helianthus

When Oikawa dreams, he dreams of his childhood bedroom growing up.

He dreams of the ceiling, of the desk, of the bed.

He used to dream of volleyball, but he hasn’t dreamt like that in a long time.

A room that is nothing but familiar, a room that traps him. Like his mind had been ensnared, like there was something left in that room he needed to find. Constantly, every time he closed his eyes. A dream. His bedroom. Nothing else.

“What do you dream about?” someone might ask him. “I have nightmares, I have lucid dreams, I dream of a cat that talks in spanglish,” they say. “What do you, Tooru, dream about?”

“Nothing,” he’d say.

It’s an empty room.

“My dreams are boring. My dreams are… just. Life, back in Japan. I guess. I dunno, they’re not really worth talking about.”

His room.

He wakes up, each time. Bored, quick to forget. Memories not worth keeping around.

And yet - and yet, there his memory stays, trapped by those four walls.

Sometimes, he dreams of his room, and there is no ceiling. He gazes up at the bright star of Polaris, a star he missed quite fiercely in the southern hemisphere. Crux was a thin replacement for the star he’d used for guidance all these years.

And sometimes, he dreams of someone else in his bed.

His childhood bed.

He assumes he’s Iwa.

It’s a familiar weight, it’s a weight he feels in his soul, pulling him in like gravity.

When he tells Iwa, “You were in my dreams last night,” he plays it off as more than it was. “Yeah, we were sleeping together in my old bedroom,” he adds with a tease.

But he knows that Iwaizumi does not have that pattern of freckles across his shoulder, below his neck. He knows what Iwaizumi’s back looks like. And there are no freckles.

But dreams are just like that, aren’t they? Dreams can be… odd. Different. Difficult. Sometimes when he dreams of his mom, she’s a dog, and also and alien, and also a time traveller. Sometimes when he dreams of Iwa, there are freckles. What is the difference?

But always, in his childhood bedroom.

Like he’s trapped.

---

Beating Japan at the Olympics is… maybe the best feeling in the world? Oikawa wouldn’t even be able to explain it to you. But that’s home! Your birthplace! Your family!

Yeah, and now he was the certified winner. That was all that mattered.

His team celebrates with him, he sees the Japanese team on the far side of the court muttering and upset, though Oikawa thinks they don’t look upset enough. Ushijima, Kageyama… He gives them the middle finger even though they’ve turned their backs to him.

Iwaizumi has to play the role of a good trainer and is staying on his side, though Oikawa is overwhelmed by the urge to run over to him with a kiss and an “I beat you!”

Oikawa’s own people have shuffled him away. It only takes a little bit of finagling, though, to escape the locker room and race around to try and predict where the Japanese team will be emerging. He wants to rub it in their face. He wants to rub it in their faces so bad-

Unfortunately for him, the people on this team, are, like, beloved or something stupid. There’s people from all over with his exact same desire, hovering and peering, waiting for an opportunity.

When the team finally does emerge, after what Oikawa hopes is a miserable pep talk to recuperate their egos, his attempts to re-middle finger Kageyama are hindered by someone screaming Tobio! and racing at him. It’s a little grey-haired fellow, someone who Oikawa thinks he’s supposed to recognize, but doesn’t. Either way, this guy has taken Tobio in a headlock, and is nuzzling him much like one would a favourite pet. Kageyama is embarrassed by it, laughing and trying to push it away, and Oikawa realizes for the first time, that although he had won, there had been no great fanfare for him.

Your friend lost, dontcha know? Oikawa wants to spit, but before he can find a way to make himself their problem, he realizes he’s being stared at.

He turns his head to the right, to where the fanclub of what Oikawa is now realizing is all ex-Karasuno students is waiting for their opportunities to hug and congratulate Kageyama and Hinata.

One of them, though, has fallen back, and let the group move ahead of him.

He’s familiar. It takes Oikawa a while to mentally dress them all in their Crows’ uniform to remember he’d been the face with the Number 1 - and past that point, he remembers the captain’s name well enough, if nothing else about them.

