Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

But I've been anywhere
And it's not what I want
And I wanna be still with you

Texas Reznikoff - Mitski

---

There is a monastery in Hanoi, Vietnam that’s been around since the beginning of time. It’s beautiful and self-sufficient. Nobody knows quite when it was built, and definitely not who built it. The monks will take you on a tour, if you ask, and you can see the centuries of fine architecture that make up the different chambers of the monastery. There are beautiful mosaics and frescoes, every floor gleams with polish and the tiles on the roof are never rotten or mossy. But there’s one part they can’t or won’t show you. 

The monastery was built around a single circular room, a room so tall it touches the sky. In it, there are three golden poles and sixty-four differently-sized golden disks. The disks have holes in the middle, and fit perfectly onto the poles. 

It began, according to the prophecy written around the walls, with all sixty-four disks on the western-most pole. At noon every day, when the sun peeks through the top of the ceiling and glints off the gold, the monks work together to hoist a single disk to another pole. But each disk can only be placed on a larger disk, and the monks only move one disk per day. 

When the tower, in its entirety, rests around the third, eastern-most pole, the world will end. 

That’s the story, anyway. 

Tooru had a set in the greenhouse. It was small, wooden. Paint peeled away from the warped wooden disks due to moisture. A few sad crumbling bits of it lay on the table next to it, and a few leaves from a nearby lavender she’d kept alive despite herself. The plant had been a gift for graduating college. 

The Tower of Hanoi puzzle was really just made by a Frenchman in the nineteenth century (he probably stole it from somewhere else, knowing Frenchmen, but that’s neither here nor there). It’s an algorithmic puzzle, sort of like a Rubik’s Cube. Once you know the process, all you have to do is keep repeating the same few actions until you “win.”

She didn’t use it very often. It had been a gift, too. For coming back to Japan. 

For coming back to Japan, for getting too well too soon, and for finding a fiance who’d treat her right. Tooru hadn’t mailed the invitations yet. They were sitting on her desk, just in the other room. She’d let Kaori pick out whatever color he wanted. There were no photos, only calligraphy and text. 

Please join us to celebrate our wedding. Oikawa Tooru and Suzumeda Kaori. Saturday, the twenty-fifth of August. 

The greenhouse was always warm and full of life in the way plants live it: sure, steady, magnificent. Like all greenhouses, Tooru kept it at a constant temperature and humidity level. This was where the small and sick plants lived while Tooru nursed them up. It’s also where Tooru’s projects and keepsakes stayed. Every morning, right at seven, she opened the door and breathed in earth. Then she placed her belongings in the adjacent office (air-conditioned and temperature-controlled so as not to rot the papers) and picked up where she had left off. Sometimes it was trimming, sometimes she’d plant, uproot, graft. And in her spare time, she poured over her data and research for her master’s thesis. 

She was working late, tonight. She worked late every night. Trimming plants in her humid sanctuary, filing reports in the adjacent office. She even got to see Watari, every once in a while, and bitch about the lack of funds going to the botanical gardens. Both the aquarium and the gardens had the same management, but the aquarium was supposedly the obvious tourist attraction. But in Tooru’s mind, it didn’t deserve that much money. Fish aren’t interesting. Fish die when you don’t feed them, and probably care if you make too much noise. 

Tooru clipped money tree leaves (although they didn’t need that much grooming) and patted azalea soil (although she’d watered it this morning). She couldn’t leave until she put the invitations in envelopes, and she couldn’t put the invitations in envelopes until she went into her office to grab her laptop and bag. 

That was a lie. She left without the envelopes, just as she had every day that week. 

“Nice day outside,” Kaori commented as Tooru closed the door to their apartment. She slid off her shoes. Kaori always came home early on weekdays to start dinner. Even now, the smell of shogayaki sleazed through the hall. 

They had dinner too early, Tooru thought. “Yeah. Brought a jacket this morning but didn’t need it by noon.” She slid the jacket out of her arms and hung it in the coat closet. 

Kaori laughed. “I always hate when that happens. Feel silly carrying around a bunch of extra stuff like that.”

Tooru made a small noise of acknowledgment and padded into the small kitchen. It was done up in dull grey walls and understated navy cabinets. Very modern. Kaori was a modern man, good at his job. Up for a promotion this year, probably. He worked in sports. 

The kitchen had been his idea, as had the rest of the apartment. They’d discussed it over dinner months ago, and the next day Tooru had come home from work to find the whole place full of dust and an envelope for a week-long vacation to an island in the Pacific. It had been nice. Tooru liked vacations, and she liked beaches. 

She retrieved dishes from the cabinets and placed them on the table. Kaori’s cooking graced the center. They served their own portions and began to eat. It was good. Tooru liked good food. Kaori’s cooking was always good. 

He talked about his day, and Tooru listened. The Jackals couldn’t avoid media controversy, but more than made up for it with interviews. Foreign audiences loved them, and their interviews went on subtitled YouTube compilations. He wished the Adlers could generate some of the same energy. Second division teams were the same as always, but they couldn’t keep members for very long. Women’s sports didn’t generate stable enough income. 

Kaori wanted to change that. He was a proper feminist. 

“You’re so mellow, now,” he said suddenly. “I remember in high school you were so intense,”

Tooru smiled. “Yeah, I was pretty into volleyball,”

“And boys,”

“And boys.” Tooru affirmed, shoving a bit of pork into her mouth. Breaking up with them, that is. None of them had ever managed to keep her interest for very long, given her good enough advice, gone to enough volleyball games. “High school was shallow,”

“Yeah, you got that right,” Kaori laughed. “I was annoying, for sure. I’d only managed the girls’ team at Fukurodani because I wanted to get an A in gym,”

“Pretty innocuous reason,”

Kaori sighed. “It’s all ancient history, now, anyways. Mom called today,”

“Yeah?”

“Said she hasn’t gotten one of the invites yet,”

“Must be lost in the mail.”

“Huh.”

They’d met after Tooru moved back to Japan. It had been a blind date, set up by Tooru’s mother. Something about “making sure she stays here for good.” Dinner, a nice restaurant. They’d discovered they had some mutual friends, and Kaori worked with Tooru’s old teammates. 

It had been a way to reconnect. 

Dinner had been good. Kaori didn’t order anything strange, or cross any boundaries, or make any obvious faux pas. He matched well with Tooru, too. A few inches taller, light brown hair to complement her more chestnut color. Freckles. Tooru looked good next to him, and they made a pretty couple. 

Both their parents thought so, and so did Kaori’s coworkers. After their first date, there had been another. And another. And then Tooru had gotten invitations to office parties, and then they’d gotten engaged. 

The natural way of things. 

They’d started dating with the intention of getting married one day. At least, Tooru had. But she’d let Kaori do all the work, just to make sure he wouldn’t go back on anything. It would do no good if Tooru had been the one to propose and Kaori had decided to call off the wedding a few weeks before it happened, or if Tooru had been refused. 

So Tooru laid back, let it all happen. Let the lunches turn into dinners, which turned into evenings, which turned into late nights and turned into sex. 

And she didn’t really wonder if it was supposed to feel like this, if life was supposed to feel like looking at an old to-do list and realizing you’ve checked all the boxes without even knowing it, if the momentous occasions middle schoolers dream about and moms cry over were supposed to feel like another paper placed in a file folder to be marked and categorized and pulled out every once in awhile to make sure it’s still there but not ever to be loved. 

It didn’t feel bad or wrong.

It just felt like nothing. 

“Hey, earth to Tooru?”

Tooru blinked. She looked down at the table. “I’ll take care of the dishes,” she said, rising.

“Thanks, babe,” Kaori said, leaning in as Tooru reached to take his plate. Tooru kissed him, just once, a quick press of dry lips to dry lips.

“Yeah.”

In the kitchen, there was a note clipped to the refrigerator. 

“What’s this?” She said, feeling Kaori’s presence in the doorway. 

“Reunion for your team. High school,”

“Yeah, I can read,” she said. “But how come it’s here?”

“Thought you’d like to go this year. Maybe you’d like to introduce me to your old friends?” He asked, hopeful, a bit of vulnerability in his tone. 

“You’ve already said we’d be there,” she deduced. “That’s fine,” she said, reclipping the note to the fridge. “Friday. That’s tomorrow. It’s at… huh. It’s at Mattsun’s house,”

“Mattsun?”

“Matsukawa Issei,” she said. “Nickname,”

Kaori laughed. “You know, every time I think I know everything about you, I hear something you did back ages ago, or some little tidbit of information and I remember you have these whole lives you don’t talk about anymore. Like an ocean,”

“Hm,” Tooru said, frowning. “Guess it’s never come up,”

“You’re a private person,” Kaori said, wrapping his arms around her from behind. “It’s okay. I like to figure you out,”

“Yeah,” she said. Then he kissed her on the back of her neck, and behind her ear. And then they went to the bedroom and had sex. 

Kaori liked to tell her he loved her, right after he came and felt lazy and warm. He would tell her poetic things, like how she was an ocean and he was caught in the undertow, or he was the night and she was the breeze that made it bearable. 

He would ask about Argentina, too. Ask her if he was better than the boys she’d taken there. And Tooru, never wanting to disappoint, would always tell him yes. Even though she’d never fucked anyone in Argentina, and he was the first boy she’d ever said she loved. 

It made Kaori happy. 

Afterwards, Tooru would go into the bathroom and look at herself in the mirror, naked and flushed. She would look into her reflected dead eyes and wonder, God. How did it get like this? Everything happens so fast and not enough. 

That night played out like all the other ones, except it was cold in the bedroom once Kaori had gone to sleep. She shuffled through a drawer. 

“What are you doing?” Kaori’s sleepy, mumbling voice spread through the darkened room. 

“Go back to sleep.” Tooru said. She put on a pair of socks. 

And when Tooru dreamed that night, she dreamed of moving disks from one pole to another. First disk to the third pole. Second disk to the second pole. First disk to the second pole. Third disk to the third pole. First disk to the third pole. Second disk to the third pole. First disk to the third pole. And on and on and on ‘til infinity.

Chapter Text

There's a party and we're all going

And we're all growing up

 Townie - Mitski

—

Mattsun’s house was the occupied side of a townhome about an hour’s train from the apartment. Eight-thirty. 

Kaori had said something about them getting old, that parties started before ten, and Tooru had laughed. They were twenty-seven. Real adults who have finished their degrees and have careers, not jobs, and don’t eat fast food and live with their partners and–

The front door flung open. “Bless my stars, it’s Shittykawa!” Mattsun’s dry voice said, masking a genuine tone of surprise. “Thought you’d been throwing out our invitations all these years,”

“Wait, there’d been invitations before this one?” Kaori said.

“You’re hilarious,” Mattsun said. Then, turning to Tooru, “He’s hilarious. Is he the fiance?”

She nodded. Kaori stuck out his hand and introduced himself, as well as held up the pack of beers they’d brought along. “Where does this go?”

“Kitchen counter. I’ll show you to it. You know, Oikawa, if he’s holding you hostage I won’t hesitate to dashingly rescue you,” 

“Am I supposed to take offense?” Kaori asked, who had only just slipped off his shoes.

Mattsun turned around and patted him on the shoulder. “You were meant to hear,”

Kaori shrugged and walked down the entryway and into the kitchen. There wasn’t music playing, but Tooru could hear the chatter of people in the living room. A door or window was open somewhere, letting cool night air circle around the house. 

Tooru placed her shoes next to Kaori’s and followed Mattsun down the hallway. The kitchen and living room were attached, separated only by the countertop filled with various bottles. Everyone, it seemed, was in the living room sitting on the mismatched sofas and on the stained carpet. 

It looked like somewhere Mattsun would live. 

“By the way,” Mattsun said, turning to Tooru, “This is an adult party, so we have to eat breadsticks first before we pull out Twister. I locked it in a time-locked safe that only activates after ten-thirty, too, so if you want to get your paws on anybody’s ass, it’ll have to be until after then.”

“Gathered that from the invite,” Tooru said.

Iwaizumi was talking to Makki on the far end of the room, standing near a screen door. Maddog, Yahaba. Kunimi, Kindaichi, Watari. There were a few others around too, friends. Or partners, more likely. Adult party, indeed. It was calm, polite, just talking. They might as well have been out to dinner somewhere. We’re all growing up , she thought with clarity. We’re all growing up, and they’ve all grown up together. And they’re going to keep growing up together and I didn’t … She didn’t really want to finish the sentence, and she didn’t really know how to, anyway. 

