#I CAN'T DO THIS 😭😭 | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

causenessus · 5 months ago

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eggy you're so amazing and talented i am constantly hitting the tag limit everytime I reblog your works </33 i had to delete my tag saying yn was VERY valid for telling kageyama to suck her dick

rot: h. iwaizumi

chapter five -> the move

(masterlist ; written content)

word count: 3.8k

now playing: school shooter by wych elm

warnings: this chapter is heavy with discussions of abuse, violence, other themes already discussed in this story, divided this last chapter in two parts and this is going to be the angst before the happy ending. when i say angst i mean angst. rest assured happy ending is coming tho

Her well-organized list of problems has been upended. A bright, shiny new problem has outshone all of her other ones, dimming them, displacing them, reducing their need for attention.

Problem #1: Iwaizumi Hajime, neighbor, definite arms-dealer, maybe boyfriend, has been arrested.

It’s hard to get people to listen to you in a police station. Cops sit at their little desks and they look at you like they’re pretending to pay attention to what you’re saying but really, all they can think about is how much better than you they think they are, and how little they care about your problems.

Matsukawa has a hand over her shoulder, not firm but not lose, like he’s ready to pull her back down to her feet if she leans too far over the front counter. She’s trying to appeal to the lady behind the front desk, (as if there’s anything she could actually do), voice raw and shaky, knuckles going white as she grips at the edge of the counter.

“Please,” she begs, her unhidden desperation feeling out of place in the clean station, where the smell of hand sanitizer and pine floor cleaner is heavy in the air. It’s far too bureaucratic for her to be like this; reduced to a pile of tears and snot, begging and pleading and being ignored like a small child throwing a fit. “He didn’t do anything to me. This is fucking insane, lady.”

“Honey,” she says, voice slathered in condescension, like she knows. Like she knows Iwaizumi’s been treating her like shit this whole time and she’s just been too stupid to realize it. Like she knows what’s best for her just because she sits behind the front desk at a police station for eight hours five days a week for semi-not shit pay and a pension. “If you want to help your boyfriend, the best thing you can do is get him a lawyer, okay? Yelling at me isn’t going to help. They can hold him for forty-eight hours, and there’s nothing you can do about it.”

God, she wants to reach over this fucking desk and sink her nails into this lady’s face. Dig under her skin and gather evidence so they know it was her that did it. That desk lady’s sickly-sweet tone and fake pity had driven her to madness. A long-buried thirst for violence that makes her feel like a grade-school girl boils in her blood and it’s like Matsukawa can sense it because it’s then that his hand goes tight around her shoulder, and he pulls her back. “Thank you, ma’am,” he says, relaxed politeness sounding natural on him. “We appreciate your help.”

She doesn’t appreciate her help. She doesn’t appreciate shit. She wants to jump over the counter and make that known, but Matsukawa grabs at her arms and tugs, using a bit more force to get her away from that desk. But she makes a point to turn her head and shoot that lady one more rage-filled sneer.

Matsukawa doesn’t let her go until he’s pulled her out the front door, into the sidewalk of a busy city street. But he has no qualms about stopping her there, a dam in the middle of the sidewalk, foot traffic splitting and flowing around them. He grabs her by both of her shoulders. “Okay, you need to calm down. Like right now. Alright?”

Her teeth grind together. “I want to pop her fucking eyes out,” she spits out, like an unrepentant child, unashamed of her outburst.

“Well, that’s not going to do anything to help, so don’t fucking do that,” Matsukawa says, a bit of a bit in his voice and slightly shaking her shoulders. The air surrounding them is suffocating, hot and humid and beads of sweat are popping up on the back of her neck already. “And she’s right. There’s nothing we can do but get him a lawyer.”

She doesn’t look at Matsukawa. She hates him right now, because he’s right, and there’s nothing her blind rage and outburst can do to make it better. She focuses her stare just past him, watching the stream of tourists and college students and burdened employees that drifts down the sidewalk, past both of them. She gnaws on the inside of her cheek. “Whatever.”

He releases her then, and her gaze falls to her shoes as Matsukawa steps back from her. A hand reaches up to push stray strands of hair away from his forehead. “Oikawa’s calling his guy. He should be down here soon. We’ve gone through this before, we know what to do. Iwa’s not an idiot, he can handle himself in there.”

The combination of rage and embarrassment tastes sour in the back of her throat. “He didn’t do it,” she asserts, for no one else other than herself.

“Course he didn’t fucking do it,” Matsukawa scoffs. “Iwa has lines. Hitting his girl is way past them.”

Her mouth furls. It’s getting hotter and hotter every second there on that sidewalk. Every emotion feels too big for her body; it paralyzes her. She hates this. She fucking hates this. Iwaizumi being locked in some holding cell with the drunken disorderly conduct leftovers from the night before. Him being in there because of her.

