Archive of Our Own

For Kageyama Tobio, Japan has always looked something like this: volleyball, and volleyball, and volleyball, and all of the people that came attached to the sport, hungering after its limbs, and the long car rides in the summers, stuck and squirming in the backseat with Miwa while Sendai gives way to Tokyo, and stamping his shoes against the gym floor to hear the way the squeak of plastic returned to him endlessly, and the slam of his teammates' hands on his back in congratulations, and all of his hunger whistling right to a close, satiated and neat and fulfilled, right into his tight closed fist.

“Kageyama-kun,” Shouyou’s complaining voice says, the words rerouting themselves to his ears like they’re still in high school and Miyagi’s damp promise of the future is made for them as long as they want it badly enough. “Focus! Get your head in the game! Think about something else other than volleyball for once!”

“You’re one to be saying that,” Tsukishima says dryly beside him, knocking him over the head. Shouyou whines, rubbing his scalp while Tadashi muffles a laugh next to him, and as the sour smell of Sapporo drifts over when Hitoka waves her near-empty beer can through the air, gesturing for them to knock it out, Tobio imagines a dull thud emitting from Shouyou’s empty shell of a brain and cracks a smile.

“I can say whatever I want,” Shouyou says indignantly, reaching over the kotatsu to try to pinch the meat of Tsukishima’s thigh in retaliation, a fighting tactic he’d picked up in their second year, and everyone shouts when he almost knocks over a full can of beer over their cold and scuffed mahjong tiles.

“Be careful!” Hitoka scolds, ever tired of picking up after their messes and now focused on preventing them before they begin. “This isn’t your apartment, and Tobio is going to want to collect his security deposit before he leaves.” She snatches away the can of beer anyway, and then, looking at it consideringly, takes a large swig from it.

“The point is that Kageyama needs to pay more attention to the issue at hand, or else we’ll have to put up with him being a sore loser all night,” Shouyou says pointedly. Tobio glares heatedly at him, though it’s half-hearted, the entire room a little blurry before him with all of the alcohol they’ve gradually gone through as the night endured. “Whatever. A win is a win. How many victories do I have over you, Kageyama-kun? Like, thirty… fifty… eighty…”

“Don’t go inflating numbers, I’m the one with the lead right now,” Tobio barks, sloping forward to study the tiles on the table. It’s true that he’s distracted; it’s difficult not to be when the space he’s been living in for so long is now filled and cramped with packing boxes, the sparsely decorated walls even emptier, a kitchen cleaned out spare a pan, one wooden spatula, a case of beer, and a couple of styrofoam takeout containers.

But he’s trying not to think about that right now. That’s the point of tonight. The point of tonight is that the only picture frame he has set out still is from their third year right before Nationals, Hitoka dragging all of them into one portrait, their arms all swinging at each other to be able to fit, and a timid first-year reserve player roped into snapping the photo itself.

“You’re drunker than I thought you were, then,” Shouyou says pensively.

“I bought the alcohol, so I can do what I want!” Tobio snarls, and then he pushes a few empty cans and a floating napkin out of the way so he can hunker over the kotatsu with a better view, scowling over the resin and marble—but nobody takes it seriously anymore, not the quiet pretense of thumping anger and thirteen years of learning the shape of each other’s emotions.

It’s why he’s spent one of his last nights in Tokyo with the very people he claims get the most on his nerves, all of them driving out to the capital to see him off and the only others to see him besides the lunch he’s grabbing with Miwa tomorrow before his flight, and it’s why they’re the last photo he’s left out before he covers them with bubble wrap and packing peanuts, where half of his boxes will go into storage, and the other half will follow him to Argentina.

“Thanks for that, by the way.” Shouyou is bumping him in the arm, then, sticky warm skin a familiar burning presence against Tobio’s side, and his frown lessens slightly under the heat of alcohol-infused proximity. “I’ll get the next pack when you come back from San Juan and I’m back from São Paulo, okay?”

Tobio looks into Shouyou’s eyes and knows, immediately, that even though he won’t be able to make the edges of Japan and Argentina close in as easily as shutting the ends of a book, that the ocean is so deep that he’d drown so he better take to air, there will always be Miyagi, even when he’s alone in Argentina.

“Okay.”

For Kageyama Tobio, he’s always imagined that Argentina would look something like this: cities shaped of different brick than he’s used to, and a cold new key with a shape he has to learn the outline of leading to an unfamiliar apartment, and an international data plan so he can carefully schedule calls back to his island home, and still stamping his shoes against the gym floor so he can still hear the plasticky sound, and always, volleyball, and volleyball, and volleyball.

“So, you’re the new setter, are you?” The man in front of Tobio has relatively broad arms and a broader chest, so he can guess that he’s a hitter of some sort. He looks friendly enough, but Tobio has hardly had a chance to practice his Spanish, and that alone is enough to introduce a fingernail’s worth of intimidation into him.

“Yes, that’s me,” Tobio says, belatedly resisting the urge to pitch forward slightly in greeting. “Kageyama Tobio—Tobio is fine.”

“Tobio, my name is Tómas, and I’m the captain,” the other says seriously, clapping him on the shoulder. It’s a familiar action, the kind that reminds Tobio of the friendly camaraderie that all volleyball players on the same team share. “Welcome to the team.”

“Thank you,” Tobio says, a little bit flustered, and Tómas gives him a set smile before waving over another man, one who looks a little bit older with a grizzly fade of a beard.

“This is our coach, Bruno. He’s an important man to know from time to time, I suppose.”

Bruno, who has a friendly enough smile but a steely look behind his eyes that Tobio recognizes from any great coach, claps Tómas lightly over the back of his head for the comment before he turns to Tobio. He’s tall, the presence following him the consuming kind that demands attention, but Tobio is grown, now, and he was never scared of people just because they seemed bigger to begin with. This is one thing that runs true no matter what soil he’s rooted in, he reminds himself, that volleyball, condensed to its true form, will always be Tobio’s.

“Very nice to meet you in person instead of over a screen, Tobio,” Bruno says, and his voice is much richer than the flattened electronic sound that passed through his computer speakers. “We are very lucky and grateful to have you on the team.”

“And I am extremely grateful to be here,” Tobio says with a small tilt of his head. “I look forward to playing volleyball.”

“Don’t we all?” Bruno laughs, turning slightly to look over his shoulder. “There’s somebody else you should meet before the rest of the team—our brand spanking new assistant coach, though I’m sure you’re already familiar with him since you’re the one taking his spot. We were fortunate to get him right out of retirement as well as you. It’s like we’re not losing him at all! Tooru! Come over here!”

Tobio follows his gaze shooting across the gym to a figure on the other side of the room, his head perking up at the call of his name. He looks straight at them—and Tobio can’t tell if he’s looking at Bruno or him, but he can feel the pull of his eyes closing down the space like a rubber band stretching to its limits before rebounding to a pressure point.

“You’ve probably seen some of his work when you were looking into our team,” Bruno continues conversationally. “He was an excellent, excellent setter—still is, of course, but time does cruel things to your bones and muscles. The very day I turned thirty, I woke up with aches all over my body. It still hasn’t gone away, you know. Like this guy, a real pain in the ass at times!”

“It’s not nice to talk about somebody behind their back, but it flatters me that you can’t keep my name out of your mouth,” a new voice says, but his tone is light and high and the hand he places on Bruno’s shoulder is friendly.

His Spanish also, just barely, only noticeable to an ear like Tobio’s, has a tinge of a foreign accent curling on his very last word.

“This is exactly what I was talking about, Tooru,” Bruno says exasperatedly, and now Tobio’s attention snaps onto the new intrusion—tousled brown hair that falls barely below his forehead, an open and curious gaze that skates all over Tobio’s face and ends at his eyes, and a mouth that twists just so to suggest a smile. “This is Tobio, your replacement.”

Bruno laughs at his own joke, a hearty thing that carves out the many smile lines curving around his face, but Tobio isn’t looking at him.

Tooru isn’t either. “My name is Tooru,” he says, extending a hand. “Oikawa Tooru, though I hope you already know that.”

His palm is cool when Tobio grasps it, a smooth slide of skin. “I do, Oikawa-san,” he says, the honorific slipping out automatically. The other’s eyes glint at that, a funny tilt to his head, but he doesn’t look displeased. “I’m Kageyama Tobio, but you can just call me—”

“Tobio-chan,” Tooru says decisively, a swift cut off to what Tobio had been about to say, and his voice dies in his throat, suffocating before a lack of oxygen. “It’s so nice to meet you.” His hand falls out of his hold and Tobio’s returns limply to his side, fingers held out in remembrance of the shape and finding thin air.

Tómas is looking at them inquisitively. “What is that name you just called Tobio, eh, Tooru?”

“It’s a Japanese thing,” Tooru says dismissively, turning and giving him a wide grin. Tobio notices that first because it stretches so perfectly, a handsomely wicked angle, and secondly because it makes him look younger, almost as young as he was on video. “Don’t worry about it, Tómas.”

“Whatever you say,” Tómas says, raising his hands up by his head, and then all three of them laugh, Tobio only remembering that he’s meant to laugh along belatedly.

“Oh, Tobio-chan, that’s another thing,” Tooru says quickly, and Tobio looks back at him again, his vision blurry from turning to him so quickly. He still has that grin on his face. It’s the kind that could get him in commercials. Maybe stretching a roll of athletic tape over his face, not covering his lips, or spinning a volleyball on one finger close enough for the wind to brush his bangs. “As my replacement, you have to play the part, so—”

He ducks close like the maddening surge of the ocean, consuming everything it dares to touch, and he swipes one thumb by Tobio’s mouth, turning up the corner and just barely missing his lips. “Smile.”

Tooru pulls back just as quickly, turning at the call of his name, but the feeling of his knuckles glancing against Tobio’s jaw and inching up by his mouth puts a vortex in his chest, all of the water recoiling to savor its punches, the earth standing still so it can unwrest its jaw, the sand licked clean and gleaming and waiting for the tsunami to hit.

A stray volleyball whistles right by his ear, and he blinks, immediately taken out of his thoughts when he turns on instinct to grab it out of the air, turning back with the ball clenched between his two palms. Tooru has gone somewhere else, probably attending to whoever called his name.

Tobio exhales.

Pop.

The thing that Tobio likes about volleyball is that it doesn’t matter much who he is—of course it matters that he’s Kageyama Tobio, three-time Olympian and medalist, but on the court, a trial by which each player must submit their best efforts as evidence to avoid a sentencing, the only thing that matters is him, the ball, and what he can spin with his fingers to prove his worth.

Even despite the natural stumbling block that adapting to Spanish poses, it’s just as easy to slip into the flow of practice, taking careful note of each player’s shouts and yells to tuck that knowledge under his belt and learning how they like to move around the court.

The first half of practice, Tobio asks to stand to the side to watch, methodically warming up his muscles while Tooru takes his job temporarily. He was their setter, of course, and even though he’s retired and curbs the extent of his role lightly tossing up balls for their hitters to practice, there’s an attentive weight to the way Tooru adjusts his fingers for each person, each flick of the wrist so easy it must only have come with persistent memorization.

Tobio clambers to his feet eventually, feeling the sweet stretch of his limbs pull into place.

“You ready?” Bruno says, looking at him from the side, and Tobio nods, finding the familiar friction underneath the soles of his shoes. “Then show me what you’ve got.”

The second half goes by just as quickly. The feel of leather under his fingers is achingly familiar, even if the faces of his teammates aren’t, but he’s spent quite a bit of his adult life adjusting to new teams from Karasuno to the Adlers to various names filtering through Japan’s national team, and now he’s here, ready, as he always is, to learn.

It’s over before he knows it. The sound of volleyballs slapping around the sides of the gym comes to a stop, everyone scattered as they stretch and starfish along the ground and talk amongst each other. Flittering Spanish all so fast and interconnected that Tobio can only pick out a few threads of conversation before he loses them again. He obligingly pulls his knee into his chest, the stretch of his muscle as familiar a tenderness as it was back in high school.

A shadow falls over Tobio’s head, and he looks up, tilting his face back to see Tooru leaning over him, the same smile on his lips.

“The guys are going to get dinner later tonight. But that’s much later than what you’re used to in Japan, so they all gather to play cards first. No drinks because the nutritionist gets huffy, but it’s still good fun. You should come.”

Tobio stares up at him, letting his hold on his knee go slack. “Um, sure. Where will it be?”

“Mateo’s house,” Tooru says, nodding his head in the direction of their libero, who is laughing while he pinwheels his arms. “Don’t sound so reluctant. It’s—” He pauses, and then he switches to Japanese. “It’s nice to know the team as soon as possible, and they’re a good bunch. All very welcoming.”

He cocks his head to the side. “I went through the same thing when I first moved here, but I have a feeling that you’re not the same kind of person as me, even if you are my replacement. Japanese, too. Maybe I should consider it an insult. You’re not even as cute as I am, Tobio-chan!”

Tobio blinks, feeling as if he’s received whiplash from the veering directions their conversation has taken. “Um,” he says again, “don’t you already take it as an insult? Or else you wouldn’t be bringing it up so often.”

In the gray shadow from the angle Tooru is squatting down at, Tobio can’t quite make out all the minute features on his face, but he swears that his eyes narrow. “So assuming, Tobio-chan. Don’t you know who I am?”

“I do,” Tobio blurts out, much too quickly if he’s right about the way Tooru’s body language shifts. It feels as if he’s shown part of his hand in a game he hadn’t even known he’d been playing. “You beat us at the Olympics. In 2021.”

That puts the grin back on Tooru’s face, the edges of it cracked open a little more, a little more natural. “I remember winning.” His eyes flick back to Tobio. “And then last year, we didn’t go up against each other and Japan took gold. I also remember that.”

“Do you remember me?” Tobio asks inexplicably, stupidly, a question that doesn’t even matter because he’s here on Tooru’s turf and his presence is now unavoidable, but it comes out anyway, and the way that Tooru’s eyes slightly widen in surprise makes him feel as if by catching him off guard, he’s won something. He clasps that feeling a little tighter inside of his fist.

Tooru doesn’t answer for a second, and for that amount of time, Tobio begins to think that he will say yes.

He doesn’t. “We played a lot of teams,” Tooru says, his eyes drifting off to the light, so Tobio lets his drop as well, viciously reinstating his grip on his knee until he pulls it hard enough to feel the twinge too strongly.

“Okay,” Tobio says, letting the skepticism drift out between them simply because he has always remembered each setter he’s gone up against that gave him an honest fight, and the Tokyo Olympics in 2021 were some of the hardest games he’s ever fought, the match against Argentina, in particular, stretching out into five grueling sets with the scoreboard inching into the thirties. There was a moment when he’d dumped the ball when he’d looked straight across the net and saw Tooru’s face broken apart by fission lines, teeth flashing like they were snapping over tendons.

“I don’t play anymore, anyway,” Tooru says. Finality hangs from his words like mercury dripping off his fingernails. He pulls away, too, the ocean vanishing from his cradle, and then his shadow lifts off Tobio’s face to reveal the bright fluorescents again. “I’ll see you at Mateo’s, hm?”

“Sure,” Tobio says, and then he scrambles up to sit, peering up at Tooru. “Wait, how do I know where to go?”

Tooru sighs and rolls his eyes, which Tooru feels is frankly unfair. “Can’t do anything by yourself. Here, put your number in my phone and I’ll give you the directions later. I suppose you would have gotten it one way or another. It would be good to have, anyway.”

Tobio takes Tooru’s phone soundlessly and inputs the string of numbers, catching his wallpaper set of him and a group of foreign faces when Tooru briefly swipes out of the app before twisting it out of his view again. “Thanks.”

“Sure.” Tooru repockets his phone, and then the first smile that Tobio thinks might be approaching genuine splits over his face. It’s a quiet thing. “Like I said, I’ve been through this before. At least you don’t have to go through it alone.”

It would be redundant to say his thanks again, but Tobio finds himself wanting to say something more, anything, but by the time he can get his tongue to move, Tooru is already gone, heading for the exit.

Unknown Number

tobio-chan

Me

oikawa-san?

Oikawa Tooru

how’d you know it’s me?

Me

nobody else with argentina’s dialing code would call me that

Oikawa Tooru

so he can think after all. mateo’s thing starts at five, come over whenever

i’ll drop a pin

Me

thanks

Oikawa Tooru

yeah

In a roundabout sort of way, it’s a rather clever way of getting his number—Tobio has nobody else’s but the coach’s, which is a given, but nobody else on the team. Not even the person whose place he’s going over to, to which he’s still not certain he was invited to, but if worst comes to worst, he can pin the blame on Tooru.

To his surprise, though, when Tobio rounds the corner to where he thinks he should be arriving, half of his attention trained on the blinking dot appearing on his phone, Tooru is waiting just outside the apartment complex.

He peels himself away from where he’s kicked back against the wall, the perfect caricature of nonchalance, but Tobio knows that for somebody like him, it must be carefully put together. Still, he delivers the part perfectly, those discerning brown eyes seeming to spin him apart as he approaches and stops a deliberate few paces away.

