volleyball a small solid weight against his ribs through the fabric.

He hands over his boarding pass. The gate agent scans it, smiles, hands it back. "Have a good flight."

"Thank you."

The jetway is a white tunnel that curves slightly, and he can't see the plane until he's almost at the door. Row 42. Window seat, because he requested window, because he wants to watch Japan disappear beneath him, wants to see the moment when home becomes memory. He stows the carry-on, buckles in, presses his palm flat against the cold oval window while the cabin fills around him.

The safety demonstration plays out in front of him, practiced and pleasant. The captain's voice comes over the intercom — eleven hours to Houston, cruising at altitude, smooth skies expected — and then the plane is moving, backing away from the gate, turning, taxiing toward the runway.

Oikawa's hand stays on the window as the engines build to a roar he can feel in his sternum, as the plane picks up speed and the runway blurs beneath them.

The nose lifts. The wheels leave the ground.

Tokyo falls away beneath him — the airport, the roads, the bay, all of it shrinking into something that looks like a map instead of a life. All of it getting smaller. All of it, already, becoming memory.

They're at cruising altitude. The seatbelt sign dings off.

Oikawa reaches down, unzips the carry-on, and pulls out the volleyball. Holds it in his lap. Runs his thumb over the loose seam, the leather still cool from the cargo hold's air conditioning.

So you remember, Iwaizumi had said, ten years and one apartment ago, that you're not doing this alone.

He's alone right now, technically. Thirty-five thousand feet up, flying away from everything he's ever known, with an ocean opening up beneath him and nobody in the seat beside him.

But he doesn't feel alone. Not entirely. Not with the ball in his hands and the ghost of a hand on the back of his neck and ten years of we're us, we've always been us riding along with him in the cargo hold of his own chest.

He closes his eyes. Lets himself, finally, rest.

⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁☆⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂☆⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁

Sleep comes in pieces. Not real sleep, not the kind that erases time — just the thin, fragile kind where the engine hum stays audible even through a dream, where every small patch of turbulence jolts him half-awake before he sinks back down.

He dreams of the Seijoh gym. The smell of floor wax and rubber soles. The sound of a ball hitting the court, rhythmic, hypnotic. He's setting, though he can't see the ball, just feels it leave his fingertips already knowing where it's going.

Iwaizumi is there, younger, seventeen maybe, the same intensity in his eyes that's never once changed. One more, he says. Give me one more. So Oikawa sets, again and again, and they could do this forever, and in the dream they do — until the gym starts to fade at the edges, the walls going translucent, the floor turning to cloud, and Oikawa is setting into empty air, and Iwaizumi is gone, and the ball just keeps falling.

He wakes with his heart pounding and his hands locked around the volleyball hard enough to ache.

For a second he doesn't know where he is. The curved ceiling is wrong. The narrow space is wrong. Then it comes back — the plane, the flight, the fact that he's really gone.

The cabin is dim, most passengers asleep. He lifts the window shade a few inches. Nothing but ocean below, blue-grey and endless in every direction, no land, no ships, no reference point at all. They're high enough that the curve of the earth is visible, and Oikawa is suspended somewhere in the middle of it, belonging to neither shore.

He looks down at the ball in his lap — the worn leather, the faded logo, the seam his thumb keeps finding without permission. He's been holding it since takeoff, apparently, even through sleep. His subconscious wouldn't let him put it down.

So you remember you're not doing this alone.

But he understands something now, turning the words over at thirty-five thousand feet, that he didn't quite understand last night in the noise of the actual goodbye. Iwaizumi was never just a person who happened to live two train stops away. He's a way of being loved that doesn't require proximity to be true — the knowledge that someone sees every difficult, unglamorous part of you and chooses you anyway. That's not something distance can erase, because it was never built out of distance to begin with. It was built out of choosing, over and over, for ten years, to show up.

Buenos Aires won't change that. It'll just make the showing up look different. A phone call instead of a knock at the door. Less automatic. More deliberate.

Maybe that's not worse. Maybe, in its own strange way, it's more honest — because now they'll have to actually say the things they've spent a decade not saying, instead of letting proximity say it for them.

The seatbelt sign chimes on. A small patch of turbulence bumps through the cabin, nothing serious, a brief shudder and then stillness again. Oikawa's grip tightens on the ball for a second, out of instinct, then loosens.

They're still flying. Still moving forward. Still suspended between one life and the next.

He closes his eyes again, not to sleep this time. Just to rest, and to let himself, for a little while, believe he can actually do this.

⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁☆⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄☆⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁

Eleven hours after takeoff, the wheels hit tarmac in Houston with a jolt that travels up through his spine.

Around him, the cabin comes alive at once — overhead bins clicking open, phones chiming back to life after eleven hours of airplane mode, the collective exhale of two hundred people arriving somewhere. Oikawa stays seated a moment longer than he needs to, letting the aisle clear, letting his body remember how to be a person who isn't strapped into a chair.

Through the window, Houston spreads out under a sun too bright, too warm, for whatever hour his body still thinks it is. Everything looks bigger here — wider terminals, wider sky, the tarmac shimmering with heat in a way it never does in Tokyo in June.

His connection to Buenos Aires doesn't board for another three hours. He has time. He has, if he's honest, too much of it.

Customs is a long, slow-moving line of people from a dozen countries, all mid-transit, all going somewhere else. The officer barely looks at him, stamps his passport, waves him through. And then he's in America — officially, briefly, a guest passing through on his way to somewhere that matters more.

He finds his next gate — Terminal E, Gate 12, departure to Buenos Aires at 6:45 PM — and claims a quiet corner of chairs nearby. His legs are stiff. His neck aches from eleven hours at a bad angle. His mouth tastes like recycled cabin air.

He pulls out his phone. Connects to the terminal wifi. And immediately it starts buzzing, notifications arriving all at once, eleven hours' worth of the world catching up to him.

His mother: Did you land safely? Call me when you can.

Matsukawa: yo you alive?

Hanamaki: don't forget about us when you're famous

Takeru: ARE YOU IN ARGENTINA YET

And then — Iwaizumi. Three messages, sent hours apart, timed like someone tracking a flight path.

Iwaizumi (sent 2 hours after takeoff): You're probably over the ocean right now. Hope you're sleeping.

Iwaizumi (sent 6 hours after that): Halfway there. You've got this.

Iwaizumi (sent an hour ago): You should be landing soon. Let me know when you're on the ground.

Oikawa reads them twice. Iwaizumi tracked his flight. Knew when he took off, when he'd be halfway, when he'd land, and sent messages into a phone he knew was in airplane mode, knowing Oikawa wouldn't see them for hours, and sent them anyway.

So you remember you're not doing this alone.

His hands aren't quite steady as he types back. Landed in Houston. Three hour layover. Then Buenos Aires.

The reply comes fast, like Iwaizumi had been sitting with the phone in his hand.

Iwaizumi: How are you doing?

Oikawa looks around the terminal — Americans walking past speaking too fast for him to fully follow, a departure board listing cities he's never seen, a Starbucks and a Hudson News that look almost like the ones back home but not quite.

Oikawa: Scared. Excited. Both.

Iwaizumi: Yeah. That sounds right.

Oikawa: I have to get on another plane in three hours.

Iwaizumi: I know. You can do it.

Oikawa: How do you know?

Iwaizumi: Because you already did it once today. And you'll do it again tomorrow. And the day after that. Until it stops being scary and starts being normal.

Oikawa closes his eyes, breathes, opens them again.

Oikawa: Thank you. For everything. For last night. For the messages. For — He stops typing, deletes it, tries again. For being you.

The three dots appear, disappear, appear again.

Iwaizumi: Go kick Argentina's ass, Shittykawa.

Oikawa laughs out loud, wet and startled, drawing a glance from the woman in the next seat. He types back, I will, Iwa-chan, and puts the phone face-down on his knee, and lets himself sit with it for a minute — the ordinary miracle of a person who tracks your flight path so he knows exactly when you'll need to hear from him.

He eats a sandwich he doesn't taste from a shop near the gate. Buys a bottle of water he'll barely touch. Watches planes queue for takeoff through the window, one after another, all of them going somewhere.

When boarding is called for Buenos Aires, he's already standing.

⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁☆⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄☆⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁

The flight to Buenos Aires is smaller than the one before it, the cabin narrower, the crew speaking Spanish first and English second in a way that makes Oikawa feel, for the first time, like he's actually leaving the version of the world he understands.

He doesn't sleep much on this leg. Ten hours, cruising south along the spine of two continents he's only ever seen on a map, the ocean giving way somewhere in the dark to land he can't see but knows is there. He watches an in-flight movie with the sound off and Japanese subtitles that don't quite match the dialogue. He eats a meal he doesn't taste. He takes the volleyball out of the carry-on once, just to hold it, and puts it back before the flight attendant can ask him to stow it for the descent.

Somewhere over Brazil, he finally sleeps — real sleep this time, deep enough that he doesn't dream, deep enough that when the pilot announces their descent into Ministro Pistarini in accented English, he startles awake with no memory of the hours in between.

The seatbelt sign chimes on. Outside the window, clouds break apart to reveal a city he's never seen from the ground — wide brown river merging into an even wider estuary, grids of streets fanning out from a center he can't identify yet, a sprawl that looks nothing like Tokyo's density and nothing like Houston's flat suburban stretch either. It looks like its own thing entirely. It looks like somewhere he's going to have to learn from scratch.

The wheels touch down just after 6 AM local time, though his body has no idea what time that actually is anymore. Somewhere over the last twenty-three hours, Tuesday became Wednesday without his permission.

⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂☆⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄☆⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁

Customs takes almost an hour. The line moves in fits and starts, and Oikawa stands in it half-asleep, passport in hand, watching officers wave through travelers in a language he's spent the last two months trying to learn from an app on his phone and understands maybe one word in five of when it's spoken at actual speed.

When it's his turn, the officer looks at his passport, looks at him, asks something too fast to catch.

"Lo siento," Oikawa says, the phrase he's practiced more than any other. "Mi español no es muy bueno todavía." My Spanish isn't very good yet.

The officer's expression softens slightly, repeats the question slower. Business or pleasure?

"Trabajo," Oikawa manages. Work. "Voleibol." He mimes a set, feels immediately ridiculous, and the officer laughs — not unkindly — and stamps his passport.

"Bienvenido," he says. Welcome.

Oikawa steps through into the arrivals hall, and it's the same chaos every airport arrivals hall in the world has — families crowded against the barrier, drivers holding handwritten signs, the smell of coffee and diesel and a hundred conversations happening at once in a language that isn't his. He scans the signs without much hope of finding his own name among them, and then he does: a laminated sheet held by a man in a windbreaker with the club's crest on the chest, reading OIKAWA in block letters, the stroke order slightly wrong in a way that makes something in Oikawa's chest loosen instead of tighten.

"¡Oikawa!" the man calls, waving, and then, switching with visible effort into careful English: "Welcome. I am Martín. Club sent me."

"Hi. Thank you. Sorry — my Spanish is bad."

"Is okay." Martín grins, takes the handle of his suitcase before Oikawa can protest. "We fix that. You sleep on plane?"

"A little."

"You look like no." He laughs, easy and unbothered, already walking toward the exit. "Come. Car is close."

Outside, the air hits differently than Tokyo's ever does — cooler, sharper, carrying a smell Oikawa can't place yet but will, eventually, learn to call this city without thinking about it. The sky is doing something between grey and gold, the color of a winter morning somewhere he's never stood before.

