Chapter Text
Ushijima Wakatoshi gets offers from a professional team and the men’s national team before the ink is even dry on his high school certificate, because obviously he does – Oikawa reads about it two months later in an article in an in-flight magazine, but even by that time it’s old news to him. He hears things through the grapevine, whether he wants to or not – and in any case, he would have known, even if no one had told him. What else, really, would Ushiwaka-chan have done but this?
The article’s headlined Young Blood, and it includes all the new players’ heights, weights, birthdays – it’s still, somehow, a kick in the guts to remember that Ushijima is actually younger than him, if only by a few weeks (though Oikawa will admit to a certain amount of private satisfaction at the thought that he did, however briefly, exist in a world as yet uncontaminated by Ushijima Wakatoshi). There’s a photo, of course, and Ushiwaka looks stupid in it, of course, but just to make sure anyone else who reads the magazine after him will think so too, Oikawa takes a pen and draws an enormous swooping moustache across Ushijima’s upper lip, and then gives him a monobrow and some devil’s horns as well. Just so people are clear on the kind of person they’re looking at.
The flight still has another hour to go, and at some point he drifts into a light doze – he wakes with a start when the landing announcement comes on and immediately regrets having slept, since naps have never done anything for him, and now his eyes feel scratchy and his throat raw from sleeping with his mouth open with the artificially chilled air of the vent above blasting down into his face. He’d meant to study – his book of Argentinian Spanish phrases is still open on his tray table, the ones he thinks he’ll especially need marked with the bright pink stickers that had been a gift from his sister, each one of which she and Takeru and her new little girl Minami had marked with a doodle of a flower or a sun or a little bird with a musical note next to its head; it’s the ones, however, where his sister has written You can do it, Tooru-kun~! and Work hard, Tooru-kun! and We’re waiting for you, Uncle! that make Oikawa suck in a quick, deep breath, even though he knows his sister wrote that last one too, since Takeru’s handwriting has never been that neat, and he’s never once called Oikawa uncle in his life.
Regardless, it’s a reminder: a reminder of everything he’s left behind, a reminder that there are things he’ll miss, and not just things he wants to break free of back in Sendai – back in the only place he’s ever called his home. He supposes most people make this kind of leap in smaller stages: to move to Tokyo, maybe, for university, or to take up a job in the next city over, or maybe to do something adventurous like take a few months off to travel. He’s never been one to do things by halves though – his mother had said that to him when Oikawa had gone to her and told her what he was planning to do, just like she’d said it dozens of other times before when he’d come home late from training to find her still up, warming a plate of dinner leftovers for him, apron on, her hair wrapped up in a silk handkerchief, her dark blue house slippers scuffing across the white tiles of their kitchen floor.
She’d always had something waiting for him – rice, miso soup, vegetables, fish, agedashi tofu, and sometimes a little something sweet. Oikawa had always told her, You don’t need to wait up for me – I can just make dinner for myself or grab something from the conbini, but his mother had always simply shaken her head and told him to do the dishes before he went to bed, before turning and shuffling her way towards the door. You don’t do things by halves, Tooru-kun, and neither do I, she’d sometimes say before she slid the door closed behind her, leaving him to his meal.
It’s a strange feeling, knowing that he’s seen the last of those meals – that if he gets home late now, there won’t be anyone there to have a meal waiting for him or to find his socks in the chaos of the laundry hamper. Iwa-chan won’t be waiting for him on the corner to walk with him to school; he won’t be just around the corner, always up for Oikawa’s offer to go and buy him a black sesame mochi ice; he won’t be there to push Oikawa ahead of him, one hand planted firmly between his shoulder blades, reminding Oikawa that no matter what he does, Iwaizumi will be there to back him up.
A kind of cold terror crawls through Oikawa as the plane dips its wings and the city he assumes is San Juan comes into view. He swallows, resting his chin on his hand as he stares down at it, the place he supposes will now be his home at least for the next little while, though it contains none of the things that had made his home his home. He can feel something – his soul, maybe – writhing and fluttering within him, twisting and turning like the kites he and Iwa-chan used to fly on windy days on the hill behind his house. Oikawa had lost so many of them that his mother, then his sister, and finally Iwa-chan had refused to buy him any more – somehow, he’d never quite been able to keep a hold of them, and they’d writhed and fluttered right out of his hands, the wind bearing them away into the endless expanse of the sky, while he was left wailing on the ground below.
Later, when he was old enough to understand things like dramatic irony and apt comparisons – because no matter what Hanamaki says, he had actually paid attention in his modern lit class – Oikawa had thought it was kind of funny, in an extremely bitter, unfunny way: here he was, still earth-bound, unable to rise any higher than he already had, watching players like Ushijima soaring away above him – and in time Kageyama and even probably Karasuno’s shrimpy little number ten would be there too, reaching heights he could only imagine.
It terrifies him that in some ways, he’s grown comfortable in his failure – that for even a few short weeks, he’d been ready to say Enough. I’ve had enough. That alone had been enough to spur him on; in a fit of almost rabid activity he’d called José Blanco to ask if his advice still stood, what he might be able to offer him if he could get himself to Argentina; told his parents and explained his plans to their blank, shocked faces; booked his flights and then his AirBnB. Looking back at it now, Oikawa wonders whether if he’d stopped to think, he might have lost his nerve. He’d always been methodical in the past: everything was rehearsed; everything was clear in his mind before he did it. The one or two times he’d allowed his impulsivity to get the better of him had not gone well: one time, he’d accepted Iwa-chan’s dare to eat the extra-spicy kimchi in his mother’s fridge straight out of the jar and had then felt the backlash of it for a week. The other time, he’d almost smacked a twelve-year-old Kageyama Tobio across the face.
It’s something that still sends a burning line of shame straight through him when he thinks of it, for all that Kageyama hadn’t seemed, particularly, to have been affected. But it’s something that has stuck with him always – the consequences of even a moment’s lack of self-control.