“Hello, Oikawa-san,” Tobio says to break the silence.

Tooru raises one eyebrow, and then he turns and heads for the lobby entrance. “You’ll want to kick that language habit,” he says in Spanish, head slightly tilted back so that his voice makes it over to Tobio behind him. “Or else it’ll be more difficult later on.” He grimaces. “I would know. I spent a lot of time calling people back in Japan, and it didn’t do me a ton of favors.”

“It’s only because you talked to me in Japanese first during practice,” Tobio mutters, stupidly feeling chastised for something any other person would have given him a little more grace for.

“Hmph. Sounds like excuses to me,” Tooru sniffs, and then he presses the button to call the elevator with one deft finger. He turns to Tobio next, arms crossed. For all that his presence exudes, Tobio can’t help but notice that standing like this on equal ground, he’s the slightest bit taller than Tooru. It may only be a couple of centimeters, give or take, but it’s enough, even if the other’s hair makes up for the discrepancy.

Tooru seems to notice as well, watching the direction Tobio’s eyes drift and then scowling a little bit. The elevator dings; the doors open before them, wanting, the metal creaking back into steel recluse.

“He’s on the third floor,” Tooru says, stepping through and snagging another one of the glass buttons, and Tobio follows before the lift can leave without him. The pipes string together a cobbled melody in place of real music, the stale air between them laid audience.

Tobio watches the casual way Tooru props himself against the bars held against the elevator walls and wonders how many times he’s found himself in this position during all of his years in San Juan. He didn’t memorize each player's statistics, but he knows for sure that Tooru has been around for a long time, especially if he was offered a position to continue his legacy the minute he stepped into retirement. From looks alone, he can’t be much older than Tobio is, but with volleyball, each player stretches out their shelf life in the sport for as long as possible until it snaps, pulverized by the pressure. He must be in his early thirties at the very least.

Tobio, twenty-eight, tries to find the years hidden in Tooru’s face and cannot find him, and it’s only when he realizes how strange it is to scrutinize someone like that does he flick his gaze to the other side of the elevator before it comes to a stop.

“Tooru!” Mateo cries when the door opens before them, pulling him into a friendly embrace and pecking him on the cheek. Tooru returns the gesture, clapping him heartily on the back before he minnows his way past the doorway. “Tobio, right?”

“Yes,” Tobio says, again fighting the urge to duck his head in greeting. “Thank you for the invitation.”

“Of course, of course,” Mateo says grandly, taking him by the arm and pulling him fully into the apartment, where he goes with a surprised exhale. “Have you gotten the—” He taps the side of Tobio’s face meaningfully.

Tobio, confused, shakes his head, and Mateo laughs before kissing him on the cheek as well. “Welcome to Argentina.”

The rest of the team is crammed into the small living room, most of them sitting around a short table in the center and deliberating over individual decks of cards.

“They’re playing poker,” Tooru says at Tobio’s side. He’s looking at the scene with a fond smile.

“Gambling?” Tobio asks, disbelief coloring his voice.

Tooru snorts. “No. They’re just competitive. I mean—they’ll bet on drills, like diving, because they’re stupid like that.”

Tobio looks at him. “Weren’t you just part of that, too?”

“Ah ah, not anymore, Tobio-chan,” Tooru says, and his lips are still curved into the same smile. “I’m a coach now. They can’t make me do anything, it’s me giving the rules now. Besides, you’re the one taking my spot, so if I were to gamble on anything, you’d be the one picking up the pitfall.”

Tooru wonders at the picture of it all—he’s hardly been here for many hours at all, and while everybody has been perfectly friendly, he keeps finding himself led back to Tooru, whether that’s because of their shared heritage or because Tooru is seeking him out in particular. There is still so much left to discover. So many facets to each person he has yet to unearth.

“Why do you keep calling me that?” he says, and this time, he keeps his eyes trained on the game so he doesn’t have to see if Tooru looks over at him.

“Why do you call me Oikawa-san?” Tooru says. Tobio thinks he shrugs.

“Because you told me—” he begins.

“Well, that’s different!” Tooru says, and now Tobio knows for sure that there’s a grand grin on his face simply from the sound of his voice. “I, Oikawa-san, must be much older and more experienced than little Tobio-chan.”

“I am not little,” Tobio snaps. He tries not to furrow his eyebrows too deeply ever since the time Shouyou made fun of him, saying that he was going to dig trenches into his forehead, but it’s an effort. “I’m taller than you, actually. I can tell just by standing next to you.”

“Hey!” Tooru says, offended. “That doesn’t erase the fact that I have seniority over you and therefore more authority. Anyway, whatever, you should just accept it as is.” Tobio glances back, unable to help himself, and Tooru’s contemplation over the team now looks a little wistful. “Besides, it’s like I told Tómas. It’s a Japanese thing, right, Tobio-chan?”

Tooru looks at him expectantly then, and Tobio lets everything inside of him holding itself up for relief sag in defeat. “I guess.”

Tooru’s fingers find the crook of Tobio’s elbow, sparking a million stars underneath his skin. “Good! Come on, we’ll join the next game. But you should just watch a little bit before that.”

Tobio elects to watch from the sidelines, but by the time Tooru gets roped into the game, he pulls Tobio in, too, and he’s not so sure if it’s a measure of getting him acquainted with the team or if he’s throwing him into the wolves, but it’s no matter.

What he quickly learns is that even though he’s flown to a new country altogether, there is little that differentiates volleyball players from each other, even while they’re off the court. The incessant competitiveness checks out; they wouldn’t have gotten so far in the league if not for that singular trait. It reminds him of late nights with his teammates back in Japan—the first time he’d touched alcohol was while he was still attending Karasuno, and they’d started with a drinking game that quickly escalated into what would become his first ever hangover.

He still remembers the sour taste in his mouth the next morning and the way he and Shouyou alternated on the court to dash to the bathroom all throughout practice, so at least he is grateful that they have all grown out of their adolescent mistakes. This is only poker.

Poker, still, is cutthroat, and by the time they tumble out of Mateo’s apartment to head to dinner, the sun has long since set, and the skyline is blanketed by infinite blackness and speckled with stars.

“Have you tried Argentine food yet, eh, Tobio?” Benjamin, one of their middle blockers, says while he knocks Tobio by the hip, a friendly motion. In the few hours that Tobio has spent in the presence of the CA San Juan team outside of practice, he’s learned that they say twice as much with their bodies as they do with their words, affection twisted into every muscle fiber and unconscious tap.

“Not really,” Tobio says, hesitating, thinking of a haute cuisine Argentine restaurant that Miwa had taken him to once while in Tokyo, right after the Adler’s had won a game and she had gotten a promotion. It had been good, but even he knew that wasn’t the real thing.

“Oh, then,” Benjamin laughs, patting him on the shoulder. “You’ll like it if you have any taste buds at all, trust me.”

Tobio nods, turning to look at the landscape all around them. It’s not just the architecture and the way the country is shaped that’s different from Japan; it’s also the people spilling out of different establishments along the streets. In Tokyo, when the clock’s hands approached this tenuous time of night, he’d see most of the crowd cloaked in their suits from the working day. He’s lived in both the bustling atmosphere of the urban city and the sleepy edges of Miyagi, and he likes it here, in San Juan, where the mountains pressed all against the skyline hover like a promise.

Before long, they make it to the restaurant that Tómas has been leading them toward, a spot not far from Mateo’s apartment. By the time they’re escorted inside and seated at a large table, flourishing hands and bodies exchanging spots in a flurry of movement, he finds himself seated next to Tooru.

Tobio blinks at him, eyes wide. In response, Tooru only gives him a lazy sort of wave, the easy edges of his teeth glinting in the low light when he grins.

“Do you like it so far, Tobio-chan?” he says, reaching over to grab a glass of water where it then stays in his hand, the rim pressed against his lips while he waits for an answer.

Tobio swallows. Tooru looks so young in the shadows, but every one of his movements is so fluid that it couldn’t have come with anything but practice. “I guess so,” he says, and then he clasps his own water and lets it chase the warmth down his throat.

Tooru hums, staring at the center of the table. “I was, of course, so perfectly acclimated in every environment I entered that I adapted as soon as I arrived. That was seventeen years ago, you know.”

Tobio has no idea why Tooru is telling him any of this. Perhaps it’s some misplaced loyalty to Japan—even so, Tobio looked him up after practice and before going to Mateo’s apartment, and it hadn’t taken many years before Tooru applied for Argentinian citizenship, thereby giving up his rights to Japanese residency, to represent the national team.

“A long time ago,” Tobio mutters, an unconscious statement made mostly for himself, but Tooru hears it evidently, throwing his head back and laughing even though it hadn’t been very funny at all.

“Long time? Really?” Tooru says, his voice teasing and his eyes sparkling. He looms closer to Tobio’s face. “How old were you, Tobio-chan? Hitting balls in middle school gym class? Writing up math tests during the day? Or were you still in diapers?”

“I was not a toddler,” Tobio grumbles, swatting away Tooru’s airy laugh. “I was eleven. Diapers, no, but hitting balls might have been true.”

“Hmm,” Tooru says, looking into the distance wistfully. “Still far too young.” He swivels back to Tobio unexpectedly. All of the attention is making a knot shrivel in Tobio’s gut—he doesn’t know what to do under the scrutiny of it, and yet, there’s something in him that makes him want to grab the rope and keep Tooru’s gaze steady while he still has it. He does have incredible volleyball experience, after all.

“You know, I looked you up before you arrived here,” Tooru says conversationally. “The moment I heard that my spot was going to be taken by some other Japanese recruit. Kageyama Tobio? I hadn’t heard the name before.” Tobio holds his breath at that, feeling his heart thud in his chest. “You’re a pretty young thing, aren’t you? The recordings on the Internet aren’t anything compared to seeing you in the flesh.”

Tooru’s fingers hover by Tobio’s face, catching his breath between their spidery hold. “And yet there was something almost… disappointing.”

All of the air whistles out of Tobio’s body, but in a strange manner, as if somebody had pricked a hole into the bottom of his foot and allowed everything to escape through that one small hole, all of his expectations engorging on themselves in an attempt to flee.

Tooru’s hand falls away from his body, landing to rest on the rim of his water. His fingers trace the cup boredly, leaving smudges against the pristine glass. “Maybe it is because you’re so young.”

“You were even younger when you started,” Tobio says. “That isn’t fair.”

Tooru smiles meanly. “Nothing is, Tobio-chan.”

How odd it is that he’s able to make everything sound both of and completely avoidant of volleyball.

“I don’t know what you want me to say,” says Tobio, because it’s true. He doesn’t know what Tooru wants from him—for him to stand up and leave, or toss his glass of ice into his face, or retaliate back with even sharper words the way he so clearly expects—so he does nothing, picking up the menu laid before him with as much casual disinterest as he can.

“You don’t have anything?” Tooru says eventually. Tobio can feel his eyes grazing the sides of his face, shaving down the hair to the bone. And yet, somehow, the touch is as sterile as possible. “How boring.”

Maybe if he were younger Tobio would have bitten back. Bared his teeth the way Tooru wanted until he’d shown the shape of his canines, pulled back enough that it left his flank exposed. But this Tobio, at twenty-eight, knows enough now that it’s not worth the expended energy. That people who fight just to fight—provocative, like Miya Atsumu—want something very specific from Tobio, and the best response he can give them is not to give it to them at all.

“Not everyone can have such a strong personality,” Tobio says because he is Kageyama Tobio and his best friend is Shouyou and he can’t help this one remark. “It would take away from the rest of the room. Somebody needs to make a scene.”

Tooru puts his hand down on the table; it’s not a slam at all, but Tobio can still feel the impact as if it had been one, resounding through the wood so that his intention snakes along the table and to his bones. “What are you—”

“What would you recommend ordering?” Tobio asks, shoving the menu in his face as another one of their teammates—Matías, he thinks—looks over at the words, reaching over Tooru’s arms to help him point out a few dishes, and just like that, Tooru is unable to finish his sentence, the words dying behind his pressed-closed lips, a tight line.

The waiter comes after that, and the tension dissolves for good, misting over them like something that only barely misses Tobio by the heels, and though the rest of the night is overtaken by the rest of the team, dishes steaming as they slide down the table and laughter bouncing up and around the flat ceiling, he can feel Tooru’s presence beside him like a sharp point in the sand, the water paving over everything, smooth and blunted and edgeless except for the threat of a knife under the tide.

For some reason, Tobio’s gut instinct after he leaves the restaurant is to call the one person he knows has the time to pick up.

Tobio stands in stillness for a few moments while the line stalls and rings, and when Shouyou’s confused hello? whispers across the speaker, that spurs him into motion, his feet automatically finding a pattern before him on the sidewalk.

“Hi,” he says after a second. It’s dark, and he doesn’t want to go back to an apartment where nothing is waiting for him. He pivots to input the directions to the nearest supermarket instead, and when he brings his phone back up to his ear, Shouyou is squawking on the other end.

“...had to reach across the counter to answer the phone, you inconsiderate bastard, and I burned my arm on the edge of my pan,” he’s complaining when his words re-register in his mind. “How am I supposed to do receives now? This is all your fault!”

“Maybe you should be more conscious of your own body, idiot,” Tobio shouts back on instinct. “You didn’t have to answer so fast. I could have waited a few seconds longer.” A few seconds in front of the entrance, the teeth of San Juan’s skyline sinking into the back of his neck and Tooru’s inexplicable cruelty thumping against his chest.

There’s a pause. “Yes, I had to,” Shouyou says eventually. There’s the quiet sound of hissing in the background; he must have returned to his stove. “You don’t really call, on principle, unless something is wrong, or you misplaced your wallet and you somehow think it’s my problem even while I was in Osaka and you were in Tokyo. And you haven’t even been in Argentina for a week. Of course I had to answer.”

There are some moments where it takes Tobio by surprise how much growing up they have had to do since they entered Karasuno, thrust into the sky and the moment. The future came hurtling at them, funneling down into one impossible strain, and they’d had no choice other than to meet it head-on.

“Also because I can’t trust you to be able to wipe on your own, Bakageyama,” Shouyou adds sneeringly, and all thoughts of maturity go straight out of Tobio’s head. “But seriously, what’s wrong?”

Tobio inhales, the first clean breath he’s taken since he’d first entered the gym for practice, and when it leaves his body, he feels scraped to the bones. Simple. “There isn’t anything wrong,” he says, because there isn’t. Wrong is a subjective assessment. Objectively, nothing has happened—Tobio has met harsher critics along his path. He’s opened up comments under articles boasting his name and scrolled through his social media the first year he got to the Olympics before his PR manager took that away from him, he’s gone up against opponents who turned their fear of him into missiles, and all of this, this ridiculous nonsense, doesn’t stack up in the long run.

Tobio has heard less. Tooru is probably only testing the waters with him to see how far he can push him before he bends. Tobio probably let it get to him in exactly the way Tooru wanted, an itch in the back of his throat that he can only ignore until it swells into a sore.

“So, nothing wrong then,” Shouyou says. “Then tell me what not-wrong thing happened.”

“It’s not… it’s stupid,” Tobio begins hesitantly. “The team is fine. I like all of them. It’s the assistant coach. Oikawa Tooru.”

Shouyou hums in acknowledgment over the line. The sound is familiar, reaching him even while he treks through unfamiliar streets where strangers pass by him without a second glance. “I’ve heard the name. He was the setter for Argentina during the Olympics, right?”

Tobio sighs. “That’s him. When he retired, that’s when CA San Juan reached out to me to fill his old position. He either isn’t taking it well or he’s testing me to see if I’m fit for the job and it’s—well.”

“Well?” Shouyou prompts after Tobio falls silent for more than five seconds. The hissing in the background has turned into the sound of running water. Tobio remembers that he always likes to have his dishes cleaned before he begins eating.

“All he talks about is how much younger I am than him as if he’s trying to make me feel like I’m immature or something,” Tobio grumbles. “Even though he was way younger when he started in my position. And then after one practice, he told me that I was disappointing compared to my recordings online and that I didn’t even make an impression on him despite the fact that I’ve gone to the Olympics three times, one of which was against him.”

“Interesting,” Shouyou says. “He doesn’t seem like that on TV.”

“Nobody with an inkling of care for their public image would put forth that sort of personality,” Tobio says with a sardonic laugh.

“Okay,” says Shouyou. The sink comes to a stop on the other side of the line. “So why do these comments from some guy bother you?”

That’s a great question. “He’s not just some guy,” Tobio says defensively without even knowing why he has his hackles raised. “He’s an Olympian.”

“So are you,” Shouyou says pointedly. “So am I! That doesn’t mean you listen to me, even when you should…”

“Hey!” Tobio barks, and the singular shout of laughter on the other end is enough to make a smile creep around his lips. “I don’t know, maybe it’s because I’m effectively supposed to step into his shoes but I don’t know what that’s supposed to look like yet. It doesn’t help that they’ve kept him around, and he’s not making it any easier.”

