#// so making new muses would be sort of pointless. as compared to just expanding my horizons with ig.

[hellguarded-moved]

// really craving to do something with the whole 'religion as a horror' theme like idk........

[astersandstuffs]

we’ve passed the end (so we chase forever)

“Hey, Iwa-chan, what do you think of living forever?

“What, like if you don’t find your soulmate?”

“Well, how else can we live forever?”

On choosing to live forever.

@iwaoiweek2017 -  (immortality)  1  ☆  2  ☆  3  ☆  4  ☆  5  ☆  6  ☆  7

thanks to @sawamura-daichis-thighs for beta’ing this!

[ao3]

“Hey, Iwa-chan, what do you think of living forever?”

This is when Tooru chooses to ask such a question—the start of high school, the two of them donned in Aoba Johsai’s blue and white and getting ready for their first practice, and as Hajime’s copying the knot on his right shoe to his left. In turn, he doesn’t look away from the task.

“What, like if you don’t find your soulmate?”

“Well, how else can we live forever?”

We, huh. Hajime wonders if Tooru thinks of forever in the context of them, and chides himself for such pointless observations. Because he might’ve been observing this best friend of his since forever (and the other boy, the same), but it doesn’t make him immune to the dangerous waters of wishful thinking.

“Humans are crazy shits,” Hajime says. He secures the shoelaces with a final twist, goes to stand with some sort of conviction, and starts his warm-up. A light kick with the toe of his shoe prods Tooru out of his crouch from where he’s been staring intently at Hajime, urging him to do the same, and Hajime just trudges past the exclaimed how rude! “We’ll figure something out.”

“Hmm.” Arms raised high and skyward, Tooru gives a pleased sound at the stretch. Hajime tears his gaze away from the line of skin exposed by the lifted shirt. “We haven’t come up with the one-hundred percent scientific explanation for soulmates.”

“Well,” Hajime says, “it’s soulmate, after all. Something unquantifiable. Why’re you asking this now, anyway?”

There’s volleyball to play, new techniques to learn and teammates to know, but throwing quips back and forth has become instinctive when they’ve been doing it with each other ever since they could babble without words.

“It’s weird, isn’t it? Finding true love is supposed to be like happily ever after, like fairy tales, but instead it’s what triggers us to age and die.”

This, too; when Tooru runs and jumps, from topics of discussion to a race down the road, the run uphill, Hajime just catches up. He dodges questions and takes pleasure in letting Hajime connect the clues, the scattered slips. But perhaps that’s because Hajime is the only one who can.

“There’s no push to do stuff together when you have all the time you don’t need, when you have forever together. It’s like how we eat because we’ll get hungry later.”

Tooru stares at him, unblinking, and it sort of pisses Hajime off because it’s the kind he does at Ushiwaka when he says things along the lines of choosing the wrong path and infertile soil. “Wow,” Tooru mutters, all pretend-baffled, and gives up a snort—awkward sounding and certainly not pretty and why the hell does it make Hajime want to smile—hiding it behind a loose fist. “Iwa-chan, I know you’re stupid, but comparing that to being hungry is a new low.”

The coach calling them for a line up is the only thing that saves him from Hajime’s wrath. Still, Oikawa Tooru has picked up another obsession, this time on the subject of forever more than soulmate itself, and he’s never one to do things half-way.

On the walk home from school—“Would it be like dreaming?”

“What?”

“The forever thing.”

“Oh, it’s a thing now?”

In the middle of the match—tugging on Hajime’s sweat-saturated jersey and gesturing him to lean close, only to whisper, “Would it be like counting years?” instead of some morally questionable strategy to crush the opposite team.

During a lab experiment—“Would it be traveling all over the world, and there are always new places to visit and things to discover?” he asks, past the girls murmuring behind their backs, as he nudges a pair of glasses to settle back on the bridge of his nose.

“Why do you care?” Hajime takes the query ahead of Tooru one day. It’s the first night of summer training camp in Tokyo, and a glance at the clock above the gym’s doors tells him it’s 10PM. They’re a sweaty mess sprawled on the floor side by side, all growing pains and aches from the extended practice, just between the two of them once the others whistled at their stamina and bid farewell, their senpai with a “don’t push too hard, first-years!”—because of course a powerhouse’s training regime isn’t enough for Tooru, and of course Hajime wants to improve awfully the same, if slightly more rational about expectations and the likes.

So, Hajime asks again, Why do you care? About forever. About what having forever feels like, when he’s been living like he’s running out of time. When he’s restless and terrifyingly driven at every practice, and faces official matches like trouncing battlegrounds, the outcomes scars to carry by something permanent.

“Why don’t you care, Iwa-chan?”

