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Hinata attacks him first with his hands.
Oikawa has been in Rio De Janeiro for two days and twelve hours when he steps onto the beach, sheilds his eyes from the sun, and finds that Hinata Shouyou’s fingers are touching the fabric of his t-shirt and cracking reality in two.
This is an unfair assessment. Oikawa sees Hinata coming, grabs those fingers and pulls him into the hug, breathless, the decisive tearing-down of a hundred nameless barriers that might have existed between two former rivals if the situation were not so absurd. Hinata’s hands press up into the warm fabric against Oikawa’s back and Hinata’s head lands against his chest, and a million half-exposed images crash over Oikawa as he stares at the beach: Miyagi. Karasuno. A number 10 flashing in dayglow orange, witnessed through the gridded barrier of a volleyball net. Skinny, jittery limbs, now wrapped around his torso with the crushing strength of a bull.
And when Hinata Shouyou pulls back, opens his mouth, and says: Oikawa-san? What are you doing here? the sound of his native language is prehistoric and impossible.
Oikawa liberates himself of his Argentinean teammates easily enough with some graceful, offhand excuse about not being hungry or coming back around later. As soon as their silhouettes become specks on the boardwalk, Oikawa sets about the task of reconciling with the fact that Hinata Shouyou is standing before him, feet buried in the sand where the beach and the boardwalk meet. Their conversation is breakneck. Something about Brazil. Beach volleyball. Italy would have been cooler. Yeah, I could have gone to Italy . They meander, half-answers about where and why and how things came together to land them here, until:
“The Argentinean League? That’s so cool, Oikawa-san!”
Oikawa contorts his face. “And you’re here to play beach volleyball, because, why?”
“Well, I moved here ‘cause I thought it looked cool! And it’s good training!”
And Oikawa cocks his head to one side and blinks into the sunlight, because it’s rare to see inanity and earnesty crammed into such close quarters. “It’s good training?”
The inanity holds true: beach volleyball is good training. Oikawa stumbles and thuds elbows-first into the hot cushion of the beach a dozen times during their first set, and through the liquid spray of sand around him he hears Hinata’s laughter.
“No like this!” Moments later Hinata is grabbing onto his forearm to steady himself and pounding the surface of the beach with his feet. It holds solid beneath his soles, and he rockets high into the air, as if he’s springing off of linoleum. “You have to stomp on the sand when you jump, or else it sucks you down.” Another leap, a warm hand steadied around Oikawa’s arm. “Look, it makes a surface to jump off of!”
Oikawa gets it on his first try and feels a grin crack across his face. Hinata’s hair is blowing into his eyes as their gazes meet. “Oh,” Oikawa says. “Like that?”
Hinata’s grin is blinding. “Yeah!”
They play five sets against various strangers during their first afternoon together. The first goes utterly sideways; the following four are the slow, painstaking process of Oikawa learning how to step properly in the sand and watching in wonder as Hinata flings himself across the beach to put himself beneath the ball.
There’s a humor to the sport that Oikawa immediately understands cannot be replicated beneath a gymnasium’s ceiling. The way the sunlight theives you of your vision, laughing and merciless, the way the wind can pluck a ball from you at its whim and will, and the boldness required of you to launch yourself blind into the path of a plummeting spike. The ocean, a lazy and solitary observer. Hinata thrives in it. He cuts through the sand and the heat-thickened air like a gleaming blade. He’s diving into places on the court before Oikawa even lays his eyes on them. Oikawa steadies himself in a rare moment of stillness as their oppoents retrieve the ball, and he finds himself on the verge of laughter. Hinata’s voice, ringing: I moved here ‘cause I thought it was cool!
And then, the way strength is organized. Oikawa has always cut himself out a respectable space to inhabit within the careful rule of six-backs-to-the-line, uniform-clad, linoleum-and-rubber, indoor volleyball. Where the coach on the bench is both your prosecutor and your defense, and the raw power in your swing as you leap over the back line to serve can carve you out a place on a roster. Here, the beach is your judge and jury. There is no coach and no uniform to wear, and your roster is you and maybe someone in the crowd, later, if you’re good enough, Oikawa is coming to understand. Hinata’s explanation makes clear: the power you wring from your shoulder when you serve is only worth anything if the wind and the beach agree with you that day.
“So you just ask someone to be your partner? Some random person you’ve met?” Oikawa finds himself sand- and sweat-laminated, leaning into a cooling dune, three sets deep into the evening, struggling to understand the sport itself. He’d asked for a break as aristocratically as possible and Hinata had acted mercy on him and brought him to a shadier part of the beach. Hinata had sat with his legs sprawled out before him and begun covering them in sand, as blithe and carefree as a child. Now only his toes are left sticking out. Oikawa studies this, and the thought occurs to him that his team has time off again tomorrow. He could return.
Hinata hums before offering an answer, as if Oikawa has asked a question he’s never considered before. “Well, mostly, but it’s more complicated than that. Partners come and go all the time. You can ask someone to play in a tournament with you, and if your reputation is good, they might say yes! But they’re probably just your partner for that tournament.”
Oikawa stares at Hinata, who is now lost in his explanation, and then at his own legs. He’s got a long scrape across his right shin from where he’d slid against a piece of shell earlier. Hinata had interrupted the game to reassure him with comical earnesty that he didn’t need to worry, he got scrapes all the time, and Oikawa had nearly doubled over, as if gut-punched by sentimentality.
“I think people just want to avoid contracts, mostly, which I can get,” Hinata continues. “I had a couple partners who I played two tournaments with, or even three one time, but that’s pretty rare. It was fun, though! I still see them around.”
