twice devoted.
a/n: for ky @oleander-cup for the hq club room summer collab! thank you so much for your patience!!! and i hope you like it! ❤
fandom: haikyuu!!
character: oikawa tooru
genre: fluff
info: high fantasy au; established relationship (oikawa is your childhood friend -> husband)
warnings: -
synopsis: oikawa returns home from the capital bearing unexpected good news.
word count: 2.4k
Oikawa Tooru
Oikawa's return home was emotional, but not in the way you expected.
There was the distant noise of a crowd gathering outside your family's bakery, murmurs slowly rising in volume from the moment you started paying attention to them. You supposed it must be a noble of sorts making passage through the town on the only road that led in and out of it. A highly decorated carriage, such as one that belonged to a person of high standing, tended to attract a mess of gawkers, even if your town was one of the many stops on the way to the capital and had definitely seen its fair share of nobility in passing. Though, for argument's sake, plenty of the townspeople – yourself included – were more inclined to wonder at the musculature of the purebred horses that pulled these carriages.
You settled back into your chair, and continued waiting for the kettle of water you set on the brazier to boil. At least you wouldn't have to turn anyone away. All the bread for the day had already been bought, save for the one basketful of sweet rolls you kept for your mother-in-law.
The crunch of gravel underfoot alerted you to the presence of someone at the doorway. These footfalls were clunky and much too heavy to be the woman you were waiting for. You ventured into the shopfront to meet the stranger, but not before pausing briefly to utter a simple enchantment that would keep the water in the kettle from boiling over.
"Well met! We're sold out for today, so perhaps—"
The remains of the afternoon sun hit you directly in the eyes as you stepped out from behind the coarse woollen drapery that distinguished the private backrooms from the public shopfront. Even with your sight temporarily impaired, the dark silhouette of a wavy-haired man haloed in gold-tinged orange was unmistakable.
"Even for me? Ma said you had a basket's worth."
You tripped inelegantly over your own two feet as you took several running leaps towards him. Oikawa caught you with an easy grace, steadying you against him as he let out a series of playful tut-tuts.
The small pearls within the royal crest embroidered on the cloak he wore over his chainmail winked at you, the proof of his achievement and the culmination of how he bled for his dream. All at once, you were overcome with a swell of pride. You put your hands under the layers of fine wool as a makeshift embrace, as close to his skin as you could get while he was still in his armour.
"I was hoping it wasn't a dream, Ru," you said. Your voice came out tearful, and you instantly wanted to swallow them back so that you could say them differently the second time around. More tenderly, more expectantly. Not that you were surprised that he came home at all, but that you have been eager and yearning for this inevitable moment of home-coming.
Your husband was the captain of the queen's personal guard. It was a foregone requirement that even his life was to be forfeit in order that Her Majesty might remain perfectly unharmed.
With one too-forceful shake of the head, you banished the thought. He was home now, and he returned to you hale and whole; that was all that mattered. It was a better outcome than you could've hoped for.
"I'd be affronted if you weren't dreaming of me," he said, starting to sway in time with an orchestra that only existed in his head even as he cradled you against his chest, humming to the tune of a favourite childhood lullaby. "Your dreams are as beautiful as you deserve when I'm in them."
You bit back an impish chuckle, and made a sound that let him know you were deliberating his words very, very seriously. After a long moment of consideration, having twirled about the entirety of the shopfront once, you spoke: "I do dream of Hajime on occasion. Ah, and Duchess Ushijima's son is handsome enough to tempt me, surely—"
Oikawa harrumphed when you brought up your mutual childhood friend, and you knocked your cheek against his mail when he halted suddenly. At the mention of the noblewoman's son and his fellow knight, he was wearing the sourest of expressions and making sounds akin to vomiting.
"How readily you insult me, my dearest. I'm appalled!" He made a show of snapping his face away from you in a theatrical fashion, and you laughed at the display of falsified petulance. "If you could be tempted by me, someone like Ushiwaka is laughably far beneath your notice."
You ignored the quavering whistle of the kettle you set on the brazier earlier on, favouring your husband with your attention instead of worrying if the simple enchantment you placed on it would hold. The coals in the brazier must be more ash than anything else by this time of day, and the enchantment you placed on the kettle was your most practised one.
Oikawa's long eyelashes fluttered prettily in the quickly darkening evening light when he made eye contact with you. With a conspiratorial snicker that brought to mind the harmless folly of your youth, he turned his eyes away and let out an exaggerated huff.
In spite of his words, he was still pressing you against his chest. It was the same way he embraced you and lingered before he announced that he was leaving home all those years ago. Something about that realisation sobered you, and you instantly stopped laughing. Could it be—
"I can see you complicating the situation in your pretty head, but I assure you that it's nothing of the sort," Oikawa said, but his words fell on your ears as though he were standing above the water and you were under the surface, trying to hide and failing. "I simply decided that I've had enough of knight service, is all."
The wood that made up the walls of your family's bakery appeared to lurch about you. It was a terrible sensation, and you felt a bit faint for the span of it, even if it was only a few breaths. Oikawa held you throughout the duration of your little dizzy spell, and you were grateful to have him to lean on. You were sure you would've collapsed in a heap if not for him.
When it was over, the first thing you managed to conjure out of your mouth was: "Why?"