“You didn’t care about what people thought about you at all in high school,” Shouyou says thoughtfully. “At least in the beginning. Remember how you ordered everyone around even though you were a first-year? Man, what awful memories. Why are you letting your high school self out-brawn you now? I mean, do you have to care?”

Tobio stops in his tracks, and a few people behind him grumble and move around, side-eying him as they go. He doesn’t pay any attention to it. “No,” he says, and it’s that simple. Why does he care? Tobio went to national youth camp at fifteen and was recruited to represent Japan as a starter at nineteen. He’s been to three Olympics and is set for one, maybe two more if he’s lucky before he retires. He got so many offers abroad that he had the luxury of choosing which team he’d like to join, and he chose this one.

“Great,” Shouyou says, and on his end, Tobio hears metal clattering against porcelain. “Well, since I’ve effectively helped you solve your crisis, I’m going to eat dinner now. What are you doing for dinner?”

“Well, I was at dinner with the team when Oikawa-san said those things to me,” Tobio says. “And now I’m going to the grocery store because I don’t have anything.”

There’s a hum over the phone. “How was that? Was it good? I can hazard a guess that your other teammates aren’t assholes, but you never know. And aiyah, why’d you wait so long to get groceries?! Are you trying to go hungry, Bakageyama? How are you supposed to maintain that figure of yours if you don’t eat right? They wouldn’t be able to sell those shirtless figures of you in the stores anymore.”

“I’m going to the supermarket right now, idiot!” Tobio snarls over the phone, and if there’s one thing he’s glad for, it’s that very few people here should understand the insults he’s hurling into the night sky. “It was good. I guess. And what do you mean by shirtless figure?”

“Don’t worry about it,” Shouyou hums. “Well, good thing you’re actually running an errand instead of sitting at home like an idiot. Causing problems for yourself, sheesh. Do you need me to hold your hand while you try to bumble through an exchange with the cashier, or can you do it by yourself? I’m sure my Portuguese must be better than your Spanish.”

“I don’t need your help!” Tobio says angrily before heatedly hanging up, standing right outside the gleaming doors of the market, but somehow, when he lifts his head to the sky, there’s a grin hanging off his face.

The moon is beaming, too. The same moon waiting to make its way over to Japan in a couple of hours and shining over the roof of Shouyou’s apartment a few countries away—it’s smiling right back at him.

The next day of morning practice, the first person that Tobio goes to is Tómas.

“Ah! Tobio,” he says in greeting, a smile on his face but a little bit of a confused look in his eyes. Tobio likes the way his Spanish accent curls around his name, the accented curve around the syllables. “What can I help you with?”

“I wanted to know how I could adjust my sets when you…” Tobio trails off, searching for the Spanish word for a term he knows easily in Japanese, even while he can picture it delineated in his head, the perfect arch in his back, the way his shoulders carry the motion forward, the way Tómas has his mouth set in concentration before it bleeds into a triumphant grin.

Watching Tobio pantomime the moment, Tómas copies him, flailing his arms in an imitation of what Tobio is trying to recreate to no avail. They must make a ridiculous picture—Tobio, who knows how to spike but not with the wicked curve Tómas pushes into the ball, limply waving his arm through the air, and Tómas repeating the gesture only for Tobio’s shoulders to sag in defeat.

“No, no, never mind,” Tobio says eventually, pointing to the court. “We can just try it until we get it right.”

Tómas watches him for a long, curious moment, and then he follows, hiding what looks to be the outlines of a smile under his fingers and waving over another teammate of theirs to toss the ball for Tobio to set.

“What,” Tobio says, faltering while he watches, and Tómas just shakes his head.

“You’re a dedicated person, Tobio, aren’t you?” he says simply. They’re familiar words, and for a moment, every person that Tobio has looked up to filters through his vision, taking the place of Tómas in fleeting sparks of light—his grandfather gently tilting the ball back into his hands before it can meet its demise on the floor, Takeda-sensei smiling from the entrance of the gym with joy pressing his eyes into happy curves, Wakatoshi telling him he’s like a dog with a bone in their Adlers days, Miwa leaning her head back upside down from the couch with her hair falling around her in waves to say that if he’s going to keep making a racket with the ball then he better become famous for it, standing with Shouyou on the graduation day, neither of them looking at each other, Shouyou’s fingernails digging into the soft meat of his shoulder in a silent farewell and good luck.

“Who else would I be?” Tobio says back, just as easily, straightforwardly, and it is that simple. Who else would Kageyama Tobio be if he were not a person to chase his dreams all the way to the sun and then pass it when his water-skin proved to survive in spite of the heat? He tilts his head to the side. “I have limited time here, and I don’t want to waste it. Why would I want anything but to win?”

Tómas stares at Tobio as if stunned, which doesn’t make sense because Tobio is certain that the other, with all of his experience, must have heard something like that before—and then he breaks to step forward, crushing the distance as he reaches out and ruffles Tobio’s hair with his hand. He’s laughing, Tobio realizes a moment after the touch takes its time to seep in with his skin, warmth bleeding into white.

“You’re right,” Tómas says, turning to get back into position once again. He leans his hands on his knees, grins in Tobio’s position. “I don’t know why I was ever worried about a new setter. You’ve got just as many years of experience as some of the other guys here, after all.”

It’s strange that he would say that after hearing Tooru’s incessant doggedness about Tobio’s wretched youth. He has, in a way, an incredible talent for making him feel small.

But still, he remembers Shouyou’s words from last night, and he decides that it doesn’t matter.

Three Olympics worth of experience, Tobio thinks, and the thought almost pulls a laugh out of him. “Are you ready?” he says instead, the restlessness in his veins gearing up to move, and in response, Tómas’ smile only burns brighter.

“Always,” he says, and not a moment later, the ball buoys into the air, the moment that it touches Tobio’s fingertips dragging him down into the waiting pits of his joints, and when it leaves again, a weight restored and absolved, his breath comes lighter.

The strike comes heavy-handed, insistent. Perfect. Tobio’s mouth parts in anticipation, saliva wetting his lip.

Bam.

Tobio feels Tooru’s eyes follow him around all week, and if he’s expecting his gaze to be heavy, he’s taken by surprise. It is instead, in contradiction, the lightest burden that Tobio has carried with him of the dozens of other immaterial nuisances he’s attempted to shed, and therefore worse as a byproduct.

For the rest of practice, Tobio can sense his attention snaking down the curve of his spine, snapping to and from him, and whether or not it’s on purpose, Tooru doesn’t approach him once. Tobio doesn’t look at him the same way that Tooru walks around the gym shouting comments at every player except for him, as if that will make up for the inordinate amount of scrutiny he’s receiving and it’ll all equal back out to neutrality.

On Saturday, the day before their mandated break from training, Tobio walks out of the building with his practice bag hiked over one shoulder only to see Tooru standing just outside the exit, propped against the wall while he looks intently down at his phone.

It’s only by instinct that Tobio looks sideways at him, inadvertently stopping in the middle of the walkway. For all of the practices that they’ve spent in proximity to each other, he’s never actually seen the other in broad daylight like this, and perhaps Tobio should have been expecting this, but the way that the sun gleams through his hair is criminal. He hasn’t really looked at him at all, he realizes. His hand lays listless at his side.

Tooru looks up, and that’s the moment when Tobio realizes his mistake, gripping the handle of his bag a little tighter until the knuckle goes white and surging forward again, twisting away from the figure haunting his peripheral vision.

“Ah, Tobio-chan!” Tooru says sunnily, and Tobio stops again, one foot forward and cursing the whiplash nature of Tooru’s mood. “You haven’t reached out to me at all.” He’s speaking in Japanese. “I thought you would have asked me more questions about adjusting to life here, especially since I offered and all.”

When Tobio turns, Tooru is tilting his head at him innocently, his hands in his pockets. As if he’s not the reason that Tobio figured he shouldn’t reach out at all, and he isn’t aware of it. Maybe other people have never called out his bullshit before or they haven’t had the brunt of it.

Lucky Tobio. “I don’t have any questions,” he says shortly, turning on his heel to walk away again.

He’s stopped when he sees Tooru’s hand shoot out to grab him on the shoulder and stop just short, watching from the corner of his eye as Tooru’s fingers falter, and tremble, and finally pull away before they can make contact with his body. It makes Tobio tense.

“Really? None? I find that hard to believe.” Tooru skips out in front of him. He’s smiling, an easy curve of his lips and a lazy slope to his shoulders. “Don’t you want to know where to buy the best rice? Those imported Ichiran ramen kits? The nearest bar with the cheapest alcohol? I’ve got all the knowledge, Tobio-chan!”

Tobio doesn’t need Tooru’s knowledge. He doesn’t need anything from him, actually—he’s done well enough on his own as somebody thrust into the world of professional volleyball straight out of volleyball, and it might have taken him quite a bit of fumbling to get to the place where he is now, where he knows how to navigate interviews and properly weave through the court with teammates that have yet to become friends, and he doesn’t need to have a spoon inserted under his tongue just because he’s now in Argentina.

“I’ll ask if I’m interested, Oikawa-san,” Tobio says, and this time, when he walks away, Tooru doesn’t try to grab him before the wisps of the afternoon steal him away.

Their day off is long, stretching itself into sterile strands of listlessness. Here, Tobio doesn’t know anybody well enough yet to ask if they can offset the strange emptiness of his temporary apartment while they aren’t training, and the times are too odd to call anybody back in Japan. Not that he is the type to call first—it’s always somebody else, Tadashi quietly telling him about his day while he cooks dinner or group calls at night with the national team when somebody (usually Atsumu) has gotten drunk enough or Hitoka calling from her train commute home, neither of them saying anything to the other, simply listening to the quiet rumbling of peaceful company on both of their ends.

Practice on Monday unfurls its limbs in tenuous, grueling ways as well. His head doesn’t feel all there, as if his skull has been half-filled with water and now his eyes trail a millisecond behind his body, and he spends more time staring at his hands and willing them to cooperate than he does tossing decent sets.

“We all have our off days,” Benjamin tells him sympathetically while they’re in the dressing room, a friendly bump on his shoulder before he peels off his practice shirt to reveal rippling planes of smooth brown muscle. “You’ll get it next time.”

The crisscrossed tiles of the floor stare right back at Tobio while he glares it down. He doesn’t have time for days of poor performance, but they find him anyway, latching onto his ankles when he least expects them to.

Almost everybody has filtered out of the gym by the time Tobio decides that he’ll stay and train a little longer—it’s almost certainly not advised upon, but he still hasn’t felt as if he’s properly stretched out his muscles, almost missing the stiff ache, and so he has his mind made up.

But when he exits the room, one foot out on the polished wooden floor of the court, Tooru is already there.

He hasn’t noticed Tobio yet, that much is obvious. If he had, Tobio is sure that he would have stopped already, spinning around with a cheerful gasp and that calculated tilt of his head. Tobio takes a step back further into the shadow of the locker room, watching as Tooru holds a volleyball close to his chin, head tilted down as if in prayer, and then he tosses it into the air, lets it spin before running forward and leaping to reach the ball, which meets the palm of his hand as if there is nobody else it belongs to but Tooru.

The smack of the ball against the court comes to Tobio’s ears later, but the image that sticks with him long after the serve is Tooru suspended in the air. His back bent like the curve of a bow about to strike, the perfect image of careful violence condensed into a singular snap of motion, all of the world’s ruthlessness contracted into the flawless line of his body.

When Tooru’s body flips forward, all of his energy going beyond and far into the hot reaches of the sun, Tobio feels the fracture as if the impact broke against his own ribs. Everything breaking apart suddenly, and then coming back together into a crystallization of a dream.

Oh.

“Teach me your serve, Oikawa-san,” Tobio says before he can think anything of it, the words falling out between his teeth like water that has never known capture. He steps forward, and Tooru startles, twisting so suddenly that his body almost folds in on itself. “How did you…”

“What are you doing here?” Tooru says sharply, his voice as rough as it was the night that Tobio stormed out of the restaurant, and it’s only then that Tobio realizes he wasn’t supposed to see that. That it was a thing only for the audience of the still air and the rippling net. A secret, bound and polished and perfect.

“I wanted to train more,” Tobio says in explanation. He can’t make out Tooru’s expression from across the gym and stained by the graying daylight, shadows pulling through the windows to lay limply across his face and along the floor. “I thought everyone had already left.”

“You were wrong,” Tooru says, turning away, and then he takes another ball from the cart set on the corner of the court to go through his ritual again, bringing the ball to his chin and closing his eyes as if he can imagine Tobio is not there. When they snap open again, Tooru feels the reverberations in his chest.

A split second later, the ball is bouncing aimlessly on the other side of the court, only just making it inside the line in a sharp curve plummeting down almost before it’s humanly possible to react. Tooru wordlessly reaches for the next ball, and Tobio realizes that he would only have let him linger if he didn’t want to chase his presence out into the day.

“Your serve—” Tobio begins.

“Don’t you have your own serve, Tobio-chan?” Tooru says incisively, the words whittled at the end so that Tobio’s name comes down like a guillotine, cleaving the air between them into shards of crystal.

The separation between them has never been so stark; Tobio hasn’t felt it delineated like that, as if he stepped forward, the glass they’ve been spun into all of this time would shatter and turn upon him.

“I didn’t know it was possible to make it onto the Olympic team if you didn’t even know how to serve,” Tooru continues. He’s halted, though, the ball held between two taut hands and his back facing away from Tobio.

“Yours is different,” Tobio says fruitlessly, frustrated despite himself. He knows that it’s Tooru’s intention to rile him up; that’s the wavelength it seems that he likes to live on, and Tobio wouldn’t be doing anything but playing right into his hands if he let it get to him. “You’re an assistant coach for a reason, aren’t you?”

The silence is taut. It forces itself down his throat, plugging the veins to stop him from saying anything else. If Tobio could give it a name, he would. It stretches beyond silence—there are a million things that Tooru is saying through the hard line of his back and his conspicuous failure to respond.

“You’re supposed to help me as part of the team,” Tobio presses. “You don’t even play any longer.”

If that was the wrong thing to say, if Tobio had put his foot into the wrong hole entirely, another one of Tooru’s biting responses waiting for skin with teeth and thirst, then Tooru does not let him know.

“Well, then,” Tooru says, spinning around, and the cheerful smile on his face has never looked more plasticky and put on. But when Tobio searches for the cracks, rooting underneath for splinters, he can’t find them. “If you really want me to teach you this serve, then you have to let me take you around San Juan. Or outside the city. As another Japanese-turned-Argentinian.”

“I’m not becoming an Argentine citizen,” Tobio says stiffly. So you don’t identify as Japanese anymore, he doesn’t say, but he thinks it, uselessly searching the outline of Tooru’s body for signs of his discarded heritage as if it’s visible. It makes sense then, in a way, that Tooru has been here so long—since eighteen years of age, he’d said. One year short of having lived in Argentina longer than he belonged to Japan.

“Eh, you know what I mean,” Tooru says with a careless wave of his hand. The same hand lands on his hip, a cocky tilt to his head while he narrows his eyes at Tobio. “So, what do you say? A favor for a favor.”

“How is offering to show me Argentina a favor for you?” Tobio says, and he isn’t even surprised when Tooru brushes right past it, scrubbing his words away as if they were a smear of dirt against the reflection of their tenuous relationship.

“It’s a great deal, Tobio-chan,” Tooru says, tossing the ball up into the air and letting it spin before it lands back into his hands. The swiveling is making Tobio dizzy, the curved black lines carving a relentless gouge into the space around it. “Any normal person would take it. I’ll even drive you, and I won’t make you pay for gas.”

Up. Down. Up. Down. The movement of his hands scores a maddening drum in the back of Tobio’s ears, staring back at him as he tries to figure out the other’s ulterior motives—

“Sure,” Tobio says, and the moment the assent leaves his mouth, the look in Tooru’s eyes sharpens curiously. He feels something lick up inside of him in response to that—something on the verge of excitement, or something that could be mistaken for apprehension. An unidentifiable species of clogged confusion.

“Great!” The volleyball falls one last time in a satisfying thud, and he grins before tossing it over to Tobio, who catches it out of sharp reflex more than he’d been expecting it. The sides are still warm from Tooru’s embrace. They’ve never touched skin-to-skin before. “We can go sometime after practice this week. Do you like wine?”

“Unless you’re talking about sake, I haven’t tried very much before,” Tobio says doubtfully, and Tooru tsks, shaking his head.

“So unfortunate, Tobio-chan,” he says, and somehow, even though Tobio knows that there is nothing wrong at all, he gets the vague sense that he’s disappointed him again, that he didn’t deliver upon the expectation set out for him. “I’ll see you then.”

Even though Tobio has the ball in his hands now, with the way that Tooru is returning to the cart and sizing up the end of the court again, he’s been clearly dismissed. So much for his extra practice—and yet, stumbling out of the gym after leaving behind the volleyball Tooru passed onto him, the blinking sunlight outside promises him that the upcoming times will make up for it instead.