Oikawa meets Hinata’s smiling gaze. It’s absurd that he’s here, in Brazil, to begin with; it’s even more absurd that he can exist and thrive within this system. Oikawa cannot imagine a world in which his place on the court is determined by something as fragile and abstract as the trust of a partner who’d been a stranger days or even moments ago. It’s like standing exposed, alone, to the wind and the tides. The image comes to him like a reflex: the number four, written in white or sea-teal, a jersey whipping like a flag as it rises to the height of a net. A head of dark hair. The kind of trust that is won between two individuals, carefully, over decades. The kind that is anything but fragile or abstract.
He is struck first with the awareness of how improbable and rare that kind of trust now looks, from this stranded position on the beach, and secondly with the sense that Hinata Shouyou is either incredibly foolish or incredibly strong, for throwing himself headlong into a version of the sport where he won’t even be able to glimpse it.
“So you’re just…” Oikawa carefully trims his voice in a way that suggests he’s nursing the thought, and not struggling against the fear it stirs in him. The image of Hinata stepping off of a plane into an empty airport gate comes to him. “Alone? For the most part?”
Hinata’s face screws up. “Well, yeah, I guess it’s like being alone, but I try not to think about it that way. There’s always plenty of people around, it’s just up to you to get to know them.” Oikawa watches him bury his hands in the mounds of sand he’s gathered over his legs. His smile flickers into a grin. “It’s more like being free.”
Oikawa is struck with a pang of embarrassment, because of course Hinata would be able to think about it that way. He wonders momentarily if his question has exposed some great weakness in himself, the glaring inability to even consider the solitude that Hinata flings himself into like it’s obvious. Where would Oikawa be, without those years with that sea-green number four? He’d only ever experienced that kind of solitude, or felt it, in the first weeks following his move to Argentina, and it had left him raw and split-open. He watches Hinata pile sand over his legs, and knows he’s staring down some kind of strength he doesn’t have.
“It’s like freedom, huh? That’s pretty clever of you, shorty-pie,” Oikawa then lilts, because even here he is not exempt from acting like himself.
Hinata laughs. “Well, and besides,” he says. He rises from the mounds of sand that he’s packed around his legs, and they crack and crumble around his form like a wave against a breaker. He stands, grinning, plastered in beach. “I’ve got you with me right now.” He extends a hand. “Wanna play another set?”
Oikawa knows, in the moment that Hinata’s hand meets his, that he’ll be returning tomorrow.
>>>
They play two more sets that afternoon against increasingly skilled strangers, and then later in the evening they lose against a couple of guys who Hinata seems to know. Ninja Shouyou! they call across the beach. Hinata beams as they vault the boardwalk’s railing to come greet him: two men, bearded, tall, with sunglasses sitting atop their hats. Oikawa can only watch as they begin recounting some elaborate tale to him in a mixture of Portuguese and English inaccessible to him. They swarm to Hinata, like a moth to a lamp, gathering as if to warm themselves around him. Hinata’s expression reads unaware, polite, cheery; he dishes out greetings and laughter oblivious to the effect they have on those around him.
Later, when Hinata nearly barrels Oikawa over as they both dive for the same ball, and then stares in utter shock at the sight of Oikawa landed several feet away from him, Oikawa is struck with the realization that’s been lying in wait all day: Hinata roams the earth ignorant of his own strength.
Oikawa is familiar with his own strength to the point of discomfort. He has always pinched and picked apart every inch of it, searching for more. It nearly aches to look across the court at Hinata, someone who seems to be bursting, ripping apart at the seams with it. A part of him wants to near that, touch it, take hold of that elusive power to gather others around him; to trace his fingers along the cords of muscle in Hinata’s arms to try and grant himself access to whatever painstaking magic put them there. He knows better than anyone that there is no such magic; that they were put there by Hinata’s gritted, gleaming teeth and his hands buried in the sand performing set upon set of push-ups; he thinks he wants to touch them anyways.
The very sight of Hinata had been a shock, earlier on the boardwalk, until it wasn’t. There was no puzzle to put together: Hinata had simply unfolded into himself in the years Oikawa had missed. His shoulders’ banded muscles and the callouses on his palms are the inevitable confirmation of the intensity that has always churned within him. The firm, swollen lines of his chest are more than something for Oikawa to skirt his gaze away from as he helps him up from the sand, Oikawa knows they are an announcement: I am Hinata Shouyou. This strength has always been within me, but now it is yours to see.
The longer they play into the evening, and the more Oikawa thinks about it, the less he can imagine it having gone any other way. There is no reality in which Hinata Shouyou’s arms are not wrought like tree trunks, the muscles in his back not taught and tanned as the cables in the volleyball net he pulls tight so that he and Oikawa can take another set. It makes Oikawa look at himself dumbly in the mirror of a boardwalk-bar bathroom later that night, as they’re getting dinner together, and wonder what truer version of himself Argentina has pulled out of him. Oikawa rubs at his face, and stares: the peeling reminder of a months-old sunburn across the bridge of his nose. The permanent ribbons of red skin above and below his knee, where the elastic edges of his brace pinch him raw. Lines beneath his eyes.
He slides one of his t-shirt sleeves up over his soulder, lifts his arm, watches the muscle contort and flex beneath his skin. He’s tanned, now, and not quite wrought like a tree trunk, but whipped more violently into shape than he ever was in high school. Oikawa’s arm stills, and hangs in the air, limp. Is this not always what he wanted to look like? Would his high school self be happy with this image of him? What would he make of it? Of Argentina’s physical imprint on his skin, the sun spots on his cheeks, the unnaturally stark definition of the veins along the swell of his forearm. What would he think, if he knew what it took to get here?
