Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun.

Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-two million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.

They also seem to be largely ignorant of the concept of ‘leg room’ as far as commercial flights are concerned. An oversight that a man, clad in light blue and white with the same yellow sun emblazoned in his chest, is resenting quite a bit in that very moment.

Oikawa Tooru thanks his driver as they pull to a stop in front of the training facilities of the Japanese Volleyball Teams and climbs out of the taxi with as much grace as he can muster after a transoceanic flight. He had managed to string a few hours of jet-lagged sleep in the dorm that the JVA had reserved for him, but his legs still feel like made of wood. However, he refuses to be defeated by questionable aircraft-engineering decisions, so there he is, early in the morning, instead of taking a couple of days, or even a few extra hours to acclimate.

He didn't get to the international stage by sleeping in.

The tall doors of the training centre open with a soft whirr and the familiar scent hits him, a faint mix of polished floors, sweat and sports drinks that has been the backdrop of his life since childhood. Oikawa grips the strap of his duffel bag and takes a deep breath before strolling into the gym, chin held high, smile locked and loaded.

“There he is!” a voice greets him mid-way across the hall. Oikawa turns to face one Kuroo Tetsurou, whom approaches him in long strides, sporting a friendly smile. “Thank you so very much for agreeing to the All Stars match. How was the flight?”

“Long,” he says. His smile sharpens slightly, teasing. “Although it didn’t feel as long as when I left. Must be the excitement for my triumphant return.”

Kuroo chuckles politely, but Oikawa can detect a competitive glint in his eyes, as if wanting to say ‘we’ll get you next time’. Kuroo might not be playing anymore, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t feel the victories and losses of the National Team all the same. He is a part of it, even if he isn’t standing on the court personally.

“Let me show you around,” Kuroo says instead, and Oikawa follows him easily.

There is a dull ache between his ribs as they travel down the corridors, a tiny pinprick that he’s been carrying since high school. The irony of the situation seems to have awakened it. Oikawa can’t remember a time when he didn’t dream to be a part of this place, of this very team, only to fall short at each attempt. Now, however, it’s them that want him, seek him. The same Oikawa Tooru that was not enough has become a star in the eyes of the Japanese Volleyball Association.

It should flood his chest with pride. And it does, in a way. But, as he’s introduced (or re-introduced) to an arrange of more-or-less familiar faces, he has to force down the slight bitterness. Oikawa is almost (almost!) grateful for the way that Miya guy huffs and puffs upon meeting him, or the way Shoyo describes him as some sort of feral gremlin. Which he isn’t, thank-you-very-much, even though Iwaizumi materializes out of thin air, clad in his JNT-staff uniform, and proceeds to treat him as such.

“We are all adults here, right?” his best friend drawls as he grips both setters by the shoulders.

“Iwa-ch-san, is this how you treat your beloved players?” Oikawa complains, but there is a fond edge to his voice.

Iwaizumi’s chiding is interrupted by the arrival of Nicolas Romero, and Oikawa is immensely grateful for the distractions. They help him ignore the tiny voice inside his head. The one that wants to throw a tantrum because all of these people made it without a hitch and I had to fight tooth and nail, had to give up so much to stand here.

The rational part of him — which exists, no matter what Iwaizumi claims — knows that’s not true. That it’s unfair. That’s what keeps him polite, instead of cackling like a maniac and saying ‘Maybe if you’d hired me you would have done better!’ like he’s imagined doing some late nights. Childish? Maybe. Petty? Certainly. But, as long as he keeps those ideas to himself, what’s the harm.

He stuffs his belongings in his assigned locker and gets ready to have a civilized first training session, like the evolved adult he has become.

That is, until he enters the court and the words “Tobio-chan! Long time no see” fly out of his mouth.

Chapter Text

Oikawa feels more than hears Iwaizumi’s sigh. He’s also pretty sure his best friend is fighting the urge to face palm, or to slap him in the back of the head. He can’t bring himself to care, though. Not in that moment.

Across the court, Kageyama has paused, straightening, and seems to hesitate before turning around to face him. Deep blue eyes meet Oikawa’s and, for a fleeting second, he feels a decade younger, back in the grounds of Aoba Johsai, of KitaIchi, always wearing white and blue. But Kageyama blinks, muttering an unimpressed “You…”, and Oikawa is brought back to present, sporting a shade of blue that doesn't match the ones in those memories.

“Still charming as ever, I see,” Oikawa muses, a perfect smirk quickly back in place.

Kageyama doesn’t respond. For a moment, nothing happens. Then, after a second or so, nothing continues to happen.