Matsukawa sees her standing there, stiff and clenched up, and sighs. “Look,” he starts off, more sympathetic than before, and the pity makes her twitch, “why don’t you just come back to mine and Makki’s place for now? You don’t have to go-“

And then, the call of her name. Loud enough to get the attention of everyone on that sidewalk. Commanding enough that people look, just to make sure, just to double check that it’s not their name, that they didn’t make a mistake, somehow. She looks over Matsukawa’s shoulder and sees her father. Out in the open, on the sidewalk.

“I’m so glad you’re okay,” he says as he approaches, broad smile sending a new rush of rage down her spine. Matsukawa raises an eyebrow at her, but she doesn’t dare to tear her eyes away from her father, looking clean in his freshly pressed uniform. Like this is some kind of special occasion for him. “I was worried help wouldn’t get to you in time.”

She blinks. There’s no room for fear in her body. “Help?” she echoes back, voice hoarse.

He moves to reach for her. She steps back, Matsukawa places himself in front of her. “When I saw how that boyfriend of yours was treatin’ you, I had to call in a favor. I got a friend that works in this district, y’know. I got lots of friends, Bug.”

Really, she shouldn’t be surprised. She feels stupid for not thinking of it earlier.

But she didn’t think of it. She wasn’t expecting it. She was completely caught off guard by her god-awful, piece of shit father.

So she can’t be blamed for her reaction.

She reaches into her pocket and fishes out her keys. A few for the sports store. Three for her apartment building (one for the front door, one for her place, and one for Iwa’s), and one to her old home she shared with her brother. She places them each between her fingers, and without very much hesitation, she punches the end of those keys into her father’s face, with as much force is left inside of her.

Pretty immediately, there’s a reaction from the stream of people. Screams, she thinks. Matsukawa’s quick to act, grabbing her by the waist and pulling her away from her now-bleeding father. But everything around her is white noise. She's numb to it. She looks at her father and she hopes the gashes will scar. “You piece of shit!” she screams at him. “I’ll fucking kill you! You fucker! You’re fucking dead!”

★⋆. ࿐࿔

Her list is fucked now. She doesn’t know where rage issues fall in the new order. But probably higher than before, she would have to guess, because she’s sitting in an interrogation room.

Kageyama Tobio sits across from her, sleeves pushed up to his elbows and arms crossed over his chest. He’s leaned back in his seat, and she has this feeling she’s about to be scolded. “Assaulting a police officer is pretty serious.”

She feels dirty, humid air making her skin sweaty and salty, her hair frizzy and tangled. A bit of blood splattered on the skin of her forearm. They wouldn’t let her wash it off. “He’s not a police officer to me,” she says, words coming stubbornly out of the corner of her mouth. “He’s just my piece of shit father.”

Kageyama leans forward, bare forearms pressed against the cool metal of the table between them. “Can I ask you something?” He does not wait for the answer. “Is Iwaizumi worth all of this? Look at where you are, do you think this is worth it?”

“Can I ask you something instead?” She waits for confirmation from him. He gives her a slight nod. “Did you like PCD?”

He sighs, fingers tapping against the table. She wants to break them. “We can drop the charges on you, y’know. If you have something more valuable to give us, we’d be happy to do something for you in return.”

She raises an eyebrow. “Valuable?”

Kageyama leans back again. He adjusts a lot, she’s noticed. Moving and shifting and repositioning. She has stayed still in her seat. “Listen, I’ve known Iwaizumi for a while. All of them. I know what they’re like. I know how they can make you feel. You get caught up in it. Good people like you and me find themselves in shit situations without realizing it. But let me tell you this,” he says, severe, and a finger pointed in her direction, “Iwaizumi’s not going to give this up for anything. And you’re not an exception. As much as you think he cares about you, he cares about his job more.”

She can see her mother so clearly, then. For the first time in years. She can see her features, the details of her face. The ones she has in common with her brother. The ones she has in common with her. She can see the anger twisted into her brow like a permanent fixture. She can hear her voice, as if it’s in her ear now.

“Men like your father, they only care about one thing. And it’s not you and it’s not me.”

She lifts her head to meet Kageyama’s stare. His eyes are so sharp and so blue. “Kageyama?”

He leans forward. “Yeah?”

“Suck my dick.”

The sigh of defeat is, at the very least, satisfying. His shoulders slump and she watches the last bit of hope he was holding onto fade out of him. And at least she has that. “Well, in that case, you’re free to go. Your father’s not pressing charges.”

She stands at once, not immediately being hit the with realization that he had tried to trick her into snitching. “Fucking finally,” she spits out, her limbs feeling stiff and disjointed.

She’s halfway out the door when Kageyama says, “Yeah, well, see you later, I’m sure.”