And growing up together just hadn’t been enough for her. 

Seems she and Kaori had been the last to arrive. Well, typical. Fashionable lateness never hurt anybody. She nodded to Mattsun, who gave her a curious look back, and scurried over to where Watari was sitting on the couch checking her phone. 

“Watachi! Bet you thought I wasn’t going to show at all,” she said, popping around to sit next to her. 

“Tooru! Hey,” she said, laughing, “Thought you had some sort of a…”

“Important and uncontrollable conflict, yeah,” Tooru filled in. “But you know how things are, someone else can’t make something, and then, wow, everything ends up working out.” In truth, when Watari asked about the reunion party a few weeks ago, Tooru made up something about her mother paying an unavoidable visit. 

“Is your fiance–”

“You know that administration person of yours came to my office yesterday?” Tooru interrupted. “Sawa-chan? What a horrid person. Kept sniffing things,”

Watari snorted. “You shouldn’t call Sawaki-san that. He’s technically your boss,”

“Then he should act like it! I don’t have time to babysit him when he gets bored.”

They made pleasant small talk for a while until Makki found some displeasure in the amount of alcohol still on the counter and opened a bottle of wine. She called Tooru over and pushed a glass into her hands. 

She gestured over to where Kaori was talking to someone Tooru didn’t recognize. “If he’s holding you against your will you’ve got better odds with me than Watari to read your little warning signs,”

Tooru took a sip of the wine and leaned against the kitchen counter. “Mattsun said something to that effect earlier,”

“Really?”

“Far more dashing when she said it, though,”

“I suppose that’s what you get for living together. You start to breathe in each other’s horrible jokes,” Makki said, small smile playing on her lips as she looked over to Mattsun.

“Yeah,” Tooru said, not really understanding. Then her brain caught up to the conversation. “Wait, you’re Mattsun’s...”

“Roommate,” Makki finished with a little smile like she was sharing an inside joke with herself. 

“Best of roommates, we are,” Mattsun said, coming from the kitchen behind Tooru’s back. She jumped. “Woah, antsy. As I was saying, best of roommates. Never complains when I come back smelling like the dead.”

“You know I only love you for your employee discount.”

“You get a discount?” A new voice asked. Iwa-chan. Iwaizumi. She had her own beer bottle in hand and stepped in to join their little circle. Tooru looked away and took a sip of her wine. Nice tile on the kitchen backsplash.

Mattsun nodded. “If Makki wasn’t such a good roommate then I’d have used it already. Friends and relatives, once a year,” she said conspiratorially. “Free bouquet and half off the coffin.”

“I can’t tell if you guys are joking,” Iwaizumi said. “Last time I was in town Makki said something about–”

“Working as a camgirl? Yeah, channel didn’t get very popular. I’m looking into politics now,” 

“Plus,” Mattsun added, “I got too jealous of all the little faceless perverts tuning in on Fridays and Tuesdays.” She shook her head. “Wasn’t sustainable,”

“I still can’t tell–”

Tooru watched the conversation ping pong between them, trying to fit all the pieces together. Whenever someone glanced in her direction, she made sure to be in the middle of a drink to dissuade any questions from being asked. She was painfully aware this was the first of little reunions she’d been to since leaving Japan, and couldn’t help feeling outside every joke and comment. The “oh yeahs” and “remember whens” each sunk her a little deeper into her own corner, one palm digging into the countertop behind her and the other sweating into the stem of her wine glass. 

When she came back, she’d tried to connect to Iwaizumi first. Little coffee dates, grabbing lunch every so often. But they got busy, stopped texting so much. They met up less and less frequently until it all petered out. As it does. And at that point, Tooru had already known that the more you try to make something stay, the more it wants to go. 

“Hey, Oikawa,” Makki said, snapping her fingers in front of Tooru’s nose. 

She blinked. “You’re overwatering your houseplant,” she said. “In the far corner. And you need to bring it out in the sun a little more, too,”

Makki cocked her head. “Iwa-chan over here was just wondering who that guy you brought is. You know, the one who keeps looking over like he’s a little monkey and his hands are too big to reach through the net and pull you out,”

“Oh,” Tooru said, looking around to orient herself. Kaori was just over there, right over Iwaizumi’s shoulder. And when he met Tooru’s eyes, he smiled. She looked at Iwaizumi, whose eyes crinkled with curiosity and concern and something else, who’d grown out her hair a bit and now wore it in a cloud around her head, draping into her eyes a bit and tickling the line of her jaw. Tooru smiled, quick, reassuring. “He’s my fiance,” she said. “His name is Kaori, and he works in sports media.” She went to take another sip of wine, but found the glass empty. She frowned. 

Iwaizumi turned around to see him. Makki and Mattsun shared another of their mysterious looks. 

“What sort of juices do you have in there?” Tooru asked, changing the subject. Without waiting for an answer, she walked over to the refrigerator and opened it. “When I was in Argentina…”

Tooru played bartender for the four of them, and that seems to spur something or other on because the faint music that had been playing turned up several notches and Yahaba set up shots and somebody else turned on the television. 

Makki took a hesitant taste, then downed the whole thing in about fifteen seconds. Fruity concoctions were Tooru’s one truly god-given talent, she informed her. Iwaizumi made a snide comment about moderation, which Makki waved away. 

Mattsun tapped Iwaizumi on the shoulder and downed hers, too. They both laughed. 

Tooru smiled too, for just a second. Then she set to putting most of everything back into the cabinets and fridge. She left the tequila, though. Just in case anybody wanted it.

When she turned back around, Makki and Mattsun were nowhere to be seen. 

“You knew they were dating, right?” Iwaizumi asked. She was leaning up against the counter, forearm casually resting on the marble. 

Tooru turned to look at her. She took a sip of her drink. “How long?”

“Since high school.”

“Really? How come we never–”

“You never.” Iwaizumi corrected. “They bet on how long it would take you to find out.”

“Who won?”

“I just did,” she said, and Tooru matched her self-satisfied smile before she caught herself and remembered to look despondent. “Wonder if they’ll let me collect interest.”

“Probably, if you appealed to their sense of fairness,” Tooru said. 

Iwaizumi shook her head. “Makki cheats like a fucking weasel as long as it gets her out of something,”

“Nah,” Tooru said, swirling the ice in her cup around. “She’ll just rules-lawyer you until you can’t think straight,”

Iwaizumi laughed, and the golden sound filled the air. Tooru wondered why everyone wasn’t looking over to take note, then remembered. They were blessed with this sound all the time, every couple months when they were in town at the same time. Iwaizumi wasn’t liberal with laughs, but she handed them out when they were well-deserved. Tooru felt something warm rise inside her, then Iwaizumi stopped. Her mouth did a funny little thing, an almost-frown, like she’d just thought of something concerning. 

“Hey,” she said. “Are you–”

A hand wrapped around her elbow. Kaori. She turned her head, he mumbled into her ear. Tooru nodded and waved him away. 

“Let’s go out onto the patio.” she said. 

Makki and Mattsun must have already been halfway drunk when they opened the door–much better tolerance than they’d had in high school. They’d disappeared off together somewhere, and Kaori had noticed and gotten ideas. Tooru needed a minute before she could carry any of them out.

Iwaizumi followed Tooru out the door. 

“What were you going to say?” she asked. 

“Nothing.”

“It’s okay,” she said. “If you want to know, you should ask,” she said in a sing-song way, an echo of her high-school mannerism.

“It’s not important.”

Tooru shook her head in exasperation. Her hands were halfway to poking Iwa-chan in the stomach before she realized them and trapped them safely in her pants pockets. “Ask me,” she demanded. 

No. I don’t want to make you uncomfortable,” she said, turning her face away and leaning on the railing. “It’s not really my business.”

Tooru leaned her head into Iwaizumi’s space until she couldn’t look away. “Just ask. Or else I’ll be thinking about it all night.”

Iwaizumi sniffed. “Someone’s burning something,” she said. 

“Iwaizumi!”

She started and looked at Tooru, something incomprehensible shifting behind her eyes. Or maybe it was just the reflection of a neighborhood firepit. She took a deep breath. “Tooru,” she said. “Are you happy?”

Tooru let the sip of her drink she was about to take fall back down into the bottom of the cup. “Am I what?”

“Never mind,” she said. “I was just–-yeah. We… I don’t know. Forget it. You’ve already sent out wedding invitations, right?”

Oh. Tooru laughed, but it was too high-pitched and a little wild. She ran her hands through her hair and drank the rest of her drink. “Lost in the mail, I think,”

Iwaizumi nodded, and Tooru felt like shit. 

“Have you ever been in love?” Tooru asked, the words falling out of her mouth before she could stop them. 

Smoke hazed through the patio, catching the light from the party inside and smearing the lights from other people on their patios, turning everything into itchy impressions. 

Iwaizumi sighed. “I think so. A long time ago,”

“How long?” 

“Too long.” she said, then she inhaled sharply, coughing on the exhale. Tooru offered her drink on instinct, but it was empty. Probably wouldn’t be much of a reliever, either. 

Tooru knew she was prying, but she needed this conversation like grass needs dew or like smoke needs hair to get caught in. “What did it feel like?” she asked. 

“It felt like…” Iwaizumi looked off into the distance, toward where the fire was coming from. “You know how we would climb trees when we were kids? And we’d dare each other to jump off higher and higher branches and one time you jumped off and broke your wrist?”

Tooru nodded. “So it’s like freefall?”

“No. It’s like right before you hit the ground and you realize it’s about to hurt like shit but you can’t do anything about it. Except you’re just doing it again and again and again even though you know you shouldn’t. It’s like…” she rubbed at her eyes. “It’s like your actual heart is hitting the ground and your blood and guts are about to go everywhere,”

“Oh,” Tooru said. “That’s–oh. I’m sorry.”

A knock on the door. Tooru left Iwaizumi out on the patio with the smoke. Kaori grabbed her by the hand and led her back through the kitchen. A few abandoned shots of something lay on the table. Tooru downed them as Kaori weaved through the small groups of people, and the warmth of the alcohol trickled down her throat as she realized she was being led into the bathroom. A covert tryst, intended to prove their passion to everyone under the guise of secrecy. 

Kaori closed the bathroom door gently. Tooru rested her arm against the wall. It was cold, and the tile sparkled under the harsh lighting. A grey bathroom mat slouched against the toilet on the far side of the room. 

She kissed him. She knew what this was supposed to be–a finale. It’s a way to end the night happily and with something to give Kaori a pleasant warm hum underneath his veins. It was intended to be fun for Tooru, too, but–

Her hands moved down his chest, and she began unbuckling his belt. She sank to her knees. No bathroom mat. Cold tile. Too cold. Tooru did more without being asked, chasing approval and making up for the guilt she felt whenever he was happy. 

When Kaori left the bathroom, he closed the door soundlessly. Tooru’s hand clutched the countertop. She spat into the sink, then stuck her head under the faucet to drink some water. She swirled the water around her mouth before spitting it out as well. Tooru repeated the mechanical action several more times before standing and pulling her hair into a ponytail.

Her hand slipped on the doorknob several times before she managed to pry the door open and step out into the hallway. She flipped the bathroom light switch off and closed the door, leaving everything as it was.

There were photos on the wall in the hallway. Dark frames, glass glinting from the light in the main room, which felt miles away. A hilariously professional Makki and Mattsun in one, some horrible baby photos. 

Tooru pressed her hand against the wall and ran her fingers around the frames. There were so many. Ugly flash-photographs at restaurants, vacation photos. She counted Iwaizumi in most of them, and every other person at the party appeared at least once. At the end of the hall, two photos hung side-by-side. The first was the Seijoh volleyball team during their third year. Everyone was looking around, clearly not posed for the picture. The second was a near-perfect imitation of the first, except taken in Mattsun’s kitchen several years later.

In the first photo, Tooru tugged on Iwaizumi’s sleeve to show her something out of frame. Iwaizumi was busy shoving her hair into a ponytail.

In the second photo, Iwaizumi pulled her hair back alone.

“Is there a line?” Kyotani’s abrasive voice turned Tooru around. 

“No,” she said. “Go ahead.”

Kyotani gave a short nod, then entered the bathroom. A click and the lights flicked on, showing underneath the door and illuminating little bits of carpet.

