Coke Can (Haikyuu!!)
Like Tooru's mom (and dad, and sister, and nephew, and brother-in-law, but Izumi doesn't count) enjoy reminding Tooru constantly: Iwaizumi Hajjme is such a nice boy. He's good natured, kind to younger students, a reliable vice captain, and a steadfast friend. He's straightforward and patient, and so comfortable in his own skin it makes you comfortable just to see him.
That's why it takes so long for Tooru to realize Iwa-chan is weird as hell about his dick.
***
Tooru and Iwa-chan have grown up in each other's pockets, and played volleyball for most of that time, too. They've changed in front of each other every day for more than a decade now, and Tooru's just so used to everything about Iwa-chan that it takes Kyoutani yelling, "Leave me alone! You don't make Iwaizumi-senpai change in here!" before the penny drops.
"What?" Tooru asks, still holding Kyoutani in place by the back of his shorts. The kid is hissing and spitting like a cat — adorable. "Of course Iwa-chan changes in here."
And why wouldn't he. The Seijoh volleyball club room is meticulously decorated in a style to which Tooru would like all the filthy heathens on his team to become accustomed. No openly visible cheesecake posters, anybody who leaves skidmarked underwear is liable to have it stapled to a public location on campus, and a tasteful reed diffuser wafting the smell of night blooming flowers — since just because they're high schoolers doesn't mean they have to live like animals.
"He gets to go to the bathroom," Kyoutani protests.
This is pure nonsense.
"Iwa-chan is shirtless maybe 60 percent of the time he's not actively in class," Tooru retorts, because this is a state of affairs that has been both a blessing and a curse since he'd hit the angry gay wall of puberty.
Makki's troll DNA must sense an opportunity to be awful, because he pops up to say, "Yes, and it's probably because you're so busy trying to hide your boner after he whips off his shirt that you don't notice Iwaizumi always finishes changing in the bathrooms."
"Iwa-chan does not," Tooru chokes, and leveling a shaking finger at Makki's unrepentantly shitty expression, hisses, "Don't talk about my boners."
"Oh?" Mattsun says, all lazy shit-stirring. "Then where's he gone now?"
This question puts Tooru in the uncomfortable position of looking around the room, where now all their shitty juniors are giving Tooru bleak expressions, as if they're above the level of current club room discourse. (Yahaba is the worst offender, as usual.) But in the ocean of pasty high school boy bacne and whippet thin calves, Tooru realizes there's not a single ounce of Iwa-chan's high-grade beef to be found.
"What," Tooru says to the uncaring universe, and as if summoned, the door to the club room opens and Iwaizumi comes in, clutching his sweat soaked practice gear and scrubbing at his face with his undershirt — Tooru's cock twitches, furious, at the sharp line of those abs — and already changed into his trousers.
And then, once he's done showing off his infuriatingly rock hard stomach, Iwa-chan must sense the weird, heavy silence of the room and looks up.
"What the hell, Pervert-kawa — let him go!" he hollers, and then Tooru's too busy shrieking his protestations of leadership and innocence and ducking to avoid getting hit in the face by Iwa-chan's toxic-smelling trainers to give Kyoutani what-for for yelling, "Hah!" and making a break for it.
***
Once Kyoutani points it out, Tooru can't stop seeing it.
The order of operations goes like this:
For morning practice, Iwa-chan shows up already in practice gear, and then heads off for class and changes in a bathroom on the way. For after school practices, Iwa-chan changes on the way into practice, and then ducks out while everyone else is stripping down in the club room.
"I can't believe I've never noticed this before," Tooru says.
"Me neither," Mattsun says. "Because you stare like a creep."
"You're just lucky he's oblivious, or he would have turned you in for sexual harassment," Makki agrees.