There was a point in time long ago, while Tobio was in middle school and sore with growing pains and the steady realization that he could not expect the world to understand him, when he wished that he had senpai in his earlier years to teach him how to guide the team through the setter’s hands. At that point, tripping over his vicious thirst for victory and a hungry desire to be the best that caused him to cut his own strings with the steel claws of greed, there had been a large gap between him and the rest of the team at Kitigawa Daiichi. A cliffside made of aching distance, but the moment that it began crumbling under his weight, the landslide became inevitable.

And yet that was long ago, and once Tobio enrolls at Karasuno and makes the conspicuous choice to shift his wooden mindset into a thing that teases out the feathers of his long wings from small and greased to long and able, he identifies the sun in the sky and shoots just under it so that he will never have to burn again.

It is only because he fell the first time—the hard crunch of gravel shifting underneath his back, the sore bruise that the age of fourteen will leave in you—that Tobio ever learned how to gain everything back.

Still, from time to time, he wonders.

Tooru’s car is small and neat and smells nice, like the clean smell of freshly laundered clothes mixed with the sweet salt of ocean spray—not that Tobio would have expected anything else.

Tobio gets a text from Tooru a couple of hours after morning practice, freshly showered and laying on the new comforter he’d purchased, the straight wrinkles left from its careful folds still crinkling against the bedsheets, a careless text me your address, tobio-chan, and fifteen minutes later when his phone chimes again, he looks outside his window to see a car that he can presume to belong to the other.

Tobio doesn’t know anything about cars (he had asked Romero, who was ostensibly the most responsible person he knew at the time, to take him to the dealership once Miwa got tired of carting him around Tokyo), but of what he can tell of Tooru’s car, it’s blue and sleek and distinctly sporty.

“Hello, Tobio-chan,” Tooru trills once Tobio opens the door, standing outside awkwardly with one foot hanging off the curb because from what he knows of the other, Tooru could easily reprimand him for coming in without being invited, but the other waves him in impatiently, so he goes.

“Oikawa-san,” Tobio says, pushing the word out like it’s a rock stuck in a crag. He settles uncomfortably onto the seat, gingerly maneuvering his legs into the vehicle.

“Ugh, your hair is all wet,” Tooru says, wrinkling his nose as the silence between them evaporates like mist, reflecting sunshine all around the car. He reaches forward and—Tobio might just be imagining it, but he thinks that Tooru is deliberate with his movements—gingerly tugs one strand of his hair, pulling it away from his scalp and making a show of shaking his hand once he lets it limply fall back into place.

“I just showered,” Tobio says in explanation, tugging the neckline of his shirt away from his skin—the neckline stained dark with his dripping skin, and a strange expression crosses over Tooru’s face, who turns away and sets his hands on the wheel. The knuckles bleed white slowly, even though the rest of his body is hung relaxed.

“Well, don’t let it get on my seats,” is all Tooru says, and then he sets off down the road.

Tobio spends most of the drive conspicuously keeping his head from falling back against the headrest, but it’s not a long drive at all. As they head further west closer to the mountains, the jagged edges growing closer through the rearview window, salt-red and rust-orange looming on the horizon, Tooru cranks up the speakers on his car. They’re songs that Tobio doesn’t know, a mix of fluid Spanish and harder-to-make-out English circling the backseat to make it back to the front, and he lets that ease some of the tension out of his shoulders, the laidback rhythm an easier pill to swallow that taut silence.

“Come on,” Tooru says, the only words he leaves Tobio with before he gets out of the car and begins heading for the inside of the facility once they arrive, heading straight for the entrance with an ease that says he’s been here before. Once the car door shuts, he locks it without looking, Tobio scrambling to follow through the thick grass surrounding the main structure.

“Have you been here before?” Tobio says once he catches up, both of them stopping just short of a service counter.

“Do you think that I would really show you around to attractions I haven’t checked out myself?” Tooru says with a scoff. “You have no faith in my tour skills, Tobio-chan. Oh, look, we were right on time.”

Unceremoniously, he gestures behind Tobio, who looks in the direction his finger is pointing to see a friendly-looking man with a smile and a lanyard approach the entrance. “Are you here for the tour?” he asks them.

Tooru answers before Tobio can even think to do the same, flawlessly taking charge of the conversation as the group assembles and sets off toward the vineyard itself, the sun a razor in the sky and shedding its sharp nails in hot pricks of warmth over the afternoon. Tobio follows a few paces behind, almost feeling like a child does when on vacation with their parents.

He doesn’t know why Tooru would pay the money to experience a tour he’s already done in the past, even refusing Tobio’s offer to pay his share during the car ride. Even when he doesn’t seem to care for Tobio much outside of the fact that he’s stepping into the hole he left in the team. Especially because he doesn’t seem to care for Tobio very much at all.

Apparently, Tobio isn’t even granted the space to think about it—Tooru falls back abruptly, falling into line with his footsteps with an ease that takes him by surprise, the quiet conversation he’d been keeping up dissolving into fine mist as the group finally stops before the first point.

“I’m not much of a wine person, but my best friend likes sake a lot,” Tobio offers as they peer around the greenery, vines draping over wood like snakes slithering out of recluse this way and that, their bright berries gathered in impossibly tight bunches as if they’re afraid of letting go of each other. He wonders how they would feel to burst between his fingers.

“Sake is nothing like wine made from grapes,” Tooru says dismissively, and then he gives Tobio another long look. “Though I do have my appreciation for it when the occasion calls for it. I can’t say I lived in Japan long enough to really enjoy it during my partying days, however.”

“You partied?” Tobio gives him a sidelong glance, a thing that sneaks up the length of Tooru and stays in the warm crevice between his jaw and shoulder. Thin and brown and tucked into the spot of the neck where one is most sensitive.

They’re quiet, having dropped to the back of the group to have their own conversation. Tobio has an inkling that Tooru hadn’t really brought him here to learn much about wine, especially considering Tobio’s inexperience with the matter, but he can’t imagine any other reason why Tooru would insist on dragging him out of the confines of his apartment, especially when they’ve been doing just fine keeping out of reach from each other. The bottom hem of Tooru’s shirt stays just out of touch when he leaps into the air, even if they are right beside each other right now, even if Tobio were to stretch as far as possible for mercy, even if this were something he wanted to beg for.

“Do I not seem like the type?” Tooru says teasingly, his words warm and quiet and starless in the company of other people and among the serene rustling of the leaves all around them, the hushedness of his voice could be mistaken for kindness.

No; actually, Tobio can imagine it as easily as pressing his eyes shut, the moment when lid hits cheek overtaken by a boy-man dancing in the dark, hair tousled like frivolousness and lips sweetened by alcohol, the kind of person who would only know being alone in the capacity of foreignity. The kind of man-boy whose first time learning how to occupy a space was moving to Argentina. The opposite of Tobio, whose aloneness contained a latitude so vast he could clear a room until not even his shadow remained. Even that would run.

“I guess,” Tobio says, gaze drifting to the side so he doesn’t have to take in the unruly scope of Tooru beside him, blazing into the imprint of the skyline. Their tour guide is still talking somewhere ahead of them, but if he is saying anything of importance, then it’s getting lost somewhere between the space to their ears.

“We can do that too, Tobio-chan,” Tooru says as if he’s being generous. “There are plenty of places to get lost in Argentina.”

And the image of that, burning and vivid and bright, makes Tobio blink, thinking back to nights he can barely remember with the insides cleaved out by alcohol and the encouragement of his friends, hot mouths and hotter fingers marking constellations on his hips; stains in the sky that he has no recollection of. Tooru in that place too, older but ostensibly not too old to outgrow the scene, bitter vodka lips and open-palmed desire—

But Tooru tears out the veins of that vision before it can devolve any further, saying, “But I wouldn’t want to do that with you anyway,” and, well, it’s not as if Tobio asked for it in the first place. He didn’t ask for—anything. He’s learned that with Tooru, asking would be a mistake.

“It wasn’t my idea, so,” Tobio says, turning to the side even as Tooru’s eyes remain. He feels the sting of it as if he can cut to the bone just by looking at him. Letting him bleed so he can decipher his thoughts from the spillage.

Of course he’s like this. One week from that night at the restaurant to now—of course nothing would change just because Tooru is doing him a favor.

“Ah, I’m the one with the bad ideas then,” Tooru says, and then their group moves on, leaving their conversation to sit in the dirt out in the vineyard.

“Your serve, Oikawa-san,” Tobio says at their next practice. They’ve almost finished wrapping up, most of the team scattered about in their warm-up stretches, the smell of sweat clean and familiar. “You told me you would teach it to me.”

Tooru looks at him appraisingly. A moment passes, and somehow, intrinsically, Tobio knows that he’s going to say no. A beat. He’s waiting for it. Your serve, Oikawa-san.

“Another time,” he says vaguely, which isn’t a rejection but runs along the same lines. He tilts his head to the side slightly—he does that a lot, Tobio notices, and if Tooru thinks it makes him look cunning then it only makes him look slightly like a dog. “What don’t you like about your serve? Let’s start there so we know how to improve.”

It’s the first time he’s sounded like an actual coach, and the quiet shock of it rinsing through Tobio shouldn’t feel as new as it is, and yet—it’s unfamiliar. New moon, new tides.

“I’ve been focusing a lot on power in recent years,” Tobio says, frowning down at the darkened lines decorating the calloused skin of his palms. If he closes his eyes, he can feel the rubbery length of leather cupping his hands, the slight shock of contact traveling down his veins. “But it’s not—”

The hard line of Tooru’s body stamped out into the air and the perfect hinge of his arm pulled back for the blow, so vivid and space-shifting that Tobio can almost imagine peeling the whole picture of it like sticker paper. He looks like he could fly if he wanted to.

“It’s so quick.” Smoking rifle, bullet point target.

Tooru is quiet for a moment, but this time he’s actually mulling it over, the thoughts visible on his face as they take different variations. When he speaks, the words sound carefully chewed and picked through. “Think about your approach first. The jump. What are you thinking of when you first take to the air? What else can you shed to get as high as possible?”

Of course Tobio has heard advice like that before, that the setup is one of the most important parts of the move, and he’s long internalized that, fighting as hard as he could to keep his vertical higher than Shouyou’s, but—shed?

“Can you show me?” Tobio asks, a little pump of adrenaline racing through his skin, and this time he’s not even surprised when Tooru shakes his head with a smile. He’s learning.

“Maybe next time!” Tooru says with a cheeky peace sign, pressing the image of his teeth into Tobio’s mind. “For now, keep your schedule open. There’s a good bakery about an hour out from here, but we’re going to have to get up early for opening and—” He glances to Bruno, who’s preoccupied talking to somebody else. “—We’re going to have to keep it a bit of a secret. Not exactly in your nutritional plan.”

“I guess so,” Tobio says, tucking the little bit of quiet embarrassment in between his shoelaces so he won’t trip over it, not knowing what he’s shying away from, only knowing the hushed relief that Tooru’s promise—for now—holds strong. “I haven’t got anything in my schedule.”

“Nope, just me,” says Tooru, and then he saunters off without waiting for a response, ever-childish fluster the only thing sustaining the tremble in Tobio’s fingers.

They’re back in Tooru’s car, the pale interior dusted over by the early Argentine morning, shy sunshine creeping around the shallow tides of the night. It’s too cold; the weather had taken an unexpected nosedive, and Tobio is too used to going straight to practices or running until his bones warmed themselves to be prepared with little more than a thin jacket.

It certainly doesn’t help that Tooru has the windows half-open, the wind dipping into the front half of the car to leave Tobio’s hair a tangled mess while it somehow still flatters Tooru’s features, the bangs in his eyes fetching even as he croons along to the radio in a severely off-tune voice. He thinks that Tooru has kept the windows open on purpose, actually. Tobio wouldn’t put it past him. When he reaches to crank up the heat, Tooru smacks his fingers away while not missing a single wretched beat.

Tobio lets a sigh whistle out of his pursed lips, but if anything that only puts a smile on Tooru’s face, and he succumbs to sticking it out the rest of the drive forward as they eat up the long stretch of highway pulsing through the open earth.

They pull up into the beaten-down parking lot of a small line of businesses. Tooru kills the engine and peers out the windshield to look at the small group of people already gathered outside of what is ostensibly the bakery in question, and then, hopping out, leaves Tobio to hurry after him to take their place in the line.

It’s quiet, but not the kind of silence that makes itself known for its pointed edge. The comfortable kind instead, that floats along and settles over quiet mornings along with the fog. Still, five minutes in, Tobio begins shivering against the chilled air—less severe than the breeze from the highway, and even though he can feel Tooru’s eyes cut to his figure, he’s still taken by surprise when he breaks the silence.

“You look pitiful,” Tooru says, and then he’s peeling off his own, thicker jacket and pressing it into Tobio’s hands, which unconsciously take the offering before he can realize what he’s doing. The material is soft and still warm from Tooru’s heat.

“I didn’t give you my jacket for you to stare at it like an idiot, so wear it,” Tooru says, sounding annoyed now, so Tobio hastens to put it on, feeling a little like a child who’s been chastised.

“Thanks,” he says gruffly, pulling the ends of the jacket closer together, and Tooru just shrugs, pulling out his phone and scrolling through his notifications as if that waves away the elusiveness of the gesture.

It’s not long before they make it inside the door—they’re greeted by a fresh selection of pastries, the scent of butter drifting outward the moment the entrance creaks open. Tooru points out several highlights to Tobio. It sounds as if he’s been here often, even with how far of a drive it is, and even with the stringentness of the meal plan most athletes of their level are usually on.

“Are you ordering together?” the employee at the counter asks them when they make their way up, looking between them with sleepy eyes. Tobio looks to Tooru almost on instinct, silently conceding responsibility in an area he’s not familiar with.

Tooru slings an arm around Tobio’s neck. It feels overly familiar and put on, but he lets it happen anyway, the flex of his bicep a foreign pulse against his skin. “Yep!” he trills, the same charisma he wears like a hat thrumming out his body. “We’ll be getting a couple of the fruit tarts, four alfajores, and… whatever your favorite is.”

The worker begins bagging their pastries while Tooru pulls out his wallet, and Tobio experiences the same flash of hot panic that he always does when he’s getting meals with his friends. Racing to get the bill, flagging down waiters, that sort of thing. The usual sort of courtesy—but for some reason, with Tooru, it feels like giving up the upper hand.

“I’ll get half,” Tobio says, fruitlessly trying to peek over Tooru’s shoulder to glance at the amount listed on the receipt only for the other to shove him off with his hand, peacefully inserting his card into the reader.

“What kind of senpai would I be if I didn’t pay for a meal at least once, Tobio-chan?” Tooru says. He raises his eyebrows, turning to Tobio with a questioning stare.

“The kind who would teach me your serve,” Tobio grumbles, shoving his wallet back into his pocket with a sigh when Tooru peacefully unhooks his arm from around his shoulders to grab the bag from the worker, smiling past his silent protest.

“We’re getting there! Patience is a virtue.”

But even despite his words, they don’t get anywhere except halfway across the parking lot before they’re stopped—the simmering daylight before them cutting streaks across the gravelly asphalt and a woman’s voice calling behind them.

“Oh my god! Are you Tooru Oikawa?”

Tooru swivels immediately, the smile that Tobio recognizes from his television interviews immediately appearing on his face, but when Tobio turns as well, he’s surprised to see the woman’s eyes trained on him.

“That’s me!” Tooru says brightly, flashing a peace sign, and the confusion clears from his fan’s face when she sees him and gasps a little.

“Can I get a picture?” she asks, and then, gesturing slightly at Tobio, says, “Sorry, I thought it was you because of the jacket…”

Tooru just laughs, taking her phone and angling it upwards to capture both of their faces, but—the jacket? He peels off the garment, a chill breaking out over his body almost immediately, not that he notices.

On the back, plastered in bright embroidery, reads OIKAWA in capitalized letters. Tobio swallows, feeling the lettering burning against his back even though he’s taken it off, but still he hugs it tight to his chest instead of putting it back on or thrusting it back in Tooru’s direction.

“I didn’t think anybody would recognize the name,” Tooru says lightly when the woman walks off, eyes trailing back into the distance while he opens the car door. He casually reaches over and takes the jacket from him, and now he’s only Tobio again, nothing more, nothing else. “Sorry about that.”

“It’s fine,” Tobio says, but the rest of his words are swallowed up by the sound of the engine starting up, tapering off to leave the lingering look of disappointment on the woman’s face when she realized he wasn’t Tooru—not the superstar who had taken Argentina to win the Olympics, only a foreign face—and the faint sense of flat bewilderment that Tooru had taken the risk to allow him to flaunt the name Oikawa in the first place.

“The next thing you need to know about a serve,” Tooru says, this time not even looking up from his phone when Tobio comes up to him at the end of practice, the question laid flat on his tongue. “Watch these recordings. It’ll give you a good idea of how I changed over time, which should help you pinpoint what exactly makes it work.”

Tobio’s phone vibrates in his bag, and he clutches the strap a little bit tighter, feels the hard edge of nylon press into his hands. He swallows. There’s a pearl in his throat made of seaweed. “Can’t you ever make things easy?”

