It's like this: Oikawa is suffering. Oikawa is sitting in a dim, dingy basement, in a termite-ravaged chair that probably used to have four legs (it currently has two and a half if he's being charitable), and suffering.
It's like this: Oikawa is suffering because Kuroo and Bokuto are playing ping pong. Kuroo and Bokuto are playing ping pong because their mismatched band of miscreants had pulled over since this place looked good. Daichi is upstairs doing responsible adult things, but the rest of them thought the basement seemed promising. And then there was a rickety ping pong table, complete with two paddles with the rubber all peeled off and one ball with the side crumpled in, and when Bokuto saw it he stopped dead in his tracks and looked up at Kuroo with an absolutely wicked look on his face and from there it was history.
Oikawa slides down in his seat and heaves a very deep sigh.
"How does he look hot playing ping pong?" he asks Ushijima, who is fiddling with the bare bulb in the wall, trying to coax it into lighting up.
Ushijima looks down at him and blinks a few times in that slow way of his. "Physical activity often results in increased body heat."
"Ugh," Oikawa groans, "just shut up" before the half-leg of the chair abruptly gives out and he lands hard on the floor with a startled screech.
It's like this: Oikawa is suffering because Kuroo and Bokuto are playing ping pong, and there's something about how Kuroo is springing around like it's goddamn Dance Dance Revolution, lithe muscles coiling and releasing under his skin and golden-brown eyes scorching with intensity as he focuses in on the ball rocketing around the dingy basement - it's driving Oikawa out of his mind. Oikawa is also suffering because when the chair collapses, Kuroo lets the ball fly off towards the wall, ignoring Bokuto's loud complaints to come over towards Oikawa.
He doesn't even say anything, just shoves his hands into the pockets of his cargo pants and smirks down at Oikawa with laughter dancing around his eyes. It's infuriating.
Oikawa glares up at him from the floor. "Laugh it up, fuzzball."
Kuroo actually does start chuckling at that. "Maybe I wouldn't make fun of you as much if you stopped quoting Star Wars."
"You recognized it," Oikawa points out, and Kuroo's smile disappears. He offers Oikawa a hand up anyways. Oikawa takes it, and then hooks his leg around Kuroo's ankle to sweep it out from underneath him. Kuroo goes down with an oof.
Now Oikawa's the one laughing, even though Kuroo's elbow landed painfully in the flesh of his thigh. Kuroo groans pathetically, twitching a little.
"You killed Kuroo, you dickweed!" Bokuto whines. "How the hell am I supposed to play ping pong without a partner?"
"You'll live," Oikawa tells him. A hand shoots up from where Kuroo is still sprawled facedown across his legs, but Oikawa's reflexes are sharp from his years of volleyball, and he catches Kuroo's wrist before Kuroo can punch him in the jaw. "Not quite, babe."
"You asked for it - ow, you ass-" Kuroo hisses as Oikawa happily bends his arm behind his back. He squirms out of Oikawa's grip and flips himself into a sitting position in Oikawa's lap so he can drag Oikawa into a headlock and dig his knuckles into Oikawa's skull. Oikawa headbutts him as best as he can, which isn't effective, then reaches around to tickle his side, which is. They fall forward together, and Kuroo bangs his head on the concrete floor of the basement. He cries out in pain.
"You deserved that," Oikawa informs him.
"I'm a nice person," Kuroo complains to the concrete. The concrete is unsympathetic.
Bokuto seems to have accepted the fate of his best friend and moves on to hunt for a new opponent. "Ushiwaka, come over here and play ping pong with me!"
Ushiwaka looks up from the lightbulb. "I don't know how to play ping pong."
"What!"
"I only know how to play volleyball."
Words fail Bokuto at that, so he chucks the paddle at Ushiwaka instead. It hits him in the shoulder, and he makes a slightly confused noise at the impact. Kuroo and Oikawa are still wrestling amidst the wreckage of the chair when the door at the top of the stairs swings open and Daichi comes down a few steps. He peers down at the chaos and lets out a long-suffering sigh. "Do I want to ask?"
Just then, Ushijima finally gets the lightbulb. The other three boys in the basement let out a collective yell as the dim basement is thrown into bright light.
Daichi comes all the way down the stairs and puts his hands on his hips. "Guys, shut up." They do. It's one of Daichi's more impressive powers. "Did you find anything down here?"
"Ping pong!" Bokuto says.
"I mean anything useful."
"It was useful! It was fun."
Daichi opens his mouth, thinks for a moment, and then closes it - a common effect of Bokuto saying things. Instead, he walks over and squints down at Oikawa and Kuroo. They stare back up at him, not bothering to untangle their bodies. "Did… Did you break a chair?"
"It was already mostly broken," Kuroo offers.
"I leave you guys alone for ten minutes-"
"Shut up and give us the scoop," Oikawa interrupts. "What's upstairs?"