Tooru decides not to mention that (a) Iwa-chan had yelled at him all the way home from practice the other day for getting handsy with Mad Dog-chan, which was equal parts insulting and ridiculous, as if Tooru wants to touch Mad Dog-chan ever, but needs must; and (b) it's not his fault that somewhere between ages 16 and 17, Iwa-chan had progressed beyond his larval state of excessive eyebrows and arm length and transformed seemingly overnight into the kind of muscular thirst trap that made Tooru cross his legs and squeeze to cope with the discomfort of it.
"But why?" Tooru presses on, ignoring Makki and Mattsun, which is almost a contractual obligation of being any kind of friends with them.
"Not everybody's comfortable getting down to skins with a bunch of random guys," Makki points out. "Maybe Iwaizumi just wants some privacy."
This would be reasonable if Iwa-chan had ever, in their entire lives, betrayed a desire for privacy. He yelled at Tooru about everything: about being late, about not taking his physical therapy seriously, about being a bad influence on his nephew, about flirting with emotionally deranged second years — but not over privacy. For an only child, his parents' precious single blossom, Iwa-chan was completely comfortable with Tooru invading his space: his desk, his room, over his shoulder. Tooru stored most of his shoujo manga in Iwa-chan's spartan little bedroom, since his own bookshelves were overflowing.
"Maybe," Makki suggests, "he has noticed you staring like a creep, and just doesn't want you doing it to his ass."
Tooru meditates on this, because it's one of those things he worries about in the private offices of self reflection, watching old volleyball tape on mute. When Tooru had confessed, nervy, earlier that year that maybe he was bi. Like definitely only a little bit gay — maybe 60, 98 percent gay— Iwa-chan had only said, "Don't be stupid," and dragged Tooru in for a hug. He hadn't treated Tooru any differently, except that now he gets mad when Tooru talks with boys too long, too, which is completely unreasonable.
But maybe this is it, the first sign of a crack? Some reflexive worry overwhelming all his good nature? But Tooru can't imagine it. Iwa-chan is a nice boy, but better than that, he's a good friend.
It must show on his face, at least a little, because Mattsun just punches Tooru in the arm and says, "Don't worry about it," with Makki adding, "Yeah, Oikawa, he probably just has a weird dick or something."
It's not until hours later that Tooru is lying in bed, staring at his ceiling, that he says out loud, "Oh, no."
***
The next day, running on three cans of Family Mart milk coffee and about 23 minutes of sleep, Tooru corners Makki and Mattsun between classes.
"I've been thinking about this," he tells them.
"This is your fault," Mattsun says to Makki. "I told you."
"Like — what if Iwa-chan's dick is weird," Tooru asks, feeling the jittery tension of an entire night imagining all the endless potential horrors of whatever Iwa-chan was packing bubbling frantically to the surface. "Like it has to be really weird, right? It can't just be — curved, or small."
"This is so much better than I had hoped for already," Makki says, shameless.
"You're an incredibly awful person," Mattsun says.
Tooru has an organized and methodical mind, with a keen visual imagination and crack understanding of spatial relationships — which had fucking plagued him through the endless night. There were a lot of different kinds of dicks, after all: showers and growers, bent, cut and uncut, those upsetting ones that look like naked mole rats, curled into a thatch of pubic dreads. From about 2:16 a.m. to 2:45, Tooru had been tortured by the possibility that Iwa-chan had some kind of heretofore unknown deformity, and then Tooru had sat up with an Aggretsuko hand mirror and practiced looking compassionate, accepting, and still sexually aroused for an hour on the infinitesimal chance that Iwa-chan was both (a) gay and (b) dumb enough to fuck him.
"If it is weird, he has to know we'll accept him," Tooru babbles. "Like, I'll make fun of him, obviously, but like, lovingly."
"This is embarrassing," Mattsun tells him, probably trying to sound kind. "This is actually the most embarrassing you've been about Iwaizumi."
It's both a hurtful and upsetting thing for Mattsun to say, since last year Tooru had cried out of a mix of abortive desire and jealousy after the girls' basketball team had cornered Iwaizumi and put lip gloss on him, which was definitely worse than this.