He gets in the car. Watches Buenos Aires start to assemble itself outside the window — wide avenues, buildings with iron balconies, graffiti that looks more like murals than vandalism, a city built on a scale and rhythm that has nothing to do with the one he left behind twenty-three hours and one lifetime ago.

His phone buzzes in his pocket. He almost doesn't check it, exhaustion pulling at every part of him, but some reflex he can't override makes him look anyway.

Iwaizumi: landed yet?

It's 6:40 AM here, which makes it — Oikawa does the math slowly, his brain sluggish — 6:40 PM in Tokyo. Iwaizumi, texting on his way home from work, or already home, thinking about him at the exact hour Oikawa is stepping into a new life.

Oikawa: just landed. in a car right now. everything is very green and very cold

Iwaizumi: told you it wasn't that warm

Oikawa: shut up

Iwaizumi: how are you feeling

Oikawa looks out the window. Watches an unfamiliar city slide past at an unfamiliar hour, feels the vertigo of being somewhere his body hasn't caught up to yet.

Oikawa: tired. overwhelmed. a little bit like I might cry in front of this very nice man who picked me up from the airport

Iwaizumi: don't do that, you'll scare him on day one

Oikawa: he seems unshakeable honestly

Iwaizumi: good. let him be unshakeable at you. go get settled. call me tonight, your time, whenever. I don't care what time it is here.

Oikawa: you say that but you have work

Iwaizumi: I don't care. call me.

Oikawa's chest does something complicated, warm and tight at once. Oikawa: okay. I will.

He puts the phone away, and for the first time since the wheels left the ground in Tokyo, lets himself feel something that isn't quite fear and isn't quite grief. Something closer, maybe, to the beginning of curiosity.

⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂☆⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄☆⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁

The apartment is on the fourth floor of a building with no elevator, which Martín apologizes for twice on the way up, hauling Oikawa's suitcase up the stairs himself despite Oikawa's protests.

"Club found this place last month," he explains, slightly out of breath on the third landing. "Furnished. Close to training center — fifteen minute walk. Two other players in this building also, from team. You will meet."

"Thank you. Really. You didn't have to carry that."

"Is my job." Martín waves it off, unlocks the door, pushes it open, and steps back to let Oikawa go in first, like the room belongs to Oikawa already and it's rude to enter it before he does.

It's small. Smaller than the apartment in Tokyo, though it takes Oikawa a moment to place why it feels different beyond the square footage — the light, maybe, coming in low and gold through a window that faces west instead of the north-facing one he had before, or the ceilings, higher than he expected, or simply the fact that every object in it belongs to someone else. A rented bed. A rented couch. A kitchen with pots that have cooked meals he'll never know the story of.

It doesn't smell like anything yet. That's the part that gets him, standing in the doorway with his carry-on still on his shoulder. No ramen, no laundry detergent, no ghost of anyone's cologne. Just the neutral, slightly stale smell of a room that's been empty for a while, waiting for someone to move into it and make it theirs.

"Kitchen is here," Martín says, walking him through with the brisk efficiency of someone who's done this tour many times before, for many players before him. "Bathroom. Bedroom. Wifi password is on the fridge — I write it in big letters so you don't lose it. Training starts Friday, ten AM, someone will come get you Thursday to show you way, don't worry about finding alone first time."

"Friday," Oikawa repeats. Two days from now. He'd expected sooner, dreaded sooner, and now that it's not sooner he doesn't know if he's relieved or worse off for having more time alone in a room that doesn't smell like anything yet.

"You rest today," Martín says, reading something in his face. "Long trip. Tomorrow also rest, or explore, whatever you like. Friday, you work." He claps a hand briefly on Oikawa's shoulder, the gesture landing somewhere between professional and genuinely kind. "Team is good. You will like them. Coach is tough but fair. It will be strange first, then not strange. Everybody says this and it is true every time."

"Everybody?"

"I drive many players from airport." Martín grins. "You are not first. You will not be last. Call office if you need anything, number is on paper by phone. Welcome to Buenos Aires, Oikawa."

And then he's gone, footsteps receding down the stairwell, and the door clicks shut, and Oikawa is alone in a room on the other side of the world for the first time in his life.

⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄☆⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂☆⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁

He doesn't unpack right away. Just sets his bags down by the bed and sits on the edge of the mattress, firmer than the one in Tokyo, a different give under his weight, and looks around at everything that isn't his yet.

The silence is different here than the silence in his old apartment ever was. In Tokyo, silence meant the absence of one person, one set of sounds he knew by heart — Iwaizumi's footsteps in the hall, the refrigerator's particular hum, the traffic pattern outside his window that changed with the time of day in ways he could've mapped from memory. This silence doesn't have an absence shaped into it yet. It's just blank. Waiting to be filled with whatever he fills it with.

He gets up eventually, mostly to have something to do with his hands, and starts unpacking. Shirts into a dresser that smells faintly of cedar. Socks into a drawer that sticks slightly when he opens it, a detail he catalogs without meaning to, already building the private map of a new home the way he once built one for the last place.

He finds Iwaizumi's shirt in the inner pocket where he tucked it two nights ago, folded badly, wedged next to the team photo. He holds it for a long moment before he hangs it in the closet — not folded away in a drawer this time, but hung, visible, the way you hang something you intend to actually look at.

The volleyball goes on the windowsill. It's not practical. It was never going to be practical. He sets it there anyway, catching the last of the gold evening light, and something about seeing it there — worn leather, faded logo, ten years of a person condensed into a half-deflated ball sitting in a window in a city that doesn't know his name yet — makes his throat go tight in a way that isn't only grief.

By the time he's done, the room looks less like a stranger's apartment and more like the beginning of something. Not home. Not yet. But the first few brushstrokes of it.

He showers — the water pressure stronger than he expected, the tiles a pale green he didn't notice on Martín's tour — and stands under it longer than he needs to, the way he did two mornings ago in a bathroom that no longer belongs to him, except this time it isn't grief pulling the shower out, it's just bone-deep exhaustion, having crossed a hemisphere in a day and a half.

When he gets out, it's fully dark outside, and the city has changed shape with the night — lights coming on in windows across the street, the low hum of traffic that sounds different from Tokyo's, a language drifting up from the street below that he'll spend the next year learning to hear as ordinary instead of foreign.

He's hungry, he realizes, distantly, the first real hunger he's felt in two days. He doesn't have groceries. Doesn't know yet where the nearest store is, or what anything on a menu here would say if he could find one. He orders the first thing that comes up on a delivery app he downloaded weeks ago and half-forgot he had, points blindly at a photo of something that looks like it might be empanadas, and sits by the window to wait, the volleyball a dark shape against the glass beside him.

His phone buzzes. His mother, first — Are you settled? Send a photo of the apartment — and he does, a quick shot of the room, the shirt hanging in the closet cropped carefully out of frame. Then Takeru, three exclamation-point-heavy messages about whether Argentina has good animals. Then, a little later, once the food has arrived and he's sitting cross-legged on the unfamiliar couch eating something that turns out to be delicious in a way he wasn't braced for —

Iwaizumi: you alive over there

Oikawa: barely. eating something that might be a meat pie. very good. slightly concerning that I don't know what's in it

Iwaizumi: classic you, eating mystery food alone in a foreign country

Oikawa: I contain multitudes

Iwaizumi: how's the apartment

Oikawa: small. doesn't smell like anything yet. weird not having anyone else's stuff around

Iwaizumi: give it time

Oikawa: I hung your shirt in the closet. thought you should know since you'll never get it back now

There's a pause, the three dots appearing and disappearing twice before an actual reply comes through.

Iwaizumi: good. keep it. it was always more use to you than me anyway

Oikawa: that's very sentimental for you, Iwa-chan

Iwaizumi: don't make it weird

Oikawa: I'm always going to make it weird, that's my whole personality

Iwaizumi: yeah. I know.

Oikawa sets the phone down on the couch cushion beside him and looks around the room — small, unfamiliar, gradually less empty than it was three hours ago. Not home yet. But maybe, if he's patient with it, something that could become that.

His phone buzzes once more before he goes to bed.

Iwaizumi: call me tomorrow. your morning, whenever you're up. I want to hear your voice properly, not just see words on a screen.

Oikawa: okay. I will.

Iwaizumi: goodnight, Shittykawa. proud of you. really.

Oikawa: goodnight, Iwa-chan.

He falls asleep on the unfamiliar couch before he means to, the volleyball still visible on the windowsill in the dark, the shirt hanging quiet and grey in a closet that's slowly, one object at a time, starting to become his.

⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄☆⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂☆⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁

He calls Iwaizumi the next morning, sitting on the floor by the window because the couch feels too much like something borrowed and the floor, at least, feels like his own choice.

Iwaizumi picks up on the second ring, and there's something in Oikawa's chest that unclenches at just the sight of his face on the screen — tired, mid-morning stubble, the slant of light that means he's sitting by his own kitchen window three train stops and one hemisphere away.

"Hey," Iwaizumi says.

"Hey." Oikawa's voice comes out rougher than he means it to. "You look tired."

"You look worse."

"Rude. I just crossed the equator."

"You look worse because you just crossed the equator, I'm being descriptive, not rude." Iwaizumi leans back, and Oikawa can see, behind him, the corner of his own living room — the same couch, the same bookshelf, a life continuing on exactly as it was, which should be comforting and instead makes something in Oikawa's throat go tight. "How was the flight?"

"Long. I slept eventually. Somewhere over Brazil I just — went out."

"Good. You needed it." A pause, Iwaizumi's eyes doing the thing they do when he's deciding how much to ask. "And the apartment?"

"Better today. It smelled like nothing yesterday. Today it smells a little like the empanadas I ate for dinner and a little like your detergent, since I hung the shirt up, so." Oikawa shrugs, feeling suddenly, stupidly shy about it. "Progress."

"Progress," Iwaizumi echoes, and something soft moves across his face before he covers it, the way he always does, with a joke. "You're going to turn that apartment into a shrine to me within a week, aren't you."

"Absolutely not."

"You already have the shirt on display and the volleyball in the window, Oikawa, I've seen the photo your mom apparently forwarded to the group chat."

"She did not—"

"She did. Matsukawa sent it with the caption 'he's already nesting.'"

Oikawa groans and drops his head back against the wall. "I hate all of you."

"You love all of us, that's the problem." Iwaizumi's smile is easy now, real, the tension from two nights ago finally settling into something that looks more like their normal rhythm — teasing instead of grief, familiar instead of final. "Training starts tomorrow?"

"Friday. Someone's picking me up Thursday to show me the way there so I don't get lost on day one."

"Good. Don't get lost."

"I make no promises, I have never once successfully navigated a new city on the first try."

"You navigated Tokyo eventually."

"That took three years and several humiliating incidents involving the wrong train line."

Iwaizumi laughs, and the sound of it, even flattened slightly by the connection, does something to loosen the knot that's been sitting in Oikawa's chest since the wheels left the ground two days ago. "You'll be fine. You're always fine, eventually. It's just the getting there part that wrecks you every time."

"That's uncomfortably accurate."

"I've had ten years of research." He shifts, and behind him Oikawa can hear, faintly, the sound of a kettle starting to whistle — Iwaizumi's kitchen, Iwaizumi's morning, continuing on schedule the way mornings do whether or not you're there to see them. "I should let you go. You probably need actual sleep, not the airplane kind."

"Probably."

