When he was eighteen, time was a sworn enemy. Regrets clouded his days. If only he had just a little more time to stretch for the ball before it hit the ground, if only he started volleyball a couple years earlier, if only...
In Argentina, time is still no friend, but it is a safety net. He makes transactions and buys some of it over the years.
Tooru hasn't visited Japan in what feels like absolute ages. The first few years were arduous. Sometimes he'd wake up, chew on a medialuna half asleep, and somehow taste natto on his tongue. Then he'd find himself puking up a storm in the toilet. Homesickness got bad, but Hajime is always a phone call away, and Tooru finds home in him.
Slowly, that suffocating loneliness mellowed out. Now he's a full-fledged Argentinian citizen and fluent enough in the conversational language, still buying time to free himself of the last of his regrets.
Some of his regrets, he has started facing head on. He's taking therapy sessions, and part of him was sour about having to pay someone to help him deal with emotions, but the money paid wasn't in vain at all. He's forced to confront his weaknesses and how to grow and move past them. One of those weaknesses is the little pocket of hatred he stores next to his heart.
Tooru's always been a little bit of a hater. He got pissed off whenever someone in class got a higher mark than him in Physics. He despised it when the basketball kid beat him in his mile run. And he found it funny, sometimes, when he comes across a TikTok video with the words "I don't really care if something good happened to you. It should have happened to me instead" purely because it's relatable. Then he realised that maybe it wasn't the best thing to relate to something like that. Then he thought back on all the times he's hated, and some of it took root in the years he'd met a certain someone: Tobio.
People used to comfort him with words like talent doesn't bring people far—hard work does. But he'd look at Kageyama Tobio, take a glance down at his own knee that he had to be careful about, and rage in his blood starts boiling again. Was he supposed to feel better when people tell him that his cages were more physical than mental? Born lacking the gift for the sport he starves for, it is inevitable that he is to fall behind those who possess it. He's seen talent appear and vanish within those who were bestowed with it. Artists who call it quits along their journey, letting the life they could create go stale because the talent seemed unsustainable. Tooru hates it.
But Tobio's one of those few people who doesn't discard their skills. Instead, he uses his luck to twist them into opportunity, and now he's more successful than ever. That's something worth admiring, Tooru's therapist noted. So why won't Tooru call it a day already and let bygones be bygones? Tooru doesn't know it himself, but he knows that going neutral about Tobio, let alone shifting to admiration, is too incredibly foreign. Impossible, even.
Time is no friend. But it has very much lost its chance to redeem itself, Tooru thinks with gritted teeth, because he's now nose to nose with Kageyama Tobio, who is staring back at him, wide-eyed.
There was no warning. He curses in every language he knows in his head. Shatballs. Mierda. Shit and piss. He's not ready for this fucking conversation.
Coming to Italy was a mistake.
It's not like he chose to come here. CA San Juan has a biennial tradition that takes place after the Olympics or World Championships, where members buy tickets (sometimes from their own pockets, sometimes club-funded) to random countries for vacationing. They place slips of paper with their chosen city into a box to draw lots. Tooru, without fail, purchases a two-week ticket to Tokyo every time, hoping that if fate deems him ready, he could draw his own ticket and visit Japan again, maybe even check Miyagi out. For the past three times, he generally lucked out on the lots. One trip to Prague, one to California (Iwa-chan!) and another to Bangkok. This time, however...
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invisible string | oikage
Fanfiction"Don't come to Aoba Johsai," he said, and watched horror birth itself on Tobio's stricken face. "We don't need dictators like you there." His kouhai didn't utter a word, but his stunned silence said it all. And in twisted triumph, Tooru left him t...