You thought of all the letters he sent you in his early days at the capital, his handwriting untidy and unpracticed from his humble beginnings as the son of a farmer. The words were difficult to read from the ink that he likely mixed himself in the incorrect proportions, clumpy and grey and not good to write with. There were smudged circles of varying sizes that further blurred his words. It took you so long to realise it was from the tears he shed when he was grappling with homesickness and otherhood and the upturned noses of the capital-dwellers when they happened to gaze upon him.
You thought of the letters speckled and stained in red that have dried to a dark brown in their days-long journeys from Oikawa's scraped hands to your burn-laden ones. The letters that were written not on parchment but on cut squares of rough patchwork hemp that you recognised as the clothes from his boyhood that he had outgrown. The letters that were written on brocaded and perfumed parchment that was too fine to be addressed to an unknown citizen of the realm living in a town of no reputation. Those were almost always ripped from the whole, as if it was more expensive than he could afford but he wanted to give you a sliver of the riches of the capital regardless.
Oikawa had barely fourteen summers in this world when he was appointed as a squire, gangly and awkward as boys that age usually were, and milk-skinned despite the hours he spent tending to his family's wheat fields. All your life you knew him as the neighbour's boy from the northern end of the town road, carrying a dream larger even than the town itself, eyes brighter than the sun on the clearest of spring mornings as he spoke of the man he wanted to become.
Despite his tears and his struggles, he was knighted by the king before he came into his majority. Because of his tears and his struggles, the queen herself recognised him for his polished doggedness and called him into her personal service.
You were only as aware of what his dream had cost him as he allowed you to be; the letters he sent home were as plentiful as the heads of wheat in his family's fields, but you knew there was much more still that he withheld from you. Even with the little blot of light he shed for you on his time in the capital, you knew his knighthood required plenty from him. By extension, his knighthood required plenty also from you.
His knighthood took occasion of his nephew's birth from him, and every birthday after the fact. His knighthood kept him from keeping vigil at his mother's sickbed when she was in the throes of an unnatural fever that plagued her with tremours and phantoms. His knighthood demanded his presence in Her Majesty's retinue and thus prevented him from bidding Hajime a temporary farewell before he was sent by the king to quell the bloody unrest in the far north.
His knighthood deified him in your matrimonial home in the manner of mostly forgotten old gods who retained but the one follower who remained in oath. You were always speaking of him and singing his praises, as did every person whose boots made tracks in the floor, but he himself was never there. His knighthood cost him that much. His knighthood cost you that much, and the true weight of it was beginning to dawn on you.
You felt the callouses of Oikawa's ungloved thumbs swipe at your cheekbones before you felt the damp of your own tears running down your face. The sensation was familiar enough that you were tickled with the urge to poke your tongue out of your mouth for a taste, but you suppressed it for the moment.
"I would've thought you'd tackle me to the ground and threaten to exile me in our dungeon before you cried," he cooed, his tone cloying and sentimental. It made your voice catch in your throat, something halfway between sullenness and affection.
"Y-you're acting a fool, Ru. And our house has no frivolous thing as a dungeon."
When Oikawa laughed, the space he carved in your life and in your heart became full. Everything his knighthood cost you was more than worth it when he laughed, tears beading up at the now wrinkled corners of his eyes and the pale of his teeth showing without abashment.
"Your fool, yes? The very same one you married," he said.
Your view of him was sullied only by the sheen of your tears, so you blinked them away to the best of your ability. It was an absolute pity the town wise-woman hadn't taught you an enchantment for keeping tears from forming, or anything with a similar function. Your family needed you in the bakery, and so in the bakery you remained.
"And the one who's come home seemingly without being maimed," you said, remembering the start of the conversation and the question you asked that he hadn't yet answered in detail.
If he hadn't become a knight who served so close to the crown, you might've taken his lackadaisical reason for returning home as the truth. However, you knew your husband as a methodical man and possessed of a firm purpose. He was not lying to you, but he was not telling you the truth in full either.
Oikawa held your gaze most earnestly, his palms cupping your face to ensure you were looking directly at him. "From the bottom of my heart, I've had enough of knight service."
Though it appeared that he was merely repeating his earlier words, you strivingly pressed your lips shut to give him room to continue. This was not a spat, and he was not provoking you.
"I was all of twenty-nine summers the first time I made a request to retire from the queen's service. She did not permit me until now, when I have successfully wearied her with my relentless asking," he said.
The revelation was a much-awaited first instance of rain after a dry and listless winter.
Your first reaction was a long gasp that pulled a chuckle out of him. Next, there was the image of your husband in his full suit of armour, leaning over and whispering to the queen even in ill-timed moments to make his request heard.
"I realised then how I've treated you unfairly. That you were here, toiling and sweating and wearing rags" — you smacked his side with the flat of your hand, having forgotten he was still wearing his chainmail, and then gave a yelp of pain — "And I was well-situated in the capital, sleeping in a cottage safe within the queen's private residences with servants and fine clothes and provisions of food and drink out of the royal household. I was enjoying a life that I had wanted to present to you, but I was absent from you."
When he removed his hands from your cheeks, your face was left cold. You were about to chase his warmth when he knelt in front of you in the same posture as when he was knighted, one knee to the floor and one arm folded across his chest in pledge. You had been among the common people gathered for the ceremony, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with the ones next to you on a balcony that was far enough that your husband's new indigo-dyed knight's cloak blended with the similarly coloured carpet beneath him.
There was a slight quiver in Oikawa's usually confident voice that was sweet to your ears, like the first time he had called you by name and not as a child of the town baker. The words he spoke next the most joyful sound you've ever heard: "I would like to formally rededicate my life to you, if you'll have me."