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mania-sama · 3 months

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hesitated all my life (but i'm all done running)

RUNNING - NF

Haikyuu Pairing - Iwaizumi Hajime/Oikawa Tooru Additional Characters - Hanamaki Takahiro Matsukawa Issei Tags - character study, angst with a happy ending, blood and injury, implied/referenced child abuse, implied/referenced drinking, internalized homophobia, homophobia, homophobic language, starvation, dehydration, childhood trauma, heavy angst Summary - Oikawa Tooru is mugged after volleyball practice and becomes the next victim in a cat-and-mouse game between a criminal and the police. Being tucked away underneath the floorboards of his practice court, Oikawa can no longer escape the overbearing feelings he has for his best friend. Iwaizumi Hajime tries to find his best friend before it's too late. Word Count - 12,646 Cross-posted from Archive of Our Own

A volleyball rolls on the ground, far away from where the rest are contained in the set bin. It’s going to be painful getting it back, Oikawa knows. His knee has flared up in aching pain. He sits on the ground and rubs it back into a condition where it can take him around the gym to lock up, then home.

That walk is going to be rough. He doesn’t live far nor in a bad part of town, it’s that he has to actually travel on his bad knee. It’s going to take him at least five more minutes, maybe ten if he has to stop frequently. He sighs, pushing himself slowly off the ground when the pain subsides ever so slightly. It’ll have to do.

He limps to and fro the gym. He’s lucky he’s even playing. His injury over the summer nearly cost him the season, and he doesn’t know what he would’ve done if he had been benched. It’s his final year of schooling before he moves on to higher education. He already has a scholarship lined up, but nothing can quite replace this; the late nights in the gym, practicing solo drills over and over again until he collapses, and gazing up at the Aobai Johsai banners hanging limply from the walls.

And then, of course, there are the people he’ll be leaving behind. It’s not so much the school experience, but the friends and teammates he’s experienced triumph and defeat with. He doesn’t know what to do with the heavyweight in his chest when he realizes he will never sit on the same bench with them or play on the same side of the court. The only way that would be possible is if they all somehow managed to go to the same university as he is.

Which they aren’t. At least, only one of them has been accepted to the same university as him. He and Iwaizumi are sticking together, but not on the court. Iwaizumi isn’t playing collegiate volleyball.

Oikawa shakes himself loose as he turns off the lights of the gym. Getting emotional now will do horribly for his sleep tonight, which he so desperately needs. He has two major tests the next day, and not to mention a volleyball match that afternoon. They’d be playing an unranked school, but it’s a game nonetheless. He wants, and needs, to be well-rested and energized.

The door opens with effort on his part, and he steps out into the chilling air. Seasons are changing, and that makes the nights colder and stretch on for longer. The freezing breeze bites his bare skin, cooling the sweat on his arms, neck, and face. However, it stiffens his knee and reinvites all the pain he was carefully controlling a moment earlier.

He turns to lock the door behind him when his heart seizes. A click of a gun. Clicks. Multiple guns. He stares at the door, his hands frozen mid-air. His entire body stands as still and stiff as possible. Unwanted bile climbs up his throat in complete, unadulterated fear. He doesn’t want to turn in the case they think he has a weapon of his own, or that he’s making a break for it. He doesn’t want to do anything that might make them pull their triggers.

“Drop the bag. Empty your pockets,” a disembodied voice says. Oikawa drops the keys to the ground immediately, then shoulders his duffel bag off of his shoulder. He doesn’t have much in there — a volleyball, a pair of shoes, the set of dirty clothes he wore to practice, and his wallet, probably the only thing in the bag they’re going to want.

He turns out his pockets, slowly drawing out his phone on one side and a lighter on the other. He can’t explain the lighter without outing the fact that his girlfriend smokes and occasionally forgets her lighter — she then gets mad at him for not remembering to carry one, as though he’s the one who smokes.

Only Iwaizumi knows about that. He knows most things about his life that Oikawa wouldn’t tell other people. Things that he wouldn’t tell his own family or his girlfriend.

He wonders what Iwaizumi would say to Oikawa in this situation. Would he hold his hand with a silent promise to keep safe? Or would he somehow try to preserve their belongings by running, or fighting? Perhaps he would’ve seen the glint of the muggers' guns before they could move in from the shadows, and then they wouldn’t be in the situation in the first place.

Well. It doesn’t matter. Iwaizumi isn’t here. He left thirty minutes ago when Oikawa said he couldn’t stop practicing just yet. He’d only even stayed as long as he did under the pretense of walking home with Oikawa.

If they had left together, Oikawa wouldn’t be slowly turning around under the orders of other people. He wouldn’t be staring into the barrels of three guns. “Where’s your wallet? You trying to cheat us?” The middle guy threatens. The voice sounds the same as the other orders, so it must be the same guy. He’s probably the ringleader.

“It’s in— my bag. I can— I can get it out for you,” he says, stuttering through his words. His heart beats erratically in his chest, and it feels like his entire body trembles underneath the rabbit-fast rhythm. The men are wearing ski masks to hide their expressions, but the main guy doesn’t shoot or yell at Oikawa, so he thinks he made the right call.

The middle mugger indicates his gun in the direction of the bag. “Get it out, now.”

Oikawa crouches and tries not to flinch under the distinct sound of guns shifting to follow his movement. One gun is necessary for a robber, he supposes. Three is excessive. Oikawa is unarmed, quite injured, and certainly not trained to fight three robbers with guns at one time. They don’t have anything to fear.

He unzips his bag and pulls out his wallet. It pathetically shakes in his grip. He doesn’t want to part with it. It is a good amount of cash as well as his credit card, which is currently stockpiled with unspent money. He spent all summer working nearly every day, and he has yet to dig into his stash. The plan was to use it on getting a flight to and from Argentina, as well as the various other expenditures that would be required of him during his stay.

Collegiate isn’t his end goal. Argentina is in his sights.

But now, he has his hand out, departing with his money, identity, and bank account. They don’t have his social security, at least, but it won’t mean much with his ID card stolen. It will take him forever to replace all that he will lose.

No, he can prevent most of the damage. He just has to wait until he gets home, and then he’ll call the bank before they can buy much of anything. He can’t do anything about the physical yen , but that’s okay. It has to be the sacrifice.

“Phone. Tell me the passcode while you’re at it.”

Fuck. His social security is in there, as well as his bank. Not to mention it’s a phone, which is expensive and will definitely hurt to replace. But it’s not like he has a choice. The man on the left takes his wallet, and Oikawa grits his teeth against the pain in his knee to pick up his phone. He hands it over while saying the six-digit passcode, and then —

The man on the left says: “What are we doing with this one, boss?”

Boss. Oikawa’s mind reels at that. He thought they were just a couple of guys low on money which resulted in unsavory methods. There are only three of them, and their weapons don’t look spectacular, nor their clothes. Boss would indicate a gang, or yakuza, or some sort of organized crime.

Oikawa is well and truly fucked.

He doesn’t know what to do when the right and left men move forward, seizing his arms and keeping one gun to his temple and another in between his ribs. He wants to struggle, to somehow run away, except there are three guns and he is one injured man.

“The floorboards of the gym,” the one remaining says. “It should be interesting. I want to see how long it takes them to crack this one.” He lowers his gun, but that’s only to retrieve the rolls of black cords behind his back. They were probably stuffed there and hidden by his shirt, or something. Oikawa doesn’t know. He doesn’t know anything, other than the likelihood he’s going to make it out of this alive or sane has suddenly slimmed to a very, very small margin of possibility.

God, he has two tests tomorrow. He has a volleyball match. His mother is waiting for him at home with a cold dinner that he’s going to have to reheat. His sister is off working in a different district, but she’ll be home to visit in a couple of weekends. Iwaizumi usually texts him before they sleep, making sure he got home okay and that his knee wasn’t bothering him too badly.