The rest of the discussion doesn't go any better, although he's able to establish the following:
- Neither Makki nor Mattsun have seen Iwa-chan's dick either, which is important.
- There is no way to rule out definitively whether Some Girl has seen Iwa-chan's dick, although Makki claims that it's "unfathomable" anybody managed it without Tooru either knowing or intercepting it. That said, Iwa-chan's family does insist on spending a week at an onsen every winter, and Tooru knows from personal experience the transports that can seize you if you see Iwa-chan in a yukata.
"You know there's an easy solution to this entire situation," Makki says.
"Install hidden cameras in the boys' bathrooms," Tooru agrees.
Mattsun covers his face.
"Or you ask him to savagely punch your carefully guarded v-card, which I imagine would involve you gaining access to the mystery dick," Makki offers as an alternative.
Tooru feels himself flush all the way down his chest, his heart suddenly racing. Of course he thinks about how handsome and strong Iwa-chan is in the abstract, in the possessive, but Tooru is allowed because he's put up with being Iwa-chan's best friend since they were babies. But it's too much to think about Iwa-chan being handsome and strong in the shape and context of reality: it's embarrassing, just like Mattsun says, to imagine making some kind of rainy day confession, leaving a letter in Iwa-chan's shoe locker, hearing Iwa-chan say his name or kiss him — it's too much, it leaves Tooru trembly. And what if Iwa-chan doesn't kiss him, what if Iwa-chan thinks it's a burden, or disgusting, and then Tooru won't have a best friend any longer, just cratered memories he can't ever revisit; he'll never get his shoujo manga back. It makes him cold and dizzy and sick.
He manages, "I—I'm not guarding my virginity!" before there's a tall, broad-shouldered shadow that falls over all three of them, and Iwa-chan's booming voice, saying:
"I don't want to know a single fucking thing about the conversation that happened before I got here, but coach wants to see all three of you before the end of day."
***
It's just one of a cascading series of indignities that haunts Tooru's day.
Iwa-chan, who is a monster and who is hiding his penis, refuses to listen to any of Tooru's explanations about why he's just misinterpreted the conversation he overheard. Then it turns out that it's Coach Mizoguchi who wants to see Tooru, which just turns into a grating lecture about Tooru's post-graduation plans that Tooru's already heard 100 separate times. Tooru already knows his plans are crazy.
"Iwa-chan," Tooru whines, over lunch later that day.
"If you're getting ready to let some guy put anything up your ass, I have like 45 links to send you," Iwa-chan warns him, sounding the same kind of irritated and impatient he always does. "And I'm going to quiz you on the content so don't get any stupid ideas about winging this. Also: who is this clown, anyway?"
Tooru hears himself make a noise like a slowly deflating balloon. "Iwa-chan."
"Because the only time I haven't been stuck with you glued to my side in the last four weeks has been to sleep at night, or when you went off to your physical therapist," Iwa-chan goes on, in between taking Godzilla bites of tuna mayo onigiri. "So? Which creepy hook up app did you find this guy on? Grindhunter?"
Tooru has a loud, high-pitched stroke. "Gri — Iwa-chan, who have you been talking to?"
"There are whole internet forums about this stuff," Iwa-chan says, the same way he'd said, "There's books about this shit, dumbass," when Tooru had started physical therapy on his knee and Iwa-chan seemed to know way too much about it. "Do you have condoms? I know you're you, but you have to make the guy wear a condom."
"That is — what do you mean 'I know you're you'?" Tooru heard himself squawk.
Iwa-chan just looked at him. "And you should use like, a lot of lube," he said. "Like when you think, 'this is probably too much,' that's probably just right the first time."
"I'm going to throw myself off the roof if you don't stop talking about this," Tooru promises. "I wish I'd never told you. I wish I thought you were some beefy jock asshole who would bully me for being gay, and was too tenderly sensitive to confess."
