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There is a chess set that Oikawa keeps on the side of his study desk like a white elephant.
"Do you play?" Iwaizumi had asked Oikawa once, having come over on a visit to crack heads at homework together.
"Not really," he'd answered then, an airy truth for he knew the basics of where each piece should go; the queen was key and despite the king's cowardice, it was vital for it not to be captured; that whoever claimed white would always take first turn. However, his own inclinations towards the game's more detailed aspects could only run so far: volleyball was his first love, after all.
"Why'd you even get it in the first place, then?" Iwaizumi said, crooking his head towards it. The amusement was dry in his voice.
It was a good question, but Oikawa had simply shrugged and smiled, waved his hand and said, "Can't I just like the look of it?"
Iwaizumi squinted at him for that, like an old man making disbelieving eyes at the headlines of the morning paper, and it made Oikawa laugh all the more because there really was nothing else to prove.
It, shockingly, was just that.
(Or, at the very least, had felt like on the surface.)
***
The first time he loses a match in junior high, Oikawa cries.
The frustration creeps as a burn inside his chest, spreading all over his heart and breath until his composure is nothing but a scaffolding razed to the ground; the awful feeling a wildfire that he refuses to acknowledge until the tears become too hot, too heavy for him to blink back. So, they fall
and fall
and fall
into Iwaizumi's cupped hands.
The caught moisture pools between the lines and creases of his best friend's fingers, shining, and that is, ultimately, what makes Oikawa stop crying: he jerks back, feeling uneasy. It is unlike him to lose himself so quickly in public. Wordlessly, he reaches into his pocket for a tissue and passes it to Iwaizumi, eyes intently hard on the way he wipe his hands clean with it before tossing it into a nearby bin.
"Thanks," says Iwaizumi.
"Anytime, Iwa-chan," Oikawa intones in return, gaze now fixed onto the bin.
There was something cathartic about watching the whole process, something that made the pain inside him quell a little: perhaps, it was the lack of thought that went with discarding something so easily that had made it so oddly satisfying. Iwaizumi had thrown the tissue away like it barely mattered, shoulders and jaw already set on moving on from this loss.
(Oikawa wants to replicate that feeling.)
He goes home and opens the chess set. He picks up a pawn, since it is the most inconsequential piece on the board, squeezes it just once to burn the shape of it into his palm, and then, it's gone: he has flung it outside his bedroom's open window.
The sharp thud it makes as it hits concrete echoes like a ball smashed towards a winning point.
***
It becomes a pattern, then.
A bishop goes hurtling when Tobio-chan replaces him for the very first time as team setter; a queen cracks against the wall as he remembers how insurmountable Ushijima had made the court nets seem; a knight gets lodged in the gutter down below the day Seijou is denied any chance at Nationals during his second year of senior high.
Each piece takes its turn to go missing, leaving random gaps on the chess board that Oikawa will never fill because he's not planning on getting them replaced.
Ever.
(The growing emptiness soothes him, stokes all the ugliness inside him into something more malleable; something that he can crunch under his ribs.)
In the end, it comes down to the final two pieces: the kings.
The black one he hides, feeling very much like a coward and a fool because for some forsaken reason, he can't bring himself to do anything to get rid of it.
(For all its fleeing, the piece still holds its importance as the deciding factor of every match.)
And as for the other king, he gives it to Iwaizumi.
He doesn't react at first, when Oikawa shows up and presses it into his hands.
"Please take care of this," he says, and a burden is lifted off his shoulders as Iwaizumi's fingers curl slowly over it, silently protective.
Iwaizumi takes a good look at it then before nodding, taking things unerringly in stride as he always does in that stubborn way of his, and asks just a single question: "It's important to you, isn't it?"
Oikawa looks to the side, finding the Godzilla movie posters plastered on Iwaizumi's room walls suddenly very interesting. "In a way, I suppose."
His fingers itch at the hem of his shirt.
(He wants to say thank you, thank you for showing it the care it deserves because all I could ever do was to hurt the others, but the words are glass, lodged deep within his throat.)
"Alright then, I'll keep it." Iwaizumi smiles, simply accepting the situation for what it is, heart sincere."I'll keep it safe."
And with that, Oikawa lets it go.