“If you want me to just show you how to do things without making you work for it, it’s not going to happen.” Tooru clicks his phone shut, pocketing it and finally spinning to face him with a broad smile. “It’s not my style, Tobio-chan.”

Tooru takes him to Casa Natal de Sarmiento over the weekend. It doesn’t quite align with what Tobio expected this time; it’s small, and it’s quiet, and it goes a bit over Tobio’s head, being the kind of person who’s not as academic or cognizant of anything artsy at all, but he can see that it’s a beautiful space. Clean and white, damp shade. Hushed respect thrumming through the floors as visitors make their way through the space.

Tooru is perhaps more into it than Tobio would have expected from him, but even that somehow slots into place when he sees him conversing quietly with an employee, pointing out some part of the architecture on the side of the building.

Maybe this was not just for Tobio’s sake but also Tooru’s, but that’s alright. Tobio got another chance to get used to the other’s terrible singing on the car ride here, though he didn’t roll down his windows for this particular performance, and still, there’s a private relief shelved in the back of him that there’s somebody to help Tobio carve his way into Argentina. That he doesn’t have to do it alone. That he may not be having his hand held, but there’s comfort in having a presence close by, even one that seems to find joy in holding things out of his reach on purpose, laughing at how far he’ll stretch to grab it.

Tooru reappears by his side. “You look real out of place, Tobio-chan,” he murmurs. “Come on, I’ll take you out of your misery.

And then he marches ahead without looking back to see if Tobio is following, as he always does. And Tobio shadows him, as he always does.

They aren’t made to understand each other; Tobio is beginning to realize that. Japan can produce two stars at once, but only one of them can stay. The other leaves. The jaws of the universe can stretch just about this far, trotting around the ends like teething pains, and like magnets of the same polarity, they cannot get much closer before the resistance grows too strong.

One ages out, and the tension eases, the sky coming together again. But there is still something pulsing in the ashes. And spinning around in the night, his feet tripping over themselves, Tobio cannot wind them any closer together than they want to be.

After another week during which Tooru gives him more vague and slightly confusing anecdotes about volleyball, he takes Tobio hiking; which is to say, he pulls up to Tobio’s apartment even before the sun has opened its tired eyes the day after a grueling practice and practically forces him to get in the car with him.

Tobio is starting to think that maybe he’ll never teach him that serve, but he’ll get it out of him some other way. If not through this convoluted chase around the San Juan province, then through some other form of coercion.

“You’ll see, it’ll be worth it!” Tooru is saying as they approach the foot of the mountains, the highway leading them there dark and long in the early morning. Tobio has his eyes shut, the rhythmic thrumming of the car lulling him back to sleep, though Tooru keeps reaching over to pinch the skin of his arm to keep him awake. “There’ll be so many less people at this hour.”

“Because they’re smart and stay inside when it’s the middle of the night,” Tobio mutters.

“Early morning,” Tooru corrects. “And anyway, when the sun does rise, we’ll have the most spectacular view.”

Tobio grinds out some grumbling discontent, and then despite himself, falls asleep anyway. Sometime along the road, he registers the radio snapping off, leaving behind sweet silence and, curiously enough, a hovering warmth by his hand that disappears as soon as it materializes.

“How do you even find the time to do this, anyway?” Tobio asks once they’re far up the mountain, the sky barely lighter above them but not dark enough that they’ll trip over the terrain, rocks crunching underneath their shoes. Tooru is walking ahead of him like usual, but this time it’s out of necessity, guiding the way. Having spent the last decade of his life, Tobio is out of his element, too used to the shinkansen and walking busy streets lit by urban bustle.

“I left Japan for a very specific reason,” Tooru says, the sound of his voice floating behind him before it reaches Tobio. “I mean, they’ve got mountains there of course, but all of my time was eaten up by school and volleyball and—” He cuts himself off abruptly, something that seemed to be a name choking his throat like a fish bone. “—School things. You know how it is. I grew up in Miyagi, just outside Sendai actually. And coming here was like, oh, I don’t know. Having the space to run and a voice in my ear telling me to sprint as fast and as far as I wanted. You could argue that I have less time now than I did then, but something about being here… pushes me to make it.”

He turns around, a half-apologetic smile on his lips. “I don’t know if that made any sense.”

“It did,” Tobio says, scrambling to follow again after having unwittingly stopped in his tracks, feet pressed into the red dust of the ground. “I, um, actually grew up in Miyagi as well. Around Sendai, but a little farther out.”

There’s a pause. “Oh,” Tooru says, and then he says nothing else, which Tobio takes as the dismissal that it is, except—

Tobio can’t help but imagine another reality in which they had met. In which Tooru stayed in Japan, and their paths somehow crossed, but Tobio would still be his trainee, in a manner of speaking, and Tooru would probably still be a cocky piece of shit. His head tight with possibility, he wonders what would have happened if they were closer in age and in the capacity to compete against each other outside of the infrequent Olympic matches.

“Tobio-chan, you’re so quiet,” Tooru complains in a voice that he might describe as closer to a whine than anything if he were any younger than thirty-five. “At least attempt to entertain me while it’s just us, the rocks, and the early morning. I don’t even have any music to sing along with.”

“Maybe that’s a good thing,” Tobio says.

“Rude!” Tooru declares, turning a rounded corner through the rock. He turns and stops to face him, amusement wiggling on his face. “You should be glad that you’ve never seen Tómas drunkenly singing karaoke at our end-of-the-season celebrations yet. That might actually scar you.”

Tobio hates how there are these flashes of the Tooru the rest of the team gets to see—a friend, a confidante—the kind of relationship you can build only by being teammates. Even Tooru’s role as assistant coach is one that Tobio sees infrequently, like fish scales glinting through a palmful of cupped water, and that’s only when he’s not letting Bruno take the brunt or doling out pieces of information about his serve. Only in rations, as if he has something to lose if he tells Tobio all at once.

“Are you any good at singing, Tobio-chan?” Tooru asks, his body still slightly turned toward him, and Tobio’s throat dries up as if it’s never heard a tune in its life, stripped bare before the almost cruel glint of the sun creeping over the planes of Tooru’s face.

“No,” Tobio rasps out, and then he clears his throat to dispel any remaining sense of betrayal for daring to think that Oikawa Tooru, in all his spectacular volatility, could be so beautiful.

“Can’t relate,” says Tooru, starting again at a pace that leaves a tight burn in Tobio’s calves. The mountain stretches out steeper here, the cragged rock beginning to blot out the rising sun. “I’ve got an excellent voice.”

“You know, I begin to wonder if anybody has ever told you no before,” Tobio mutters, which evidently doesn’t get lost amongst the jagged ridges all around them because Tooru lets out a snort.

“I assure you, I’ve been told no enough times in my life to forget how to hope for approval,” Tooru says, a tinge sarcastic, maybe bitterness coloring his words, but that doesn’t fit into the sketch of him that Tobio has in his head. The one that moved to Argentina after being immediately recruited into the professional league and then took the nation to the top. The one who left behind Japan simply because he could.

“And besides, you’re not the first person to tell me my singing sucks,” Tooru grumbles, and Tobio lets him guide the conversation from whatever strange cranny it was about to dive into. “My—eugh—best friend tells me the same all the time. You’d think that he’d realize I’m tired of it. But no, Iwa-chan is just mannerless like that.”

“Iwa-chan?” Tobio repeats, trying to place the name.

Tooru flits a careless hand behind him. “He’s your Olympic athletic trainer, I suppose. Sorry if it’s not the first thing that comes to mind when I try to place him. It’s never going to replace the image of him sucking giant spit rings into the collars of his Godzilla shirts when he was a kid. Unfortunately.”

“Your best friend is Iwaizumi-san?” Tobio gasps, his head spinning while attempting to place the puzzle pieces into the spots they belong. “But—he never mentioned that during any of the Olympics. And you didn’t mention him until now.”

“Hm? That’s because he gets all serious when we’re going against each other. As if he can beat me by the pure virtue of seeing me as an enemy instead of a friend. I don’t bring him up because it is, frankly, embarrassing on my end to be associated with him.”

“You should be honored if your name is in the same breath as his,” Tobio says stoutly. “Even Shouyou thinks so, and Shouyou thinks everybody is the best.”

“Shouyou?” Tooru asks curiously, latching onto the foreign name. “Your best friend?”

Tobio has a physical recoil to that, a shiver going through his limbs and face. “If you have to put it like that.”

Tooru just laughs, a marvelous little sound that shakes down the length of his spine. He takes another steep corner, and it’s only then that Tobio realizes they’ve made it to the top, somehow. “So you understand that some best friends have to stay secret. Well, here’s one of my secrets, Tobio-chan.” He throws his arms out, waving over the unfolded ribbon length that is the San Juan landscape.

Tooru was right; it was worth it to wake up at such an ungodly hour if only to see the golden yolk of the sun spill over the horizon as it beams up and up and up. The clouds part way like theater drapes opening to reveal the city hidden by the night, and he can imagine the city waking up, too, people opening their curtains to the morning sun and the beginning of the day. Behind them there is even more mountain and rock, more to climb, and on another limb there are lengths of green groves.

Tooru drifts over across the flat plane of the mountain to where a small outcropping of stone sprouts upward, a tiny monument of its own making. It’s twice as tall as them, the shadow draping over Tooru where he stands, and Tobio can make out several layers of sediment trapped over time and whittled into the statue where it stands.

Tobio follows until he, too, is underneath its shade, standing right behind the proud line of Tooru’s back.

“Do you want to know another secret, Tobio-chan?” Tooru’s voice comes as almost a whisper, floating over to Tobio with the same gentle sigh as the sun heaving itself over the mountaintops. He turns, and Tobio instinctively backs up, feeling pinned under his gaze, until he feels the hard hand of stone hit him.

Tooru doesn’t stop moving forward, though, pressing him up against the rock not by physical force but through the solid physicality of his presence, and Tobio almost feels cornered. Not in a dangerous sense, but as though the man before him is a fox, and even if he is turned mellow by touch, he is still, at his core, an animal.

A long moment balloons between them as Tobio tries to search for the right thing to say—he feels like Tooru is looking for one—and during that time, there passes the breath of San Juan waking up and resting and stirring once again. “Your serve?” Tobio says, as much of a joke as it is a serious inquiry, as untimely as it would be to bring up volleyball at the top of a hiking trail. He doesn’t mean for his voice to sound like that, all floaty and unsure, but Tooru’s rigid stare carves his words into something else entirely.

“Ugh,” says Tooru, his face momentarily wrinkling in disgust, but Tobio doesn’t see anything else before Tooru digs one hand into the back of Tobio’s head and cants him forward, his head tilting up and eyes closing automatically as if suspended, waiting. “I have a thousand secrets and only a few that I’m willing to share with you. Can I…”

Tobio doesn’t want to seem desperate. But Tooru’s voice is coming out rough, much lower in tone than he’s ever spoken to him before, and he can’t breathe when faced with the thick scent of Tooru’s shampoo, and the want in him sparks to life, embers flickering into flames, and before it can consume him whole he lurches forward and kisses Tooru.

Kissing Tooru feels like the secret he promised it would be—the private way his lips push against his own, the hushed breath he chokes back into the well of his throat, the covert way he sneaks his fingers down Tobio’s neck into the exact spot that makes him melt. Tobio has wrecked things by running his mouth before. There are a million ways he can ruin everything with one word. But this feels right—this sense of speaking without a voice, just the quiet exchange of something good.

By the time they break apart, both of their breaths are coming out ragged, filling the silent air between them. The sun has risen just a little bit more, the shade cast over them on the cusp of running away, and Tobio can’t take his eyes off of Tooru, afraid that if he looks away, he’ll lose him forever.

Tooru’s expression shutters and there’s that snaking fear again, grounding Tobio to the dirt, coming back in the memory of broad fingers and the wrinkle on his face when he smiles that Tobio has never quite admitted to himself that he wants to trace until it disappears into the thick of his hair.

There are so many things that he wants. There are so many ways his want could ruin him.

Tooru turns away. “Only the devil would send my replacement in the form of somebody so gorgeous,” he mutters, the words bouncing off against the rock as he walks away, and then he swivels after he’s walked the length of the plane. “Are you coming, or are you just going to stand there until the sun sets again?”

Tobio starts forward as if that had been the only thing to melt the lead that had become his feet, tripping forward to follow Tooru as he sets back down the hiking trail. Kissing Tooru felt like a secret, he realizes, because maybe that was all it was meant to be—a fleeting surrender to desire. One they certainly cannot tell the team, not in the least admit to themselves.

Because Tooru is older and wiser and somehow made all of the experience he’s gained over the years evaporate like old milk the second their lips touched and makes Tobio feel so fucking naive. Because Tobio isn’t sure where they are supposed to from here, how this fits into their deal, what to do with the restless longing making a home for itself in his chest.

They’re quiet all the way back, slipping silently down the mountain, and when they bundle back into the car Tooru turns to him meaningfully, eyes searching Tobio’s face for something that he evidently can’t find, and then, cursing to himself, half turns before Tobio reaches out to try to kiss him again. Maybe for the last time, if he’s learned anything.

Tooru catches Tobio’s hand, and instead, staring at him unbearably, excruciatingly, impossibly, stretches across the seat to take him by the mouth in a forceful motion that feels a lot more final once their mouths meet.

It’s short, and then the sound of the engine starting up and the radio automatically flicking on swallows up anything else to be said, Spanish crooning filling up all of the space that Tobio couldn’t breach and yet still emptier than Tobio’s warbling voice, and Tooru says, like he’s giving in, “Fine, I’ll teach you that fucking serve, Tobio-chan.” He hits the gas, and Tobio falls back into his seat, having still been partially listing forward like a compass needle seeking home.

And Tobio can’t help but wonder what that means for their expeditionary agreement.

Tooru tells Tobio to stay after practice the next week, and he leaves the locker room after ensuring that the rest of the team has already left to find the other already on the court, a mimicry of the first time Tobio stumbled upon him.

“Great, we can get started,” Tooru says once he hears Tobio come to a stop behind him, the shuffle of his shoe a harsh shriek against the polished wood. “So—”

“Why won’t you kiss me again?” Tobio says, the jarring statement almost a demand. He watches Tooru’s back tense in front of him, his movements faltering. “You still never talk to me unless it’s strictly outside of practice hours.”

“I find that when you do something once, people start to expect things of you, Tobio-chan,” Tooru says, finally turning around. The tilt of his mouth is firmly set and betrays none of his thoughts. Not for the first time, his expression is smooth as glass, the kind that only reflects what it sees instead of giving way to the depths below. “You’d want things that I can’t give you.”

And it’s wrong, wrong—Tobio hasn’t let himself desire anything more since that day on the hiking trail because he knows that it would be in vain if not from the arms-length Tooru has always held him at then from the way he holds himself as if he’d never once been stained by Tobio’s touch.

“You overestimate how I feel about you,” Tobio says, knowing it’s not true, “and you can’t pretend you don’t want things, too, if you were the one who initiated.” Tooru stiffens, and it’s as if not even the air can touch him, every dust particle subverting his body. “I know how it is. I’ve had sex before. With teammates and rivals and people from bars. You’re only a man.”

“Am I?” Tooru almost growls, the low rumble of his throat an unmistakable drum, the memory of his fingers dancing through the prism of his mind. “It wouldn’t mean anything.”

“I wouldn’t want it to,” Tobio lies, and it’s like a pin drops over the rapidly cascading tension ballooning over them, overbearing and overwhelming before it just pops, a gunshot to sprint going off in the dark.

He hears it, too—but that’s just the sound of the volleyball hitting the ground when Tooru lets go of it, stalking over to him in large strides to roughly pull Tobio forward by the strung neckline of his practice shirt and into his hot mouth, where his tongue tastes both bitter and silvery and his only swear is that he cannot promise anything.

Tooru corners Tobio up against the gym wall and traps one of his hands against the paneling, the other worming around to his back to grasp at the muscle there and press him closer. Tobio gasps around his mouth, the obscene sound of their ministrations welling up around them, and through it all, Tooru says, “Has anybody ever told you no before, Tobio-chan?”

“Y-yes,” Tobio rasps, sighing when Tooru presses the hot length of his body against his own. The thing is, Tobio is also a man.

“It’s hard to ignore you when you blink those big doe eyes at everyone. I bet you could get into the pants of anybody you wanted.”

“Oikawa-san—”

“Any stranger who looked at you the right way,” Tooru continues. “Would you let me stick my tongue down your throat if you didn’t know me at all?”

Tobio can’t even reply around the way his mind is spinning and the feeling of Tooru’s fingers snaking around the waistband of his shorts.

“Anyone would have a hard time turning you down.” Tooru’s warm hand, a tender sense of relief that hitches into heightening urgency as Tobio throws his head back against the wall. The way Tooru’s sharp cornerstone of a jawline glints in the afternoon sun, thrown into relief. “Does it feel good knowing you’ve gotten everything you wanted? Me? Japan, Argentina. They’d love what you can do with your hands. The way you stick your tongue through your teeth when you’re concentrated on the court.”