And as soon as he said it, Tooru felt himself go hot with horror, because the words that had tumbled out of him were true and still so close to being utterly wrong. Every day, a confession lived just under his tongue, and it was only focused discipline and nauseating terror that kept it from breaking free — it was too dangerous to talk about this with Iwa-chan, Tooru thought, dizzy with it, to be so near the truth at the heart of all these misunderstandings when Iwa-chan had never been as dumb as his face made him look.
"The only time you managed to keep a secret from me, you blew out your knee and I had to carry you on my back to the street so your mom could take you to the doctor," Iwa-chan tells him flatly.
Tooru glares down at his bento. "I'm not going to do anything," he mutters.
"I'll believe that when I see it," Iwa-chan says, but then he gives Tooru a milk tea, still warm from the vending machine, and it makes something inside Tooru's chest go light, go foolishly hopeful, the way it always does.
That evening, walking home, before Iwa-chan breaks away down a side street to his family's cozy two-story, he says, "Hey — Shittykawa: I was serious."
"You're serious about everything," Tooru complains. "It's why you're boring."
"Before you do anything — and I mean anything, I want to meet this guy," Iwa-chan orders, punches Tooru in the arm, and takes off.
"Iwa-chan, you're the worst!" Tooru yells after him, but his voice is trembling, his throat hurts, and he feels — bizarrely — like he's about to cry.
***
After dinner and a soak and in the deep, forgiving dark of night, Tooru curls up in his bed and conjugates Spanish verbs in his head, murmurs his favorite words quietly into his pillow: corazón, sueño, verde.
"It'll be hard," Coach Blanco had told him, his tone soft in the high ceilings of the Red Falcons' home court, while his team had been warming up for practice that day. "It'll be harder than you're imagining, harder than you hope it will be, and you'll be alone for all of it — are you still sure you want it?"
And Tooru had said yes like a reflex, something limbic, even though he'd intended to be thoughtful and to appear as measured and mature as someone who might be able to scam his way onto the international volleyball circuit must, surely, be.
"I mean," he'd tried again, halting and shakier than he'd thought he would sound, younger than he thought he could still feel, "I mean — yes. Yes, I'm sure."
"All right," Coach Blanco had said, smiling, and clapped a hand on his shoulder: the upward rush of all of Tooru's hopes taking flight, and the press of all their consequences. "Then you'd better be ready — make your time here count."
So Tooru takes Spanish classes when everybody else heads off to cram school, and he follows a careful training regimen with clockwork precision. He has appointments with nutritionists and physical therapists, trainers and sports managers; his mother sits with him during long bus and train rides to see one person in a suit or another. When he sits with the reality of what he's doing long enough he goes cold all over in fear, so he keeps moving, stares straight ahead with the terror of desperation.
And when he'd confessed all of this, panicking, to Iwa-chan that first time, they'd huddled in close together under the kotatsu and made lists long into the night. Their favorite bakeries, the best arcades, what movies they still hadn't seen together. Since they'd handed over management of the volleyball club to Yahaba and whoever Yahaba decided was mean enough to become his vice captain, they've packed all their spare moments with things they won't be able to do much longer — together or at all.
"Iwa-chan, will we be okay?" Oikawa had asked him, during the gray cold of a winter storm, sitting pressed shoulder to shin with Iwa-chan on the intercity train. "Will you miss me? Will you forget me?"
Iwa-chan's kindness was his constancy, the metronome beat of his heart, and he said he already let Tooru get away with murder anyway. But that day, with the percussion chug of the train and the whip of wind outside, he'd tugged Oikawa's hand into his own — tucked them both into the pocket of his winter coat where no one could see — and he'd said, quiet and close to Oikawa's ear, "Out of everything you worry about — this? You and me? You never have to worry about this, okay?"
Oikawa's throat had hurt too much to speak, but he could nod his head and hide his face in Iwa-chan's shoulder and be entirely, incredibly understood.