What does Hinata make of it? This is some half-decent westernized asian restaurant they’re in; Oikawa returns from the bathroom to where Hinata is waiting for him at their table, blasting him with a smile, and the world seems to swim. They are parodies of each other. Oikawa feels his face sting. Two men self-stranded at sea, landed upon the same deserted island, an ocean away from their families and lives, one of them seemingly handling it a lot better than the other. The absurdity of Oikawa’s decision to move to Argentina had been blasted back at him full volume when Hinata first laid eyes on him across earlier this afternoon, a confrontation in the form of a pair of legs and flashing eyes and a pealing voice. Here it is again, sitting across from him in a restaurant, recounting another lighthearted tale of losing against strangers on the beach that Oikawa can only bring himself to half-listen to. Oikawa hears Hinata’s initial call: Oikawa-san! Nothing is as blunt a reminder of distance as a piece of home.
Oikawa struggles not to call Iwaizumi that night, after he and Hinata depart from the restaurant. The team clamors together and recollects itself downtown, long after Oikawa has exchanged parting words with Hinata, a Can I see you again tomorrow? launched up from the restaurant’s terrace and a bubbling, barely-contained Sure. They’d played a total of five sets that night before tumbling to dinner, Oikawa tearing through bowls of noodles and laughing with Hinata harder than he can remember laughing in a long time, and sitting in the bathroom later with the numbness of that realization. The walk back to the hotel with his team is jittery and long and his teammates’ voices wash over him in shades of Spanish and English that he knows he should understand. He replays Hinata’s voice in his ears instead, the chiming, familiar notes of their native language. What are you doing in Brazil, Oikawa-san? Hinata feels like the only other person on the continent who can speak it. When was the last time he had heard Japenese in person?
Over the phone?
He almost calls Iwaizumi. His hotel bed feels narrow that night, and too warm with the awareness of seeing Hinata again tomorrow, and he dangles one foot off of the side of it as he studies his teammates’ sleeping forms. Witnessing their peaceful sleep is like cruelty. His phone flits between the nightstand and his palm as he grabs it and puts it back in indecision, repeating the motion over itself a dozen, hundred times. Its clink against the wood is like a whispered secret. He stays awake behind closed eyelids and repeats the rhythm to lull himself to sleep.
Oikawa wakes in the morning with his phone pressed hard to his chest. He clumsily, shakily opens his sent calls folder and deflates in relief when he sees that he hadn’t called anyone the night before. He rolls onto his back and feels the phone against his chest like the collective weight of the Pacific.
>>>
The last time he called Iwaizumi had been months ago, back in Argentina. The memory is short. A curt, startled crack of a voice through the speakers: Huh? ‘Kawa?
Oikawa had stared across his dorm room at his alarm clock and thought about time zones, came back to himself with an imprecise calculation before speaking. Sorry, forgot how early it is, Iwa-chan.
Nah, it’s alright. I was up early for training anyways. The voice splintering for a moment as someone else was heard in the background. Hey, can you get—store—I need to— And then Iwaizumi through the speaker again, talking to someone other than Oikawa. Yeah, I’m going after breakfast.
Is that one of your roomates, Iwa-chan? Oikawa launched out the interruption with confidence, but then started at his own voice, soaked in the kind of disingenuous teasing he hadn’t heard from himself in months. His grip tightened around the phone. What version of himself was this?
Another rustling and crackling before Iwaizumi spoke. Uh, yeah. He’s moving out next week, though, actually. I’m about to go pick up some boxes, ‘cause we’re packing up his stuff this weekend.
Ah, how sad! Are you heartbroken? Let me guess which one. Takahashi? With the hair?
The sound of the phone being set down somewhere. Uh, no, he’s one you don’t know, I think. Moved in last spring. Same program as me. He’s transferring schools though.
Iwaizumi lived in a shared apartment off campus, Oikawa knew, two stops down from the campus center and three stops down from the training gym. He’d described it in vivid detail to Oikawa over the phone on the day he’d moved in three years ago, down to the toothed paneling around the cupboards and the color of the curtains when the sunlight hit them, as if he wanted Oikawa to be able to reach over and touch them, too. His voice had taken on a childlike excitement Oikawa knew, in all his years with him, to appreciate as incredibly rare. It’s really gorgeous, Oikawa. The windows in my bedroom are huge. Takahashi says you can see the whole city light up at night. His smile had crackled through the reciever as clear as his words.
Oikawa had sat on the same carpeted floor of his room in the team’s dormitories in Buenos Aires, three years younger and greener and more terrified, and pictured Iwaizumi standing there alone in the center of his half-unpacked apartment high in a tower on the other side the Pacific, and felt as if the floor was warping beneath him. He struggled in search of a snide comment and found himself blanking. A brief surrender: That sounds wonderful, Iwa-chan.
A pause. It is. I wish you were here.
The quality in his voice that Oikawa knew, in all his years with him, to appreciate as incredibly rare. I wish you were here. Oikawa had bitten down hard on the bent knuckle of his forefinger and watched his watery vision swirl before him. I do too. More than anything else in the world.
But he heard the words come through him at a distance more than he spoke them: Of course you miss me, Iwa-chan! How could you possibly live without me? Don’t worry, I’ll grace Japan with my presence again sometime soon, if I can fit it in! I’m in high demand these days, you know!
A pause, in which Oikawa could only hear the sound of his own heartbeat. An immediate feeling of regret.
Mm. Yeah, Iwaizumi said. Listen, I gotta help Saito with some boxes, I’ll call you back later.
And Oikawa had watched the phone go dead in his hand.
What version of himself was this?
Three years and several dozen phone calls later, he was asking himself the same question as he sat in the same team dormitory, dragging out the conversation about Iwaizumi’s roomate and the moving boxes and the undergraduate program and shuffling through the mental file folder of a dozen different names he could just barely remember, because he didn’t know what else to talk about. The ones Iwaizumi had mentioned off-hand, that Oikawa tucked away with the greatest level of care he was capable of, ready to whip out again when the conversation lulled and Oikawa felt somehow like the great gully of the Pacific was widening rapidly between them. Random people, dates, the benign, small details of Iwaizumi’s life that he’d always taken for granted, and now clung to as if his life depended on it, when they were offered. Which seemed to be happening less and less.
