LUCY @rineros - Tumblr Blog

Jan 10

ROT - IWAIZUMI HAJIME

her neighbor knocks on her door, and asks for a favor

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WARNINGS: language, angst, alcohol use, violence/blood, adult themes, angst, crimes, poverty, smoking, flawed characters, anger issues, mental health issues, bad fathers, mention of family member death/mention of overdose, probably bad, general ooc-ness, overused tropes that i will be beating to death, set in 2006 for no good reason other than i felt like it; happy ending but will probably be upsetting

A/N: okay so i didn't like that rot was linked on my masterlist but it linked to my old blog so i'm reposting it in its entirety here so i can update my masterlist thank uuu

WORD COUNT: 26.2k

Her apartment is a piece of shit.

Rot has set in its bones, a permanent stench of musk and mold seeped into its walls. The bathroom is perpetually wet, and pieces of the ceiling frequently chip off and fall into her coffee. And it doesn’t help that there’s half smoked cigarette buds littered everywhere or greased soaked take out containers spilling out of the trash she’s too lazy to take out. But she doesn’t have it in her to blame herself. It was shit when she got here-there was hardly any motivation for her to take care of it.

Paint chips from the window as she struggles to jerk it open, muttering curses with a lit cigarette between her lips. The landlady has given her shit before about the smell of smoke that drifts out into the halls, and now she has to muscle open the painted-shut window in order to avoid her ire. She figures the old hag just wants something to complain about. There’s years of ash yellowing the walls; if she went at it long enough with some disinfectant spray and a roll of paper towels, she’d eventually reach the original, creamy white color of the walls.

She’s not the first smoker to rent the one-bedroom. She certainly won’t be the last.

Her teeth grind together, and her hands are starting to cramp, struggling against the wood. The apartment might be a piece of shit, but it’s the only piece of shit she’s got, and she’s not about to ruin it by pissing off some temperamental old lady. If she wants the smell of smoke gone, the smell of smoke is going to be gone (and what, is she supposed to climb down three flights of stairs to smoke on the steps outside every time she wants to light up? Please).

With one final grunt, she’s able to fling the window open, nearly losing a finger as she does so. There’s no screen, and the windowsill is decorated with years’ worth of grime, dust, and bug corpses. Distaste furls on her lip, and she holds the cigarette out the window, arm suspended in the air.

The night is cool and refreshing as it floats into her humid room. It’s always nicer outside than it is in her piece of shit apartment, and if she weren’t so convinced someone in this neighborhood wouldn’t hesitate to climb through any open window they could find (third floor or not), she’d leave it open all the time.

She flicks the end of her cigarette, and ash floats from the tip down to the sidewalk below. This isn’t really what she imagined when she imagined leaving. Her nose twitches, and she brings the cigarette to her lips. Chain-smoking and picking mold off bread and trying to lure in street cats to kill off rats that make their way up from the basement.

Leaving should look different. It shouldn’t have a sickly green tint to it. It shouldn’t be this distorted.

Her liberated life had played out so nicely in her head. Leaving would be the last hard part. She had figured, naively, that once the rot was cut from her, it would be the end to it. There’d be no more problems. It would be easy to be on her own. It would be easy to take care of herself. It would be easy to live in a shit apartment and work a shit job and make shit money and live off shit food and shit coffee and shit cigarettes. It was alone on the train platform, everything she owned stuffed into a single suitcase, that she realized she was dead fucking wrong.

She’s taken to keeping track of her problems with a numbered list.

If it weren’t for the dead bugs, she’d lean out the window, try to get the window to catch her hair. She’d get a good look at the street and the people who stumble through it. But instead, her arm goes sore, and she stares at the yellow wall in front of her.

Every day since she’s been here has been the same. An embarrassingly monotonous groundhog’s day.

In the morning, she wakes up to the sound of songbirds and the dogs in the apartment below her that continuously bark at them. At night, she falls asleep to the sound of whatever is going on in the apartment is going on above her: harsh footsteps, crashes, the occasional breaking of glass. In between, her mind numbs, and she mindlessly works the shift of whatever job she’s managed to get for the week.

She’s run through more jobs than she can count (she gets fired by anyone who makes the mistake of hiring her, problem #2). The grocery store fired her after she called a customer an ugly bitch at the end of a dispute over the price of plums (rage issues, problem #6). The restaurant she served tables at stopped putting her on the schedule after she called in sick one too many Fridays in a row (habitual liar, problem #11; chronic laziness, problem #5). The babysitting gigs she just stopped showing up to (she can’t stand to be around kids, and they can’t stand to be around her, at least she doesn’t have a problem with that).

Her current employment is at a video store. That she seems to be able to manage. At least better than all the other ones she’s had. And it’s easy enough. Rent out DVDs. Collect late fees. Let your eyes gloss over whenever someone starts to run their mouth at you. Beg your managers for extra hours so you can pay all of your bills this month (problem #1, tied in pretty directly to problem #2).

A sigh escapes her. The cigarettes burns down closer to her fingers. A piece of shit apartment, and she can hardly afford it.

Her head turns, and she eyes the living room behind her, surveying the cramped kitchen and the rotting front door just beyond it. Her eyes are lingering on the dull, brass locks that keep her door in place. She thinks that she should install new ones, invest in something more secure. And it’s because she’s fixated on those locks that she sees the door rattle as someone slams their fist against it.

The noise makes her jump, and she hastily puts her cigarette out on the window, leaving it to blow away in the wind. She just a few long strides, her hand is around her doorknob, and she’s cursing the lack of a peephole and figures that’ll give her something to complain about with her landlady. She unlocks the deadbolt but lets the chain lock stay where it is. She opens the door just enough to get a look at whoever’s on the other side.

It's her neighbor. Upstairs. She blinks.

There are three things she knows about her neighbor:

His name. Iwaizumi Hajime. She’s heard his perpetual guests call it out enough to have it committed to memory, as well as the names: Mattsun, Makki, and Oikawa (see also: Shittykawa, Crappykawa, various-one-worded-insults-Kawa). But Iwaizumi is for certain the one she’s heard most, both though bouts of laughter and panic yelling.

He has a very careful routine. He’s religious about it. She can hear his footsteps as he follows the same 24-hours daily. In the morning he’s always gone by the time she wakes up. At night, he’s out smoking on the front step when she comes home. And in between-

Whatever it is that he’s doing in that upstairs apartment, it’s none of her business. She has her ideas. She has her clues that she chooses not to see. But she won’t even let herself think about it, nevermind say it out loud. Whatever it is, she doesn’t need to know. It is not her business.

The first time she saw him, he was smoking a pack of blues on the front steps that led into their apartment building. His black jeans were worn in, and his sweatshirt had tears in the sleeves. A dark purple bruised blossomed along his jawline, fading into a lighter blue as it crept up his skin, and into a sickly yellow when it stopped under his cheekbone. The shape of it distorted when he dropped his jaw to let out smoke. She slowed in her approach at the sight of him and averted her gaze. It wasn’t any of her business.

The first time she saw him, he didn’t say anything. He just watched as she rummaged through her bag in search of her keys, careful not to brush against him as she passed him on the steps. She pretended she couldn’t feel him staring.

Her interactions with Iwaizumi Hajime, neighbor, have always been uneventful. At most, he will give her a slight nod of his chin in greeting as she approaches, but usually he just watches as she fiddles with her keys or pretends to be furiously texting, thumbs aggressively slamming against the keys (the text with no set recipient usually reading: aaaajjdewppgaa).

But even with their nothing interactions, she still would find herself thinking of him. As she popped another plastic meal into her microwave, she would think of his hands: long and veiny and cut up fingers holding up a cigarette, knuckles red and raw and forever scabbed over. When she deleted voicemails, she thought of his eyes, sharp and observant and a shade of green she finds perplexing. She thought of where he might be as she took out the trash. She started to look for the outline of him as she got closer to home.

She chalked it up to the loneliness.

The more she thought of him, the more she noticed him. His new bruises. The way his footsteps sounded late at night. How his voice rose in agitation when he spoke into the receiver of his phone, words muffled by the thin floorboards and drywall between her apartment and his. She noticed the unusual hours he kept and the way his most frequent guests always looked over their shoulders on their way out. She noticed heavy looking boxes covered in thick blankets going in and out of his place.

And she’s not stupid. It didn’t take very long for her to piece it together and resolve to stop noticing him (she can’t, as hard as she tries, and feels she knows entirely too much about him, problem #4).

She notices, now, the way his mouth is pressed into a fine line, a fresh laceration that spreads across the bridge of his nose. His expression is composed but there’s a panicked movement in his eyes, flashing over the details of her face that he can see through the crack of the door. She raises an eyebrow at him. “I need a favor,” he says, speaking directly to her for the first time, slightly out of breath and words strung together in a rush.

She blinks again.

───────

Her thought process is convoluted. She’s still working on justifying it to herself as she stands on the tips of her toes, trying not to shrink under his stare as her fingers clean his open wounds, the tips of them now stained with his blood.

It’s the path of least resistance, she tells herself. Really, there was no good reason or excuse to deny him, and she couldn’t exactly give him the bare faced truth of, “no, I think you’re a gunrunner and I don’t want to be involved in that shit, thanks.” And even if she did, or could come up with any other excuse to slam her door in her neighbor’s face, she figured it would be better to be on the good side of Iwaizumi Hajime, neighbor and potential arm’s dealer.

So she opened her door for him, and told herself that it’s better to be owed a favor than it is to owe one.

Hands steady, she applies a skin-toned bandage to the deep cut over his nose, an extra pad of cotton underneath it. She thinks it might need stiches, but that’s not an opinion she’s about to voice out loud to him.

She steps back and moves to wash the blood off of her hands in her kitchen sink, lathering her hands up with extra soap and running them under water so hot it turns her skin red. The water hits the sink a rusty color. Iwaizumi lingers, standing in the same spot, watching attentively as she does so. “Want a tea?” she asks as she turns off the faucet, wiping her wet hands off on the front of her jeans.

Without looking back at him, she moves about her cabinets, opening one to find her (frankly, pathetic) collection of mugs. She pulls out one with a chipped-up, knock-off version of Pikachu (a yellow rat-looking thing called “Ponkadu” with the iconic catchphrase, “ponka, ponka,”) and another with unsettling, discolored cats, knocking around a ball of orange yarn that she's fairly certain used to be red. “Ginger, if you have it,” he responds, still standing unsurely in the middle of her kitchen.

She glances at him over her shoulder. “You can sit down, if you want.”

Mechanically and awkwardly, he does so. The floorboards complain under his shifting weight and the chair squeaks as he pulls it out from under her table. It’s only quiet again when he settles back against the chair, going still. “You’re not gonna ask me what happened?” he asks.

It takes a few twists of the knob for her to finally get the flame on her stove going. She places her kettle on top of it, and rips into her tea bags. “Nope,” she answers. He gets ginger. She gets green. He gets the cats. She gets Ponkadu.

She can feel the way he watches her as she moves about the kitchen, putting a dot of honey in the bottom of her mug. He hasn’t asked her name, yet, which she figures is fair. She hasn’t asked his. And he’s probably seen it on the envelopes that get haphazardly tossed on their front steps or slipped under their front door (and he probably knows just as much about her as she does him, considering that more than half of the envelopes with her name on them have a big red stamp of “payment overdue,” or “bill enclosed”).

The kettle on the stove hisses, and she’s quick to snatch it up and pour the boiling water into each of their respective mugs. “How long do you need to stay?” she asks, not meaning to be rude, but she’s pretty sure it comes across that way anyways. She sets a timer on the oven for four minutes and turns to face him.

Iwaizumi shrugs. “Just for a bit, while things cool down,” is his uncomplicated answer.

She nods, arms wrapping around her middle as she leans against the counter, waiting for the teas to brew. There are questions she could ask that she’s sure he’s anticipating, but she doesn’t bother, she knows the answer. (Q: Why can’t you just hide out in your own apartment? A: I need the alibi. Q: Why’d you come to my apartment? A: Location convenience and believability. Q: Could I get in trouble for being involved with this? A: Probably).

Her fingers tap against her side, and her eyes are anywhere but on him. And despite reaching into the deepest, dustiest parts of her brain, she cannot think of one thing to say to him. There aren’t really any standard conversational topics to whip out when your neighbor/local arms trafficker (alleged) knocks on your door and asks if he can stay there for just a few hours, he promises, and also maybe a Band-Aid, if you have one.

It doesn’t help that she feels unbearably vulnerable with him, sitting at her dining room table (okay, it’s a kitchen table; a wobbly little thing pushed off to the side of her kitchen, but calling it a dining room table makes her feel better), looking at her, looking at her living space. She wasn’t anticipating guests, not that she ever gets any.

Everything she owns is splayed out on display for him to see. Dirty socks on the couch that she kicked off while watching late-night reruns. A stack of CD’s piling up on the ground, unopened because she doesn’t actually own a CD player. Dishes with remnants of ketchup and soy sauce and chocolate ice cream on the bottom of her sink. Loose cigarettes. Dozens of dead lighters. Mismatched furniture, curtsey of sidewalk disposals and secondhand stores. It’s a flagrant display of poverty and laziness.

Iwaizumi nods his chin towards the least offense thing he can find: the pile of CDs. “Those all yours?”

She thinks it’s a stupid question. Of course they’re hers. This is her apartment. Everything is hers. But the most complex form of conversation she could come up with to break the silence was, ‘tea?’ so she can’t really hold it against him. “Yeah,” she answers, and then adds without thinking, “got most of them from my brother,” (problem #9, she just says anything without ever thinking about it).

He stands from his creaky chair and creeps closer to the display. She holds her breath as he approaches. One wrong exhale and the entire pile will go toppling. Iwaizumi kneels down next to the pile, and his looking at the spine of them. His brow his furrowed as his eyes skim over the album names, and she’s anticipating some sort of string of critiques about her collection, or lack of. “Anything you like there?” she asks.

Iwaizumi straightens up and looks back over at her. “Gotta be honest, I don’t know any of these,” he admits, moving to sit back at his designated spot.

This makes her scoff. Her brother had started a worldwide sort of collection. Japanese synth-pop. Ethiopian jazz. Russian new wave. British post-punk. American folk. The rarer and more obscure, the better. If he could hear now that her neighbor and possible weapons dealer was stumped by his collection, he’d be overjoyed. Even if she has added a fair few of Hikaru Utada albums since she’s taken it over.

“What do you listen to then?” she asks, arms still crossed around her center, as if she’s shielding herself from him.

“Just whatever’s on the radio when I drive, I guess,” Iwaizumi answers with a shrug. “Not really a big music person, typically.”

For a moment, she tries to imagine whatever could be happening outside her door while he sits at her kitchen table, nursing a potentially broken nose and casually discussing music preferences. She gives him a nod. “That’s fair.”

Iwaizumi taps his thumb against the top of her table. She can’t read his expression. Every time she’s seen him it’s always been the same, like he’s permanently plagued by some minor annoyance that downturns his brow and pulls his lips into a slight frown.

It’d be intimidating if she wasn’t so used to that kind of thing. “Wanna play something?” he asks.

Involuntarily, she scoffs. “Get me something to play ‘em with and I’ll play you whatever you want,” she snarks, and then stops. The smart smirk she had on her lips falls, and she shakes her head. “Sorry, that was rude. I don’t,” she starts, and then stops, “nothing to play ‘em on.”