Around them, most of the other players file into the court. Voices fill the gym, the squeak of shoes bounces off the walls. Oikawa remains stubbornly focused on that shade of blue that chased him and that he chased away for so long, until it’s not clear who follows who anymore.

“Well?” He tilts his head, eyebrow cocked. “Is this how you greet your senpai nowadays?”

Kageyama walks forward with that unreadable dull expression he always wears and stops in front of Oikawa, just a handful of steps away.

“Long time no see, Oikawa-san,” he finally says, his voice is low and irritatingly measured for Oikawa's liking.

There is a beat of silence before, not far from them, Hinata leans towards Iwaizumi.

“Wait. Is it just me or…?”

“Nope. It is more obvious without the net separating them,” Iwaizumi says, arms crossed and not bothering to hide his smirk.

Oikawa frowns, glances at them. Then he squints back at Tobio and— he freezes. Because he realizes he has to flick his eyes up. Only slightly. But just enough.

Kageyama stands a solid three centimetres taller than him. He knows it, of course he does — Oikawa had read Japan’s players’ stats from top to bottom, front to back. But knowing it is different than being made aware of it and, somehow, without a net in between, it becomes more noticeable.

It’s not a trick of the light. There is no blaming his shoes. It’s real.

‘He’s taller than me. Kageyama Tobio is taller than me. This is an attack. This is a betrayal. This is…’

“Did you hurt your back?” Tobio asks, derailing his train of thought.

Oikawa blinks.

“What?”

“You look shorter. I was wondering if you were slouching because your back hurts." He shrugged a shoulder. "Happens sometimes after a long flight.”

It takes Oikawa five full seconds to process the words, delivered in the most deadpan tone known to man, and another three in trying — and failing — to elaborate a calm reply.

“What the actual—!? Iwa-chan! Stop laughing you traitor! And you,” he shoots an accusing finger at Tobio, “I am NOT shorter, you ridiculous cartoon giraffe! How did a brat like you even grow that much?”

Kageyama frowns in confusion, as if he’d just asked him the square root of forty two. Or any other, for that matter.

“I just… did?”

“You should have seen him when he hit 188,” Hinata chimes in, not trying to pretend he’s not invested in the conversation. “He stared at the measuring tape for like ten minutes.”

“Amazing,” Oikawa grumbles. “I leave you all unsupervised for two seconds and I come back to find myself overshadowed by some volleyball robot with zero fashion sense!"

He hears Iwaizumi cough.

 "You were never that tall to begin with. You just filled the room with your loudness and insufferable ego."

"You wound me, Iwa-chan! I'm fragile right now!"

His friend lets out a long suffering sigh. “I can’t believe I’m saying this, but, shouldn’t you be more concerned with being a better setter, not who can reach the top shelf of the cupboard?”

Oikawa opens his mouth and closes it again. Right. Volleyball. That’s his job, the thing that he does best, the reason he’s moved half-way across the world and that’s brought him there. He’s about to agree with Iwaizumi when Kageyama seems to decide it’s his turn to talk.

“Oikawa-san is a good setter, though. He shouldn’t be concerned about his skill.”

Oikawa thinks he hears a snap as he turns his head, but that's very low in his order of priorities right now.

“Did you… Did you just compliment me?” Oikawa wonders if that’s Tobio's thing now. Just opening his mouth and sending the conversation in the most unsuspected direction. Well, two can play that game. “Is this your awkward way of saying you missed me, Tobio-chan?”

In return, Kageyama wrinkles his nose as if he’d just bitten into a lemon.

“No,” he says, managing to concentrate an impressive amount of offence in just one syllable. “I was just stat—”

“Too late! I’m choosing to interpret it that way.”

Kageyama looks so taken aback that Oikawa barks out a laugh. There, that’s how things are supposed to be!

The gym around him buzzes back into focus. Those who were not-so-subtly listening in resume their warm ups. Even Iwaizumi nudges Hinata towards the court, assuming this is the end of the ridiculous exchange.

“You wanted me to miss you?”

Chapter Text

Oikawa has never remembered Tobio because of his words. He’d be keen to bet nobody ever has. The man himself is memorable: his commanding presence, that striking gaze, the sharpness of his movements… all of it demanded the world to look at him without having to open his mouth. Which was a good thing, considering Kageyama tends to make talking seem painful, as if it took all of his focus to articulate each sound. Whenever he does speak, it tends to be something bland and unremarkable in its simplicity. Nothing haunting or meant to be preserved for posterity.

