“It’s what you gathered from our talk, but you were wrong.”
di haven’t written about them in forever sooo, im making this into some angsty iwaoi :3c
“So I guess it-” he stuttered, his tongue refusing to let his words form right, “it means that I’m in love with you.”
Oikawa held his breath, the tightness in his stomach turning into a gordian knot. He clenched and unclenched his hands, staying limp by his sides as he awaited a response.
Iwaizumi was sitting on his bed across him, the volleyball he’d been twirling in his hands now perfectly still between his palms, resting simply on his lap.
How did they end up here?
It didn’t really matter. Oikawa knew this time would come eventually. He knew it from the first moment he’d laid his eyes on Iwaizumi’s toothy grin across the playground all those years ago. Knew it when he let Iwaizumi take his hand in his, when he’d accepted all the bugs and dirt ‘presents’ Iwaizumi would give him, how he’d fluster at the pleased look in Iwaizumi’s eyes.
Knew it when years after, he’d feel his heartbeat shake and rush at the mere sight of his childhood friend, his best friend, when the guilt pooled in his stomach at the thoughts his head would conjure.
The time to confess his guilt to Iwaizumi.
“So I’m in love with-with you”, he breathed, “and if you want to-to pretend this never happened, or if you want to talk about it then-then we can do that.”
Iwaizumi never met his gaze.
He kept staring down at the volleyball, tracing it’s lines with his hand.
“We should talk about it”, he said after a drawn-out silence, “if we don’t it’d just make things awkward.”
It’d just make things awkard.
Was this Iwaizumi’s way of rejecting him?
“Yeah...yeah, I understand-” Oikawa started, doing his best to steady his breathing, before Iwaizumi interrupted him.
“But do you mind if we don’t discuss it right now?”
Oikawa looked down to the floor, nodded and hoped the earth would split open and engulf him whole, hide him in her core and burn this day out of his mind.
“I’ll see you tomorrow at practice, and in class, and we can talk about it after school.”
With a sigh, Iwaizumi let the ball drop from his hands, rolling on the floor and stopping at Oikawa’s feet.
He felt Iwaizumi get up, felt a hand reach for his shoulder before it stopped, falling back to Iwaizumi’s side.
“I’ll see you tomorrow”, he heard, followed by the gentle click of his bedroom door closing shut.
He reached down, picked the ball up, his fingers clenching into the plastic until his knuckles turned white.
He threw it on the wall with a flurry of rage, ignored it as it connected to it with a loud thud and fell back down, bouncing once, twice, and rolled out of sight and beneath the bed.
Only then he let himself unclench his chattering teeth, let his fists unfurl and reach up to his face where wetness already seeped out of his eyes, salty and painful as he fell onto his knees, as the heel of his palms pushed against his eyelids.
“Let me disappear”, he muttered, “let me disappear into the bottom of the earth and never be seen again”
But the earth didn’t open up, didn’t swallow him down into nothingness.
And so he remained there, until his tears ran dry and his head throbbed.
The next morning, Iwaizumi didn’t come meet him outside his door like usual.
He didn’t walk with Oikawa, didn’t chastisize him for staying up until late watching volleyball matches on youtube.
Oikawa clenched his fists, rubbed at his reddened eyes, and walked to school.
He went through the motions of morning practice, didn’t let his eyes wander in the locker room, didn’t let his mouth open and ask if anyone’d seen Iwaizumi.
And from the looks of it, no one dared ask him why he didn’t come to school with him either.
He pushed himself to focus only on the training, on the burn of his feet as he ran, faster than he ever thought he could, until the emptiness of his stomach threatened to spill from his throat in exertion.
He took his position on the court, picked up volleyball after volleyball and hit it with full force, ignoring the confused gasps of his teammates.
His concentration only broke when, 30 minutes into their hourly practice, the door to the gym slammed open and shut, a heaving figure running through and coming to a halt at the edge of the court.
Iwaizumi stood there, sweat dripping on his brow, his hands resting on his knees.
He had an expression of disbelief on his fae, eyes wide, mouth slack.
Oikawa knew he’d have to be the one to tell him what to do, where to go. He knew he had to step up as the leader of this team, even if his heart ached at the mere sound of his best friend’s voice.
“We’re doing tossed and returns. Go to across the net to receive tosses.”
He saw Iwaizumi nod from the corner of his eye, and with that, everything that’d stilled returned back to motion, a shared breath exhaled from their teammates.
Oikawa kept hitting ball after ball until his palms oozed with blood.
Oikawa, usually the ideal student, let his head lean down and as close to his books as he could let it without getting scolded by their teachers, let each word become a blur beneath his glasses.