Daichi is just… looking at him.

Not with the intensity or aggression of someone who’s realized he’s absolutely here to bully and mock his friends, not with wonder or awe of a fan, and certainly not with confusion.

He’s just staring, eyes open, expression sweet. Like he’s seen a painting he wants a second to memorize.

Oikawa realizes that Ushijima has snuck out of the team’s inner ring, but he misses the opportunity to chase him down and make him feel back, because he’s baffled by Daichi’s choice to still be staring at him.

Oikawa ends up staring back, if only looking for a hint as to what he was so interested in.

It’s almost like Daichi knows something he doesn’t - he looks like someone Oikawa has forgotten, like they’d agreed to meet up here, and Daichi is waiting for him to cross the floor and say hello.

Then Daichi lifts a hand up, and gives him a little wave. A short little hi, as if they knew each other. Like Oikawa had ever said a word to him.

So Oikawa does the same, on impulse.

Daichi smiles, and it’s far too warm a look. Like the wave had given him the world. And then he seems to consider something, finally looking away from Oikawa to inspect his shoes for a moment, before making up his mind and turning to walk towards him.

Oikawa wants to open his mouth and say something snarky, like coming to say your team will take me down next time?

But Daichi beats him to it.

“Congratulations,” he says, coming to stand before him with his hands in his pockets. “You played brilliantly, you earned every point.”

“Oh,” Oikawa says, because his personal default is hostility and this is a man who’s now looking at him with the sun and all the stars in his eyes. “Thanks.”

This answer makes him laugh, as if it were amusing at all.

“You aren’t going to declare war on me…?” Oikawa prompts, after a heartbeat. “I assume you ride or die for little Tobio, so…”

This only makes him smile more. It would be fine, if it was a wide and friendly grin, but it’s not. It’s a warm, adoring look, the kind that Oikawa would usually expect to be saved for lovers, for close friends, for people bonded through more than a hello.

Do I know you?

“No,” Daichi assures him. “I was actually rooting for you, so.”

Oikawa fakes a gasp, putting a hand on his chest. “Now that must be a lie,” he says.

“It’s not. I wanted to see you win. You deserve it more than anyone.”

“Over Kageyama? Over Shoyo?”

“More than anyone,” Daichi replies, before shaking his head slightly. “How’s Argentina been? I take it you like it, since you took citizenship.”

“I love it,” he agrees, thrown off once again by how familial and easy Daichi seemed to be taking this conversation. He’d probably just gotten his life’s story off Kageyama, but… “took some getting used to, but ultimately the choice was easy, I can’t imagine myself coming back here.”

“I’m so glad to hear that,” Daichi says, then: “And Iwaizumi, how’s he treating you? Is that still going on?”

Now, considering his relationship to Iwaizumi was a secret from the public, that was insane.

Oikawa pulls back from him.

“Oh, shit, was I not supposed to know that?” Daichi says. “No, you definitely told someone, I’m sure of it-”

“I’m sorry,” Oikawa says, stepping back and putting his hands out. “Do we know each other? What is going on?”

Daichi’s smile wavers slightly, before it suddenly shifts into a more normal expression: a broad, friendly grin, holding no further meaning.

“Sorry,” Daichi says. “No, we don’t. Sorry.”

“Right. Of course we don’t…” Oikawa replies. “You just came at me with such an energy-”

This makes him laugh. “I imagine. I’m sorry. Really, I am. I shouldn’t be bothering you,” Daichi says, shaking his head. “I just couldn’t help myself.”

I know you.

I must know you. You’re talking to me like you’ve been my friend for ages, you are not acting like a stranger - even a friendly one.

“You’re very odd,” Oikawa says. “It feels like…”

Daichi raises his eyes, somewhat expectantly.

“...it feels like I’ve forgotten you.”

And Daichi closes his eyes, as if the words were a familiar balm over some concern he held, the smile on his face more easy, less forced. When he opens his eyes again, he’s not as apologetic, not as twitchy.

“Yeah, you always say that,” he says, but if Oikawa is going to ask any more questions, it’s interrupting by a shrieked:

“Daichi!”