"Call me after your first practice."

"It's not until Friday."

"I know. I still want you to call me after it." Iwaizumi's voice softens, just slightly, just enough that Oikawa notices. "I want to hear how it goes. All of it. Even the parts you'll want to downplay because you think I'll worry."

"You will worry."

"Probably. Tell me anyway."

"Okay." Oikawa's throat is tight again, in the good way this time, the way that comes from being known this specifically by someone this far away and having it not matter that the distance is there. "I will."

"Good." A beat. "I miss you. Already. It's been like thirty hours and it's stupid how much."

"It's not stupid." Oikawa's eyes sting. "I miss you too. So much it's genuinely inconvenient."

"Yeah." Iwaizumi's mouth curves, soft at the edges. "Get some sleep, Shittykawa."

"Night, Iwa-chan. Well — morning, for you."

"Go to bed."

The call ends, and the apartment feels, for a moment, emptier than it did before he picked up the phone — the ache of a voice disappearing back into a screen. But underneath the ache is something steadier than it was yesterday. Proof of concept, maybe. Evidence that this shape (voice instead of presence, a scheduled call instead of a knock at the door) can still hold the weight of ten years without buckling.

He sleeps for four hours straight, the first real sleep since Tokyo, and wakes to afternoon light and a growling stomach and the disorienting relief of a body finally catching up to where it actually is.

⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄☆⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁☆⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁

Thursday, a woman named Sofía knocks on his door at nine in the morning, introduces herself in careful, deliberately slow English as one of the physios, also I walk you to training center so you don't die on your first day trying to find it, and turns out to be exactly the kind of blunt, warm company Oikawa didn't know he needed.

"You nervous?" she asks, as they walk, the city waking up slowly around them — bakeries opening their shutters, dogs being walked in packs of six or seven by professionals who seem entirely unbothered by the chaos, a mate gourd passed between two men on a park bench like it's the most natural thing in the world.

"A little. A lot."

"Good. Means you care." She says it simply, like it's obvious, the same way his mother said something similar three days and one lifetime ago. "First week is worst. Everyone speaking fast, you understand maybe half. Coach yells sometimes but not because he is angry, is just — how he talks. You will learn who yells because angry, who yells because passionate. Different people."

"That's reassuring, I think."

"Is meant to be." She grins, sideways, easy. "Also — everyone knows you are good. Club does not sign player from Japan just to be nice. You earned this. Remember that when it feels hard."

It's such an uncomplicated thing to say, and it lands somewhere unexpectedly deep, in the same place his mother's hand on his knuckles landed, in the same place Iwaizumi's you earned this, not because you're talented, though you are landed three nights ago. He's starting to notice a pattern — the way people who actually know what they're talking about keep saying some version of the same thing, and the only person who hasn't fully believed it yet is him.

"Thank you," he says, and means it more than the two words probably convey.

"Is nothing. Come, training center is this way, I show you where you get lost the least."

The training center, when they reach it, is smaller than the facility in Tokyo and somehow more alive for it — windows lining one whole wall, morning light falling across a floor that's clearly been used hard and cared for anyway, the smell of a gym that exists everywhere in the world regardless of language: rubber and floor wax and effort. Oikawa stands in the doorway for a moment longer than he needs to, feeling something settle in his chest that's closer to recognition than fear.

Whatever else changes — the language, the apartment, the fourteen-degree June that Iwaizumi was right about — this part, at least, is going to feel like something he already knows how to do.

⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂☆⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁☆⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁

Friday morning, he's the first one at the gym.

He didn't mean to be. Sofía's directions were good and the walk shorter than he'd braced for, and now he's standing alone in a training center that isn't empty exactly — the lights are on, a maintenance staff member sweeps somewhere near the far wall — but isn't yet occupied by the noise of a team either. He sets his bag down. Laces his shoes slower than he needs to. Picks up a ball from the cart near the net, tests the give of it under his palms, familiar in a way nothing else here has been yet.

He's midway through a slow, private warmup — nothing serious, just a few sets against the wall to remember what his own hands feel like doing the thing they know best — when the door opens behind him and voices spill in, rapid Spanish overlapping itself, six or seven players arriving in a loose cluster with the easy noise of people who've known each other long enough to stop being careful with each other.

They notice him immediately. Of course they do. He's the new one, the foreign one, the one whose photo's probably already circulated in whatever group chat this team keeps.

A tall setter — Oikawa clocks the position by instinct before he even knows the man's name — breaks off from the group and crosses the court toward him, hand already extended, grin wide and unguarded.

"Oikawa! Bienvenido — sorry, welcome. I'm Emiliano. Everyone calls me Emi." His English is better than Martín's, looser, clearly practiced on more than just airport pickups. "We're all very excited. You're going to make my life so much easier, honestly, I've been playing every position badly for two years."

Oikawa shakes his hand, something in his chest loosening at the immediate, uncomplicated warmth of it. "I don't know about that. I've never played anywhere but Japan."

"Volleyball is volleyball," Emi says, with the easy certainty of someone who's clearly said this exact sentence to every new import the club's ever signed. "You'll be fine in a week. Miserable for the week, but fine after." He claps a hand on Oikawa's shoulder, steering him toward the rest of the group already assembling near the net. "Come. I introduce you to everyone before coach makes us actually work."

The introductions blur — names he'll spend the next month cementing, faces that are friendly in a low-stakes way, people who haven't decided whether to actually like you yet but are willing to give it a real shot. A libero named Bruno who high-fives him a beat too hard. A middle blocker who says something in rapid Spanish that makes the whole group laugh and then, seeing Oikawa's blank face, translates with visible effort: "I said you look like you haven't slept in three days. Which — is true?"

"Very true," Oikawa admits, and the group laughs again, this time with him instead of at him, and something about the quality of that laughter, easy, unbothered, already making room for him, loosens a knot in his chest that's been tight since the moment the wheels left the ground in Tokyo.

Coach arrives ten minutes later, exactly as Sofía described — barking instructions in Spanish too fast for Oikawa to fully track, but with an energy that reads as invested rather than hostile even across the language gap. He pulls Oikawa aside before the first real drill, switches to slow, deliberate English.

"You know why we signed you?"

"Because you needed a setter?"

"We needed this setter." The coach taps two fingers against his own temple. "I watch your tape. You see the floor before the ball is even in the air. That is not teachable. Everything else — the language, the system, our rhythm — that is teachable. This part, you already have." He claps once, decisive. "So don't be scared to be who you are on this court. That is why you are here."

It's not so different, in its bones, from what his mother said at the kitchen table three days ago. Not so different from what Iwaizumi said with his hand on the back of Oikawa's neck at one in the morning. You earned this. You already have what matters. Everything else you'll learn.

The first drill is simple — nothing that would challenge him in Tokyo, a basic rotation meant more to let the team see how he reads the floor than to test him — and Oikawa sets the first ball of his professional career outside Japan into a spike that lands clean, and the gym erupts into noise, Emi whooping, Bruno slapping his back hard enough to sting, the middle blocker who translated the sleep joke shouting something that's clearly a compliment even without translation.

It's a small moment. Objectively, in the scope of an entire career, it means almost nothing — a single clean set in a low-stakes first practice on a Friday morning in a city he's known for three days.

But standing there, breathing hard, surrounded by the noise of a team already deciding to like him, Oikawa feels something settle into place that's been unmoored since the moment he stepped off the plane. Not home yet. Not even close.

But the first real proof that he's going to be able to build one here.

⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂☆⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁☆⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁

The team has a tradition, it turns out, for new imports, one nobody bothers to warn him about in advance, which he decides afterward was almost certainly the entire point.

It happens after the second practice of his first full week — the whole squad still in the locker room, damp towels and half-eaten protein bars scattered across the benches, when Bruno stands up on one of them with the gravity of a man about to deliver a wedding toast and announces, in Spanish slow enough for Oikawa to actually follow, that it is time.

"Time for what," Oikawa asks, and the entire room breaks into grins that make him immediately, deeply suspicious.

What follows is less an initiation and more a gauntlet of increasingly ridiculous, entirely good-natured demands: he has to sing something, badly, in front of the whole team — he picks an old Seijoh cheer, half-remembered, mangled by a decade of not needing it, which somehow makes it funnier rather than less embarrassing. He has to answer a rapid-fire round of questions about Japan that range from genuinely curious (is the volleyball really that different, tactically) to deeply unserious (is it true everyone in Japan owns a robot), the second of which he answers with such committed, deadpan sincerity — describing an entirely fictional household robot named Kenji — that half the team believes him for a solid thirty seconds before Emi finally breaks and starts laughing too hard to keep translating.

And then, the actual point of the whole exercise, which Emi explains once the laughter dies down: every new player has to share one true thing nobody else on the team knows, something real, not a joke, before he's officially allowed to be considered one of them instead of just a guest wearing the jersey.

The room quiets, waiting, and Oikawa feels the old reflex rise immediately — the urge to deflect, to make it a joke, to give them something polished and safe instead of something true. He almost does it. Opens his mouth already halfway toward a punchline.

Then he thinks about his mother at the kitchen table, saying don't perform for me, not today. Thinks about Iwaizumi's hand on the back of his neck, saying let me have this. Thinks about how far he's already come, in less than two weeks, just by admitting things out loud instead of managing them from a safe distance.

"I almost didn't get on the plane," he says instead, quiet, the room going stiller around him the way rooms do when someone stops performing and starts actually telling the truth. "The morning I left. I sat on my bedroom floor at five in the morning holding a half-deflated volleyball my best friend gave me ten years ago, and some part of me was seriously considering not going. Not because I didn't want this — I wanted this more than almost anything I've ever wanted. But because leaving meant leaving him, and I didn't know yet if the two of us could survive that kind of distance."

He glances up. Nobody's laughing now.

"I got on the plane anyway. Obviously. I'm here." He shrugs, a little helpless, more honest than he's been with a room full of near-strangers in longer than he can remember. "I still don't fully know how it's going to work out, the distance thing. I'm figuring it out as I go, same as everyone probably does. But that's the true thing nobody here knows about me. I almost didn't come. And I'm really glad, every single day so far, that I did anyway."

The silence holds a beat longer, and then Bruno, still standing on the bench, breaks it by reaching down and pulling Oikawa up onto it beside him, nearly toppling them both, and the whole room erupts into noise again — not laughter this time, or not only laughter, but something warmer, more solid, a room full of near-strangers deciding, all at once, that whatever this new setter turns out to be on the court, he's already someone worth actually knowing off it.

"Okay," Emi says, once the noise settles, grinning, clapping Oikawa hard on the shoulder. "Now you are real teammate. Before was just very good volleyball tourist."

"High bar," Oikawa says, laughing despite the sting still behind his eyes.

"Highest bar," Emi agrees. "You cleared it. Welcome, properly, this time."

He texts Iwaizumi about it that night, the whole ridiculous story — the fake robot named Kenji, the mangled Seijoh cheer, the true thing he almost didn't say out loud — and Iwaizumi's response comes back within minutes, warm even through the small glowing rectangle of a screen eleven thousand kilometers away.

Iwaizumi: told you they'd like you. told you the mistakes were the good part.