This time, however, his words leave Oikawa’s ears ringing like a grenade going off.

‘You wanted me to miss you?’

‘What the hell are they teaching him in Italy?’

Around them, the whole gym seems to hold its breath. Hinata’s eyes are wide as saucers.

“Wait, wait. What did he just say?” the redhead asks, tugging Iwaizumi’s sleeve. The athletic trainer seems to be experiencing the whole spectrum of human emotion at once, but settles for wincing as if he’d just seen someone throw a volleyball directly at a hornet’s nest.

Honestly, Oikawa can’t blame him, even though the implications on who he is as a person are all but flattering, because he himself doesn’t know how he’s going to react until he finds himself uttering a strangled “Eh?”, mind blank and reeling.

It feels illegal, being subjected to this sort of conversation first thing in the morning. It’s surely written somewhere in the Geneva Convention, in an annex about emotional damage.

To add salt to injury, Kageyama barely even blinks.

“You said you were choosing to interpret it as if I’d missed you,” he speaks slowly. In different circumstances, Oikawa might have felt offended, but right now he does need the extra time to process. “Makes it sound as if you wanted me to. So. Did you?”

Oikawa blinks rapidly. He can feel his brain blue-screen. He isn't prepared for this. Not for the height thing, and certainly not for Tobio-chan of all people picking apart his words and questioning them like that.

"Wh-what kind of—? Who asks that with a straight face?!"

"You're the one who brought it up."

Oikawa lets out a full-body sigh.

 "I was being theatrical! You know, for effect! Obviously!" he gestures with his hands.

Kageyama stares at him for a second longer. Oikawa tries his best to hold his gaze, dismissing the uncanny feeling that those blue eyes can see into the depths of his soul. Finally, Kageyama nods, satisfied with whatever he’s read in Oikawa’s expression, and turns to walk back towards the court.

"I didn’t miss you. But I did think about playing against you again," he adds without stopping or looking back.

Oikawa watches him go, momentarily stunned once again. After a couple of seconds, he can’t help but huff, biting back a smile.

"...Hmph. Of course you do. Let’s see if you still think that once I crush you, Tobio-chan."

The younger setter casts a sidelong glance at him, the ghost of a smirk faintly brushing his lips. He doesn’t say anything, he doesn’t need to. That look is more than enough to make Oikawa feel as if he’d had sixteen shots of espresso injected under his skin.

“Who’s ready for training!?” he bellows, striding towards his team’s side of the gym.

From the sidelines, Hinata is still looking alternatively between both setters.

 "Okay, but… Is it me or... Was that flirting?" he asks, seemingly horrified by his own words. "Was that flirting or fighting?"

Iwaizumi groans for what he senses will be the first of many, many times. (He isn’t wrong — the second will come less than an hour later, during a water break, when he catches Oikawa considering stuffing his shoes with tissues to appear taller).

 "Honestly, I don't think they even know."

Chapter Text

The first day ends with Oikawa arriving at his designated dorm, an apartment just big enough not to make him feel like a protected witness on the run, and crashing on the couch. His legs dangle off one armrest while he muffles a whine in the cushions.

Everything hurts — the usual after-practice heaviness has teamed up with the cramping pain of the flight instead of easing it — but he isn’t concerned about it. Nothing a scalding hot bath can’t ease, he hopes. Worst case scenario, he’ll have to make Iwa-chan earn his salary. No, his mind is way too distracted with something else. Something that has happened to develop broad shoulders, a penchant for lapidary sentences and a sharp jawline.

Oikawa sits up with a grunt. Of course it would be like Tobio to take away the fun out of messing with him by becoming a grown up. And, yes, Oikawa is aware that his fixation is irrational and completely unproductive. He doesn’t even know why he’s so upset…

Well, okay, being shorter than his — formerly — scrawny little kouhai is indeed a hard pill to swallow. When he thinks about Tobio, the image that comes to his mind is the one of the tiny kid he met in middle school, all round cheeks and rounder eyes filled with stars. The comparison between that Tobio-chan from his memories and the current one is jarring. It tugs painfully at something deep down in his chest, close to where he keeps his insecurities, but not quite.

Oikawa runs a hand through his hair, tugging a little at the strands.

Can he get a refund about the lifetime he’s been assigned to live? He’d very much like to be sent to one where bratty little Tobios didn’t grow into gigantic smartmouths, so that he doesn’t have to feel as if his soul were being squashed and put through a blender at once, please and thank you.

Before he can keep falling down the spiral, his phone starts ringing. He picks it up without checking the caller, grateful for the diversion.