“Do you watch me play, Oikawa-san?” Tobio lets his eyes drift closed, hardly able to think.

“It’s my job.” Tooru hasn’t been gentle with him once. Doesn’t slow down, even still. “Have to make sure you’re good with your mouth too if you’re going to be my replacement.”

“Is it—good enough?” Tobio’s body is torn between bucking away and pressing insistently closer. Tooru yanks his head to the side to suck at his neck, biting hard just as Tobio’s defenses fall away completely.

Tooru clucks his tongue, and Tobio opens his eyes long enough to see the way his dilated pupils take in when the tide crashes over Tobio’s head and drags him under. “You’re perfect.”

The words sound resentful, hissed sharp through knife-like teeth, but Tobio will hardly remember that later, lost in the flashes of memory.

Tooru steps back as Tobio recollects himself, his vision cracking open just in time to see the other wipe his mouth in a clinical movement, watching him with a cat-like gaze. “The next time I show you around, we’ll look into the nightlife,” he says, and his voice is so unexpectedly light and carefree that it hits Tobio like vertigo. “Maybe a bar! I won’t tell Bruno that you’ve been drinking if you don’t tell on me.”

He pats Tobio on the shoulder while he brushes past him, and he can’t bite back his voice: “You’re not going to teach me the serve?”

Tooru pauses and looks back, his eyes glinting as he gestures to Tobio’s body. “You don’t look fit to play volleyball at all. Maybe next time.”

Tobio peels himself away from the wall, heading back to the locker room to pick up his belongings. He catches a look at his neck in the mirror and unconsciously lets out a small gasp at the dark shadow of a hickey burned into his skin; he’ll have to hide that during practice, which will be a pain. Tooru’s an asshole, but that’s what he’d been expecting, anyway—their arrangement, like their show around San Juan, is merely an exchange of mutual benefits. Nothing more, nothing less.

The sound of his ringtone trills right through the cold sheer of the early morning fog and cuts off abruptly when Tobio tucks his phone between his ear and shoulder, crouched down by the pavement to lace his running shoes.

“Tobio-chan?” Tooru’s voice is clear and cuts straight through to its target.

“Oikawa-san,” Tobio says, pausing.

“I’ll pick you up at ten tonight for the bar,” Tooru says. His voice is raspy with sleep. “Remember, no snitching or we both go down!”

“I’m sure this is a breach of some contract in some way,” Tobio says dully, but Tooru just laughs before hanging up, stark silence creeping back into the mist.

Tobio stands, his breath coming out solid and thick as he looks before the road stretching out seemingly endlessly before him. And then he runs, the pounding of his heels against the asphalt taking him far away from Tooru and San Juan and himself.

The bar that Tooru ends up taking them to is hot and heavy and just like every other club that Tobio has ever been in, but the difference here is that it’s overcrowded with his companion, all of the free air shrinking into Tooru’s presence. There’s nothing special about it, familiar to him as somebody who spent a lot of his time exploring Tokyo’s nightlife and also the people who fell into his bed, but Tooru is here to guide him around with a possessive arm around his waist and then to push a glass of something into his hands before long.

“Just trust me,” Tooru says, using his deft fingers to tilt Tobio’s chin up and guide the drink to his lips, and he shouldn’t trust him, not his smooth words or whatever he’s ordered or the dark glint in his eyes, but he can’t stop himself anyway, throat working until it’s emptied.

Tobio tries not to let his mouth twist around the bitter taste before it clears. “What are you drinking?”

“Water,” says Tooru shortly, sliding over a frosted glass and taking a sip from it. He eyes Tobio above the rim, which presses into the pink of his lip infuriatingly. “Do you want another one?”

“What was it?” Tobio asks, but Tooru waves him aside and flags down the bartender to make a second.

“Don’t worry about anything,” Tooru says, staring straight ahead at the walls lined with bottles, some of them familiar in design and the rest in Spanish. “While your nights are mine, you’re my responsibility.”

While Tobio’s nights are Tooru’s. It shouldn’t sound suggestive. If anything, his designation as Tooru’s responsibility almost makes him sound like he’s his charge, but the extent of their relationship falls squarely between mentor and heated trysts when he least expects it—in other words, just enough for Tobio to forget the taste of his mouth but not the rush of heat whenever their eyes lock.

They don’t have practice tomorrow. Tobio mulls over that fact while rolling the liquid in his glass around in circles, wondering how Tooru plans for the rest of this night to go, and then decides that for once, he’ll let the choice out of his hands.

The drunken club members move in an amorphous shape out on the dancefloor, swelling and rising with the night. If the best way to make his mark in Argentina is to play their volleyball, then the second best method is to join them. He knocks the glass back, squeezing his eyes tight as his mind finally clears, and lets the night slide down his throat like the rest of his drink.

At some point, Tobio loses count of how many glasses he’s gone through, but the only thing he knows for sure is Tooru’s stable presence at his side the entire night like a solid fixture he cannot discard. He joins the fray briefly, bodies bumping against him and rolling against his front, but he can still feel eyes on the back of his head—and when he checks, they’re there, keeping watch.

He stumbles back out eventually and makes his way back to Tooru, who is talking to somebody else; tall, with dark hair, but still not taller than Tobio is. It’s the only time of the night that Tooru’s attention isn’t devoted exclusively to Tobio, and his alcohol-hazy eyes haven’t gotten used to the look of the other’s side profile in place of his straight-on gaze.

But when he tries to slip away, Tooru’s arm shoots out and wraps firmly around his waist, tugging him back to his side, and he lets it happen. His eyes drift closed. He doesn’t know what the two are talking about but he likes the feeling of Tooru’s arm like a symbol of possession. A casual touch heightened ten times by the alcohol.

“How do you like it?” Tooru says into his ear, words grazing the fine shave of his hair, and Tobio opens his eyes again to find that his companion has disappeared elsewhere.

“It’s just like every other bar I’ve been to before,” Tobio says honestly, his gaze dragging back to Tooru and catching briefly on a man opposite the room who’s staring at him with a smirk on his face. It snaps back to Tooru, though, whose face contains the slip of a frown that dissolves so quickly he’s not sure it existed in the first place.

“But it doesn’t have me,” Tooru says, almost gloating as a look of sheer enjoyment passes over his face and he reaches up to rest one finger against the hickey he’d bruised into Tobio’s neck the other day and his quickening pulse, his heart rate rabbiting under his attention.

He concedes. “It doesn’t.” He sighs when Tooru presses meanly into the mark, a full-body shudder shaking down to his shoes. The other had to know what he was doing when he’d entered the bar wearing a button-up that he’d slightly undone at the top from the oppressive heat of so many bodies so close. When he fed Tobio shots until his defenses were lowered. When he dragged one hand across his hip bone through his jeans and never stopped touching him since.

Tooru makes a show out of checking his watch. “It’s late. We should head out if we want to try to preserve our sleep schedules. Just don’t throw up in my car, Tobio-chan!”

“I’m not that drunk,” Tobio protests, but the moment that they step outside, unburdened from the heavy weight of the bar, Tooru’s grip around his waist tightens even though there’s no need for it, and that makes the heady feeling in his chest rise even higher. He stops Tooru in the middle of the sidewalk and paws uselessly at his shirt, trying to climb up and grasp his shoulders so he can make an attempt at kissing him.

Tobio gets there, a surprised sound coming out of Tooru’s mouth when their lips meet, but he peels him away and holds him at length, eyes darkly glittering. “You’re drunk,” he says, a laugh passing his lips. Tobio wants to replace it, hold his space against his collarbone. “We’re not going to be doing anything tonight.”

“I know what I’m doing,” Tobio grumbles, and he knows he’s not mistaking the tension between them when Tooru strokes the mark he’d sucked into his neck almost thoughtfully, deliberately. “I just can’t control my feet as well.”

“Right, you idiot,” Tooru says with a smile at his expense, pushing Tobio lightly into the passenger seat where he lands with a thud. “It’s time to go home.”

But Tooru doesn’t drive the streets back to Tobio’s apartment—it’s only after the fifth unfamiliar turn that he realizes they must be drawing up to Tooru’s flat instead, Tobio peering up at the face of it through the car window in case he never gets this chance again.

“I told you that you’re my responsibility for the rest of the night,” Tooru says into the damp and early morning as he tugs Tobio up by the wrist and through the iron gate. “That’ll include the hangover.”

Tobio doesn’t want to miss this first look into Tooru’s space, trying to take in all of the frames he has put up in the hallway, his choice of furniture set up in the sitting room, what kind of magnets he has decorating the fridge in the kitchen that they briefly pass, but how his feet are too leaden and his head is spinning too much to memorize everything before Tooru deposits him ungracefully in what must be his bedroom.

Tooru brings him water in a mug that’s decorated with a landscape picture of San Juan and a little scrawled caption, but he’s too tired to make out the letters, downing the water and flopping back onto the bed.

“You look like an angel when you sleep, Tobio-chan,” he thinks he hears Tooru’s amused voice say somewhere above him, but that’s floating away on feathered wings, the incremental beginning of a headache edging around his mind and the creeping darkness of sleep taking over before he can think anything more of it.

Tobio wakes up not to the early afternoon light but because of the low sound of Tooru’s voice.

He cracks his eyes open and sees that Tooru has migrated to the end of the bed, hunched over the corner with his phone to his ear—they must have shared the bed, having woken up tangled in his sheets and surrounded by the scent of his shampoo, but he doesn’t quite remember how they got there. The light that’s slightly leaking through the curtains illuminates Tooru in a dewy glow, the white tank top he has thrown on sculpted around the sharp shape of his collarbones.

“Iwa-chan,” Tooru says, and then he cuts off with a quiet, frustrated groan. The name pins Tobio into place; it’s the nickname he’d mentioned before for Iwaizumi, so it makes sense that if he were calling anybody who wasn’t his family, it’d be his best friend.

Tobio should probably say something to let Tooru know that he’s awake. He doesn’t, though, for a reason he doesn’t quite understand. It’s the quietest Tobio’s ever seen him. His figure even looks gentle when he looks like this. He doesn’t want to disturb him, toss a stone into the middle of a placid lake while it’s still beautiful.

There’s the quiet buzz of indistinguishable words that tells Tobio that Iwaizumi is talking on the other end, so he takes the time to glance around Tooru’s room instead, his body firmly still to not alert the other of his awakening. On the wall, he has a collection of photographs pinned together of smiling faces, all of them unfamiliar, and closer to the end is a small collage of posters and prints artfully placed. On the windowsill, he can see the outlines of potted plants on the other side of the semi-sheer curtain that leads to the street. The whole room is painted blue, and with the slow light coming in, everything is flushed watercolor cobalt.

The nightstand is sparse, simple. A lamp, a propped picture frame of Tooru, another woman, and a small child, a pair of glasses that Tobio didn’t realize Tooru wore. A glass of water and a pill bottle, which reminds Tobio of the pounding headache knocking under his temples. The desk holds only a computer, a monitor, a cup of pens, and a miscellaneous spread of papers. A pale blue paper mache bird sits on the corner, waiting for flight.

“It just can’t be the same and you know it,” Tooru whispers suddenly, startling the silence out of existence. “No, I don’t wish that I was back in Japan so you could lecture me in person, thank you very much. Besides, shouldn’t you be going to sleep now, you old man? I know how much you treasure that beauty sleep of yours, Iwa-chan. Goodness knows you need it. Lots and lots of—”

He cuts off with a bright laugh that he stifles after it’s only rung out in the air once, no doubt thinking of Tobio, but it’s enough to put a small kernel of something in Tobio’s chest.

“Yes?” He can hear the smile in Tooru’s voice. He closes his eyes, the back of his eyelids coming back dark blue, and imagines what that would look like if it was presented before Tobio, for Tobio. “Okay, then, tell me about it. I wish I could’ve been there to see little Hana-chan put makeup on you and make you all prettified, Ha-ji-me o-ji-san.”

Tooru punctuates his words with a lilting tone that he’s never taken with Tobio, nor has he ever sounded so indulgent, and for the first time, Tobio wonders what he’d done that had made it so impossible for Tooru to treat him like he does everybody else. Why the other members of the team get head pats and back slaps and he gets cold silence until he decides it’s time to jet off on another adventure around town. Or swipe his tongue over his bottom lip until he cries. Why, as foolish as it is, people like Tobio don’t get phone calls.

Tobio rolls over, letting the sheets shifting make the announcement for him, and Tooru pauses, turning. He keeps his eyes shut.

“I have to go,” Tooru whispers. “Tobio-chan’s waking up, I think.”

There are a few more words exchanged before silence falls upon them again, but this time, he feels the bed heave as Tooru gets up and lightly pads around the bed to stand over him. “Tobio-chan.”

He stirs. The sight of Tooru awash in blue is enough to make the headache come back ever more fiercely than before, and he groans, barely willing to stretch enough to come back into waking. “Oikawa-san.”

Tooru silently hands him the water and a couple of pills when Tobio gingerly pulls himself up into sitting, draining the glass even though it makes him slightly nauseous. “What am I doing in your bedroom?”

“You got carried away with the drinks last night,” Tooru says, stepping back to walk away and put on a real shirt. Tobio watches him stalk around the room. “You should be more careful! You don’t know what kind of unsavory characters could take advantage of you when you have your guard down. You’re positively fortunate that I was there to keep an eye on you.”

“You mean that you got carried away with the drinks,” Tobio says pointedly. “If I recall correctly, it was you who kept pushing drinks into my hands.”

Tooru waves a flippant hand. “Well, you didn’t have to drink all of them, did you? Did you have a good time, at least?”

Tobio remembers Tooru standing before him, leaning too close, pressing into the hickey that’s preparing to fade back into his skin, and lets out a shaky breath. “I don’t know.”

“That usually means it was great,” Tooru says, and then he pauses to look up conspicuously at the clock perched on the dresser. “It’s getting late.”

Mentally preparing himself, Tobio swings his legs off the side of the bed. “I get the hint.”

“Actually…” Tooru’s hesitant voice stops him before he can get too far. “I know it might not be a cute cafe, but I can make something before you go. How do you like your eggs?”

Tobio’s not going to look a gift horse in the mouth. “Sunny side up, please.”

“The toilet’s on the left of the hallway,” Tooru calls as he bustles away to the kitchen that Tobio only has a faint recollection of passing by in the early hours of the morning. “If you’re going to throw up, make sure to aim in the bowl!”

Tobio doesn’t vomit, and he doesn’t snoop around the bathroom even if part of him wants to. It’s neat and clean as expected of him—Tooru seems like the type of person whose high expectations apply not just to other people, and when he leaves, the narrow hallway takes his attention instead.

Hung on the walls are even more photographs, this time of Tooru with various teams, most of them the CA San Juan jerseys, but a few interspersed Olympic shots. In more than one, he looks to be crying, the most prominent picture depicting him clutching a gold medal to his chest. 2021, he remembers with a wry twist in his mouth. In the blurred background, he can make out the red uniform of the Japanese National Team crumbled in defeat. The forefront is all Tooru.

The other side of the hallway is lined with a long wooden shelf that holds various glass cases, all of them holding several awards. It looks to be going chronologically, the far end holding an award from best setter from middle school and then running from league volleyball to two Olympic recognitions—the first place having the biggest case—and then building up all the way to 2024 before it just stops.

There’s a gap of empty space at the end as if Tooru had overestimated the intervals for the other awards and forgot that he left it uneven. He couldn’t have been expecting more. He’s already thirty-five, the tail end of a volleyball player’s last legs. A couple of years more may have been harmful or even unfeasible. But still—Tobio’s hand hovers over the dust left behind, waiting to be lovingly taken away and replaced with a much heavier weight.

“Eggs are ready!” Tooru shouts from the end of the flat, and Tobio startles, leaving behind the memories and the medals and the promise of how great a man can be before he is felled by time.

Nobody ever talks about how odd it feels to search for somebody’s name once you know them personally. Doing so causes a strange shiver to run up Tobio’s back, almost paranoid that somebody will know even though he’s on his personal computer back in his apartment, but it doesn’t stop him from entering oikawa tooru volleyball into his search engine. The search bar helpfully auto-fills the rest for him.

The first page is all information he already knows, small anecdotes about his various victories and a million news articles about his role in Argentina’s Olympic win in 2021. The videos, too, are only of his time in San Juan. Tobio goes back to the search bar and adds miyagi to the end of his inquiry.

Fewer results come up, though there are still enough to populate a few pages. Tobio hovers over a few videos with blurred thumbnails of what must have been his high school team—even further back are a few shots of him during middle school. All of the titles run in kanji instead of Spanish.

There’s an article at the very bottom of the second page. It reads, Shiratorizawa Academy Moves Onto Nationals, Clearing The Net For Another Generation of Volleyball Dominance.

Shiratorizawa has boasted the honor of representing Miyagi in the high school-level volleyball national tournament for many generations. Having been ranked in the top eight boy’s volleyball teams in the nation for the past several years and led by one of Japan’s top talents, Ushijima Wakatoshi, they once again sweep Aoba Johsai High under the table and clinch the victory. 

