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“You, in space? That’s a pretty bad joke, Makki. Even for you.”
“Why, you jealous?”
A pause. Tooru kicks at Hanamaki’s ankle. Dodging Tooru’s toes with ease and a slow-rising, satisfied smirk, Tooru ends up scuffing his shoe along the pavement instead. He frowns. Hanamaki laughs.
“I’m not jealous,” Tooru says over the laughter. It just makes Hanamaki laugh louder. He’s got a hideous laugh, the wheezing kind that jumps from pitch to pitch, not yet settled with puberty or time or Hanamaki’s persistent desire to poke and prod at Tooru’s patience.
“Sure you’re not,” Hanamaki agrees, “you’ve only hoarded space paraphernalia for the last, what? Decade?”
“Mean! Who told you — it’s Iwa-chan, isn’t it? Isn’t it! I knew it, you’re all conspiring against me, the kind Oikawa-san, an innocent…!!”
When Tooru lunges to jab at Hanamaki this time, Hanamaki lets him, which infuriates Tooru about as long as it takes Hanamaki to grab Tooru’s fingers pressing into his side, tugging Tooru closer to launch a counterattack of extreme tickling measures.
“Makki,” Tooru manages breathlessly between bursts of laughter. “Makki, you’re — you’re — I can’t believe this.”
Hanamaki tries to whistle, though the effect’s ruined by how much he’s straining against Tooru’s struggles. “Eh? Did I hear someone just then? Maybe my ears are already fine-tuned for the stars.”
“Unbelievable!”
“I’m kidding,” Hanamaki stops the tickling but he doesn’t stop holding on. Too relieved to care for now, Tooru slumps back against him, catching his breath. Slinging his arm from Tooru’s side to rest along the curve of Tooru’s shoulder, Hanamaki says: “You’re heavy.”
“Make me move, then.”
“…Hey. Write to me sometimes, yeah?” Hanamaki’s ignored Tooru again, but he hasn’t shoved him off yet, either. “When I’m — when I’m out there.”
“Miss me already, Makki? Well, that’s only to be expected, after all…”
“Oikawa.”
Tooru hums, twisting a little to face Hanamaki properly. He’s barely leaning against Hanamaki now, Hanamaki’s arm not so much beginning to fall away as it is a gradual decrease in pressure. And that — it’s not unpleasant, exactly, Hanamaki’s just as hard to carry as Tooru is, but. It’s unsettling, and Tooru’s not sure why that is, but he doesn’t like it.
“Makki,” he says, and Hanamaki arches a brow. Pushing on anyway, Tooru continues. “Go get ‘em out there.”
And just like that, Hanamaki’s grinning again. Tooru hadn’t realised he’d stopped until he saw it again, bright and beaming, lighting up Hanamaki’s whole face.
“Gotcha. I’ll send you my selfies with the aliens when I meet some.”
“I knew we were friends for a reason.” And Tooru’s smiling, too, still somewhat unsettled but there’s a pressure there, too, now, not as heavy as before but more noticeable for its increased presence, settled low and constant in Tooru’s chest, pushing up against his ribs.
Hanamaki doesn’t send Tooru any alien selfies — or at least, he hasn’t yet — but he does reply to Tooru’s mails when he can. There’s a funny, jilted gap between each of his answering mails, and it takes Tooru longer than he might’ve otherwise to notice the disconnect in their conversations. Because they are conversations, all of Hanamaki’s delayed jabs a direct response to Tooru’s spur of the moment thoughts, brought back into significance and immediacy after four hours, a day, two weeks and a half, three months.
>>Makki, Makki, is it cold up in space? It’s supposed to be spring here, but I’m freezing! And I forgot my muffler.
>>Wait, does this mean you’re a high-school dropout — or, you know, a high school truant?? Makki, you’re dropping me for the aliens! You haven’t even introduced us at all…..!!
>>Did you know? My text buddy Makki’s gone, and Iwa-chan pretty much never answers after 2 in the morning, booooo.
>> A girl asked me out today! Amazing, right? The high school level’s really something; this Oikawa-san is super impressed! Milk bread’s expensive at the store here, though.
<< Can’t believe Hanger Tooru forgot his muffler in his coat. Considered checking the pockets yet?
<< Sorry, my cute intergalactic squeeze is pretty shy. Reckon it’s worth skipping out on algebra indefinitely, though.
<< Go to sleep, Oikawa. Aren’t you aiming for Nationals? You’re not allowed to write back until you send proof of Ushiwaka’s crushing defeat.
<< …hey, this just in — future setter superstar, Oikawa Hanger Tooru, is actually five years old. No wonder Iwaizumi puts on worry lines.
And maybe Tooru should mind, but the thing is, Tooru’s always had an excellent memory and an even better eye for detail. Besides, between volleyball and volleyball and studying with whatever time’s left, Tooru doesn’t really mind the distance between each response. It’s not like the gap keeps Hanamaki any farther away; Tooru’s no astronaut but even he knows every word that crosses time and space, whole galaxies even, keeps them as close-knit as possible. So even if that’s not necessarily enough Tooru makes it stretch.
