HELLO?! THE PAIN?! But This Was So Well Written - Tumblr Posts

bergamot haze.

a/n: i listened to a new song that popped up on my youtube feed and here i am writing an angsty thing because of it. you can find your optional background music for this fic here. it might be that i was looking for an excuse to write introspective ushijima, too. for the friend who said it's "not in his character", it can be done. now add him to your harem. also, i am addicted to earl grey tea these days. please do not ask me when the last time i had a sip of water was. i do not know these things.

fandom: haikyuu!!

character: ushijima wakatoshi

genre: angst

warnings: -

word count: 4.1k

“I’m home,” Ushijima said, a force of habit.

He removed his shoes and placed them on the shoe rack by the front door, clearly noting that there were fewer pairs of shoes on it than he remembered. It was out of place, but he didn’t let it bother him. Ushijima shut the door behind him and locked it, and he walked further into the strangely dim apartment.

His slippers were there by the entryway, but yours weren’t.

There was something wrong with the apartment, but he couldn’t quite yet put his finger to it. Everything seemed okay, but the longer he looked at any one thing in the place, the more unseemly it became. Still, Ushijima pushed the uneasy feeling to the back of his mind with a swallow, and repeated his call of “I’m home, Y/N.”

He still didn’t receive a response.

Immediately, he went to the bedroom to check if you were taking a nap at this late hour. Ushijima pushed the door open and expected to find you bundled up on the bed, a reminder about keeping an established sleep schedule already on the tip of his tongue.

You weren’t there.

With a turn of his head, he took in the entirety of the master bedroom, and the feeling that something was very wrong sprung up again and refused to be ignored. A suspicion arose with the feeling, and Ushijima followed it, taking too-wide steps to the door of the walk-in closet.

One look was all it took for him to remember that you had already moved out. The realisation gave an explanation for the creeping feeling of disquiet that clung to him from the moment he unlocked the front door.

You had already moved out.

The shelves in the closet were bare of your clothes. You had an affinity for patterned socks for the longest time, and you were always buying new ones, even when you already had more than a hundred pairs. All hundred something pairs of your socks lined your shared closet and spilled over into drawers and shelves where socks shouldn’t be.

Ushijima never thought he would miss the jumble of colour that your collection of socks brought, but here he was.

You had already moved out.

The new awareness of that fact was starting to sink into his mind and deeper still into his bones, and suddenly, he felt a little bit numb. It was a kind of numbness that he was sure he couldn’t have explained, if ever he went to a doctor and wanted to receive some medication for it. It steeled his feet to the tile of the bedroom floor, and he couldn’t move from his spot even if he willed it.

Ushijima was still wearing his socks from training and his feet were in his house slippers. Even so, there was a cold seeping into his feet and it spread upwards frantically, like a bad fever. A phantom shiver born from a fever that wasn’t real passed over him in waves, decreasing in strength as they came, until it all subsided into numbness.

It was too late to have dinner when he managed to tear himself away from the doorway of the closet. He trudged to the kitchen, feet still too heavy and too cold, and searched for something that he could easily whip up and would fill him enough that he could wait to have a proper breakfast.

Something that would taste good even if he was eating alone.

The kitchen was soon filled with the sounds of cooking when he settled on making an omelette to go with the morning’s leftover rice that he had reheated. Ushijima whirled the centre of the omelette with his chopsticks, watching for when the entirety of the omelette would become opaque and he could flip the whole thing onto the rice.

As he set the table to eat, the two plates of food in his hands felt strange, too heavy. When he remembered again that you weren’t there, he slid what would’ve been your portion of dinner onto his plate and he set down both plates on the dinner table anyway and ate.

It was a strange and bitter experience, to be eating alone at a table for only two when he was used to seeing you at the place you claimed at the other end of it. The silence at the table was broken when the kettle on the stove began to whistle, and Ushijima remembered again that you were the one who liked to drink hot tea with your meals and not him.

He went to switch the burner off and opened the cabinet where you placed your tea. When he grabbed the box from the open cabinet, it too felt too heavy and too cold in his hands. Even reading the label felt wrong in your absence.

However, having set the tea bag in a mug that wasn’t yours and letting it steep, being surrounded by the scent of it was a much greater suffering than merely looking at the box itself.

There was a bright and slightly bitter citrus scent that hung in the air. Even when Ushijima was done with his admittedly too heavy dinner and washed it down with your tea, the scent lingered and followed him.