Oikawa: you did not say that, Bruno said that

Iwaizumi: I'm saying I agree with Bruno. sounds like a smart guy

Oikawa: he really is. I think I found my Iwa-chan away from Iwa-chan, if that makes sense

Iwaizumi: it makes a lot of sense actually. good. you needed one. I can't be the only person on the planet willing to tell you the truth, that's too much responsibility for one guy across an entire ocean

Oikawa reads it twice, something warm settling low in his chest, and sets the phone aside to finally, properly sleep, the volleyball catching streetlight on the sill, a room full of near-strangers already, somehow, three days in, starting to feel less like strangers and more like the beginning of something durable.

⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁☆⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂☆⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁

He calls Iwaizumi that night, still faintly sore the way a body gets doing unfamiliar drills for the first time in days, sitting cross-legged on the floor with his back against the couch because the apartment already, somehow, has a spot that feels like his.

Iwaizumi picks up fast enough that Oikawa knows he was waiting for it. "How was it."

"Hi to you too."

"Hi. How was it."

Oikawa laughs, the sound coming easier than it has in days. "It was good. Really good, actually. I was terrified for no reason, which is apparently a pattern with me."

"Shocking."

"Shut up. Coach is intense but not scary-intense, more like — invested-intense. He watched my tape, apparently, told me they signed me specifically because of how I read the floor. Said everything else is teachable but that part isn't." He picks at a loose thread on his sleeve, suddenly a little shy about how much he wants to say. "It reminded me of what you said. About earning it."

Something shifts in Iwaizumi's expression, soft and unguarded for a second before he covers it. "Told you."

"You did. I hate when you're right."

"I'm right a lot, you'd think you'd be used to it by now." He leans back, and Oikawa can hear, faintly, the sound of Iwaizumi's own evening continuing behind him — a TV murmuring low in another room, a spoon against a bowl. "Tell me the rest. Don't skip the good parts because you think it's bragging."

So he tells him. About Emi, the setter who's apparently been begging the coaching staff for a real partner for two years and treated Oikawa's arrival like an early birthday present. About Bruno's too-hard high five and the bruise it's probably going to leave. About the first set landing clean and the whole gym erupting like it mattered more than a low-stakes Friday practice actually warranted.

"They were loud about it," Oikawa says. "Like — genuinely happy, not performing happy. It surprised me. I thought it'd take longer to feel like anyone actually wanted me there instead of just needing a setter."

"Why would it take longer? You're likable, when you're not being insufferable."

"High praise, Iwa-chan."

"I'm generous like that." His voice softens, just slightly, the teasing dropping out of it for a second. "I'm really glad it went well. I've been thinking about it all day, not gonna lie. Kept checking my phone like an idiot."

"You checked your phone for me?"

"Don't make it weird."

"I'm always going to make it weird, we've established this." But Oikawa's chest is doing something warm and complicated, the ache of being missed from very far away landing somewhere gentler than it did two days ago. "Thank you. For checking. For wanting to know all of it, not just the highlights."

"That's what I said I wanted, wasn't it? Don't downplay it for my sake." Iwaizumi's eyes are steady on the screen, direct in the way that always makes Oikawa's stomach do something complicated. "I meant that. All of it. Even on the days it's bad — especially on the days it's bad — I want to hear it. Not just the version where everything's fine."

"Okay." Oikawa's throat tightens. "I will. I promise."

"Good." A pause, comfortable this time instead of heavy. "How's the apartment settling in?"

"Better. I bought groceries today, which felt like a genuine achievement given I had to point at things and hope. I have a working theory that one of the things I bought is laundry detergent and not, in fact, dish soap, but we'll find out."

"That's concerning."

"It's an adventure, Iwa-chan, try to have some perspective."

"I have perspective. My perspective is that you're going to accidentally poison yourself with dish soap within the first month."

"I would never poison myself, I'm far too vain to die that way." Oikawa glances toward the window, where the volleyball still sits catching the last of the streetlight. "I hung up a photo today. From the team dinner two years ago, the one with all of us at Hanamaki's place. Put it on the wall by the bed."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah. Felt like the room needed proof that I had a whole life before this one."

"You still have that life," Iwaizumi says, quiet but certain. "It didn't stop existing because you got on a plane. It's just — over here now, waiting for you to visit, instead of down the hall."

"I know."

"Do you?"

Oikawa smiles, small and real. "I'm starting to. Ask me again in a month."

"I will. I'm going to keep asking, for the record. Regularly. Whether you want me to or not."

"I want you to." The words come out simpler than he expects them to, no performance in them at all. "I like being asked. It's the closest thing I've got to you actually being here."

Iwaizumi is quiet for a moment, something moving behind his eyes that Oikawa recognizes even across a screen, even across a hemisphere. "Yeah," he says finally, low. "Same."

They talk for another half hour about nothing that matters and everything that does — Matsukawa's ongoing haircut crisis, whether Buenos Aires has decent coffee, the exact temperature threshold at which Oikawa is contractually allowed to complain about cold. When they finally hang up, the apartment doesn't feel quite so much like a stranger's room anymore. It feels, instead, like the beginning draft of somewhere he's going to end up loving, built one clean set and one late-night phone call at a time.

⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁☆⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂☆⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁

Bruno appoints himself Oikawa's unofficial Spanish tutor sometime in the second week, for reasons Oikawa never fully gets a straight answer about beyond someone has to, and Emi is too impatient to actually teach anything properly.

The lessons happen after practice, usually, the two of them sprawled on the gym floor while the rest of the team filters out, Bruno running through vocabulary with the patience of someone teaching a much younger sibling, correcting Oikawa's pronunciation with a bluntness that somehow never feels unkind.

"Say it again," Bruno says, for what might be the fifteenth time, over a phrase Oikawa keeps mangling. "Slower. You're rushing it because you're embarrassed, don't rush it."

"I'm not embarrassed."

"You are extremely embarrassed, it's written all over your face, it's actually very funny to watch." Bruno grins, unbothered by his own bluntness in the way the whole team seems to be, a directness Oikawa's still adjusting to after a lifetime of Japanese indirection. "Again."

Oikawa says it again, slower this time, and gets it mostly right, and Bruno's grin widens into something genuinely pleased.

"There. See? Not so hard when you stop performing confidence you don't have and just admit you're learning."

It's such an oddly precise thing to say — an echo, unknowing, of his mother's voice at the kitchen table two months ago, of Iwaizumi's voice a dozen times since — that Oikawa laughs, startled, and has to explain why when Bruno asks what's funny.

"Apparently that's just a universal truth," Oikawa says. "Everyone keeps telling me to stop performing. My mom. Iwaizumi. Now you."

"Because you do it a lot," Bruno says, matter-of-fact, no judgment in it. "Is not bad thing, necessarily. Just — with us, you don't have to. We already like you. The mistakes don't change that. Actually," he adds, considering, "the mistakes probably make us like you more. Confidence with no mistakes is boring to be around."

Oikawa thinks about that longer than the comment probably warrants, turning it over on the walk home, texting a rough summary of it to Iwaizumi that night because it feels like the kind of thing worth sharing.

Oikawa: teammate told me today that my mistakes make people like me more than my confidence does. kind of profound for a guy who mostly talks to me about vocabulary and terrible pop music

Iwaizumi: he's not wrong though

Oikawa: you're supposed to defend my honor here Iwa-chan

Iwaizumi: I am defending your honor. your honor is better served by someone telling you the truth than by me pretending your performing act was ever actually convincing

Oikawa: rude

Iwaizumi: accurate. I've watched you do the confident-perfect-Oikawa thing for ten years. it's a good act. it's just always been an act, with everyone except the people who've stuck around long enough to see past it

Oikawa: and you stuck around

Iwaizumi: obviously I stuck around. ten years, remember? I'm basically an expert at this point

By the fourth week, Oikawa's Spanish is still bad, technically, by any objective measure — but it's bad in a way that lets him order food without pointing at menus, bad in a way that lets him understand roughly three-quarters of what the coach yells during drills, bad in a way that no longer makes him want to disappear into the floor every time he has to ask someone to repeat themselves.

Bruno declares this progress, formally, with the same gravity he'd use to announce a match win, and buys Oikawa a beer to celebrate that Oikawa can now, at minimum, correctly order for both of them without help.

⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁☆⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄☆⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁

His mother calls on a Sunday, video this time instead of just voice, and Takeru's face crowds into frame within the first ten seconds, holding the volleyball-uniformed bear up to the camera like proof of a promise kept.

"UNCLE TOORU LOOK, I SLEEP WITH HIM EVERY NIGHT."

"I can see that, buddy. He's looking well cared for."

"He needs a NAME. Help me pick one."

"That's an important decision, you shouldn't rush it."

"I've been thinking about it for THREE WEEKS, Uncle Tooru, I'm not rushing anything."

Oikawa's mother eases into frame behind him, laughing, nudging Takeru gently aside so she can actually see her son's face properly. "He's not exaggerating. It's been a whole household debate. Your sister has opinions. I have opinions. Nobody agrees."

"What are the current frontrunners?"

"Spike," Takeru announces, with total confidence. "Or Tooru Junior."

"You are not naming a stuffed bear after me, that's deeply strange, Takeru."

"IT'S AN HONOR."

"It's something, certainly." Oikawa laughs, something warm and uncomplicated settling in his chest, the easy comfort of family that doesn't require translation or performance, that's known him exactly as he is since before he had the language to perform anything at all. "How's school?"

"Boring. Tell me about Argentina. Is it true they eat meat on sticks for every meal?"

"Not every meal. Most meals, though, if I'm being honest."

"AMAZING."

His mother steers the conversation more seriously once Takeru's been sufficiently distracted by a second, unrelated question about the bear's eventual name, asking after his apartment, his team, whether he's sleeping enough, whether he's eating enough that isn't meat on a stick.

"I'm okay," Oikawa says, and means it more fully than he has in weeks, the truth of it landing easy instead of forced. "Really okay. There've been a few hard days, but the team's good, Mom. Really good. I have a Spanish tutor now, unofficially. A physio who basically adopted me. A setter who apparently tells everyone every embarrassing story I've ever shared with him."

"That sounds like you've found your people."

"I think I have. Some of them, anyway. It's different from home. But it's not — bad different. Just different."

"That's all I wanted to hear." Her smile is soft, proud the same way it was proud across the kitchen table two months ago, before any of this was real yet. "And Hajime? How's that going?"

Oikawa feels his face heat, which apparently transmits perfectly clearly over video, because his mother's smile widens before he's even said anything.

"He visited. Last month. We — talked. Properly, this time. Said things we'd been not-saying for about a decade."

"Finally," she says, with the specific satisfaction of a woman who's been waiting a very long time to say exactly that word. "I've been telling your father for years that boy was going to fly across the world for you eventually, once he worked up the nerve. Glad to see I was right."

"You knew?"

"Tooru. Everyone knew. You were the only two who hadn't said it out loud yet." She laughs, gentle, unsurprised. "I'm happy for you. Truly. Whatever this turns into — long distance, visits, whatever shape it takes — I'm glad you finally have the words for it instead of just the shape of it."

They talk another twenty minutes, Takeru periodically reinserting himself with increasingly elaborate name suggestions for the bear, and when the call finally ends, Oikawa sits for a while in the quiet aftermath of it, the ache of missing people balanced, for the first time in weeks, by something steadier than grief. Proof, gathered slowly across an ocean, that none of what he left behind actually stopped existing just because he got on a plane. It just moved, the way water moves, finding new shapes to fill without ever actually disappearing.

⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁☆⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄☆⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁

Homesickness catches him sideways on a Tuesday, the way it apparently always does — not on the hard days, when he's braced for it, but on an ordinary one, walking home from a practice that went fine, past a bakery whose smell reminds him, with no warning at all, of the ramen shop two blocks from his old apartment.

