Come on skinny love just last the year
Pour a little salt we were never here
My my my, my my my
Staring at the sink of blood and crushed veneer.
Chapter 1
"Thanks so much for coming, Hajime-kun, I'm sorry for the short notice…"
Iwaizumi glanced at his aunt - not in blood, but she might as well have been; he had known her all his life - taking in the now-familiar mixture of relief and worry that seemed to deepen the creases in her face and make her look so much older and frailer. He wondered if her son felt the same twist of pity and guilt in his stomach that he did when he laid eyes on that distressed expression...he would have a far greater reason to.
Lifting his shoulders in a dismissive shrug, he crouched in the doorway to the kitchen to untie the laces of his sopping boots, before kicking them off and pushing his rain-spattered hood away from his face. It had been pouring violently since noon, and he was pretty sure even the short bike ride to Oikawa's house had left him drenched to the bone. With any luck, the idiot would be so glad for his visit that he'd see fit to lend him a pair of dry socks. Probably of the tacky alien emoji print variety, but he hardly cared so long as he could cover his frozen toes with something warm.
"Bad day?" he prompted, getting to his increasingly numb feet and meeting her troubled, soft brown eyes.
Wringing her hands, Oikawa's mother was the first to look away, seeming to swallow with difficulty, "Bad week, I think."
"A week? It's been -?" Sighing and pinching the bridge of his nose, he resisted the urge to storm right past her and see for himself exactly what state the subject of their discussion was in. He'd seen him in class just the other day, of course, but for some reason that didn't seem comparable. Oikawa only dropped his carefully constructed appearances when he was home. "Why didn't you call me sooner?"
"Well I mean...it's been on and off, and I thought he was doing better...until this morning."
Iwaizumi felt his throat close for an instant. He'd also fallen prey to Oikawa's routine in the past, despite his niggling doubts and suspicions; the shelf-full of skin and hair products that brought a convincing glow of health to his appearance, the constant, fervent assurances that he was perfectly fine, Iwa-chan, stop worrying… He was frighteningly good at faking it, right up until his own body betrayed him, giving out long before his mind and landing him prone and pricked with an IV line in a sterile white room. And even then he'd kept insisting it was no big deal, and still held a grudge against his mother for overreacting.
"What happened?" he asked, shaking off the memories and returning his attention to his visibly distraught aunt.
"He just seemed kind of...distant, but then…" she carefully glanced away again, biting her lip anxiously, "He wouldn't let me help...but he got up and seemed to shake it off pretty quickly…"
"He collapsed?" Iwaizumi demanded, only noticing that his voice had quickly risen to a shout when she winced and started to step back. "Sorry," he mumbled, shoving his hands in his damp pockets so she wouldn't see them shaking. Whether it was anger or pure, animal terror, he wasn't sure, but he tried to regain his composure either way. He'd been called here as a fellow adult, not a little kid to freak out and throw tantrums when he heard something upsetting.
"Will you...talk to him?" his aunt pleaded after a moment, "I don't want to resort to drastic measures again if I don't absolutely have to. He still hasn't forgiven me for last time, but he listens to you."
Iwaizumi snorted ruefully to himself, "Yeah, I wish." Realizing how far from encouraging that sounded, he tried to summon some conviction and drew himself up taller as he faced her, "I'll see what I can do."
Walking past her, he opened her fridge as comfortably as he would his own, ducking in to grab a bottle of green tea from the door. It wasn't milk bread, but it might still work as a bribe, and Oikawa probably shouldn't be eating anything too solid anyway, he reasoned. ...He'd worry about the rest later.
"Thank you, Hajime-kun," Oikawa's mother murmured sincerely as he started out of the room with a purpose. He paused with his foot on the bottom stair and looked back. "Tooru may not tell you, but I know he's grateful too."
Taking a deep breath, Iwaizumi inclined his head in acknowledgement before continuing his solemn journey up the stairs. "I know."
.
.
The fourth time Oikawa's speeder careened into one of Planet Celestius' many sheer cliff faces and burst into flames, sending his bounty hunter into a fiery oblivion amid an explosion of smoking debris, he threw his controller down on the bed with a deep sigh and flopped onto his side. This distraction was proving to be a useless effort; he couldn't focus enough to maneuver the joysticks and keep his ship from blowing up, much less bring the intergalactic outlaw Turant to justice and collect his reward. He'd been stuck at Level 38 for weeks now, and the game was more frustrating at this point than relaxing.
He only got a moment's peace to just lie there and close his eyes before a familiar, angry crawling sensation started up in his lower chest. His stomach didn't growl anymore; instead he occasionally got the feeling like an army of fire ants was scrabbling at his throat and ribs, and then there was the dull, hollow ache that spread throughout his body and never really went away.