The oven clock, gracious with its timing, beeps three times. She spins around on her heel, turning it off and using a spoon to fish out the tea bags. Her cheeks are red as she grabs his cat mug by the handle and walks it over to him. “Ginger,” she says, placing it down on the table in front of him. “”S hot,” she says, and then thinks, obviously.

She returns to the safe space of her kitchen counter, and grips her own hot mug around the middle, leaning against the counter and holding it up to her lips. She’s blowing away the steam that rises from it. Iwaizumi has a hand around the handle of the mug, and he’s staring down harshly at it. “So, listen, if someone asks you-“

“You were here with me all night,” she replies, and Iwaizumi looks up at her with a raised eyebrow. “You met up with me after my shift ended at around nine, and then you crashed on my couch by midnight, if I remember right. You were still sleeping in that same spot when I woke up.”

Iwaizumi’s quiet for a while. His thumbs are fiddling against the mug. She slowly sips at her tea, and when it’s too hot still, she blows at the top of it. There’s a rhythm to the way he taps his foot against her floor, deep in thought, probably trying to decide whether or not he could trust her.

He can trust her. Even if he doesn’t know it. He looks over at her with a slight scowl. “And you’ll tell that to anyone who asks?”

She can read between the lines. The anyone he’s so worried about is, undoubtedly, the cops that might come to her to verify whatever version of events he presents to them. “Yeah,” she confirms, “anyone.”

───────

In the following weeks, she gets three visits. Which is three more visits than she got in her first six months of living here.

When she was a kid, her dad bought her a knife, and stuffed it in the bottom of her schoolbag. “You don’t ever leave the house without a way to defend yourself, bug,” he had told her, and made sure it was properly hidden by books and crumbled homework assignments. And it’s the only thing her father has ever taught her that has the slightest bit of validity to it. She’s rummaging through her purse on her way out, double checking for her pink cannister of pepper-spray and that same little knife, when there’s another knock on the door.

Her head snaps up, and she sighs. At this rate, she’s already gonna be late for work and her sixteen-year-old manager is going to write her up if she’s more than twenty minutes late one more time and she cannot think of a single more embarrassing scenario. One hand grips onto her pepper spray, the other undoes the deadbolt. She barely opens the door, and on the other side is a grinning man.

This one she recognizes. It’s one of the men who’s always in and out of Iwaizumi’s place. Sometimes occupying the front step with him and sometimes laughing so loudly she can hear it clearly from her living room. She closes the door, undoes the chain lock, and then opens it once more. Her fingers are still tight around the pepper spray, which she thinks is fair, considering he’s got both hands behind his back. “Can I help you?” she asks, trying not to sound agitated.

He grins down at her, brightly. He’s the pretty one. “Hey, I’m Oikawa Tooru,” he greets, a natural sort of flirtation in the tone of his voice. She can’t tell if he does it on purpose or not, but she can tell form the glint in his eye that, either way, he doesn’t mean it. “Iwa’s friend.”

She nods. “Yeah, I recognize you. Listen, I don’t wanna be rude or anything, but I’m late for work, so-“

“Don’t worry about it,” he dismisses. “Just wanted to give you this gift, from Iwa, since you helped him out the other night.”

He reveals his hands to show off a box, neat and fresh from the store. It’s unwrapped, so she can see right away that it’s a silver little CD player. Portable. Battery-powered. Batteries included. She blinks. “He’s real grateful,” he says, pushes the box into her arms and giving her a wink. And he doesn’t say anything else as he turns on his heel, headed straight for the staircase that leads up to Iwaizumi’s apartment.

She places the box on the kitchen table where Iwaizumi sat, and makes sure her door is locked three times before she finally leaves for work.

The entirety of her ten-hour shift is spent thinking about it. She processes returns, and she thinks about it. She stocks shelves, and she thinks about it. She gets yelled at, and she thinks about it. What she’s going to play first. Where she’s going to keep it. How she’s going to thank him.

It makes her nervous to think about, that he got it for her. That she sarcastically suggested it, and then he did it. It makes nervous to think that he was thinking of her after he left her apartment. It makes her nervous to think that he went out of his way to buy something for her. Even if he left it up to an errand boy.

And listen, it’s not like she’s never had the money to spare to buy one of her own. At least, she could’ve bought a really cheap one, if she wanted. But in her liberated life, she’s always found that there were more pressing, demanding things that needed to be bought. Food. Phone bills. Credits at the laundromat. Cleaning supplies. Train fare. Cigarettes. Every time she passed by an electronics store and considered it, guilt gnawed at her stomach. She never needed it as bad as she needed everything else.

She clocks out a few minutes later than she was supposed to. Maybe it’s a bit much for a thank you. All she really did, at this point, was let him sit in her piece of shit apartment for a few hours and make him a mediocre cup of tea. She thinks about giving it back. She’s not going to, but she thinks about it.

Iwaizumi is where he always is when she gets off of work, smoking the same cigarettes. And instead of ignoring him via fake text or difficult-to-find keys, she stops in front of him, painfully aware of the intensity of the stare. “Thank you,” she says, and it’s all she manages to say.

Iwaizumi brings the cigarette to his lips and inhales. There’s no bruises on him today. She looks at him and doesn’t feel the need to turn her gaze. “It was a gift to thank you with,” he says through clouds of smoke, “you don’t have to thank me.”

She shrugs. “I wanted to.”

He lets out a small chuckle. “Okay, well, you’re welcome then, I guess.”

She gives him a small nod, and then takes careful steps passed up the stairs and passed Iwaizumi. It’s only once she’s twisted her key and is pushing the door open with her shoulder that he says, “Remember though, this means you’ve gotta play me whatever I want, now.”

Inexplicably, her face gets hot.

The second one comes thirteen days after that.

She’s got a layer of sweat on the back of her neck and her hair’s pushed out of her face with a bandana. The CD player sits on top of her kitchen table, playing an old scratched up copy of London Calling: her brother’s favorite. The mess got to her. She had started in the kitchen, scrubbing the burnt food off of her oven and trashing her food-poisoning level of expired leftovers.

Somehow, in the thick of it, she’s made more of a mess than she started out with. Full trash bags falling over in her living room, useless knick-knacks she’s managed to collect that would be better off in the trash, piles of clothes she plans on getting rid of (divided into two groups: ‘maybe I can sell these,’ and ‘these would be best to donate,’).

Her hand is down the drain of her bathroom sink, cleaning out the gunk and collection of her own strands of hair, protected only by a thin, yellow, rubber glove, when the knock on her door echoes around her apartment. “Fucking hell,” she grumbles, yanking her arm out of the sink, along with a clump of her hair, and carefully slides off the glove. She leaves it on the surface of the sink to be a later problem.

When she opens the door, she’s tired and out of breath, her body sore and aching. The door cracks open, halted by the chain lock, and she goes cold and rigid at the sight a police officer, standing outside of her door. “Can I help you with something?” she asks, tone not necessarily impolite, but it’s hard not to hear just how much she does not want to help. The door can stay locked.

There’s a fair few things she’s learned about cops (and lying to them) in her twenty-something years of living. Keep your distance. Don’t give them more than they need. They’re not your friend. They don’t wanna be your friend. She’s careful to keep her expression level and unbothered.

The cop starts up with his spiel. He’s sorry to bother her, ma’am, but he just has a couple questions, if you don’t mind. It shouldn’t take up too much of your time. You don’t wanna open up the door, do you?

She opts to answer any questions he might have through the thin space allowed by her chain lock. And the cop asks the questions she would expect him to ask. Where was she fifteen nights ago? Was she alone? Who was she was? For how long? Does she remember what time, exactly? Was he here the whole time? Are you sure? Are you positive?

Answers flow out of her easily, naturally. Fifteen nights ago, she was here. Like most nights. No, she wasn’t alone. Her neighbor was here. Iwaizumi. He hangs out here with her, sometimes. For how long? All night, why are you asking? What time? Exactly, she doesn’t really remember. She got off work around nine, and he fell asleep on her couch, maybe a bit after midnight? If she had say. Yeah, he was here the whole time. Yeah, she’s sure. Yeah, she’s positive. Why are you asking?

The officer thanks her, disappointed, and leaves with his head hung, disappointed. And she figures that, whatever Iwaizumi did, they were sure that he did it. And the only thing that stands between them and him, is her. She closes the door behind her and makes sure that it’s locked.

That kind of thing, it doesn’t really bother her. Her sense of morality is not dictated by written law, and she’s not going to be the one getting in the way of another person’s living, whether it’s honest or not. There are hard lines she wouldn’t cross, or help others get over. Of course. There are for everyone. But those lines aren’t in sight, so she’ll keep her mouth shut.

A shudder goes down her spine, and once the door is closed, nerves prickle at her skin. She hates talking to cops. Every time’s worse than the last. She shakes her head, trying to shrug it off, and returns to her pile of hair in the sink.

Her third visit comes three nights later, when she’s fresh from the shower, water dripping from her hair down her neck. She’s got a pint of ice cream in her hand, legs crossed on her couch as she watches reruns of Inuyasha. She presses the spoon against her tongue. They’re airing season two, but she’s only caught up halfway through season one.

She got off work a few hours ago. She’ll sleep for a few hours. And then she’ll wake up and go back to work. Then it’ll happen again. Standing on her feet for hours. Getting talked to like she’s scum by people who take video rentals too seriously. Being belittled by her boss. Making barely enough money to pay rent for her shitty apartment. It’s depressing. It’s boring. She shoves another spoonful of ice cream into her mouth to try and distract herself from it.

“Whatever you think life’s gonna be like away from here, it’s gonna be worse than you think. And I bet, when you realize that, you’re really gonna start to miss me.”

On her television, human-faced fruit falls from a demon tree. She puts her ice cream down. At least she hasn’t got to that point yet.

From above, she can hear footsteps moving. She can hear his door open, and swing shut. She can hear him stomp down the stairs. Her head is already turned in his direction when his fist raises to knock on her door.

She shifts off the couch and steps towards her door. She undoes the deadbolt. She undoes the chain lock.

Iwaizumi greets her with a smile once she opens the door. He’s wearing a t-shirt that reveals the clear definition in his arms. Her eyes linger there for a second too long before they flick up to meet his. “I owe you a favor now.”

───────

Iwaizumi’s not stupid. He never has been. He’s careful and deliberate and sure, in everything he does. And that’s the reason his record’s clean. It’s the reason he’s never been caught and the reason he’s been able to keep this whole thing going. He doesn’t second guess himself. He doesn’t make mistakes. He doesn’t get desperate.

With one, recent exception.

His internal reasoning: his gut tells him she’s trustworthy. He just looks at her, and he knows it. She acts like a private person, keeping to herself and minding her own business. She never has guests. She’s never given him any trouble. Never looked at him like she was scared of him. And, no, it’s not just because she’s pretty. It’s not just because he likes the smell of her fresh lemon perfume blended with the smell of her menthol cigarettes. It’s not just he wants a reason to talk to her, to knock on her door.

Iwaizumi would never do something so stupid.

She sits across from him, cross-legged on the (recently mopped, from the looks of it) floor of her living room. She is carefully studying the layout of CDs in front of her, and he is carefully studying her. The sort of messy way she lets her hair fall. The boxers she wears as shorts and the way they hug the bottoms of her thighs. The boxy shirt that hangs off her shoulders, loose and wrinkled, sporting the name of some band or movie or whatever that he’s never heard of.

Iwaizumi likes looking at her. He doesn’t act caught when she lifts her gaze to see him staring. She doesn’t blush. He wants to see her blush.

She leans forward and picks a CD. Iwaizumi tilts his head to read it. New Order. “Can I ask you a question?” he says, because, at this point, he figures that she won’t.

“Go for it,” she answers with a shrug, extracting the CD from its case with care and precision, movements delicate.

“How’d you end up here?” he asks, watching her face as she bites down on her tongue, placing the CD face down into the gift he got her. “I mean, girl like you, figure you should be enrolled in university or something.”

Her finger is firm against the play button, and the CD whizzes to life. “Girl like me,” she repeats back, though it sounds like it’s mostly mumbled to herself, a touch of bitterness to her tone. She shakes her head and looks up at Iwaizumi. “Is that the kinda question you’d answer? Honestly.”

He smirks. “Nah, I guess not.”

Music is slow to start up. It skips a bit, at first, but then it smooths out as the song progresses, evening out. Iwaizumi doesn’t look away from her. “I didn’t like it at home, so I left. This is where I ended up.”

Iwaizumi shifts, his hand reaches into the back pocket of his jeans and he fishes out a pack of cigarettes. He’s already got one in his mouth when he asks, “Mind if I smoke?”

Her response is a shake of her head, and she pushes up to stand on her feet. Iwaizumi watches her legs as she walks towards the window and, with a bit of a struggle, jerks it open. The early spring air drifts into her living room and cools it considerably.

Iwaizumi lights the end of his cigarette. She grabs her own pack and an old cap to a pint of ice cream she’s been using as an ash tray before she sits back down, across from him.

She puts the cigarette to her lips, and before she can reach for her own, Iwaizumi lifts his lighter up, and the flame catches on the end of hers. She inhales, and Iwaizumi watches as her pupils dilate. “Thanks,” she says when she turns her head to let out a cloud of smoke.

“No problem,” he says, and leans back, resting his weight on the hand he places behind him. Iwaizumi jerks his chin and asks, “You gonna cash in that favor any time soon?”

“Hmm,” she muses, flicking the tip of her cigarette against the already ashy cardboard. “Think I’ll save it, for now.”

───────

The video store fired her. Apparently, it’s not good optics to tell customers to go fuck themselves.

She’s better suited to her new job, anyways. The Higurashi CD Store has better air conditioning, and she gets paid about 3% more, which is 3% less overtime she has to work. Not to mention the clientele (pretentious, university boys who are uppity about their taste in music) seem to appreciate her lack of customer service skills. They think it’s cool when she’s unhelpful, and even cooler when she ignores them.

She leans up against the front counter, behind the register, and stares at her phone. Her thumb is frantically pressing down the buttons, so hard it leaves an imprint on her thumb: right up right down left up left down right up. Her front teeth bite down on the tip of her tongue. She’s about to break her high score in Snake.

There’s a customer standing at the counter. She doesn’t notice them. “Hey,” he says, and he stops to wait for a response. She doesn’t give him one. Right down left up. Her eyes narrow at the screen. “Where can I find the Melt-Banana section?” the customer asks, and she can feel him lean in closer.

“Probably with all the other ‘M’ bands,” she replies, curtly and hardly opening her mouth as she does so. The words come out rough and mumbled.

From her peripherals, she can see him push off the counter, and he’s either grinning or grimacing. She doesn’t really care either way. Her pressing of the keys gets more aggressive. The score climbs, and she figures she’s about two seconds away from breaking her high score when she’s interrupted by a text.

One new unread text message.

She stares. She forgot phones got text messages. At this point she just sort of thought they were just for Snake and deleting voicemails from your father.

Down, down. Select.

FROM: UNKNOWN CALLER

hey. its iwa. u busy tonite?

Delete.

Are you sure you want to delete this message?

No.

Her fingers snap the phone shut, and she’s quick to pocket it.

Iwaizumi Hajime (neighbor, likely gunrunner, newfound admirer) has not left her alone. She cannot make up her mind on whether or not this is a bad thing.