Mail after mail after mail, days into weeks into months.
He wonders how long it feels for Hanamaki before each message reaches him, too. It’s fine if he never gets any photos from him, with aliens or without, if the lag for Hanamaki never drags any longer than it does for Tooru. Hanamaki’s patience is almost as bad as Iwa-chan’s on the best of days.
After all, if Tooru’s spending all this time wishing his words out into the sky, he’d better make them count, right?
So Tooru makes them count.
>> Makki, guess who made the starting line-up in his first year? Actually, don’t bother guessing, you probably already know, right? And if you don’t then you better watch out, because Oikawa Tooru’s going all the way. Maybe even all the way to Nationals by the time you read this. Wouldn’t that be something?
<< All the way, huh? How far we talking about, here — I’ve got my money bet on you, you know.
The message comes on the bus ride back from Sendai, just after the spring nationals qualifiers of Tooru’s last year of high school. He almost doesn’t get the message at all, phone buried into the depths of his bag, not because Tooru’s stopped expecting the mails, but precisely because Hanamaki would answer right about now. He wonders if there’s a rule for that, if maybe, somewhere up wherever Hanamaki is, he can see Tooru. Calculates the exact moment to reply to his messages by aligning them to the exact moment Tooru’ll need to get something back the most.
Time and space, and all that.
See, Tooru’s gotten good at making things count, but how do you make the most of something last indefinitely in a numbered amount of days? The volleyball career of a high school only lasts approximately two and a half years; slipping through hyperspace farther forward and away, Hanamaki’s barely managed to scope out the first three months of it.
And honestly? How far ahead Tooru’s moved from there is equally subjective.
But when the message comes Tooru hears it anyway. Phone at the bottom of his bag, bumping into a bottle of water, nudging into Tooru’s hip where he was about to pull the bottle out for a drink. Fishing out his phone instead, Tooru takes a minute, considering what it is he wants to say. He thinks about winning and losing and pride and what he wanted to make of all that, what he still wants from all of that. He thinks of Hanamaki, making bets with whoever’s up there with him, putting his money on a high school in Miyagi Prefecture for a friend he last saw blubbering into a packet of milk bread at the airport, mumbling Just you wait, Makki, just you wait!
He doesn’t think about how long a minute’s pause to reply adds to the distance each word has to make it back to him. Instead, Tooru types out a response before tucking his phone back into his bag. He sips at his water, he needles Iwa-chan and Mattsun to manage the first years because Even I can’t wrangle from the window seat, here.
And then, once Tooru’s said everything there is to say, he leans back in his seat and closes his eyes. He’s said everything but he hasn’t done nearly enough to measure the weight behind his words yet.
>> Who knows? Farther than the stars, bigger than everything else. I don’t know if you remember, Makki, but I’ve been told I have an awful lot of pride. Enough to make it through captaincy all the way through high school, even. How far are you going to go up there, I wonder…? I bet I’m still taller than you.
It was probably a childish thing to say, Tooru will tell himself later.
He’s sitting at a kitchen table in his very first apartment, watching his first TV christen the space with a breaking news report. It’s on every programme, every channel, eating into time slots everywhere but still headlining as Years Late, Worlds Away: Victory from the Stars. There’s a blurry snapshot on the screen, resolution almost as bad as Tooru’s phone used to take, way back in middle school.
From what Tooru can see, there’s the fragments of something he thinks is probably a spaceship, or a rocket, debris floating into debris into a picture reporters are spreading like wildfire, proof of some heroic feat by people who’ve never seen a screen as high-def as the one Tooru’s looking at now. He wonders what it must’ve been like, seeing it firsthand.
He wonders what Hanamaki must think, between their breach into space, a string of words and volleyball and each other holding up against a fight Tooru never realised was happening until it was over. If Hanamaki thinks any less of Tooru, scrawny and still fourteen years old in Hanamaki’s memories, bluffing through high school captaincy and dreams of something more out there, somewhere.
He tells himself what matters is that he said it anyway.
The television’s still on, but beneath that — over that? — the phone buzzes on the counter. Not the landline, shrill and demanding, but another phone, mobile and feeble and barely there at all, kept through the years and changing phone numbers to find its way to the apartment of Oikawa Tooru, twenty four years old, now living in Tokyo, heart of the country.
Tooru’s in front of the counter before he registers what he wants to do there. He picks up the phone, squinting a little at the faded quality of the words, wrung through with time but there, here, in Tooru’s hands all the same.
It’s less than a minute before he sends back a reply.
<< Hanger Tooru,
You holding up alright over there? Don’t carry too much — you’re just a hanger, you know. But, for some reason or another, I believe in you. I believe in you, so try believing in yourself, too.
Thanks for everything, Captain.
— Takahiro