His girlfriend...

They manhandle him into the gym and shove him out of their grip when he’s inside. He would’ve run, he would’ve done anything if it weren’t for the fact that they immediately pressed the gun back to his temple. The boss nods to one, and they trade places. The apparent boss starts wrapping Oikawa tight with a black cord while the other keeps Oikawa in check.

“What are you going to do to me?” Oikawa asks, the first question he’s been able to produce on his own since this whole thing started. His voice is rather small and too shaky for his own good. “Please, I’m just a student. I haven’t done anything wrong. I—”

“Stop begging,” the boss grumbles and pulls the restraint binding his arms to his back by crossing his entire abdomen. Another one spans his waist to bind his wrists. “I’ll reconsider this whole thing and just shoot you right here. Would you like that better?”

Oikawa only responds with a shake of his head. The boss scoffs and continues with the last two pieces of cord to wrap Oikawa’s ankles and legs. Beside them, the last man tears up the gym floor with a hammer he must’ve pulled out in a similar fashion as the ropes. The strips of wood give way easily under the prying end of the hammer.

He thought that there was only solid ground beneath the hard flooring of the gym. He was wrong. There, in the center of the left side of the volleyball net, is a rectangular, less than a foot hole. He tears up more to reveal the most of it that he can, showing that it spans just long enough to fit someone as tall as Oikawa.

“I did my research on this place. The yakuza used this place as a money and weapon stash, once. One of those holes on either side of the court. Hope you don’t have a preference,” the boss says, tugging the final restraint on his ankles. It nearly knocks Oikawa over, but the other man has a steady, iron grip on his shoulders. The gun isn’t needed any longer — Oikawa can’t do anything.

Without ceremony, the man behind him forces a strip of cloth in between his lips, painfully pulling the sides of his mouth and triggering an uncomfortable salivating response immediately. He ties it behind his head, secures it, and wraps duct tape several times around his head. All the while he supports Oikawa’s weight carefully on his chest and leg.

He drags Oikawa to the pit and dumps him onto his back. Oikawa lands hard on the cement, halfway onto his shoulder before he lays flat. He’s too afraid to try and plead again, to ask them to please reconsider. He can’t, in any case. The cloth and tape have him completely muffled. When he tries to make a sound, absolutely nothing reaches his ears.

“I would tell you I’m sorry for this,” the boss says, waving for the man to start replacing the flooring again, “but I couldn’t care less. I have this game with the police. I rob and hide people, they try to find the victims before they die of whatever torture I’m putting them through. Great fun. You will die of starvation, I hope.”

The boards are close to Oikawa’s face. Close. The end of his nose presses up against the board — it’ll break if the board gets pushed in too hard. Considering that most of this is empty space, and it’s the dead center of the court, it would be hard to not hit his nose.

“Right under their noses. To put it simply, you’re an insult. I’m playing a practical joke.” It’s not funny in the slightest. Oikawa’s hungry, tired, and utterly terrified. His mouth is rubbing raw from the gag, and the cord hugs his body too tightly to the point where it digs harshly into his skin and flesh.

They leave only after stomping on the replaced floorboards. The sound reverberates through his tiny space, made perfectly to fit just one human person. Made for a victim like Oikawa. The lights turn off, and Oikawa is, one hundred percent, alone.

His stomach growls in the silence of his underground coffin. It’s quiet. It’s nothing but darkness and silence and the adrenaline-boosted exhaustion of being robbed and then locked under his gym. He’s an insult to the police, a practical joke.

Body tingling with the edges of hunger, Oikawa does the absolute only thing he can do. He sleeps in a fitful, restless night, with his body encased in cement and his face pressed against the floorboards of the volleyball court. Sleeping may be too harsh-defined for what he did. It was more like closing his eyes, forcing his breathing to even out, before startling back awake to phantom sounds of guns clicking and feet walking above him.

He doesn’t cry, even though he wants to. His family will notice that he’s gone, his friends, his teammates, and probably his girlfriend. Iwaizumi will see that Oikawa didn’t respond, even though he always does. They’ll tear the world apart looking for him.

He hopes they will.

—

The door opens with a bang, and the only indication that the lights are turned on is from the faintest of yellow outlines in the toothpick-thin space between each board. Footsteps echo through the room, and presumably his head coach sets to work preparing for morning practice. Carts are rolled out from where Oikawa hid them in the closet the night before, and the head coach paces the area. It won’t be long before the team starts filtering in.

It’s never too late to get a head start, though. Oikawa shifts, trying to make as much noise as possible by hitting his feet against the boards. Tapping is all he can manage — the cords have him restrained oddly, the tight quarters of the cement on either side, and the fact that he’s already extremely close to the boards make it so he can’t utilize much force. He tries to make vocal noises, but that’s a lost cause. Nothing makes it past the gag and layers of duct tape.

Oikawa hears his head coach mutter something faintly, then the door opens again. “Good morning, Irihata-san,” Mizoguchi, the other coach, greets.

Irihata quickly shushes him. “Do you hear that? There’s this incessant tapping noise.”

They are silent for a beat. Then: “Maybe Oikawa used the bathroom and forgot to turn off the water. I’ll check.”

The sound of footsteps carries Mizoguchi away toward the bathrooms. Oikawa continues to tap the floorboards, but it’s getting harder with each passing minute. He hears the head coach pace the gym, occasionally getting near to Oikawa, but always turning before he can get close enough to register the exact location of the noise.

Multiple people filter in at once. They greet Irihata in a disjointed manner, and Oikawa does whatever he can to keep tapping. But his body will fail soon. It’s not meant to move in this way, pinned and held together by cords, with nothing but his core to lift his legs a couple of centimeters. And with the gag strangling his ability to breathe, the task becomes a lot harder than it should be.

He hears his friends, Hanamaki and Mastukawa, talk together and say nothing about Oikawa’s absence. Iwaizumi arrives much later than everyone else, much to the coaches’ chagrin. “Where’s Oikawa?” Mizoguchi asks, having returned from the bathrooms a few minutes ago.

Oikawa’s heart races as he waits for his best friend’s reply. I’m here, he wants to scream. Help me! “I have no idea,” Iwaizumi says. “His mother called me this morning asking if Oikawa spent the night with me. Which he didn’t, by the way,” he adds rather hastily. “He hasn’t responded to any of my texts.”

“Call him right now. If he’s hungover from a party or something, I don’t care. We’ve got a game today, and he needs to get his butt over here,” the coach orders.

“I don’t think…” Iwaizumi starts and then trails off. He’s likely getting the death stare, which would be funny if it weren’t for the fact that Oikawa’s anxiety is skyrocketing. Hunger has truly struck him now, having missed two meals already and suffered through an incomplete night of sleep. His friend’s phone rings faintly from where he’s standing closer to the door than to Oikawa.

Louder, he hears: “Hello! This is Oikawa. Sorry, you just missed me! Leave a message, and I’ll consider getting back to you.”

Hanamaki calls from further away: “He hasn't replied to either me or Mattsun.”

“He better have a good reason for this,” Mizoguchi grumbles. “Whatever. Everyone else is here, so no point in delaying practice any further.”

Oikawa’s real Hell begins here.

Each step reverberates through the cement and pounds into his ears. In the close encasement, it sounds like bombs are raining down on his coffin. After they complete their sideline drills, it takes exactly two nanoseconds for someone to step on the floorboards holding him in. His noise splinters and cracks under the pressure. Blood trails down the sides of his face, and suddenly, breathing becomes one of the hardest tasks he’s ever had to do.