He stands on the sidewalk longer than he means to, throat tight, homesick in a way that feels almost physical, a low ache behind his sternum that has nothing to do with muscle soreness. It passes. It always passes, he's learning, the way weather passes — sudden, disorienting, and then gone, leaving the day mostly intact behind it.

He texts Iwaizumi about it that night, honestly, the way he promised he would.

Oikawa: had a rough moment today. smelled something that reminded me of the ramen place and just about lost it on a public sidewalk

Iwaizumi: you okay now?

Oikawa: yeah. better. it just hits weird sometimes. not the big stuff, just small dumb things

Iwaizumi: that tracks. it's usually the small stuff that gets you, the big stuff you brace for

Oikawa: how do you know that

Iwaizumi: I don't, actually. just guessing. seems right though

Oikawa: it is right

Iwaizumi: I miss you too, if that helps. in case you're wondering if it's one-sided over here

Oikawa: it helps. a lot actually

Iwaizumi: good. tell me next time it happens too. don't sit on it

Oikawa: I won't. I promise, for real this time, not just saying it to make you feel better

Iwaizumi: I know. that's why I believe you.

It becomes a rhythm, over the following weeks, one Oikawa didn't expect to find so quickly — morning calls before his practice when it's Iwaizumi's evening, texts scattered through both their days, longer video calls on weekends where they don't talk about anything in particular and it doesn't matter, because the point was never the content of the conversation. The point was always just this: proof, delivered regularly, that the person on the other end is still there, still paying attention, still choosing to show up even when showing up now takes real, deliberate effort instead of just a short walk down the hall.

His first official match comes five weeks in — not a start, just a substitute appearance in the fourth set of a match the team's already winning comfortably, but Oikawa's hands shake lacing his shoes anyway, the vertigo of first time doing this for real, in this uniform, in this language hitting harder than he expected.

He checks his phone one more time before the whistle. A message from his mother, sent hours ago accounting for the time difference: Whatever happens, I'm proud of you. Play like yourself. One from Takeru, all capital letters and exclamation points, incomprehensible in its enthusiasm. And one from Iwaizumi, sent that morning, timed with the same precision as the flight-tracking texts three weeks ago, like he'd worked out exactly when Oikawa would need it most.

Iwaizumi: whatever the score is when you check this, doesn't matter. you already did the hard part just by getting on the court. go be the person I know you are.

Oikawa reads it twice, tucks the phone away, and walks onto the court with something steadier in his chest than fear.

He sets four balls in that fourth set. Two land clean. One goes slightly wide, corrected at the last second by a spiker with faster reflexes than Oikawa's used to reading yet. The fourth is the one that matters — a quick set to Emi at the exact height and speed the two of them have spent five weeks building toward, landing so cleanly the whole bench comes up off their seats.

It's not much, in the grand scope of a career that's supposed to last another decade. A handful of touches in a match that was already decided.

But it's real. It's proof, the kind that doesn't come from anyone telling him he can do this, but from having actually done it, in a stadium eleven thousand kilometers from the one he learned to play in.

He calls Iwaizumi the second he's out of the locker room, still sweat-damp, voice cracking slightly when Iwaizumi picks up.

"I did it," he says, before Iwaizumi can even say hello. "I actually did it."

"I know." Iwaizumi's voice is thick with something that sounds, even through the phone, dangerously close to tears. "I watched the stream. That set to Emi in the fourth — Oikawa, that was beautiful."

"You watched?"

"Of course I watched. I've had the stream link open since this morning, I watched the whole warmup too, don't act surprised."

Oikawa's own eyes are burning now, standing in a hallway outside a locker room in a city that didn't know his name two months ago, listening to the person who knows him best in the world tell him, from eleven thousand kilometers away, that he saw the whole thing.

"Iwa-chan," he says, and doesn't have anything else to follow it with. He doesn't need to.

"I know," Iwaizumi says softly. "I'm right here. I'm always going to be right here, watching. However far away here has to be."

⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂☆⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄☆⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁

By the six-month mark, Buenos Aires has stopped being somewhere Oikawa is staying and started, without his quite noticing the transition, becoming somewhere he lives.

The signs of it are small, mostly, easy to miss if he isn't paying attention. He no longer needs Sofía's directions to find the training center, or the bakery, or the pharmacy that stocks the brand of sunscreen he likes, though he could probably find his way there blindfolded at this point. He's stopped translating in his head before he speaks — the words just arrive now, imperfect but immediate, the relief of a language finally starting to live in his body instead of sitting, effortful, just outside it. He's learned which corner of the training center gets the best afternoon light for the private, unhurried warmups he still does most mornings before the rest of the team arrives, an old habit from Seijoh that turned out to travel well.

He has a favorite bench in the park two blocks from his apartment, the one where he sits some evenings just to watch the chaos of dogs being walked in packs of six or seven, a sight that still makes him smile every single time even after months of it being ordinary. He knows the name of the woman who runs the corner store, knows she keeps a particular brand of tea aside for him because he mentioned once, in halting Spanish, that it reminded him faintly of something his mother used to make.

The apartment has stopped smelling like nothing. It smells, now, distinctly, like his — like the mix of his own laundry detergent and Bruno's terrible cooking lessons gone occasionally wrong and, underneath all of it, faintly, still, like Iwaizumi's shirt hanging in the closet, worn soft from a decade of washes that started somewhere else entirely.

He calls his mother most Sundays now, a fixed appointment instead of an anxious, homesick reflex. He calls Iwaizumi most days, sometimes just a few minutes, sometimes an hour, the shape of it settling into something as ordinary and unremarkable as breathing, the way showing up always eventually does when two people keep choosing it. Matsukawa and Hanamaki send updates on a rotating cast of nonsense — Hanamaki's haircut situation apparently deteriorating further, Matsukawa's new job, a running joke about Oikawa's Spanish that's evolved into its own elaborate mythology none of them can fully explain to outsiders anymore.

He thinks, sometimes, about the version of himself sitting on the floor of his old Tokyo apartment ten months ago, terrified, certain that leaving meant losing something irreplaceable. That version of him wasn't wrong to be scared. He just didn't yet have the information his current self has now — that the losing was never actually going to happen, not really, not in any of the ways that mattered. What he was actually doing, without fully understanding it yet, was proving something his mother and Iwaizumi had both been trying to tell him all along: that home was never a single fixed coordinate. It was a thing you built, and rebuilt, wherever you happened to be standing, out of the ordinary choice to keep showing up for the people who mattered, regardless of how many kilometers stood between you and them.

He still keeps the volleyball on the windowsill. Still finds the loose seam under his thumb some nights without meaning to, an old habit that's stopped being about grief and started being about something closer to gratitude. Still hangs the grey shirt where he can see it, though these days it's less a relic of what he left behind and more a marker of what came with him — proof, worn soft at the collar, that some things really do survive the crossing intact.

He's not homesick anymore, most days. He's just, simply, living two lives at once, in two places, connected by a decade of history and a habit of showing up that neither distance nor an ocean ever managed to break.

It took him six months to believe that was actually possible. He suspects it'll take him considerably longer to stop being quietly amazed by it.

⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂☆⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄☆⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁

The furnished apartment came with a small kitchen table, wobbly on one leg, the kind of thing nobody actually chooses and everybody just inherits, and Oikawa lives with it for three months without giving it much thought at all, because replacing furniture in a rented apartment on the other side of the world feels, for a long time, like admitting to something he isn't sure he's ready to admit yet.

Then, three months in, on an ordinary Saturday, he passes a secondhand shop two streets from his building and sees a table in the window — small, sturdy, real wood instead of the composite the rental furniture is made from, with a slight water ring near one corner that some previous owner never quite managed to sand out. It's nothing special. It isn't even particularly beautiful. But something about it stops him on the sidewalk anyway, and he stands there long enough that the shop owner comes out to ask, in Spanish slow enough for him to follow, if he's interested.

He buys it that afternoon, has it delivered the next day, and spends an embarrassing amount of time afterward simply looking at it in his kitchen, turning the decision over in his head, trying to understand why a secondhand table with a water ring feels like it matters more than it should.

He figures it out that night, video-calling his mother, angling the phone to show her the new addition to the room.

"You bought furniture," she says, delighted, the way she said finally about Iwaizumi's visit two months later. "Real furniture. Not the rental kind."

"I don't know why it feels like a big deal. It's just a table."

"It's not just a table." Her smile is soft, knowing, the same expression she wore across her own kitchen table the day before he left. "It's you deciding to actually live there instead of just staying there. There's a difference, and apparently your body knew it before your brain caught up."

He thinks about that for a long time after the call ends, sitting at the new table with a cup of tea from the corner store that keeps a particular brand aside for him now, the volleyball catching the last of the evening light on the sill nearby, the grey shirt visible through the open bedroom door.

His mother's right, the way she usually is about things like this. The suitcase he arrived with, a year ago, was full of things chosen to survive a single flight — practical, portable, easy to pack up again if leaving turned out to be a mistake. The table is the opposite of that. The table is a piece of furniture he had no intention of ever needing to move again in a hurry.

He texts a photo of it to Iwaizumi, no explanation, just the image — small, sturdy, slightly imperfect, planted in the middle of a kitchen eleven thousand kilometers from where either of them started.

Iwaizumi: that's a table

Oikawa: yes

Iwaizumi: you're sending me a photo of a table

Oikawa: it's an important table, Iwa-chan, show some respect

Iwaizumi: explain

Oikawa: it means I'm not just staying here anymore. I'm actually living here. figured you'd want to know

There's a pause long enough that Oikawa starts to wonder if he's overexplained something that should've stayed simple. Then:

Iwaizumi: good. I'm glad. that's — genuinely a big deal, Tooru, thank you for telling me instead of just letting me find out eventually

Oikawa: I promised I'd tell you the real stuff. even the small real stuff. this counts

Iwaizumi: it counts. I'm proud of you. also I want to see this table in person eventually, put it on the list for August

Oikawa: it'll still be here. it's not going anywhere. neither am I

The table stays exactly where he put it, wobble-free, solid under his palms every morning when he eats breakfast before practice, a small, ordinary, unremarkable piece of furniture that turns out, in its own quiet way, to have marked the exact moment Buenos Aires stopped being a place he was staying and started, properly, being a place he'd chosen.

⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄☆⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂☆⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁

Not every week is the fourth-set breakthrough kind. Six weeks in, Oikawa has the worst practice of his professional career — three sets that go wide, one that nearly costs a teammate a collision at the net, a mistake in a defensive rotation that draws the loudest, least-passionate yell he's heard from the coach yet, and every one of it delivered in Spanish fast enough that Oikawa catches the tone perfectly and almost none of the actual words, which somehow makes it worse.

He showers alone after everyone else has cleared out, standing under water gone lukewarm, replaying the sets in his head the way he always does, cataloging every place his body didn't do what his brain told it to. It's not really about the sets. He knows that, even while he's doing it. It's about the loneliness of failing in a language he can't fully process being failed in — the coach's correction landing half a second delayed while Oikawa's brain scrambles to translate it, by which point the moment's already gone, the lesson already half-lost.

He walks home slower than usual. Doesn't check his phone. Doesn't want to perform fine for anyone tonight, not even the people who'd see through it immediately.

Emi catches him at the gym door before he can fully escape, though — falls into step beside him without asking permission, the way Iwaizumi always used to, and doesn't say anything for the first two blocks, just walks.