His mother had condemned him to bed after the incident this morning, and had insisted he lie down and stay home from school until he felt better. Drink plenty of fluids and all that crap. He assumed she wasn't fooled by his weak explanation of staying up too late and feeling a bit dizzy...and not just because it was an excuse he leaned on so often that it had all but worn out its use. She'd caught on to the real reason he stumbled and bumped into things, sometimes on a daily basis, a long time ago, but apparently she hadn't learned by now that sending him to his room with a well-meaning bowl of rice porridge wasn't going to do anything. The wastebasket in the corner of the room had enjoyed the meal, at least, and unlike if Oikawa had tried to choke it down, it didn't throw it back up again an hour later.
A soft knock on the door pulled him from his dispassionate thoughts, and he propped himself up on his elbows as it started to swing open before he could say anything. His father or returning mother wouldn't be so bold.
"Iwa-chan," he guessed, with certainty, before his childhood friend had even appeared in the doorway. As he took in his bedraggled appearance and obviously soaked jacket, he couldn't fight an amused smirk, bringing the back of one hand to his forehead theatrically, "Did you really leave school and brave that horrible tempest just to visit me in my lowly sickbed? So touching…"
"Your mother called," Iwa-chan replied bluntly, with an unimpressed scowl, and took a seat on the edge of the bed without requesting or requiring an invitation. "Apparently someone scared her half to death this morning by fainting on the kitchen floor."
"That's not what happened," Oikawa pouted, sitting up fully and crossing his arms in his lap.
"Oh?" Iwa-chan drawled, raising one cruel eyebrow and staring him down, "What, then? You fall down the stairs?"
"It was just...never mind. You're not really listening. You don't really care what happened."
"Cut the melodrama, Shitty-kawa," Iwa-chan snapped hotly, before seeming to slump ever so slightly and averting his gaze, absently watching the GAME OVER graphic flashing over the spectacular combustion of Oikawa's ship, playing on loop on the screen across the room. "You're right. I don't care what happened; bottom line is you're backsliding again and making stupid choices. Do you want to end up back to the hospital? Is that it?"
"...No," Oikawa said quietly, so quietly that he could barely hear it himself, let alone project it loud enough for anyone else.
"What?" Iwa-chan pressed, cupping a hand impatiently over his ear and leaning in closer.
"No," Oikawa repeated, a little louder, squirming where he sat before adding under his breath, "I can't help it."
"You can do better than this," Iwa-chan retorted immediately, but despite the heat that remained in his voice, when his eyes cut back to him they seemed a little less harsh, "I know you can. And I think deep down, so do you."
"Iwa-chan…" Oikawa murmured, and okay he might have actually been tearing up a little, watching him with only slightly exaggerated awestruck eyes, "You really believe in me?"
"Huh? What part of that makes you think -? Okay, whatever…" Seeming to shake off his irritated confusion, he fixed Oikawa with an (admittedly rather pandering) adamant gaze and craned his neck to place a light, somehow stern kiss to his temple, "Yeah, I believe in you. Now will you get something in your stomach before you pass out again?"
"I didn't pass -" Oikawa started to protest indignantly, but he was cut off by a bottle of his favorite iced tea being shoved insistently against his chest.
"Drink that," Iwa-chan ordered, "Slowly. Your blood sugar's low and you need fluids."
As a force of habit, Oikawa started to turn the bottle around to inspect the label, but a strong hand clamped down on his wrist before he could reach the nutrition facts panel.
"Just drink it," Iwa-chan urged, without moving his hand away, "And none of your forcing it down in one gulp bullshit, either. Take it easy."
Shaking his head with a soft, defeated laugh, Oikawa twisted the cap off resignedly to do as he said. "Yes mom."
Iwa-chan huffed an unamused breath through his nose and folded his arms resolutely, "Speaking of, you'll have to make this up to your mother later, she's worried sick over you."
Bringing the bottle to his lips and taking a tiny, tentative sip of the tea, Oikawa waved him off with his free hand, "I know, I know…" As he raised the bottle to take another sip, he settled back against the headboard with a faint smile to himself, because yeah, his mother might have been worried, but clearly she wasn't the only one.
.
.
"Hey, you should get out of those clothes," Oikawa proposed after a few minutes of companionable silence, in which he'd just worked on the green tea slowly, lips parting, throat flexing as he sipped intermittently, saying nothing...until the silky suggestion he'd decided to give right at that moment.
Iwaizumi jerked, startled and offended, and whipped his head around to glare at him, "...Your timing sucks, pervert. And anyway, you're not well enough yet for..."
He trailed off as Oikawa burst out laughing, and a disgruntled frown settled on his face as he felt it start to heat up in embarrassment.