He stops tapping the floor in order to carefully control the air flowing in and out of his nose. He can’t exert any effort with his bones misplaced and blood seeping out his nose. His eyes sting up with the tell-tale blur of forthcoming tears, and he shuts his eyes tight. He can’t start crying. If he does, it’ll open a floodgate, and then he really won’t be able to breathe.

Oikawa isn’t keen on dying just yet. They are going to realize he’s missing soon. Hopefully. Even if they, for some reason, think he was partying and got too drunk. Iwaizumi doesn’t think that. If he can just come to his senses and report him to the police, then maybe he’ll get out of here before starvation takes him.

Practice ends without Oikawa ever making an appearance. The bones of his nose have been shattered from repeatedly being smashed in unknowingly by his teammates. He has cried if only for the sheer pain he’s experiencing. It’s only survival instincts that keep his breathing even under the pressure of his broken bones. Iwaizumi had called him again during their small break, and still, voicemail. Even Hanamaki and Matsukawa tried, but they received the same response.

The coaches dismiss them with a thinly veiled threat to make sure Oikawa attends school so he can play the game. To Iwaizumi, Mizoguchi lays the punishment thicker. They know their close friendship, he supposes.

He can’t help but find it a little odd. He has time to dwell on it since everyone clears out of the gym and they shut off the lights. They don’t stick around, because Oikawa has stopped tapping the floor due to his shattered nose. He can’t make a noise.

A few pathetic tears slip down his face. This time from sorrow — any pain he feels has become a monotonous throb hidden behind the heavy pounding of his heart. His mouth dries out, and a headache builds at the base of his neck. Yet, he is utterly alone. Though it’s morning, his world is dark and contained in a cement coffin underneath the floorboards of his volleyball gym.

Oikawa doesn’t know if he’ll ever be able to step foot in this place again once this is over. If he even gets out of here.

He presses his head as close as he can to the ground to relieve his nose of any kind of pressure, and he tries to sleep. Tries. He’s not very successful. More than anything, he’s bored and alone with only his thoughts to keep him company. No music, no entertainment, nothing. Just him, unbearable pain, and his incessant inner voice.

He thinks about his mother. He wonders if she’s worried sick about him, or if she thought he had been off at a party like his couches assumed. Oikawa wants to think that she knows him better than that; honestly, he’s not much of a party person anyway. Partying takes away from the time he could be spending watching matches and studying. School and volleyball are too important to him.

That doesn’t mean he hasn’t gone to a party. His friends have dragged him to them on occasion, but they’ve never had a problem with him leaving when he doesn’t feel like staying for long. He’ll pick them up if they need a drive home in exchange. His girlfriend doesn’t like it as much when he leaves, so he stays to please her.

He wonders if that’s why they’ve grown so distant. Oikawa can’t go to parties. He didn’t bring the right lighter. He has too many fangirls, too many high-level classes to attend, and too little time to spend with her, even though he tries so hard to make time.

The silent treatment recently has struck a chord in his heart. He doesn’t even know what he did wrong, but she won’t answer his texts and she looks the other way when he speaks to her. So he can’t even find out what happened. It’s driving him up the wall, but mainly, it’s made him upset.

Upset because he doesn’t even know if he wants to salvage their relationship.

His breath shudders as that thought crosses his mind, blatant and blaring like a police siren. Their downfall isn’t a tragedy, it’s merely an inevitable end. Oikawa had felt their tether loosening and splintering over the past few months. He doesn’t mind her smoking habits; he minds her jealousy streak, the way it’s always his fault and never hers, and how she really, really didn’t like Iwaizumi.

The slimmest reflection of his best friend sent his hands tremoring with a new kind of anxiety. He doesn’t know what’s gotten into him recently — it’s like every time he sees Iwaizumi, his heart races, body heats, and tongue thickens, causing him to stumble over his words as though he’s a young girl giving a confession. It’s embarrassing.

He doesn’t know what it means. Or rather, he doesn’t want to know what it means. Oikawa would rather focus on anything else in the world, but bringing himself back to the present is worse than the tumultuous words banging around his head. All that’s here for him in reality is his various aches and pains, the sharp sting of the cords keeping his body tight and still, and the complete darkness of his cement coffin.

Iwaizumi is a much better topic to think of. He always has been, and always will be, and reflecting on their relationship is much more fun than focusing on his pain. And as he reflects on his odd ailments regarding Iwaizumi’s presence, he remembers the entire, sorrowful ordeal concerning the university.

Oikawa had a very quiet meltdown when Iwaizumi texted him about the university he’d sent an application to, decidedly one that was not the same as the one that had offered Oikawa a full-ride scholarship to play collegiate volleyball. The thought that they would be separated so soon after high school made him so unbearably upset, and he couldn’t even comprehend why. His reaction to Hanamaki and Matsukawa’s decisions had been bad, but not that bad.

The day Iwaizumi revealed where he was going to university was the day Oikawa blessed the sun, the moon, and the stars, and sent his gratitude to every god of every religion. He doesn’t think he’s clingy, but when he reflects on his stroke of luck, he rethinks his entire self. Maybe he isn’t clingy, per se, but he doesn’t like losing the things he loves. Like volleyball, which he’s signed to play collegiate for. His family, whom he would lay down his life for.

Iwaizumi.

Oikawa promised himself the moment they met eleven years ago that he wanted Iwaizumi to be his best friend to the end of time. He still holds to that now, even as he starves and breathes shallowly and evenly beneath the Aoba Johsai gym floor. There’s nothing false about his eternal vow. It’s just that love is a strong word to use for a best friend.

Yet, he cannot deny that he truly does love Iwaizumi. As an extremely close best friend. Nothing more, nothing less. That’s all they ever will be, and Oikawa knows this. He doesn’t know why there’s an achingly familiar pang in his chest so vastly unrelated to his current predicament when he repeats the label of their relationship. Best friend.

He redirects his thoughts to the tests he’s missing today. He’s in his last year of English language, and though his grades are fine, he can’t help but worry over structure. Everything has become a lot more complicated after they’ve started doing complex sentences, each one being in a different tense and containing vocabulary words he’s not sure he fully understands. He went over them with Iwaizumi the other night, and it honestly seemed like his friend was fairing much better with the vocab than Oikawa.

Before his mind can travel down that familiar road of late-night study sessions, he associates English with learning Spanish in his free time, then Spanish with Argentina, then Argentina with volleyball. And where there is volleyball, there is Iwaizumi. He’s right back where he started.

He tries aliens and the various theories that follow, but that goes even quicker to Iwaizumi than English had. His other test is Calculus, he thinks desperately, but then that goes to how he struggles with the equations and graphs and Iwaizumi can just do it so effortlessly —

Everything comes back to Iwaizumi. Always.

And that leaves him with the muggers, guns, cords wrapping his body tight, cloth and duct tape binding his mouth, and a broken nose strangling his breathing.

So he goes back to Iwaizumi in a vicious cycle that repeats until he falls into a frustrated, headache-induced sleep.

—

He wakes to nothing but the deep-set ache of his body and the tight constriction from starvation. His throat is dry and his mouth is sore from the gag.

Other than his breathing, he hears nothing. He cannot tell how far into the day it is, when school will let out, or when the next day will come. Since there’s a match, nobody will be in the practice gym all afternoon. He’ll have to wait until tomorrow to try his luck again.

Distantly, he wonders if they’ll notice him tomorrow. Oikawa may be weak at that point. A full day and a quarter without any food or drink is hard on the body. It’d be one thing if he was getting water, but he was barely even taking in an adequate amount of oxygen . This careful equilibrium can’t last him forever. Besides, if they keep crushing his nose underneath their feet, then he really won’t be able to breathe.

The thought is upsetting enough that he returns to the snake biting its tail. Iwaizumi and him. He and Iwaizumi.