They both turn, in time to see Hinata absolutely fling himself across the space. Daichi is quick to catch him, laughing and ruffling his hair up, calling about how amazing he played and how good he was - and Hinata, now having spotted Oikawa, is shouting about how phenomenal the “great king” was, and how much fun they had and how they were totally going to beat him next time, and-

Oikawa has not heard any of it, because his attention is caught by the way Hinata has pulled Daichi’s jacket down, the fabric being tugged far enough to expose a string of freckles across his shoulder, below his neck.

The freckles he ascribed to Iwa, in his dreams.

The freckles from his childhood bedroom, from the place his memory is trapped.

For a split second - no, not even. A nano second - a zeptosecond of time - he has a memory. It’s not a real memory, maybe, it’s a song he’s never heard before overlaid on the familiar image of his childhood bedroom, it’s the pressure in his bed that shows up in his dreams, it’s pressing his forehead in against those freckles and feeling nothing but desperate, angry misery, like he had already lost something he was still holding.

But it’s not even there.

And it’s a memory that doesn’t… exist, not really.

Like he wrote it out just for fun, a thought experiment zipped together by various real world experiences. An unfamiliar song in a shopping centre, the way his bedroom used to smell, staying up to late, begging the universe to make him good enough to reach his dreams, Iwa’s arms wrapping around him, when it was too cold outside.

The same, the same, and very different.

He reaches a hand out, to touch the line of freckles, because he’s sure if he does, he’ll be able to know why they show up in his dreams. If he can touch them, he’ll remember what he’s forgotten.

Hinata drags Daichi away, to introduce him to the rest of the national team, and Oikawa puts his hands in his pocket. It would be weird to touch a stranger.

Oikawa turns away to go find Iwaizumi, and he does not check to see if Daichi looks back to see him go.

---

His mini homecoming in Japan had almost driven it all from his memory. When he dreams, he still dreams of his childhood bedroom. He still finds himself stuck there, unable to escape it.

They feel like academic papers, like complex equations and theoretical science-fiction. They feel like studying.

As if, if his brian works hard enough, it can solve a puzzle it’s stuck on. As if it has unfinished business in that room.

As if Oikawa has forgotten an important job he needs to complete.

The weight in the bed sometimes appears. Tanned skin, dark hair, the shadow that is definitely Iwa, but is freckled across the shoulder.

He touches it in his dreams, sometimes, to no avail. To no change.

He lays on his bed, and he feels his fingers brush against the skin of the hand that lays beside him.

He chews on the edges of his glasses.

He stares at Polaris.

And then he wakes up. And it’s all gone in a matter of seconds, no memory of the words he’d said, or heard. No memory of if that other person had said or done anything. All gone, instantly, into the aether.

No, I don’t dream, he tells people. It’s all boring.

It’s not until he’s working on cleaning out his closet for the coming summer, almost a year later, that he finds an old shoebox of miscellaneous shit. A broken pair of glasses (why did I keep that?) and a rock (from a vacation?) and a worm-on-a-string (it’s blue!)

He’s weaving the worm between his fingers when he spots the old post card tucked at the side, faded handwriting unfamiliar to him still.

Another old puzzle he’d never solved.

He turns it over, and rereads the same message, over and over again.

P.S. I’m dying to know what a cherimoya tastes like.

He brushes his thumb over the word.

He’d had many since coming here, and he’d be lying if he said he hadn’t thought of the post card every single time. The mysterious stranger, who wrote to him like he knew everything about him.

The word was a coincidence, right? He’d written it off as a coincidence, an elaborate prank.

Nobody in the world knew what his timeloop password was. Not a single person, he’d never breathed a word of it.

Have one for me.

“...it feels like I’ve forgotten you.”

“Yeah, you always say that.”

Oikawa stares at the postcard for a long time, before laughing at himself, and shaking his head.

“You’re too fanciful,” he says to himself, as he sets it back in the box, and pushes it away to continue cleaning.

Have one for me.

It was the sweetest flavour Oikawa had ever tasted.