Third-year Oikawa Tooru, acknowledged as Miyagi’s best setter, expressed hope at being able to take his team to Nationals and break the precedent set by Shiratorizawa. While remaining respectful at the match’s end and seen shaking hands with Ushijima, this past Interhigh was Oikawa’s last chance at making it to nationals, making him one of the few up-and-coming athletes to never have the opportunity to play on the big stage.

Ushijima is sure to garner attention for his captaincy and striking power, which has been heralded as being the distinguishing factor for Shiratorizawa’s continued legacy of excellence…

Tobio knows what happens next. Karasuno had been the school to break Shiratorizawa’s streak, and he’d played in Nationals in his very first year. The Aoba Johsai name is familiar, even though it has been a little over ten years since they would have gone up against each other—they were skilled, a team put together by overwhelming game sense and intrinsic knowledge of how to work the court, but they hadn’t had that key piece, the star player that seemed to bring everybody together—Tooru.

And yet he had never even gone to Nationals. He knows that Tooru went to Argentina straight after graduating, which means that the first time all of Japan heard his name was at the 2021 Olympics when he beat his home country on their own soil. He knows that CA San Juan started dominating in the second year after Tooru began playing for their team. He knows that Tooru’s Argentine naturalization means he gave up citizenship to Japan, which doesn’t allow dual residency.

He knows that Tooru would have played volleyball until he physically couldn’t anymore, and he knows that Tooru carved his entire life out in Argentina for the upcoming future, having seen the mortgage bills on his desk while in his bedroom, and he knows that he will never quite understand what it means to be Oikawa Tooru.

Homesickness hits Tobio suddenly, unexpectedly. For his time so far in San Juan, he’d been too caught up in adjusting to the team and dealing with the glaring issue that is Oikawa Tooru, but it catches up with him the Tuesday after the bar, blinking into consciousness in his bed-that-isn’t-his and a bone-deep yearning for something that feels real.

The season has been a blur even though it hasn’t technically started yet—their first matches begin within the month—and there's a kicking part of Tobio that feels as if he’s stuck in a dream. For all that Tooru put in the effort to cart him around and show off Argentina’s novelties, it hadn’t really hit him until Hitoka sent a message to the Karasuno first-years group chat asking when Tobio and Shouyou would be back in Japan for a reunion.

And now the feeling pins him to his bed even though these sheets aren’t the same as the ones back in his residence in Tokyo, sliding over his bones even though he has to pick himself up for practice. The sludge follows him all the way to the gym and through conditioning—Hitoka’s text is still on his lock screen, unanswered and a drilling reminder of what he left behind, even if he knows he’ll return. It only seems that that day stretches farther into the horizon than he can fathom or reach.

“If you want to talk to anybody, I’m all ears,” Tómas quietly tells him while they’re in the locker room, the sincere message somewhat undercut by the fact that he has his shirt off.

Tobio just nods and tries to rid himself of the wrinkle between his forehead that Shouyou informs him appears when he’s stressed, biting his tongue at the idea that anybody could tell that he felt off. He has limited time here; he’s not supposed to have off days, and what’s more, if one person’s attitude is off, it’ll spread throughout the team. What he needs is to curl up back in his apartment—call Shouyou, maybe, to keep the loneliness at bay.

He shouldn’t be lonely, not when the team is as welcoming as they are and he’s accepted five separate invitations to go over to somebody’s house and have a homecooked meal, which is more than he can ask for with his still somewhat halting Spanish. Tobio has gotten to know Mateo’s girlfriend so well that she ruffles his hair like he’s a kid whenever he sees her, but still—Tooru had been right when he’d talked to him in the beginning. It’s not the same. Flying out of Japan to a country where he walks down the street and can’t spot anybody who looks like him has hollowed him out a little.

Tooru reaches out and grabs him by the arm when Tobio walks by the entrance, gripping him close and peering intensely at his face, which forces a flush out of his cheeks that he wishes he could hide from the other’s debilitating gaze. “What’s wrong?”

“What?” Tobio’s heart makes a whistling noise when it nosedives out of his chest. “Was my playing lackluster today?”

Tooru shakes his head impatiently, what could be a flash of irritation appearing and disappearing as fast as it had struck his face. “No. You’re just—” He lets go of him and leans back, arms crossed and eyes a little haughty, and Tobio feels the imprint of his hand even once they’ve separated a few paces. That’s how it always is with Tooru—lingering, insistent. He’s choosing his words carefully. “You’re not—sad, are you?”

Tobio is horrified. He doesn’t know what either of them would do in that situation and he doesn’t want to find out. “I’m not,” he says, his fingernails digging little half-moons into his palms. “I’m just homesick, I guess.”

At that, Tooru visibly deflates. “That’s all?” He takes Tobio by the arm again, this time taking advantage of his stilted surprise to drag him out of the gym and toward his car, which has become a familiar sight burned into his eyes over the past months.

Pushing Tobio into the car before he can protest, Tooru leans over him with one hand on the door and the other in his pocket as he squints down at him. “What do you need? What do you miss? There’s a semi-decent Japanese place twenty minutes or so out if that’s what you want. And if you’re lucky, then the Asian grocery store has the right kind of rice stocked right now, though it’s not always there when I check. Annoying, but nothing else that I’ve found has the right chew—”

“I miss watching the new One Piece episodes with Shouyou and drinking actually good milk,” Tobio blurts out, which horrifies him because he’d always made fun of Shouyou for it (what kind of storyline needs to be spaced out over that many episodes?) until the other forced him to sit down and watch with him, where they’d started from the top on Shouyou’s ratty little couch or screen sharing over video call until he’d caught up. It’s Shouyou’s fault, basically. But he’d always used Shouyou’s Crunchyroll subscription and he has no idea how to access anime while in Argentina, so he hasn’t touched it since he flew over.

“Really? That’s all?” Tooru throws his head back and laughs, which should annoy Tobio more than it does because he’s thought it before but this only confirms that Tooru is a creature made for the sun. Nobody else would brighten like that under the light. Nobody else looks as though their very being is stitched together with the fine threads of dayspring. “I can’t do anything about the milk, but I can get the latest episodes of One Piece.”

And that’s how Tobio finds himself in Tooru’s flat for the second time, even more confused than the first. It looks the same, still tidy and neat, but this time around he’s there as a guest instead of an unfortunate leftover from the bar.

The hallway out in the back looms with the long shelf of awards, threatening and so achingly present that Tobio can’t quite scrape it out of the corners of his mind.

Tooru puts on One Piece and then settles beside Tobio on the couch after asking if he’d like water, a painful few centimeters away from him. If it were possible, he would be able to feel Tooru’s presence as a physical manifestation, a thick bubble emanating around him and poking Tobio with sharp nails so that he never forgets the soreness of his proximity.

“Do you watch?” Tobio asks, his gaze settled squarely on the television so that he doesn’t turn to Tooru every five seconds. He never thought that they would get to a point where they could calmly watch a show beside each other, especially with how the tumultuous beginning played out, but here they are. All it took was for Tobio to have a little bit of a crisis to break down the crumbling remains of the wall between them. All that’s left is that serve and a conversation that actually has to do with volleyball while they’re not at practice.

“Not really,” Tooru confesses. He looks confused by what’s playing out on the screen, but he seems to be earnestly attempting to follow along. “I don’t have time to watch television. And when I first came here, I watched everything in Spanish so I would get used to the language.”

“Oh.” Tobio feels stupid. “Do you think I’m not making enough of an attempt to assimilate here?”

“What?” Tooru says and turns to Tobio with an incredulous look on his face, the kind he can’t ignore. “Why do you think that? Have you been erasing your memory every time I take the time out of my day to cart you around or what? You live every day here surrounded by the culture, Tobio-chan. There’s no escaping it once you move here. It’s not so much of an attempt to acclimate than you being forced into the role.”

There’s a strange squirming in Tobio’s gut that he hates. He still doesn’t look at Tooru because sometimes it’s easier to not look. “I don’t know. I feel like I’m still so caught up on Japan.”

“It’s only natural to,” Tooru says slowly. “You’ve gone abroad to play volleyball in a country you likely never thought you would step foot in. You lived all twenty-eight years of your life on that island. I’d be more concerned if you could just get over it that easily. I moved everything I had over here, but you’re not like me, and nobody is expecting you to be.”

But they are. Half the time, Tobio thinks that Tooru himself expects him to be the carbon copy of the role he left behind, even though he seems to resent him for it. It’s impossible to fill the expectation and intolerable to fall short.

“You’re allowed to miss the things you voluntarily chose to leave behind,” Tooru says. An odd hitch in his voice distorts part of the words, causing Tobio to quickly glance over at him. His eyes are clouded with memory. “It doesn’t mean that you made the wrong decision. It doesn’t mean that—”

Tooru cuts himself off and reaches forward, the movement so unexpected that Tobio has to actively stop himself from flinching back. His fingers deftly dip below the dimple in his collarbone to pick up the chain lying around his neck, warm fingers drifting against the tender skin. The charm on his necklace is the kanji for home, a gift Miwa had pressed into his pressed hands the day before he flew out.

“I think it’s admirable, Tobio-chan.”

The words hang, strung out between them on another invisible silver chain. Delicate and so incredibly frail. Tobio can’t breathe or else he’ll disturb its simplicity; can’t blink or he’ll fan away the sincerity Tooru so rarely distributes to people like him. An emotion in the hollow shape of want swirls up inside of him, irrepressible and unbearable and blue, and it quivers at the peak of his throat, longing to be said.

“If only it weren’t you.”

Tooru lurches backward abruptly, breaking the beautiful silence he’d built between them as he always does, predictable in all of the worst ways, and the necklace hits Tobio again like a stone. His expression is unreadable now and the space between them lies aching. Back on the television sounds the language he thinks in even when he hears it less than he does Spanish.

“Oikawa-san,” Tobio says, and he wishes that in and of itself didn’t sound a little bit like a plea.

“You should focus on your anime,” Tooru says, and this time he’s the one who won’t look in his direction. “That’s what you wanted in the first place.”

Tobio is so fucking tired of this. It’s as if Tooru doesn’t remember what kindness is supposed to be like when they’re around each other. He scrambles up so he’s no longer slouching against the couch, his back straight as if that’ll afford him more courage. “I would think that you’ve managed to develop enough maturity to compliment me without taking it back, but I would be mistaken.”

Tooru is silent, the hard ridge of his jaw an impossible mountain to climb.

Tobio scoffs. “I don’t know why I expected more out of you,” he says.

“I don’t know why you had expectations for me in the first place,” Tooru bites out harshly, and then he turns to him with a dark glare, his shadow looming over him. “Don’t be unfair, Tobio-chan.”

It’s far from the first time he’s called him that, but it feels more mocking this way, somehow. “Unfair?” he splutters. “You—”

Tooru hisses through his teeth, a quiet noise. He’s visibly holding himself back from saying something else, a tick on the left side of his jaw jumping. “It’s not important.” He falls back heavily onto the sofa. “Let’s keep watching.”

It’s hardly the conclusion that Tobio wants to get to, but Tooru’s stubbornness has gotten in the way of every civil conversation they’ve tried to hold. To a certain point, he’s not sure when it’s worth his energy to keep fighting.

So he lets the thread die, falling down limply between them to play house with the stilted silence that lurks beneath their feet, uneasy, strained, graceless.

A car horn that Friday afternoon has Tobio standing from his creaking office chair to peek through the sun-stained curtains at his window. come down, tobio-chan, reads the text on his phone. He lets the curtains fall back into place. i can see you at your window.

Well, damn.

Tobio considers leaving his message on delivered and pretending that it wasn’t him at the window, but he takes the winding stairs down his apartment complex and emerges in the cold, whipping wind of the dreary afternoon anyway. Because he’s infinitely curious as to what Tooru deems important. Because it is Tooru who is asking. Because he is Tobio, who has accepted.

The clouds froth up in the empty space above them, windy and gray. They look as though they’ve borrowed their color from smoke, clearing the sky so that even the sun that pushes through the cover lands beaten and dead. There is no music in the car this time, only a permeating silence that skips a few beats of his heart.

“Where are we going?” Tobio asks a few minutes in, not recognizing any of the lurching turns Tooru takes through the streets, the buildings bleeding from familiar to unknown. It’s not saying much; Tobio hasn’t done any exploring on his own, but they’re driving out to a different end of the city than they normally take, to the west, where they’ve only headed to go hiking in the past.

“Dique de Ullum,” Tooru says shortly.

The residential roads slowly begin to drift into a swelling highway; up ahead, he can see it curve where it begins to turn into mountainous rock. He doesn’t know why they’re headed to the lake on a day as cloudy as this. They won’t be able to see anything but gray fog. But he doesn’t say anything. The unsettling silence in the car is already enough as it is.

Suddenly, Tobio reaches out and flicks on the dial to the radio, the static filtering through first before the music comes to life—jazz of some kind, a screaming trumpet wailing over the speaker and inserting itself in the backseat. He winces, just slightly, but it’s better than the quiet. Tooru isn’t usually this quiet.

They pull into the parking lot, gravel crunching underneath the tires as Tooru maneuvers the small clearing. There are only a couple of other cars parked as to be expected on a day such as this. The weather isn’t any clearer this far from the city. If anything, it’s a little worse, the clouds reaching down from the sky closer to the car with thick and smokey fingers.

The radio squeals into silence when Tooru abruptly turns off the engine, the idling roar slowing as well until it’s just them and the hush and the water reaching out endlessly before them. It’s colder, too, when they’re closer to the mountains and the water, which seems to catch the chill like water between cupped hands.

Tooru stares straight ahead. A tremble comes to life in his hands, and he kills it by tightening his hands on the steering wheel. The blood flees from under his skin, going bone white and rigid.

“Tobio,” Tooru says clearly, the name shearing the air in front of his mouth to glass shards. It’s the first time he’s called him that without the condescending honorific. “I can’t do this anymore.”

Tobio looks into the lake as well because he doesn’t know where else he’s allowed to face. He doesn’t want to turn to Tooru, the first that he’s never had the inclination, so he settles for the blank, ashen water gently rippling against the rocky soil.

It sounds like Tooru is breaking up with him, which is funny because there was nothing to break in the first place. No bones, no resolve, just the gentle hope he stored behind his teeth because there was nowhere else for it to go. He could not have offered that to the sky. A wingless bird will never taste flight, nor should it yearn for it.

But a human is not a bird, and even he crosses his fingers for love. An earthbound prayer has no right to search for home in the broad expanse of another, but still, it forges on because it was not given the gift of flight, and somewhere, somehow, there must be an answer. Tobio was just mistaken to look for it in Tooru.

He breathes slowly out of his nose to prevent it from shaking. He doesn’t know why Tooru had to drive out so far just to tell him this.

“I never expected you to carry on for this long,” Tobio says because he is an honest man and he does not lie when he only has energy for the black truth. “I never asked for this.”

“I don’t know what I was doing, either,” Tooru says woodenly. He’s still staring straight ahead—if his head were to turn anywhere else, Tobio would feel it. “Offering you my assistance, helping you with the customs, giving up my weekends for this.”

“I didn’t ask you for any of this,” Tobio says again sharply.

“I know.” Out ahead, a bird dives into the water, skimming the surface. “You know that makes it worse, right? I think that when you came, I remembered what it was like when I first moved. And it gave me closure to help you through that instead. I couldn’t stand watching you play volleyball in my spot, though. Can’t. I can’t stand it, god, Tobio, I don’t know if I can stand you.”

I didn’t ask you to, Tobio wants to say again, but that would be a lie. He wanted Tooru to like him, fervently, desperately. Because he was older and handsome and could command the court like no other.

“Glad to know that it was never about me and all about you,” Tobio says, the words tasting of salt.

Tooru barks out a sharp, bitter laugh. The echo of it is poisonous, luring the dark clouds closer. “I’m just a selfish asshole who wants more things than he can qualify for, aren’t I? You don’t get it, and I think you never will. You know what you did get, though? Everything. Japan and Argentina and the Olympics all in one fell swoop, a success story with a neat bow.

“I hate how pretty you are, Tobio,” says Tooru. “Maybe if you were uglier and worse at volleyball than me, I could hate you less.”

Even if Tobio were able to pry his jaw open, he wouldn’t have any of the words to respond, everything gone and dried before he could assemble it into sentences.

“But I can’t,” Tooru continues almost wistfully as if he’s imagining another reality in which Tobio is inferior to serve his dreams rooted in resentment. Is it possible that he would only have wanted Tobio if he were lesser?

What an ugly thought.

“You’re so perfect,” Tooru says, and this time something else leaks into his voice alongside the desperation. “I can’t even—I can’t even... You sicken me, Tobio. I was hoping you wouldn’t be so—so damn beautiful. Or maybe that you’ve already hit your prime. But it was never going to be true, was it? You’re a three-time Olympian who got to keep Japan, and you still chose Argentina in the end. You were always going to be better.”