He works on trying to pry the duct tape off by scraping it against the cement wall. It’s not like there’s anything else he can do. He’s pressed in close enough that it doesn’t work very well, and he has to take frequent and inhibiting brakes every thirty seconds or so on account of his nose. It’s positively miserable. More miserable is sitting and doing nothing in agony.

He questions fleetingly, with objective curiosity to cure incurable boredom, what it would be like if Iwaizumi was born a girl. Oikawa shuts it down before it can bloom. It’s not like he can imagine Iwaizumi looking any different, anyway.

—

It’s incredible how fast his thoughts turn sour.

In his intense avoidance of Iwaizumi, he ends up recounting his entire life from the point of remembrance to his current, unfortunate predicament. He starts off innocently enough, but then it moves on to the first embarrassing moment of his life. Then the next, and then the avalanche of his Worst Days comes crashing down on him in a violent flurry of misery and distress.

His stomach curdles and coils with hunger, uncomfortableness, guilt, and regret. Reliving your tragic memories of humiliation isn’t something he thought he’d be dealing with when he first got shoved underneath the floorboards. At that point, he’d been too scared to think about anything but his imminent death and what he could do to avoid it. However, now he’s alone and most of the initial terror has worn off — the anxiety of it all doesn’t quite abandon him — so all he’s left with is an impenetrable amount of boredom.

He recalls the times when he caused scenes over minor things, when he’s cried in front of his classmates in elementary and lower secondary school, and been unreasonably rude or angry to his friends and family. Those in particular make his head reel and jaw flex. He has a mean streak — he’s well aware, and he doesn’t always feel sorry after he’s laid a few thick words — but something about the cramped darkness of the gym floor has him rethinking his actions.

The words he could have chosen differently. The people he’s hurt.

God, he never apologized to Kageyama for that shit he pulled when they were younger. Slapping a child because Oikawa felt sorry for himself is such a shitty move that he can’t even find the wherewithal to come up with a better justification for it. Even though it happened literal years ago, his heart pangs, and his gut clenches in that familiar, pitiful self-loathing agony.

He spirals before he knows it, and it jumps so fast to yesterday, or the day before, or however long it’s been since he and Iwaizumi had gotten into an argument, the same old fight, and Iwaizumi left Oikawa to practice in the gym alone for longer than usual. Iwaizumi wanted to walk Oikawa home, as they usually do, but Oikawa was confounded with a fit of nerves and anxiety that was overall foreign to him.

Or rather, it had been foreign to him, but in the past few weeks, he’s noticed an uptick in tremoring heartbeat and frantic thoughts. Nothing had changed between him and Iwaizumi, not anything that Oikawa had picked up on. Yet, on the basis that he was sure he was going to have a nervous breakdown if he walked in the dark with his best friend, he vehemently denied the offer and said that he should practice more. Iwaizumi argued that his knee was hurting, which it was and despite Oikawa’s best attempt at lying, Iwaizumi saw right through him.

Oikawa resorted to his usual defense mechanism, except he was much worse. The insults he swore cut deeper than he intended, and he knows it’s because of this thing he’s developed around Iwaizumi that’s completely fried his nerves. Iwaizumi left before the argument could turn from normal to violent, as though he knew that Oikawa hadn’t been feeling his best.

It didn’t mean that his face wasn’t twisted when he slammed punched the gym doors open and that Oikawa spent the next thirty minutes pushing himself as hard as he could to forget his jittery nerves and the hurt expression on Iwaizumi’s face. For the most part, it had actually worked. His knee was in enough pain and his exhausted, sweaty body averted his attention.

He’s cognizant of the fact that he was being unreasonable and that there has to be a root cause of his apparent fear of being close to Iwaizumi despite the fact that they’d been that way for their entire friendship. It came with the territory of being friends since they were six, and staying that way until they were both seventeen and drank themselves into a stupor over their eleven-year friendship.

Alone. Together. Just the two of them in the backyard of Iwaizumi’s house when his parents weren’t home. It would be one of his favorite memories, honestly, if it weren’t for the intense anxiety and heartache it causes him to recall it. It’s the way Iwaizumi looked at the time, with his face flushed with alcohol and his lips looser than usual, calling Oikawa more endearing terms than meaningless insults. He can’t remember much from that night past the hours they spent downing shots and cups that gradually led to a horrid, impromptu one-on-one volleyball match that ended with them sprawled out on the grass, laughing and making non-existent shapes of the stars hanging above them.

Oikawa woke up in Iwaizumi’s bed with the worst hangover in his entire life, pressed close to Iwaizumi, and starfished around him like a jellyfish clinging to an unsuspecting human leg. His and Iwaizumi’s torsos were bare, and thank fuck their pants were on or Oikawa would have had a panic attack for not remembering their first time together.

His thoughts come to a halt at that, and he feels his neck and face heating at the imagery of sex with his best friend. Who is a boy. Who is someone that Oikawa is not at all attracted to, and never will be attracted to. It’s embarrassing, he concludes, that he would even entertain the idea for more than half a second.

His heart palpitates and his breathing falls uneven, sending a spike of panic through his veins as he struggles to take in air through his shattered nose. It doesn’t help that he’s now actively thinking about having sex with Iwaizumi, even though he keeps trying to banish the thought. He blames it on the gym floor and boredom. He doesn’t want it to be anything else.

Even if his whole body twinges at the phantom feelings of his best friend planting kisses on his face, licking his neck, roughly unbuttoning his shirt, and sliding his hands down past Oikawa’s boxers. He moans into Oikawa’s ear, and instead of being entirely aroused, Oikawa feels uncomfortable and insurmountably guilty. He shouldn’t be having these thoughts – not about his best friend, who is not a girl and is very much a boy. He pushes imaginary Iwaizumi away from his two-thirds exposed body, unfathomably worsening his guilt and regret, and forces his mind to search for another topic.

Anything else. Please. Anxiety thrums through him as he keeps coming back to Iwaizumi, and his family, and about how horrified they would be if they found out Oikawa had been having these wretched, immoral fantasies. Ones that he’s tried for years to control but keep coming back to haunt him like a restless ghost. He can’t imagine the anger and betrayal Iwaizumi would feel if he ever had a peak into Oikawa’s intrusive, unforgiving mind. Iwaizumi would never talk to Oikawa again. Their eleven-year-long friendship would splinter and snap like a twig, and Oikawa’s friends would all leave him because he keeps pulling Iwaizumi back to him, pressing his hands to his chest, and tearing him apart with his mouth even though Iwaizumi is the same sex as him and that makes this so, so wrong.

The metal doors of the gym creak and groan. Multiple sets of footsteps glide into the court, carrying them only a few paces before they stop entirely. They’re probably grouped at the front.

“Is there any place he could be hiding?” An unfamiliar voice asks. It’s deep and masculine, and the distinct sound of clanging metal makes him wonder if the group of people is the police coming to investigate his disappearance.

His evil fantasy disbands before him like dust in the wind. He focuses on the conversation, trying to regain his breath so he might be able to tap on the floor. If anyone can find him, it would be them or Iwaizumi. Distantly he thinks that Iwaizumi wouldn’t make a horrible officer.

Speak of the devil. “The changing rooms is where I’d look first. Nobody saw him at practice, but he spends more time here than anyone else. If there’s a place to hide, he knows it,” Iwaizumi says. His voice is tight and tired. Oikawa's heart starts hurting all over again, and something akin to strong desire throws his breathing far off-kilter again.

Moreover, the fact that Iwaizumi is directing the police to look here, where Oikawa really is. They are so close. They just need to focus and see that he’s right under their noses. If the men who did this to him were able to find out that the yakuza used this gym once — the thought sends a shiver down his spine. How long has it been since they abandoned it? Were they still using it when Oikawa attended in his first and second year, waiting for him to leave the gym so they could unload weapons, drugs, and God-forbid bodies? — then surely the police could as well.