“Sir – if you wouldn’t mind stowing your tray table for our descent.”
Oikawa looks up, jerked out of his thoughts by the voice of the stewardess, who’s speaking to him in English and leaning over the side of the seat next to him – since he’d somehow managed to score an entire row to himself. She’s smiling at him, and Oikawa can’t help but smile back – it’s what he does, after all. “I’m sorry – I drifted off.”
She laughs lightly, and he runs his fingers through his hair, though honestly, he dreads to think what it must look like after a full day on a flight from Haneda to Buenos Aires, a nightmarish three-hour stopover that he mostly spent staring at the plate of spaghetti he absolutely had not wanted to eat but somehow ended up buying anyway, and now this latest two-hour ordeal, which almost seems worse somehow than all the others combined. It’s always the last leg of the journey that takes you out – always the last moment, when the end is in sight, that somehow makes the last little bit seem all the more impossible.
He stows his table and stuffs the magazine he’d spent most of the flight doodling in back into its netting. He really doesn’t need that kind of toxicity in his life – he’d spent enough of high school looking at pictures of Ushijima in Volleyball Monthly, after all, and he does not need a return to that kind of nonsense.
It’s not until the last minute that Oikawa grabs the magazine, tucking it into the back pocket of his backpack as he stands. He can’t really explain it – maybe it’s just embarrassment at having done something so childish as doodling devil’s horns and moustaches. He probably shouldn’t leave the evidence of that lying around where any old rando could see it.
Oikawa waits – now that he’s actually here, he finds he’s not so impatient to get off the plane as he’d thought. He lets the other passengers off ahead of him before stepping out into the aisle, emerging from the plane door and into the airbridge. Despite the fact it’s June, and winter – something Oikawa knows he’s going to have to get used to – the late afternoon sunshine beams through the window of the bridge as he walks down it, momentarily blinding him. He squints, then raises a hand to shield his eyes from the harsh white glare, looking out over the tarmac – it’s probably just his imagination, but he can see a dark smudge on the horizon that he thinks could be the mountains he spent so much time reading about in the weeks before he came here. Not mountains like he’s used to in Miyagi at this time of year, lush and green and filled with the sound of summertime cicadas, but bare, rocky, and snow-peaked.
Though it’s the least of the things he’ll have to get used to, Oikawa supposes, as he approaches the wide, open door that leads to the airport arrival lounge. He takes a deep breath – it seems strange now to be having second thoughts, and truly, he isn’t. But there’s still a squirming in his gut that reminds him there’s no going back now: he’s here.
He’s Oikawa Tooru, he’s nineteen years old, and regardless of whether he fails or whether he flies, at least no one will ever be able to accuse him of not doing his utmost.
Four and a half months earlier
Oikawa isn’t sure why he goes – maybe he’s more of a masochist than he realised. It’s not like Shiratorizawa and Karasuno can, somehow, both lose the game, which is really the only outcome that would even partially satisfy him, so there’s really not any point in watching it at all.
But it’s like he explains to Iwa-chan, when he catches Oikawa curled forward in his seat at the back of the gym, watching the game just a little more intently than he probably would have liked anyone to observe him doing, even if it’s only Iwaizumi – it’s not like he can hide from reality; it’s not like he can close his eyes and Ushiwaka-chan and Tobio-chan will just disappear back into whatever disgusting nether-realm they crawled out of.
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen Karasuno do a slide before,” Iwa-chan says as they sit together, Oikawa’s foot resting on the back of the seat in front of him. “I guess they really are omnivores, and they’ll take what they can get.”
“They don’t have a playstyle,” Oikawa says, sitting back. “Nothing they’d regret abandoning if they decided it wasn’t working.” His lip twists. “They’ll even get rid of that stupid god-like quick if it’s not doing what they want for them anymore.”
He’s not unaware of the irony. He’s not unaware of what he’s saying, even as he’s saying it. The lesson that he’s being beaten over the head with yet again.
The question is, how much of himself does he think he can shed, and which parts?
He watches the game; he watches Ushijima score point after point; he watches Kageyama’s perfect form succumb to the pressure that horrific creature of a middle blocker subjects it to. He almost wishes, in a way, that he didn’t really have any prior knowledge of either Ushijima or Kageyama: he misses the way he used to watch volleyball, when it was purely exciting, purely fascinating to dissect a successful play, and purely absorbing when an individual in particular was doing well and speculating about what exactly made them different.
Maybe that’s what galls him the most: the knowledge, sitting dark and heavy in his stomach that if he didn’t know Ushijima, if he hadn’t spent years getting beaten by Ushijima, he’d think he was amazing. Even now, he still finds himself hungrily watching the perfect form of his jump – the long stride of his run up, the way his back arches as he draws his left hand back, the illusion he spends just a tiny moment longer than should be physically possible hanging in the air before he spikes the ball.
“Ugh.” The thought is gross enough that he actually snorts out loud about it, and Iwa-chan glances across at him, but apparently assumes it’s just a generalised ugh about the entire situation and doesn’t ask.
It’s not really all that necessary that they talk, anyway – he’s known Iwa-chan long enough to know what the little huh sound he makes when the Shiratorizawa first-year with the bowl cut manages one of his incredible straights means, and Iwa-chan knows him well enough to keep his mouth shut during the interminable back-and-forth between deuces in the final set, when Oikawa tells him how disgusted he is.
He is disgusted, of course, and it’s a disgust that doesn’t let up, even when the ball drops onto Shiratorizawa’s side of the court. Iwaizumi doesn’t argue when Oikawa hustles him out, saying he’s not about to stay for the line ups or the trophy presentation. He still finds himself lingering, though, for some reason he can’t explain, after Iwa-chan has unchained his bike and ridden off towards home. Perhaps it’s just a reluctance to leave for what he supposes will be the last time. He’s still not sure he has anything left within him to continue giving to volleyball.
