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“well you haven’t just ended your volleyball career!”

“i might’ve just ended my track career!”

he sticks his tongue out at that, and both your and his parents sigh from beside you, tired from dealing with their kids in pain and now anticipating an argument that they don’t have the energy to interrupt. “track isn’t as good as volleyball.”

you have half a mind to break his knee instead, but you’re interrupted by one of the staff calling his number, watching as his father helps him up. you just can’t help but shout a retaliation after him as he disappears into the hospital. “i hope it does end your career!”

your mother spends five minutes scolding you about manners, but you’re too pleased with yourself by that point to care.

the second time you meet tooru oikawa is when you’re fifteen, having just moved to aoba johsai. you’re in the same class as hajime iwaizumi and honestly thrilled to be sitting next to a guy who's nice and eyecandy. he invites you to lunch with him on the first day, but the excitement at making your first friend in a new school is soon crushed by seeing the same boy that you met at the hospital a year earlier. he’s taller, prettier, has better hair, but is just as annoying and is somehow still whining about his knee. you recognise him by the voice and topic of conversation, he recognises you by the support on your ankle and immediately laughs in your face.

“ha! take that! my volleyball career isn’t over.”

you honestly don’t even remember saying that until he mentions it again, it's more the irritation of the memory not actual words. “i’m so sad to hear that.”

his eye twitches a little, fingers drumming on the table as iwaizumi introduces the both of you. he doesn’t speak to you again for the lunch period, instead ranting about volleyball, some alien show, and some guy called wakatoshi ushijima. you politely decline the offer to sit with them at lunch the next day and you make new friends anyway, ones who don’t make you want to bash your head in with a rock.

when you’re sixteen, you get your first boyfriend, and on the same day he gets his first girlfriend. you know this from the gossip spread around school: pretty boy tooru oikawa is now taken and half the girls at aoba johsai are heartbroken. you don’t feel the same at all, and almost pity his girlfriend. you’ve heard iwaizumi complain enough about his obsession with volleyball, obsession with beating some kid two years below you, and his general strange behaviour when in class together, plus you’re more than happy with your new boyfriend.

you only see him at parties, still avoid talking to him over a petty rivalry inspired by very few sentences ever uttered, and stick around the people you know. or come up with excuses when your groups intersect. but he’s there, he’s always there in your line of sight, at these events, or in the hallways outside your class, or you spot him inside the gym while you’re out on the field, or he sits across from you at lunch. you just wish he was less noticeable.

when you’re eighteen, you break up with your respective partners on the same day only seconds apart. you know this because your good-for-nothing boyfriend cheats on you with his equally good-for-nothing girlfriend at one of those stupid parties you’re both at. and you’re standing at opposite ends of the hallway watching the scene unfold.

he drops the second drink in his hand, the one he’d gotten for her, and you throw the drink in your hand at the two of them in the very same moment. you’re pretty sure the entire exchange is recorded, you yelling at the both of them and throwing the other drinks that he’d passed you (ones which you took with much gratitude) at both of them to try and prove your anger. you’re also pretty sure the punch he threw at your now ex-boyfriend is caught on camera.

the rest of the party is spent drinking away your sorrows in a corner of the garden, both lamenting over the almost-two years you had wasted on them.

“i mean, he used to buy me flowers every time we went on a date, my favourites as well, and choose colours that meant love. what a joke.”

“she used to come to every volleyball match and she’d have milkbread for me every single time from my favourite bakery.”

“seriously? you like milkbread? weird, but he used to come every track meet as well, waiting with a vanilla matcha latte from my favourite cafe.”

“she met my parents, she baked with my mother every weekend and was at every family gathering.”

“he used to buy mine presents for their birthdays, their anniversary, mother and father’s day as well.”

“i got her this gorgeous necklace for our upcoming anniversary.”

“i spent months saving up for this new game console for ours because his birthday is the day after, booked a fancy dinner for it as well.” you pause at that, head falling into your hands at the absurdity of the situation. “maybe i’ll keep it for myself just to spite him.”

“i’m returning it and buying myself some new trainers.”

“or maybe i’ll just give my parents the table and buy myself a… i don’t even know, maybe i’ll save the money, or i could go on a shopping spree.” you take the beer bottle he hands you from the pack he brought out, seeing yours now empty. “cheers to our shitty exes, right? they deserve each other.”

“cheers to that.”

“what’re you doing about the punch? i think maybe ten people have that on video.”

“rely on my good looks and popularity for people not to share it?”

for the first time, you laugh with him a little. and when monday comes around he’s absolutely right. you’re called in about ‘the incident’ and lie to the principle’s face, just like everyone else who had witnessed it did. you and oikawa don’t talk properly again, you don’t sit with each other at lunch, but when you see each other in the hallways, you smile, when you see each other at parties, you share a drink, and when you see each other in the gym at practice, you wave.

he leaves for god knows where after graduation.

when you’re twenty three, you move to san juan for your career, there’s a new branch of the company opening up and you’re offered a very generous promotion, so you promptly agree. the fifth night of living in your new apartment, you get a knock on the door and open it to see the man who'd disappeared from the face of the earth. “oikawa?”

“no way!” your name falls from his lips in a shout, and you see him pinch himself before gasping again. “are you stalking me?”

“i didn’t even know you lived here! why are you at my door?”

“i guess i'm your neighbour, then. i was asking if you had any white wine, trying to cook dinner and i’m out.”

you obviously do have wine, alcohol has been a staple in your kitchen ever since you were eighteen and could buy it for yourself legally. sadly, you knew you were getting old when you went to the local supermarket and chose a mid-range chardonnay over the cheapest bottle of whatever you could find or even own-brand vodka. “i’m not giving you wine to use in food when i could just drink it.”