She’s not sure what it is about her that he’s taken such an interest in. It’s not quite in line with the way she views herself (bland, boring, a bit rude, fairly plain, and uninteresting). She kind of figured that, once the cops gave up on trying to catch him for whatever it was that he did, that he would go back to mostly ignoring her.

He has not.

In the mornings, he brings her a coffee. The first time, the knocking on the door woke her. She groaned as the sound of it stirred her from her sleep, hoping that either she was imagining it or whoever it was would go away, if she ignored them for long enough.

But Iwaizumi Hajime has an irritating sort of persistence that cannot be ignored. He knocked again.

She groaned as her bare feet hit the cold ground and she didn’t bother taming the wild knots in her hair or wiping the sleep from her eyes. She just waddled towards the door, in the same t-shirt she wore the day before and an old pair of boxers. That morning, she didn’t bother checking who was on the other side before she undid her locks and flung the door open. She was too tired to use proper judgement.

Iwaizumi was on the other side. Eyes bright and black hood pulled over his head. Her attention was drawn to the split in his bottom lip. She didn’t notice the cup of hot coffee until he held it up to her. “Got you this.”

She tilted her head to the side, eyelids still drooping. “A coffee?” she questioned, sounding sort of dumb, her voice still thick with sleep.

He nodded. She looked down at his lip again. It looked fresh, the cut. “I didn’t know what you’d normally order, so I guessed.”

Hesitantly, her fingers wrapped around the Styrofoam cup, and she took it from him, watching as a drop of blood trickled down his chin. Iwaizumi didn’t seem to notice. She wanted to reach out and wipe it away, but didn’t. Instead, her free hand rose to her own lip, pointer finger tapping against the flesh and dragging it down. He watched. “You’re bleeding,” she remarked.

Iwaizumi shrugged but used the back of his sleeve to wipe away the spilled blood. “It’ll be fine.”

He would know better than her, she figured. It was not the first time she’d seen Iwaizumi with blood on him. She raised the cup and took a small, careful sip. The flavor flooded her mouth at once. Burnt, syrupy sugar and thick milk. Her nose scrunched involuntarily. “What is this?”

“Not a caramel person?” he questioned, and chuckled at the way her disgust was made clear in the twisting of her face. “I thought you would like sweet things. Don’t tell me your order, though. I wanna get it right on my own.”

Iwaizumi left after that, and she realized she forgot to say thanks.

He continued showing up at her door, knocking against the wood until she rose from her death-like sleep. He’s done it enough to fuck with her sleep schedule, and now she wakes up at eight in the goddamn morning daily, always just a few minutes before he arrives.

It’s just a part of both of their routines, now. He hands her a coffee she would never drink on her own, (an iced Americano, a chai latte, a cortado, other bullshit she's never even heard of), and leaves without saying much. Once he’s gone, she drinks the whole thing.

On the fourth day, she took a sip, shook her head, and said, “You know, you don’t have to feel indebted to me.”

Flat white. Wrong, again. Iwaizumi smiled at her. “I don’t feel indebted to you.”

At night, he’s a little less consistent. But she figures his work schedule requires flexibility, so it makes sense.

His excuses for knocking on her door are less consistent at night, too. It ranges from ‘hey, sorry for the noise last night,’ to, ‘I found this CD you might like,’ and, most alarmingly, ‘I kinda just wanted to talk to you.’

She doesn’t really know if it’s a good thing or not, all of his attention. She likes it. She likes when there’s a knock on her front door and it makes her heartbeat uptick in pace for just a second. She likes the way that he grins and the timber of his voice and she likes that he’s just around.

A lot of her life has been lived alone. Days at a time without speaking. Days at a time without seeing another living person. It got worse when she buried her brother. There were some days when she felt like she could slip below the surface of the earth and never emerge again, and not one living soul would notice.

Now that Iwaizumi has slipped her into his routine, it’s a little harder to think like that.

Still, his occupation makes her uneasy. She’s gotten this far in life by strictly adhering to one, single rule: mind your own business. There was already too much of Iwaizumi Hajime she noticed before, but now that he has become a consistent visitor to her doorstep, it’s even harder to ignore the injuries, the noises, the neatly packed boxes and wads of cash going in and out of his pocket.

And if he keeps it up, she’s worried her façade of obliviousness can only hold up for so long. She doesn’t want to get wrapped up in it.

She marks the text as unread and goes back to Snake. It freezes, and then crashes, previous high score untouched.

The text burns in her back pocket for the rest of her shift. As she rings people up and restocks and pretends to clean, she writes out responses in her head. She’s trying to draft the cleverest, most casual response but the only thing she can think of saying to him is, ‘no, I never am,’ which is not even close to clever and so self-deprecating it’s almost pathetic.

Texting is sort of hell, for her. It gives her so much time to overthink and overanalyze everything she could possibly say, finding faults in every sentence structure and word choice. At least in person she’s awkward and blunt without hesitation.

By time she’s done with her shift and is locking the store doors behind her, the text still sits in her pocket, unread. If the past however many months of anecdotal evidence are enough, Iwaizumi will be sitting on the front steps, smoking a cigarette by the time she gets home. She can respond to him then if he still wants an answer.

She feels stupid when she’s surprised to see him there. Or at least, her body feels surprised, if the way her mouth dries up and heat rushes to her head are any indication. It seems like the more and more she comes face to face with Iwaizumi, the less prepared she is for it each time.

He’s on his phone when she approaches, rapidly pressing his fingers against the keys, so he almost doesn’t notice her when she passes. And with the harsh look of irritated concentration he has etched into his expression, she’s not about to interrupt him.

But as she tries to step past him, his head shoots up, like her presence ripped his attention back into reality. And before she can get any further, his hand shoots up to grab at the end of her sleeve. “Hey,” he says, and she freezes, head turned to look down at him. He lightly tugs at the end of her sleeve. “Sit with me, for a second.”

Without really thinking about it, she’s does as she’s told, sinking down to step on the step beside him, ensuring that there’s a healthy few inches between them.

Iwaizumi pockets his phone and squishes the cherried tip of his cigarette out against the concrete beneath him. “Get my text?” he asks, voice easy.

“Yeah,” she answers, eyes not on him but on the smoking pile of ash he had just created. “’M not busy tonight.”

He grins, bright and bold and any trace of irritation has melted away. “Good. I wanna take you for a drive.”

───────

Iwaizumi’s car sucks. For as well-kept as it is, its age shines through. It is old and deteriorating and occasionally it makes a noise that sounds like it needs immediate addressing. She’s not sure why she was expecting anything different. He lives in the same cheap apartment building as her, and people who live in apartment buildings like that do not drive luxury cars. Or even just okay cars. People who live in apartments like that are lucky to have any car.

It must not be as profitable as she thought, all the trafficking.

He has the window rolled down as he drives. The wind isn’t too bad, and the spring air is pleasantly wet and warm. It smells fresh, and it washes out the smell of nicotine that has settled into the fabric of the car seats.

Pretty blatantly, she’s looking at Iwaizumi. He is looking at the road, and she is looking at him. The veins in his neck and how they connect to his sharp jaw. The slant of his nose and the shape of his profile. His hair, spiky and slightly messy from the way the wind runs through it. Dusk has settled but the streetlights cut through it and highlight the sharpness of his features. The shadows deepen his bruises.

Everything about Iwaizumi is sharp. From the look in his eyes and the way words fall from his mouth. It’s sort of intimidating, in a way. Or it should be. It must be, to others. She finds it almost sort of endearing, the way he’s all prickly edges, even when he smiles.

His eyes flick over to her, and then back towards the road, a soft pink lightly dusting his cheeks. “You starin’ at me?” he asks, corner of his lip tugging upwards.

She lets her gaze fall back down to her lap. “You’re pretty,” she admits to him, crossing her arms over her chest and settling back further into the seat. She means it, but she doesn’t know why she says it. It comes out without any thought, like there’s nothing there to filter her thoughts out of her tongue.

Iwaizumi laughs. The roads are getting narrower the further he takes them from the densely populated area of the city in which they reside. She doesn’t know where he’s taking her. She didn’t bother to ask. “Y’know, I thought you were shy at first. But you just say whatever you want.”

She can’t help but flinch. Shy. Her father always called her that. Maybe Iwaizumi didn’t mean to be an insult but that’s the only way she’s ever heard it. Shyness was just one of the many faults in her that her father was eager to correct. “I’m not shy,” she asserts. “I just don’t talk unless I feel like there’s something I need to say.”

It’s partially true, at least (and the reason she’s so horrific at any and all small talk). That explanation conveniently leaves out the fact that she’s never really had anyone to say anything to.

Iwaizumi looks at her over his shoulder, tearing his attention off of the road in front of him for just a second to flash her a smug sort of grin. “And you felt the need to tell me I’m pretty?”

“You are,” she shrugs. It’s nothing to be embarrassed about, she figures, but the way he keeps turning to look at her like he just can’t help it makes her gut feel upended. “Nothing wrong with pointing it out.”

Iwaizumi hums, one hand on the wheel and the other resting on the top of his thigh, fingers tapping against the denim of his jeans. “Nah,” he agrees. “You can point it out as much as you’d like.”

───────

Iwaizumi brings her to a grassy riverbank under a bridge. It’s dark, and the streetlights are flickering. Cars only pass over the bridge every five minutes or so. If he was going to kill her, it’d be here. She doesn’t think he’s going to, but she still has the thought.

She sits on the slightly damp grass, knees pulled up to her chest and watching the slow flow of the river. It’s so loud, where she lives. She never really realized it until now, surrounded by the absence of noise. It’s just the soft, trickling of water and the buzz of hidden insects.

The town that hugs the river is small, and it makes her feel small, to be there. The air feels fresher here, by the river. The smell of it is familiar. It’s like her brother. She inhales deeply, and lets the air fill up her lungs.

He sits beside her, Iwaizumi, legs crossed and elbows resting on his knees. Iwaizumi’s hunched forward, staring at the same flow of water as her. “I come out here sometimes when I miss home,” he tells her. “It’s not exactly the same, but it’s enough to remind me.”

Her fingers tangle in the grass below her, and she carefully and slowly uproots it. Iwaizumi drives an hour to find a small, isolated spot that reminds him, even a little, of his home. She sees her home in everything, like a kind of curse she can’t escape. She chews on the inside of her cheek. It seems cruel. “I don’t like being reminded of home,” she confesses, rolling the ripped-up grass between her fingers.

Iwaizumi studies the side of her face. “Where’d you grow up?” he asks.

“Nowhere special,” she shrugs. “Just your average suburb. You find one just like it every twenty minutes.”

“What was so awful about it?” he questions, not looking away from her.

Her tongue twists in her mouth, and she tilts her head back to look up at the dark, empty sky. “My dad,” she answers eventually, voice level. Her head rolls back forward, and her hands knot together under her knees. “He was sort of an asshole.”

“Ah, one of those.”

“Yeah, one of those.”

“Me too.”

She sighs, feeling a bit fidgety. She adjusts the way she sits and then does it again and then does it again until she’s mimicking Iwaizumi’s position. “Why’d you bring me out here?” she asks.

“I dunno. I like it here,” he says. “And I like you. Made sense to me.”

His words put some kind of contracting pressure on her chest and it makes her want to squeeze into a tight ball, becoming smaller. Iwaizumi won’t stop looking at her and it’s not really helping, exactly. “Yeah, I don’t really get that.”

“Get what?”

“You liking me,” she explains. “I know that you do. I don’t get why.”

“Why wouldn’t I?”

“You don’t really know me.”

“I want to.”

Between them, a cricket buzzes. A car passes on the bridge above them, headlights casting a light over them. She turns to look at Iwaizumi and sees him already looking at her, his stare fixed and intense and she likes the way he looks at her. She wonders what he sees when she looks at him under the illumination of the headlights.

She nods. “Okay.”

───────

She’s surprised the first time she sees Iwaizumi’s apartment. She’s not sure why she expected to see something different than her own, but it’s pretty much exactly the same place. Except it’s not an absolute fucking shithole, like hers is.

She’s noticed a certain pride with the way Iwaizumi is, how he does things, the way things are upkept. If things are old and deteriorating, he breathes new life into them, takes care of them, makes them as like new as possible. He cares for his space. He keeps it neat. He maintains.

He’s different from her, in that way. She’s content to just let everything rot away around her.

The shiny, metal pot on his stovetop boils and steams, rattling the lid that covers it. She bites down on her lip. “Are you sure you know what you’re doing?”

Iwaizumi stands with his back to her in front of the stove. He’s got a wooden spoon in one hand and the other is apprehensively poking at a smoking pan with (likely burnt) chicken. “Yeah,” he tells her without looking back at her. “I’m a great cook.”

Forty minutes later, they’re seated at his couch, coffee table pulled up close, an open box of pizza between the two of them. She has a slice pinched between her fingers, and a napkin bunched up in her hand to catch the drops of grease that drip out of it.

“Don’t feel too bad,” she says, teeth ripping into her slice, eyes on his television as Death Note plays. He gets better cable than her. “”S probably better. I’m not convinced I would’ve been impressed by your cooking,” she teases lightly.

Iwaizumi nudges his elbow into her side. “Yeah? And who says I was trying to impress you?”

She raises an eyebrow at him. “Were you?”

Before he can answer, his phone rings. A generic, loud, irritating ringtone that demands attention. Iwaizumi groans and pulls a phone out of his back pocket. It’s not a phone she’s ever seen before. It’s not the one he texts her from, not the one he uses on their front steps. His brow furrows. “I’m sorry,” he says to her, “I gotta take this.”

He stands then, going all the way around his coffee table and straight out the door. She sits there dumbly, staring after him, pizza falling limp in her hand.

It was easy to forget. The more time she spent with him, the more she forgot. His odd behaviors and unusual habits were easy to lose track of, the more she knew him. She’s not to bothered by his abrupt walk-out; she figures it’s good to have the reminder, every now and then, of what exactly it is that he does.

Not that it bothers her, really. But it does make her nervous. The more she knows him, the more his bruises work their way under her skin.

When her mother left her father, she was young. Too young to remember the details of her face or the way her voice sounded. When she thinks of her mother, all she can imagine is a blurred, distorted face that eventually morphs and twists back into her father’s. She can remember, though, what she said when she left. Spat out viciously as she threw wrinkled clothes and wadded piles of cash into whatever loose bags she could find.

“Men like your father, they only care about one thing. And it’s not you and it’s not me.”

She wonders, just briefly, what else Iwaizumi and her father might have in common.

By the time he returns, she’s abandoned the dinner before her and has curled into the furthest corner of the couch, gaze fixed on the screen in front of her but not paying it any real attention at all. Her eyes follow Iwaizumi as he returns to sit beside her. “Sorry about that,” he says. “Just work stuff.”

She shrugs. “Don’t have to explain yourself to me.”

───────

The pros and cons of Iwaizumi Hajime.

She invested in a diary.

Okay.

She stole a diary.

It’s not her first choice in journal: it’s not even a little discreet, a bright pink, fuzzy leopard print that practically begs to be investigated. But it was the first one she could grab and stuff into her bag without being noticed. And at least it came with this glittery little gel pen that she’s writing with now. She taps it against the page now as she leans against the counter of the Higurashi CD Store.

This is her first entry.

