#i love it when the silly guy does horror and pulls it off flawlessly
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crt8ball · 2 years ago
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hey watching blood in the bayou!
IVE CRIED TWICE SO FAR
/// spoilers obviously mid ep 3
first time with rand talking to donna while she bunkering down and him telling her hes gonna do something good for once
and again when richard said "please when you come back, be our roland"
im never gonna survive mayn I CANT DO THIS I SWEAR TO GAWD
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harkwrites · 6 years ago
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natural
a/n: iwaoi uni / ice skating au. wc: 2685. i started this fun little au at least two years ago and wish for it to see the light somewhere but not on ao3 because this isn’t my best work. there may be more parts incoming in the future!
**
“And here we have the rare Oikawa Tooru, one and only of its kind, struggling in an unfamiliar and harsh environment. Wave to the camera, Oikawa.”
Tooru hisses through grimaced teeth, flashing all two perfect rows. Stiffly, he smiles. Hanamaki, nonplussed, swings his camera phone downward, his narrative voice turning graver. “Take a moment now to watch his feet. The usually graceful Oikawa wobbles like a newborn fawn taking its first steps out into the brave new world. As you can see, others of his species have made much more progress in this endeavor.” The phone sweeps over the rest of the ice skaters in the rink, most of who were gliding smoothly in circles, moving around the trio like a river parting around a nuisance of a protruding rock.
Hanamaki turns his camera back onto Tooru in perfect timing to see the comical wobble of ankles. “But this one has a long way to go.”
“Tragic,” Matsukawa comments.
“Truly,” Hanamaki adds.
“It’s like the runts of the litter on those wilderness shows,” Matsukawa thoughtfully says. “The ones you cheer for because you want them to survive.”
“Survive the winter, Oikawa, and be sure to live a long, fruitful life.”
“Mattsun,” Tooru implores, both hands clutching onto the walls surrounding the ice rink that he’s been clinging to for the past ten minutes. “Stop Makki.”
“I can’t.”
“Take his phone, Mattsun.”
“It’s a documentary.” Matsukawa lifts his fingers in a shrug, looking the picture of casual. “I can’t interfere with education.”
Tooru’s lips curl in distaste, and then he mumbles, “I’ll pay for your ramen later if you do me this teeny, tiny favor.”
Matsukawa snorts. “You’ll do that anyway.”
“Not willingly!”
Hanamaki and Matsukawa give each other a silent look, which they do infuriatingly often when in Tooru’s company, and then break out into simultaneous peals of laughter.
Affronted, Tooru shuffles forward and attempts to swipe the phone from Hanamaki’s gloved hand himself. Hanamaki skates backwards – backwards! flawlessly! – so that his lunging motion only serves to destabilize his already precarious balance. His skates noisily scrape against the ice as he struggles to stay upright, heart beating a little faster in his chest when he finally manages to steady himself without falling over.
“You two are fired,” he huffs upon regaining balance. “You’re both fired.”
“From what?” Hanamaki’s fingers are making a pinching motion over his screen as he zooms in, presumably on Oikawa’s face.
“Roomateship!” Tooru exclaims. “You haven’t even offered to teach me how to do this!”
“The rare Oikawa Tooru,” Hanamaki continues, smile a smug slant of the lips that Tooru would love to wipe out if his hands weren’t currently white-knuckled and gripped over the railing for support. “Has just issued an aggressive declaration. It’s startling how quickly young animals grow up when they begin to feel threatened. Is this what they call survival of the fittest, Matsukawa-san? Rising to the challenge?”
“I think so,” Matsukawa seamlessly picks up. “Eat or be eaten.”
“The fight or flight response in action, ladies and gentlemen,” Hanamaki says.
“Well,” Matsukawa says. “It looks like he couldn’t manage either of those right now.”
“Goodbye,” Tooru primly announces, and with a mighty shove launches himself away from the edge of the rink, the titters of his two friends at his back.
It’s not so difficult, really, if he limits himself to a few small strides at a time. The momentum keeps him going with ease. He soon finds his balance returning to him, not quite graceful, but a few good steps above floundering. Completing the first lap around the rink fills him with a refreshing sense of leisure, warms him up to the idea of staying and possibly enjoying himself, and he thinks that he’ll be alright for the next forty minutes or so, although he still refuses to converge with Matsukawa and Hanamaki again after they, upon passing Tooru once, erupted in a sudden burst of applause that had several confused heads turning in their direction.
No, for now Tooru is firmly and cheerfully alone.
Time passes with few incidents, and he finds the repetitive circuits around the rink allows himself to slip into a pleasantly empty headspace that doing exercise usually does, his thoughts slipping quickly and harmlessly away. Even the chill of the ice rink isn’t as abrasive as it was upon entering, even as he can feel the gooseflesh peppering his arms beneath his long sleeves. The air smells nice. A light breeze nips at his cheeks and ruffles his hair as he maintains an easy pace. 