Tooru took a step away, unsure of whether to stay near the bathroom door or go back to the party. Her hand bumped a table, and she heard the clink of bottles. She grabbed one and inspected it in the dim light. Unreadable. Took a sip. It tasted familiar. She took a larger sip, then a swallow. She made eye contact with her empty space in the second photograph. It was filled in so casually that if there hadn't been the first photo for reference, you wouldn't even know there was supposed to be another person.

A voice. “Oikawa?” It was Iwaizumi, backlit and hair like a hall. Tooru put the bottle back on the table. Again, softer. “Tooru?”

“Hi,” she said innocently, the single syllable tasting sour.

“Are you okay?” She asked. Tooru brought her hand up to her face. It was warm. Hot, even. And wet. Cool wet on her cheeks. Tooru realized she had been crying. She wiped her eyes with her hands clumsily.

“Yeah, I’m… fine,” she said, the words coming out both slowly and stumbling over each other. 

Iwaizumi nodded. “How much have you had to drink?” She asked, too conversational.

Tooru shrugged. Her elbow bumped into a picture frame, and she turned to fix it. Her hands kept missing and bumping into plaster. Iwaizumi took a look at the picture and straightened it carefully.

“Do you want to go home? Your fiancé is looking for you,” she said.

Before she could control it, Tooru scoffed and rolled her eyes. “He can–He can deal with it,” she said. “I don't want to go back,”

“Go back where?”

Tooru shrugged again, this time careful not to hit the wall. She had the feeling it was urgently important for Iwaizumi to know at least this, but an equally strong feeling that Iwaizumi shouldn't know. “Nowhere. There's no home, Iwa-chan. There's nothing that's mine,”

Iwaizumi wasn't understanding her, Tooru could tell by the way her eyes flitted between Tooru and the main room. But Tooru was filled with warmth and strength. She took a step toward Iwaizumi, then another. Too fast. Iwaizumi held out her arm and Tooru took it. 

“It's too warm in there for those plants,” Tooru said, not sure what she was talking about anymore. “In the bathroom. Too warm, too warm. I bet they'd like it better cold. I don't like the cold, you know,”

“I know.” Iwa-chan said, and Tooru felt the distance between them increase. She leaned forward. Iwa-chan stayed steady. She was clearly not looking at Tooru anymore, her eyes more concerned with communicating with someone in the main room than listening to what Tooru was trying to tell her.

“Tooru.” Kaori. 

Tooru turned her face. Her hair swished behind her, forming a barrier between her and everyone else. Kaori held out an arm. Tooru didn't take it.

“Iwa-chan. You know the balconies? I don't have any. My heart is fine. It doesn't hurt–not at all. I’m serious. I don't have a balcony and I don't get to climb it and I don't get to jump off and it hurts and I don't know what to do because–” 

Kaori grabbed her arm. Iwaizumi lifted her arms away, and Tooru missed their steadiness. Kaori turned to Iwaizumi to say something out of earshot. Iwaizumi shook her head.

“Tooru, I think it's time to go home,”

“Don't you see? There's no home,” Tooru said desperately, still looking at Iwaizumi. 

Kaori laughed. “Tooru,” he said, and her name sounded wrong in his mouth. “What are you talking about?”

He was leading her away, out of the hallway and into the bright entryway. He said something else to Iwaizumi, who nodded and turned to go back to the kitchen. 

“Don’t you know? Don’t you know? You keep our apartment too cold,” Tooru said, brimming with conviction.“Four whole degrees. I like it at twenty-two. You keep it at eighteen.”

“You’re drunk, Tooru. Let’s go home.” he said. And Tooru let him lead her out of the house, into the grass and smoke-smell outside.

Chapter Text

Wild women don't get the blues

But I find that lately I've been crying like a

Tall child

First Love/Late Spring - Mitski

—

Tooru didn’t know if it was worse to keep pretending to be asleep or to go into work on a Saturday. The apartment smelled like conflict, so she kept herself wrapped in sheets that smelled like anxiety. Here she was warm, curled around herself and eyes fixed on the old digital alarm clock, red numbers blinking at her through the increasingly well-lit room. A glass of water stood on her nightstand. 

She knew what would happen as soon as she took two steps out of bed, opened the door, walked into the kitchen, faced him. 

Do you remember what happened last night? He’d say. Kind, gentle. Give her a way out, a chance to say No. Forgot how many drinks I’d had. I’m sorry. What did I do?

And then Kaori would shrug and say Nothing much, it’s okay . He’d ask her what she wanted for lunch. 

But God, Tooru didn’t know if she had the strength to lie now that she knew she was doing it. But she also didn’t know if she could say Kaori, I remember riding home on the train in silence. I remember staring at the map on the wall and thinking about falling. All I could think about was falling. I remember when you led me up the stairs and to the door and we both stood in the hallway and I looked at you. You didn’t look at me, just focused on putting the keys into the lock. I looked and you and I remember the words falling from my lips like a pair of kids who’d climbed too high in a peach tree. 

I don’t want to go home. 

I haven’t sent the invitations. 

I don’t want to get married. 

All three statements in a row, like she was being timed on a perverse game show where they forced your three deepest secrets out of you. God, she’d have to say them again, and she wouldn’t feel any better about it. At least last night she’d had the warmth of alcohol and a slice of high school confidence behind her. Now, the only warmth she had was from her own body heat and the only confidence in her was the building terror that came from the realization that she hated disappointing people. She didn’t like the way people tried to look happy after, the way they pretended to be relieved. 

She’d tell him those three things again, and he’d say I’m glad you told me like a damn good honest man. 

If she could just stay in bed forever, she wouldn’t have to disappoint both Kaori and herself. 

“I’m glad you told me,” he said later in the kitchen. “I still love you.”

“I know.” Tooru said. She hated the kitchen. She hated grey walls and navy cabinets. She hated everything the kitchen represented: blandness and not committing and underuse and shitty modern style. 

“I would have hated you to keep everything bottled in. I wouldn’t want to marry you knowing you didn’t want to be married. Now we can talk, and we can push back the wedding, or we can take it off the schedule altogether,” he said, reasonably, hand extending to grab hers. “My mom won’t be that angry, I promise.” He looked at her, eyes wide and smiling at the corners. 

“I hate this kitchen.” She said. 

Kaori blinked. “Tooru, what–“

“Stop,” she said. “I’m going to go to work.”

“Tooru, you can’t just run away.”

He was making sense. Kaori always made sense; he always had good ideas and he always knew what was right. But Tooru was somewhere deep inside her body, piloting a woman standing in a kitchen that wasn’t ever really hers. God, her heart we beating so fast it felt like it was about to burst. “Don’t–please don’t say you love me. I’m going to go to work.”

His brow furrowed, and Tooru could feel his hand wilt around hers. “It’s Saturday. Tooru, why did you never say anything?”

“I’m going to work. Don’t expect me home.” She said. Her pulse thudded in her ears. “I mean, the apartment.” She started toward the door, then turned back. Tears were gathering in Kaori’s eyes. He stood alone in the kitchen, hand hanging limply in the air. He looked so dreadfully alone. 

Tooru had forgotten most people come to the botanical gardens on Saturdays around noon. It wasn’t hard to walk around them, but it was odd to see a narrow stream of people walking through the gardens she knew at sunrise and sunset, skies and soil all to themselves. 

She only had to apologize to one man as she unlocked her greenhouse. Sorry, sir, this is not open to the public. He nodded and went back to his family to repeat her apologies to his young daughter. She nodded solemnly from her spot on her mother’s hip. Tooru complimented her on her pink overalls, then smiled and slipped inside. 

The blessed warmth forced her jacket off, casual clothes bared to her plants’ judgments. There was no work to be done. Tooru hoisted herself up onto the table in the center of the room. Her little pot of lavender was doing quite well. Something must have shifted in the past several hours for it to perk up like so. 

She fiddled with the old Tower of Hanoi for a few minutes. Disc to third pole, disc to second pole. First disc to second pole. Take the third disc from the fist pole and put it on the third pole instead. And on and on. 

Then she left it half-finished and walked into her office. She saw the pile of invitations on her desk and allowed herself to cry. 

It’s surprisingly easy to do nothing for hours on end, to stare blankly at white-painted walls. It’s simple to spot a spider creeping along a bag of soil at the far end of the greenhouse and follow it along its journey. It has to make several little jaunts out to various corners. It must go around its business swiftly, but not hastily. 

God, Tooru wished she was a spider. She wished she was a spider and not a woman, a brisk businessman and not a sad glorified gardener with envelopes in her office and a phone turned to silent charging in a yellow, cracked outlet that surely wasn’t up to code. 

The spider skittered from plant to plant, inspecting each for the perfect place to spin its web. It settled on a wisteria tree sapling Tooru had been attempting to resurrect. The spider began extracting silken rope from its butt, building both a net and a home. Tooru watched it until shadows grew several feet from their noonday starting place. 

Then she sat up. Her face felt tight and dry, and she was sure her eyelids had puffed up. A few tendrils of hair had escaped from her ponytail and tickled her throat. She leaned against the wall, a small space bare of vines or leaves and closed her eyes. 

…

The door handle jiggled, sending harsh cracks through the greenhouse. Tooru brought her head up so quickly it crashed against the wall. She scrambled up, feet not quite ready to support her and legs tingling from the sudden change of elevation. 

“One second! Sorry,” she said. 

A key slipped into the lock with a click. Tooru gathered up her things. It wasn’t much, just ripping her phone and charging cord out of the wall and throwing them into her bag. The door opened for an older man pulling a cart with cleaning supplies. 

Tooru tried to look dignified. She apologized again. “Just the floors, please, like normal. Stayed a little late today,”

The man looked up at her. His grey hair curled out from underneath a baseball hat and his eyes seemed to stare right through her. “Of course, Oikawa-san,” he said. “Only the floors, then you can get back to your work,”

She shook her head. “I’m actually going home for the day.” It took extra effort to make sure her voice didn’t waver. “Thank you so much.”

He shrugged and rattled the mop around in its bucket. “Perhaps I should be thanking you for spending so much time with the plants. Most people keep regular business hours. Suppose that speaks to dedication.”

Tooru nodded. She slipped out the door and into the night air. The stars transformed her familiar workplace into a cold harsh maze of concrete and hesitantly rustling leaves. The concrete under her sensible, yet workplace professional, shoes trapped her against the exterior wall of her greenhouse. You should be sure you know where you’re going , the sidewalk seemed to say. A misstep will have consequences. A single lamppost at the entrance to the botanical gardens tried its best to illuminate the night, but its best petered out about twenty meters from where Tooru leaned against the wall. She didn’t move into the light. 

Tooru didn’t want to go home yet. She couldn’t. 

Her phone cast a blue light against her face. She moved to turn the brightness down, but it was already at its minimum. Tooru squinted. It was like looking into the goddamn sun. She scrolled through her contacts. 

Watari. Her work friend. The automated ringing went through a few cycles, then stopped, asked her if she wanted to leave a message. Tooru hung up. 

Who else did she know?

Makki. Ring ring. No answer. 

Mattsun. No answer. 

Yahaba, Kindaichi, Kyotani. Tooru might as well go through the invitation list from last night’s party. Nothing, nothing, nothing. 

Hinata Shouyou. Tooru was willing to go to Tokyo. Shouyou’s personalized voicemail intro started, peppy as ever. Hey! It’s Shouyou …

Tooru hung up. 

She genuinely thought about calling some of her old Argentinian teammates. Sure, it wasn’t ideal, but starting a call with “Hey, funny story, but I’ve gotta crash at yours for a bit–don’t worry about the overnight flight–just expect me in two days, okay?” was preferable to calling her mother. 

That would go worse. 

“Oka-san. Hi. Kaori and I are spending some time apart. No… it… yeah. It was my fault. Anyway, his name was on the lease. I’m moving back in. Again.”

Not the sort of call you wanted to get from your adult daughter at–Tooru checked the time–two in the morning. 

So there was really only one name left. Tooru didn’t have many people in her contacts anymore, and she couldn’t reach out to her boss or Kaori’s mother, and she wasn’t going to call anyone with a name like “Asakusa (Biology)” or “Himekawa (Calc 3)”. 

The name in question was still listed in her favorites, left over from high school. 

Iwaizumi Hajime. 

A lone cicada chirped. 

Tooru held her breath and pressed call. 

One long dial. 

She should’ve just gotten a hotel room. God, that would have been so smart. Tooru could be on the train right now, on her way to some room that managed to be both cheap and expensive, a nice night with her own bed and hot shower with little shampoo bottles. 

The automated ring played again. 