The afternoon sun is slanting in through the wide glass front doors when Oikawa finally turns to go, pulling his chin down into the collar of his jacket – only to be stopped in his tracks by the sound of a voice behind him. A voice he would, extremely unfortunately, know anywhere.
“Oikawa Tooru.”
Oikawa clenches his jaw, grinds his teeth, and turns, trying to give Ushiwaka his best razor-blade smile – the one that says, I might be smiling, but I actually hate you very much indeed.
“Ushiwaka-chan! Fancy seeing you here!” he says, lightly, sweetly. His smile hardens. “Losing.”
Ushijima just tilts his head slightly, blinking. “Yes. It would seem that way.”
Oikawa narrows his eyes, searching for the anger, the upset, the tears of failure in the final match of Ushijima’s high school career, his last high school opportunity to play on the national stage, but he doesn’t see anything like what he’s looking for. He doesn’t look anything like how Oikawa felt just weeks before, when Ushijima had beaten him and ended Aoba Jousai’s Spring Tournament campaign. He still doesn’t look upset – just large, tall, and sweaty.
“Well. I won’t keep you,” Oikawa says loftily. He already feels sick enough; he doesn’t need Ushijima standing there having the audacity to not look utterly humiliated that Oikawa has just watched him get beaten. “I imagine you have a loser’s trophy to go pick up. And I certainly have a life of my own to get back to.”
“I see,” Ushijima says, blinking again, and then draws in a breath, as if he’s about to speak.
For some insane reason, Oikawa waits, wondering what on earth Ushijima could possibly have to say to him – he swears, if any words about his petty pride pass his lips, Oikawa’s not going to be responsible for his actions.
Instead, however, Ushijima, having apparently gathered his thoughts, asks, “Where will you go from here, Oikawa?”
As if it’s any of your business, Oikawa’s initial impulse is to snap – he’s tempted to tell Ushijima that he’ll find out soon enough, but instead, something makes him pause. He shrugs, raising his hands, his palms pointed upward to the ceiling, affecting nonchalance. It’d be terrible for Ushijima to see how much he still cares at this late stage of the game. “Who knows,” he says. “Wherever I end up, I suppose.”
Ushijima only blinks again, that long, slow blink that Oikawa has always assumed means he’s thinking – insofar as whatever goes on inside Ushijima’s head actually passes as thought.
“I understand,” he says, after another long moment, in which the sunlight shifts and cuts a long bar of gold across the space between them. “Well. In that case, I’ll look forward to seeing wherever that may be.”
so ur staying? Iwa-chan LINE messages him, four weeks after he arrives, when Oikawa tells him he’s been looking for apartments. He’s ready to move out of his AirBnB and into something more permanent. u feel like ur fitting in there okay, then?
Oikawa fiddles with his phone, puts it down, picks it back up and says, yeah, i feel like i’m fitting in.
He feels deceitful, because it’s Iwa-chan, who he’s never lied to in his life – but it’s hard to explain the whole reason he’s staying is because he doesn’t fit in. Even though it looks like he’s going to get an offer from San Juan Atletico, he’s still not sure he’s made the right decision.
He meets up with José Blanco the day after he signs his lease, in what has become Oikawa’s favourite restaurant – the first place José had taken him for a meal after he arrived and the place he still goes to when he feels like a little slice of home. It’s an izakaya-style bar down one of the backstreets of San Juan, run by a Japanese expat and his Argentinian wife, and Oikawa knows he can always rely on it when he feels like some agedashi tofu that’s almost just like his mother used to make, or miso glazed eggplant, or karaage with actual Kewpie mayo. The brown pleather of the booth they’re sitting in is cracking at the corners, so the soft, puffy stuffing is starting to seep out, the wood panelling of the walls is a little the worse for wear, and the table itself is stained and sticky from a thousand evenings’ worth of spilled beers and sake. But despite the place’s slight disrepair, he kind of likes the decorating scheme – the paper lightshades, the fairy lights wound around the beams across the ceiling, the pink plastic cherry blossoms stuck in a vase by the counter, and the faded gold maneki-neko sitting by the cash register, with its facial expression that reminds him of a taxi driver silently judging a bunch of drunkards piling into the backseat of his cab. On the wall by his favourite booth – this one – there’s a faded, slightly curling vintage advertisement of a shirtless yakuza manfully drinking sake out of a masu cup; to the right of that, there’s a poster of a pretty girl in a bikini holding a beer. So Oikawa thinks they pretty much have their customers’ tastes covered, in terms of the view.
“So. How are you finding the city? You haven’t had any troubles?”
Oikawa glances across the table at José, then looks down at his katsudon and licks his lips.
“I suppose it’s a work in progress?” he says – he doesn’t see any reason not to be honest. Not if he’s actually going to get any benefit from his meetings with José, who’s generously made himself available once a month to have dinner with him, despite what Oikawa imagines must be his packed-out schedule – and despite what he’s already done for him, in terms of introductions, getting him in the door of tryouts and vouching for him more generally, and the more important and yet far more boring business of putting him in touch with visa agents and accountants and real estate brokers.
Learning a new city is a process Oikawa hasn’t had to deal with before – he’s always lived in the one place, in the one house even, and the streets of Sendai have never felt unfamiliar to him. He’s never liked feeling like a fish out of water; and, during his first few weeks in San Juan, he realises he’s never actually felt that way before – not really. He’d always known he’d play setter; he’d always known he’d go to Kitagawa Daiichi and then to Aoba Jousai. He’s never set a foot off the path he planned for himself, except when something else threw him off.
“Well, that’s a given,” José says, picking up a piece of karaage. “That’s all we ever are, isn’t it?”
“I suppose so.” It’s nice to be able to speak Japanese with him – speaking of works in progress, that’s all that can really be said for Oikawa’s Spanish.
