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#das war die schönste zeittt weil alles dort begaaaaaaaann
konohamaru-sensei · 3 months
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"Du warst ein Polaroid im Regen und mein erstes Lied." (You were a polaroid in the rain and my first song.) | Sayuri X Oikawa
Hello, betcha didn't think this would come round eventually. I've had this plottted in my head for a while, so here it is! <3
This is an OC story with Oi kawa, please do not read on if you hate OCs. I'll tag nothing and I'll put all under a readmore, please just move on, thanks.
“So yeah, she has a boyfriend again now.”
Tooru snipped with his finger against the table in front of him. “That's great for her~,” he sings back. “Why would that matter to me?”
He does not have to see Hajime to know he is rolling his eyes. “I thought you would like a warning. Her boyfriend is working for the volleyball association and is around the national team a lot, so if you come over for the olympics or other…”
“I’ll make sure to congratulate them on their impending wedding.” Even for his usual way of speaking, the sarcasm was especially overflowing now.
Hajime sighed at the other side of the telephone. “Anyway,” he said and sighed again,”It’s late here, so I’m going to go. I thought I was being a nice friend and telling you about it, but it seems like you don’t care, so let’s say goodbye for now.” Though Hajime had said the words, Tooru knew that he didn’t mean them.
“It’s been a long time since then,” Tooru heard himself say. “I don’t have a connection to her anymore anyway.” He waited for Hajime to say something, but the line stayed in this silence that showed that they both knew that Tooru was lying. “Well, bye, Iwa-chan.”
Hajime didn’t even say goodbye. He just hung up.
Tooru let the phone slip from his hand directly onto the bed below him. For a moment he did nothing but stare at the ceiling. What had Iwa thought would happen if he told him Sayuri had a boyfriend now? That he’d cry? And if he had? What would that have mattered?
She was free to date whoever she wanted to date. After all, they had not been a couple for ages and even when they had, they hadn’t really been one. Everything that had happened that year seemed like a movie he had once seen and then decided to never watch again. A distant memory. And that, even though it wasn’t even ten years ago at this point.
People romanticised their first real love. They also, of course, did that with childhood crushes and all, but especially with the first love one had as a teenager. Often you’d long for those very pure feelings back, without a way of turning back the clock and keeping yourself from getting older. Tooru was no different, though he could have really lived with being the exception to this.
How he fell in love with the only classmate that openly disdained him was still a mystery to him. Maybe it was her open honesty about how much and what exactly she disliked about him, or maybe it was the way her face had looked when he saw her play on the field for the first time, whatever it was, it had been quick, strong and without him noticing until it was too late.
There had been a moment in time where they could have been more than two people who occasionally kissed and slept with each other. Where these feelings could have turned into a real blooming relationship with dates and presents and love confessions. At the time Tooru could feel it on his tongue, but it had never quite come out of him, not when Sayuri had always repeated that they would “not be a couple.”
Now, older, wiser, and so far removed geographically as possible from whatever they had been, Tooru understood that Sayuri had been scared, at least a little, of going out with him. He was convinced there were feelings there too, not that she even said that to his face. But there was something about that last time they spoke to each other that told him that he was right.
That April, shortly after their graduation, Tooru had visited Tokyo on his way to Argentina. They hadn’t spoken to each other since shortly before the graduation ceremony, when he had told her that he would move abroad right after for his career. Thin lipped she had nodded away and wished him good luck and what he had actually come to ask her, to move abroad with him, stayed stuck in his throat.
He’d seen her work diligently to enter a good journalism academy, to leave her fathers oppressive house. There had been no way he could have asked her to abandon all of that for him. Tooru’s career was not more important than the goals she was working towards. She wanted to write, portray careers, and she ought to do it.
But then, the loneliness and longing, side effects of loving, had overwhelmed him so much that he had gone to see her anyway. Let Saya give him the address of her apartment so he could go by, talk to her directly. He had gone with high ambitions. He’d tell her how he felt, he’d ask her to come with him.
Now, 8 years later, eyes closed on his back, Tooru could still see Sayuri’s face right in front of his eyes when she opened that door that day. He gave her a little wave and his signature smile and her lips curled for a moment before she threw the door shut into his face again. So much of that.
Eventually, of course, she had opened her door to him again and with a growl stepped back to let him into her apartment. It was small, but completely adequate for a student with her small income. A big room that could be parted by a sliding door hiding the bed, not that Tooru took notice of much of the room at first, he was totally focused on what was in front of him.
One of their great failures as an almost-couple was that they always skipped the talking part, the “lets-define-what-we-are” part and went right into the next step. It had been a few weeks since they’d been together and now that she stood in front of him, her eyebrows furrowed in anger, he could not help but kiss her again. Really, love was stupid and selfish.
The other one of their great failures was that Sayuri never said no to him. From their first kiss to their very last, she had always let it happen. Always sliding herself into him, always letting his hand roam wherever he wanted to go. If she hadn’t at least liked him a little, she would have complained, right? He told himself things like that all the time to keep himself sane.
It was almost like a fever dream to remember now, that night, the morning that followed. As if it had barely been real. They’d gone out for food, brought it all home, sat and chatted a little, but did a lot of other stuff all the while Tooru had wanted to say what had been on his mind for almost a year, but no matter how hard he tried to persuade his heart, the words just wouldn’t come out. 
Maybe it was a fear of rejection.
Finally, when he could not wait any longer, when his flight was so close that even Sayuri lifted her eyes to ask when he would need to go to the airport, in this “by-the-way” fashion that told him that she had been thinking about him leaving nonstop. Finally, then, the words on the tip of his tongue spilled out.
“I want you to come with me.” He had said, very quickly and when he noticed her mouth opening he had added: “It does not have to be now. It can be in a year or two or three. You can study here and I can come visit. I can teach you the language. I don’t care. I want you to come with me someday.”
There were her thin lips again, the ones that had discouraged him so much last time. “Why?” she had asked. 
It was as if she was offering him an oil branch. As if she was saying “Tell me your feelings honestly first”. It was right there for him to take an opportunity of a lifetime and yet, he said.: “Because I think we are good together. Don’t you think so?”
Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.
His head was screaming at him. No matter how many years passed, this moment still haunted him. What had Tooru expected to happen? He remembered it so well, her eyes darkening and then her face dropping. 
“I don’t think you should say things like that to me.” She had replied coldly. “We aren’t a couple after all.” 
Then, before he could get it together, before he could say anything else, she had already ushered him out of her apartment and closed the door. Other than his dreams and the occasional check up on social media Tooru had not seen her since.
It was alright, of course, that now, years later, Sayuri was dating again. It had been alright if she had been dated a week after he had flown out. Still, the “what if” haunted Tooru and would probably continue to haunt him. Hajime knew this, though they had never explicitly talked about it. That's why he had called, to be considerate. 
How would she react if he came back to Japan and ran into her? Would she stare at him coldly again like she had the last time their eyes had met? Or would she be so over their thing, that she would have reverted back to hating him? And did it really matter if she liked him or not?
Tooru sighed and grabbed his phone again. The only way to find out was to meet her again and he knew that eventually they would do exactly that. Maybe there could come a day in which they would be alright with each other, when their youth was such a distant memory that neither of them would still cling to it. 
Maybe then he would finally be able to tell her what he wanted to tell her then, even if it was a confession that's way too late.
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