Surely, he thinks when they pass over his coffin. Not all of them went to the locker room. Some were directed to search the main area while they thoroughly ransacked the changing room. Unfortunately, Oikawa hadn’t left anything behind when he finished practice. He doesn’t like to give any indication he was there in the first place, which is an odd behavior he’s kept since he was young. Even though the whole team knows he stays for an hour or so after practice is over, Oikawa refuses to leave a trace of his presence.

Oikawa knows exactly where, when, and why this habit developed. It doesn’t matter, now, though. His father has been out of his life for seven and a half years. He has no reason to be thinking about the awful man any further.

“And you’re sure he had no connections with any gangs, drug dealers, or the yakuza?” An officer asks, their voices filtering in as they re-enter the court.

“Yes, I don’t—” Iwaizumi’s voice cuts out abruptly. It sounds so unlike his best friend that Oikawa could honestly cry. “I didn’t go through hours of interrogation for it to continue here. Just do your job and find him.”

It’s not an officer’s place to give condolences or comfort where they aren’t strictly necessary, so the policeman predictably doesn’t respond Oikawa’s still not breathing right; every voice he hears sends jolts through his aching head, knocking away all of the progress he’d made in the second before. He can’t scream to let them know that he’s here, that someone from his past or a mugger playing an awful practical prank has laid him under the floorboards to die.

They pass over him without pausing. His nose is bent far enough back that their footballs are unable to damage it any further. Splitting in different directions, he assumes Iwaizumi is going back in the direction of the changing rooms while the police officer heads the opposite way. Oikawa has the sickening premonition that they aren’t going to find him after all.

Oikawa is overridden with panic and dread as they search through the gym and come up with nothing. They meet in the middle after a while, and a long, tense silence stretches among them. “Nothing?” One asks. Another parrots the same word as an answer. “Then let's keep going. Iwaizumu-kun, take us down his usual route home.”

“... Okay,” Iwaizumi consents.

Oikawa never got his breathing under check in time. He continues to struggle, wondering if the light-headed feeling is coming from the lack of oxygen, hunger, dehydration, or sorrow. Most likely an amalgamation of all four to maximize his misery. The door closes behind them and locks into place.

He is alone. Even his intrusive thoughts are unable to keep him company as he silently processes the likelihood that he will die.

—

Memory is inherently fallible, but Oikawa remembers his father perfectly. It’s a trick of the universe, another set of unwanted thoughts to corral his misery. He’s too tired to fight them anymore. Hunger and thirst have started to drain him in earnest.

In truth, he didn’t get to see his father that often. The custody agreement between him and his mother meant that Oikawa only went to his dad’s house on the weekends. He didn’t hate his dad at the time, but he certainly enjoyed his mom’s place more. She had all of the posters he liked, the action figures from his favorite comics, three volleyballs, and most importantly, Iwaizumi. He only lived a few houses down from his mom’s house, while his dad lived on the other side of the city. Much further away from Iwaizumi, which made it extremely inconvenient for Oikawa to hang out with his best friend.

Oikawa was young at the time. He didn’t have any comprehension of divorce, or why his mom and dad lived in two separate houses. It didn’t matter to him, really. It wasn’t until he was older that he was slowly taught all of the reasons why his father was abhorrent, and why Tooru should strive to clear the dirt off the Oikawa family name.

He was seven years old when he first heard the word fag at his dad’s house. It was about some television show his father and his friends were watching, strewn around the living room while having Oikawa serve them beer at intervals. They laughed loudly, and when Oikawa came into the room with four bottles balancing carefully in his arms, his father said the words that continue to haunt Oikawa to the present day:

“Never be a dirty bastard like that, son, or I might just have to kill you myself.”

His dad said things like that. Casual threats, slurs to anyone different than himself, and overall degrading comments to women. His dad’s friends weren’t any better, and they tended to goad his behavior rather than amend it. The abnormality of his father’s personality became more apparent to him as he got older.

Iwaizumi’s dad didn’t leave bruises on the places where he gripped too tight. Iwaizumi’s dad didn’t leave cans of beer on the ground for his son to clean up. Iwaizumi’s dad was nothing like his own dad. Oikawa liked Iwaizumi’s house better than he liked his dad’s house.

Oikawa’s room was barren at his dad’s house. He tended to keep people over when Oikawa wasn’t there — and he did when he actually was there, sometimes — so he was ordered to pick up anything that might indicate that he even had a son in the first place. Of course, Oikawa knows why that happened: his father invited women to his house almost every night. Multiple, in many cases. They couldn’t all sleep in one bed, so they were delegated to what was supposed to be Oikawa’s room.

Then there was the other stuff. His dad didn’t like how Oikawa preferred to keep himself pristine and clean, didn’t particularly enjoy any other sport than volleyball, and hadn’t shown much interest in any of the girls in his class. He only really talked about Iwaizumi, and when he met them, Mastukawa and Hanamaki. His father would warn him not to be a disgusting homosexual, and that would be that.

Oikawa only got to learn about the really bad things after his father killed himself in the living room on a Saturday night.

He was ten years old, and the sound of the killing gunshot woke him up from his shallow slumber. His room was plain and bland, just like always, with his clothes packed in his duffel bag. He raced down the stairs and found his father dead on the couch with two empty bottles at his side.

It’s only on bad nights that Oikawa recalls this. And on those bad nights, he calls Iwaizumi, who always manages to answer him despite the fact that it’s three in the morning and they have morning practice, or Iwaizumi’s at the beach, or something or the other.

He only ever asks to hear Iwaizumi’s voice. His best friend always obliges. They don’t talk about it the next day, though even if Iwaizumi asked, Oikawa would have denied him. He doesn’t like to think about it, much less talk about it.

Besides, he doesn’t know what to do with the guilt that overrides him on those nights, and the day after when his mind supplies him with the gruesome scene of his father’s pink and red brains splayed out over the dirt brown couch.

The truth is, Oikawa doesn’t feel sorry that his dad committed suicide.

He feels sorry that he had to see it. He feels sorry that his mother suffered all his dad’s abuse and degradation for years, yet not be able to obtain full custody of her children. His father was a piece of shit through and through, and Oikawa does not mourn his death as a seventeen-year-old.

Oikawa only fears the person he will become, fears that to this day, his father clutches his mind so tight that he thinks his own brain matter is seeping between his fingers.

“Never be a dirty bastard like that, son, or I might just have to kill you myself.”

The disembodied voice echoes and bangs around his skull like a bullet’s ricochet path. Bile climbs up his throat when he thinks about Iwaizumi and all of the nasty thoughts he’s had about him in the eleven years of their friendship.

Oikawa’s father is dead, but the weight of his impact clings to him as though he were still alive to repeat those threats. Oikawa knows that the world has differing views on homosexuality, but he also knows that in the Miyagi Prefecture, there are way too many people who hold similar, if not identical, beliefs. Oikawa plays men’s volleyball for God’s sake. If he was gay, they’d all turn their backs on him. They might beat him, leave him for dead, or shoot him in through the temple like his dad did to himself all those years ago.

That’s why Oikawa likes girls, not boys. He doesn’t like Iwaizumi that way, despite his brain unhelpfully supplying him with the night they got drunk out of their minds in his backyard.

Oikawa only enjoys alcohol when he’s with Iwaizumi. That he can admit to without feeling a convoluted mess of emotions that make him want to rip out his hair, which he can’t do regardless. His arms are tied firmly to his back, and he doesn’t have nearly enough space to attempt wiggling out of the cords.

He wonders what his father would do in this situation, but he can’t imagine he’d be in it in the first place. He would’ve gotten himself killed in the process of being robbed, probably. Then, he reprimands himself. He doesn’t want to do whatever his father would do. That man was a liar, a bastard, and a cheat.