At least he can say he likes shopping at the Vea Cencosud these days, though it’d been a mild shock to his system to find they weren’t open twenty-four hours like Seiyu back in Sendai had been. Which had been especially bad when Oikawa had just wanted to creep around doing his shopping unobserved at some small hour of the morning, sorting through his notes and coins before he got to the cash register without everyone staring at him and wondering if he was, perhaps, an idiot. At least he knows his Spanish is improving, though, because the other day he overheard two abuelitas standing behind him in line as he sorted furiously though his wallet, saying It’s okay, he’s a handsome boy. Handsome boys don’t need brains.
But he can jog from his new apartment in Concepcion to the Estadio Aldo Cantoni in about fifteen minutes – less, if he pushes himself – passing beneath the shade of the elm trees that line the streets. He’s beginning to get to know the streets and buildings, with their worn brick facades painted in pastel pink and pale yellow, cast iron looping over the windows and doors. And he can get fresh orange juice from a street van that’s usually parked near his apartment, and ice cream from the blue and pink ice creamery on the corner of his street, which is still open even now that it’s getting colder. He’s visited the San Juan Bautista Cathedral, with its long white columns, and sat and watched the fountain in the Parque de Mayo.
“I shouldn’t say anything, but I’ve heard good things about you through the grapevine,” José tells him, after a moment. “You impressed people at the tryouts, though I’m sure you know that – not just with your skills, but with your… hmmm. I’m not sure how to say it. In Japanese, I mean, so that it’s more polite. Your guts. Let’s say that.”
Oikawa lets out a small, snorted laugh. He can imagine what José had been going to say. “It’s okay. You can say balls, Blanco-san. I promise I won’t be scandalised.”
José laughs, deep and rich, throwing his head back, and Oikawa swallows, suddenly remembering exactly why he’d had his poster on his bedroom wall for ten entire years, until the Blu-Tac had worn through the corners and made it unhangable. And why, as soon as he’d reached puberty, he’d started having hot and cold flushes every time he remembered he’d asked José to sign his jockstrap.
“Well then, your balls, if that’s what you like. They want players who’re hungry,” José says. “And no more of this Blanco-san. We’re in Argentina now, and I should be José to you, and you can be Tooru to me. How about that?”
He gets the offer – after he hangs up the phone, he has to go stand on his tiny balcony for a moment and stare up at the sky, at the smudge of the mountains on the horizon, purple and hazy in the afternoon light.
And the first thing he does once he heads back inside is call Iwa-chan.
“Wh-hello?” Iwaizumi sounds groggy – and he looks groggy too, to say the least, squinting at his phone, his face horrifically illuminated in the darkness of his room. “Who the hell is this?”
“Picking up your phone without even checking the number, Iwa-chan!” Oikawa tsks, shaking his head. “I could be anyone! I could be someone who calls young men at home in bed to take embarrassing screenshots of them looking like complete shit.”
“Shittykawa, it’s four in the morning,” Iwaizumi rasps out, still squinting. “What the hell do you want? Is your hair on fire and you can’t remember how to put it out? Because that is literally the only reason –”
“I got an offer, Iwa-chan,” Oikawa says, cutting him off before he can build up a head of steam for his rant. “San Juan Atletico. I’m going over to sign the contract tomorrow.”
To Iwaizumi’s credit, he wakes up fast enough then, sitting up and running a hand over his face, blinking the sleep out of his eyes. “You’re serious?”
“Maybe I am, or maybe this is all a dream – in which case, how sweet, Iwa-chan! You dream of my successes, even from all the way over there!”
“Well, I know this isn’t a dream, since in my dreams there’d be a way to reach through the screen and punch you in the face from all the way over here,” Iwaizumi mutters. He blinks a couple more times, then says, quietly, “But seriously, Assykawa. Congratulations.”
“I’ll take the congratulations and ignore the nasty nickname,” Oikawa says loftily, “because that’s just the kind of guy I am. Soon you’ll be able to tell everyone you knew me back when I was still the kind of guy who hung around with people like you. Aren’t you lucky, Iwa-chan?”
For once, Iwaizumi doesn’t make a gagging noise and call him Shitty/Assy/Trashykawa – he just laughs, low and soft at the back of his throat, and says, “Yeah, Oikawa. I am.”
It’s dreadfully unpleasant the first time he opens one of the Japanese volleyball magazines his sister has shipped him and sees Ushijima’s face inside it – it had to happen sooner or later, but Oikawa thinks these things should come with some sort of Hazardous Materials warning. A person could do themselves a mischief, seeing that kind of thing un-forewarned and therefore un-forearmed.
He nibbles on one of the three Chocolinas he’s allowed to have on a training day and eyeballs the article – does he really want to read it? He’s not sure he can take getting a faceful of a gushing, fawning article about Ushiwaka’s deadly left hand… so it’s actually kind of a surprise when he finally can bring himself to read the first few paragraphs of the article, and that isn’t what he gets.
In the current round of international friendlies, the Japanese men’s team, currently ranked 10th in the world, has failed so far to impress, despite signing on a roster of what seemed to be fresh young talent earlier this year. The Japanese team was held to 20 points or fewer in each set against the Italian team, who needed only 78 minutes to win all three sets.
Of particular note – for the wrong reasons – was Ushijima Wakatoshi (OP) who failed to reliably penetrate the Italians’ blocks, managing only two kills in nine attacks before being subbed off and leaving us wondering if perhaps it was too early to sign such a relatively inexperienced player, despite his fearsome high school reputation and his having been ranked as one of the top three high school aces in the country. If this is the calibre to be expected from high school players, then it has to be said –
At some point, Oikawa realises he’s stopped chewing his Chocolina. It sits half-crumbled in his fingers as he finishes the article – sometimes reading over paragraphs twice just to be sure he’s actually reading correctly and isn’t in the midst of some kind of delirious fever dream.