“mean! i’m trying to cook myself a nice dinner here.”

“not offering me any isn’t helping your cause.” 

“is that you asking to have dinner with me?”

“that’s me not wanting my hard earned money to go to waste.”

he sighs dramatically at that, shaking his head. you’re tempted to slam the door in his face when he sighs again to try to gain some pity, and then places his hands on his hips like an indignant toddler. “fine! i’ll cook you dinner and we can drink the leftover wine, even if it’s not much.”

“fine.” you do shut the door on him for good measure, right before emerging with two bottles, ignoring the raise of his eyebrow. “what? obviously i don’t just have the one.”

on that very same night, you realise that tooru oikawa cannot cook to save his life. the risotto tastes awful and he knows it from the way he grimaces at the first bite, washing it down with his glass and a cough. you don’t even attempt to make him feel better. “this is terrible.”

“i tried my best.”

“maybe you should take some cooking lessons.”

“what, you’re any better?”

“i’m a michelin star chef compared to you.” he doesn’t bother to argue with that, instead grumbles something incomprehensible into the drink he uses once more to mask the taste of his own culinary failure. “so, what do you do now?”

“professional volleyball player. guess that sprain didn’t end my career after all.”

“huh?”

“remember? when we were fourteen and we met for the—“

“don’t remind me. you were whining for ages about a sprain, i had a break, y’know? far more serious and painful and you didn’t hear me complaining.”

“sorry about your ankle, by the way. never told you that.”

“i never would’ve gone professional anyway, never wanted to. it got me a sports scholarship into uni and that was good enough for me.” it’s nice to hear it from him anyway, you’ve always known what you wanted to do and managed to get yourself a good job with surprisingly good benefits. it’s safe and it pays well, especially now. you’re somehow happy with where you are, no relationship had ended as badly as your first one, and as of a week ago, you’re living in a gorgeous city with a neighbour who, even if he can’t cook, is a familiar face. “guessing you’re in ca san juan?”

“how’d you guess?”

“you… live in san juan.”

he looks a little sheepish at that, its the only club in the city, after all. “so, why are you here?”

“new branch where i work, transferred with a promotion.”

“you learnt a whole new language just for that?”

“i know some anyway from an old part time job, there’s a massive south american community near roppongi.”

the conversation flows easily from there, you have a strange amount in common still, from trivial things like your favourite tv show, down to the shop nearby where you’re both apparently friends with the same cashier (even if one friendship is brand new and the other has been going on for five years). when you suggest cooking him dinner next time, he smiles so wide it looks like it hurts.

when you’re twenty four, oikawa becomes tooru and asks you out properly after three months of dates that you disguise as friendly hangouts, drunken hookups that you don’t speak of, and apparently both of you pining to mutual friends nearby during hangouts and hajime iwaizumi. the latter of which once hung up on you after exclaiming that he’d heard the story before and that he’s sick of hearing about every insignificant event twice.

the question is asked, to no surprise, over a fancy dinner at your favourite restaurant. and he, also to no surprise, does it in the most dramatic way possible. there's a heartfelt speech about how much he likes you, how he wants to grow to love you, how he’s so happy you met and recalling memories that you both share. and he does it all on one knee, a box with a ring and a note saying not a proposal this time.

he does it all in japanese, the other guests clapping loudly and the restaurant giving even giving a dessert and a glass of champagne on the house to congratulate you both on your engagement.

neither of you correct them.

when you’re twenty five, you move in with him. dating and living with tooru oikawa is the same as you thought it would be when you were sixteen.

he insists on watching an awful channel that only plays alien conspiracies on sundays after 9pm, but you watch it every week with him happily. the shared apartment is full of old jerseys he's hung on the walls and there's too much vaious gym equipment scattered on the floor – a ridiculous amount when your only contribution to it is a single yoga mat. (you argue that there’s no point having what is basically a gym at home when you pay for one anyway, and he just says that technically he doesn’t pay because it comes with the benefits of his team). the main topic of conversation is ususally volleyball, new strategies, when the matches are, and as always, he complains about his opponents. somehow, even years later, he still has a rivalry with tobio kageyema and wakatoshi ushijima - which only intensifies when he’s chosen for the argentinian national team.

what you don’t expect from dating tooru oikawa is the flowers he buys you when he’s late home because practice overran, or the way he spends hours - even days - learning how to cook your favourite dishes despite his abysmal lack of talent. he spends his days off cleaning the apartment and doing the laundry because he knows your boss makes you work overtime and he doesn’t want to cause you extra stress. he keeps a photo you in his wallet like he’s a soldier going off to war. and you find out from his teammates that when they go out drinking, there’s always a point in the night where he takes the photo out and some poor, unsuspecting victim has to listen to thirty minutes of him declaring his love for you.

(when you’re told about this after being invited to one of those nights, it doesn’t go the way in which they had hoped. he instead pulls you into his side and declares it to the table, and with how loud his voice is, the entirety of the bar.)

when you’re twenty seven, you sit in the olympic stadium with the number thirteen plastered on your back and the argentinian flag painted on your cheeks (you've been actively ignoring the text of traitor from hajime). you're the loudest voice by far when your boyfriend sets the winning ball to his teammate, and your side of the stadium erupts in cheers and shouts of joy. somewhere in him still is the twenty three year old who made you your first meal in an unfamiliar country, the eighteen year old who made you laugh after a disaster of a breakup, the fourteen year old who was crying over a sprained knee and you’re glad that his volleyball career didn’t end.

you’d never have met him otherwise. he wouldn’t be shouting your name into the audience, or running into your arms with tears of joy in his eyes, or telling you that he wants to marry you over a celebratory homemade dinner and a glass of wine on your balcony.