Girls in his class came up to him, put their hands on his shoulder and asked what’s wrong.
But how could he tell them?
How could he tell anyone that the one person he ever fell in love with was going to reject his feelings as soon as the last bell rang? That he already knew, that this prolonged silence was killing him, that he’d regretted ever letting that damn confession slip through his lips?
He just smiled half-heartedly, gave an excuse of being up all night and let the girls coo over his reddened eyes, their words blendign into nothingness in his ears.
He didn’t know how he’d make it through that finall bell.
As soon as the last bell rang and the teacher bid them goodbye, he gathered his things, sluggishly, as if there was no strength in any cell of his body. He slung his backpack over his back and trudged towards the door and out into the hallway, merely nodding at the chorus of greetings and goodbyes around him.
He made it out the school gates and into the quiet residential streets, the setting sun beaming pink tints on him, when a pair of footsteps joined his, hurrying to his side before slowing to match his pace.
“I must’ve yelled your name out a million times and you didn’t so much as flinsh”, Iwaizumi exclaimed, standing straight and preening down to Oikawa’s hunched form with an unreadable expression.
Oikawa shrugged. “I must’ve zoned out.”
Neither boy spoke for a while, until they reached the empty park merely a block away from their neighbering houses.
Oikawa kept walking, when he noticed the ever-bearing presence beside him disappeared.
He turned his head, noticing Iwaizumi stopped a few feet behind, his head tilted down before he exhaled loudly and looked back up, matching Oikawa’s gaze with his dark eyes.
“We should talk before going home.”
Oikawa turned to face Iwaizumi, yet his head remained tilted to the side, trying to avoid the rejection in his best friend’s eyes, to shield himself as much as possible from the hurt that was about to erupt in his chest.
“I think I already know what you want to say” he said, trying to keep his voice as steady as he could.
Iwaizumi raised an eyebrow.
“I gathered it from what you said last night, that you don’t feel the same way so we could just-let’s just skip the awkwardness yeah?”
“I don’t feel the same way?”
Iwaizumi’s voice sounded so innocent, a naive curiosity that tasted putrid in Oikawa’s ears.
Oikawa huffed a heartless laugh, the familiar tint of pain behind his eyes slowly seeping in.
“You said we’d talk the next day and then left. I’m not an idiot, I can read between the lines Iwa-chan.”
“So you think I’m rejecting you?”
“That’s what I figured, yeah.”
“It’s what you gathered from our talk, but you were wrong.”
Oikawa looked up at that, and held his breath as he realised how much closer Iwaizumi had gotten whilst he wasn’t looking.
In the setting sun, with pink tinting at the edges of Iwaizumi’s face, his eyes clear, clearer than Oikawa had ever seen, a soft smile, the sort that Oikawa could’ve sworn he never saw his best friend sport before, greeting him as he looked up to meet his eye.
Iwaizumi hummed in agreement.
“I just...I needed a while to think about it. About how to tell you that I love you too but without making it...creepy?”
Oikwawa simply stared. His brain had stopped working. Or he died? Maybe he was stuck in limbo? He could see the blue screen of death of computer monitors glazing over his eyes.
“I’ve wanted to confess to you for so long and you just beat me to it and-I guess I’ve loved you since we first met, when you smiled that stupid smile and told me to come look for UFOs with you-I guess that was it for me.”
Oikawa blinked, slow, owlishly.
Was Iwaizumi flustered? Was that reddened colour on his face a blush or was it the setting sun playing tricks on his eyes?
“I love you too. I-uh, I’m sorry I made you wait a day before I could tell it back to you.”
“You and I”, Oikawa pointed to them both, “we’re in love.”
There’s a smile forming in the corners of Iwaizumi’s lips and Oikawa has to rub his eyes to believe the sight in front of him.
“We’ve been in love for hell knows how long and we. We love. each other.”
He kept at it for a while, babbling mainly to himself, trying to convince his brain that this wasn’t a hallucination, or a dream because-how could this be real?!
“Should I like, kiss you now or something so you can shut up, or is that rude?”
Oikawa’s mouth flapped open and close, his eyes widened comically.
“Yeah okay, I don’t care if it’s rude I’ll just kiss you now so.”
He put a hand over Oikawa’s wide eyes, a gentle warmth engulfing his lips in the dark.
When he regained vision again, Iwaizumi’s hand moved away from his eyes in favor of cradling his jaw, a shit-eating smirk ebbed on his best friends face.
Oikwawa blinked once more, before he muttered the first coherent phrase his mind could conjure.
“You are so gonna treat me to ice cream for letting me cry all night thinking you don’t want me.”
Iwaizumi kissed him again, and again, until his pout turned to a huffed laugh.