—and for all their differences, Hajime can’t say he isn’t the same, either, and perhaps that’s why he doesn’t give much thought on this. I live my life, and I set the pace. But he also knows there’s a certain limit to it, even if it doesn’t entirely stop him from trying to break through. Tooru eschews the boundaries he doesn’t set himself, and Hajime’s there to remind him of it, with a hit upside the head and wise words and bodily dragging him out of whatever he’s got himself into. Just like when Tooru lends a hand on Hajime’s back for the push, or to smack him to his senses, or just to linger there. I’m here if you want to fall. Because I won’t let you.

“—there are seven point five billion people in the world,” Tooru continues, sight on the ceiling like he’s watching ghosts dance beneath the limelight of cheap fluorescents. “What are the chances of finding your soulmate?”—and, oh. They’re talking about that, too.

“…Actually, I remember from some documentary that it’s quite high.”

“Yes!” Tooru gripes. “Yes, I know. Why, though? There’s so little time for everything—imagine if we can be on the Olympic team forever.”

“You truly have nothing but volleyball in your head,” Hajime mutters. We. Still us. “But”—he tips his chin up, gazes straight at the ceiling lights, and pretends the sting of it is the sun of a summer noon—“it’ll be somewhat lonely. Our families and friends aren’t forever.”

Quiet looms over the next moment. Cicadas sing through the barred window, the gym’s open doors, light from the spaces inside spilling over the road in front. Hajime closes his eyes, the cicadas’ hum a memory from home.

“Ne, Iwa-chan,” Tooru calls with a voice much too small for his usual flair, and Hajime, with eyes closed, encompassed in darkness, tries to catch every single lilt. “If we’re still lonely souls by the time we’re thirty, let’s stay together.”

“Aren’t we already doing that? You’ve always been clingy and you probably won’t ever let me have peace.” And I can’t leave you, anyway. “Getting a girlfriend or married shouldn’t change anything.”

“No, I mean together, forever,” Tooru says, not quite above a whisper.

Hajime opens his eyes, craning his head to the side, but Tooru has his face turned away from him, and he can only speculate if the pink flush down his neck is from physical or mental exertion. “Dunno.” He shrugs. “You’ll do stupid things and I might snap and kill you before we’re thirty.”

“Such a brute answer!”

“It’s not as bad as it might be, though,” Hajime muses, and this might be wishful thinking worth realizing. “Us staying together for that long.”

“Staying, huh. So. Nothing’s gonna change?”

This is when Hajime breathes in, deep and expanding, drowning the lungs with the scent of Salonpas and sweat, summer breeze and a hint of burned rubber soles, and goes to stand up. His footfalls echo in the hush of such a spacious place, yet Tooru doesn’t turn to look, as if he knows, anyway, when Hajime settles down closer beside him. Hajime simply reaches out like always, running his fingers through a tousled mess of brown hair.

“Only if you want to.

“Oikawa, say something.

“Shittykawa. Will you at least look at me.

“If I wrestle you over, am I gonna find you crying and dripping snot all over?

“This gym isn’t ours, you know, so don’t contaminate it with your nasal mucus.”

Tooru snorts, all stuffy nose and held breaths, and lays the back of a wrist over his eyes. Hajime spots the wobbly line of his mouth, a bottom lip gnawed white in some failed attempt at keeping silent; Tooru’s always been loud in everything he does, anyway, and perhaps that’s why he cries all ugly and bawling.

“Stupid Iwa-chan.”

Hajime clears his throat. “So,” he says, hoping he won’t choke on his own words, “is this your way of confessing? All cryptic messages and hypothetical questions bordering on philosophy?”

He covers Tooru’s face with the spread of a palm and Tooru slaps it away as expected, half-hearted, knowing, revealing himself in the process. He glares at Hajime, squinting past the mess of tears and cheeks flushed ruddy and nose all scrunched up. “What, like you would do any better? We would’ve gone through a mass extinction before you did anything.”

“I think you’ll do stupid things and I’ll eventually be desperate enough to kiss you to shut you up.”

Tooru’s mouth goes agape, for a second. He mashes it shut (and it’s definitely been too long for that flush to be solely from exercise) when he finds that Hajime can’t keep eye contact during the confession. And he just grins, the smug dumbass.

“I like like you a lot, Iwa-chan.”

Hajime huffs out a breath, squishing Tooru’s cheeks again so he doesn’t catch more glimpses of Hajime’s own burning face. He smiles, too, when Tooru’s laugh only rings melodious.

Their train enters the tunnel, underground darkness coating the windows.

A toddler wails, their mother all shh’s and whispering warmth, and Tooru just hums an old-learned lullaby, smiling when the mother answers with a grateful yet awed glance. Tooru finds him by the graze of pinky fingers. “Iwa-chan, are you tired of me yet?”

At this, after ninety-nine years, Hajime’s grip on the handrail doesn’t strangle. “No,” he tells him as per usual. “Not yet.”

“I’m fifteen for a moment Caught in between ten and twenty And I’m just dreaming Counting the ways to where you are.”

[ao3]