★⋆. ࿐࿔

Iwaizumi is released before the forty-eight hours is up. She does not find out until four days after.

Most of those four days are spent numbly sitting through her shifts, face weathered and her limbs hanging from her body like heavy, led weights. She lies in her bed. She hardly eats. She checks her phone every five to ten minutes and she calls Oikawa and Matsukawa and Makki and gets their voicemails and she hears nothing.

And then, as she’s hanging out the window, smoking her second cigarette in a row, she sees him. Walking down the sidewalk with his hands in his pockets and his chin up. She watches, in disbelief for a moment, waiting to see if he’s going to turn into their apartment building and run straight up the stairs and into her arms and kiss her and apologize and swear that he would exact vengeance on her father. For the both of them.

But Iwaizumi just walks. He goes straight until he is out of her view.

With shaking hands, she texts him:

so when were u planning on telling me u got out?

He does not respond.

★⋆. ࿐࿔

It’s a month before he speaks to her again.

A month after no texts and no calls and no early morning coffee visits and nothing but the creaks of his floorboards from above. It’s torture. It scratches at her throat and it puts nails in her bloodstream and she spends more than one evening laid out on her bathroom floor, sobs wrecking through her frame, clawing at nothing, trying to grab onto something.

The feeling of abandonment is not entirely unfamiliar. It tastes the same as anger, and it never comes without it. And the combination can make her irrational.

“-and my friend Tanaka has a truck,” Kiyoko says into her, her voice fuzzy from the poor connection. She has her phone pressed between her ear and her shoulder, haphazardly throwing whatever belongings she can find into the cardboard box she stole from work. “He offered to help move your stuff out if you want.”

“Yeah,” she mumbles, drifting through her apartment, stopping as she settles in front of her CD player, sitting in the middle of her kitchen table. The one Iwaizumi gifted her. She makes no move to grab it. She’s sure that Kiyoko has one already. “Maybe he could come by tomorrow. I could be done packing by then. That cool?”

“Yeah, that should work. I’ll ask when he’s free.”

She hums in response, and kicks at one of the legs of her coffee table. A lot of her sidewalk trash furniture is going to right back to where it came from. “Are you sure this is okay with you?”

“Of course!” is Kiyoko’s enthusiastic confirmation. “It’s been a little lonely since my last roommate moved out. And to be honest it’ll be nice to split the rent again.”

God, rent splitting. It sounds like a dream to her. Expenses divided in half-she almost drools at the thought of it. She chuckles. “Alright, fair enough. I’ll talk to you tomorrow, then. Should probably finish packing now.”

“Alright. See you then.”

She snaps her phone shuts and pockets it.

Even as she empties it of her belongings, the apartment is a mess. Littered with forgotten belongings and things she never had the motivation to get rid of. Things she doesn’t know what to do with. Things that she doesn’t need and can’t justify keeping but she can’t bring herself to trash. The Ponkadu mug. Her pink, fuzzy journals filled with love struck passages. A dried, dead dandelion Iwaizumi ripped from the ground and placed in her hand.

Her head throbs. She looks up at the ceiling above her, like she’s waiting for something. A creak or a slam or something. A sign that he’s still there. That he’s not as far away from her as he feels. But it’s silent, and there’s nothing. And it’s like he was never even there in the first place.

She swallows the lump in throat and returns her attention to the scattered objects in front of her. She forces herself to harden and drops the Ponkadu mug in the trash. Then the journal. Then the dandelion. And she thinks to herself, bitterly, like she’s in an argument with herself, that it’s not like he was never even here in the first place. The evidence of his existence is all over her. It lingers in her lungs, in her chest, it spreads through her bloodstream. Iwaizumi’s there, causing every ache and every sting and every throb. He’s there.

Something possesses her. Everything can go in the trash, suddenly, it doesn’t matter what it is. Plates and freezer-burnt ice cream and a half-empty first aid kit. Anything with the lingering presence of Iwaizumi is getting dumped. Trashed. Left rot and fester in some landfill. And after an hour passes, her apartment is covered with bursting, heavy black trash bags of her wasted belongings.

She sits on the floor, shoulders slumped, legs crossed. She already threw out her couch. Her mattress is sitting on the floor of Kiyoko’s apartment, in the bedroom that will be hers by tomorrow. So for now, all she has is the rotted hardwood floor, where Iwaizumi told her he’d marry her.

Her throat tightens. She cannot get out of here fast enough.

Sweat droplets form on the back of her neck as she stands, ready to start hauling bag after bag out to the presumably already overflowing dumpster behind her apartment building. Her knees knock together as she stands, and she moves towards her door, ready to prop it open with one of the trash bags.

She undoes her deadbolt. Then her chain lock. Then she opens the door, and Iwaizumi is there, hand raised to knock.