But Takahashi’s the one with the crazy hair, you said. Oikawa was scrubbing a hand through his own hair, staring blankly at his door.
Oh, uh, he moved out last month. Saito took his old room. I’m planning on following him to Osaka soon, actually. There’s a research position opening up at his University.
Oikawa let the line go still. You’re moving to Osaka?
Yeah, listen. Another scraping and tapping that suggested the phone was being relocated. I told Sakurai I was gonna go to the supermarket before class, is it alright if I call you back later?
Yeah, Oikawa said automatically, before the weight of it hit him. Wait, actually, can I—
The line was already dead.
Oikawa leaned back on his elbows, and then lowered himself to the floor entirely, and cast his phone off of him like a burning coal. Osaka? Iwaizumi was moving to Osaka?
His curtains swayed above him with a mocking serenity, ochre-yellow, billowing and beamed-through with Argentinean sunlight. An ambulance wailed in the distance, and Oikawa pictured it careening towards downtown through a narrow sidestreet. Iwaizumi had lived in the same Tokyo apartment for the past three years, Oikawa thought, and now he was moving to Osaka. Offhand, like it was nothing. What other knowledge of his life was Oikawa missing? What other gaping holes were there in the hull of this vessel, where Oikawa couldn’t see them?
Oikawa tried to picture the curtains in Iwaizumi’s apartment, as he’d described them over the phone those years ago with a voice heavy with elation. The way they’d looked against the windows, mid-afternoon, with the sunlight streaming through.
He couldn’t even remember the color.
>>>
The first time he kisses Hinata, they’re drunk and waist-deep in the Atlantic. It feels in the moment like something that was agreed upon long ago, somewhere between the fourth set of their second afternoon together and Oikawa’s delicate admission over their second dinner that he was considering taking a week of his paid leave to stay here in Brazil and train for a while.
Really, Oikawa? You know, you could always stay with me! Hinata had dropped the -san sometime yesterday afternoon, and begun holding eye contact a little longer since. He’d leaned in a little closer over their table, and let the collar of his shirt dip lower, because he could guess what this meant, and these words were only a pretense. There were some parts of his own strength that he certainly knew, Oikawa considered.
Oikawa had violently beaten down the grin trying to spread across his face and swirled the water around in his glass as if it were a fine vintage. You know, shorty-pie. I’ll think about it. And that’s when it was agreed upon.
It’s unclear how they ended up waist-deep in the ocean that night. They’d played all afternoon and then gone out for drinks with the guys who’d beaten them in their last set, two of the players who’d gathered around Hinata on that first evening, calling him Ninja Shouyou and greeting him like he was their brother. Hinata did not seem to care that he lost whenever he played with Oikawa, and neither did his friends. As soon as they got word that Oikawa was in the indoor Argentinean league, they insisted on paying for more drinks and goading more stories about the league out of him. Oikawa obliged only to watch the wonder in Hinata’s smile grow brighter and brighter.
Come on, I wanna go in! Later, after Hinata’s friends have departed, a pleasantly-drunk Hinata is tugging Oikawa from the boardwalk bar and leading them both tumbling over the beach. It sits warm and vacant and dark beneath the night sky, cratered with hours-old footfalls to be combed away by morning. Their feet crash over it with their laughter.
When they reach the edge of the water Hinata charges through the foamy spray without pause, and Oikawa doesn’t have enough time to hesitate, and finds himself soaked to the ribs moments later. Hinata is laughing and spraying seafoam at him and Oikawa is peeling his shirt off, because he’s drunk and it’s cotton and uncomfortably wet, and he doesn’t care what Hinata makes of the gesture, because they’d already agreed that afternoon that they were going to do this. You know, you could always stay with me.
Oikawa casts his shirt into the waves and lifts Hinata at the hips like it’s nothing. Hinata rises from the ocean in Oikawa’s grasp, beaming. Nothing needs to be spoken. Hinata’s gaze gleams off of his like a live wire in the dark. Perhaps this had been agreed upon from the moment they embraced on the boardwalk, Oikawa thinks, or the first sand-covered hand extended and taken, or some time and place long ago in high school, through the flimsy barrier of a volleyball net. Oikawa-san . Hinata’s legs find their way around him, the warm pitch-dark ocean laps at where their hips meet, and Hinata’s hands fall to the crest of his shoulders and the nape of his neck.
There’s a only a moment where they both hesitate. A second of eye contact, indistinct and bright, and then Shouyou’s mouth is on his.
>>>
Oikawa has lived in Argentina for three years. If he were to somehow go back and intercept the wide-eyed, deer-in-headlights version of himself who’d stepped off of an aiplane into a swarming airport terminal in Buenos Aires three years ago, Oikawa is pretty sure he’d be unrecognisable to himself. It wasn’t the matter of finding a team and trying out and joining a league that had been a problem, nor the language, after a couple months spent with his head buried in English and Spanish textbooks. It was the violent tearing-apart and reconfiguration of the self.
There are some things you can only learn about a place once you leave it behind; Oikawa is forced to swallow this fact in his second month abroad, when he realizes that he hates Japanese alcohol and that Argentinean wine has ruined it for him for the rest of his life. The second reckoning is at the realization that he hates Japanese weather, and that the ability to take a nap beside the open window of his Argentinean dorm room at any time of the day has ruined it for him for the rest of his life. The third reckoning is that he’s no longer so sure about the Japanese version of himself, and that the Argentinean version of himself is going to have to fight tooth and nail in order to be considered an improvement.