“¿Hola?”

“Hey, Oikawa,” his best friend’s voice surges from the speaker and softens something inside his chest. “You weren’t sleeping, were you?”

“Nah, not yet.”

“Cool. I—” The sound of traffic momentarily drowns his voice. “Sorry, I was saying that I’m getting some take away for dinner. Did you eat yet?”

“Time is an illusion, Iwa-chan. Dinnertime doubly so.”

“If I find out you’ve been skipping meals, my fist on your face will not be an illusion, Sillykawa.”

“Wow, I feel so cared for right now,” he rolls his eyes, but he can’t help an affectionate smile. “Sure, eating together sounds good. But you have to come over, I’m beat,” he says, making sure to add a whiny edge to the last word.

As expected, Iwa-chan calls him spoiled and a child, but he still appears in his front door little after Oikawa got out of the bath.

“I love you so much right now,” Oikawa blurts out.

Iwaizumi watches him for a beat, eyebrows crumpling into a frown, and then dismisses him with a scoff.

“You are talking to the food, aren’t you?” he says, walking past him into the genkan.

“Rude! Is this what I get after professing my sincere feelings?” He clutches his chest. Iwaizumi promptly ignores him and heads towards the kitchen area, where he drops the bags. The counter is so tiny that the food containers barely fit. Oikawa leans against the doorframe, toweling his hair while his friend pries the boxes open and fetches the cutlery. It’s so domestic it hurts. “I can love more than one thing, you know.”

Iwaizumi glances at him. Oikawa pinpoints the instant in which his friend sees past the theatrics, biting back whatever reply he had at the ready and offering a small smile instead.

“Well, ain’t that an upgrade?”

They eat sitting on the floor, resting their backs against the couch, and set the food on the coffee table. Because, somehow, it’s bigger than what’s supposed to be the kitchen table. They don’t complain, though — there is something comforting in a nostalgic way about sharing the space like this. No appearances to uphold. Not between them. They can simply lounge on the floor and rib each other over petty stuff (“Iwa-chan, how do you always get sauce on your chin?” “Shut up, at least I don’t look like a chipmunk”), and it had been a long time since Oikawa had felt so at home.

Ugh, jet lag is turning him into a sap.

“Do you want the last onigiri?”

“My mouth says yes, but my stomach says no,” Oikawa pouts.

Iwaizumi chuckles lowly. “Ah, the wonders of aging past twenty five.”

“It’s a scam, if you ask me.” He looks longingly at the remaining food. “Do you know how much I’ve missed rice? I mean, Argentinian food is great and all, but some days I almost cried because rice never tasted right.”

His friend takes a deep breath and rests his head on the couch.

“I know what you mean. Sometimes the smallest things…” He trails off. “It’s like background music that’s always been there, so soft you don’t notice until it stops. And then we realize how much we gave it for granted.”

Oikawa’s breath shudders when his friend locks eyes with him. The yellowish lamplight dampens the greenish colour of Iwaizumi’s irises, turns them into something closer to dark gold, but the sheen remains. Steady and unchanged through the years.

“I didn’t think you could be so poetic, Iwa-chan,” he says, voice raspier than he expected. He coughs to hide the emotion. “Looks like I’m not the only one to get an upgrade.”

Iwaizumi lets out a displeased grunt and elbows his side. Not hard enough to hurt, but Oikawa whines anyway.

“Just because I’m not as dramatic as you doesn’t mean I don’t have feelings, you jerk.”

“Rude!”

He could stay like this forever. But he yawns and Iwaizumi is already up and taking the dishes to the sink. Oikawa tries to fight him on it, but Iwaizumi baps his hand away without a second glance.

“Go to bed. You can use some rest.”

And he is right, because the sleep deprivation and the feeling of being taken care of are turning his insides into mush, but Oikawa stays stubbornly beside him and takes care of the drying. Whether because he wants to stay a few more minutes by his friend or in order to maintain a self-imposed sense of dignity, that’s for future-Oikawa to sort out.

Or bury in the depths of his mind.

“You may want to have this tap checked, it leaks a little,” Iwaizumi says, drying his hands with the dish rag.

Oikawa nods lightly.

There is a pat on his shoulder and a soft “see you tomorrow” before the door of his apartment is closing. Oikawa blinks. He doesn’t even remember walking to the entrance. He also won’t remember walking to the bedroom and burrowing under the blankets, lulled to sleep by the buzz in his head and the quiet drops in the sink.

But the shades of blue, green and gleaming gold stay with him.