Oikawa pretends he’s called Iwaizumi. Pretends that his chest isn’t constricted with the terror that he’s become exactly like his father. Pretends that he doesn’t want Iwaizumi to hold him tight in his arms, because his father would kill him if wanted that, his teammates would abandon him, he’d never be successful in his professional career, he’d stain the family name more than it already has been, he—

—

It takes ten years for the doors to be opened again. According to his vague perception of time, — calculated mainly on his increasing thirst and hunger — Oikawa thinks it should be time for morning practice. That means a day and a quarter has passed underneath the floorboards. He feels gross from the dirt and dust coating his body. A shower would be nice. So would food, water, more than two centimeters of space to move, and real human interaction.

Alas, every man wants what they cannot have.

Instead of the slow pace and quiet grumbles of Irihata, two sets of footsteps land heavily on the gym floor. They rattle the cement coffin, though they never quite step on top of him. “Oikawa!” Hanamaki’s familiar voice calls. “This isn’t fucking funny! Oikawa!”

After a beat of silence that is filled entirely with Oikawa’s mental screams of desperation, his other friend’s voice cuts in. “Yeah, I don’t think he’s here,” Matsukawa says, and there’s an edge in his tone that Oikawa isn’t fond of.

“Fuck,” Hanamaki sighs. It’s truly amazing how one word can summarize Oikawa’s entire situation.

He hears the distinct rustling of paper and his friends moving a few paces. The pulling and ripping of tape comes next, and while Oikawa knows they’re putting something on the wall, he’s a little lost as to what. “This feels useless,” Makki professes.

“It’ll guilt the team into trying harder to find him,” Mattsun steadfastly replies. An unsettling feeling coils in his stomach when he realizes that his friend is being reasonable. Not only that, he’s become a comforting figure. Truly terrifying. The world may as well collapse underneath their feet.

Another lull haunts their conversation, as though they can’t quite figure out what to say. Or rather, everything that they wanted to share had already been discussed before they arrived at the gymnasium. Either way, it helped Oikawa very little in terms of gleaning information about the living world.

“LSD,” Makki starts. The word makes Oikawa’s eyebrows furrow painfully, given his pounding headache. “All his money went to LSD and some other drug, right? That doesn’t seem right.”

What?

“He barely even drank, and he was saving for a trip to Argentina,” Mattsun agrees.

“He seemed nervous, though, right? Like, all last month.” Makki pauses. Then, “Do you think—”

“No gangs. Oikawa doesn’t have the guts for that.” Oikawa would be offended in any other scenario. But, given his predicament and the dots connecting in his head, a bitter taste fills his parched mouth instead. “Besides, we agreed his behavior was linked to college and Iwaizumi. Getting into a gang and doing hard drugs is far out, even for us.”

What the fuck, Oikawa thinks incredulously, do they mean by that.

“Shit. I hate this. I hate this so much. It’d be easier if he ran away. At least he’d be okay. And we’d probably know where he went,” Makki rambles, then follows up with a string of curses.

Matsukawa mutters inaudibly. A little louder, he says: “We aren’t helping anyone by standing here. Let’s get changed.”

Out of all the things they’d said in their short conversation, that threw Oikawa for a loop the most. If it’s morning practice, then they should already be in their practice clothes. Their footsteps led away to the changing room, leaving Oikawa to stew in his thoughts as he always does.

A second later, the door opens again. This time, Oikawa is sure it’s Irihata. He’s usually there after one or two early players in the afternoon practice. though the fact that Hanamaka and Matsukawa are the early ones this time calls for concern. He knows why. They’re worried for him.

The anxiety and despair crushes any warmth he may have felt at the sentiment. Not only is it afternoon practice, meaning his perception of time is worse than he imagined, but morning practice had been canceled, likely from his disappearance. It surprises him — one person not being able to show up shouldn’t have made his coaches cancel the whole thing. Unless, of course, the brief investigation happened in the morning rather than at night as Oikawa originally thought.

More irritating than anything is that Oikawa has absolutely no way of confirming this unless someone happens to talk about it at a distance where he can hear, and the likelihood of that occurring is even worse than his chance of making it out alive. He resigns himself in his bristling agitation as Irihata begins setting up the court and more players, along with Mizoguchi, enter the gymnasium.

Iwaizumi’s gruff greeting captures Oikawa’s attention for a second. It doesn’t sound like much at first, but for the second day in a row, he’s come far later than the rest of the team. He knows the observation isn’t lost on his coaches, yet they opt out of saying anything about it. They let Iwaizumi pass through to the changing room without so much as a hint of displeasure.

Oikawa feels his heart hurt unbearably in his chest. Iwaizumi and Oikawa usually walk together to practice, and if they don’t, they’re on time regardless. Lateness could only mean Iwaizumi was waiting for a person who will never come, or searching for a friend whom he won’t find.

We agreed his behavior was related to college and Iwaizumi, Matsukawa’s voice echoes in his head, only slightly overshadowing the rough threat of his father.

He’d been as discreet as he could over the past few weeks. He didn’t hang out with his friends any less, didn’t break up with his girlfriend out of the blue, and certainly didn’t do anything to indicate that his heart rate went through the roof when he was with Iwaizumi for more than five whole seconds. The issue of his anxiety was something he resigned to solving by himself. Enough self-berating over time should have done the trick.

Except it didn’t, and his friends were able to pick up on it. His father, Matsukawa, and his own voice run together in a murky, slow-moving river. It rises past his shoulders and clogs his nose with muck.

“Before we begin,” Mizoguchi begins after all of the players gather in a stiff silence, “if anyone has any idea where Oikawa Tooru has gone, speak now. I don’t care if someone has given you hush money. This is bigger than pride or volleyball or whatever profit you made. A real person’s life is at risk.”

The silence prevails. Oikawa screams behind his cloth gag and layers of duct tape.

Mizoguchi continues awkwardly. “Practice and games will continue like normal. Please, keep your eyes out for Oikawa. Don’t stop searching.”

Practice is only marginally more bearable than last time. His headache splinters the space between his eyes from the constant rattling of the cement and floorboards. Although his nose is no longer in mortal danger of being broken again, he can’t quite pull it far enough back. The wood bending under hard, falling feet, chests, arms, and the occasional butt, still taps his nose in painful bursts. It makes it hard to breathe, and he spends most of practice filled to the brim with panic. Less so because he thinks he will die from suffocation, though always a prevalent fear, but because not being able to breathe makes the heart behave erratically.

His best friend leads the drills, just like he had the day before. While he isn’t toned down at all, he definitely seems out of it. Talking to the same person every day for eleven years has allowed them to gain the innate ability to tell when something is wrong with the other using simple inflections of the voice if no physical cues are given. Oikawa’s disappearance is bothering him a lot. More than Oikawa would have guessed.

He’s only been gone for nearly two days. They could easily guess that he’s run away, taken his trip to Argentina a little earlier without telling anyway, or got really messed up on LSD, if his friends’ earlier conversation is anything to go by. It wouldn’t be wrong for them to still hope that he’d pick up his phone soon and respond to the texts and calls they’d sent him.

Of course, that isn’t what happened. Hajime knows him too well. He knows that Oikawa could never keep plans of running away a secret for so long, that he still doesn’t have quite enough for his Argentina vacation yet, and he’s never been high despite the several attempts made by others. He doesn’t smoke and can count on his fingers on one hand the amount of times he’s been tipsy or drunk. The obvious conclusion Iwaizumi would come to is that Oikawa has been kidnapped or murdered.

The reality is a mixture of both. Oikawa has a feeling that Iwaizumi knows that, too.