Pros: don’t have to worry about what I say around him, easy to talk to, I like the way I feel when I’m around him, I like his smile and his laugh, treats me like a person, respectful, intriguing, pretty (like, really fucking pretty), nice arms, sweet to me

Cons: that thing that I actually cannot write down on paper, reminded me of my dad that one time

She bites down on the end of the glitter pen. She feels like a fucking twelve-year-old.

Iwaizumi brought her something simple this morning: medium roast with just a bit of cream and even less sugar. It’s room temperature now but she keeps it beside her, non-dominate hand wrapped around it and taking small sips of it every few minutes. She wanted to savor it, today, take her time with it. She removes the pen from her lips and takes another swig.

It’s been hard for her to think of anything but Iwaizumi lately. He’s the first person she talks to in the morning and the last person she sees before she goes to sleep. And on the nights were he’s too preoccupied to make an appearance, he sends her a text.

(Her personal favorites include things along the lines of: ‘sorry i can’t see u tonite, thinking abt u,’ and ‘what r u doing tonite? wtv it is i wish i was doing it w u instead of working’)

Even if she did have something else going on in her life (and she absolutely does not), she can’t imagine being able to focus on anything ever again that’s not him. The thought of him is pretty much all-consuming. And currently, she’s having a hard time deciding if that should be filed under the ‘pro’ or ‘con’ category.

Her hand moves towards the ‘pro’ section, and with slightly shaking hands, she writes out: I really want him to kiss me.

But when she looks down on the words on the page, it makes her cheeks heat up painfully. She’s quick to scribbled it out so harshly the pen leaves indentations on the next several pages.

A bell rings. Her head shoots up, and she sees someone step through the front door. Looks like another bored university student, with the same façade of disinterest and the general aura of I am way too good for everything around me that the rest of them have.

Still, she shuts her journal closed and shoves it under the counter, the atrocious fuzzy fabric completely hidden from sight. She opts in to watch the customer instead.

He seems to know exactly what he’s here for. Either that or he walks up to the first display he can find and grabs the closest CD to him, and then he’s making his way towards her. She studies him and his flat black hair and his bored expression and watches as he places the CD on the counter in front of her and slides it towards her. “I’d like to buy this, please.”

PCD by The Pussycat Dolls. She wouldn’t have pegged him for the type, but it’s not like it’s any of her business.

“Sure,” she remarks, a lingering heat still on her cheeks, hoping that it’s not noticeable enough to detract from her reputation as the stoic bitch who’s mean to you at the checkout. She scans the CD, and reads out the price in a flat, monotonous voice.

He pulls out his wallet. Black leather, which suits him more than PCD does. He pulls out a slim, red card and hands it to her. She looks at the name before she swipes it. Kageyama Tobio.

“You look familiar,” he says as she slides the card through the register, and she turns to give him a raised eyebrow. “I think I know you.”

The machine’s taking its sweet time, processing the payment. She taps her fingers against the counter, impatient. “Unlikely,” is her simply reply.

He shakes his head. “You’re Iwaizumi’s neighbor, aren’t you?” he presses. “Iwaizumi Hajime?”

She doesn’t like the question. She doesn’t like that she hasn’t seen him before and he’s right. The payment goes through, and her expression remains the same. “I dunno, maybe,” she says, and slides the CD into a thin plastic bag. “I don’t really know any of my neighbors. Want a receipt?”

Cardholder Kageyama Tobio eyes her carefully, like he’s waiting for a crack, of some sort. She stares blankly, waiting for a response. “No, thanks,” he says eventually, and then turns on his heel. “Have a good one.”

She stares after him long after he’s gone. She resolves to tell Iwaizumi about it, after her shift is over. But when she gets home, he’s not on the step, like he always is.

She decides not to read too much into it.

───────

When she was ten, school uniform covered in dirt and eye blackened, her father put a baseball bat in her hands. “You don’t let people disrespect you,” he told her, each word sharp. She flinched, small hands going tighter around the bat. “You make sure people know not to push you around. You protect yourself, cause no one else is going to, kid. And you,” he had said, turning to point a finger at her older brother. “What were you doing while these assholes were picking on your sister, huh? Just sitting there watching?”

There were tears in her eyes she was trying very hard to contain. She couldn’t see her brother’s expression as he spoke. “I’m in a different class,” he had defended. “I wasn’t even around when it happened.”

“Yeah, well, there’s no reason I didn’t get a call from your teacher telling me you beat the crap outta the kids that did this to her. You’re her brother, it’s your one job,” their father insisted, and then turned his attention back over to his youngest. “You, go out there and don’t come back until the shits that did that to your face are sorry.”

“I don’t wanna,” she had protested, quiet and meek, the things her father hated most about her. She didn’t lift her head. She didn’t look him in the eye.

There was a light shove to her shoulder. She stumbled backwards. “I don’t give a shit what you want, kid. Go out there and make them regret it.”

He was true to his word, at least, and did not let her back inside the house until she made them regret it.

When she was twelve, she started tending to her brother’s wounds.

He got them from a lot of things. Fights at school, fights after school, fights with their father. Each time he came out worse than before, lip busted, eye bruised shut, nose cracked and shifted.

She would pull up first aid videos on their home computer and make her brother sit in silence, ice pack pressed to his face, while she watched attentively, scribbling down notes for reference whenever the video buffered.

Over time, skills like cleaning wounds and snapping a nose back into place and, in extreme cases, weaving thread in between deep cuts with the sharpest needle she could find (thus creating the world’s shoddiest stitches).

Each time she did so, her brother would groan and hiss and snap at her in pain, cursing whenever her hand closed around his bent cartilage or poked the needle through his skin. “Stop complaining,” she would whisper on the floor of his bedroom. “It’s not as good as a real doctor but it’s better than nothing.”

When she was fifteen, she got kicked out of school.

It was the end of a long string of incidents: ditching classes, smoking on campus, and backtalking teachers were some of her more minor offenses. In her first year of high school, she was unable to go one month straight without getting into trouble (problem #6: rage issues, kind of a chronic thing for her). She was quiet, alone a lot of the time, and pretty much disliked by all of her teachers. It kinda made her seem like an easy target for someone to take their frustrations out on.

She can’t remember her name. The girl’s. She tries sometimes, whenever she thinks about it. But there’s just a blank space in her memory where the girl’s name used to be-can’t even really remember her face. The color of her eyes or the way she wore her hair. She just remembers, on day three of a dedicated, concentrated effort to get under her skin, she just snapped.

The insults were scathing, but they weren’t the worst thing she had ever heard. Just persistent and annoying. She can’t even remember exactly what it was that sent her over the edge. But as her classmate loomed over her desk, laughing and teasing, something inside of her chest burned up, and she stood, whipping the back of her hand across the girl’s cheek.

Her father had screamed at the vice principal, after the fact. He yelled so loudly and for so long that the police were almost called on him. (Fat load of good that would’ve done them). He told them that he was gonna pull his daughter out of that school, because he couldn’t fathom her being educated at an institution that did not allow her to defend herself.

It didn’t really matter, at that point, though. She was already expelled.

Her whole life has kind of been defined by violence, in one way or another. It’s been consistently pushed on her as an end all, be all type of solution. Something that, if you’re good enough at it, it can fix any issue that might pop up. It’s something that she’s always had to cope with, whether that be through dubious first aid methods or dealing with the blood elicited from her own hands.

She’s just sort of used to it, at this point. So when she is awoken in the middle of the night by the continuous ringing of her phone, to hear Iwaizumi’s voice on the other line say, “How good with first aid are you?” she’s not rattled.

Her answer is a confident and sleep-filled, “Pretty good.”

Still, she wasn’t really anticipating a full-on stab wound.

Matsukawa Issei was formally introduced to her as he lay bleeding out Iwaizumi’s couch, half-conscious and a little delirious from the pain. His eyes keep fluttering open and shut. She presses a dish rag against the bare skin of his shoulder, applying as much pressure as she can and thanking whatever named deity she can think of that it’s his shoulder and not his gut.

It’s chaos, and she feels underprepared. Iwaizumi is pacing, hands stained red, and yelling into the receiver of his phone, rage barely contained. There is also the familiar figure of Oikawa, who is kneeled by Matsukawa’s side, saying any and everything he can think of to keep him awake. And then there’s Makki, the one who is freest of blood stains, standing in the middle of the living room, frozen in panic.

He’ll have to do.

“You, Makki,” she barks, and he snaps his head in her direction, eyes wide and waiting for instruction. “Go to the closest convenience store and buy antibiotic ointment and as many bandages as you can. Okay?”

He nods, and without wasting a second on a response, he’s running past Iwaizumi and out the door.

The blood is soaking into the rag, rapidly. She doesn’t know enough to fix everything so neatly. She presses down harder. She did everything she remembered to do. Elevate the wound. Apply pressure. Do not stop applying pressure. Apply more pressure.

She needs the bleeding to stop a little before she can clean it and stitch it and wrap it. She presses down harder, and bites down on his lip. The little white box with the red cross she had brought sits open on the coffee table, too poorly stocked to be of any use.

“Fuck,” she mumbles under her breath, hovering over Matsukawa. The rag’s stopped absorbing the blood. “Fuck. Iwaizumi! I need another towel!”

She watches him move from the corner of her eye, phone still pressed against his ear as he steps into the bathroom for a second and returns with a heavy, black towel in his hand. He brings it over to her, saying cool into the receiver of his phone, “Tell him he’s fucking dead,” before he slams it shut.

Iwaizumi hovers for a second, rage still marring the details of his face. Though it does become slightly diluted by the horror that drains his skin of any color. “You need to press that against his wound,” she instructs. “I can’t take pressure off it for even a second right now, so you need hold it down.”

Sort of mechanically, he nods. She can’t help but notice the way his hands shake as he lowers the towel down over the wound, bunching and bundling it up. He holds in firmly in place over her hands. “Like this?”

“Press down harder,” she instructs. “Harder than you think you’d have to.”

Iwaizumi does as he’s told and leans more of his weight against the wound. Matsukawa groans, pain slipping out of his lips. “I know, I’m sorry man,” Iwaizumi says, leaning down harder. “I’m sorry.”

───────

When the dust settles, she runs her hands under the hot water of her skin for five minutes. It doesn’t matter how much she scrubs at the skin of her hands with soap and the harsh edge of her fingernails. The faint blood stains don’t go away.

Iwaizumi’s exactly where she thought he would be, out on the front steps of their building, smoking a cigarette. She lights one of her own as she takes a seat behind him. The concrete is cool beneath her, and the tips of her fingers are appreciative of the warmth emitting from her lighter. Iwaizumi doesn’t look at her. He’s too fixed on the ground in front of him.

“I’m not a doctor or anything but, I think he’ll be okay,” she tells him, inhaling a puff of smoke. “Just have to makes sure it doesn’t get infected. Wash it a couple times a day, keep an eye on the stitches. I did okay with those, so.”

“I’m sorry I called you,” Iwaizumi says, head hung. There’s a roughness in his voice, an almost trembling as he speaks.

“Why would you be sorry?” she asks, inching closer to him. “Your friend needed help.”

Iwaizumi laughs wryly and lifts his head. His eyes are wet but not watering. “You know, you play dumb a little too well. It gets me, sometimes,” he tells her, eyes tracing along the details of her face. He feels close. She flicks the end of her cigarette, so she has something to do with her hands. “But I know you know. And I’m sorry to get you involved. I know you didn’t want to be.”

Maybe there was some sort of wishful thinking on his part. Her part too. But it’s hard to live two separate lives. It’s hard to be two different people. She’s always sort of known this, even if she didn’t want to admit it.

“I’ve been involved in worse things,” she remarks, and ignores the look of doubt he throws in her direction. “If you need help with that kind of thing, you can call me, okay? Don’t worry about that.”

Iwaizumi stares. She stares back and holds her breath. He feels so close. “You know,” he whispers, “I think you really might be too good for me.”

She smiles at him, and acknowledges that she’s fucked. She’s caught up in it.

───────

Hey Bug, it’s me. I was just thinking about you and your brother-

Delete.

Would it kill you to answer a call from your old man, once? Why don’t you respect-

Delete.

I’m getting’ real sick of-

Delete.

I love you, Bug. Wish you’d call me back.

Delete.

Her face is pressed against her too-hot pillow, lying on her too-hot bed, too-hot blankets pushed to the floor and too-hot air suffocating her. Sweat makes baby hairs cling to the back of her neck. She doesn’t need to put her phone on speaker to hear the grainy voice of her father without lifting the phone to her ear. He’s loud enough.

Metal clinks together. She can hear it vaguely over the buzz of noise pouring in from her open window. Keys turn in her front door, and it’s pushed open.

She gave Iwaizumi a key. He didn’t ask for one, and seemed confused when she gave it to him. “You better take it,” she had said to him, pressing it into his palm when he tried to give it back to her. “I had to pay to have this copy made.”

His furrowed his brow the way he does when he’s mad or confused or irritated or concerned. “Why are you giving it to me?”

“I’m too lazy to keep getting up to let you in every time you knock.”

Iwaizumi accepted it, then. He’s started wearing it on a chain around his neck. He’s tugging it back over his head as he walks into her bedroom, ice coffee in his hand. “You’re still in bed?” he greets, sitting on the edge of her bed.

She pushes herself up to a sit, letting her phone fall to the ground and clatter shut on top of her pile of discarded blankets. Her hand is quick to take the coffee from him, lips curling around the straw and inhaling a gulp. It’s halfway empty by the time she comes back up for air. “Thanks,” she says, somewhat breathless and disoriented. The heat makes her feel melted, gummy and stretched out. The iced coffee running down her throat and cold condensation on the plastic cup help, at least a little.

Iwaizumi watches as she pants, catching the breath that was stolen from her by the heat and the chugging. His expression is unclear. It’s hard for her to get a good read on him unless it’s explicit joy or rage. “I’m gonna walk you to work today,” Iwaizumi tells her.

She raises the plastic cup to her neck and presses it against her hot and sweat-soaked skin, hoping the ice concentrated on that one spot will cool the rest of her. “’M not working today.”

He raises an eyebrow. “You always work Fridays?”

“CD store fired me yesterday,” she tells him.

“You serious?” Iwaizumi questions, and she nods. “What was it this time?”

“Hmm,” she muses. It could be a number of things, really. The elderly shop owner told her that she just wasn’t the right fit. It could’ve been her general apathy or the way she half-assed her tasks or that one time she let a customer scam extra change out of her because she was too lazy to argue with him. But if she really had to guess-

“Probably because I spit in a guy’s receipt after he asked for my number,” she answers, and Iwaizumi narrows his eyes at her. She places the coffee on the ground beside her bed, next to her fallen phone. “In my defense, though, it was like, the sixth time. Couldn’t take no for an answer.”

She stands, lacing her fingers together and throwing her hands back over her head, leaning on her heels as she stretches, a pleasant tug in her stiff muscles. Vaguely, she’s aware of the tangled mess of hair that’s piled up on the top of her head, of the stains and holes tattering her brother’s old t-shirt, of the dried bit of drool that crusts on her chin. She doesn’t waste her time being embarrassed about it, though. Iwaizumi sees her in a state of undress more often than not, the main stable of her wardrobe being hand-me-downs three times removed.

“Sounds like it was deserved,” Iwaizumi says, and it sounds like his tongue is dry. He clears his throat, eyes on her back as she sways into her kitchen, waiting a beat before he stands to follow her. “What are you gonna do now?”