Shouyou’s blithe, unwitting type of bull-strength is a slap to the face. Oikawa wonders ruefully if he is drawn to it not only because it’s beautiful to witness, but because he needs it. Because it reminds him of an earlier, easier version of his own being. Shouyou pulls others to him the same easy way the moon pulls the tides from the earth. There is not a single moment in Oikawa’s three years of Argentinean history in which he’s felt that he’s been able to pull anyone to him. The sight of Shouyou gleaming and surrounded by Brazillian friends on the boardwalk is a living memorial to the time in Oikawa’s life when he was gleaming and surrounded by a team of white- and teal-uniformed friends beneath the lights of a high school gym. He had drawn them to him the same easy way the moon pulls the tides from the earth.
This isn’t to say that he does not play well anymore. This isn’t to say that he doesn’t have friends among his Argentinean teammates. This isn’t to say that anyone would peer in from the outside on his three years spent in the Argentinean league and say that he’s done anything other than exceptionally well. It’s merely this: there are things that you can only learn about a place or a time or a person once you leave it behind, and that the Japanese version of Oikawa Tooru took many things for granted is one of them.
And then there’s the sense that it might be too late for the Argentinean version to play catch-up. That the most important part of that old, glittering, white-and-teal reality was already lost in the moment that Oikawa could no longer remember the color of the curtains in Iwaizumi’s Hajime’s old Tokyo apartment. Or maybe that it was lost at some indistinct, unannounced point well before then, when Oikawa turned down a few too many phone calls from his Argentinean dorm, or felt his face sting at the word Tooru spoken over the phone, and discovered that he was too much of a coward to speak the word Hajime into the reciever in return, so he just quipped back with some glittering, automated reply, and they both had to watch it sit there on the phone line. Or when he was unwilling to speak of his Argentinean companions, because the reality of their faces and their language and their friendships still felt foreign even several years in, no matter what he did, so all he did was poke and prod at the minute details of Hajime’s life until the topic was beaten into dust and neither of them knew what to speak of anymore, and it was easier just to hang up. Or for Oikawa not to pick up altogether.
There is the sense that it might be late for the Argentinean version to play catch-up. There is also the sense that Hinata Shouyou is the most breathtaking being to ever walk the earth, and that not everything can be salvaged, and that sometimes it is better to wade waist-deep into the glittering roil of the ocean in the dead of night and lift him to your hips and kiss him until reality splinters open and dissolves itself into a singular, warm sweetness, and there is nothing left of the world for you to consider or struggle against beyond the gentle pressure of his body wrapped up in yours.
>>>
Oikawa calls his manager from the sunlit puddle of Shouyou’s bed the next morning and tells him he’s taking a week of his paid time off to stay a bit longer in Brazil. He hovers his thumb over the bottom of the screen when he hangs up so he can’t see his missed calls list. The phone is cast off of him like a hot coal, and he rolls over to pull Shouyou’s half-sleeping form back into him. The thought washes over him, heady and fragile and sharp, like the feeling of Shouyou’s warmth freshly caught beneath his palms: one week.
>>>
Their first time sober is the next afternoon. Oikawa has been in Rio for five days, now, his afternoons growing somehow longer and more sun-baked and punctuated only by the sound of Shouyou’s laughter lifting across the beach. He hasn’t recieved any phone calls. There is something released between them, even in how they look at one another in public, now that the pre-ancient agreement has been delivered on. He isn’t sure if they’re even on the same continent, the same timeline as Argentina. He only knows the grit of sand against his forearms and the lap of the sea and the lines on Shouyou’s shoulders where his skin goes from pale to sun-kissed. The laughing voices of strangers, words shouted through the sunlight in Portuguese and Spanish and English. It’s like swimming through an idyll, air as thick and buoyant as syrup. They win their first set that day, and Shouyou launches himself into Oikawa’s arms. Oikawa takes all of him.
Shouyou’s bedroom is small and tidy, and the wooden panels of the floor are bleached tawny in geometric patterns where the sun projects the shape of the window frame onto them. There are a million tiny little details Oikawa had missed in his ocean-soaked drunkenness the night before: It smells like laundry detergent and deodorant and salt and sweat, and grains of sand stick to his bare soles as he tumbles towards Shouyou’s bed with Shouyou giggling in his arms. The door wishes shut behind them, and Shouyou’s old Karasuno jacket billows on its hanger. The mattress dips beneath Oikawa’s knees; one bare, one braced in white.
Shouyou smells like laundry detergent and deodorant and salt and sweat, and he tastes like heat in Oikawa’s mouth. They did this or something like this last night in the drunken haze that trailed them from the beach, Oikawa knows, but that feels like a distant sense-memory, a rehearsal; here Oikawa is, seeing him by the light of day, learning him over again. Oikawa has never needed anything so desperately as he needs Shouyou’s tank top off of him, and he has never touched anything so carefully as he touches his fingertips, and then his lips, to those firm, swollen lines of Shouyou’s chest, now laid warm and sunlit and naked beneath him. The silent soliloquy: This strength has always been within me, now it is yours to see.
Oikawa takes in as much of that strength as he can, tasting it, with his hands, and his lips, and his tongue, pressed against the taut striations where Shouyou’s pectorals meet one another, against the swell of his muscle beneath a pert nipple. Shouyou gasps and whines and tangles his fingers in Oikawa’s hair, and Oikawa thinks of music. Oikawa. Please. Please. His skin is as warm as sunlight.
And then Shouyou flips Oikawa beneath him. A single flash of muscle and breath, a gleaming show of strength. The soliloquy: And now it is yours to see. How those round brown eyes envelop his.