Hearing his taut voice order the players around in place of Oikawa is too much for him to bear. It sends spikes of anxiety and such intense longing through his veins, and for the first time in his life, he can’t smother it. He can’t pretend it’s about anything else, because he isn’t doing anything else. There’s no person he can turn to blame his tremoring body on, no place to direct the pull of his heart, no game to accuse of causing his elevated temperature.

And when Iwaizumi leaves, the last person to do so without actually practicing any extra drills, Oikawa feels a part of himself leave, too. The part that has been held in Iwaizumi’s hands since they were six years old.

However, Iwaizumi fails to take Tooru’s hysterical emotions with him. It remains trapped with him in the six-foot by ten-inch coffin.

He has no road to run away from his feelings.

He takes a deep breath through his nose, experiences the pain it creates, and cries.

—

Time passes without him. It could be the next day, next month, or next year. It’s impossible to keep track anymore. All he knows is that he’s steadfastly dying under the floorboards of the practice gym, and nobody has come to tear him out of his coffin. They are only going to realize their mistake when his corpse is rotting and emitting a foul smell that attracts ants and maggots alike to feast on his flesh. His silent heart and brain will be the delicacies they save for dessert.

Practice occurs four more times: morning, afternoon, morning, afternoon. Oikawa’s convinced he’s missed some more in between there. He drifts in and out of sleep, but never long enough to allow him dreams or make him feel well-rested. He’s hungry, so unbearably hungry, and he can’t quite feel his mouth anymore. The only sensations he comprehends are the cloth pressuring his aching teeth and the duct tape sticking to his skin.

It comes to a head at no specific given point. Practice ended some time ago, and he is alone as usual. There’s nothing special about this time, and yet.

He thinks about Iwaizumi, as he has been recently. Always is his friend accompanied by the harsh words of his father, mainly because when he imagines Hajime, he’s pressing a kiss to Oikawa’s head and reassuring him that everything will be okay.

For the first time, it occurs to Tooru that his worst nightmare will come true. His number one fear, just after being outed and suffering ridicule for his sexuality, is that he will become just like his father.

Oikawa hasn’t gone out of his way to treat women poorly, but he knows that his long history of short relationships can’t be blamed on the individual girls. He doesn’t drink often, but he has and that’s worth something. This slow death of his is practically his fault, making it suicide. He hasn’t done enough tapping or wriggling or shoving.

He’s homophobic to a fault.

A painful memory resurfaces in his mind. He was sitting on a couch in Iwaizumi’s living room, two years after his dad shot himself in the head, and they were watching some television show that happened to be on. Oikawa doesn’t remember all the details. He doesn’t have to; only one scene matters.

It happened to be that two men kissed on the screen at that very moment. Iwaizumi wasn’t paying much attention, since he was actually doing his assigned homework that Oikawa was definitely not procrastinating on. The couple had been developing at a fast rate in the episode, and Oikawa’s conflicting emotions prevented him from properly distancing himself from the screen.

As such, when the scene occurred, he made a noise that was something between a gag and a whine. Iwaizumi looked up in slight alarm, looking from Oikawa, to the screen, then back to Oikawa. Raising an eyebrow, he said: “Are you okay?”

“I– uh— is that not… weird to you?” Oikawa nodded to the screen, and he felt the flush on his neck that had quickly overtaken the biting cold that had drained his body all at once.

Iwaizumi’s forehead crinkled in confusion. “What?”

“That!” Oikawa waved a shaky hand at the men who were then holding onto each other. “That shouldn’t be on screen. Right?”

Even then, Tooru’s inner conflict had raged within him. As young as twelve, he’d recognized that he was different from other people. But, at that point, his father’s death was still fresh in his mind, along with the words that would continue to haunt him for years to come. Oikawa will never forget the affronted look on Iwaizumi’s face when he realized what Oikawa was specifically pointing out.

“Don’t be an asshat, Oikawa. Boys can like other boys. Girls can like other girls. Get over yourself,” Iwaizumi asserted and then returned to his homework.

They didn’t bring it up again after that.

There were more times that Iwaizumi got hints of Oikawa’s homophobia, like when he’d startle seeing two men holding hands or two girls dancing close together in the rain. Iwaizumi would give him a look, slap him on the back or head, and that would be it. It didn’t take long for Oikawa’s outward homophobia to dissipate. He dragged it all inward, pointed it to himself, and let people live their lives without his hateful judgment.

But homophobia is homophobia, regardless of who it’s being directed to. He doesn’t care anymore when two people of the same gender share a kiss, hold hands, or dance. At least, that’s what he told himself. Oikawa reflects, and he recognizes the viper of jealousy that strangles his intestines.

He cares that people care about him, and the image he needs to uphold, and the father that’s been dead for years but is still terrified of disappointing. He’s denied himself the happiness reflected in the eyes of couples by forcing himself into relationships that won’t work because, quite simply, he doesn’t like girls.

He never has, and he never will. It’s the exact sentiment that would’ve driven his father into beating Oikawa until his heart stopped beating and then killing himself again.

His father was homophobic. So is Oikawa, despite his best efforts not to be.

He doesn’t want to be like his father. He doesn’t want to die a liar, a bastard, and a cheat.

For so long, he’s listened to that deceased voice like it can come back and kill him, like his words carry more weight than the dirt he’s buried in. Oikawa knows what it’s like in his country, and he’s aware that his father’s views were a little more radical than most. He won’t get shot in the back of his head by his teammates, and they certainly wouldn’t kick their best player off the court.

Besides, he doesn’t have to tell them anything. They aren’t entitled to his personal life — if they want to make assumptions when he stops dating girls, so be it. He’s not going to keep lying and lying and lying.

He will tell Hajime, and he won’t cut the truth down. He’ll tell his best friend that he’s gay, that he’s been in love with him for at least three years, and that if this changes anything between them, Oikawa will understand.

The thought of Iwaizumi separating himself from Oikawa’s life entirely is painful. It hurts more than his stomach eating itself to survive. But this way, he won’t be like his father. He won’t run from his problems any longer. The voice in his head will mean less than the scuff on the bottom of his shoe. Tooru will be an Oikawa in name only.

He just has to be found.

Please, he prays, uncaring of which god his words reached, I’ll do it. Please don’t let me die as my father. Please don’t let me die. I’ll do it. I’ll tell him I love him. I won’t keep living a lie. I don’t want to die. Please.

Oikawa barely hears the doors open over the pounding of his headache. He’s had it for so long that it should’ve become dull and forgettable, but he’s been acutely aware of its growing intensity. What little water is left in him is wasted by the tears trickling down his face in slow, agonizing droplets.

He knows he will die before the next practice.

The tell-tale rattle and shake of feet stepping on the gymnasium floor startles him. They pace directly to where Oikawa thinks the flyer is. Matsukawa and Hanamaki taped it up to the wall a while back, but it’s clearly not done any good. Oikawa is still missing, and he won’t be found.

Then, the sound of ripping paper cuts through his headache like a steaming knife in sharp bread.

“Damn it!” Iwaizumi yells, and his previously faint heartbeat picks up rapidly in Oikawa’s chest. “Where are you? Where are you? I can’t do it anymore. You never left. I know you didn’t. You’re somewhere in here, and I can’t—” His voice breaks into choked sobs. “Where did you go?”

Oikawa can’t breathe. Every breath hurts more than the last like a searing firestick being jabbed directly into his lungs. There isn’t enough energy in his body to keep him alive for much longer.

For the first time, he ignores his shattered nose. He ignores the fact that he cannot breathe at all without pain splintering his head as though he’s a piece of firewood being chopped in half by an unskilled lumberjack. He takes his feet and slams them as hard as he can against the floorboards. It’s probably not as loud or effective as he imagines it would be if his body wasn’t ninety-nine percent of the way dead from starvation, but he does it anyway.