"Bad day," Emi says finally. Not a question.

"Bad day," Oikawa agrees.

"First bad one, in six weeks. That's actually good. Most imports have their first bad week by week two." Emi says it lightly, but there's real observation underneath it, the kind that comes from having watched a lot of players go through exactly this. "You want to talk about it, or you want me to shut up and just walk with you."

"Second one. If that's okay."

"Is okay." Emi walks with him another three blocks in silence, easy, undemanding, and only speaks again once they're standing outside Oikawa's building. "Hey. For what is worth — everyone has weeks like this. Even here, even after ten years playing. Doesn't mean anything about whether you belong. Just means you're human and today was hard." He claps a hand on Oikawa's shoulder, same gesture Martín used on his very first day, apparently some kind of unofficial club ritual. "Go rest. Call whoever makes you feel less alone. Tomorrow will be better, or it won't, and either way we still have you tomorrow."

Upstairs, alone, Oikawa sits on the floor by the window for a long time before he picks up his phone. He's gotten better, these six weeks, at not performing for Iwaizumi — but the instinct is still there, the old pull to say fine first and let the truth leak out slowly instead of leading with it.

He leads with it this time.

Oikawa: today was really bad. worst practice I've had here. missed sets, got yelled at in a language I only half understand, felt about as far from belonging as I've felt since I landed

The reply comes fast.

Iwaizumi: you want to call, or you want to just text for a bit first

Oikawa: call, if you're free

Iwaizumi: always free for this. give me two minutes.

The call connects two minutes later exactly, Iwaizumi already sitting somewhere quiet, giving Oikawa his full, undivided attention the way he always has, the way that never once, in ten years, made Oikawa feel like a burden for needing it.

"Tell me," Iwaizumi says.

So Oikawa tells him. All of it — the three wide sets, the near-collision, the coach's voice too fast to fully parse, the loneliness again, failing in a language that keeps the lesson half a beat out of reach. He doesn't dress it up. Doesn't downplay it to make it easier for either of them.

Iwaizumi listens the whole way through without interrupting, the way he always has, and when Oikawa finally runs out of things to say, he doesn't offer a pep talk right away. Just lets the silence sit for a second, honoring it.

"That sounds genuinely hard," he says finally. "Not in a 'here's how you fix it' way. Just — that sounds like it actually sucked, and I'm sorry it happened, and I'm glad you told me instead of pretending it didn't."

"You're not going to tell me it'll be fine?"

"It probably will be, eventually. But that's not what you need to hear right now, is it?"

Oikawa's throat goes tight, gratitude landing somewhere he didn't expect it to. "No. It's not."

"Then I'm not going to say it yet. I'm just going to sit here with you while today was bad, and tomorrow we can talk about whether it's better." A pause, and then, softer: "You're allowed to have bad days over there. You don't have to be flawless just because you're far from home and proving something. You're allowed to just be a person having a hard Tuesday."

It's such a simple thing to say, and it undoes something in Oikawa's chest that six weeks of trying to be fine hadn't managed to touch. "Thank you," he says, voice thick. "For not fixing it. For just — being here for it."

"Always," Iwaizumi says, the same word he's said at the end of a hundred goodbyes over ten years, except this time there's no goodbye attached to it at all. Just presence, uncomplicated, offered freely across a distance that used to feel insurmountable and now, slowly, is starting to feel like just another kind of ordinary.

⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄☆⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁☆⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁

The call comes on an ordinary Thursday, two months in, at an hour that's inconvenient for both of them — late for Oikawa, absurdly early for Iwaizumi, who apparently couldn't wait for a more reasonable time to say what he's about to say.

"I booked a flight," Iwaizumi says, no preamble, the second the call connects. His hair is a mess. He's clearly just woken up, or never gone to sleep, one of the two.

Oikawa blinks at the screen. "What?"

"A flight. To Buenos Aires. Your team has that break in August, right? Before the second half of the season starts?"

"Yeah, but—" Oikawa sits up straighter, heart doing something complicated and fast. "Iwa-chan, that's an entire international flight, that's not a small thing—"

"I'm aware it's not a small thing, I bought the ticket, I did the math." He says it like it's obvious, like the decision required none of the deliberation it clearly did require, given the state of his hair and the hour. "Ten days. I already cleared it with work. I want to see the apartment. I want to meet Emi, since apparently I have to hear about him constantly now. I want to see you play, in person, not through a stream with a two-second delay that makes my heart stop every single time before I know if the set actually landed."

"You're really coming."

"I'm really coming." His voice softens, all the false-casual bravado dropping out of it at once. "I told you distance doesn't change what we are. I meant it. But I also missed you enough that I looked at flight prices at two in the morning like a lunatic, so. Both things can be true, right? Isn't that the whole lesson your mom taught us."

Oikawa's eyes are stinging, and he doesn't bother fighting it this time. "Both things can be true," he agrees, voice thick. "Iwa-chan, I—" He stops. Starts again. "Thank you. I don't — I've been trying so hard not to ask you for this, because I didn't want it to feel like an obligation, like something you had to do because I'm struggling, and instead you just—"

"I didn't do it because you're struggling," Iwaizumi says, firm now, cutting through the spiral before it can properly start. "I did it because I want to see you. That's it. That's the whole reason. Nothing complicated, nothing about obligation. I miss my best friend and I have vacation days and a functioning credit card, so I'm using them."

"Your best friend."

Something flickers across Iwaizumi's face — the same thing that flickered there at one in the morning in Oikawa's old living room, the night before all of this started, when Oikawa asked what are we and got we're us instead of an answer.

"Yeah," Iwaizumi says slowly. "My best friend. Who I am, apparently, willing to fly across an entire hemisphere for, which — if I'm being honest with you, and I promised I'd be honest with you — is maybe not just a best-friend kind of thing to do. I don't know. I've been thinking about it a lot since you left. About what we're us actually means, when I say it. I think I've known what it means for a while and just never had a reason to say it out loud, because you were always right there and it never needed saying."

Oikawa's breath catches. "Iwa-chan."

"I'm not trying to have this whole conversation over a video call at five in the morning," Iwaizumi says, a little too fast, color rising in his face even through the slightly grainy connection. "I just — wanted you to know it's on the table. Whatever it turns into. I'll be there in August and we can figure it out in person, properly, not like this. But I didn't want to get on that flight without you knowing it's not just a friend visiting a friend. Not entirely. Not for me, anyway."

The apartment is quiet around Oikawa, the volleyball catching streetlight on the sill, the grey shirt hanging visible in the closet through the open bedroom door, ten thousand kilometers and two months of phone calls sitting between this exact moment and the one on his old living room floor when Iwaizumi first asked what they were and neither of them had an answer yet.

"I've known for a while too," Oikawa says quietly. "Since before I left, honestly. Maybe since longer than that. I just didn't say it because I didn't want to make leaving harder than it already was."

"And now?"

"Now I think it might make the distance easier, actually. Having something honest to hold onto instead of just — implication. Instead of just we're us and hoping the other person knows what that means."

"Yeah." Iwaizumi's smile is soft, real, a little disbelieving, like he's surprised by how simple this actually turned out to be after ten years of never asking. "Yeah, I think you're right."

"August is so far away."

"It's two months. We've survived two months already."

"Barely."

"We survived it well, don't undersell us." Iwaizumi laughs, and it's easy again, familiar, the weight of what they just said settling into something warm instead of something heavy. "I should let you sleep. It's late for you."

"I don't want to hang up."

"I know. Me neither. But you have practice tomorrow and I have an actual job, unlike some people who get to play volleyball professionally for a living."

"That's a low blow."

"It's an accurate blow." His eyes are soft despite the teasing. "Go to sleep, Tooru."

Not Shittykawa. Not Oikawa. His actual name, said quiet and deliberate, landing somewhere in Oikawa's chest that hasn't been touched in exactly this way before.

"Goodnight, Hajime," he says back, testing the shape of it, and watches Iwaizumi's whole face go soft and startled and pleased all at once before the call finally ends.

⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄☆⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁☆⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁

August arrives slower than either of them wants and faster than Oikawa is braced for, the season's break landing on a Tuesday that he's circled on a paper calendar taped above his kitchen sink, a habit he picked up from Sofía, who insists digital calendars don't count as real anticipation.

He's at the arrivals hall two hours early, which even he recognizes as excessive, standing near the same barrier where Martín held up his own laminated sign two months ago, watching a departures-and-arrivals board cycle through flights from a dozen cities he's never been to and one, finally, from Tokyo, via São Paulo, landing on schedule.

His hands aren't quite steady. He keeps checking his phone, though there's nothing new to check — Iwaizumi's last message was sent hours ago, somewhere over the Pacific, boarding now, see you on the other side, and there's been nothing since, the particular silence of someone he loves being unreachable at exactly the moment he wants them most reachable.

The doors open in waves, travelers filtering through in loose clusters, dragging suitcases, scanning the crowd for familiar faces the way Oikawa is scanning it now, heart climbing steadily up into his throat with every cluster that isn't the right one.

And then it is.

Iwaizumi comes through the doors looking exactly like himself and nothing like the version Oikawa's been carrying in his head for two months — realer, somehow, more solid, travel-rumpled in a way that no photo or video call ever quite captured, hair a mess from eleven hours in transit, dragging a suitcase with one hand and scanning the crowd with an intensity that finds Oikawa almost instantly, like some part of him already knew exactly where to look.

Oikawa doesn't remember crossing the distance between them. One second he's standing at the barrier with his heart in his throat, and the next Iwaizumi's suitcase is abandoned on the floor and they're wrapped around each other in the middle of a crowded arrivals hall, ten thousand kilometers and two months of phone calls collapsing into the simple, overwhelming fact of a body he can actually touch again.

"Hi," Iwaizumi says into his shoulder, muffled, wrecked.

"Hi," Oikawa manages back, and doesn't let go, and doesn't plan to for a long while yet.

They stand there long enough that a few people navigate around them with the indulgent patience travelers reserve for other people's reunions, and when they finally pull back, Iwaizumi's hand finds the back of Oikawa's neck automatically, the same gesture it's found a thousand times before, except this time neither of them treats it like something that needs to be explained away.

"You're really here," Oikawa says, still not quite believing it.

"I'm really here." Iwaizumi's thumb moves against his skin, familiar, grounding. "Ten days. All yours."

"Ten days isn't enough."

"It's a start." He leans in, and this time there's no ambiguity in it at all, no ten years of unspoken shorthand standing in for the thing itself — just Iwaizumi's mouth against his, soft and certain, the culmination of a decade finally, plainly said instead of implied.

When they break apart, Oikawa is laughing, a little wet, a little disbelieving. "That took you long enough."

"You could've done it first, at any point in the last ten years."

"I was waiting for you to be brave about it."

"I flew across a hemisphere, Oikawa, I think that counts as brave." Iwaizumi picks his suitcase back up, but keeps his other hand firmly laced with Oikawa's, like he has no intention of letting go again anytime soon. "Now take me to see this apartment I've been hearing so much about. I want to see the volleyball in its natural habitat."

"It's on the windowsill. Exactly where I told you."

"And the shirt?"

"In the closet. Also exactly where I told you." Oikawa squeezes his hand, leading him out toward the taxi stand, into a city that's slowly, steadily, over two months of small brave choices, started to feel less like somewhere he landed and more like somewhere he's actually building a life. "You'll see. I've been keeping a piece of you here this whole time. Figured it was about time the rest of you caught up to it."