Daichi sighs again, but he tells them. "Some canned food, a first aid kit, little bit of bottled water. Nothing big. We aren't the first ones here. More importantly-" and most people wouldn't pick up on the sudden mischief tinting Daichi's voice, but Oikawa Tooru isn't most people- "you know the Maserati that was in the driveway?"
"Yeah," says Kuroo dreamily.
"Did you find the keys?" Ushijima asks.
Daichi tries and fails to disguise his grin. "Yup."
Oikawa sits up quickly, eyes locked on Daichi's face. Kuroo makes a disgruntled noise as the movement dumps him onto the floor again. "How much gas does it have?"
"You can find out if you help carry the new stuff into the van," Daichi says. With that, he turns and climbs back up the stairs, oozing smugness.
Oikawa rolls his eyes and disentangles himself from Kuroo's lanky limbs as Bokuto bounds up the stairs with Ushijima following, rubbing his shoulder. Oikawa brushes himself off and turns to Kuroo expectantly. "Well, get up."
Kuroo frowns up at him. "Not going to offer me a hand?"
"Nope."
"That's not very romantic of you."
"You caught me," Oikawa deadpans. But Kuroo knows the irresistible effect that his hooded-eyed smirk has on Oikawa. And so, when he gets up and gives him that smirk - takes a gentle but firm grip on Oikawa's hips - guides him back towards the ping pong table - Oikawa hops up onto it to help him along.
Kuroo always kisses him like they've got all the time in the world, which is ironic, all things considered. Apparently now, Kuroo also likes to kiss him while bending at a weird angle - feeling around under the table? Oikawa feels an unmistakable smile against his lips, and then the table is collapsing underneath him - oh, that ASSHOLE-
Oikawa ends up squished between the two folded-up halves of the table. Kuroo lets go of the release lever and steps back, laughing outright at him. Oikawa gives him his most vicious glare, and he just laughs harder. His laugh is terrible - most things about Kuroo are. It sounds more like an asthmatic hyena than a human being.
But it's also undeniably endearing. Most things about Kuroo are.
"I hate you," he tells Kuroo from the wreckage anyway. Kuroo just grins at him and offers him a hand up.
He pinches Kuroo's butt hard as they walk up the stairs. Kuroo's yelp is satisfaction enough.
Yeah, he'd say he's pretty far gone.
It's like this: the five of them came together mostly out of necessity. The point is, Daichi was the only familiar face that didn't belong to a corpse when Oikawa's wits were still scattered all over Miyagi and he was wandering around the skeleton of Aoba Johsai like he was already a ghost. The point is, even in that early stage, both of them had already seen what happens to the ones who try to make a go of it alone. The point is, his age-old rivalry with Ushiwaka was hard to let go of, but in the end Oikawa couldn't justify it to himself when Nationals don't even exist anymore, when the nation doesn't even exist anymore.
The point is, Daichi used the last vestiges of cellular connection before the lines went dead for good to call his friends at Nekoma - still sticking to clannish volleyball loyalties, even when volleyball seemed like fragments of a faraway dream. The point is, by then Kuroo and Bokuto didn't have anyone left but each other, either. The point is, a group of five tall, athletic young men doesn't invite much bad attention. Not from humans, at least. Not from the humans that are still lucid, at least.
No matter that that last category is growing rarer and rarer as the weeks stretch into months.
And this thing he's got going with Kuroo - they gravitated to each other somewhere between arguing themselves to sleep in the van Daichi coaxed into working condition and waking up snuggled together as the night rolled by overhead, between the mornings of long backseat conversations about the stupidest things (breakfast food, how magnets work, what happens to people when they die) and the afternoons of roughhousing in dingy basements.
They've got two gas cans in the back and a pocketful of pilfered credit cards to fill them up with whenever they find a filling station. They've got a stash of sleeping bags and canned food and a camp stove. There's never any guarantee that it's going to last longer than the next two weeks, but Daichi's the only one who seems to worry about that. Oikawa and Kuroo have moved past the imminent probability of gruesome, painful death and onto the decision that they might as well make the rest of survival as fucking wild as possible.
Hence the Maserati.
They emerge from the basement hand in hand, blinking against the noontime sun through the windows of the house. The rest of their group is nowhere to be seen.
"Where are you guys?" Oikawa calls.
"In here," Daichi's voice floats out from the next room over. Kuroo and Oikawa make their way in. It's a kitchen, with faded yellow curtains fluttering in the window and all the drawers and cabinet doors thrown open from Daichi's search. Ushijima and Bokuto are loading themselves up with cans and bottles. Oikawa spots a bottle of wine tucked away in the top cabinet, and gleefully goes over to commandeer it despite Daichi's disapproving gaze.
There's also a half-rotted body in the chair next to the window, bloated beyond recognition of skin color or facial features. Oikawa pauses next to Kuroo, and they look at the corpse without any particular horror. Death lost its shock value a few months ago, when it stopped being some vague distant spectre and started being Bokuto's quiet setter or Kuroo's tough-as-nails mom or Daichi's pair of overly-energetic first-years or Iwaizumi still looking half-surprised as he stared emptily at the sky.