Tooru could buy off the minibar. She’d skipped dinner. Surely, paying a stiff 500 yen for a single bottle of water would be preferable to waiting out in the cold, hoping the night janitor didn’t finish cleaning too quickly. She lowered the phone from her ear. 

Hello?

Tooru almost hung up out of surprise. She pulled the phone back up to her face. 

“Hello?” She echoed. 

Hello . It’s very late, Oikawa , Iwaizumi said, and Tooru felt about five years old. 

“I know,” she said. “I have a problem.” She stuttered on the ‘problem’ part, and tried to play it off. She laughed. “A conundrum, if you will,”

And then Tooru found herself on the last train shuttling her to the outskirts of town where Iwaizumi had a smallish house. 

She’d know it by the peach tree out in front, Iwaizumi’s text read. It was the first text Tooru had gotten from her in over a year, and the old one Tooru had sent saying she couldn’t make it to lunch this week and was very sorry hung above it. If the train ride had been ten minutes longer, Tooru would have deleted it. 

The peach tree was indeed distinctive. Its many branches hung laden with peach blossoms, and as Tooru walked up the drive one floated down and landed on the ground just before the sole of Tooru’s shoe connected with the gravel road. She skipped to avoid crushing the delicate petals, and the action and lack of counterbalance sent her toppling ass-first onto white powdery pants-staining driveway. 

Great , Tooru thought. Now Iwaizumi’s going to think I’m drunk again. Either that, or that I’m in a lot more trouble than I actually am. 

She picked herself up and brushed her work pants off as best she could. Her phone vibrated in her pocket. She picked it up, the too-bright light again causing her to squint and costing her the sliver of night vision she’d accumulated on the walk from the train station. 

Are you lost?

“No,” Tooru said into her phone, feeling petulant. “I’m in the driveway. Actually,” she corrected, stepping up a few stairs and tapping the toe of her shoe on a doormat, “I’m on the front step.”

God, what took you so long? Tooru heard shuffling from inside the house, and an interior light flicked on. Did you walk or something?

“No,” Tooru answered again. The door swung opened and there, a silhouette against the warm lights inside, was Iwaizumi, phone held irreverently in one hand and tired eyes. Tooru swallowed. “I took the train and then walked. Big difference. You know, the footing on your driveway isn’t very even.”

Iwaizumi hung up. Tooru’s phone beeped in acknowledgment and she slipped it back into her bag. 

“Oikawa,” Iwaizumi said, moving to usher her into the house. “What the hell are you doing?” Now, there are a lot of ways ‘What the hell are you doing?’ can be uttered. It can be uttered quickly, loudly, the way a mother would to her particularly disobedient toddler. It can be said slowly with wonderment, like a good friend would say after realizing their friend with a dead-end office job has what could be award-winning artwork tucked away in their attic–and they add to the collection on Sundays and Tuesday nights. There’s the way a different friend in a different situation whispers the phrase in their pathological liar friend’s ear after they’ve used their third alias at the same bar. And, of course, there’s the angrily shouted ‘What the hell are you doing?!’ backseat drivers love to employ. 

But when Iwaizumi said it, she said it with awe and disappointment and tenderness. Her voice rasped slightly on the ‘what’ and the ‘hell,’ and ended with a clipped sort of sound where Iwaizumi’s mouth couldn’t decide whether to end with a gentle refined ‘doing’ or a more casual and offhand ‘doin’.’

What the hell are you doing?

It was existential. 

“Taking off my work shoes,” Tooru said, stepping inside and placing her shoes platonically far from Iwaizumi’s on the entryway rug. 

Iwaizumi closed the door behind her. 

“Would you like something to drink?” She offered. “Water? Hot chocolate?”

Tooru shook her head. “I’ve had enough of this night sky,” she said. “Already walked all over it.”

Iwaizumi had a nice house. The entryway opened right into a living room with a red couch and some mismatched chairs. Beyond it, a small table sat with a sliding glass door at the adjacent wall. A kitchen bar overlooked the area. It had red barstools to match the living room sofa. Tooru couldn’t see much of the kitchen, but she assumed the bedrooms were to the right, same side as the sliding glass doors in the dining room. Must open to a nice looking patio in the middle of a large backyard surrounded by deciduous forest. 

“Can I, um.” She shifted her bag from one shoulder to the other. “Can I use the bathroom?”

“Sure!” Iwaizumi said, then repeated. “Sure. It’s right through–actually, I’ll just show you.” They walked in silence through the darkened house until they reached a hallway. “It’s on the right,” Iwaizumi said. 

Tooru used the bathroom, flushed, then put on her bedclothes from the night before. She didn’t know why she’d shoved them into her work bag this morning instead of rooting around for clean clothes. At least these didn’t smell of Kaori’s detergent. 

She exited the bathroom and Iwaizumi was right there. She jumped, making Tooru jump. Tooru laughed, and Iwaizumi cracked a grin. Then it disappeared. “I only have one bed,” she said. “I’ll take the couch and–”

“I’ll take the couch,” Tooru said firmly. “I’m the one imposing. It’s so late, and you’ve earned your own bed.”

Iwaizumi crossed her arms. “I don’t know what you’ve been taught, but you don’t earn the right to a bed.”

Tooru waved her hand and walked past Iwaizumi anyway. “I’m sleeping on the couch, and you can’t make me move.” There. Either Iwaizumi let Tooru win or she was too tired to put up a fight, but Tooru succeeded in sprawling over the red couch in Iwaizumi’s living room. 

A few minutes later, Iwaizumi (or at least, Tooru assumed it was Iwaizumi) dumped a blanket on her head and muttered a gruff goodnight.

“Goodnight,” Tooru said, head still covered by the blanket. She shoved it off and hugged it in her arms. She was looking up into Iwaizumi’s barely-illuminated face, only the security lights from the patio giving it form and shadow. “Thank you,” Tooru said, and the shadows skipped over Iwaizumi’s face in a different way. She had furrowed her brow. 

“It’s what any friend would do. You’re in a tough spot,” she said. “I assume.”

Tooru cocked her head. “Not that,” she said. “Well, that too. But also, thank you for being normal, like always. Like a friend.”

Like a friend. Tooru hadn’t meant to echo Iwaizumi’s statement, too busy forming her own to listen to what had been said to her a few seconds ago. But as the word dropped from her lips, Tooru realized what it meant. 

Friend. 

Before Iwaizumi could respond, Tooru continued. “Anyway, I’ll be out of your hair tomorrow. Don’t worry too much.” She let a moment pass. Iwaizumi had stepped back farther away from the couch and into the dining room. Tooru could barely see her. She propped herself up on the back of the couch with her elbows. “Goodnight,” she said again. 

Iwaizumi opened her mouth, then closed it. She took another step back, bumping her heel into one of the dining room chairs. It made a slight noise as it scraped against the wooden floor. “Goodnight,” she said again, too. And then she turned around and disappeared into the night of the house. 

Tooru crawled into Iwaizumi’s blankets, hugging the couch cushions beneath her. Everything she needed was in her bag, and she didn’t have to touch it until tomorrow. She began counting. One to three, one to two, three to two. One to three, two to one, two to three, one to three. And so on.

Chapter Text

I don't need the world to see

That I've been the best I can be, but

I don't think I could stand to be

Where you don't see me

Francis Forever - Mitski

—

“I’m surprised at how calm I am,” Tooru said to Makki and Mattsun’s twin intrigued faces. “I mean, my life just completely went to shit. But I’m fine!”

She sat on the bed in Makki’s spare bedroom. Makki and Mattsun stood at the foot, and Iwaizumi lingered awkwardly at the door. Tooru’s single bag sat leaning against the bare side table, and her phone charged on the floor in a corner. It was no longer dead, but now lighting up every few minutes with unread text messages. 

“Yeah, well,” Makki said, ignoring Mattsun’s closed eyes and slight cough. “You’ve always had a couple of screws loose.” Tooru laughed at that.

“Seriously, thank you,” Tooru continued, making sure to look over to Iwaizumi as well. “If not for you, I would be in a hotel or still under my work desk. You didn’t have to do this,”

“Well, uh,” Makki started, then stopped.

In the silence, Iwaizumi said, “We did. Mattsun’s your landlord now, though. Hope you don’t get evicted.” She pushed herself off the doorframe, lingered blankly for a few minutes, then extended her hand in a wave. She ducked away from the room, and in a few moments Tooru heard the front door close.

Makki and Mattsun left soon after, probably to whisper without Tooru’s listening ears. She had nothing to do, then, but sit and think about herself and how humiliating it is to be grateful. She was, genuinely, truly grateful, but another part of herself resented the help she now had, knowing that she also owes gratitude to Kaori. If he hadn’t spotted the reunion party letter, if he hadn’t dragged her out to this house, she wouldn’t occupy enough of a space in Mattsun’s mind to receive help. 

But, again, if Kaori hadn’t found the reunion party invitation, she also would not have left. 

Whatever. 

Tooru went to work, and Tooru went outside. She picked up her phone, eventually, and organized a time to grab her possessions from Kaori’s apartment. She ducked in, packed a suitcase and a cardboard box, and no words passed between them. She didn’t buy anything new, and she didn’t unpack. 

Weeks passed. Tooru paid rent. 

She had no idea what else to do. 

Sawaki-san, either in uncharacteristic perception or opportune coincidence, gave Tooru a project in the form of a young and sickly-looking olive tree. The administrator wandered into Tooru’s greenhouse, potted plant clutched in his sweaty hands. 

“I have a task,” he said, then backpedalled. “No, I have a plant. And an idea? No. I don’t have an idea. I have a plant. And you’re the plant person. You’ve never killed a plant.”

Tooru looked at him, then, properly looking at the sticks in the pot. “I haven’t killed anything that wasn’t already well on its way out,”

“But you try your best, right?” He said. “I need you to make this plant grow. And look green.”

Sawaki-san was not in charge of exhibits, and especially not in charge of exhibits at the botanical gardens. His role lied mainly in creating email lists about how the gardens didn’t generate as much income as the aquarium and were going to receive a smaller monetary allocation of resources during the next fiscal year. He also sometimes walked around to hear the sound of his own hard-soled shoes clacking. 

“I would just really appreciate it, okay?” His face was sweating, too. Tooru went to grab the plant from him, then noticed its general stickiness and instead gestured for him to set it on the counter. She spared a few glances for it, then went back to the substantial stack of paperwork she had yet to complete. 

His shoes tapped the ground. Tooru looked back up. “Thank you for the plant, Sawaki-san.”

He blinked, then shook his head a little. “Thank you, Oikawa-san.” But as he turned to leave, he looked back and said, “It’s still Oikawa-san, isn’t it?”

Tooru took a deep breath. “I will be sure to notify you, my colleagues, and anyone important if my surname should change. I would also be sure to change both my namecard at the entrance of the greenhouse and my email sign-off. I hope you have a good afternoon.” She smiled warmly, and as soon as he left she took off her glasses and rubbed her eyes. 

She could deal with whatever that was later. 

It was, for all Tooru’s intentions and purposes, Sawa-chan’s fault that she had to complete so much paperwork in the first place. Every plant, a form stating which type, when it entered, when it left, how much water it used. Tooru was planning to launch a campaign to move to digital—it seemed counterintuitive to be a botanical garden relying on piles of shredded trees—but hadn't gotten around to it yet.

Needed a few more allies. She had a lunch date today. Well, it was more of a lunch work meeting, and it was more of a two o’clock sort of thing. Whenever Watari sent the email that she was all done with training or whatever they did with new employees. Tooru could hardly remember her first day, so none of it had to be that extensive. 

They met outside. The irregularly mild June weather gave them a seat at a wire table in one of the garden's far corners. Tooru got there first, and she'd just opened her laptop to assume the posture of business when Watari’s tanned face and dark, sleek ponytail entered her view. She waved, and Watari walked over to the table. A young man, too young to really be a man but too old to be a boy, followed her. He had tufty, bright orange hair and a skinny build that gave the impression of cottongrass.

“Hinata Natsu,” he said, after a few meaningful eye movements by Watari. He held out his hand. Tooru shook it, and motioned for them to sit down. 

“Hinata?” Tooru asked before she could think better of it.

Natsu nodded. “Like the volleyball player, if you’re interested in that sort of thing. My older sister is Hinata Shouyou.”

Tooru chewed on the inside of her cheek. “I know Shouyou,” she said, not intending to be dismissive but finding the words sounded a little more clipped out loud than she’d intended. “What will you be doing here?” 