He’s never read anything other than glowing praise of Ushiwaka before in his life, and he’s pretty sure Ushiwaka hasn’t either. He briefly, though his mind rebels instantly against the idea, tries to put himself in Ushijima’s shoes and wonders what that must be like for him – to suddenly not be experiencing universal adulation everywhere he goes. To feel, at least a little, like Oikawa has felt these past six years: to try and try and try – because Oikawa has no doubt Ushijima is doing his absolute best, since he seems incapable of doing anything else – and yet, still, to fail.
Oikawa thinks he should be feeling just a bit more smug than he does right now – he stares down at the photo of Ushijima by the article, taken just as he was in the midst of being subbed off, which Oikawa thinks must also be a new experience for him, since he only very rarely hadn’t played a full game. There’s a tightness around his eyes that Oikawa hasn’t seen before – it might be just because of the sweat that’s plastering his hair to his temples, but Oikawa doesn’t think so. He leans in, looking harder, as if trying to suck up the image of Ushijima failing – not just not winning a match, but personally failing – with his eyes, as if he can somehow absorb it directly into his brain if he just stares hard enough.
It still doesn’t seem like enough, somehow. The photo has caught him mid-stride, and Ushijima’s fists are clenched by his sides, the corded muscle of his forearms showing clearly through his skin. Despite the number of jumps he makes per game, he’s still not wearing any kind of knee brace, not that Oikawa has ever known him to have an injury. He’s not smiling, but when he is ever?
“Pfft.” Oikawa lets out a short, huffy jet of air from between his lips, shoving the magazine away. He still can’t quite identify what the strange, tight feeling in his chest is – until he realises that the article had singled out the calibre to be expected from high school players for special criticism – in other words, him.
Because if Ushijima was being tested and was found wanting, then, as someone who’s been repeatedly, seemingly endlessly beaten by Ushijima, what does that say about him?
The next day at training, Oikawa sweats and yells and jumps and passes until his legs shake and his knees wobble, his lower back aching with the number of backsets he’s done, and he feels almost ready to pass out. Leaning over, he rests his hands on his knees, his breath aching in his chest when the coach blows his whistle and tells them it’s time to quit. Sweat rivulets down his forehead, into his eyes, and he wipes it away impatiently with the back of his hand, about to raise his head and ask the coach in his still-halting Spanish if he can stay back and practice his serve the way he always used to do back home, when one of his new teammates, who’d introduced himself as Fabián and gone out of his way to be friendly towards him, throws an arm around his shoulders and starts dragging him off towards the showers.
“Hey – has anyone ever told you you work too hard?” he says pleasantly, as Oikawa allows himself to be manhandled across the floor of the training gym, too tongue-tied and too tired to protest. “Hey – my sister studied Japanese for a while in school, and she taught me something. Otsukaresamadeshita, right? How was that? Not too bad?”
Almost despite himself, Oikawa laughs. “¡Qué copado!” he says, mangling it, but it earns him a hug that almost heaves the air out of his lungs all the same.
He’s grateful for how quickly the team enfolds him – after his first four weeks of feeling like he’d been wandering around in a daze, the shape of his new life here starts to feel more solid, like something he can grab on to. It starts to feel more like a reality, instead of just some incredibly protracted dream sequence. They answer his questions, clap him on the back after a serve, and start to teach him what to say and how to say it. They pick up Nice kill from him, and Fabián, with the sister who knows some Japanese, starts calling out Ike! when he’s called up to serve, and soon the rest of the team picks it up too.
Oikawa’s not the starting setter, of course. Coach Vargas makes it clear to him that while he was impressed with his set, it was his serve that tipped the balance, so to the extent he gets playtime for the moment, it’ll be as a pinch server. The first game he gets court time in is a friendly against Buenos Aires Unidos – he manages three service aces before someone finally manages to get a bump in, and then he walks back to the bench, feeling his blood fizzing in his veins, heart thudding, his stomach churning with a hunger for more – just the same as it used to back when he was playing on his first primary school team but hadn’t had his growth spurt yet and so was almost always left sitting on the sidelines. Back before he’d realised what he really wanted to be was a setter and still lionised the aces.
His hunger doesn’t get fed – not in this particular game, anyway. And afterwards, his teammates take him out to celebrate his christening, as they put it, by stuffing him so full of high-quality steak Oikawa’s pretty sure he’ll never feel any other kind of hunger again, at least.
“So you were a good high school player, yeah?” their middle blocker, Rafa, asks him, speaking English, as Coach Vargas goes to take care of the bill. “With a serve like that, you must’ve been. Why’d you come here? You must’ve had offers in Japan.”
Oikawa laughs a little, shrugging. “I suppose I wanted a change of scene.”
“Well,” Rafa says, raising his wine glass. “It’s our gain, so I’ll drink to that.”
Oikawa knows he gave him a half-answer, at best. But how can he explain that things hadn’t quite worked out how he’d wanted them to, back home? He certainly hadn’t expected he’d end up here, playing on this team, in this country. But he’d known, somehow, that he had to get out – get out from under the oppressive shadow of his own failures, of the overwhelming pressure of his disappointed dreams, of the persistent presence of Ushijima Wakatoshi, out of sight for now but never fully out of mind.
But how does he explain all that? He can’t say, Actually I moved countries to avoid this one guy. He has enough self-awareness to know how utterly unhinged that would sound.
And would it even be true? Oikawa finds himself wondering, after Rafa and Fabián have pushed him out of the cab they shared. He doesn’t like that idea at all: the idea that getting out from Ushijima’s shadow (and out of range of Kageyama Tobio nipping at his heels like one of those tiny dogs his aunt keeps) has pushed him to such extremities as fleeing the country.
That’s not why I did it, he thinks as he unlocks his gate and makes his slow way up the concrete steps to his apartment. Not the whole of it, anyway.