***
Because Tooru's life is terrible and everybody he knows — including Iwa-chan — is bad, he wakes up sweaty under the collar and sticky under his shorts from dreams he can't even remember, and he ends up late to morning practice because he has to hide his shame under all the other clothes already in the washer. That means Coach Mizoguchi is on him the minute he walks in and his shitty kouhai all unsubtly stop practicing to watch the theatrics, because there's no better show at the Seijoh VBC than watching your captain get raked over the coals for first year shenanigans.
"You're supposed to be a good example, Oikawa," Mizoguchi lectures.
"Yeah, you're supposed to be a good example, Oikawa-senpai," Makki parrots.
"What kind of lessons are your underclassmen taking from this?" Mizoguchi goes on.
"This is why Mad Dog-chan is the way Mad Dog-chan is," Mattsun says.
"Oi!" Mad Dog-chan, who is That Way, yells.
Then somebody throws a volleyball and the whole thing descends pleasingly into abject chaos. Tooru gets assigned 10 punishment laps, for which he's joined by the entirety of the volleyball club with the singular exception of Iwa-chan, who is absolutely Coach Mizoguchi's favorite and shamelessly reaps the benefits of this incontrovertible fact.
But since Iwa-chan's one of those guys who's so good it makes Tooru's teeth hurt, he shrugs and joins the run — their entire stupid club yelling in stupid happiness over it — and pulls alongside Tooru to ask, "You okay?"
"Iwa-chan, don't you think it's unfair you never get assigned laps?" Tooru huffs in between breaths. "Don't you think it's obvious Coach Mizoguchi likes you best?"
"You're never late to practice," Iwa-chan presses as they round the gym going into lap three. "Is it your knee?"
Tooru rolls his eyes. Behind them, Mizoguchi is yelling at Kyoutani to run like he means it.
"My knee is fine," he mutters.
Iwa-chan's face settles into Tooru's favorite scowl: it's hilariously ugly and impatient.
"If it's not your knee then what?" he demands as they near the corner of the building, before hissing, "Oi, Shittykawa, is this over that guy you're trying to fuck?"
Tooru runs straight into the side of the gym.
By lunchtime, the worst of the swelling has gone down and he's been given a bandaid with an extremely cute design by some of the girls in class, but he's still not talking to Iwa-chan. This is partly because it is unbelievably inappropriate to confront people about their wretched emotional attachments, especially when you are the wretched emotional attachment in question, and partly because if Iwa-chan is riven with guilt and still buying him bribe milk breads, he's too busy to keep asking any probing questions.
"So what did Iwaizumi ask to deserve the silent treatment?" Makki asks mildly, in between math and English. "To be clear: I'm not trying to get you to stop, I just want in on this action."
Tooru sniffs — carefully. "None of your business."
"Did he tell you why he's hiding his penis from you?" Makki presses.
One of the girls nearby, who had been too focused on her novel, makes a wheezing noise. Tooru knows this is the kind of thing that led to Watanabe Ayumi telling all the Seijoh girls he's undatable on account of both his awful friends and terrible personality. One of which is regrettably true but the other of which Tooru could argue at length and vociferously and has, frequently, in the past.
Tooru's considering shoving Makki out of a third floor window when there's a clatter at the door signaling Iwa-chan's return. He's got a frown on his face, tired, and his jaw has a particular tension that means he's been talking to the counselors about his university applications.
"Go away," Tooru shoos, pushing Makki out of Iwa-chan's designated seat, and ignores the way Makki makes kissy faces as he goes — sneaky behind Iwaizumi's back. "Iwa-chan — how did it go? What did Eguchi-sensei say?"
Iwa-chan shrugs, his sleeves of his button up shirt struggling to contain him. "The last practice TOEFL I took came back almost the same as before."
"But it was a good score, better than what UCI said you had to have to apply" Tooru reminds him. "What about the essay?"
Iwaizumi groans. "Can we not talk about this?"