Natsu looked to Watari.

“Well,” Watari said, and she rubbed her fingers against the iron gaps in the table. “Shadowing people, doing tasks, that sort of thing. I wondered if you could, you know, let Natsu see what you do about a day and a half a week, Thursday and Friday. I’m sure you have things to teach him, and he did apply to Sawaki-san himself. Supposed to have guidance in both aquarium and botanical science.”

“And you didn’t email me?” Tooru asked. She made eye contact with Natsu. “I’m sure Natsu would have appreciated not being dragged out here like a starving puppy on those animal shelter commercials. Twist my arm while you’re at it.”

Watari’s fingers stopped tracing the bars. Shit, Tooru was being nasty . She sighed. “Watachi, relax. I’ll do it.” Natsu seemed to relax, too. 

“So, why are you here?” Tooru asked, instilling all the gentleness and warmth into her tone as she could. 

He blinked. “I’m studying biology next year at university. I want to go into ecology.” He ran his hand through his hair, managing to fluff it out in the back even more. “I’ve been going here since I was a kid–my sister would always take me when she was watching me. It inspired me, I guess. I think it’s important to have places like this, organizing nature so that everyone can understand it. If there’s any hope for the future–climate change and all that–it starts here.” His eyes lit up as he’d hit his stride, but then he seemed to remember where he was and turned red. “That might have been a lot. My bad.”

Tooru turned her lips down in a sort of smile. Shouyou had done okay with this kid. 

“Well, I guess I’ll take him to see the greenhouse,” Tooru said. “If there’s nothing else on the agenda.” 

Watari shrugged. Go for it . 

Tooru stood. 

Watari waved to Natsu, who really was starting to resemble a lost puppy. “Congrats, you passed,” she said. 

Natsu followed Tooru to the greenhouse in silence. Tooru stopped to unlock the door–could never find the right key, didn’t even know where half the keys on her key ring came from–and Natsu made a small noise. He was looking at her namecard on the wall. 

“Oh,” he said. Discovery. “I didn’t know you were Oikawa Tooru.”

The door swung open. Tooru raised an eyebrow. “Watachi didn’t tell you?”

Natsu shook his head, and he seemed to be looking at Tooru in a different light. “I should have figured. Of course you know Shouyou.”

“High school volleyball,” Tooru affirmed. “Back when. We did a holiday in Brazil once, right before she was Ninja Shouyou.”

Natsu nodded eagerly. Tooru flicked on the lights and motioned for him to follow her in. The door swung closed behind him. 

“That’s all a long time ago, though. I’m afraid all I can teach you is about plants now.” She pushed the Tower of Hanoi set back as she passed it. Natsu trailed behind, inspecting every plant he passed. 

“Last I heard you had gone pro in Argentina. If you don’t mind me asking…” He trailed off, perhaps sensing from the way Tooru stood with her back to him leaning on the counter with one hand that she wanted very badly to say Actually, I do mind you asking.

Tooru sighed. “Got injured a few years ago. If you see me sitting for a while with a leg up, that’s why. Got metal bits in my knee. Came back and now I do this.” She turned around. Natsu’s round eyes stared back. He nodded, apology on his lips. 

Tooru waved it away. Then she smiled. “Actually, I have a project for you, if you don’t mind research. Come back here Thursday afternoon with everything you can find about growing olives.”

Natsu nodded and typed something into his phone. 

“Now, how about I show you how everything works, and then I’ll send you off back to Watari-san, okay?”

Natsu left, and Tooru tapped her fingers on the stainless steel sink. She’d started doing meaningless tasks. These days it seemed like her job was pretending to work for her own comfort. She’d pulled out her thesis to edit, then closed the document without even a paragraph re-read. She’d fussed with several plants, trimming a few leaves but never making it around to inspect the backsides. And now she could barely keep her hands under the water without remembering another thing she might have to do. All she could do was wait until five o’clock when she could leave without feeling guilty about it. Tooru looked up at the clock again. Four-fifteen. Not too bad, only forty-five minutes to go. 

She tightened her hands around the edge of the sink, knuckles meeting the cool metal. Warmth pricked behind her eyes and nose and she knew what she was feeling. Tooru was angry. What at, specifically, she didn’t know. Everything, maybe. She felt it, then, unable to distract herself from it any longer. Every second gave her a new reason to be angry, and the longer she stayed with her hands against the stainless steel the longer her inability to stop being angry frustrated her further. 

Tooru left work fuming. She fumbled the key to lock her greenhouse and almost screamed. Not fair, all wrong. The breeze turned malicious, and every street noise was hostile. As she stood waiting at the train station she closed her eyes and breathed slowly. She could imagine what the day should be, watch the clouds slowly drift across the blue sky. There are people, sure, but they’re soundless and faceless. Sometimes they stop to read notices on the billboard, but they don’t linger. They all have places to be, all know who and what they’re going back to. They’re waiting for the train to take them home. 

Tooru’s eyes snapped open and her fantasy dissipated. The train arrived. People flooded out, and Tooru made her way inside. She held onto a cool metal pole. The door slid shut, and not quite managing to counterbalance effectively, Tooru’s arm brushed the man in the seat next to her. “Sorry.” she muttered. 

He looked up at her for a moment, made a small noise, then went back to reading his newspaper. Tooru exhaled. At the next stop, a few people shuffled out, and a few got on. They didn’t do anything wrong, maybe got a bit too close for comfort, but there was no need for Tooru to furrow her brow like she did, scowl like she did. 

But she did. 

She wondered what would happen if she ever did get angry. Not angry like she was now, all contained and lonely, but truly angry. Cathartically angry. An anger that forced everyone else to deal with it, to placate her, to fix something. She wondered how powerful she could feel, watching soundless and faceless strangers get impossibly quiet and grow concerned and frightened faces. To get rid of everything inside her, to turn to the man whose arm she’d brushed and ask him if he knew what it felt like to know nothing, be nothing, be riding the train for no reason other than because she’d done it nearly every day for five years to get back to a home she didn’t love. Do you know what it feels like to not know if you can love someone? She would yell at him, get right up in his face, so close she could smell his terrified and confused breath. Do you know what it feels like to not know if you’re capable of starting over?

He probably did, though, and Tooru knew that she didn’t deserve her anger over problems she’d created. She left Kaori, she said yes, she injured herself, she went to Argentina, and so on. For all she knew, the man sitting next to her had worse problems than she’d ever know. He had cancer, probably. And a dead wife. A wife who’d divorced him right after the cancer, married another man, and then died. He was behind on rent. He was going to go back to his apartment tonight and find an eviction notice taped to the door. Of course he’d know Tooru’s anger, and he’d know worse. 

The woman across the train car typing away on her phone could be far more miserable than Tooru. What use would it be to yell at these two wells of potential misfortune? Tooru would look silly. And not only would she look silly, she’d just look like a complete asshole. 

Her anger got smaller. Maybe not in an evaporatory way, but just in a more hidden way. She wasn’t getting rid of it, just getting rid of the expression of it, and wasn’t that the same thing?

She got off the train at her stop, walked around, bought dinner. Picked up a newspaper, did the crossword. Picked up an older newspaper, did the crossword on that one, too. Walked into shops, bought nothing, just played with the sleeves on mannequins and flipped through books and thought about which curtains she would buy if she lived in a palace or a studio apartment or a smallish house outside of town with a fruit tree in the front. 

Tooru didn’t get back to Makki and Mattsun’s place until late enough that she could excuse herself into her bedroom. Just like she planned, neither of them bothered her. She sat in her bed until around three, scrolling through single bedroom apartments for rent on her laptop. 

She should have known that every quiet evening has a loud morning to complement it. By ten the smell of baked goods drifted through the house, and when Tooru opened her door she found herself ushered onto a barstool at the kitchen island before a regular feast. And it wasn’t just a nice breakfast. Before long, Tooru found herself confessing things to her two friends.

“I have to be a difficult person. If I wasn’t difficult, then what other reason would there be for me to feel so lonely? I don’t have a difficult life, so I must be the difficulty for everyone else. I just don’t know what to do. I haven’t tried to not be difficult because I’m scared that nothing will change and I’ll still be lonely. That’s it.” She said, when they’d asked why she’d ‘snuck into her room like a doggone worm on a dry day’ last night.

Mattsun considered this, pursing her lips, looking like she didn’t want to say what she was about to say. “I mean, it’s not like you’re not a difficult person. You’re just not, like, not difficult.” 

“But everyone’s difficult.” Makki added, clapping a hand on Mattsun’s shoulder and squeezing.

“But what did I do ?”

Makki sighed. “Nothing! Goddamnit, Tooru, life just sucks and people are lonely. I don’t know what you want me to say. People don’t look at you and think you’re lonely–”

“–and I don’t want them to–”

“–and it works!” She exclaimed. “People don’t think you’re lonely because they look at you and think you have it together. You have a nice job and you live somewhere. If I just saw you walking around, I would think you’re doing fine! You have to… you’re giving everybody else too much credit.” 

Tooru pushed a strawberry into her mouth. She didn’t really want to eat it, but she didn’t not want to eat it. She liked strawberries, and she also liked getting a moment to not respond. It was already difficult enough to have been entrapped into this sort of conversation; she didn’t have to add not even eating fresh fruit into it.

“Also, your life is kinda difficult. Like, you can believe whatever you want about who got you into whatever, but you still had to do it. Yeah, you failed. At whatever.” Mattsun waved her hand around, not wanting to get into whatever ‘whatever’ is. “But you did your best.”

“I did my best,” Tooru repeated miserably. “And it sucked. I don’t like that the best that I can do is still shitty.”

Makki sighed and released her hand from Mattsun’s shoulder, letting it slap against her leg. She sat on a stool. “I’m not good in a crisis. Like I said, you got a nice job and a place to live. All most of us can ask for.”

“Yeah, I don’t think you really went to the best pair you could for emotional support. You want a joke? I can do that. You want a casket discount? I can do that too. See, that was a joke. Except,” Mattsun leaned closer to Tooru and grasped her forearm. “I can actually get a casket discount if you need one.”

Tooru shook it away. “I just miss knowing what to do.” She near-whispered, a bit ashamed but not quite sure what of.

Makki took a moderate bite of half a croissant. “Tooru, nobody has known what they’re supposed to do with anything ever. Maybe you thought you did when you were like six, but–”

“We live on a floating rock. In space.” Mattsun grabbed the other half of Makki’s croissant.

“Shut up, dude.”

“I’m not a dude, I’m your platonic female roommate.”

“We sleep in the same bed. Are we engaged? Honest to God, some days I accidentally call you my wife to random people.”

“Why are you talking about me to random people?” Mattsun stood.

“Because I love you.” Makki said, holding out a strawberry for her partner to eat.

Mattsun ate it. “You’re so sweet. But I feel like we should be engaged by now. Do you wanna, like–”

Tooru laughed, a bit relieved. “Don’t propose in the middle of my breakfast crisis. You guys are the worst. Now I can’t even be sad because I’ll have to congratulate you.”Makki raised an eyebrow, another strawberry in her hand and halfway to Mattsun. She poised it up towards its presumed recipient until Mattsun leaned forward, then she jerked it toward her own mouth and ate it. “I don’t know what Oikawa over here was thinking about, but I was gonna ask if you wanted to make another round of pancakes because I heard something about Hinata Natsu through the grapevine and I wanted to ask you ,” she turned to look at Tooru. “If you knew anything about that.”

Chapter Text

Now the rest of my days are just

Waiting for when

You come down and tell me

I was meant for you, baby

I Don’t Smoke - Mitski

—

She didn’t know why she said yes. Tooru didn’t particularly need ‘closure’ or ‘to figure things out’ or ‘explanations.’ But she’d said yes anyway, and she didn’t bear Kaori enough ill will to cancel. Dinner. At a restaurant. For old times’ something.

Tooru caught the train early and walked fast. She knew the restaurant; Kaori had taken her there several times before. The awning teased her as she got closer, and Tooru ducked into a corner store directly across the street from it. Tooru’s nerves about dinner dimmed in comparison to the nerves instilled in her by fluorescent lighting. The cashier nodded at her. This was a discomfort she knew how to deal with. 

Pacing shelves of single-serving snacks she didn’t intend to buy offered comfort. The sour candies and dubiously safe processed meat sticks helped her pass time. Looking through the clear glass doors into the refrigerated drinks gave her something to concentrate on, something to be. Tooru could be the best average corner store customer in Japan. 