"Poor dude," Kuroo says. "Chose to die like this."
It's like this: none of them have a damn clue how many other humans are still alive. But either the rest of the world just doesn't give a shit or it's an international problem, because there haven't been any foreign helicopters swooping in, or anything overhead at all. And as the weeks stretch into months, there's not much left on the ground either. Just the open road, and the empty houses full of dead bodies, and the five of them crammed into a van hurtling through it all.
Outside, the Maserati gleams in the sun. They load the van in record time. Daichi makes them promise to meet up down this same highway once the car runs out of gas or the sun sets, whichever comes first.
"No detours," he warns. "We don't know the car's conditi-"
"Yeah, yeah," Kuroo interrupts. His fingers are twitching with eagerness. Daichi rolls his eyes, but he hands the keys over.
There are only two seats in the car, and Oikawa and Kuroo hesitate in unison, glancing back towards Bokuto. Neither of them can say no to Bokuto. It's a proven fact.
"Bro, do you want to ride?" Kuroo asks him. "I don't mind."
Bokuto shakes his head. "Nah. Me and Ushijima need to finish our game of Connect Four."
Oikawa nods in understanding. A year ago, when he and Ushiwaka were vicious rivals on the volleyball court, this would have surprised him. He's far beyond questioning any of it at this point. Corpses at their kitchen windows. Clear blue skies empty day after day. Connect Four. Sure. Why not?
"It'll be like a date," Kuroo says, twirling the key ring around his index finger. "You should drive."
"No," Oikawa tells him, mostly out of habit. Then he actually processes the request, and he reconsiders. "Yes."
A lazy smile crawls across Kuroo's face. He lets the keys fly off the tip of his finger.
Oikawa snatches them out of midair and grins back, feral.
It hasn't always been easy. It was bad at first, when the confusion and grief were still raw and fresh and aching. Then, gradually, Oikawa stopped stumbling across their camp in the dead of night and crawling into Kuroo's sleeping bag and breaking into shuddering, heaving sobs in his arms, and started doing things like this, like stealing some scavenged cherry-red Maserati and barreling down the empty highway with Kuroo whooping with delight in the passenger seat.
Oikawa weaves around some wreckage, and then spots a dead body lying across the yellow lines. He accelerates and swerves over to hit it in the skull with a squelch and a slight bump. "Ten points!"
Kuroo is snickering. "That was maybe seven, eight if we're being kind."
"Don't sell me short."
It's horrible, really, but the most awful things have started being hilarious lately.
"You look hot playing ping pong, by the way," Oikawa adds.
Kuroo's laugh is half confused. "Haha, what?"
"Never mind," Oikawa says, and presses down on the gas. Out of the corner of his eye, he can see Kuroo's lips curving up into a grin.
Kuroo reaches out and starts fiddling with the radio after the initial rush of adrenaline subsides. There isn't anything but static right now - there rarely is - but it's Kuroo's only ever gesture of unshakable hope, and Oikawa allows him it.
Kuroo's fingers freeze and Oikawa's grip on the wheel falters when they hear a voice that isn't one of their party's for the first time in months.
The words are scratchy and wavering, but that's as much to do with the speaker as the questionable status of their technology. It's some poor fuck who's set up a home radio system, and it doesn't take them long to figure out that she's swaying over the line of utter delirium. Her sentences are disjointed and rambling, jumbled together like the strewn remains of a centuries-old avalanche. She sounds hollow - like her tone, once commanding and authoritative, is wandering through the abandoned halls of bygone glory and staring numbly at the empty rooms.
By the time her station fades out, they can't pretend anymore that the madness in her voice is just a hint. Then there's nothing but static again.
One corner of Kuroo's mouth lifts in a pitying smile. "She sounded nuttier than we are."
"We're all a little cracked," Oikawa tells him, and then his giggles are whipping away, floating down the road behind them along with the radio signal and there's nothing but Kuroo's hair gleaming dark in the sun and the cracked asphalt ahead of them, endless, endless, endless.
It's like this: Oikawa's too smart to believe in things like soulmates and forever, even before the wastelands beat any vestiges of it out of him. He's not even sentimental enough to think about tomorrow. Leave that to Daichi.
But he believes in Kuroo cuddled up to him in the backseat of the van, he believes in Kuroo's arms wrapped around him in a sleeping bag in the dead of night, he believes in Kuroo wrestling with him on a concrete floor of a dingy basement. And he believes in Kuroo in his passenger seat, as they speed down an empty highway on a beautiful sunny afternoon and the world lies in pieces around them.
So when Kuroo discovers a sleeve of CDs under his seat and finally gets some music thumping out of the Maserati's five-star speaker system, Oikawa reaches out and turns the volume up.