At the sight of him, her throat tightens up, and she is immediately, torn split between her rage and her desperation. As much as she wants him to hold her, to make her promises and give her the comfort she’s been craving so desperately for the past month, she wants to bite his head off just as much. To make him hurt the way he hurt her. To tear him up from the inside.

Instead, she stares, blankly, somewhat horrified. Her heart beats heavy in her throat and her ears get fuzzy. He looks the same. That makes her angry. She wishes there was some change, some difference. But the Iwaizumi that said that he loved her in her kitchen and that he’d marry her on her floor is the same one that left her to rot on her own.

He steps into her apartment, right past her, like he still has the right to, and looks at the state of it. Everything packed up. Everything scattered. He looks at her like he still has the right to. “What’s going on?”

She flinches, and her anger is starting to win. “I’m moving.”

Iwaizumi pulls that face. That same one. Always looking like he’s slightly dissatisfied with something. “Why?”

Why. It’s such a stupid question. She tries to take a breath to calm herself but it makes her shudder and lock up. “I’m sure if you think about it, you can figure it out.”

She watches the air enter and exit his lungs through the rising and falling of his shoulders. He looks at her, right through her. “Don’t leave.”

In an odd way, she likes the control. She likes the feeling that, for once in her life, she’s not the one begging. “Don’t tell me what to do. Not after you left me.”

He exhales sharply. Iwaizumi takes a step towards her, and she takes a step back. “C’mon, that’s not fair. I didn’t leave you. I just needed to put some distance between us for the time being. Your dad, he’s fucked, alright? It was a liability to-“

“A liability?” she cuts him off, hands clenched into fists by her side. The heat in her blood rises. “I’m a liability?”

Iwaizumi shakes his head and reaches towards her. She jerks away from him. “No, not that you’re a liability, it was just a risk to be around you while-“

“So, what, you couldn’t get one of your little errand boys to tell me about it?” she says, and it comes out like a bark. “You had to leave me in the dark for a month while you dicked off doing god knows what? Too risky to send a text? After I lied to the cops for you and risked getting arrested for you and became a fucking on-call nurse for you, you couldn’t send me a fucking text?”

Her breath is ragged. Iwaizumi stares down at her like he’s seeing for the first time. “I thought you wouldn’t care. I thought you don’t care about anything.”

And it’s too much for her. It’s too big for her body. It’s too much for her to carry and she can’t hold onto it anymore. “I care about everything! I care about everything so fucking much it makes me sick!” she erupts, tears in her voice and rolling down her face. Her skin feels hot. The air feels hot. “Is that what you liked about me so much? You thought I was some kind of apathetic ragdoll you could toss around and do whatever you want with?”

“I thought you would understand!” he eventually bites back at her, his own voice rising. “I thought you knew what kind of life I live and what that meant! God, you fucking act like nothing bothers you and you pretend to not see the world around you and you just expect me to read your mind?”

“What fucking person would be okay with being abandoned for a month?” she screams. “You knocked on my door and asked me for a favor and you hovered around me and you said you loved me and said you’d marry me and then you just fucking disappeared! That’s so fucked, Iwa. That’s so fucking cruel.”

He steps towards her, and before she can say anything his arms are around her shoulders, pulling her into his chest. Like one simple embrace will end it all. Like he can just take her in his arms and suddenly she’ll stay, suddenly it’ll fix everything. She wants it to. She wants it to so badly. But she places her palms on her chest and pushes him away. She stumbles back and looks at him with wet eyes. “Don’t fucking touch me.”

“I do love you,” he tells her, voice lower now. “I meant what I said and I still do. You’re my girl. You’re everything to me.”

She shakes her head, trembling. She can’t let it be true. “No, I’m not,” she asserts, backing up into her kitchen table. Her hands go around the edge of it. “I don’t mean anything to you. You wouldn’t have left me if I did.”

“I had a reason-“

“I don’t fucking care what your reason was! I don’t fucking care, Iwa! I don’t care about your stupid job or your stupid fucking guns or whatever! I care that you were here, and then you weren’t! You left me like my mom did and you left me like my brother did and then you come back here and you have the fucking audacity to not even be sorry about it. I fucking hate you!”

She knows that she doesn’t mean it, when she says it. Iwaizumi probably knows too. He probably knows she doesn’t mean it when she swipes the CD player he got her off the kitchen table and it goes flying. Soaring across the room until it slams into the opposite wall, breaking and crumpling against the pressure. Bits of it snap off.

Iwaizumi looks at it, and then he looks at her. She’s shaking. She wants to get on her knees and do everything she can to fix it the second it breaks. But it’s on the floor, broken and shattered. Iwaizumi nods, and then he leaves. He turns around and walks out the door and slams it shut behind him.

an: huge huge huge huge thank u to wyr and ness and honee and molly and dodger who all had to suffer thru me trying to get this chapter out u guys are the best

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