She was still ten minutes early. 

A plastic sign, dingy despite the clean paint coating and lack of dust pointed to a restroom in the back of the store. Tooru barely heard the tapping of her heeled dress shoes on the linoleum tile. The bathroom probably should have been a single stall, but had been separated into two stalls, one large and the other barely large enough for Tooru to stand in with her feet at shoulder width. Though, Tooru supposed, she was a good eight centimeters taller than the average Japanese woman, it was also mildly discomfiting to straighten up and see herself in the mirror above the single sink.

“You’re such a loser. Always hurrying up to wait. It’s diva shit, really.”

Tooru stood in that bathroom stall trying to remember who had said that to her. Couldn’t have been her parents–she was fairly certain her mother wouldn’t call her a loser, and her father wasn’t likely to be familiar enough with “diva shit” to use it in any derogatory way. And it certainly hadn’t been Kaori; there was no one who she’d been less of a diva to than him. 

Nonetheless, Tooru was on her diva shit, and she planned to be for the rest of the night. It was the only way she was going to survive this. She had to be unbothered, confident, as cocksure as a woman like her could be. And she had to be three minutes late. 

When meant she had to leave this bathroom–this corner store–at two minutes past six, so she’d have just enough time to slip into the booth on time. Or rather, just barely unbotheredly confidently cocksurely late. 

I am on my diva shit , she thought. I am smelling the smells of diva shit . Then, a little hysterically, she thought, tall diva shit, heavy on shit, moderate diva . Just what you want on a nice summer evening.

Tooru hated this bathroom. All she could feel was the warmth of indignity and the coldness of knowing that she had nowhere to go. She wanted to beat the stupid plastic stalls down with her fists and nice heeled dress shoes. 

She sat on the toilet, pulled out her phone. Kaori had sent her a few messages about locations and extraneous helpful information. She read through the notifications, but didn’t properly open the messages.

 It was part of being unbothered, confident, and cocksure: you had to assume that everyone cared about you more than you cared about them. Easy.

She exited the bathroom and contemplated the wall of cigarettes. Tooru didn’t know very much about smoking–only that her mother quit before Tooru was born and every once in awhile would complain about the smell of some blouse she’d found in the back of her closet before getting it dry cleaned. On TV, sometimes, they would show a pack of cigarettes and her mother would scoff at the brand. 

Well, she used to. Now there was some sort of law against smoking in too much detail in films. 

“D’you need one?” The cashier asked, startling her. She was a bored looking woman, maybe a few years older than Tooru. She was fiddling with a pink barette clipping half her bangs to the side. 

“Uh.” Tooru said. “No. Just–just looking.”

The cashier frowned in sympathy. “You quit? I went cold turkey about a year ago. Still dream about it.” She shook her head. “Heard you never stop wanting it. Found these zero-calorie mints, though. If you want any, they’re right by the gummy bears. Sure helped me out when I first quit.”

Tooru bought the mints. 

The top of the package stuck out the top of her bag when she slid into a booth at exactly three past six. Kaori looked at them funny and sat down his phone. 

“I was just about to text.” He said. He looked good, if a little tired. He always looked good, though, so maybe it would be more accurate to say that he looked normal. He smiled. “How are you?”

“Fine. How are you?” She responded, toying with the paper napkins.

He looked at her for a second then shook his head. He opened his mouth several times, catching words before he could say them. “I guess I’m fine, too.” He said.

He picked at his fingernails, Tooru pressed nail-shaped indents into the napkin. They were saved by the waitress who brought them waters. Kaori drank from his, Tooru drank from hers. It was good water, if you could call plain water good.

“Sawaki-san gave me a plant at work the other day,” Tooru said, wishing she was the type of person who could have let the silence stand forever.

Kaori wrinkled his nose. “Really? The sweaty guy?”

“Yes, the–the sweaty guy,” Tooru said. She cracked a smile. “He wanted me to revive it.”

“Can you?”

Tooru shrugged. “I’ve been told that if sheer force of will was enough, I could make anything grow. Make grapevines grow peaches.”

Kaori smiled again, but there was a bit of tightness behind it, a bit of showmanship in front of it. “Anything grow? Who told you that?”

“My–” Tooru stopped. My friend . It had been Iwa–Iwaizumi–when Tooru had first come back to Japan and they’d talked about going to college. “My mother,”

He cocked his head. “Really?”

“It was a long time ago,” This, at least, was true. 

“Oh. Huh. Back before–”

“Yes.”

“Tooru, you didn’t know what I was going to say–”

“I did.” She said. She tried not to put any bite behind the words, tried to say them softly and simply and gently. Back before she’d injured herself and her mother stopped trusting her to make her own decisions .

The waitress came again, and they ordered.

The restaurant had red leather booths and an inadequate lighting system. They'd mostly come here during the winter--Tooru remembered having to squint to read the menu. But now, summertime stretched the hours of the day long enough for windows to work as windows should, and today their booth promoted legibility. 

Kaori broke the silence this time. “You know, Hinata’s back.”

“Shouyou?”

“Yeah,” he said, then leaned in. “She’s coming to play for us. Been practicing with us for a month, first game is next Tuesday. It’s being announced tomorrow, so keep it a secret until then.”

Tooru smiled, genuinely. “For us ?”

“Jackals. It’s been a wonder it hasn’t gotten leaked yet–-Hinata’s probably the most well-known women’s volleyball player in Japan. Scratch that. She’s the most well-known player in Japan, period. And it doesn’t stop in Japan. It’s crazy we even got her…”

He continued talking excitedly about his job. Tooru nodded in all the right places, made little yesses and mhms of encouragement when needed. 

“...and with whatever Miya’s been doing on Twitter, it’s actually worked to our advantage. Everyone knows there’s a surprise, but no one knows what it is! All I have to do is send our press releases.” Kaori finished, eyes shining and looking triumphant. He looked like he wanted to kiss her. 

Tooru felt her face fall from the smile, hardening. “I don’t know if I ever loved you,” she said. Saying this was true but immature, and she regretted it. 

Kaori’s face did something horrible. He bit the inside of his cheek and stared out the window. He might have had tears in his eyes. When he looked back at Tooru, it was like he’d stopped breathing. “I do. Did. I love–loved you.”

“I know.” She was the one looking away, now. 

Kaori muttered thanks to the waitress as she placed their plates in front of them. She left, and he looked somewhere to Tooru’s left. 

“I don’t know what to say to that.” He said.

“I know.”

He looked down to his food, made to eat it, then set his utensils down. “Why wasn’t I enough for you? I…” He trailed off. 

Tooru crossed her arms on the table top, hugging herself. “I don’t know.”

Kaori just sighed, a barely-perceptible heavier-than-usual breath, and it hurt more than if he’d screamed and made a scene. He was picking at his nails again. “Was there someone else? All the nights at the greenhouse?”

“No.”

“ Is there someone else?”

“No.”

His eyebrows relaxed from where they’d been knit together. He seemed to come to a conclusion and sucked in a breath. His eyes wandered around, as if searching to see if the right words to use were printed on the walls or ceiling somewhere. 

“Are you–” His phone buzzed. He looked at it, facedown on the table. “Tooru, are you–” It buzzed again. He picked it up. 

He met Tooru’s eyes, the sadness still there, but hardened over with urgency. “It leaked,” he said, texting rapidly. “I was so concerned about Miya, I wasn’t even–” He held the phone up to his ear. “Yes, I saw. I’m on my way. I’m just–” He pulled several bills out of his wallet. “This should be enough. I’m so sorry, Tooru. I really have to go. Will you be okay?”

Tooru nodded yes, and then he left. She ate her dish alone, then had Kaori’s packaged so she could eat it for lunch tomorrow. He had barely touched it anyway. And she’d already been exposed to any diseases he may have had. 

“Are you…” Are you what ? The unfinished question bothered her. She thought about texting him later. Am I what , Kaori? Happy ? No. Happier ? Maybe. Feeling less existentially powerless, maybe. 

Their waitress was serving another table. She was pretty, Tooru noticed. Eyes that crinkled at the corners when she talked. Short hair styled to poof out around her ears, smooth. Straight nose that turned up a little at the tip. Again, pretty. Anyone would think so, but when she turned back to glance at the tables on Tooru’s end of the restaurant, Tooru looked away. 

She looked at her hands, the various pictures on the red-painted walls, the light fixtures hanging above every booth that emitted enough light to differentiate this place from a nice restaurant but dim enough to distinguish it from a cheap one. 

“Tooru, are you…”

Was she what? She always knew what Kaori was going to say, what he meant . 

It bothered her that in those words he had been unpredictable. 

Tooru pulled the mints out of her bag and unwrapped one. She ate it. She sorted through the cash Kaori handed her. It was more than twice the price of the meal. She left it all on the table, then she left herself. When she walked out the door, the waitress gave her a sympathetic look. Tooru didn’t acknowledge it–just stared blankly back.

Ten minutes later, Tooru stared at a cigarette vending machine at the train station. A light drizzle coaxed a pleasant smell from the concrete. She opened her bag and unwrapped another of the individually wrapped mints and put it in her mouth. A tall athletically built woman came up and looked at the machine for awhile, then turned around. 

“Haj--Iwaizumi?”

“Tooru?”

“You smoke?”

“Do you smoke?”

“No, but–” Tooru threw her hands up. The drizzle intensified, and she waved Iwaizumi over to stand with her under the roof. “Are you taking the train?”

She nodded. “Why were you staring at the cigarettes?”

“Why were you staring at the–”

“My God, Tooru. You go first.”

“It’s stupid.”

It was nice to see Iwaizumi’s face scrunch in frustration, her forehead crinkle and eyebrows draw close, the way her mouth tensed and frowned. “I didn’t ask you if it was stupid. I asked you why you were staring at the fucking cigarettes.”

“Is that a question?”

“For the love of–”

“I always think about starting. Smoking, that is. I was going to start, the day I got back from the hospital. You know. When I was an athlete I didn’t want to because it rots your lungs, but I decided that I was going to become someone new that day. I wanted to do something I’d never done before.” Tooru confessed, her voice quiet. She looked out across the train tracks. The gentle rain made little sounds on the pavement.

Iwaizumi’s voice, gentle now: “Did you do it?”

“No. I got halfway to the corner store and then I turned around.”

“That’s probably best. Didn’t your mom smoke?”

“Before I was conceived, I’ve been told. I realized on the way to that store that wanting to smoke was kind of stupid, like a misplaced teen rebellion fantasy. Plus, addiction’s a money hole, and I’ve been told nicotine doesn’t even make you feel that good.”

Iwaizumi said. “Makes sense. I don’t, by the way.”

“Don’t what?”

“Smoke either.”

“Took you a while to answer.”

“Didn’t want to interrupt,” she said. They shared a smile. 

“That would’ve been a great line to light a cigarette after.” Tooru said. “And you never told me why you were looking at the machine.”

Iwaizumi looked at her quizzically. “You can buy me cigarettes if you want me to smoke so badly. Then, ten years down the line I’ll be chainsmoking while determining what’s wrong with some kid’s shoulder, and I’ll be thinking of you.” It was meant to be a joke, Tooru knew. It was meant to be a bit of a hyperbolistic sarcastic little jab. But something about Iwaizumi’s voice, something about the quickly-concealed genuineness in her eyes rendered Tooru speechless for a second. 

“You’d start an addiction because I suggested you should?” Tooru finally asked, and she found herself in a similar situation to what Iwaizumi must have just been going through. It had come out softer, gentler than she’d intended, than she’d known it should. 

Iwaizumi nodded, then quirked a smile. “More likely than you’d think.”

The breath fell out of her, and Tooru felt untethered and off-balance, her stomach turning to helium and her lungs weighing tons. A rumble announced the incoming train. 

“This is mine,” Iwaizumi said as it arrived. “Yours is the next?”

Tooru found her voice. “Yes. How did you know?”

“You live with my best friends,” she said, as if it was the simplest thing in the world. And maybe it was. She turned to go. “I’ll see you.”

“Wait.” Tooru said. Iwazumi turned to her. She was just outside the roof. Raindrops fell on her curls, weighing them down. “Would you like a mint?” She pressed one into Iwaizumi’s hand before waiting for an answer. “I’ll see you. Around.” She said. 

Iwaizumi nodded, then turned and walked into the train. Inside, through the window, Tooru saw her unwrap the mint and place it in her mouth.