Outside, the winter air is exactly as cold as Iwaizumi promised it would be, and Oikawa doesn't reach for a scarf, doesn't complain, just laces his fingers tighter through Iwaizumi's and lets the cold be cold, because for the first time in two months, there's someone standing next to him to share it with.

⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂☆⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁☆⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁

Iwaizumi meets Emi on the second day, in the lobby of the training center, and the two of them size each other up for exactly three seconds before Emi grins and says, in careful English clearly rehearsed for this exact moment, "So you are the famous Iwa-chan."

"Don't call me that," Iwaizumi says, immediately, on reflex, and Oikawa laughs so hard he has to lean against the wall.

"He's earned the right," Oikawa manages. "I told him everything. All the stories. He knows about the volleyball, the shirt, all of it."

"You told the entire team."

"I told Emi. Emi tells everyone everything, that's just how he operates, it's not my fault."

"It is a little your fault," Emi says cheerfully, already steering Iwaizumi toward the gym doors with the easy confidence of someone who's decided, unilaterally, that they're going to be friends. "Come, come. I show you where he plays. You watch practice today, yes? See if the stories match the real thing."

They do watch — Iwaizumi sitting in the empty bleachers for the full two hours, sometimes talking quietly with Sofía, who's adopted him with the same brisk warmth she extended to Oikawa on his first week, sometimes just watching in silence, and Oikawa is aware of him the entire practice in a way he wasn't aware of anyone watching from the stands back in Japan — every set feels sharper for having him there, every small correction from the coach feels lighter to absorb, knowing there's someone in the bleachers who's going to ask about it afterward not because he has to, but because he genuinely wants to know.

Afterward, sweat-soaked and grinning, Oikawa finds Iwaizumi waiting by the door with two bottles of water, one already open and held out before Oikawa even asks.

"Well?" Oikawa says. "Verdict?"

"You're better than I remembered. And I remembered you being very good." Iwaizumi's eyes are soft, unguarded the way he only ever gets around Oikawa, around exactly this. "Your coach yells like Sofía warned me he would. Emi is exactly as much as you described, which is a lot. And that set in the third rotation, the one that went to the outside hitter — I actually made a noise. Out loud. In the bleachers. Alone."

"You did not."

"I absolutely did, ask Sofía, she looked at me like I'd lost my mind."

Oikawa laughs, warm all the way through, and doesn't think twice before leaning in to kiss him right there in the training center doorway, easy and unhurried, the luxury of not having to hide this anymore from anyone, least of all himself.

⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂☆⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁☆⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁

There's a real match on the fourth day, not a practice, and Iwaizumi gets his first look at the stadium at full volume, seated in the section reserved for players' families and guests, wedged between Sofía and a member of the front office who spends the first set trying, with visible determination, to explain the offside rules of a sport with no offside rule, apparently confusing it with something else entirely.

Oikawa doesn't look for him in the crowd before the whistle — some old superstition from his Seijoh days insists that looking too early jinxes the first set — but he's aware of him anyway, the electric awareness of someone he loves being present in a way no phone call has managed to replicate in ten months. It changes something small and fundamental about the way he plays, not better exactly, just fuller, like a piece of the court that's been quietly missing all season has been returned to it.

The team wins comfortably, four sets, nothing as dramatic as the championship still months away, but Oikawa sets three separate balls that draw genuine reactions from the crowd, and after the final whistle he doesn't wait for the customary post-match interviews before scanning the stands, finding Iwaizumi immediately, on his feet, clapping so hard his hands must sting.

Afterward, in the tunnel, still in uniform, Iwaizumi doesn't say anything clever or teasing for once — just pulls him into a hug that smells like stadium popcorn and the exact cologne Oikawa's spent a decade learning to recognize before he can name it, and holds on longer than either of them probably intends to, in front of a hallway full of teammates who've, by this point, stopped pretending not to notice.

"Well?" Oikawa asks eventually, pulling back just enough to see his face.

"You're incredible," Iwaizumi says, simply, no teasing in it at all. "I mean that. I've watched you play for ten years and I don't think I've ever actually seen you like this. Confident without performing it. Like you finally believe it instead of just saying it to convince everyone else."

"I do believe it. Took me a while."

"I noticed." His thumb brushes along Oikawa's jaw, unhurried, unbothered by the teammates filing past them toward the locker room. "Worth the flight. Worth all of it. I'm so glad I got to actually see this instead of just hearing about it secondhand."

"There's a whole season left. You'll see plenty more."

"I'm counting on it," Iwaizumi says, and kisses him right there in the tunnel, unhurried, the luxury of two people who've finally stopped rationing the ways they're allowed to show it.

⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁☆⠂⠄⠄⠂☆⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁

They spend the rest of the ten days doing everything and nothing — walking neighborhoods Oikawa's only half-explored on his own, eating at the parrilla two streets over that Sofía swears by, sitting on the fire escape of Oikawa's apartment at night with mate they're both still learning to make properly, arguing about whether it tastes good or whether they're both just pretending because Sofía would be disappointed in them otherwise.

On the sixth night, Iwaizumi finds the volleyball on the windowsill and picks it up without asking, turning it over in his hands the way he did in Oikawa's old apartment two months and a lifetime ago, thumb finding the loose seam automatically.

"Still falling apart," he says.

"I'd never let it actually fall apart. I just let it look like it might."

"Sentimental idiot."

"You gave it to me. Don't act like you're not equally sentimental, you flew across a hemisphere for a volleyball player who lives in a rented apartment that still smells faintly of empanadas."

"I flew across a hemisphere for you," Iwaizumi corrects, setting the ball back down carefully, exactly where it was. "The volleyball's just a bonus."

"Very smooth, Iwa-chan."

"I've had ten years to practice being smooth. Give me some credit."

"You have never once in ten years been smooth."

"I'm being smooth right now."

"You're really not."

He kisses him anyway, on the fire escape, mate going cold between them, the city loud and unfamiliar and increasingly, unmistakably, becoming home in a way that has less to do with the streets themselves and more to do with who keeps choosing to be in them alongside him.

On the last morning, Iwaizumi's suitcase packed by the door in an echo Oikawa recognizes with a small, private ache, they stand in the same doorway where they said goodbye two months ago on the other side of the world, except this time neither of them is pretending it's just another ordinary morning.

"Ten days wasn't enough," Oikawa says.

"I know. It's a start, though. There'll be more. Christmas, if the schedule lines up. And you're coming home for a visit in the off-season regardless, that's non-negotiable."

"Bossy."

"Realistic." Iwaizumi's hand finds the back of his neck, familiar, grounding, the same gesture it's found a thousand times across ten years, meaning exactly the same thing it's always meant, except now they've finally, plainly, said the word underneath it. "I love you. I should've said it years ago. I'm saying it now instead."

Oikawa's throat goes tight, the specific ache of hearing something he's wanted for a decade finally spoken instead of implied. "I love you too. I think I have for longer than either of us wants to admit."

"Probably since the volleyball."

"Probably since before the volleyball."

Iwaizumi laughs, soft and a little wrecked, and kisses him one more time before the taxi arrives, unhurried despite the clock, like he intends to make this particular goodbye last as long as it possibly can before the distance has to reassert itself again.

"Call me when I land," he says at the door, echoing, deliberately, the exact words Oikawa's mother said in another apartment two months ago.

"I will. I promise."

"I know you will." One more squeeze of his hand, one more look that says everything ten years of shorthand used to carry on its own. "Go be amazing, Tooru. I'll see you soon. Not eventually. Soon."

And this time, when the door closes, it doesn't feel like an ending at all. It feels like exactly what it is — a comma, not a period, in a sentence the two of them are still writing, together, across whatever distance the next few years decide to put between the lines.

⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁☆⠂⠄⠄⠂☆⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁

Christmas comes, and the schedule lines up, and Oikawa flies home for the first time since June with a duffel bag half-full of gifts he agonized over for a week and the volleyball, once again, tucked carefully into his carry-on, because he's not leaving it behind in an empty apartment over the break no matter how impractical it is to fly a half-deflated ball across two continents twice a year.

Landing at Narita this time feels different than landing anywhere has felt since he left. Not like arriving somewhere new and having to learn its shape from scratch, but like slipping back into a shape he already knows, the way a hand remembers a doorknob it's turned a thousand times even after months away.

Iwaizumi is waiting past the barrier, not holding a laminated sign, not needing to, and the sight of him standing there in the actual arrivals hall instead of on a screen makes something in Oikawa's chest go soft and overwhelmed all over again, the way it did in Buenos Aires in August, except this time it's Iwaizumi who traveled two train stops instead of eleven thousand kilometers, and somehow the smallness of the distance doesn't make the reunion feel smaller at all.

"You cut your hair," Oikawa says, the first thing out of his mouth, because apparently after six months apart this is what his brain decides is most urgent.

"You noticed immediately."

"Of course I noticed immediately, I notice everything about you, that's not new information." He drops his bag and closes the distance instead of finishing the thought, and Iwaizumi meets him halfway, the kiss unhurried despite the crowded arrivals hall around them, despite the six months and the video calls and the ache of having only gotten to do this once, in person, since it became something they were allowed to do at all.

"Missed you," Iwaizumi says into it, low.

"Missed you more."

"Impossible. I've had six months of only your face on a screen, I win by default."

"That's not how missing someone works, Iwa-chan, it's not a competition."

"Everything's a competition with you, I'm just meeting you at your level."

They spend the two weeks doing everything Oikawa didn't realize he'd been aching for — his mother's cooking, properly, at her table instead of over video; Matsukawa and Hanamaki crowding into his old favorite ramen shop, loud and delighted and full of questions about Argentina that Oikawa answers at length, watching Iwaizumi watch him talk about his new life with an expression that's proud instead of wistful; Takeru, finally meeting the actual man behind the volleyball bear — which turned out, after weeks of household debate, to be named simply Tooru, a decision Oikawa still finds both flattering and mildly unsettling — dragging Oikawa into the yard to demonstrate everything he's learned about setting in the months since the bear arrived.

On the last night before he's due to fly back, they end up on the floor of Iwaizumi's apartment, the way they used to a hundred times before any of this started, except now there's no unspoken shorthand standing in for anything, no rule about what hours are allowed to hold what kind of need.

"You're really going back tomorrow," Iwaizumi says, not quite a question, watching Oikawa from where he's sprawled against the couch.

"I'm really going back tomorrow." Oikawa leans into his side, familiar, easy. "It doesn't feel the same this time, though. Leaving."

"No?"

"Last time it felt like the end of something. Like I was losing you the second the wheels left the ground." He tips his head back against Iwaizumi's shoulder. "This time it just feels like — going to work. Somewhere far away, sure. But not away from you. Just away from this city, for a while, before I come back to it again."

Iwaizumi's arm tightens around him. "Good," he says, quiet. "That's the whole point, isn't it. Distance was never supposed to change what we are. Took us both a while to actually believe that instead of just saying it."

"You said it first. That night. Before I left the first time."

"I said it. I'm not sure I fully believed it yet, not that night. I think I believed the idea of it more than I believed I could actually live it." His thumb traces along Oikawa's knuckles, the same gesture from a decade of history, except easy now instead of desperate, memorization no longer necessary because there's no longer a countdown attached to the touching. "I believe it now, though. Fully. Watched it work for six months. Turns out you were right, that first night — it's not less. It's just different. And different isn't automatically worse."