Tooru wants to tell him, you're working too hard, and, you're already amazing, they'd be fools not to see how amazing you are, but Iwa-chan looks tired and a little defeated today, and it always makes Tooru frantic to fix it. When they were little, Iwa-chan was easy to distract with a fascinating bug, a mysterious cave, some wonderful copse of trees in the nearby woods. Now that he's older and annoyingly gorgeous, he just sits there looking serious and handsome, heavy with worry in a way that makes Tooru want to aim jump serves at someone's head. Too soon, there will be days and oceans between them, and Tooru hates that he's already feeling the expanding distance, that Iwa-chan, sitting near enough to touch, is already so far away.
And Tooru feels suddenly raw, all his defensive layers scrubbed away, and he says, more quietly and softer than intended, "We won't be able to talk at all, later."
It feels gouged out of him, like it took a chunk of him when it escaped, and Tooru sits there and hurts for a long time before Iwa-chan closes one of his giant gorilla hands around Tooru's wrist and tugs him to his feet.
"Come with me," he says, and starts pulling.
"We're going to be late for class," Tooru complains, mostly so he can say something instead of stewing in his own mortified silence, and goes where Iwaizumi takes him.
They end up in one of those disused little stairwells, in an awkward spot in the building off all the main beaten paths. Iwaizumi's still holding onto Tooru's wrist, his grip just tight enough that Tooru can feel the throb of blood under his own skin, the reassuring pressure, and when they reach the third floor landing Iwa-chan stops.
Late afternoon sun is the bright orange-gold of egg yolks, pouring in the windows, and Tooru feels the light hot across his skin, where the sleeves of his uniform shirt are rolled up. He looks at Iwa-chan's fingers, tight on Tooru's skin, and he lets himself feel a little sizzle of heat, the the greedy clench of a muscle that runs through his core and down between his hips. It's so crazy that he can feel this way, suddenly devastated and still hot. Late puberty's a mess. Or maybe it's just that Iwa-chan makes him completely nuts.
Iwa-chan doesn't say anything and he doesn't let go of Tooru's wrist, and it goes on so long that the silence crosses from strange to uncomfortable to easy all over again. Tooru looks at the dust in the air and the the place where Iwa-chan's broad shoulders pinch down into a narrow waist and realizes he could probably stand here feeling sad and a little horny until the heat death of the universe.
Except then Iwa-chan says:
"Is our friendship over once we leave Japan?"
It lands like a punch in the throat, a knife in the stomach, a shocking physical pain — worse than this knee injury and a hundred times more nauseating, all of Tooru's night terrors crawling into his waking hours.
He whispers, "Iwa-chan?" and it's an entire question in barely a name; he can hear his voice shaking. Tooru's only brave on the surface, and Iwa-chan's always been under his skin.
"Well?" Iwaizumi asks, finally turning around. His face is clear and calm, and he meets Tooru eye to eye, utterly unafraid. "Are we? Are you flying off to Argentina and deleting my number immediately? Blocking all my emails? Are you getting a new best fr — "
"Iwa-chan, stop it," Tooru hears himself say, high and wobbly, stuttering. "You — you know that's — I would never. You — you better not, either — why — are you — ?"
Iwa-chan's calm breaks. He cracks a smile, all the warmth of the world flooding back in.
"You see?" he asks, and it comes out with the casual certainty of the sun rising, the ebb of a tide, the turning of a season. "So what are you even worried about, Shittykawa?"
Tooru's had this conversation a hundred thousand times: with his mother, his sister, his brother-in-law, with his father in bureaucratic offices and doctors and trainers in their exam rooms. He's not scared of anything that should terrify him. Spanish is hard and being away from family will be difficult, but staying here instead of pushing wild-eyed, recklessly ahead is the more nauseating fear. Tooru's not scared of being alone, of people looking at him strangely, of the rest of the Argentinian team being taller or stronger than him — it barely feels like a choice and there's no point in being worried.