Oikawa pulls in a deep breath as he opens his apartment door, toeing off his shoes in the doorway. He could have stayed, he supposes; he could have stayed and fought, and refused to concede that ground, his home, to Ushiwaka-chan. But he didn’t – and he’s here now, he’s playing professionally. Yes, as a pinch server, but he’d helped his team win tonight, and that’s all that matters. He knows the coach is invested in his future here. San Juan Atletico is a successful, solid team, but they’ll have to enter a rebuilding phase next year when a few of their senior players retire, and Oikawa intends to make his potential to fill those newly created gaps clear. He knows his teammates value and like him. They’ve made that clear – more than clear.
As he lies down on his bed, too exhausted to change, his beef-filled stomach gurgling dangerously, Oikawa wonders if it’ll ever start to feel like enough.
“Oh – very nice, Iwa-chan. You have a room to yourself, then?”
Oikawa spoons locro from the place around the corner into his mouth as Iwaizumi gives him the guided tour of his room. It’s not the room back in Sendai that Oikawa feels like he knows almost as well as his own, but his brand-new dorm room at Birtwistle University, California, where Iwaizumi had suddenly announced in the group chat they share with Hanamaki and Matsukawa that he’d both applied and been accepted for a study abroad program, and just hadn’t wanted to say anything until it was all settled.
Oikawa had felt briefly affronted that Iwa-chan hadn’t said anything to him about it, and had eaten an entire packet of Chocolinas while having an imaginary argument with him about whether this meant they were drifting apart as friends. But then he’d gotten a LINE message from Iwaizumi saying hey – sry i didn’t say anything. i just wanted to know that it was a sure thing. it’s nerveracking, ok? u get it, right? at which point he’d immediately texted him back of course i do iwa-chan! u were nervous! how adorable! which had earned him a week’s silence, and now Oikawa’s mainly just happy they’re both back to being more or less in the same timezone.
“Yeah – the guy who was showing me around – the RA? I think? – was saying he stuck his neck out to get me my own room because he said he thought it was important for people from my culture to have their own space or something… like I haven’t spent the past twenty years tripping over my brother’s shit,” Iwaizumi says, showing Oikawa the view from the window by sticking his phone out of it.
“Oh, well, that’s nice of him I guess, though,” Oikawa says, slurping on his soup. “So you arrived in one piece, then?”
“Yeah, I guess.” Iwaizumi pulls his phone back inside, and Oikawa realises he looks kind of crestfallen.
“Are you tired, Iwa-chan?” he asks. “Do you need to put your little head down for a bit?”
“Nah, I’m actually kind of buzzed. I had like three Starbucks frappuccinos during my stopover because I was so worried I’d fall asleep and miss my flight being called.”
Oikawa thinks that he could say something rude to him about enjoying the comedown off that in about two hours, but he decides Iwa-chan’s imminent suffering will be punishment enough. “So what’s up, then, Iwa-chan? Why the face?”
Iwaizumi blinks at him, screwing his face up. “It’s kind of dumb.”
“Nothing that has my Iwa-chan looking so miserable could be dumb,” Oikawa says, deciding to be magnanimous. “Tell Uncle Tooru all about it.”
“Only if you promise to never say that again,” Iwaizumi says, grimacing. “Ugh. Okay. Fine. The airline lost one of my bags – I wanted to take it as hand luggage, but they said I had to stow it, and now it’s gone. They said they’ll contact me if it shows up, but, you know…” He trails off, looking utterly miserable.
“What was in it?” Oikawa asks. “Not your hand lotion, I can assume.”
“Shut up, Shittykawa,” Iwaizumi snaps back at him, though it feels almost automatic rather than something with real feeling behind it. “No. It was all my CDs.”
“Oh no,” Oikawa gasps. “What, all four of them? With the three songs you listen to on repeat?”
“See, this is exactly why I didn’t want to tell you,” Iwaizumi shoots back at him, snarling. “I have more than that! And I liked them – some of them’re really hard to get now!”
Oikawa shakes his head. “This is what you get, Iwa-chan, for not just joining the rest of us in the modern world. Are you aware of what an .mp3 is, Iwa-chan? Are you aware how many of them you can fit on a computer?”
“Look, forget about it,” Iwaizumi snaps, suddenly both looking and sounding extremely tired. Maybe his frappuccinos are wearing off already. “I better go – I can give you a call next week sometime once I’m more settled, all right?”
Oikawa knows better than to push his luck – even though he usually always does anyway. “All right, Iwa-chan. Have fun. Text me later so I know you came out of your caffeine overdose okay. Yes?”
Apparently this is the last straw for Iwa-chan, caffeine overdose or not, and he hangs up with nothing more than a disgusted snort and a dirty look, leaving Oikawa to his locro.
The next time Oikawa turns up at the izakaya for his regular dinner with José his favourite booth is occupied, so he sits up at the bar and watches the owner, Eiji-san, chopping things up to make rolled cabbage, and enjoys a free cup of green tea while he waits for José to arrive. Eiji-san is in a chatty mood – he always is, and Oikawa is happy to listen.
“My wife and I have been putting aside money so my daughter can go and stay with my parents in Niigata for a while and learn Japanese manners,” Eiji tells him, as he chops onions so swiftly that Oikawa can’t help but wince as the knife flies close to Eiji’s fingers. “But she asks me who cares about that kind of thing in this day and age? She says I should give her the money to go on a shopping trip to Paris instead.” He sighs deeply.
“Young people these days,” Oikawa agrees, holding his hands up and shrugging. “They never listen! What can you do?”
“Yes, you’re right. What’s to be done about it? But then, perhaps I ought to feel proud that I’ve raised a strong-willed daughter,” Eiji-san says, resigned, as he lifts his chopping board and dumps the onions into a mixing bowl. “She has an idea that she’d like to be a fashion designer. What do you think?”
“Well,” Oikawa starts, tapping his finger against his chin with extreme meditativeness, “if you want my advice about raising children –”
He doesn’t get to share it, however, because in the next moment José arrives and seats himself at the bar next to Oikawa.