Shouyou’s hands invent new places on Oikawa’s body that Oikawa is convinced have never been discovered or witnessed or touched before, and he conducts magic on them. Oikawa finds himself curled around and beneath Shouyou with his brow buried in the crook of Shouyou’s neck, or with his lips at the tender stretch of skin behind his ear, and he finds himself squeezing his eyes shut against the warm, knife’s-edge ache that Shouyou wrings from him like a towel over a laundry basin. Oikawa feels Shouyou’s laughing breath brush his ear when his hips jerk, his gentle mouth, as smooth as seaglass, kissing ribbons of warmth down the architecture of his throat. Where Shouyou’s fingers wrap around him, sparks crack themselves open in white, blinding heat, and scatter across the underside of his skin.
Oikawa’s eyes later fix on the ceiling when Shouyou’s silhouette begins rising and falling above him, and he is suddenly awash in the desire to somehow gather up as much of Shouyou as he can. To take the whole of him in his hands, in his palms somehow, and look into his eyes and tell him something that Oikawa can barely articulate. To tell him that there’s something in him that’s deathless. To tell him that some fraction of him was cleaved off from a force so blinding-white, so impossibly hot to the touch, that Oikawa can feel it beginning to rend him straight through where their skin meets. That the sight of him cresting and falling against his hips is obscene, immaculate mercy.
Oikawa takes him in his hands, later, as they’ve come down, and Shouyou laughs and twists and keens beneath the gentle touch of Oikawa’s fingers to his ribs. The vision of him is blurry, but his laughter is clear and impossibly bright. Oikawa. Please. Bedsheets, pooled white in the light of the sun, rustle beneath him. Oikawa plants a knee in the mattress on either side of Shouyou’s hips, leans in, and kisses him soundly.
Heat in his mouth, enough to melt the Pacific to steam.
>>>
Oikawa gets a call during lunch. He and Shouyou are sprawled out on the terrace of one of his favorite boardwalk restaurants, taking a luxuriously long time to finish their drinks as Shouyou chats away in Portuguese with one of the regulars who just lost to them. Oikawa has one finger hooked into Shouyou’s belt loop beneath the table, and Shouyou has a sandy ankle pressed up against his. The call announces itself with an angry buzzing against Oikawa’s thigh.
He presses a hand against it through his shorts, hard, as if this might offer any clue as to whether or not the pit of fear that’s just opened itself up in his stomach is justified. Shouyou throws him a questioning look, and he pulls it out.
One look at the caller ID, and he crushes his thumb against the sleep button. It’s immediately stuffed back into his pocket. “S’alright, just a work call.” He’s alarmed at how easily the lie, and the grin, slide from his lips. He feels his face sting. “I’m on vacation right now, as far as that’s concerned.”
A quick laugh, and then conversation resumes at the table, but he’s deaf to it. For the first time, the sight of Shouyou’s smile punches him with guilt.
Iwaizumi hasn’t called him in months. Why now?
>>>
“I think that you should call him,” Shouyou says.
It’s Oikawa’s sixth night in Rio, and they’re waist-deep in the ocean again. Shouyou’s habit is to play until the sun has long buried itself in the sea and the last lingering opponent turns in for the night, and then soak himself in seawater before returning to his apartment. It doesn’t matter how cold or how warm or how late the night is, Shouyou launches himself through the foam, laughing, and rinses the salt off in the shower before rolling into bed.
“Why,” Oikawa says, belligerently, because the Argentinean version of himself is working on something called being honest with others, and he is feeling incredibly belligerent. He stands with his eyes pinned blankly to the horizon and his hands stuffed into the pockets of his sea-soaked shorts. Shouyou’s presence beside him seems to loom. His neck stings.
“I mean,” Shouyou begins. He’s swirling a foot around beneath the water, watching it. “You’re going back to Japan someday, right?” Eye contact, gleaming brown eyes.
Oikawa feels himself simmering at those words. Yeah, obviously I’m going back, he wants to spit out. We talked about that. You know that already. Don’t make me say it. He has never been angry at Shouyou before, and the feeling is alien and cold on his skin. But he’s gripped, bone-deep, with a searing sense of injustice. It is absurd, near-embarassing, how they ended up here, and he’s turning the series of events over and over itself in his head: he’d let it slip at dinner that night that it was Iwaizumi who’d called him at lunch, some comment he thought was innocuous and vague, and he’d then watched with rising horror as Shouyou somehow saw inside, and latched onto it with that prying bull-strength. Oh, Iwaizumi-san, how is he? Why didn’t you pick up? Is something wrong? It was as if Shouyou knew. Oikawa wondered at himself: if he’d been stupid, or careless, if this truth had been trailing him where he could not see it, waiting for Shouyou to pick it up and read it.
And the thought had followed them silently throughout the evening, through their last sets against Shouyou’s friends. The automated half-answers and evasions Oikawa had offered at dinner were apparently flimsy enough that Shouyou was worldlessly fiddling with them the whole time, turning them over, warping them until they splintered and he could see through.
Here they stood, Shouyou having pulled him into the sea again, now cornering him with gentle, patiently-voiced questions like So, if he still calls you, why did you say you think he doesn’t wanna talk to you anymore? It occured to Oikawa that in that moment that this was the last thing he ever wanted Shouyou to know about.
“I am going back to Japan someday, yes,” Oikawa says, answering his question several moments late.
The most infuriating part is that Shouyou doesn’t see himself as part of the equation. Oikawa wishes to the roots of his teeth that this was laced-through with some kind of selfish need, on Shouyou’s part, to see how he looks in Oikawa’s mind when held up to the ancient monument with the name Hajime on it; that is the kind of thing Oikawa could point out and latch onto and twist to his own advantage until he didn’t need to answer any more of Shouyou’s questions. Oikawa would say something glittering and cold and soaked in his most acidic kind of teasing, the kind of thing that Shouyou wouldn’t deserve, like: Why, I’m afraid that’s none of your business, shortie-pie.