"I don't want to leave you," he says, because he doesn't know how else to say it, or what else to say. It's so embarrassing he's hoarse with it. "I don't want to do this without you."
Iwa-chan reels him in, and Tooru goes — frictionless — crashing into the brick wall of Iwaizumi's chest and clutching at him. He hides his face in Iwa-chan's shoulder, hot with humiliation, and he mumbles, "Iwa-chan — Iwa-chan," because it was one of the first things he ever learned to say as a baby, and it's a name burned into his limbic system, as reflexive as a fear of fire or love of sun.
"I'm going to be right there with you," Iwa-chan says, whispers it close to Tooru's ear. He's got one hand across the back of Tooru's shoulders, the other fisted in Tooru's hair, and somehow he's still not close enough. "Do you understand? Every step of the way, no matter what happens — you've got me."
It's exactly what Tooru wants and still not enough.
"Iwa-chan, how are you never scared?" he asks, into Iwaizumi's shoulder, because he can't say, I'm in love with you — I've been in love with you my entire life. Can you be in love with me, too?
Tooru can feel Iwa-chan's laugh roll through his entire body: it's incredible. It's the best.
"Are you kidding me, Shittykawa?" Iwa-chan says. "I'm scared shitless all the time."
They're too old for this, too old to hide away and curl up with each other, whispering secrets, but the best Tooru can do is to take a half step back, enough so he can stare down at Iwa-chan's school shoes, the cuffs of their stupid uniform trousers.
"You don't act like it, you never act like it," he says.
The hand in Tooru's hair loosens, and Iwa-chan cups his palm over the back of Tooru's neck; it's so good it makes Tooru's teeth hurt.
"Yeah, well, I've got you in my corner, right?" Iwa-chan asks, quiet and so reasonable. "What have I got to be scared of — if anything ever happens, you'll help me, won't you?"
There's something sharp in Tooru's throat that makes it hard to speak, but he nods, earnest and biting down hard on his lip. That's good enough because Iwa-chan says:
"See — you and me, we're going to be fine. You hear me, Shittykawa?"
Tooru shoves at him, but he doesn't let go where he's got his fists in Iwa-chan's jacket; he can't bear to be more than six inches away right now.
"Stop," he mutters, and after a beat, he says, "Yeah — I hear you."
Iwa-chan grins, and he squeezes the back of Tooru's neck in a way that he probably intends to be reassuring but actually just leaves Tooru trying to will away an erection. It's probably hallucinatory relief combined with a lack of higher function blood flow that triggers it, but in that moment, finally brave enough to look into Iwa-chan's face, Tooru thinks, what if I just tell him? It feels suddenly possible in a way that's terrifying and thrilling all at once, and Tooru tugs a little on Iwa-chan's jacket, feels his heart racing, sees the question in Iwa-chan's eyes, and —
And because this day is cursed, someone a level down from them in the stairwell loudly and deliberately clears their throat.
"If you two are done making out, Saito-sensei says you're both dead if you're not back in the classroom five minutes ago," Makki carols up at them.
Just like that, Iwa-chan's pulling his hand away, stepping back so he can lean over the railing and call down, "Yeah yeah, we're coming," the moment over, dissolved.
***
If Tooru were a different, deeper, kinder, softer person, he imagines he would lose sleep that night thinking about the way Iwa-chan's voice makes him breathless, makes him wild with bravery, makes Tooru want to go higher and faster and do more and more. But the unromantic romantic truth is that Tooru's been in love with Iwa-chan for years, has felt this heart-stopping vertigo since he was old enough to get possessive — all of that's the old hurt of a chronic injury.
What's killing him tonight is the memory of Iwa-chan's hand, heavy and hot, on the back of his neck. Iwa-chan's both dumb and strong as an ox, and Tooru lies in bed and kicks at his blankets, thinking of how Iwaizumi Hajime could hold him down and make him take it until it makes him completely insane.