"When did I say that?"

"You didn't, actually, I think I just worked it out on my own somewhere around month three, lying awake missing you at an inconvenient hour. Felt very profound at the time. Slightly less profound saying it out loud now."

Oikawa laughs, warm and unguarded, and turns to press his face into Iwaizumi's neck, breathing in the same detergent, the same skin, ten years and one difficult, necessary ocean condensed into the simple fact of being held by exactly the person he's always wanted to be held by, in exactly the way he never quite let himself ask for until distance forced the asking.

"I love you," he says, muffled, unguarded. "I don't think I'm ever going to get tired of getting to say that instead of just — implying it for ten years."

"Good," Iwaizumi says, pressing a kiss to the top of his head. "Because I'm planning on hearing it a lot. Every phone call. Every visit. However many hemispheres end up between us over however many years, until neither of us has to fly anywhere to say it anymore."

"Is that a promise?"

"It's a promise." His voice is steady, certain, the same certainty that carried a plane ticket across a hemisphere six months ago without a second thought. "I've had ten years of practice showing up for you. Distance was never going to be the thing that finally made me stop."

⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁☆⠄⠄☆⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁

The morning of the final, Oikawa wakes before his alarm, the way he always does before something big, and lies still for a moment cataloging the differences between this morning and the one that started all of it, a year and change ago.

That morning, he woke already exhausted, having barely slept, his body heavy with a fear that felt bottomless. This morning, he wakes rested, calm in a way that would have seemed impossible to the version of himself packing a suitcase at 5 AM with shaking hands. The apartment doesn't smell like nothing anymore. It smells, faintly, of the coffee he set up on a timer the night before, of the grey shirt hanging in the closet, of a year of ordinary mornings that have slowly, without any single dramatic turning point, become simply his life.

He showers without rushing. Eats breakfast at the small kitchen table he bought secondhand in his third month, once he'd decided the apartment's furnished furniture wasn't quite going to cut it long-term, a decision that felt, at the time, like a small act of faith in his own staying power. He checks his phone once, unhurried, and finds the same cluster of messages he's come to expect on match days — his mother, characteristically certain; Takeru, characteristically capitalized; Matsukawa and Hanamaki, characteristically irreverent.

And Iwaizumi's, arriving exactly when he expects it to, worded almost identically to the one he sent before that very first fourth-set appearance a year ago, except this time there's no undertone of anxious hope underneath it — just plain, settled certainty.

Iwaizumi: whatever happens today, I already know who you are. go remind everyone else.

Oikawa reads it and doesn't feel the old lump in his throat this time, or not only that — feels, alongside it, something steadier, the warm certainty of a promise that's been tested for a year and held every single time.

He picks up the volleyball on his way out the door, the way he has before every home match since he arrived, sets it on the small shelf by the entrance where he can touch it on his way past without breaking stride, an old superstition that's become, somewhere along the way, less about needing luck and more about a small daily ritual of gratitude.

So you remember, the gesture still says, even now, even a year and a whole rebuilt life later. That you're not doing this alone.

He isn't. He hasn't been, not really, not since the day a boy caught his sets after everyone else went home and never once asked to be thanked for it.

He locks the door behind him and walks out into a Buenos Aires morning that feels, for the first time since he arrived, entirely and unremarkably like home.

The season final falls in April, ten months after a taxi first pulled away from an apartment building in Tokyo with a cherry tree just starting to bud out front. Oikawa doesn't think about that morning often anymore, not the way he used to — the memory's stopped being a wound and settled, instead, into something closer to a marker, a line on a map showing how far he's actually come.

He starts the match this time. No substitution, no fourth-set cameo — his name in the lineup from the opening whistle, printed alongside Emi's and Bruno's and a dozen others whose names took him months to stop mentally translating before he could say them properly. The stadium is louder than anything he's played in outside of nationals, a roaring particular to this city, that he's only in the last few months started to feel less like noise and more like fuel.

Emi falls into step beside him in the tunnel, the way he has before every big match since that first fourth-set appearance, and bumps their shoulders together without breaking stride.

"Nervous?" Emi asks.

"A little. A lot less than a year ago, though."

"Good sign. Means you belong here now instead of just visiting." He grins, easy, familiar, the same warmth he offered on Oikawa's very first day, worn now into something deeper by a year of shared practices and losses and small, ordinary victories. "Whatever happens today — proud of you already. For the whole year. Not just today."

"That's uncomfortably close to something Iwaizumi would say."

"Maybe I have been talking to him too much when he visits." Emi laughs, unbothered. "Come. Team is waiting. Let's go show them what a full year of you actually looks like."

⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁☆⠄⠄☆⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁

It's a long match. Five sets, the kind that wear on past the point where technique alone carries anyone, down into whatever's actually underneath — the same stubbornness that got an eight-year-old back onto a jungle gym with a broken wrist, that rebuilt a knee twice, that boarded a plane to a country whose language it didn't yet speak because the alternative was staying somewhere safe and never finding out what it could actually become.

In the fifth set, tied late, Emi calls for a specific play they've run a hundred times in practice and maybe a dozen times in real matches, one that lives or dies entirely on whether Oikawa reads the blockers correctly in the half-second he has to decide. He does. The set goes exactly where it needs to go, fast and precise, and Bruno's spike lands clean in a gap that shouldn't have existed and somehow, perfectly, does.

The whistle blows. The stadium comes apart.

Oikawa doesn't remember, later, exactly how he ends up on the floor, Emi's arms around him, Bruno half-tackling both of them, the rest of the team piling in until it's less a celebration than a single tangled, joyful organism. He just remembers the noise, and the dizzying fact of having done this — actually done it, ten months after standing terrified in his old apartment doorway wondering if he was making the biggest mistake of his life — surrounded by people who, at some point over the last year, stopped being strangers whose language he was learning and became, simply, his team.

He calls Iwaizumi from the locker room afterward, still in uniform, sweat-soaked, voice wrecked before he's even said hello.

"We won," he manages. "Iwa-chan, we actually won."

"I know." Iwaizumi's voice is thick, unmistakably wet. "I watched every set. I screamed at my television so loud my neighbor texted to ask if I was okay."

"Were you okay?"

"I was better than okay, I watched you set the winning play of a championship match, I don't think 'okay' covers it." A pause, and when he speaks again his voice has dropped, softer, the teasing falling away. "I'm so proud of you. Not just for today. For all of it. For getting on that plane when you were terrified. For learning a whole language. For building an entire life on the other side of the world and somehow still finding room in it for me. I don't think I've ever been prouder of anyone in my life."

Oikawa's throat closes, tears finally catching up to him now that the adrenaline's draining, sitting on a locker room bench eleven thousand kilometers from where this all started. "I couldn't have done it without you. I know that sounds like a line. It's not a line. Every hard week, every homesick Tuesday, every single time I almost convinced myself I didn't belong here — you were the reason I didn't actually believe it. You and Mom and this whole team, but mostly you, because you were the one who taught me, ten years before I ever needed the lesson, that showing up is the whole thing. It's not about being close. It's about choosing, every single time, to be there anyway."

"Yeah," Iwaizumi says, voice rough. "I know. I learned that from you too, if it makes you feel better. Neither of us really knew what we were building until we had to build it from opposite ends of the planet."

"When do I see you next?"

"Sooner than you think. I already checked flights for June. One year, almost exactly, since you first got on that plane." His voice softens further, something warm and certain underneath it. "Figured it was worth marking properly. Full circle and all that."

Oikawa closes his eyes, sitting in a locker room half a world from where this story started, a championship medal somewhere nearby that he hasn't even properly looked at yet, and lets himself feel, fully, without performing it for anyone, the enormous relief of having done the hard thing and found, on the other side of it, that none of what mattered most was actually lost in the crossing. Just carried. Differently. But carried all the same.

"I'll be counting the days," he says.

"Me too," Iwaizumi answers. "Always have been. Go celebrate with your team, Tooru. I'll be here when you're ready to call again. I'm not going anywhere."

"I know," Oikawa says, and for the first time since a taxi pulled away from a building with a budding cherry tree out front, believes it completely, without a single reservation left to perform past. "I know you're not. That's the whole point, isn't it. That's what you were trying to teach me all along."

⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂☆☆⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁

June comes around again, exactly a year on, and this time Oikawa is the one waiting at the barrier, watching a departures-and-arrivals board cycle through cities until Tokyo, via São Paulo, finally lands on schedule.

The cherry tree outside his old building would be fully leafed out by now, he thinks idly, waiting. Nothing left of the buds that were just starting a year ago, the last ordinary detail he noticed on his way out of a life he was terrified to leave. He doesn't know who lives in that apartment now. He hopes, whoever they are, they've found their own version of what he found here — not instead of what they left, just alongside it, the way rooms fill slowly with a life instead of arriving already lived-in.

Iwaizumi comes through the doors looking travel-rumpled and familiar and entirely unhurried about finding him in the crowd, like some part of him has simply stopped worrying, over the last year, about whether Oikawa will be there. He always is. That's stopped being a question either of them needs to ask.

"You're late," Oikawa says, when he's close enough.

"The flight landed on time, you're just standing here early because you're a mess about this and we both know it."

"I am not a mess."

"You've been checking the arrivals board every ninety seconds for the last twenty minutes, Sofía would have opinions about your cardiovascular stress levels."

"Sofía isn't here to have opinions."

"I'll tell her anyway. She'll enjoy it." Iwaizumi drops his suitcase, the same easy abandonment as a year ago, and pulls him in without further preamble, and for a long moment neither of them says anything at all, just stand there in the noise of a crowded arrivals hall in a city that's become, somehow, over the course of one difficult, necessary year, exactly as much home to Iwaizumi as it is to Oikawa — a second address for something that was never really about the address to begin with.

"Welcome back," Oikawa says eventually, into his shoulder.

"Good to be back," Iwaizumi says. "Take me home."

And Oikawa does — out through the doors into a winter exactly as cold as it was the first time, into a taxi, into a city that greets Iwaizumi, this time, like an old, familiar thing instead of a stranger.

In the apartment, the table is set for two before either of them has said a word about dinner — an old habit Oikawa's built without noticing, cooking enough for someone who isn't always there, just in case, the way his mother used to keep a drawer for Iwaizumi's clothes without either of them ever formally agreeing to it. The shirt still hangs in the closet, worn softer now by another year of washes. The volleyball still sits on the windowsill, catching the last gold light of a winter evening, the seam looser than it was, the logo faded almost past recognition.

Iwaizumi picks it up anyway, the way he does every visit, turning it over in his hands like he's checking on an old friend.

"Still holding together," he says.

"Barely. I keep meaning to have someone look at the stitching."

"Don't." Iwaizumi sets it back down, exactly where it was, careful. "Let it fall apart eventually, if it's going to. It did its job. It doesn't have to last forever to have mattered."

Oikawa watches him from the kitchen doorway — a year older, a year further into whatever this is turning into, a decade and one difficult, necessary ocean behind them both — and feels something settle into place that no longer needs a name, because they've already given it one, plainly, out loud, the way they should have years before either of them found the courage to.

"Dinner's almost ready," he says. "Sit. Tell me about the flight."

And Iwaizumi does, pulling out a chair at the small, secondhand, slightly wobbly-no-longer table that started as one man's decision to stop just staying somewhere and start actually living there — and ends, a year later, as the place where both of them, however many kilometers apart the calendar makes them for however many weeks at a stretch, keep choosing, over and over, to come home.