She shrugs, throwing open the door of her fridge and pretends not to see the half-empty carton of eggs as quickly as she does so she can stand in the cold for a second longer. “Get another one, I guess,” she replies, closing it shut with her hip, eggs in hand. “Want some eggs and toast?”

“Sure,” Iwaizumi replies. She looks over her shoulder to see that he’s settled at her kitchen table, her half-empty coffee and discarded phone gathered up and pushed towards the empty seat she will occupy.

She hums in response, hands busy with the cracking and the scrambling of eggs. “How’s Mattsun?” she asks, splitting an egg from the middle and letting it slip and plop onto the hot pan on the stove below her.

Iwaizumi’s fingers tap against her kitchen table rhythmically. “He’ll live,” he answers curtly. “Not infected, so.”

“Next time, if it’s a lung or an organ, bring him to an actual doctor,” she tells him, trying to fish out a bit of eggshell from the yolk without breaking it. “Shoulders I can handle, but lungs are another thing. Will you light me a cig?”

The legs of his chair scrape against the floors as Iwaizumi stands, and she can hear his thumb fiddled with the flick of his lighter as his footsteps approach. She lifts her head from the pan in front of her, and sees that Iwaizumi is already standing by her side. He leans in close, one of the blues he’s always smoking held between two fingers. Iwaizumi raises his hand, and places it between her lips.

His presence is hot, amplified by the humidity that suffocates her apartment and the burning stove just below her. It’s too hot. The heat seeps through the layers of her skin and starts to melt away at the layers of fat and muscle that hold her together. Iwaizumi places the lighter at the end of the cigarette that hangs loosely from her lips, and doesn’t look away from her eyes until the tip of it is a bright, cherry red. “No lungs,” he repeats back to her, and it takes a minute for her thoughts to catch up. “I’ll remember that.”

Iwaizumi retreats back to the kitchen table, and her eyes linger on his back for a moment before they fall back to the egg in the pan. The edges are burnt black, and the yolk is overcooked.

───────

It starts out simply.

“Here’s to the girl who saved my life,” Mattsun cheers, though he tries to sound like he’s only somewhat bemused by the whole affair (contrary to the forty-five-minute phone call between them, where he cried into her ear about how eternally grateful and indebted to her he would be). He’s holding up a can of beer that sloshes and spills onto the table beneath him.

Iwaizumi’s apartment seems smaller than it did before, with the group of people gathered around his coffee table and the impressive spread of empty, crushed beer cans. She tips her own, lukewarm can down her throat, and laments the ones that are bent and crunched up. She could’ve returned them.

She’s sitting on the floor, Iwaizumi on her left. His shoulder keeps brushing against hers and she notices it every time. And she knows that has something to do with her lingering desire to sink her teeth into his neck because every time his friend Kyotani accidentally hits his elbow against hers she inches closer to Iwaizumi. Just slightly.

The only person that seems to notice is Oikawa. He smirks at her every time she does it.

She’s really good at pretending not to notice.

Iwaizumi nudges her side, and with the beer still pressed to her mouth, she looks at him with wide eyes. “Need another?” he asks, wearing a slight, warm smile that makes her question the source of the heat in her cheeks.

Quickly, as if she was challenged, she tilts her head back and gulps down the remainer of her can. Some of it leaks out of the corner of her mouth, and drips down the side of her neck. She straightens out when it’s emptied, and places the can on the coffee table in front of her before she wipes her mouth with the back of her hand. “Yeah.”

For a second, Iwaizumi eyes her like he’s trying to figure something out. Like there’s something about her left to crack and he just can’t figure it out. He reaches a hand out and wraps it around the top of her knee, lightly squeezing it before he stands, heading for the kitchen.

From his spot on the couch, Makki grins. “What about me, Iwa? You wanna get me another one too?”

Iwaizumi’s response is a cool, clipped, “Fuck off, get it yourself,” and she knows it’s supposed to, but it makes her feel pretty special.

Then things slightly derail.

She’s lost track of the number of beers she’s put back, but she knows she’s not going to have any more, because she’s really trying to get a hold on problem #13 (drinks too much, pukes everywhere, is an embarrassment-in that order).

There’s a slightly sway in her stance as she stands in the middle of Iwaizumi’s living room, furniture haphazardly pushed to the side in favor of the spectacle she’s the center of. She crosses her arms over her chest. “I know how to throw a punch,” she asserts, voice lower and lazier than usual.

Oikawa smiles, half-condescending and half-shitfaced. “Just wanna make sure,” he says, on the verge of slurring his words. “Gotta make sure Iwa’s girl can take care of herself, y’know? Hafta make sure. Can’t take any risks.”

Her back is to Iwaizumi, but she can feel the heat of his stare as it blazes past her and lands harshly on Oikawa. But his tall, drunken friend pays him no mind. “So don’t worry about hurting me, okay? I’ve taken plenty of punches before.”

Instinctively, her hand curls into a fist. The same one her father engraved into the memory of her flesh by meticulously placing each finger and forcing her to swing. Maybe she wouldn’t do it if she were sober. And maybe if Oikawa was he wouldn’t offer, either.

But they’re not sober, and now she has this itchy suggestion in the back of her mind that this is some sort of initiation. Iwaizumi’s presence behind her feels immense.

“So, it’s really easy,” Oikawa explains, lifting up a closed fist of his to her face. A demonstration. “You just wanna make sure your thumb’s not-“

She got tired of listening. She arches her elbow back, and launches a right hook into his jaw.

At the immediate collapse of Oikawa Tooru, there is a collective low groan of, “ooo’s,” and “oh fuck’s,” and even a bout of whooping laughter that she’s pretty sure comes from Kyotani. She’s shaking out the stinging pain in her knuckles when Iwaizumi steps up behind her, and wraps his fingers around her other wrist.

She can feel each finger print on her skin, hot like they’re branding her. She can smell the bit of beer that lingers on his breath and the cheap cologne that lingers on the skin of his neck and god she cannot stop thinking about his neck. He raises her hand above her head. A declaration of victory. “She told you she could punch, man.”

Oikawa straightens up, hand cupping the point of impact on his jaw. “Well, damn, the price I pay for doubting her.”

Iwaizumi drops her arm back down to her side, but does not let go of her wrist. There’s an odd sense of pride in her chest. It was about time something her father taught her turned out to be useful. Iwaizumi slips a single finger down her wrist and uses it to lightly caress the center of her palm before he lets her go.

The quick and oddly intimate gesture makes her dizzy. She forces herself onto the couch, and switches to water.

And then it completely devolves.

She’s somehow found herself squished between someone who looks even more quiet and judgmental than she does and Iwaizumi. She’s had more to drink (problem #15, says she won’t drink any more and then immediately does). The lukewarm cans of beer make her skin hot to the touch and her posture sloppy; her head flops to the side, and lands on judgement boy’s shoulder. Iwaizumi wraps his hand around her bicep, and pulls her towards him, her temple falling nicely into the crook of his neck.

Oikawa is splayed out across the floor, icepack held up against his jaw. Kyotani is trying to teach himself to play a guitar and no one is really quiet sure where he got it from. Makki and Mattsun are crowded in the kitchen, trying to create some sort of monstrosity with Twinkies and wasabi almonds. Something loud plays on the television. She’s not sure what it is. Her eyes are closed.

It’s the dim, weary stage of house parties. When people want to leave but are too drunk to. When every noise is too loud and every light too bright. Her apartment is just downstairs. Getting there isn’t a stretch of indomitable feat. But for someone who is all sharp lines and muscle, Iwaizumi’s surprisingly comfortable.

He grabs her hand and holds it in his, flipping it over so her palm lays flat on the top of his thigh. Her eyes flutter but don’t open. Iwaizumi takes the tip of his finger and drags it along the sensitive skin of her palm. “What are you doing?” she slurs against his shoulder, hand twitching at the contact.

“I’m reading your fortune,” he answers, quiet and low. “This is your money line,” he tells her, finger tracing just below her pinkie. “You’re broke as shit.”

“Are you fucking kidding me?” she deadpans, monotonous. “What the fuck am I going to do now?”

Iwaizumi continues to draw patterns along her palm. She’s certain he’s making it up, but it doesn’t really matter. Whatever he says to her then, touch feather-light and sweet, she’d take anything he’d say at face value. “This is your head line. I don’t know what that means, though. And this is your life line. You’re going to be the first person to live to two-fifty. And this is your love line.”

She swallows, eyes still shut. She couldn’t open them if she tried. “What’s it say?” she asks, voice dry.

There’s a knock on the door. Iwaizumi shoots up at once, dropping her hand and becoming rigid. She slips at little, nearly falling into the side of the couch, but rightens herself up just in time to hear, from the other side of the door, “Open the fuck up, I know you’re in there!”

And before she can really have any grasp on the scenario or what it means or the potential severity of it, there’s chaos. Bodies moving around her and curses spilling from lips. Iwaizumi, once more, grabs her by her arm and pulls her to her feet. “I’m sorry,” he says, and he tugs at her.

Her feet stumble in an attempt to follow, and once she’s up there on her feet she really as a second to realize how dizzy and shitty she feels. She trips over her own feet, and Iwaizumi pulls her into a dark room, and pushes her down onto something soft. “I’m sorry,” he repeats, and the knocking at the door gets louder and violent. “Stay here. Don’t make any noise.”

Iwaizumi disappears then. She’s on his bed. That much she’s able to realize. And really, she doesn’t have it in her to be frightened. At least her drunken state is good enough for that. She just leans back and lets sleep take over.

When she wakes up again, it’s morning. And he’s gone. Iwaizumi has disappeared from his own apartment. The only thing that remains is empty cans of beer, and a blood stain on the counter.

───────

The sports store has to be her worst job by far. It’s some sort of cosmic punishment for spitting in that guy’s receipt.

She has to wear this ridiculous collared shirt that makes her feel like she’s choking, and the smell of plastic and rubber is nauseating. The air is stale and stuffy and there is a layer of sweat that coats her skin before her first hour is up.

It sucks. Kiyoko is the only silver lining.

Kiyoko’s manager badge is pinned neatly to her chest, and she smooths out the front of her pants as she explains the ins and outs of getting their finnicky register to work. She licks her lips to wet them as she talks, she tucks her hair behind her ear, and she smiles softly as she lays out clear instructions.

And the whole time she watches, sort of awestruck and not really listening.

She doesn’t really know how to talk to Kiyoko, and throughout her whole first shift she just sort of watches her. Watches as she restocks and explains the products and how to organize and where to take breaks. She wants to say something but can’t think of anything.

By the end of her shift, she hasn’t learned anything, and is preemptively embarrassed that Kiyoko is going to have to explain everything over again to her tomorrow. Or maybe she’ll break her record for quickest firing after Kiyoko realizes the full extent of her incompetence.

She’s standing outside the front shop’s door, watching as Kiyoko locks up and reiterates the closing procedures (of which she retains nothing), and something pricks at her spin. She turns her head, looking just slightly over her shoulder.

Iwaizumi’s there, lingering in the parking lot and leaning against his old, battered car. His nose is more crooked that before, and when he smiles at her it cracks open a cut in his lip. He waves. She smiles.

───────

She’s become an on-call nurse.

It’s never anything worse than the stabbing (which she’s grateful for, because she’s started having reoccurring nightmares where every towel she owns becomes oversaturated with blood, but the flow never slows).

If there’s any sort of silver lining, it’s that her skills have improved. No longer are the wounds she stitches up angry, crooked red lines of over-agitation slathered in too much Neosporin to compensate for it. Her precision and steadiness have both improved; she figures she’s just gotten used to threading through skin.

She would go to nursing school, if she had any semblance of drive or determination. But she doesn’t, so she doesn’t. She just sits on her couch and waits for the call to come so she can go complete some of her back-alley medical procedures.

Iwaizumi’s her favorite patient. Kunimi complains the least and Kyotani has the best pain tolerance. But Iwaizumi’s still her favorite.

He’s sitting on one of the kitchen stools in his apartment, one of his hands lazily grazing against the back of her thigh as she stands in between his legs, focused intensely on the gash that decorates his cheek. He’s had plenty of these, she can see the faint markings of them underneath her fingers as she works. Most of them were never deep enough to become anything other than a faint mark you can only see if you squint. Some of them are pale and in stark contrast to his tanned skin.

You see him and you see them.

There’s no sound but the overworked rotating fan that spits and gurgles and begs to be put out of its misery. Iwaizumi watches her as she works to close his wound. “You know you always do that when you concentrate,” he says, tired voice rough and low. He draws circles just above the back of her knee with his thumb.

“Do what?” she asks, reaching for a pair of old kitchen scissors on the counter. She resolves to disinfect them later. But it’s not like Iwaizumi has actually ever cooked anything in his life. At least nothing edible. She snips the end of the suture.

“You stick out the end of your tongue,” he tells her, grinning. And she abandons her task of tearing into her alcohol wipes in favor of narrowing her eyes at him. “Like this,” he says, and pokes the very tip of his tongue out between his two lips, brow furrowed in a bit of mock concentration. “It’s cute.”

He winces slightly as she cleans off his wound with the alcohol wipe. He tries to play it off like he doesn’t, but she notices, and smiles, just a bit. “You think everything I do is cute,” she tells him, as if he needs reminding.

And it’s true. Iwaizumi’s liberal with the word. Everything about her gets the label. When she wakes up in the morning and her hair is a mess and there’s still sleep in her eyes. When he drives her home from work and she tugs at the collar of her uniform, complaining loudly about how much she hates it. The way she eats. How she texts. Everything.

“Cause you’re cute,” he asserts. And she deposits the now rusty alcohol wipe onto the counter with the remainder of the discarded medical equipment she’s used on him.

He doesn’t say anything else as she places a bandage over the stitched-up slice on his cheek and she doesn’t go anywhere when it’s done. Even though there’s nothing left for her to do. Even those there’s no reason for her to be standing in between his legs still, she doesn’t want to leave.

Iwaizumi doesn’t ask her to, so she doesn’t. She stays, and his hand slowly creeps up the back of her thigh. “Thanks,” he tells her, grinning. “I’ll pay you.”

“Fuck off,” she rolls her eyes. “You and me both know you don’t have money to pay me with.”

His hand squeezes slightly. “I’ll get some.”

“Don’t do anything that’ll get you hurt again,” she chastises lightly, and raises a hand to cup his cheek, and she brushes her thumb just under the bandage, careful to dodge any bruises that have blossomed. “Swear to fucking god, you’re gonna give me a heart attack.”

“Aww,” he coos, and uses the grip he has on her thigh to pull her forward. She stumbles, just a bit, and a hand automatically goes to his shoulder to steady herself. “You’re worried about me.”

There’s no part of her that is inclined to take her hand off of him. She slips it behind his neck and lifts her other hand to meet it, fingers twining together. “Course I’m worried about you,” she tells him, unashamed. “You dickhead. How could I not be?”

Iwaizumi studies her. His eyes are bright and green and as they scan over the details of her face they’re all she can focus on. He has pretty eyes. They might be one of the prettiest things about him. Iwaizumi blinks at her, and then swallows. “Can I tell you something?”

She nods, still thinking of his eyes. “Yeah.”

“I think I might be in love with you.”

“I know.”

He uses his free hand grip the tip of her chin, softly, but in a way that gives him control. She can’t look away from his eyes, and she doesn’t have to say it.