That night, Tooru couldn’t get to sleep. She laid in her bed above the sheets like a corpse in a coffin. No tossing or turning, just blank eyes at the ceiling. She imagined the moon rising above the roof of Hanamaki and Matsukawa’s townhome, everyone sleeping soundly. Makki sprawled in the same bed as Mattsun, the faceless soundless neighbors in the other unit. She imagined the neighbors as an older couple, a salaryman on his last year before retirement and a wife who had already retired. She spent her time visiting her children and grandchildren, and once her husband retired, they would be moving to live with their eldest daughter. 

Sadness coursed through Tooru at these pictures. Sadness, then jealousy. At once, it seemed incredibly unjust that these people, her friends and strangers alike, could sleep peacefully in each others arms while she was left reckoning with empty space and no one. 

She stared at nothing for what seemed like hours, wide awake but no thoughts. And then something seemed to connect in her brain, some electricity shot between neurons, and she realized her hand was resting on her breast. 

Tooru took her shirt off and watched her finger circle her dark nipple. It hardened under her nail’s gentle scrape. She watched the wrinkles pull together, the red-purple bud condense. Then she ran her finger over it, pinched slightly, twisted it a bit. It was scientific, disinterested, an experiment formed from dispassionate curiosity. She’d never felt that much sensation from her breasts despite their smallish size. Sometimes, when she was younger, she’d massaged into them where it felt good, but she’d get distracted wondering if mammograms felt like this or worse. 

She still hadn’t had a mammogram. 

Her other nipple still laid flat, so she played with it for a few seconds. The cold air tingled. 

Tooru looked to where her waistband covered her shorts, and she wondered. 

She hadn’t done this in a long time. Probably too long, if that one sexual health pamphlet she’d read in Brazil was a reputable source. The pamphlets were always so clinical with it. Masturbation is healthy , etc. Made her feel like she was performing a procedure each time she’d gotten herself off. Like taking multivitamins or doing physical therapy. 

Still, her hand slipped below her shorts. She played with the hairs, just toying–like she was still considering. She pressed into her clit from above, pushing the skin around it downwards to get a slight sensation. It felt good. Her hand traveled lower, passing her clit and dipping to her opening. It was dry. She brought her hand back up to her mouth and licked her first two fingers. 

Tooru had never been good with scenarios to touch herself to. She’d never liked porn. To be honest, she usually just thought about other things for twenty-odd minutes until she came. Even with Kaori, she’d had no idea how to help him get her off. One time, he’d had his mouth on her for over an hour before she faked an orgasm to save him from embarrassment. She’d heard it was a good thing to have ‘high stamina,’ but she wondered what it would be like to want a man like how Kaori had wanted her. 

She spent some time circling her opening with her moistened fingers until it became wet on its own. This was always nice. She slid her fingers in and out a few times, then pressed them into the G-spot. Moistening the fingers on her other hand with saliva, she began circling her clit with more insistence than before. 

Kaori–she shouldn’t think about Kaori when doing this. She’d never liked what he’d done anyway. It would be futile to continue trying to force herself to like something she clearly didn’t. Tooru closed her eyes. She thought about herself masturbating. Both hands occupied, one two fingers deep. But she needed more for a fantasy. 

Maybe someone could watch her? No. She couldn’t think of a man she’d want to see her like this, someone who could turn embarrassment into arousal. But maybe a man was a good idea. Some faceless, attractive man. 

She tried to think of one. Tried to even think of features she found attractive. 

Quite unbidden, Iwaizumi’s mouth closing on that mint came to mind. 

No. That’s not what she was thinking of–that’s what she was trying to avoid. Nothing from real life, and especially not recounting events of the day. 

Her mind played the clip back in slow motion, Iwaizumi’s careful fingers tearing open the plastic wrapper and plucking the mint from its casing. Then, she brought it up to her mouth and bit the side, all the while her head tucked down, hair like a dark halo extending in all directions and almost shielding her from view. As she brought her head back up to look at Tooru one last time, her lips closed around the mint. 

God, that was it. 

She knew she shouldn’t, but thinking about Iwaizumi, her eyes, her hands, her mouth , brought Tooru closer to orgasm. For this moment of quiet desperation in the dark, Tooru suspended what should and shouldn’t be. She let herself feel.

Tooru felt the nerves under her clit edging closer, closer, more intense. She pushed her fingers further into wall, searching deeper. At last, something inside her snapped and she came undone. Her mouth opened and she breathed hot gasps towards the ceiling. She felt her walls flutter and spasm–rapid bursts of feeling that gradually slowed until she found herself searching herself for one more, just one more until she’d feel satisfied. 

She slid her fingers out of her vagina and put them in her mouth. She licked away the familiar salty sweet, then wiped her saliva away on the sheets. Tooru turned over onto her stomach.

A sense of emptiness surrounded her. She wanted… she wanted someone. For the first time in her life, Tooru wanted. 

Chapter Text

Take me out, baby

Doesn’t matter where we’ll be

But please under the light of day

Take me out

Jobless Monday - Mitski

---

“How did you know you were a lesbian?”

Makki’s head barely rose from the couch she lay on. She stopped typing on the laptop on her stomach. “Why don’t you take this one?” she said to Mattsun.

Mattsun sat in the kitchen eating pretzels and looked up at Tooru in disappointment. Tooru had just come back from work. It was late afternoon, and it was Wednesday.

“Well,” Mattsun said. “Well. There’s a lot of other questions inside that question, Tooru. You could be asking: ‘Matsukawa Issei, how did you, personally, know that you were a lesbian?’ conversely, ‘How do people typically find out they are lesbians?’ or more vaguely, ‘how do people know they aren’t straight?’ Lots of questions, but I’m not going to make you suffer the mortifying ordeal of specification, so I’ll give you the answer to as many of those as possible.”

“Wow! Women, gender, and sexuality studies over here. Good job, babe!” Makki gave an enthusiastic thumbs up.

“You know I didn’t go to college,” she said. Then, turning back to Tooru: “Take a seat.”

Tooru did. Mattsun handed her a pretzel. The white subway tile backsplash had never looked so ominous. Maybe this was a bad idea. 

“I’m not going to give you a questionnaire today and give you back a scale with ‘homosexual’ on one side and ‘abnormal’ on the other and a little dot to mark where you fall, either. See, rule one of lesbianism is that only you can decide if you are one or not.”

“Rule two is fuck your high school best friend,” Makki added. Tooru was halfway through a heart attack before she realized that Makki was absolutely referencing her high school best friend, the one who she shared house, income, and bedroom with; and not a certain athletic trainer who had recently burst a few carefully-constructed levies inside Tooru’s brain. 

After a brief back and forth with her partner, Mattsun handed Tooru another pretzel. Tooru tried not to read too much into the look in her eyes. 

“I thought I heard distinctly that I was taking this one. Anyway, I knew I was a lesbian when I realized that I could have a girlfriend. Not a lot of fanfare to it–just the knowledge that cutting men out of my dating life would not be difficult. I was also fourteen, and the majority of my dating life up until that point had been my mom telling me whichever asshole boy in my group project group probably had a crush on me. Like, I never wanted to kiss or be really good friends with or do whatever to a boy at that point, but I was realizing I did want to do those things to a girl. So I decided I was a lesbian, and I’ve never had a reason to re-evaluate. I don’t think about men at all,”

“Oh,” said Tooru. Fourteen was so young, and hearing Mattsun explain her experience seemed impossibly simple. “You just… decided?”

Mattsun thought for a moment. She worried her thumb between her teeth. “Putting it like that seems silly, I guess. Like of course I had conflict or whatever. And socially, it’s tough, but I never felt like I had any option other than to be a lesbian. Internally. Makki’s different though,”

At the mention of her name, Makki began to speak again, but Mattsun shushed her. “I’m queer erasuring you. You don’t get to speak,” she said. Makki acquiesced with an exaggerated sigh. “Anyway, Makki didn’t call herself anything for a long time. But one thing she told me, right before we started dating and were having one of those post-practice homoerotic heart-to-hearts, was that she was tired of thinking so much about what she shouldn’t want and who she shouldn’t be. Whatever words she found to describe herself were secondary to her real-life experiences.”

“How old were you?” Tooru asked. Post-practice homoerotic heart-to-hearts, she thought. The phrase sounded too familiar. Maybe if she hadn’t been so intense…

“Sixteen or so. Maybe seventeen. All blurs together,” Makki said, much to Mattsun’s chagrin. “Point is, in your head you can make yourself think you want anything. Listening to yourself in real life is the only way to figure this stuff out.”

Mattsun stood up abruptly, chair scraping noisily against the floor. “All this heart-to-heart advice is making me feel like a wise old grandmother. I can feel the wrinkles developing.”

“You know, we should just go out this weekend,” Makki said, finally closing her laptop and sitting upright.

“Which day?” It wasn’t like Tooru had any other plans, but she would prefer to be prepared. 

Makki hummed and then said, “Friday night.”

Mattsun swiveled her head to give Tooru a scrutinizing look. “You know she means, like, go out, right?”

“Um,”

“To one of our places,” Mattsun continued. 

“Or a regular one,” Makki said, shrugging.

Mattsun gave her a bug-eyed look. “Sorry, what? No. Babe, I thought we were–”

“Oh, yeah. Not a regular one. Tooru,” she said theatrically. “Would you like to experience the thrills, the epics, and the incredible… uh,” Makki searched for a word. “Uh, experiences of going to a lesbian bar?”

“Yes,” Tooru said, then thought maybe she sounded too confident. She wasn’t confident. “I think so,” she amended. “I think so.”

The conversation sat in Tooru’s stomach undigested for the rest of the evening. She gained a whole pantry full of information and had no idea how to organize it. Something had started between her and Iwaizumi, something that felt like it had been building for years. But she couldn’t be sure what it meant. 

After leaving Kaori, was Iwaizumi just the first familiar, sympathetic, and possibly available face she met? With a shock, she realized she didn’t know if Iwaizumi was dating anyone, or if she even liked women. That night, her house had looked pretty empty, but Tooru hadn’t been there for very long, and just because Iwaizumi lived alone didn’t mean she wasn’t in a relationship of some sort. 

Another creeping suspicion began to build in her chest—that she had loved Kaori, but that her love was just disappointing. Whatever Iwaizumi had talked about on that porch had been what love felt like to other people. All the movies and novels and songs had been exaggerating or were written by the types of people who could love, and Tooru was just born without that ability.

Equally sinister—what if she went through it all, everything Makki and Mattsun had described, and still felt empty, but in a new way? What if all the self-discovery, all the internal dialogues and real-life experiences helped her to say sure, she’s a lesbian, sure she’s bisexual, but all the identity named was a new way to be unhappy?

These were the questions Tooru still pondered Thursday morning in the greenhouse.

As she cleaned up her lunch, she spotted a familiar orange flag of hair waiting outside. It was Hinata Natsu. She opened the door. 

“You could’ve knocked, you know,” she said, letting him in. He carried a heavy-looking backpack.

“I didn’t want to disturb you if you were doing anything important,” he said.

Tooru laughed. “There’s nothing I’d be doing in here that pausing to open a door would ruin. Anyway, I was expecting you.”

Natsu nodded eagerly. He hoisted the backpack onto a chair and began arranging its contents on the central counter. A laptop, three library books, and a notepad joined the collection of plants. One of the books had several bookmarks sticking out of it. It was a volume on European plant symbolism and folklore.

“Did you know,” Natsu started, catching Tooru’s eye, “that olive branches symbolize peace or reconciliation?”

“Yes,” Tooru said. She’d come across the phrase once in Brazil. Extend an olive branch. “Maybe Sawa-chan has to apologize to someone. Or he’s developed an interest in Mediterranean food.”

“Maybe he has to apologize to a Mediterranean,” Natsu said. His voice quivered.

Tooru laughed once, harsh, staccato. She hadn’t expected Natsu to make a joke, serious and eager-to-please as he was. He looked up at her, startled, eyes jumping to her face, then desperately pretended like he hadn’t been looking anywhere at all. Tooru let herself smile. “Maybe he does,” she said. 

A few moments. Natsu’s fingers twitched toward the book. 

“Write down everything about caring for olive trees you know on one of those sheets of paper,” she directed. “At about three, I’ll take you around to check on the recent transplants.” Tooru retreated to her office. She’d never been good with assistants, much less students. 

By the next day, Natsu had obediently written everything about caring for olive trees on those sheets of paper. It was a miracle. So studious–Tooru couldn’t remember working that intensely on anything in many years. Maybe she was getting old. 