Tobio’s throat is thick with something he cannot name. “You didn’t even know me before I arrived,” he says. “I’m not the one who’s responsible for your misplaced spite, Tooru. ” He sees the other recoil out of the peripherals of his vision. “The team’s new setter could have been anyone—from Italy or America or straight out of high school, and you still would have hated them all the same.”

He turns to Tooru, his eyes blazing. He grips the leather interior of the seat below him, the stitches etching into his skin. Before them, the lake watches on, solemn. “It’s not me that you hate,” he says, the words striking clean like little bullets razing through the thin curtain of Tooru’s resolve. “I don’t think you ever did.”

Tooru stares at him, face white like all of the stars have left his bloodstream. Tobio pincered them out of the sky with the same brutal accuracy that embodied his limbs on the court, and now all that is left is a bloodless stain of navy blue. “You don’t know anything about me,” Tooru whispers.

And the lie of that all—Tobio would rather choke on the cherry pit of misunderstanding than have it shown before Tooru’s discerning eye. But it makes its way back up without his permission, clearing the way for oxygen and his next trembling breath.

“I do know you,” says Tobio. “I’ve been watching your matches since I was in middle school.”

“I didn’t think that Japan could have borne a setter as genius as you for several generations more,” says Tobio.

“I looked up to you like I idolized nobody else,” says Tobio, his chin held high because if he lets it drop at all he’ll sink into himself, a concavity he could never hammer the dents out of.

“I thought I knew you,” says Tobio, “but then I came here, and you spent all of your time during practice not looking at me once, and you touched me as if you were trying to shape a man out of obsidian, and I realized that I never knew you in the first place because you didn’t care about the one thing that matters.”

“You’ve got a lot of things wrong,” Tooru says brokenly. “I’m not a genius, and I don’t deserve your idolization. Don’t you get it, Tobio? I couldn’t have done anything for you because you were already impossibly whole without my touch. You never needed me. I couldn’t do anything but watch it happen. You are already so much more than Oikawa Tooru could have ever become. I know you, too. I lied when I said I don’t remember playing against you in the Olympics.”

One thing about people: you will never understand something as deeply as what you fear the most.

“So what then?” Tobio says. The wind whistles forlornly through the trees. “You don’t hate me, but you’ll never like me. You could kiss me and tuck me into your bed, but you can’t promise me anything more than that. Did you drive all the way here just to tell me that you’ve ruined me? I’m sorry that you’re jealous I am the player you couldn’t be.”

Tooru is a hunched, crooked shape of a man, the curve of his back broken instead of elegant, but that makes him sit up straight once more, whip-smart. “I told you not to expect anything from me, Tobio. And I would never want to be somebody like you. I swear to you, Tobio, you can count that as law.”

So this is the last scrap of pride that Tooru will cling onto.

“I know,” Tobio says, scrubbing a rough hand over his face that he keeps clasped over his eyes and the top of his mouth to keep him inside of himself. “That’s another thing that I got wrong. I fell in love with the wrong image of the wrong man.”

Tooru is silent, conclusively so. There is nothing more to be said between them.

“I’m calling a taxi,” Tobio says abruptly, fishing wildly for his phone. “You can leave. Since I apparently take up so much of your time.”

“I’m not going to do that,” Tooru says softly. A gentleman only when he wants to be.

“Fine, then,” Tobio says, scrambling out of the car and slamming the door behind him with all the viciousness he’ll allow himself to dispense. The car will come in fifteen long minutes. The water is still so commiseratingly despondent. And above them, the clouds swirl together in reflection of their fight.

Quietly, it begins to rain.

The car door opens again. “Tobio, come into the car,” Tooru says tiredly. He makes a beautiful figure standing out in the downpour. Tobio feels the shower soak into his hair, flattening it even more.

There’s a long moment where Tobio considers saying no before he decides that he’s done inconveniencing himself for Tooru’s sake after all that’s fallen between them, and so he stalks back across the parking lot and throws himself back into shelter. The heat is turned on, coming at him in waves. Tooru peeks at him from the side, softened by the rain.

Tobio checks his phone. “Ten minutes.”

Tooru settles back into his seat. “I don’t think I can possibly make this worse, so I’m going to say one more thing,” Tooru offers. “I’ve always wanted to kiss you in the rain. I think I—I always want to kiss you. I’m sorry for making you cry.”

“Of all the things to apologize for,” Tobio says, wiping the water from his cheeks, “it’s the one thing that’s not true. It’s rain.” He flicks it onto Tooru for good measure.

“Well.” Tooru laughs softly, the first gentle exchange between them this day. “That makes one of us.”

And Tobio can’t bear to see if that’s true—if the water dotting Tooru’s face is rain or tears, but he figures that with the heat blazing the way it is, it won’t last long either way.

Tooru doesn’t come to practice for the next half week even though Tobio almost expects him to the way he always does: uncaring, nonchalant, gaze breezing over Tobio as if he doesn’t even exist in his world. But he’s absent instead. Bruno tells the team that he caught a bug over the weekend and they should expect him once he’s feeling better, and if anybody catches on that it’s a lie—people like them are the last to voluntarily sit out due to illness of all things—they don’t say anything at all.

Tobio continues on like he always does. He can’t miss the presence of somebody who never acknowledged him in the first place.

He almost doesn’t want to tell anybody about what’s happened, but the next time he has a scheduled video call with his friends, it winds up coming out anyway, if only because Shouyou can be really good at needling somebody when he wants to be.

“Come on, Kageyama-kun, you’ve been more silent than usual!” Shouyou cries over the glitchy cell service, the bottom half of his face morphed as it freezes into a neon spectacle. He’s on some beach in the middle of nowhere because he’s Shouyou. “And that’s saying something. Sometimes talking to you is like having a conversation with a brick wall.”

“Same amount of brain cells as one, too,” Tsukishima mutters, which has Tobio bristling and is probably the very thing to provoke him out of his silence in the first place.

So he ends up telling them, the words splashed out on the floorboards of his little apartment, and they stay there, ugly and miserable and messy while he waits for one of them to get their thoughts together and respond.

“So you’re in love with somebody who hates you,” drawls Tsukishima, somehow emanating condescension even over video call. “Got it.”

Tobio scowls. He hadn’t even mentioned love.

“You got it all wrong!” Shouyou shouts. He’s placed the phone down on the sand and is running around for some reason. “Oikawa-san doesn’t hate Tobio. That was the whole point of their entire argument!”

“This Oikawa-san sounds like a very… complex person,” Hitoka tries, grimacing.

Tadashi gives a soft gasp and then immediately covers his mouth, looking embarrassed. “Sorry! I just looked him up to see what he looks like, and jeez, Tobio, I get it.”

“What does that even mean?” Tobio says irately, but all four of his friends (a questionable definition) go silent as they presumably search his name too.

“Oh, wow.” (Hitoka.)

“Of course one bumbling volleyball idiot would fall for another idiot.” (Tsukishima.)

“Oh, I remember going against him in Tokyo! He looks so much more tanned here than he did in 2021!” (Shouyou.)

“None of you are helpful, this is why I didn’t want to tell you guys anything, and I think you should all die,” Tobio grinds out. He can figure this out on his own. Even if going at it alone is how the situation ended up so broken and mangled between them—surely he’s learned. He’s considering dropping out of the team prematurely and flying back to Japan.

“I’m sure whatever we say is better than anything you can come up with,” Shouyou fires back. “You have stupid ideas. You’re probably thinking that you should just come back to Japan!”

There’s a noticeable silence.

Hitoka gasps. “Tobio, no.”

“It’s not the worst idea—” Tobio starts.

“But it’s not the best,” Tadashi interjects, fixing him with the stern look he learned from being captain their third year that somehow translates exactly as it would in real life as it does over the pixelated screen. All sixteen blocks of his face look at him as if he’s disappointed. “Running won’t solve anything.”

“Yeah!” Shouyou pipes in. “I know it’s Oikawa-san and you’ve been in love with him for half your life, but maybe you should go and yell at him and stuff and then you’ll feel better! And maybe apologize a little. You said something really mean.”

“Kageyama.” Tsukishima’s voice comes through, direct and grounding. Somehow, it had always been him that was able to get through to Tobio despite their differences. “Neither of you is in a position to leave, and he can’t avoid you forever. There is no other option, as much as your half-witted brain doesn’t want to accept it. So what are you going to say when you see him again?”

Tooru shows up at his door at ten in the night, the smell of alcohol so strong it wafts over the doorway even with the insurmountable distance between them.

“Are you drunk?” is the first thing Tobio asks, and then figures that’s too obvious of a question, so he refigures it. “How did you find out which apartment I live in?”

“It’s the third floor up and above the really thin tree on the sidewalk,” Tooru slurs. His eyes aren’t even open, long eyelashes framing the crescents that make up his gaze. Hunched over, he edges slightly past the door so that Tobio can’t close it on him. He’s always had such long limbs even if Tobio is slightly taller between the two of them, and they’re draping everywhere, his arm propped against the wall so that he doesn’t fall over. “Can I come in?”

“I don’t see any other choice,” Tobio mutters, so he opens the door wider as Tooru takes a half-steady step forward, his eyes finally opening. They’re glazed over and bloodshot, and they widen slightly when he sees him.

“Tobio-chan,” he whispers quietly. The name stretches out and brushes Tobio lightly against his beating heart.

Tobio sighs. “I thought you left the nickname behind by the lake,” he says, but he redirects Tooru to the couch where he collapses inelegantly into the cushion, almost swallowed by the fabric as he pushes his face into the back.

“Fine, Tobio,” comes Tooru’s muffled voice. He is very still. Tobio watches him, unsure if it would be cruel to kick him out in this state but not feeling very generous in the wake of their argument. “I left a lot of things behind by the lake.”

The uncertainty wants to swallow Tobio whole, so he pivots suddenly and mechanically fills a glass with water in the kitchen. It sloshes over the rim, cold trickling down between his fingers.

“I’m an idiot,” Tooru says softly when Tobio leaves the kitchen, his feet slowing to a stop. All the words left unsaid between them are magpies, flapping around his living room. They’re bumping into his furniture. Running into his legs. Staining the walls. “But you already know that, don’t you?”

Everything he says blinks a bird out of existence so that they do not risk redundancy with their words. Not again.

“I do,” Tobio says. Flap, flap. “Where did you leave your car?”

“I took the bus to the bar and then walked here. It’s too far to walk home and the buses have stopped running.”

“That’s—”

“Not your problem, I know. But I’m making it your problem.”

“Why are you here, Tooru?” Tobio whispers, the birds cleared enough so that he has room to fall to his knees into the soft plush of the carpet and the ground reaching up for him.

The only answer that greets him is silence. Tobio gets back onto his feet and wades through the room to peer over Tooru’s silent figure—only to see that his eyes are closed and his breathing is quiet, steady.

Tobio sighs and retreats to his bedroom, but not before leaving a bottle of pills beside the water on the coffee table, the exact same care that Tooru had left for him when they’d swapped places before.

The sound of magpies keeps him awake all night.

Early into the morning, Tobio traipses into the kitchen with eyebags heavier than the long-limbed weights of regret to make tea because if he can’t sleep, he may as well indulge in a soother. It’s also partially to keep an eye on Tooru, who is as still as an undisturbed lakebed with all of its stones hidden under the surface. Sleeping birds lay around their feet.

The kettle is bubbling softly on the stove, quiet columns of steam wisping out of the spout. The flame flickers into blue at the bottom before he clicks it off. And then, the rustle of fabric.

Tobio looks out over the bar to see Tooru slowly rise, his hair mussed strangely in the shape of Tobio’s couch. His eyes dart around for a few seconds, visibly trying to place where he is before his eyes lock onto Tobio’s stare and his face clears with understanding. He doesn’t look as distraught as he would have presumed him to be upon waking up in Tobio’s apartment of all places.

“Tobio,” Tooru says, and the entire room rustles to life. So does the kindling inside of Tobio that responds to the other’s voice and that name. It’s as if he’s predestined for failure.

“Tooru-san,” Tobio says, a hitch in his throat, a clog that says that he’ll never be able to shake the child in him that can do nothing but look up and up and up to Tooru, even when he’s surpassed him in height. And then he waits for him to start.

Tooru rises and slowly makes his way through the room to stand across from him at the bar, ignoring the glass of water. It only makes Tobio angrier. Tooru is here, taking up space and mental space and sucking his morning up through a straw, but all of his fury vanishes, suddenly, stomped out by a wet finger when he sees the unbearably honest look on his face.

“You were right,” Tooru says amidst a flurry of feathers. He is so blue in the morning light. It hurts, a secret bruise that Tobio harbors like a promise. “Do you know how difficult it is for me to say that? You were right, Tobio. About most of it, actually. That—” His eyes drift closed. “—That I don’t hate you, and I was jealous. I’m sorry.”

“I’m sorry too,” Tobio says quickly. Tooru’s eyes fly open in surprise, and the fists resting on the counter unclench. Something inside of Tobio twists open, unfolds. “I shouldn’t have said the—the thing about—you know what I said.”

“No,” Tooru says with a sad smile on his face. “I’m nowhere near the man you are. You would never have done this to us. And maybe you got Japan, but that isn’t your fault.” The soft exhale he lets out sounds as if he’d been socked in the stomach and he’s trying to hide it.

He turns to the side, studying the picture frame of Tobio and JNT he has propped on the side. Half of them are smiling, the other half crying, but all of them have their mouths shaped around joy. “I should tell you more about myself.

“I already told you that I grew up in Miyagi. I was captain of my team at Aoba Johsai, and we were good but never good enough to beat Shiratorizawa Academy. You know the names, right?”

Tobio nods, and another smile graces Tooru’s lips. “I looked you up, too. Karasuno, right? So you were the ones to shove it in Shiratorizawa’s face. Anyway, it was—it was hard, you know? To give something your entire heart, sacrifice the rest of your life to this one sport, and you never end up making it to nationals. When everyone tells you that you have this big future ahead of you, what they’re actually saying is that they have expectations for you that you could never dream of.

“But those expectations are never as great as the ones you set for yourself. I was the best setter in the prefecture and I couldn’t even make a name for myself outside of Miyagi. I didn’t think that I had any hope of breaking into the Japanese league, either through scouts or playing in college. So I left.”

He shrugs, but even Tobio knows that this knowledge is a heavier burden than he makes it out to be.

“I don’t know what would have happened if I stayed. But I did pretty okay out here, didn’t I? And I’m happy. I went to the Olympics and I won in the very country that I felt never had any faith in me. I played my heart out, and then: a knee injury. I got too old.”

The very concept of that seems incomprehensible to Tobio. Tooru has always seemed like the type of person who could stand on his own. Crippled by something as simple as a knee injury—it doesn’t match up.

“So I am jealous,” Tooru says simply. “I am. You had the successful career as a setter in Japan that I always wanted, and you had the luxury of coming to Argentina because you wanted to. And all I can do at this point is stand on the sidelines and watch. I never even had the chance to fight for my spot because my body made the decision for me.”

“But we did,” Tobio says, his head tilting to the side. “The 2021 Olympics. You beat me, setter to setter. The war that you think you’re losing; it doesn’t exist, Tooru-san.”

Tooru lets out an unbelieving laugh, and then he squeezes his eyes shut again as if it’s too painful to keep them open. To see, in all of the unbearable light, Tobio at his most honest self. It hurts for Tobio too. Mirrored bruised ribs.

“That almost makes it worse,” he murmurs. “That I’ve treated you this way over nothing in the first place. I’m sorry. Again. I will always be sorry. You don’t have to forgive me, I just want to—”

“It’s not your fault that I’m in love with you, either,” Tobio says plainly, and he watches the impact of that ripple across Tooru’s face. There are hardly any magpies left milling around on the ground. “All of these expectations are mine to bear.”

“You can’t mean that,” Tooru whispers.

“I do,” Tobio says, more sure of it than he is anything else. He’d spent his life watching this man across the screen. It would never have been any less to meet him face to face. And to have known the taste of his mouth—Tobio can never forget that for the rest of his life.

“Then it’s my fault that I always want to kiss you, too,” Tooru says with a wry twist to his mouth. The air rustles around them, endless. “And those expectations? I want them as well. I was just scared of what that meant.”

He blinks, something like embarrassment ruddying his face, and he looks away. “You don’t have to forgive me, though. I still mean that. We’ve said a lot between the two of us. I just wanted you to know that I meant it every time I touched you.”

“Tooru-san,” Tobio says exasperatedly, and when that still doesn’t make Tooru face him, he sighs and reaches directly over the bar to pull Tooru’s face to his, meeting him in a kiss much sweeter than any of the previous ones they’ve shared. He tastes like possibility. He feels like the shape of a future that has more want for mercy than cruelty.

They part. Tooru looks stunned. “We can work on forgiveness,” Tobio says firmly. “But I don’t think I want fear to get in the way anymore. Do you?”

Around them, all of the magpies quietly disappear so that the only things left are Tobio, Tooru, and love tinged a certain shade of blue.

Underneath his hands, Tooru’s face slowly splits into a smile, fragrant joy blossoming, such impossible, impossible sweetness. “No,” he says, the words curved around his quiet happiness. “I don’t think I do.”