When Iwaizumi kisses her, it doesn’t feel like it’s the first time. It feels familiar, like she’s returning to something she didn’t know she had. It’s chaste for only a second. Like Iwaizumi got a taste of her and then could not hold back for even a second longer. The hand on her chin tangles in the roots of her hair, the one on her thigh shoots up to her back, inching up under her shirt.

Iwaizumi’s something special to her, she thinks, as he nibbles on her bottom lip. Something she doesn’t quiet understand. All of her life has been rot and decay. It has been death and violence and blood and those are all things that are tacked right alongside Iwaizumi’s name. They come with him just as they come with her.

But he doesn’t make her feel like the wooden boards that hold her home up are soft and wet and termite ridden. He doesn’t make her feel like the flesh of every fruit she touches is squishy and leaking and smelling of something foul. For the first time in her life, she feels like she’s tasting something fresh.

He lifts her, and carries her to the bedroom. The persistent summer heat melts them both, sweat sticking to their skin. The fan still sputters. A small cut on Iwaizumi’s lip makes him taste of rust and iron. The integrity of the walls around them are soiled, and one day, maybe someday soon, they will fall in on themselves.

But still, in his sheets, she feels fresh.

───────

They locked the doors of the sports shop for their fifteen-minute break. She leans against the wall on the back of the building and smokes a cigarette. Kiyoko sits on a pile of palettes and watches.

“Did he call you his girlfriend?” Kiyoko asks, twisting and untwisting the cap on her water, just for something to do with her hands. “Or did you just hook up?”

“I dunno,” she answers with a mouthful of smoke. The sun beams down on her, and for the first time in a while, she actually enjoys it. It’s cooled down today, with a healthy amount of fluffy white clouds in that picturesque blue sky. “It’s not like he asked or anything, but it felt like more than a hook up. He said he thinks he’s in love with me.”

“He thinks?” Kiyoko repeats back to her, sounding like she’s trying not to sound incredulous, and doing a very bad job.

She thinks that maybe she’s had a bit of a bad influence over Kiyoko, who was, when she first met her, a perfectly nice girl with a good work ethic and no apparent flaws. And just after a few weeks, she’s become the type of person to indulge in a bit of healthy shit-talking and let breaks run just a few minutes extra.

It’s almost scary to imagine what a few more weeks with her would do. She’s just a corrupting force, not much she can do about it.

Her foot taps. “I’ve known,” she admits. “He’s not subtle about it.”

Kiyoko tilts her head. “Do you love him?”

“Of course I do,” she answers at once, and puts her cigarette out on the wall behind her. “But I’m not very good at loving people.”

Their fifteen-minute break ends at twenty-two minutes. Kiyoko expresses guilt over this and compensates by putting a little extra effort into cleaning and restocking and organizing while she sits behind the counter and doodles in her stolen fuzzy pink journal.

She knows that maybe a part of her should feel bad for sitting back while Kiyoko does all of the work, because she knows it’s a piece of shit move. But Kiyoko tells her repeatedly that honestly, she doesn’t mind doing the work, and as long as she takes care of the customers, it’s fine.

So she tells herself that it’s fine, and that really, she’s doing what Kiyoko wants, anyways. And plus it’s not like she’s any good at the majority of her job. The page of her journal meant for children is covered in dozens of Marvin the Martian’s. It’s the only thing she knows how to draw. She starts adding another one, and thinks about Iwaizumi.

He was in her apartment early this morning, before she woke up. He left a note that briefly explained that he’s out on business for the day (like she doesn’t know what that mean, but she appreciates the ambiguity), but he would be back in time to pick her up from work. He also left a wad of cash of dubious origin; the note explaining that it’s for the stitches, not the sex (three underlines on the ‘not,’ he wanted that very clear). His daily gift of coffee was left beside the money, the condensation soaking into the paper bills.

And it’s sort of pathetic on her part, because the entire day before, he was with her, and most of the night, he was with her. Really, it’s only been a few hours, so there’s really no excuse for her to miss him this much. It’s all she can think about. She adds little hearts to the eyes of Marvin.

Her fingers tug under the collar of her work uniform. If it’s not good for anything else, it’s good for covering the dark purple marks left by Iwaizumi, at least.

Thinking of him passes the time. It’s so dead that even Kiyoko has given up on her busying tasks in favor of slumping behind the counter. She’s quick to flip to a new page, and she does a sloppy sketch of Kiyoko that does little to capture her real life beauty. The pen lines overlap and her eyes are uneven. Kiyoko declares that it’s the best drawing she’s ever seen.

She’s grateful for Kiyoko. It’s nice to have a friend. Someone that’s not the person you’re sleeping with or his friends. Kiyoko leans her head against her shoulder, and says, “I’m glad we hired you.”

And it’s strange, but for the first time, she sort of feels like she has a reason to try.

───────

It’s too hot to lie on the couch or the bed. She and Iwaizumi lie side by side on his hardwood floor. She’s lifting up one of his hands, cradling it carefully, studying the lines of it. “Can I ask you something?” she asks, lips and voice dry.

“Of course.”

“Are we like, in a relationship?” she asks, and it earns a hearty chuckle from Iwaizumi. She’s quick to lightly pinch in the inside of his hand. “Don’t laugh. I just wanna know what your endgame with me is.”

Since the initial incident, there have been about six more incidents, all involving proclamations of love and no further discussion of status. Not that she particularly cares what the response is. There are two facts that she knows are true: Iwaizumi is in love with her, and he’s not fucking anyone else. So yes or no, it doesn’t make too much of a difference, as long as those two facts don’t change.

“I’m gonna marry you,” is Iwaizumi’s proud and confident answer.

She turns her head towards him so he can see the eyebrow she raises. “You are?”

“Yeah,” he breathes out.

“You seem really certain.”

“I am.”

She hums, and then turns her head to look back up at the ceiling. There are stains she doesn’t recognize. ”You might change your mind. I’m a really fucked up person.”

“That’s okay. I am too.”

“My dad’s a cop,” she says, and doesn’t know why.

Iwaizumi hesitates, and when he does respond, it’s a soft, unsure, “Oh,” and it gives off the impression that she fucked up, just now.

“We don’t talk,” she rushes to explain, desperate for him not to hold it against her. It’d be a fucked-up thing to hold against her, she thinks. There’s no one who hates her father and the things he does more than her. There’s no one impacted by it more than her. “Well, he tries to, but I ignore him. He’s a piece of shit.”

“Did he like, send you here to entrap me, or something?” Iwaizumi asks. She can’t tell if he’s serious or not.

“No,” she scoffs. “If he had known I was planning on leaving he would’ve locked me in a shed somewhere.”

“Then he can get fucked,” Iwaizumi says with a shrug. “I don’t care if he’s a cop or not.”

She nods, the declaration lifting at least some of the weight off of her shoulders. She wiggles slightly against the floor, like she’s trying to settle against it, make herself more comfortable.

Iwaizumi’s head turns towards her. “Is your brother still with him?”

“My brother’s dead,” is her swift and immediate response, said so succinctly it makes Iwaizumi flinch. “It’s because of my dad.”

“What happened?”

“Overdosed,” she answers, tongue feeling so dry she’s afraid it might crumble away. It’s hard to swallow. “He had problems. My dad caused them, and then made them worse.”

Iwaizumi sits up and looks down at her. She doesn’t move to follow. She lies there on the floor and stares back up at him, expectantly. “Then I’m glad you’re here with me, and not him. You can always be here with me.”

“You promise?”

“I promise.”

It feels strangely like a vow.

───────

Iwaizumi’s gone. She’s not working and Iwaizumi’s gone. The store’s closed and she has nothing to do but rot away on her bed, eating freezer-burnt popsicles and staring at her phone while her television plays shitty reruns in the background.

She’s contemplating texting Kiyoko. She’s never texted her outside of work, and isn’t one-hundred percent sure if she should. But she cares more about Kiyoko than her actual job, and thinks it might be worth the risk. Maybe they could go shopping or get lunch or do something that friends actually do.

She’s holding the phone and the popsicle in both hands above her head, staring at it as if she’s waiting for some kind of sign to send the text or not. The popsicle is starting to melt in her hand. It drips down her wrist, and falls straight down her arm. She doesn’t care, she has to shower anyways.

And it’s just when she’s about to send the text that her phone rings. Unknown number. Her eyes narrow. Usually the only calls she gets are from her dad (declined) or Iwaizumi (answered). An unknown number is uncharted territory.

She then has a vision of Iwaizumi stabbed and bleeding out, and an unknown number trying to reach her over it.

She answers at once with an aggressive, “Who’s this?”

The answer is not of the urgent nature you’d expect from a stabbing. It’s a calm and chilling, “You know you’re a really hard person to get in touch with.”

“Yeah,” she agrees slowly. “Who is this?”

“You might remember me from the CD shop. You sold me PCD. I’m Kageyama Tobio.”

Her brow furrows. “I didn’t really do much selling, but sure. Why are you calling me and how’d you get my number?”

“I’m an officer with-“

“Officer?” she cuts him off.

“Yeah.”

“Fuck off.”

She hangs up, and goes to block the number. Her fingers hover over the keys of her phone, hesitating. She dials a number she knows by heart, and asks Iwaizumi how to block numbers.

───────

She overhears on accident. The walls are thin and they think she’s asleep in Iwaizumi’s bed. And she was, until about twenty-seconds ago when their heated conversation woke her up. She’d get up to tell them off about it if she wasn’t so fascinated by their conversation.

“I’m gonna kill him.”

“You can’t kill him. Do not kill him. Just think with your head for a second.”

“It’s not good if he’s calling her. He visited her at old job. He’s gotta go, I don’t care. We should’ve killed him when he fucking quit to be a cop. Or when he narced and got Kindaichi arrested.”

“Just let me talk to him, alright?”

“Yeah, that’ll go well.”

“At least give me a chance.”

“Fine. You get a chance. But if he fucks with her, he’s dead. I don’t care what you say.”

She blinks, and swallows, rolling over in his bed. She tries to conjure up some sort of feeling about the matter but comes up short. She closes her eyes, and reasons that this is what she signed up for.

───────

Her guard’s gone down since Iwaizumi’s become a part of her life. She’s not careful enough anymore. When there’s a knock on the door, she throws open her locks without thinking about it, and flings the door wide open, just to see her father on the other side.

It only takes a second to register that it’s him, and she’s slamming the door shut once more. He gets to it before it can close all the way, and leans in heavy. Her panic is immediate, and she leans her whole body up against that door trying to get it closed again.

The door rattles, and it rattles her with it. She presses her should hard into it, and reaches for the chain lock, struggling to hook it with the way her father slams into the wooden door. She doesn’t realize that she’s started sobbing until the lock’s secure in place.

Still, he rages against it. “I taught you better than that,” he screams from the other side. The sound of his fists is familiar; it reminds her of home. “You’re asking for it, opening up your door like that, for anyone to break in!”

Her breathing is unsteady and her hands are shaking. She slides down to sit on the floor, back pressed against the door, and she fishes for the phone out of her pocket.

“Do you know how long it took me to find you?” her father yells, and the dogs in the apartment below her bark so loud she can almost hear it over the sound of his voice. “Do you know how hard I had to work to track you down? And you just slam the door in my face?”

She messes up Iwaizumi’s number the first time she tries to dial it. Then again a second time. “Fuck!” she whispers out in frustration as her trembling thumbs mess it up a third time. She gets it right on the fourth.

“You’re an ungrateful little bitch, you know that right?” he yells, his foot now jamming into the door. She can feel it against her back. It almost throws her. “You left your family! Your brother died and you left!”

She’s afraid the door’s going to break. The call goes to voicemail. She calls back immediately.

“I don’t care what it takes! I don’t care if I have to beat it into you! You’re coming home with me and I am going to teach you to respect your father.”

There’s a click on the other line, and then she hears his voice. “Hey, love, now’s not a good time-“

“You have to get rid of him,” she hiccups out, and there is another fierce slam of fists against the door. “He’s here. He showed up and he’s gonna hurt me and I-“

“Who are you talking to in there? Huh? Answer me, bitch!”

Something cool runs through her spine. The door might break. She thinks she might die.

“Is that your dad?”

She nods, and then remembers he can’t see her. “Yes.”

“I’ll be there in five.”

Another click, and Iwaizumi’s gone. Her breathing is out of control. Five minutes. She can last another five minutes. She squeezes her eyes shut. He’s still yelling, her father. Yelling the way he always has. Ferociously, with a kind of hated that’s so potent and acidic she’s almost in awe of it.

But she’s known him for long enough to know how to block it out, well enough. She raises her shaking hands to cover her ears, and she curls into herself, wanting to disappear, and willing these five minutes to pass as quickly as possible.

She forces the world around her to go black.

The knocking on her door pulls her from it. It’s different. Gentler this time. Softer. The phone she abandoned buzzes against the hardwood floor beside her. Once it stops, it starts again. Slowly, she realizes herself, takes stock of her body. She looks at her phone. It’s been seven minutes.

The knocking on the other side of the door continues. He calls her name. “It’s me. Just me, he’s gone. Please let me know you’re in there.” The phone stops ringing. “Fuck,” he exclaims, quieter, harder to hear. The phone starts ringing again.

She stands. Her legs are shaking, and it takes her a minute to get steady on her feet. But once she gets there, she undoes the chain lock, and opens the door.

Iwaizumi looks worse for wear; his eyes are bloodshot and the widen at the sight of her. “Sorry,” she says. Her voice is hoarse. “I think I blacked out.”

He doesn’t waste time. Iwaizumi launches forward, and wraps his arms around her middle, holding her so tightly her feet are off the ground. “I was so worried,” he admits against her hair. “He was gone when I got here,” Iwaizumi tells her. “I have people working on it.”

She returns the embrace, arms going around his shoulders and once more, her eyes start to prick with tears. She holds her breath for ten seconds before she speaks. “Don’t kill him, please,” she says, words muffled by the fabric of his shirt.

Iwaizumi’s hold on her waist gets tighter. “You know I’d do anything to help you, right? Anything to make sure you’re safe, and something like this doesn’t happen again?”

It’s not the type of reassurance she’s looking for. Her heart is starting to beat faster once more. She buries her face in the crook of his shoulder. “I know he’s a piece of shit, but he’s stilly my dad,” she says, trying not to cry. “Do whatever you want, just don’t kill him.”

Iwaizumi stays still and silent, doing nothing but continuing to hold her. She thinks he’s not breathing. She can’t feel it, any intake of exhale of breath. Just his furious, persistent heartbeat. She bites down on her bottom lip. “Please,” she tacks on, his extended silence causing a feral sort of desperation to grow in her chest.

That seems to do it for him. His the tension in his shoulders lessens, and he relents. “Okay,” Iwaizumi agrees. “Alright. I won’t do anything you don’t want me to do.”

It’s open-ended. It’s unclear. But it’s not her father dying at his hands. So she’ll take it. She lets herself sink into his hold, and she takes it.

───────

Her well-organized list of problems has been upended. A bright, shiny new problem has outshone all of her other ones, dimming them, displacing them, reducing their need for attention.

Problem #1: Iwaizumi Hajime, neighbor, definite arms-dealer, maybe boyfriend, has been arrested.

It’s hard to get people to listen to you in a police station. Cops sit at their little desks and they look at you like they’re pretending to pay attention to what you’re saying but really, all they can think about is how much better than you they think they are, and how little they care about your problems.