But like all terrible things in life, it happens both in an instant and in an agonizingly slow moment. Whatever meager balance he had been clinging to throughout his foray into casual Sunday morning ice skating abandons him altogether and he lands hard on his backside. The wet chill of ice seeps through his good pair of jeans as his body continues propelling forward, fueled by the momentum of his horrendous wipe out.
There are people fumbling out of the way save for a single, oblivious person. Tooru feels not unlike a bowling ball barreling straight toward a pin down the lane, determined and helpless.
“No,” he hisses, preparing for the collision.
“Fuck,” grunts the guy who Tooru bodily slams into.
Oikawa only catches a shocked face decorated with a vehement frown before they’re both falling over each other in a wild scramble of limbs. Tooru’s eyes widen in horror as he watches the guy’s body descend toward him, right elbow sticking out in a direction dangerously aligned with his face. He cringes in anticipation, barely has enough space to pinwheel his arms in a pointless attempt at regaining his balance. The ice skater very nearly tumbles straight on top of Tooru but manages an absurdly quick mid-air twist at the last second. It lessens the severity of their impact but the weight that slams heavily onto Tooru’s left arm and shoulder still has him grunting out a note of pain. It’s a clumsy, hard scramble of limbs, and he has just enough presence of mind to remember to keep his head lifted to avoid a serious knocking. As soon as they grow still Tooru lets his head sink back onto the ice, eyes squeezed shut to catalogue the damage. A dull ache throbs in his shoulder though, radiating a dull sensation of discomfort. which incites a flare of panic, a kneejerk reaction that the prospect of getting seriously injured always brought even if he hadn’t stepped onto a volleyball court in months. He breathes out in a rush.
The carnage fades into silence. Plunged into darkness, only his sense of touch and hearing informs him of what happens. There’s a shuffle of limbs, Tooru finding his own again as the other man disentangles, a low curse, and the sudden disappearance of weight from Tooru’s side. The other skater rises back to his feet mere moments later, dusting off bits of shaved ice that clings to his clothes in quick, jerky swipes.
“Oi,” Tooru hears the person above him say, tone low and crisp like he might launch into an angry tirade in the next breath on how silly or dangerous that all was, as if Tooru’s pride is deserving of any more damage. “Can you hear me?”
Tooru again ignores him. He keeps his eyes squeezed shut for another precious second, sure that the whole rink must have their gazes locked on him, concerned and amused by the figure still sprawled on the ground.
Now, Tooru is a person of good grace and good coordination right down to the most minute movements, able to turn a motion as insignificant as sitting down into something fluid and eye-catching. A finely tuned awareness of his body and its movements: the gestures that look appealing, the angles that flatter him the most, the sweetness and cadence of speaking that best attract others to him, all of it earning results he finds pleasurable and oft entertaining. He had trained his body for athletics before. This is simply an extension of that training, something he learned alongside the sport,  grew up and figured out how to smile his way through life and he derived satisfaction whenever he caught someone watching him due to the way he moved. Having that easy control stripped away so completely leaves him feeling uncomfortably exposed. But there is no way to mitigate the spectacular harm the last minute of his life had inflicted on his sense of self. The ice is quickly becoming too cold to continue languishing atop on. He’s not sure how much longer he can endure the freezing sting on the sliver of bare skin between his sleeves and his gloved hands and raising goosebumps where his shirt has ridden up on the small of his back during his collision into the stranger.
The sharp chink of a blade stopping uncomfortably close to his head rips him from his melancholy. Tooru snaps his eyes open, incredulous, and stares at the neat black pair of skates resting mere centimeters from his face. He turns his gaze upward, a vapid smile coming onto his lips, the thrilled expression of someone who has just survived a near death experience, and says, “Are you trying to kill me?”
“That’s my line,” his almost-murderer readily replies. He’s wearing a horrible expression, all downturned lips and furrowed brows. Tragedy, Tooru thinks. Does his resting face default to a terrible poutiness all the time? Tooru has very little sympathy. “You’re the one who came out of nowhere and almost killed me.”
Fair, but rude. Tooru harrumphs and wordlessly sits up, tugs his sweater down and flicks loose slush from his sleeves, each movement slow and fastidious, and then he truly studies the person standing above him.