Or maybe, as Shouyou’s younger brother, Natsu had both inherited and improved on her work ethic. Tooru read over the papers while Natsu measured the heights and widths of some saplings and entered the numbers into a spreadsheet. The olive tree, already recovering from whatever Sawa-chan had done to it, sat awkwardly on her worktable next to the Tower of Hanoi. She put together a rehabilitation plan.

“How’s Shouyou?” She said into the comfortable silence.

It took Natsu a second to respond. “Good! She’s–uh,” he hesitated, fingers tapping on the keyboard. “Do you still follow… volleyball, much?”

“Yeah, some.” Then it dawned on her what Natsu was getting at. “I know she’s with the Jackals, now. Wasn’t there some kind of–”

“Yes!” Natsu nearly shouted, slamming the laptop shut. All hesitation and formality left him. “Don’t worry, I saved it! You’re, like, going to be the only person I can talk about this with since Shouyou’s at practice all the time and also, she’s, like, the central character here! And you know her as, like, a real person!” He blinked, then seemed to notice he was still standing in the corner while Tooru sat at the table. He hurried over, then stopped himself, probably noticing Tooru’s puzzlement. “Wait, how much do you know?”

Tooru pulled out the other chair for him, then stood and took the laptop from his hands to place gently on the table. “That it was supposed to be a big secret, and now it’s not.” She furrowed her brow, thought for a second. Tried to remember Kaori’s rambling. “And that it’s not Miya’s fault.”

“Okay, so, like, half a year ago Shouyou gives this public statement about not competing in Brazil anymore, and everyone’s, like, so sad, and then she moves to Tokyo and is generally really mysterious. I think she was doing a lot of stuff with lawyers and brands and whatever. She doesn’t talk to me about that stuff–I think it stresses her out.” Tooru made a sound of agreement. When she’d gotten injured, and then when she learned she couldn’t return, she’d had to pull out of a couple sponsorship deals. 

Natsu continued, one hand reaching up to fiddle with the hair around his ears. “Meanwhile she already has everything lined up with the Jackals.”

Tooru’s lip curled. “And then it leaked?”

Natsu nodded, then shook his head. “The leaking didn’t actually do anything legally, it just ruined the marketing strategy. And so now the marketing people are trying to get everyone to turn over their personal social media accounts, and Shouyou’s trying to plot to keep hers because she likes posting those old trick videos from Brazil.”

Tooru remembered the trick videos. She was probably in some of them. “Who was it?”

“The marketing guy? I don’t know if he was actually in marketing, but Shouyou said his name was, like, Kaoru or something. Keiko?”

“Kaori?” Tooru suggested, then regretted it. 

But Natsu just shrugged. “Could’ve been. I don’t remember–I’m terrible with names.”

“I meant who leaked it,” she amended.

“Oh! Yeah, it was actually just Shouyou forgetting that she wasn’t supposed to post a million Instagram stories everyday of absolutely everything all the time. Which is so…” he trailed off.

Tooru hadn’t seen Shouyou in a long time. They’d connected a few times in South America, done little vacations or visits to each others’ cities. It had been fun to hear Shouyou’s Portuguese improve over the years. By their last trip together, Shouyou was the one ordering them drinks at bars, Tooru and her semi-useful Spanish lingering behind. But Tooru certainly remembered the social media. A memory surfaced. 

It was late at night. They were on a beach. They probably weren’t the only ones there, but the lack of light and cool regularity of the waves, helped by drunkenness, narrowed the world’s scope to just the two of them. Shouyou was hanging onto Tooru. She wrapped her arms around her neck, then her shoulders, then waist, then neck as the two stumbled across the sand. Tooru could smell her. Sweat, sunscreen, lime, alcohol, and a buried light floral from either shampoo or perfume. It could’ve been laundry detergent, but smelling it felt like being trusted with a secret. A flash went off and Shouyou jumped on her back. Tooru begged her to delete it, but then, like she could see through Tooru’s superficial pleas, Shouyou took another. And then they were on the ground taking picture after picture. One sitting together, one cheek to cheek. Then Shouyou kissed Tooru on the cheek, then Tooru copied the position for the next one. Then they turned to each other and kissed each other on the lips, once, for the camera. Tooru looked down into Shouyou’s glittering eyes, and saw Shouyou staring at her lips. Shouyou put her phone down, and then they kissed again.

The memory ended. “I can believe that,” Tooru said, re-entering the conversation.

Natsu nodded emphatically. “Everything I did with her in high school is archived on Snapchat. It’s insane. Anyway, her opening game is tomorrow.”

“Wow,” Tooru said, for lack of anything better to say, and for the small amount of tact left in her that prevented her from admitting to Shouyou’s younger brother that she actually hadn’t kept up with her old friend at all. “That’s exciting. I’ll definitely have to catch a game this season, then.” She cringed at the stilted, formal reply, but Natsu didn’t seem to think anything of it. 

Natsu stood. “I do actually have tickets for Tuesday, too, if you want them. Family discount. I can’t go.”

“There’s no one else?” Tooru asked. She itched to see some professional volleyball, but she didn’t want to impose. And, their friendship aside, Shouyou had always been incredibly fun to watch.

He shrugged. “They’re my tickets, now. I have two, and they’re good seats. I’m sure I’ll have more, and Shouyou can get more whenever she wants.” He dug in his backpack and pulled out his phone. “I can transfer them to you. Is your work email okay?”

Tooru nodded, a little unmoored. “That’s fine.”

Then they got back to work, Natsu blissfully unaware of the new problem he had caused in Tooru’s life–figuring out who in her life she could bring to a MSBY Jackals professional women’s volleyball game in five days.

Tooru toured apartments that evening. There was one she liked enough that was, conveniently and anxiety-inducingly, a single train stop away from Iwaizumi’s house. And more convenient and certain, it was on the same bus line as the botanical gardens. Small building, upper floor, two rooms plus a bathroom, private balcony. No apparent leaks or structural issues. 

She would probably apply for it next week. Let a few days pass, go through the motions of thinking it over. Feign reigning in impulsivity and procrastinate telling Makki and Mattsun.

Fail to invite anyone to the game.

She could always go alone.

Then it was Friday, and after work Makki and Mattsun were in the kitchen talking at Tooru about how much they loved this bar they were taking her to. Tooru was regretting saying anything at all about lesbians. Surely a lack of curiosity would’ve been less mortifying.

“It’s so cute. Like it really takes you back to the sixties or seventies,” Makki was saying. They were splitting a bottle of red wine Tooru bought on her way home from work.

“Like a fictional version of the sixties where it was all cool, and we didn’t have to wear, like, pantihose and stuff,” Mattsun said.

“Well, if you were really cool in the sixties, you still wouldn’t have worn pantihose. Also, I totally know women who wear pantihose today.”

“Like who, your mom?”

“No, your mom.”

Mattsun sighed. “I hate it when she does this to me. Oikawa, tell her to stop.”

“No,” Tooru said. “You started it.”

“Oikawa’s just sensitive about moms because there’s a hot one at work she wants to fuck, and now she’s trying to get in with lesbian culture to seduce her,” Mattsun explained to Makki. “So that’s why she’s not taking my side right now,”

“That’s not even remotely true,” Makki said. “Tooru’s interested in lesbian culture because she feels bad about not clocking us in high school.”

Tooru didn’t know which one was a better excuse–anything seemed better than ‘I’m interested in lesbian culture because I got off to thinking about my childhood best friend’s mouth a couple nights ago, and now I’m questioning things about myself.’ Instead, she said, “Natsu gave me tickets to a Jackals’ game.”

Her friends turned to her as one. “How many?” 

“...two.”

“Who are you taking?”

“I don’t know yet. Are you busy?”

Mattsun said: “What day?” at the same time as Makki said: “Probably.”

Tooru looked between them. “I thought you liked volleyball,” she said. 

Makki shrugged. “I have a busy life.” 

Tooru doubted that. She seemed to mostly fuck around on her computer. It was odd that neither of them seemed interested at all, but it’s possible they just wanted a date night or to plan an evening without her anywhere near the apartment. And it would’ve solved her problem to just give both tickets away, anyway. “Tuesday,” she said. 

“Yeah, busy,” Makki said. “Both of us.”

“You should take Iwa,” Mattsun said. 

“Yeah, she likes that stuff,” Makki said. “And it could be good for her. Anyway,” she stood and drained her glass. “I’m ready to head out if you two are.”

Somehow, Tooru didn’t manage to interject any statement about Iwaizumi. It was as if as soon as she started to bring up why she was the first person the pair thought of, and why so immediately, one of them sensed it in the air and pointed out a tree or a small animal or made a comment about the weather. 

Makki and Mattsun’s lesbian bar turned out to be the upstairs of a record store at the edge of their neighborhood. Tooru had passed the place hundreds of times without ever going in. It was a square, unassuming building with shades pulled halfway down its windowed front. Apparently Mattsun liked music, and she was talking into the air in front of Tooru about various genres. Tooru was observing the environment. Makki was probably already drunk somehow.

Two women and a person of indeterminate gender, just visible in the golden light emanating from inside, stood outside smoking. One examined a display of discount CDs. 

Her friends seemed to know one of the women and the other person, and soon all five of them were at the bar together buying each other drinks. Tooru stopped herself from entering any conversation too personally–she gave her name when asked, talked about how she knew Makki and Mattsun–and instead, focused on observing. 

The bar itself only seated the five of them, and there were a few small tables crowding the rest of the space, all filled with people. Presumably, all lesbians or something like it. Everyone in this room except for Tooru had probably kissed another woman, had probably done more. Everyone in this room except for Tooru had had their heart broken or fixed by a woman. Maybe they had sex with women like Tooru–women who were just, really, trying things out or thinking about it for the first time. Maybe they wanted to fuck people like Iwa–women who were tall, strong, lived alone, and didn’t seem to actually need anyone else’s approval. And they probably assumed Tooru, by virtue of existing in this room, had done all those things too.

She took a long drink of her beer to derail that train of thought.

The lights were warm-toned and time. A record player in the corner connected to a sound system, and periodically a song would stop, silence would set in, and the bartender would choose a new record from the cabinet beneath it. Tooru could see hints of the post-dusk deep blue from an open door in the corner. A cool breeze came from that direction. A balcony. Tooru watched women float in and out, lighters in their hands and fists fumbling in purses and pants pockets.

Then it was time for another round, and this time, some sort of game. Tooru played, demurred any questions, then announced: “Going out to smoke. I’ll be back soon.”

Makki raised an eyebrow and looked sideways at Mattsun, but neither questioned her. For a second, Tooru felt something hot like anger. Why did they always just let her do whatever she wanted, lie about whatever she pleased? Wasn’t anyone going to tell her no?

Tooru felt the alcohol when she stood, but floated out to the balcony without any trouble. She put a hand on the wooden doorway. There was a woman standing on the other side looking out at the neighborhood.

“Hey,” Tooru said.

“Hey,” said the woman. She was smoking a cigarette. Tooru watched her pull it into her mouth, then out, her strong hands holding the paper so delicately. The night air was cool, the little smoking balcony dark. They were the only ones out there.

The woman was… attractive. Now, with the casual atmosphere, the strangers, and the increasing freedom that comes from trying, for the first time, to understand wanting, Tooru could almost recognize her attraction without dissecting it. Almost. She was hung up on the accuracy of her adjectives. Tooru couldn’t say she was pretty, since pretty implies a kind of untouchable delicate-ness. There was certainly something pretty about her high cheekbones, about the straight lines of her nose, about the curl of her short hair. She was wearing jeans, not loose in the current style, but straight-legged. They hugged her waist, showed her form, made her look put-together. The woman’s other hand casually hooked into one of the belt-loops. 

“D’you smoke?” The woman asked. Her voice was a little gravelly, whispery. She had light brown eyes and a mole under her left eye. Full lips. She looked Tooru in the eyes, and her lips twisted into half a smile. She held out the cigarette at her eye level, a good six or seven centimeters below Tooru’s eye level. Tooru could’ve grabbed the cigarette, but some boldness possessed her to lean forward and press her lips to the paper tucked between the woman’s fingers. She looked up. The woman’s lips had parted, her smile fading. Tooru sucked in, prayed to God she was doing this right. Then she stood away from the cigarette and blew the smoke off the balcony. 

It really did taste bad.

The woman’s arm snaked behind her, and then they were kissing. 

It was good.