Matsukawa has a hand over her shoulder, not firm but not lose, like he’s ready to pull her back down to her feet if she leans too far over the front counter. She’s trying to appeal to the lady behind the front desk, (as if there’s anything she could actually do), voice raw and shaky, knuckles going white as she grips at the edge of the counter.

“Please,” she begs, her unhidden desperation feeling out of place in the clean station, where the smell of hand sanitizer and pine floor cleaner is heavy in the air. It’s far too bureaucratic for her to be like this; reduced to a pile of tears and snot, begging and pleading and being ignored like a small child throwing a fit. “He didn’t do anything to me. This is fucking insane, lady.”

“Honey,” she says, voice slathered in condescension, like she knows. Like she knows Iwaizumi’s been treating her like shit this whole time and she’s just been too stupid to realize it. Like she knows what’s best for her just because she sits behind the front desk at a police station for eight hours five days a week for semi-not shit pay and a pension. “If you want to help your boyfriend, the best thing you can do is get him a lawyer, okay? Yelling at me isn’t going to help. They can hold him for forty-eight hours, and there’s nothing you can do about it.”

God, she wants to reach over this fucking desk and sink her nails into this lady’s face. Dig under her skin and gather evidence so they know it was her that did it. That desk lady’s sickly-sweet tone and fake pity had driven her to madness. A long-buried thirst for violence that makes her feel like a grade-school girl boils in her blood and it’s like Matsukawa can sense it because it’s then that his hand goes tight around her shoulder, and he pulls her back. “Thank you, ma’am,” he says, relaxed politeness sounding natural on him. “We appreciate your help.”

She doesn’t appreciate her help. She doesn’t appreciate shit. She wants to jump over the counter and make that known, but Matsukawa grabs at her arms and tugs, using a bit more force to get her away from that desk. But she makes a point to turn her head and shoot that lady one more rage-filled sneer.

Matsukawa doesn’t let her go until he’s pulled her out the front door, into the sidewalk of a busy city street. But he has no qualms about stopping her there, a dam in the middle of the sidewalk, foot traffic splitting and flowing around them. He grabs her by both of her shoulders. “Okay, you need to calm down. Like right now. Alright?”

Her teeth grind together. “I want to pop her fucking eyes out,” she spits out, like an unrepentant child, unashamed of her outburst.

“Well, that’s not going to do anything to help, so don’t fucking do that,” Matsukawa says, a bit of a bit in his voice and slightly shaking her shoulders. The air surrounding them is suffocating, hot and humid and beads of sweat are popping up on the back of her neck already. “And she’s right. There’s nothing we can do but get him a lawyer.”

She doesn’t look at Matsukawa. She hates him right now, because he’s right, and there’s nothing her blind rage and outburst can do to make it better. She focuses her stare just past him, watching the stream of tourists and college students and burdened employees that drifts down the sidewalk, past both of them. She gnaws on the inside of her cheek. “Whatever.”

He releases her then, and her gaze falls to her shoes as Matsukawa steps back from her. A hand reaches up to push stray strands of hair away from his forehead. “Oikawa’s calling his guy. He should be down here soon. We’ve gone through this before, we know what to do. Iwa’s not an idiot, he can handle himself in there.”

The combination of rage and embarrassment tastes sour in the back of her throat. “He didn’t do it,” she asserts, for no one else other than herself.

“Course he didn’t fucking do it,” Matsukawa scoffs. “Iwa has lines. Hitting his girl is way past them.”

Her mouth furls. It’s getting hotter and hotter every second there on that sidewalk. Every emotion feels too big for her body; it paralyzes her. She hates this. She fucking hates this. Iwaizumi being locked in some holding cell with the drunken disorderly conduct leftovers from the night before. Him being in there because of her.

Matsukawa sees her standing there, stiff and clenched up, and sighs. “Look,” he starts off, more sympathetic than before, and the pity makes her twitch, “why don’t you just come back to mine and Makki’s place for now? You don’t have to go-“

And then, the call of her name. Loud enough to get the attention of everyone on that sidewalk. Commanding enough that people look, just to make sure, just to double check that it’s not their name, that they didn’t make a mistake, somehow. She looks over Matsukawa’s shoulder and sees her father. Out in the open, on the sidewalk.

“I’m so glad you’re okay,” he says as he approaches, broad smile sending a new rush of rage down her spine. Matsukawa raises an eyebrow at her, but she doesn’t dare to tear her eyes away from her father, looking clean in his freshly pressed uniform. Like this is some kind of special occasion for him. “I was worried help wouldn’t get to you in time.”

She blinks. There’s no room for fear in her body. “Help?” she echoes back, voice hoarse.

He moves to reach for her. She steps back, Matsukawa places himself in front of her.

“When I saw how that boyfriend of yours was treatin’ you, I had to call in a favor. I got a friend that works in this district, y’know. I got lots of friends, Bug.”

Really, she shouldn’t be surprised. She feels stupid for not thinking of it earlier.

But she didn’t think of it. She wasn’t expecting it. She was completely caught off guard by her god-awful, piece of shit father.

So she can’t be blamed for her reaction.

She reaches into her pocket and fishes out her keys. A few for the sports store. Three for her apartment building (one for the front door, one for her place, and one for Iwa’s), and one to her old home she shared with her brother. She places them each between her fingers, and without very much hesitation, she punches the end of those keys into her father’s face, with as much force is left inside of her.

Pretty immediately, there’s a reaction from the stream of people. Screams, she thinks. Matsukawa’s quick to act, grabbing her by the waist and pulling her away from her now-bleeding father. But everything around her is white noise. She's numb to it. She looks at her father and she hopes the gashes will scar. “You piece of shit!” she screams at him. “I’ll fucking kill you! You fucker! You’re fucking dead!”

───────

Her list is fucked now. She doesn’t know where rage issues fall in the new order. But probably higher than before, she would have to guess, because she’s sitting in an interrogation room.

Kageyama Tobio sits across from her, sleeves pushed up to his elbows and arms crossed over his chest. He’s leaned back in his seat, and she has this feeling she’s about to be scolded. “Assaulting a police officer is pretty serious.”

She feels dirty, humid air making her skin sweaty and salty, her hair frizzy and tangled. A bit of blood splattered on the skin of her forearm. They wouldn’t let her wash it off. “He’s not a police officer to me,” she says, words coming stubbornly out of the corner of her mouth. “He’s just my piece of shit father.”

Kageyama leans forward, bare forearms pressed against the cool metal of the table between them. “Can I ask you something?” He does not wait for the answer. “Is Iwaizumi worth all of this? Look at where you are, do you think this is worth it?”

“Can I ask you something instead?” She waits for confirmation from him. He gives her a slight nod. “Did you like PCD?”

He sighs, fingers tapping against the table. She wants to break them. “We can drop the charges on you, y’know. If you have something more valuable to give us, we’d be happy to do something for you in return.”

She raises an eyebrow. “Valuable?”

Kageyama leans back again. He adjusts a lot, she’s noticed. Moving and shifting and repositioning. She has stayed still in her seat. “Listen, I’ve known Iwaizumi for a while. All of them. I know what they’re like. I know how they can make you feel. You get caught up in it. Good people like you and me find themselves in shit situations without realizing it. But let me tell you this,” he says, severe, and a finger pointed in her direction, “Iwaizumi’s not going to give this up for anything. And you’re not an exception. As much as you think he cares about you, he cares about his job more.”

She can see her mother so clearly, then. For the first time in years. She can see her features, the details of her face. The ones she has in common with her brother. The ones she has in common with her. She can see the anger twisted into her brow like a permanent fixture. She can hear her voice, as if it’s in her ear now.

“Men like your father, they only care about one thing. And it’s not you and it’s not me.”

She lifts her head to meet Kageyama’s stare. His eyes are so sharp and so blue.

“Kageyama?”

He leans forward. “Yeah?”

“Suck my dick.”

The sigh of defeat is, at the very least, satisfying. His shoulders slump and she watches the last bit of hope he was holding onto fade out of him. And at least she has that. “Well, in that case, you’re free to go. Your father’s not pressing charges.”

She stands at once, not immediately being hit the with realization that he had tried to trick her into snitching. “Fucking finally,” she spits out, her limbs feeling stiff and disjointed.

She’s halfway out the door when Kageyama says, “Yeah, well, see you later, I’m sure.”

───────

Iwaizumi is released before the forty-eight hours is up. She does not find out until four days after.

Most of those four days are spent numbly sitting through her shifts, face weathered and her limbs hanging from her body like heavy, led weights. She lies in her bed. She hardly eats. She checks her phone every five to ten minutes and she calls Oikawa and Matsukawa and Makki and gets their voicemails and she hears nothing.

And then, as she’s hanging out the window, smoking her second cigarette in a row, she sees him. Walking down the sidewalk with his hands in his pockets and his chin up. She watches, in disbelief for a moment, waiting to see if he’s going to turn into their apartment building and run straight up the stairs and into her arms and kiss her and apologize and swear that he would exact vengeance on her father. For the both of them.

But Iwaizumi just walks. He goes straight until he is out of her view.

With shaking hands, she texts him:

so when were u planning on telling me u got out?

He does not respond.

───────

It’s a month before he speaks to her again.

A month after no texts and no calls and no early morning coffee visits and nothing but the creaks of his floorboards from above. It’s torture. It scratches at her throat and it puts nails in her bloodstream and she spends more than one evening laid out on her bathroom floor, sobs wrecking through her frame, clawing at nothing, trying to grab onto something.

The feeling of abandonment is not entirely unfamiliar. It tastes the same as anger, and it never comes without it. And the combination can make her irrational.

“-and my friend Tanaka has a truck,” Kiyoko says into her, her voice fuzzy from the poor connection. She has her phone pressed between her ear and her shoulder, haphazardly throwing whatever belongings she can find into the cardboard box she stole from work. “He offered to help move your stuff out if you want.”

“Yeah,” she mumbles, drifting through her apartment, stopping as she settles in front of her CD player, sitting in the middle of her kitchen table. The one Iwaizumi gifted her. She makes no move to grab it. She’s sure that Kiyoko has one already. “Maybe he could come by tomorrow. I could be done packing by then. That cool?”

“Yeah, that should work. I’ll ask when he’s free.”

She hums in response, and kicks at one of the legs of her coffee table. A lot of her sidewalk trash furniture is going to right back to where it came from. “Are you sure this is okay with you?”

“Of course!” is Kiyoko’s enthusiastic confirmation. “It’s been a little lonely since my last roommate moved out. And to be honest it’ll be nice to split the rent again.”

God, rent splitting. It sounds like a dream to her. Expenses divided in half-she almost drools at the thought of it. She chuckles. “Alright, fair enough. I’ll talk to you tomorrow, then. Should probably finish packing now.”

“Alright. See you then.”

She snaps her phone shuts and pockets it.

Even as she empties it of her belongings, the apartment is a mess. Littered with forgotten belongings and things she never had the motivation to get rid of. Things she doesn’t know what to do with. Things that she doesn’t need and can’t justify keeping but she can’t bring herself to trash. The Ponkadu mug. Her pink, fuzzy journals filled with love struck passages. A dried, dead dandelion Iwaizumi ripped from the ground and placed in her hand.

Her head throbs. She looks up at the ceiling above her, like she’s waiting for something. A creak or a slam or something. A sign that he’s still there. That he’s not as far away from her as he feels. But it’s silent, and there’s nothing. And it’s like he was never even there in the first place.

She swallows the lump in throat and returns her attention to the scattered objects in front of her. She forces herself to harden and drops the Ponkadu mug in the trash. Then the journal. Then the dandelion. And she thinks to herself, bitterly, like she’s in an argument with herself, that it’s not like he was never even here in the first place. The evidence of his existence is all over her. It lingers in her lungs, in her chest, it spreads through her bloodstream. Iwaizumi’s there, causing every ache and every sting and every throb. He’s there.

Something possesses her. Everything can go in the trash, suddenly, it doesn’t matter what it is. Plates and freezer-burnt ice cream and a half-empty first aid kit. Anything with the lingering presence of Iwaizumi is getting dumped. Trashed. Left rot and fester in some landfill. And after an hour passes, her apartment is covered with bursting, heavy black trash bags of her wasted belongings.

She sits on the floor, shoulders slumped, legs crossed. She already threw out her couch. Her mattress is sitting on the floor of Kiyoko’s apartment, in the bedroom that will be hers by tomorrow. So for now, all she has is the rotted hardwood floor, where Iwaizumi told her he’d marry her.

Her throat tightens. She cannot get out of here fast enough.

Sweat droplets form on the back of her neck as she stands, ready to start hauling bag after bag out to the presumably already overflowing dumpster behind her apartment building. Her knees knock together as she stands, and she moves towards her door, ready to prop it open with one of the trash bags.

She undoes her deadbolt. Then her chain lock. Then she opens the door, and Iwaizumi is there, hand raised to knock.

At the sight of him, her throat tightens up, and she is immediately, torn split between her rage and her desperation. As much as she wants him to hold her, to make her promises and give her the comfort she’s been craving so desperately for the past month, she wants to bite his head off just as much. To make him hurt the way he hurt her. To tear him up from the inside.

Instead, she stares, blankly, somewhat horrified. Her heart beats heavy in her throat and her ears get fuzzy. He looks the same. That makes her angry. She wishes there was some change, some difference. But the Iwaizumi that said that he loved her in her kitchen and that he’d marry her on her floor is the same one that left her to rot on her own.

He steps into her apartment, right past her, like he still has the right to, and looks at the state of it. Everything packed up. Everything scattered. He looks at her like he still has the right to. “What’s going on?”

She flinches, and her anger is starting to win. “I’m moving.”

Iwaizumi pulls that face. That same one. Always looking like he’s slightly dissatisfied with something. “Why?”

Why. It’s such a stupid question. She tries to take a breath to calm herself but it makes her shudder and lock up. “I’m sure if you think about it, you can figure it out.”

She watches the air enter and exit his lungs through the rising and falling of his shoulders. He looks at her, right through her. “Don’t leave.”

In an odd way, she likes the control. She likes the feeling that, for once in her life, she’s not the one begging. “Don’t tell me what to do. Not after you left me.”

He exhales sharply. Iwaizumi takes a step towards her, and she takes a step back. “C’mon, that’s not fair. I didn’t leave you. I just needed to put some distance between us for the time being. Your dad, he’s fucked, alright? It was a liability to-“

“A liability?” she cuts him off, hands clenched into fists by her side. The heat in her blood rises. “I’m a liability?”

Iwaizumi shakes his head and reaches towards her. She jerks away from him. “No, not that you’re a liability, it was just a risk to be around you while-“

“So, what, you couldn’t get one of your little errand boys to tell me about it?” she says, and it comes out like a bark. “You had to leave me in the dark for a month while you dicked off doing god knows what? Too risky to send a text? After I lied to the cops for you and risked getting arrested for you and became a fucking on-call nurse for you, you couldn’t send me a fucking text?”

Her breath is ragged. Iwaizumi stares down at her like he’s seeing for the first time. “I thought you wouldn’t care. I thought you don’t care about anything.”

And it’s too much for her. It’s too big for her body. It’s too much for her to carry and she can’t hold onto it anymore. “I care about everything! I care about everything so fucking much it makes me sick!” she erupts, tears in her voice and rolling down her face. Her skin feels hot. The air feels hot. “Is that what you liked about me so much? You thought I was some kind of apathetic ragdoll you could toss around and do whatever you want with?”