And he does it again, and again, and again. All the while, he pressed his face as close as he could to the floorboards, willing his nose to be felt as an odd lump underneath Iwaizumi’s foot. His chest constricts, his heart unable to keep up with the effort he’s applying. It’s why he hadn’t done this before — the likelihood he’d make it out alive would be slim to none.

Well, if he doesn’t try now, he will die regardless.

“Oh my God,” he hears Iwaizumi exclaim, horrified, as his foot finds Oikawa’s nose. As soon as he hears his best friend and feels the pressure against his broken bones, he passes out. He knows this because when he opens his eyes next, his body is limp on the cement, and the distinct sound of metal scraping the floor filters through toothpick-thin cracks.

The wood peels up off the floor, right on top of Oikawa’s eyes. The brightness of the gymnasium lights hits his fattened pupils hard, for he’s staring directly at a burning light fixture above.

He blacks out again.

The time discrepancy between his past and current wakefulness is shorter because Iwaizumi has barely started on another board. He’s slow to comprehend his surroundings and sensations, staring blankly at the peeling wood without much going on outside of his slowing heart.

“I’m gonna get you out. Don’t die. Don’t fucking die,” Iwaizumi warns between heaving gasps in the struggle against the wood, and Oikawa truly sees him.

Iwaizumi’s short hair is more tangled and mussed than usual. His voice is frantic, hard, and frail all at the same time. He’s wearing one of his pajama shirts with his cross necklace dangling off of it. Oikawa gave it to him as a good luck charm a year ago, more so to tease him about the fact that he’s baptized, though he doesn’t believe in the Christian God. He knew Iwaizumi wore it every now and again as a fashion icon rather than his baptized status.

The sight of it now encourages his heart to keep him alive a little longer.

Tear stains mark Iwaizumi’s face as he rips out floorboard after floorboard. Oikawa doesn’t know when he stopped crying, or when Oikawa started. The scent of fresh air hits his shattered nose in a wave of flowers with thorns sticking out of every fiber. The bulbs strangle his eyesight as his pupils slowly adjust to light after bearing complete darkness for so long. The rest of his body has gone numb entirely, save for his headache.

When the last board is pulled out, Iwaizumi drags his dead weight out of the shallow cement coffin. Oikawa’s ears ring as he’s dropped onto the wooden floor, and it takes everything in him to not pass out again. His best friend wastes no time in picking at the duct tape holding his lips together, and then untying the gag that has rubbed the edges of his mouth into raw. Those parts of the cloth are stained with Oikawa’s blood.

Oikawa takes his first, deep breath of fresh air. It prickles his dry throat, and he greedily takes in all that he can in the shortest amount of time possible. He knows he must look like a drowning fish, what with his mouth gaping open and water streaming down his face, but he doesn’t care.

His mouth is open, and he can close whenever he wants. He can make sounds, and he can breathe.

“Oh my God,” Iwaizumi repeats. He’s shaking as he finds the tied ends of the cords, untying Oikawa as fast as he can. Unfortunately, Oikawa is extremely unhelpful in this process as he gets his bearings, processing the arms that are now free, the mouth that is open by his free will, the air flowing through his lungs, and the Aoba Johsai banner hanging loosely from the ceiling.

Once the final cords come off on his ankles, Iwaizumi pulls him into a tight hug. It crushes his chest and weak bones, and Oikawa would tap out of it if not for the fact that this is Hajime, who’s wound his hand through Tooru’s greasy hair and is holding on like Oikawa is his lifeline. His body is trembling and his chin rests against Oikawa’s head.

From this position, Oikawa’s ear is pressed to Iwaizumi’s chest. The beat of his friend’s heart is set in a fast, comforting rhythm. In this hold, he’s warm and safe. He wants to stay in Hajime’s arms until the world catches fire, and for some reason, he thinks Iwaizumi would let him.

Naturally, he breaks away from the hug.

Iwaizumi’s right hand remains tangled in Oikawa’s hair, but the other drops soundlessly from his back. The loss of contact makes him shiver. Hajime’s turbulent gaze is enough to get Oikawa to make use of his aching arms, bringing them up to cup Iwaizumi’s face in his hands.

His cheeks are warm to the touch. His jaw is trembling in Tooru’s weak hold. Oikawa’s arms are too weak to hold this position for long.

Iwaizumi starts to say something, and Oikawa can tell it’s going to be an apology, to ask how he’s feeling, and if he’s okay. Oikawa doesn’t give him the chance. He leans forward and presses their lips together, savoring the way Iwaizumi’s wet lips feel against his own, healing the cracks and split, bloody ends.

Their kiss only lasts but a second. Hajime doesn’t reciprocate, and Oikawa can’t physically deepen their kiss. His mouth is far too dry and weak, and his arms are shaking with the effort it takes to keep them up. He pulls back, opening his eyes to find Iwaizumi staring wide-eyed back at him with his lips slightly parted.

Oikawa knows what this means, and although he told himself it would happen, it doesn’t make it sting any less.

“I’m sorry,” he says, his throat scratching on every syllable, struggling to produce anything above a hoarse whisper. “I’m so sorry. I can’t—- live like this. I won’t run from you— anymore.” His salty tears flow over the sticky residue of the duct tape and slip into his mouth. Iwaizumi’s holding onto his wrists, keeping Oikawa’s arms from falling away from his face. He still has that shining stare that stabs Oikawa’s heart. “I’m in love with you. I’m— sorry I’m like— like this. I’m—”

Then lips are pinned against his own, silencing his rambling, shaky apologies. This time, it’s Oikawa who isn’t reciprocating. His mind has stuttered to a stop with the fact that his best friend instigated a kiss with him, and when he pulls away, he finds Iwaizumi’s eyes aren’t hard and disappointed. One of his wrists is dropped, but only to allow Hajime to rub his thumb across Oikawa’s cheek.

Hajime offers the barest hint of a smile, though it doesn’t hide the quiver of his lips. “Will it take you dying again to see how long I’ve been in love with you?”

And Oikawa can’t help it, really, when sobs tear away his soul. He collapses forward into Hajime’s chest, and Iwaizumi cradles him as gently as he can. His head splits and his eyes drain away the rest of his body fluids. He’s dry, completely, and all that’s left are desperate gasps and pained coughs while Iwaizumi repeats how worried he was, and that he’s so glad that Oikawa’s alive.

“I’m— going to die,” Tooru somehow manages. “Food. Water.”

Immediately, Hajime shifts to grab his phone from his pocket. It takes him less than a second to dial the correct numbers.

“Hello, this is one-one-nine. What’s your emergency?” A dispatcher answers.

“I need an ambulance,” Hajime says shakily, and the hand he has in Oikawa’s hair tightens only a fraction. It’s painful for his headache, but comforting all the same. Human contact is something he has been devoided for so, so long. “I found missing person Oikawa Tooru. He hasn’t eaten or drank anything in four days.”

His hand trembles against Oikawa’s scalp, carding his fingers through his crusted, greasy as he gives the dispatcher directions to the practice gym. When the call is over, he presses one gentle kiss to the top of Oikawa’s head.

“I’m sorry it took me so long. I’m so, so sorry,” Iwaizumi says.

His energy is too depleted for him to respond, his throat too scratchy and dry, so he opts to do the only thing he can do: burying his head deeper into Iwaizumi’s chest and letting Hajime hold him as though he’ll never let go.

Oikawa doesn’t want him to let go.

#fanfic #fanfiction #ao3 fanfic #haikyuu #hq #iwaoi #iwaoi fic #oikawa x iwaizumi #oikawa tōru #tooru oikawa #oikawa tooru #iwaizumi hajime #angst with a happy ending #angst #one shot #iwaizumi x oikawa

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