“Please excuse my lateness,” he says, shrugging off his coat. “A few things ran overtime, and then the traffic was a nightmare.”
“Ah, José!” Eiji-san puts his knife aside, reaching over to turn on the small portable TV that rests on the very end of the bar. “I was beginning to worry you’d miss the beginning.”
Oikawa tenses. He knows what he’s going to see when Eiji turns on the TV: it’s the repeat of the Brazil vs Japan men’s volleyball game that was played last night, which José had said he wanted to watch with him. He already knows the result: Brazil won in five sets. But he also knows the Japanese team had given them an unexpectedly tough run for their money.
He absent-mindedly chews on a nail as Eiji and José chat back and forth, watching as the teams line up for their pre-game handshakes.
“You know any of these guys, Oikawa-san?” Eiji asks him, and Oikawa nods.
“Yeah – one or two of them.” He can spot a former Itachiyama player in the starting lineup, and one from Inarizaki, who both graduated the same year as him – not that he’d ever gotten to play either of those teams in competition. “Or at least I know of them, anyway.”
“Ushijima Wakatoshi is from Miyagi, isn’t he?” José asks, in a way that Oikawa knows isn’t calculated, since he seriously doubts José had any time to notice his personal high school drama while he was coaching the Tachibana Red Falcons. “You must have played him. You were in the same year, weren’t you? I heard good things about him. Our development team had their eye on him.”
“I’ll bet,” Oikawa mutters. Was there any team in the league that hadn’t? A little louder, he says, “Oh, Ushiwaka-chan. Yes. I remember him. A bit.” He then adds, because he can’t quite manage to stop the swell of maliciousness before it emerges, “Too bad he hasn’t lived up to all that potential, from what I’ve heard.”
José gives him a quick, quizzical glance, but then the game starts, and they both settle in to watch. Oikawa finds himself drawn into the rhythm of the game, quickly enough that he doesn’t even realise at first how absorbed he is – watching it the same way he used to when he was a kid, for the pure enjoyment of seeing an elaborate play come off well, or a beautiful feint, or an especially well-delivered serve. Maybe it’s because Ushijima’s not playing – or at least he hadn’t been, until the starting opposite hitter gets subbed off in the second set after a series of failed attacks and onto the court walks Ushijima Wakatoshi.
Oikawa narrows his eyes. Ushijima looks much the same as he always does – though, unbelievably, he looks like he might’ve actually somehow gotten taller and maybe even a little broader since the last time Oikawa saw him in person, standing in the late afternoon sunshine, after Shiratorizawa had just finished having their asses laboriously handed to them by Karasuno.
“Oh, who’s that?”
Oikawa jerks his head up from where he’s been resting his chin on the palm of his hand. He hadn’t noticed Eiji’s daughter, Naomi-chan, come over and sit herself behind the bar next to her father, where she’s completing her job of putting maraschino cherries onto toothpicks for the cocktail evening the izakaya runs once a week. Oikawa glances back at the TV – Ushijima’s the only one on the screen as he takes his place as opposite hitter, and so, unfortunately, he has to assume she’s talking about him.
“Oh, so that’s what it takes to get you interested in sports, is it?” Eiji teases her, reaching over to ruffle her hair, while Naomi huffs at him, ducks her head and tries to escape. “A good-looking boy with a few muscles, and suddenly you’re interested.”
“Dad! Oh my God,” she says in Spanish, moving more or less seamlessly between it and Japanese. “I didn’t mean that. God.” She looks indignant, and Oikawa can’t say he blames her. Even though her cheeks are turning pinker by the moment. “I didn’t notice that! Why do you say things like that? Gross. I just think he looks shy. Or thoughtful.”
No, just idiotically arrogant, Oikawa wants to tell her, though it seems ungallant to tear down an innocent young girl’s dreams, even if they are about Ushiwaka.
In the end, the game starts up again before he can say anything. He watches it, though the feeling of pure enjoyment has reduced somewhat now that Ushiwaka-chan is on the court, replaced by a low-level fizzing of tension in his stomach as he waits for him to receive his first toss.
And when he does, Oikawa blinks. Then he frowns. “What was that?”
“Hmm,” José says, a surprised little hum. “I’m not quite sure.”
Oikawa knows Ushijima’s swing well – he spent hours studying it, and studying players who actually managed to consistently receive it successfully, like that Sakusa Kiyoomi guy from Itachiyama. But that had been something different – not quite the powerful left-handed swing that went through blockers as if they weren’t even there. It had been quick, and there apparently wasn’t going to be a replay since it hadn’t scored – but Oikawa knows Ushijima well enough to know that even in the most exhausting of games, his perfect form never crumbles. It definitely doesn’t fall apart in his first hit of the game.
So what the hell was that?!
It happens again, the next time he receives a toss – and this time, he does score, so there’s a slower replay and Oikawa is able to see the odd new arm motion he’s making in more detail.
“Is he… compensating for an injury or something?” Oikawa wonders aloud, though he doesn’t truly think that’s what could possibly be happening. The coach wouldn’t put an injured player on the court.
“Hm. No. I don’t think so,” José says slowly, his eyes on the screen. “Look again, when he next attacks. What he’s doing is deliberate – he’s building something new with his swing. But I don’t think it’s quite come together yet.”
Oikawa glances at José, about to ask what he means, but in the end, he simply turns his eyes back to the screen to watch Ushijima.
“You see – there it is,” José continues after a moment, when Ushijima goes in for his next run up. “It’s not the orthodox swing he used to have. I think he’s going for something that’s one continuous motion – putting the momentum of his jump into the swing. It’s not quite there yet, though. It needs some work.”