Deceived by the gruffness of his voice and that distasteful frown pulling on his lips, Tooru is surprised to see genuine concern reflected on the man’s face too. The shock Tooru had noticed earlier is all but wiped away, the frown smoothed into something slightly less severe. A gentle downward tilt of the corners of his mouth rather than the full-blown distaste that had been stuck there a few seconds earlier. His brow is crinkled in a mix of worry and irritation and, most surprising of all, are that his eyes are arresting. Not in color or shape, for both were rather plain, but arresting in their intensity and steadfastness. They hold Tooru’s glance with no amount of hesitance and a great deal of patience when a semi-awkward silence unspools between them. No holier-than-thou glare. No hint of held back laughter. That nonjudgmental gaze feels at odds with the man’s crass tone of voice. Unsettlingly so, like he might really stand there for as long as it takes to receive a proper verbal response from Tooru, his legs spread a casual shoulder length apart, gaze mutinous but patiently so, awaiting for the appropriate time when he could say something else to sway the conversation into his favor.
Tooru balks, but then the guy opens his mouth and says, “Hello? Did you hit your head that hard?”
The illusion breaks. This grump isn’t quite as charming as he first thought. If they were on normal ground instead of a sheet of ice he’s certain that this stranger would be an arms-crossed matched with irate foot tapping kind of person.
Tooru smiles with force. “Would you take responsibility and carry me to the nearest hospital if I said yes?”
The man looks like he’s just been asked to swallow glass.
“Well,” Tooru breezily continues, ignoring the other’s aggressive words of concern (if they could be called that!) in favor for tugging at his gloves before holding both hands out like an offering, watching the skater’s eyes slide over them as if alien appendages had abruptly sprouted from Tooru’s sides. A light sigh blows past Oikawa’s lips.
“More than either of us, I believe the fault lies with the ice for being so mean to our feet. Will you help me up please? It’s very cold down here.” He adds with an overly sweet amount of cheer when he’s been left hanging a little too long. His neck is growing tired of craning up.
“You should help yourself up.” The man smoothly moves backwards but not completely away, the perfect distance to avoid a beginning skater proven to be a hazard to himself and to everyone else within a five foot radius. Knowing the reasoning behind the precaution doesn’t stop Oikawa’s mouth from slanting into an offended pout. He’s not the only novice struggling out here!
It must catch the man’s attention because he offers a slightly more helpful but equally aggravating piece of advice. “Get onto your knees first and then stand up without using your hands. Put your arms out straight in front of you if you need the extra balance. Squat lower to the ground if you feel yourself about to fall.”
He even demonstrates it, bending at the knees and putting both arms out before him, palms facing out.
He may as well have been asked to stick his ass out and act a fool. The posture looks exaggerated and silly and not at all like something Tooru wants to do in the public eye. In fact, Tooru feels a little like he’s being talked down to, admonished for being the utter beginner that he is. He considers using his hands to pluck himself off the floor as a small act of spite and because it seems like the safer option, yet he heeds the words and swivels onto both knees. He wavers once more, daunted by the prospect of performing another clumsy movement which may result in ruin. This is the point where he’s sure that Matsukawa would remark, laughingly, that he should suck it up and stop being such a drama monger. Tooru mentally shoves a pillow into his roommate’s smug face, after which the raucous voice of their other roommate, Hanamaki, releases a steady chant of ‘fight, fight, fight!’ The mental scenario barely helps him shore up enough desire to push one of his feet beneath him.
“Easy now,” the skater says, low and steady.
“Humans were not meant walk on ice,” Tooru says, the knee still planted on the hard ice growing increasingly cold and uncomfortable. He wishes the guy would simply pull him up and get it over with rather than attempting to teach him an unwanted lesson. Where were Hanamaki and Matsukawa? Tooru knows he’s been on the ground long enough for the two of them to complete at least one circuit around the rink. Unless they wee still too busy laughing at his plight. Oh he could see that – stomachs clutched, swiping real and imagined tears from their eyes.
“Maybe that’s what the skates are for,” the man retorts.
“Ugh,” Tooru insists, feeling his ankles lock up while fighting for balance.
“Now stand up.”
“I’m trying to do that.”
“Just do it.”
Tooru grits his teeth and tries a jerky, aborted movement. “How am I supposed to swing my other leg around?”
“You just have to do it.”
“My god, you are terrible at this.”
“I know you know how to stand up. It’s the same exact motion. Don’t use your hands, do it with your legs only.”
Oikawa tsks, frustrated, but raises his fingers from where they’d planted themselves on the ground for balance. In one brave effort he gets his other foot beneath him and stands. A frantic pause where he fears toppling over again, but after a tense moment balance deigns to grace his body again and he straightens up, buoyed and accomplished. “Did you see that?”
“Yes,” the guy dryly says, “You’re a natural.”
“Aren’t I?” Tooru croons, not missing the eye roll the other graces him with before the man skates away. Tooru feels affronted at that abrupt farewell, but he brushes the encounter off and kicks himself into motion again, feeling more confident now that he knows the feeling of falling isn’t as bad as he was expecting.
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