But Shouyou is standing beside him in the water, doe-eyed, asking him these dredged-up, primeval questions not because he is jealous of Oikawa’s ancient monument to emotion with the name Hajme inscribed on it, or because he has ever heard of the concept of jealousy, but because he has taken the narrow cracks of Oikawa’s facade as footholds, and has seen the contorted and blistering thing inside, and is now extending a hand and asking if he’d like help climbing out. Oikawa has never been so angry with him.
“You would miss him if you went back and he wasn’t there, right? If you weren’t close anymore?”
Shouyou’s question rings in Oikawa’s ears like that of a teacher or a prying parent, who already knows the answer, and would simply like to hear it spoken to them. “Yes,” Oikawa says with mocking dispassion, “I would miss him.” His gaze doesn’t waver from the pitch-dark horizon. His neck sears.
“Mm,” Shouyou says. His hands are trailing over the surface of the water, his brow pinched in earnest, gentle concentration. “He’s your best friend. I think calling him is a good idea. It shows him you don’t take him for granted.”
Oikawa nearly shouts, gripped in a single moment by white-hot anger: “I don’t take him for granted—”
And then Oikawa stops, because he hears himself.
Shouyou’s hands go still against the surface of the water, and Oikawa feels those gleaming eyes on him, but he can’t bring himself to meet them. He’s studying the place in the darkness where the surface of the sea meets his t-shirt, pulling and plucking it away from his skin with the rolling tide. Shame, or something like it. It’s no wonder that Shouyou was able to see right through it all, to see him so clearly. I don’t take him for granted. Could he be more transparent?
“I’m sorry,” Oikawa says. His anger is gone, melted away, replaced by something hot and barbed and stinging in the pool of his gut. The tension in his limbs is gone, and all at once he feels immensely tired. He imagines the wounded look on Shouyou’s face. “I’m so sorry, Hinata. I shouldn’t—”
“I find it hard to watch Kageyama’s games, sometimes,” Shouyou says. The words strike as if thrown. Oikawa glances up in shock. Shouyou’s eyes are dark and wide and honest.
“What?” Oikawa asks helplessly. He feels, at once, disarmed. His hands hang in the water.
“There was a while in 2016 where I couldn’t watch them at all. During the Olympics I would avoid even glancing at televisions, ‘cause I saw him on there once when I didn’t expect it, and really wasn’t ready for it. I stopped responding to his text messages. I had this terrible fear of seeing him on TV again.” He shrugs, and the gesture looks absurd in its innocence.
“You…” Oikawa begins. He wonders, then, at the layers of months and years between them, and what the shape of Shouyou’s first experiences in Brazil are, if they mirror his own; what kind of contorted and terrible shape they must be, if he knows that this is the right thing to say. What kind of white-hot, crushed up emotions lay scattered over the surface of his bedroom floor, what names, what his sent calls list looks like. The afterimage of Olympic rings. An ancient monument to the name Tobio , torn down . All of it, the way he imagines it, is too familiar. Oikawa is overcome with the need to say something. “I didn’t—”
Shouyou cuts him off. “But then one day I made myself sit down and watch one of his games, and I survived. And I even called him right after, because the whole time, secretly that’s all I wanted to do. I realized that it was okay if his life doesn’t revolve around me anymore. And it’s okay if mine doesn’t revolve around him. But that doesn’t mean I needed to shut him out entirely or something. It’s dumb to stop calling him out of pride. He’s still just Kageyama. And I still care about him. I shouldn’t pretend that I don’t.”
Oikawa stands wordless. He feels himself faltering. “I don’t mean to say that—”
“Running from it is the easy way out. But you know that you’d regret it.”
Oikawa stares blankly at the ripples of light across the ocean. When that image begins to blur, he presses the heels of his palms against his eyes, and they come away salty and damp. It could be from the seawater. “I don’t…” He searches for words and finds none.
“You will be fine if you call him. You’ll do better than you think.”
Oikawa looks to him. Shouyou stands entirely still, serene, looking back at him. There’s a faint smile on his lips. Oikawa had been kicking, this whole time, against the feeling of being seen. Against the awareness that Shouyou was peeling apart and witnessing some part of him that he normally kept folded and wedged somewhere between his ribs. He’d thought that to be witnessed was to be hurt. He hadn’t taken into acount just how gentle Shouyou might be with that part of him, when he takes it in his hands.
“It’s been three months since we talked. Our last conversation was a mess. I’ve been ignoring him since. I don’t even know where to begin,” Oikawa says, and each word is a struggle, but he’s working on being honest, and they’re the truth.
“Mm,” Shouyou says. He turns his attention back to his hands, which he still cuts gently through the surface of the water. Oikawa watches the quiet concentration on his face. For a moment, with his furrowed brow and his pursed lips, he looks incredibly young. A living reminder of the orange number ten that once flashed on the back of a jersey, two lifetimes ago. “Maybe you should just tell him how you feel.”
Oikawa exhales sharp. “It’s harder than that.”
A moment of hesitation, and then a blinding grin. “And since when do you back down from things that are hard, Oikawa-san?”
Oikawa looks at him, and then back at the sea, when he feels the smile begin to spread across his face. Something warm and faint is beginning to stir in his chest. Shouyou walks the world blind to his own strength, Oikawa thinks. Maybe, for that, he gets to see it in everyone else.
>>>
Oikawa gets to watch Shouyou whine and gasp beneath his touch a dozen more times; he gets to pick him up and throw him into the ocean a dozen more; he gets to lose twenty sets of beach volleyball with him and win fifteen; he gets to drink Brazillian wine and tear through bowls of noodles with him and dunk himself into the sea every night before racing him back to his apartment to try and get in the shower first. When Shouyou wins he lets Oikawa get in with him. Oikawa lets him win.