He didn’t stop to think that maybe he was imagining it.

From: Y/N i left some of my books at your place. mind if i come pick them up tomorrow?

His phone screen lit up with a notification that he had received a text from you. He responded to it with a simple “I don’t mind”, and then he heard your voice in his mind, a little disapproving but mostly fond, telling him that he could stand to use more words. Ushijima’s thumbs hovered over the keyboard. He tried a smiling emoji, but quickly decided against it.

To: Y/N I don’t mind. I will be at home after 4pm. You can come then.

Ushijima stayed in the shower too long after sending you those two texts. There was nothing vaguely affectionate in the short, insignificant text exchange between the two of you. It was as if the relationship that had lasted the rough patches of high school and the uncertainty of entering adulthood was only a delusion of his own mind.

Like he had been going it alone, with only his wishful thinking for company.

When he had gotten dressed for bedtime, he found himself in the other bedroom that you once used as a home office. Sure enough, it was mostly bare, save for several stray novels that you had left behind in your rush to get out and take your things with you.

If Ushijima stared at the now empty bookshelves and desk long enough, he could imagine that everything was back to how it should be. Your books would be lining the shelves, full to nearly overflowing. Some days, they would be sorted by colour. Other days, they would be sorted by height, or language even. Other days still, they were sorted in alphabetical order of the author’s last name.

The notebooks had an entire shelf set apart for them. Your desktop setup would be in the centre of the desk. There would always be a few open books and notebooks scattered about the keyboard, with pens and highlighters and sticky notes with scribbles thrown in the mess. A coaster you knitted yourself would be some distance to the right of the mouse and the mousepad, with your favourite Pompompurin mug filled with tea on it.

And that bright and slightly bitter citrus scent would herald your presence in that room, and he would know that you were at home because he could smell it in the air. Even from the entryway, he would’ve been able to detect it.

Ushijima tossed and turned on his side of the bed, even the most fitful and disturbed sleep eluding him when he needed it. He would’ve thought that practice had worn him out sufficiently, but the scent of citrus kept him up, along with thoughts of you. For some reason, the image of you still in your pyjamas standing at the stove waiting for the water to boil burned in his mind, amongst all the other happy memories he had with you.

The bedroom door was closed and there wasn’t any tea brewing in the kitchen, and yet he could smell it, like the tea leaves perpetually sat underneath his nose. Like the ghost of you was still there in the apartment, brewing tea even at odd hours of the night.

He went to practice the next day with his feet still too heavy and too cold. When his teammates and coach asked him if he was alright, he allayed their concerns and questions by repeating the mantra that he was in good health and that nothing was wrong. They left it at that after a few cycles of Ushijima uttering the same excuse.

The afternoon came too quickly, and he was at the apartment again, sweaty and sore from an appropriately effortful practice. Again, he removed his shoes and noticed that all your footwear was missing from the shoe rack. Again, he noted the absence of your plush house slippers at their rightful place beside his.

Again, the apartment smelled of bitter citrus, even if there wasn’t anyone at home brewing the tea.

From: Y/N i’m already on the way. are you at home?

Ushijima checked his phone after showering again, even if he’d already showered before leaving the gym, and there was a text from you.

To: Y/N Yes, I’m at home now.

“At home”.

It was an oddly intimate way to be saying that he was at his place of residence, especially now that this apartment was only his home and not yours any longer. The words stirred up a hopeful part of him that he had only ever scarcely been aware existed, and he suddenly felt a certain excited anticipation overtaking the sense of dread that came with the knowledge that you were coming home.

You were coming home. To him. To this place that you once shared with him.

Ushijima felt himself tensing up uncharacteristically when a series of gentle knocks echoed from the front door. He put his magazine down on the coffee table and answered the door.

“Y/N,” he said, and he felt a little more like himself, the taste of your name on his tongue still sweet, still familiar, still like home.

You nodded, giving him a smile that he could tell was half-hearted, a practised manner of politeness. “May I come in?”

It was his turn to nod, and he moved out of the way so that you could come on in. Ushijima reached for the small stack of hotel slippers stashed away close to the entryway and handed one to you. You took it with a soft expression of thanks, but you didn’t rip the flimsy plastic open so that you could wear them.