Oikawa chews his lip. The tension in his belly fizzes a little higher, feeling an awful lot like the same kind of bile he’d have bubbling away there, back when he’d been in high school. “If it’s not working, then it’s not working,” he snaps, which earns him a surprised glance from José. “Maybe he should just drop it. The coach can’t want him using something that unreliable.”
“Maybe not, but I’d be surprised if it isn’t coming from the coach,” José says. “As you say – the Japanese men’s team has been out of its groove lately. They’re trying new things. Experimenting a bit.”
“So Ushiwaka-chan’s the guinea pig, then?” Oikawa says, not completely able to keep the sharpness from his tone. “The lab rat?”
José glances at him, a surprised, mildly curious expression in his eyes, and Oikawa drops his gaze, looking away. He feels embarrassment and maybe even a little shame welling up inside him – José, after all, isn’t one of his teammates back in Seijou. He knows nothing about Ushijima or what having to play against him had meant to Oikawa. That Ushijima had been at least two-thirds of the reason Oikawa had come to seek out his advice about what he should do next and where he should go.
Oikawa braces himself for an awkward question, but instead, José merely says, “Maybe so. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. I find it takes a great lack of ego to break yourself down and then rebuild. To realise what you’ve been doing is no longer working, and that you need to utterly abandon it. It’s like abandoning a part of your identity, isn’t it? Especially if it’s something you’ve defined yourself by before now. Stepping into a place of such uncertainty means making yourself quite vulnerable – and if there’s one thing I know about athletes at any level, it’s that they very rarely enjoy feeling vulnerable.”
That makes Oikawa swallow, before sucking in a quick, sharp breath through his teeth as he looks back at the TV screen. As the last person who scored, the camera’s still on Ushijima’s face as his teammates come and throw their arms around his shoulders, clapping him on the back. Ushijima seems to accept the praise quietly, nodding as someone even taller than him ruffles their fingers through his hair.
The idea of Ushijima being vulnerable is one that won’t sit comfortably in his brain. It keeps sliding off it, like an over-ambitious amount of pudding from a spoon. He buries his chin in his hands and stares, watching the rest of the game without a word. He watches as Ushijima’s scoring shot brings Japan to deuce, only for the Brazilian team to rally and score two consecutive points in the seventeenth minute of the fifth set.
Walking home after he’s said goodbye to José, Eiji and Naomi, Oikawa tucks his chin into the collar of his jacket, his head feeling empty, except for José’s words about Ushijima having been willing to break himself down to build himself back up. They seem to rattle around inside of it even long after he’s gone to bed, and he finds himself staring up at the ceiling, waiting for sleep to find him.
It’s just idle curiosity, Oikawa tells himself. It doesn’t mean anything. He’s definitely not falling back into bad habits – after all, he threw away the inflight magazine he drew all over on his way to Argentina months ago, and he’s only kept the volleyball mags his sister sent him because she went to the trouble of buying and posting them, so it’d be rude to just toss them like that. It’s not like he re-reads them. Much.
Still, he sits there in front of his laptop – the one he had to buy here, since he accidentally tipped freshly squeezed orange juice into the one he brought with him – his finger resting lightly on the Enter key, having just typed Ushijima Wakatoshi into the Google search bar.
Well, what the hell. Let’s see what he’s up to.
The first few hits are just what he’s expecting – old articles about his signing and some new ones about what he’s been up to with the Schweiden Adlers, where apparently he’s been doing a little better than in the national team. Which isn’t surprising – nor is his signing with them, since the Adlers have a reputation for snapping up the most promising new players as soon as they become available, even if it’s only to keep them away from other teams, with no clear idea for their role in the Adlers’ lineup.
That hasn’t been Ushijima’s fate with them, it seems – he’s a regular starter and their top scorer for a lot of the games he plays in. Oikawa makes a face, screwing up his top lip and sticking out his tongue, back-clicking out of some fawning article about what a good catch Ushijima has been for the team.
That turns out to be a mistake – clicking on what seems to be a Schweiden Adlers discussion forum, he’s inundated with search results for things like USHIWAKA – HOT????!!!!! (which is absolutely disgusting), and RATE YOUR FAVE NEW HOTTIES: USHIJIMA WAKATOSHI – 68% (WINNER) (the poll is closed so he can’t even spitefully vote for someone else), and Ushiwaka’s new pickling recipe is up on his Insta, u guys shld take a –
Oikawa blinks and scrolls back up, frowning. Wait, what? Pickling?! Did he read that right?!
It’s purely out of a sense of morbid curiosity that he clicks on the forum post, and then on the link that purports to be Ushijima’s pickling diary on Instagram. He wonders briefly if this is some kind of macabre euphemism, but – no. Apparently it’s exactly what it sounds like: a diary of Ushijima. Pickling things.
Oikawa stares at it. That’s literally all it is – just photos of jars with various things inside them, and a brief caption, then a dot-pointed recipe. Things like: A new pickling spice. I have added cumin seeds, and A typical amazu shoga and The allspice was somewhat difficult to find and then an open jar of… cucumbers?... with These did not turn out as I expected, I will try again next time.
Oikawa has to admit to himself that he is slightly… dumbfounded? If someone had asked him what he thought he’d find on Ushijima’s Insta page, he would have said, I don’t know, and I don’t care, never ask me that again. But even if someone had held a gun to his head and told him he had to make a guess, he never in his wildest dreams would have said pickling recipes.
Rolling his chair back from his desk, Oikawa shuts his laptop with what is probably a little more force than is really warranted. Between what José Blanco had said to him last night, the horrific forum posts, and now this, he doesn’t need any more Ushijima-related revelations for at least the next forty-eight hours.
Despite the fact he was at the gym this morning, Oikawa throws on his tracksuit and heads out for a run – he doesn’t like the gathering feeling in the pit of his stomach. As he jogs through the streets, however, it occurs to him, not for the first time, that he can hardly outrun something that’s inside him – but despite that, he puts on an extra burst of speed, heading through the early evening gloom, his head down, shoulders hunched.