The acknowledgement of the looming emotional monument with the name Hajime carved into it makes things easier, somehow. It makes the light that pools on Shouyou’s bed brighter and more fragile and more precious. It entangles the feeling of Shouyou’s skin beneath his fingers with the concept of here and now and not later. Shouyou tries to teach him to meditate, on their sixth day together, using those words and others, like presence and mindfulness. Oikawa gets up at 6 A.M. to sit on the beach with him and does an admirable job of staying still on his towel and pretending he’s trying for the first couple minutes, before opening his eyes and simply peering at Shouyou sideward, and thinking about the way the wind presses the folds of his t-shirt into the muscles of his chest. Shouyou catches him staring, a couple minutes in, and when Oikawa bursts out laughing Shouyou shouts and tackles him into the sand. That’s not how it works, Oikawa. Oikawa kisses him sweetly.
By the end of the week, signs of Oikawa are everywhere in Shouyou’s apartment. A t-shirt strewn over his laundry basket. His toothbrush migrated into the bathroom. A pair of sandals in the foyer. A stain on the counter from where he accidentally spilled a bit of their wine on night three and Shouyou refused to let him clean it up himself. A couple of marks on Shouyou’s neck that gleam pink in the right light.
Shouyou hovers backlit in the doorway to his bathroom on their last night, toothbrush in his mouth, and makes eye contact with Oikawa in his bed. Oikawa’s packed suitcase stares at them from the floor like a third presence in the room, and Oikawa is sitting on the bed like he’s afraid of it. He needs to get up at 5 A.M. to make it to the airport on time; he’d told Shouyou in a moment of self-pity that he didn’t have to get up that early if he didn’t want to, that he would be fine to go alone, and Shouyou had crawled into his lap and taken his face in his hands and kissed him to get him to shut up. Oikawa had pulled him closer and wrapped his hands around his hips and leaned into him like his life depended on it; a part of him was convinced that it did.
They watch each other now, silent, Oikawa’s hands in his lap and Shouyou’s toothbrush in his mouth. Oikawa feels small, helpless. He formulates and re-formulates something to say in his head a dozen times, plays the words back to himself in his own voice: Gonna miss me, shortie-pie? Gonna start hoggin’ all of the bed again once I’m gone? It all sounds childish, pedantic. He stills, tries something else: I am going to miss you more than you can possibly imagine.
Oikawa feels his eyes prick at the very thought of those words. He’s working on honesty; he tries to say them with his gaze instead. Shouyou cocks his head to one side and pulls his toothbrush out of his mouth. Oikawa hears the words in his head, a silent soliloquy, projected across the room: I am going to miss you, Shouyou, more than you can possibly imagine.
Shouyou must get it, because he spits his toothpaste out, beams at him, and flips the bathroom light off before crawling into bed. Oikawa’s arms are already open for him. Oikawa gathers up as much of Shouyou as he can, and tries to hold him in his palms; Shouyou folds into him like a warm, solid weight, breath soft and familiar and hallowed against his chest.
When Shouyou falls asleep, Oikawa stills himself, and tries to do what Shouyou does: think of here, now, the tangibility of him, his gentle, steady breathing, anything but the thought of its absence tomorrow. The firm lines of his chest beneath his nightshirt. Shouyou’s old Karasuno jacket billows on its hanger above them. Cicadas roar.
Oikawa presses his cheek to the crown of Shouyou’s head watches his vision go blurry.
>>>
“I’m going to miss you, Oikawa.”
Oikawa stands with his suitcase in the middle of a sunlit street with a dumb grin on his face and wonders, for the hundredth time, at Shouyou’s blithe ignorance. It is one thing to know your own beauty, and to wield it between your fingers. It is another thing to spill it over the earth wherever you go, unwitting and careless, your molten path of destruction trailing you. Throwing around deadly, unjust words, sharp as daggers, like: I’m going to miss you, Oikawa .
Oikawa knows that his position in the middle of this sidestreet in Rio de Janeiro is currently the dead-center of that path of destruction, and that he’s here because took one look at Shouyou and laid himself down in it willingly. That upon hearing Shouyou’s laughter he look the knife and put it in Shouyou’s hands and asked politely if he might be willing to wound him. And that now, as promised, he is being wounded. He only knows one way to get him back.
“ Shouyou ,” he says, and he only gets the faintest glimpse of what that word does to Shouyou’s face before he pulls him into a hug, and his world is condensed into the warm space between Shouyou’s shoulder and the tufts of his hair on the back of his head. Shouyou’s arms around him are impossibly solid, bull-strong, radiating warmth. Oikawa has the feeling of them memorized. He wants to take Shouyou’s face in both his hands and lean into him and kiss him deeply in the middle of the street, here, for all to see; he presses a kiss to the soft stretch of skin behind Shouyou’s ear instead. He feels Shouyou’s breath hitch, and he grins.
When they pull apart, Shouyou’s eyes are misty. Their conversation meanders. When Oikawa is returning to Japan, the feeling of beach volleyball, his flight number, his boarding gate, his next tournament in the Argentinean league. Shouyou’s next game. Eventually, the moment.
“Oikawa, I—”
“Tooru.” And because Oikawa, through the white-hot ache rending through his chest, is working on honesty: “I’ll see you later.”
And they grin, because they both know it's the truth.
>>>
“Hey, Iwaizumi?”
“Oikawa?”
Oikawa tips his head back, stares through the terminal’s glass at a plane receding into the distance. He taps his boarding pass against his thigh. His phone feels impossibly heavy in his hand. Since when do you back down from things that are hard, Oikawa-san?
“A little bird told me it was time to call you. Do you have time?”
A pause. “Uh, yeah.” Iwaizumi clears his throat, and then his smile comes crackling through the phone's speaker as clear as his words. “Yeah, I do.”