"I meant you should get in some dry ones, Iwa-chan," Oikawa explained, slowly and overly-patiently, as if Iwaizumi were particularly slow. Which he wasn't, but Oikawa was still quick to take any chance to lord things over him, because he knew he got flustered easily and couldn't seem to resist exploiting that. "You're totally soaked. You'll have a pretty tough time babysitting me if you catch a cold, you know."
"No one's babysitting you, Ass-kawa," Iwaizumi sighed. He'd almost forgotten the damp, clammy unpleasantness of his clothes, in favor of focusing on more important things, but he supposed Oikawa was right, however insufferable he insisted on being at the same time. It wouldn't do for Iwaizumi to get sick when Oikawa's well being was in this much doubt, to the point where his mother was resorting to calling him for help, like she had in the weeks leading up to his first hospitalization, three or four months ago. He was the only one who had any luck getting Oikawa to eat anything and actually keep it down when he got like this, and they both knew it. Even Oikawa knew it, though he still complained and protested and made the whole thing more of an ordeal than it needed to be.
"Sure," he muttered, pushing off the edge of the bed to stand up and turning to face him, "I wouldn't mind some dry clothes. But no aliens, got it?"
With a victorious flicker of a grin he quickly suppressed, Oikawa screwed the lid back on his bottle of tea and rolled to his feet, "Coming right up."
And that was how Iwaizumi found himself sitting on one side of Oikawa's bed, in a pretty distasteful but warm sweater with a large spaceship right smack in the middle of it, feet snugly covered in fuzzy socks dotted with cartoony stars and planets, but technically speaking no aliens. Oikawa had fallen asleep sometime during the third act of The Martian, and was probably drooling on Iwaizumi's shoulder, the now empty green tea bottle balanced precariously in his lap.
It was encouraging that he had drank all of it with such minimal prompting, but it was still only a calorie or so more than he'd had on an empty stomach, and the worry that had gnawed at Iwaizumi's stomach - like the hunger Oikawa consistently denied feeling - since getting on his bike and pedalling furiously through the storm to come here hadn't faded at all.
He found himself turning away from the screen frequently after Oikawa dozed off, eventually settling for just watching him instead of the movie, his eyes tracking over the dark lavender crescents under the sweeping lashes of Oikawa's, betraying how badly he'd been sleeping for God knew how long without the guise of concealer and foundation to cover them up. His hair drooped in his face as well, lackluster and unhealthy and, unless it was just the illumination of the TV screen flashing on it, even losing its color and graying in places. His hands that rested on his bent knees were like those of a corpse; the veins standing out blue and purple under nearly translucent skin, his fingernails ragged and chewed down to the quick, instead of filed and glossy with the cuticles meticulously pushed back. This was Oikawa's true appearance, and it was as rare and unwelcome a sight now as it had been in the past.
He could remember back in elementary school when he'd teased his friend for being a picky eater, and for being so fixated with his own image, but he'd never made the connection on his own between the manicures and exfoliation creams, and the portions and sometimes entire food groups he excluded from his diet even leading into junior high. He hadn't understood his aunt's fretting and occasional consultations with other parents, asking about their kids' eating habits. Not then. Though he did remember nearly all of them promising Oikawa would grow out of it eventually, as well as offering some "helpful tips" on how to manage his fussiness and make sure he was eating healthy, balanced meals.
It was only after they'd graduated and were starting high school that Iwaizumi started to wonder if something might actually be wrong. Oikawa grew tall, taller than even him, but he never put on the weight and solid muscle that his classmates, and especially his fellow athletes did, no matter how much he seemed to be eating or training. It didn't occur to Iwaizumi to consider that just because he saw food go into Oikawa didn't mean it was staying there, and even when he had accidentally walked in on him mid-purge, he'd accepted the hodgepodge flu excuse he was given and walked away none the wiser.
It was more than a little disheartening to realize that even now, even being privy to all Oikawa's tricks and knowing the reason for the red flags, he could still be fooled so easily. It spoke of so much sneakiness on Oikawa's part...and so much willful ignorance on his own. Even though he had known, even though he'd been shocked and slapped awake he had hoped, blindly, that because they'd caught it (relatively) early, the scare was over now. It wouldn't ever get that bad again.
And yet there Oikawa was, right next to him, looking so pale and so fragile with little to nothing in him, leaning on his shoulder like a barely living skeleton. Iwaizumi could feel the outlines of each individual rib even through his shirt, expanding and relaxing rhythmically as Oikawa snored gently against him. And as the sun disappeared behind the curtains and the credits at the end of the movie started to roll, he found himself freezing completely still and counting the seconds between each slow, shallow inhale to make sure they never stopped.
TBC