“I thought you would understand!” he eventually bites back at her, his own voice rising. “I thought you knew what kind of life I live and what that meant! God, you fucking act like nothing bothers you and you pretend to not see the world around you and you just expect me to read your mind?”

“What fucking person would be okay with being abandoned for a month?” she screams. “You knocked on my door and asked me for a favor and you hovered around me and you said you loved me and said you’d marry me and then you just fucking disappeared! That’s so fucked, Iwa. That’s so fucking cruel.”

He steps towards her, and before she can say anything his arms are around her shoulders, pulling her into his chest. Like one simple embrace will end it all. Like he can just take her in his arms and suddenly she’ll stay, suddenly it’ll fix everything. She wants it to. She wants it to so badly. But she places her palms on her chest and pushes him away. She stumbles back and looks at him with wet eyes. “Don’t fucking touch me.”

“I do love you,” he tells her, voice lower now. “I meant what I said and I still do. You’re my girl. You’re everything to me.”

She shakes her head, trembling. She can’t let it be true. “No, I’m not,” she asserts, backing up into her kitchen table. Her hands go around the edge of it. “I don’t mean anything to you. You wouldn’t have left me if I did.”

“I had a reason-“

“I don’t fucking care what your reason was! I don’t fucking care, Iwa! I don’t care about your stupid job or your stupid fucking guns or whatever! I care that you were here, and then you weren’t! You left me like my mom did and you left me like my brother did and then you come back here and you have the fucking audacity to not even be sorry about it. I fucking hate you!”

She knows that she doesn’t mean it, when she says it. Iwaizumi probably knows too. He probably knows she doesn’t mean it when she swipes the CD player he got her off the kitchen table and it goes flying. Soaring across the room until it slams into the opposite wall, breaking and crumpling against the pressure. Bits of it snap off.

Iwaizumi looks at it, and then he looks at her. She’s shaking. She wants to get on her knees and do everything she can to fix it the second it breaks. But it’s on the floor, broken and shattered. Iwaizumi nods, and then he leaves. He turns around and walks out the door and slams it shut behind him.

───────

Autumn cools everything down. The feverish sort of pain that made her almost delirious has chilled into a dull, steady ache. Kiyoko rests her head on her shoulder. They sit on the couch together, under a shared blanket, and watch old, cheesy horror movies. Every on-screen death makes Kiyoko flinch and hide her face under the blanket.

It’s odd, to be in her apartment, to have it be her own as well. Where the fridge is free of remnants of rotten food and is properly stocked with essentials. Where the furniture matches and there’s no stuffing spilling out of the cushioning. It’s small, and sometimes she has to fiddle with the pipes under the sink to avoid calling a plumber, but it’s nice. It’s well-kept and Kiyoko always has some kind of candle lit. The walls are white, just white, not stained yellow from years of cigarette smoking. The locks don’t look like they’re about to fall off the door. There’s no mold in the bathroom. No pest infestations. No decay in the hardwood floor.

It makes her feel so out of place.

“My parents helped with the deposit,” Kiyoko had explained to her, almost sheepishly, like this was something she should be ashamed of. “And with the first few months of rent while I built up some savings. It’s how I was able to get it.”

Her brother would’ve liked Kiyoko, she thinks. He would’ve liked her quiet demeanor, and the deliberate sort of way she carries herself. He would’ve liked how spending time with her is never overwhelming. He would’ve liked how her voice is like a small stream that runs down the street after a rainstorm.

They would’ve gotten along.

She has the thought that he would’ve hated Iwaizumi, and then tries to pretend that she didn’t.

Onscreen, a head is removed from a set of shoulders. She tries not to think of Iwaizumi. It makes her sick, even his name. Never once has she felt like she did the right thing. Kiyoko keeps telling her that sometimes, the right things hurt the most. But that doesn’t help. It doesn’t quell the nausea she feels at his memory. It doesn’t fade that dull, aching loneliness. It doesn’t make her feel better about leaving him.

Objectively, her life as improved post-Iwaizumi. She’s held onto the same job for several months in a row without incident (no spitting, cursing, or fighting-though that’s mostly due to Kiyoko). She actually has money in her bank account now, ¥50,901.96, after rent (which, isn’t a lot by any metric, but it’s definitely more than nothing). Her father stopped calling. Her diet is much more balanced. The cable’s better. She doesn’t really get mad anymore.

It's an improvement. A drastic one. Something she probably wouldn’t have been able to achieve on her own.

But it’s worse. It just feels worse.

Blood spews from a headless body, cartoonishly fake. Kiyoko squirms, and she doesn’t flinch.

───────

The bell on the door to the sports shop dings as the it closes, and a customer leaves with fresh tennis balls. She rests her cheek on the palm of her hand as she leans up against the counter. She’s drawing the earth as it explodes from the inside, splitting into dozens of chunks of land and ocean. “Who the fuck buys tennis balls in November?”

Kiyoko slides behind the counter to stand beside her, peering over her shoulder to watch her draw. “I dunno. Maybe he’s going somewhere warm,” she offers as a solution.

Kiyoko doesn’t hate people the way she does. She can’t ever hate someone just because she wants to; Kiyoko doesn’t ever want to. It makes her feel mean, since the feeling of hatred comes to her so naturally. “Yeah, maybe.”

“Noya thinks you’re cute,” Kiyoko says, suddenly stiffer when she talks. “He asked if you were going to go out with us tomorrow night.”

She doesn’t know who Noya is. She probably should. He’s probably someone that she’s met more than once. But she can’t conjure up the face that’s supposed to go with the name. “Which one’s he?” she asks, well past the point of caring if she seems rude to Kiyoko.

Kiyoko knows she’s rude, at this point.

“The short one,” she answers. “The one with the blond in his hair.”

Her pen digs into the notebook paper, adding shading around a blown-up chunk of earth. “Yeah, he’s cute, I guess.”

Kiyoko makes a noise of acknowledgement. “But you’re not into him.”

It’s not a question, so she doesn’t answer it. Kiyoko sighs, and rocks on her heel. “That’s fair. As long as it’s because you’re actually not into him, and not because you’re not over Iwaizumi.”

Hearing his name spoken so casually makes her flinch. Kiyoko notices and leans her head down on her shoulder. “Well, we’ll get there.”

───────

At her lowest point, she calls her father.

She dials his number so many times she loses track of it. She stares at the numbers for so long they start to lose meaning. When she closes her eyes, she sees them burned into the inside of her eyelids. She hits ‘call,’ and then hangs up, only to dial him right back up again.

She doesn’t know what she’s doing, and definitely not why. She just sort of acts, moved by impulse and a craving for something unknown.

It rings. It rings three times before he answers. His phone is gruff and worn on the other line. “Hello?”

Her hand slaps over her mouth, and she tries to quiet her breathing, like she’s hiding from him. Her eyes prick and burn. “Hello?” he repeats on the other end, more impatient this time. Her heart pounds like he’s just on the other side of the door. She doesn’t know what she’s doing.

“Fucking hell,” is the last thing she hears before the line goes dead. The phone clatters to the floor of her bedroom, and she cries. The first time she’s cried like this in months.

She really doesn’t know what she’s doing.

───────

Most of her time is spent lying in her bed, doing nothing, thinking about everything. Sometimes she goes along with Kiyoko when she goes out with her friends, and she sits in the corner and tries not to draw too much attention to herself. She hates that. Sometimes she tries to pick up extra shifts at work just to pass the time. She hates that too. Sometimes she goes to this cheap dive bar just two blocks away from her new apartment, just to have a drink or two in a place that’s not her bedroom.

She orders a second drink. It’s bone-chilling cold outside, and the alcohol makes her feel warmer. Just a bit. She thinks it’s sad that this is the most exciting part of her week.

At least the festering rot that tore her up from the inside was interesting. Now her life is boring and depressing.

The call of her name is sudden and jarring. She spins around in the barstool with an elevated heartrate and her fingers reaching for her keys. She doesn’t recognize him, at first. When her eyes first land on him, she continues looking for a second, before it catches up to her. Her heart leaps up to her throat. “Matsukawa?”

Matsukawa chugs, his head tilted back and his Adam’s apple bobbing, downing the pint until there’s nothing left but traces of white foam. Her fingers tap against her own glass, looking at the condensation that leaves a ring around the wooden bar. It reminds her of the plastic cups of coffee Iwa brought her daily. She didn’t drink coffee before that. Now every morning she finds herself crawling out of bed at eight in the goddamn morning, throwing on whatever clothes are on her floor so she can get to the closest coffee shop before it gets too busy.

“Is he over me yet?” she asks, tips of her fingers collecting droplets of condensation.

Matsukawa slams his glass down on the bar. “Nah.” He wipes his mouth with the back of his sleeve. “Not even a little. Iwa’ll never get over you.”

Her eyes roll. Matsukawa sees this and narrows his own. “Don’t think I don’t mean it.”

There’s an awkwardness that hangs between them. She takes a sip of her own drink and swishes it over her tongue, trying to distract from it. “He’s got a long time to.”

“Doesn’t matter. I know him. You were it.”

“Then he shouldn’t have left me.”

She says this, she realizes, with familiarity, the kind that no longer exists between her and Matsukawa. She hasn’t seen him since her father’s blood was on her hands. Any closes between them granted by the lifesaving has since evaporated, and now, they’re as good as strangers. At least to her.

Still, Matsukawa leans back in the bar stool. “Yeah, he probably shouldn’t have.”

She shifts in her seat uncomfortably. It would’ve been better if he argued. “Yeah,” is all she can manage, her fire dulled.

“You don’t look like you’re doing that much better than he is,” Matsukawa remarks, and she offers no reaction. It’s not like he’s wrong. “You two are both idiots. You’re perfect for each other.”

Her lip furls up. “You got a lot of fucking opinions on this.”

“Hard not to. Iwa’s heartbreak is everyone’s problem.”

Iwa’s heartbreak. She doesn’t like the implication of it. Like it’s just his. Like it’s nothing something he caused for her. Like it’s not something they share.

“C’mon,” Matsukawa says, hand clapping on her back, like he can see the thoughts brewing in her head, and he wants to cut her off before they can work their way over to him, “let me walk you home.”

He does. He walks her home and he talks about his recovery post-stabbing and he rants about Oikawa and he talks about this girl he’s been talking to that he’s not really that into and he talks about how good Makki’s been looking lately but he doesn’t ask about her and he doesn’t bring up Iwaizumi again.

At least that she’s grateful for.

And when he deposits her at her front door, he grins, and tells her that he’ll see her later.

───────

It’s snowing. She stands outside of his apartment, box in her hands and something caught in her throat. It’s been a few weeks since she’s seen Matsukawa, and she’s done little but think about him and what he said and fixate on it and let it gnaw away at her.

So she’s outside Iwaizumi’s apartment, snow getting stuck in her hair and fingers going numb.

Her list of problems doesn’t really exist anymore. They’re not as material, harder to pin down. Her anger issues have simmered down into this lethargic mood that has much less daily wear and tear. The split rent and the consistent income have dissipated the money problems. She doesn’t worry about things the way she used to. Things don’t really plague her the way they used to.

It’s really just him. It’s really just Iwaizumi.

She sighs. It was easier in her head. Everything’s always easier in her head.

Now that she’s here, all she can think about is everything that can go wrong.

Matsukawa being wrong, and Iwaizumi being over her, so much so that he’s not even moved at the sight of her and there’s already someone else in there warming up her side of the bed. He could be working. He could hate her. It could go as badly as it did last time.

Kiyoko disapproved of the plan. Kiyoko wanted her to move on. She wanted her to find a life outside of Iwaizumi, purpose outside of him, drive outside of him.

But people like Kiyoko don’t get it. People like Kiyoko don’t know what it’s like to be infected with something so consuming and persistent and chronic. Kiyoko doesn’t get it. Iwaizumi gets it.

He gets it.

She inhales slowly, and forces herself to move forward.

Breaking into the front door of her old apartment building is something she’s done more times than she’s proud of. It’s oddly nostalgic to pop that old lock open, and it feels the same as she creeps up the stairs. It was like this when she first moved in. Bitter, winter air floating up the stairs like all the windows were left open. She remembers shaking as she hauled up trash bags of her belongings, and taking breaks to wrap herself up in the first blanket she could unpack.

She feels that way now as she stomps up the stairs, the bottom of her boots heavy against the wood. She wonders if he can hear her coming.

By the time she reaches the top of the stairs, her hands are trembling, and she’s slightly out of breath. She takes a moment to catch it before she’s shifting the box to hold in one hand, and she knocks. She does it before she has the chance to talk herself out of it.

The door swings open sooner than she thought it would, like Iwaizumi was just standing there on the other side, waiting for her. Waiting for her this whole time.

When she sees him, she holds her breath. She holds her breath as she counts the one, two three, four bruises and the one, two, three cuts that decorate his features. He’s paler than he was before. The bags under his eyes are darker.

Still, he looks pretty. She always thinks he looks pretty.

His reaction to her, standing at his doorstep after six months, is the same as his reaction to everything else. His brow slightly furrowed, mouth curled up in something that looks like annoyance. She’s not surprised when he doesn’t say anything.

“Um, hey,” is how she starts out. It makes her flinch. “I’m sorry to just like, pop up out of nowhere but, I just kinda wanted to see you. I, erm, I missed you. A lot.”

Iwaizumi says nothing to this either. She feels oddly like she is shooting herself in the foot, and she loses the ability to look him in the eye.

“I feel really bad about how everything went down,” she confesses, now staring at her shoes. He’s still looking at her, she can feel it. “I’m not proud of the things I said or how I acted. I don’t-I don’t hate you, not at all.”

She thinks she can see his chest rise and fall with heavy, deliberate breaths. But she’s not sure. Could be imagining it. The corners of her vision are starting to blur. She holds the box up to him.

A CD player. Brand new. The same one he got her.

“I got you this. As a sorry. I felt like shit for breaking the one you got me. I feel like shit for a lot of it, but that gift meant a lot to me. Just like you do. And I break things a lot and I have a lot of issues and I don’t think you-“

She does not get to finish her sentence. Iwaizumi grabs her by the arm and pulls her into her chest. The force knocks the box out of her hands, and CD player slams to the ground between them. Before she can realize what’s happened, her feet are hovering above the floor, and Iwaizumi’s arms are tight around her.

It’s automatic, the way she returns the embrace. Her arms snake around his middle, and she leans her head against his chest. She started crying at one point, without realizing it.

“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” Iwaizumi says, pressing his face into the top of her head, lips kissing her hair between words. “You have no fucking idea how sorry I am.”

She does, because she feels it. It gnaws away at her chest the same way it does to his. She shakes her head. “I get it,” she tells him. “I know it.”

“Please stay,” Iwaizumi pleads. “Please. I would do anything for you to stay.”

If she were someone like Kiyoko, she would say no. She would leave. She wouldn’t have ever come back. Because she knows, she knows that Iwaizumi is not going to change. He’s not going to become someone different overnight, or over six months, or a year or a dozen. Iwaizumi is always going to be who he was the day that she met him.

People like your father only care about one thing. And it’s not you, and it’s not me.

She holds onto him tighter, and thinks that that’s okay. She is too. “I’ll stay,” she promises. “I’m not going anywhere.”

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