Ushijima looked at you, and you were visibly uncomfortable for the fact that this apartment was your home until two weeks ago. He watched you crinkle the plastic covering the hotel slippers in your hands in a feeble attempt to reach the slippers, as though your hands suddenly lost all their strength from the sheer difficulty of being in his presence. He felt a prickle in his chest at the thought.

After some needless struggling, you set the slippers down on the tile, and most of the pattern of your colourful socks disappeared into them.

“My books?” you asked.

He nodded and led the way to the other bedroom, even if he knew that you knew just as well as he did where it was. Ushijima opened the door for you and gestured for you to enter the room. You said “thanks” again, though your tone and your half-smile told him it was a necessary evil of common courtesy, and you went inside.

As you walked by him to enter the room, there was that bitter scent of citrus in your hair. It wafted into his nose, and the smell hit his senses harder than brewing a cup of tea for himself to drink did.

Were you doing some work at that cafe you liked and drinking tea before coming to meet him here?

“Waka– Um, Ushijima-kun,” you said, and the way you chose to address him hurt more than he let on, his face not betraying a single hint of the storm of emotions that was brewing beneath the surface.

“I was missing a notebook that has some important things in it. It’s not here? Because I swear that... I left it here. Two weeks ago,” you said, hand caressing the surface of your desk. Ushijima stepped into the room with you, but maintained some distance between the two of you for your comfort.

“The cover’s pink. It’s this thick,” you said, turning to him with your hand up and your fingers bent to give him a visual clue on how your missing notebook looked like. “It’s ring-bound and– And hardcover. It’s a kind of pink that you can’t miss. Have you seen it maybe?”

He shook his head. “I have not seen it.”

Your face pinched in apprehension, and instinct almost moved him to approach you so he could kiss that expression away. Instead, he willed himself to stay where he was, his hands gripping the loose fabric of his sweatpants too hard.

“I’ve not touched anything in this room since you left,” Ushijima said. “You might have taken it with you but you weren’t aware of it.”

At his hopefully helpful words, the expression on your face morphed to something more palpably sullen. “The cover is blindingly pink. I can’t have missed it. It has to be here,” you said, gesturing to the room with both your hands.

“It has to be here,” you said again, and he didn’t understand why you repeated yourself.

“But it’s not. I have not seen it. All there is in this room are the novels on the desk. Nothing more.”

You sighed, exasperation clear in the sound and on your face. You scratched at the back of your head, the harsh movements messing up your hair, and you sighed again. Looking him in the eye for the first time since you arrived, you said, “Well. I’m sorry for wasting your time. I’ll get going.”

You tried to sidestep Ushijima to leave the room, but he moved faster and blocked your path of exit.

“Y/N,” he said. “I want to know what’s wrong.”

You wrung your hands in the way you did when you felt distressed. He hated to be the thing that caused you to feel that way, but he left his statement in the air and waited for you to respond.

“Wa– Ushijima-kun,” you said, correcting yourself again. “Wasn’t it obvious?”

Ushijima shook his head.

You suddenly began to withdraw yourself from him, before telling him one day that you wanted to break up and that you were going to move out. He remembered that he had said that you were being “reckless”. Just that one word sparked an argument between the two of you. He hadn’t seen you raise your voice at anyone in anger until that day, and he regretted being the cause of it, even if he hadn’t yet found the words to express it to you. Hadn’t yet found the right way to apologise for it the way you deserved.

The moving company came just two days after you had announced that you were moving out to live with a friend, and the new knowledge that you were serious about leaving was so much for him to process that he hadn’t thought to ask you why.

But now that you were here, after Ushijima has had some time to think, he wanted to get an answer from you. Even if it would be something that he didn’t like, he had to hear it from you.

You let out a forceful exhale, shaking your head at him with a rather hostile expression on your face. He watched you clench your fists, like he’d seen you do before on that day when you had shouted at him because he had called you “reckless”. Despite the almost tangible lump growing in his throat, he swallowed, and readied himself for the tirade that you looked like you were about to unleash on him.

“… You were my best friend,” you said, in a voice that was too small and too bitter and too unlike you. He wasn’t used to you sounding like this.

The outburst he had prepared himself for never came.

Instead, Ushijima waited in the silence that was beginning to feel suffocating, despite the lingering scent of citrus and tea that always surrounded you. He breathed it in as he waited, and it was more bitter than he remembered it being, the scent more like traditional medicine than the fresh peel of a fruit and tea leaves.

The silence toiled on, effortlessly trapping his breath in his throat and making his mouth run dry. He wet his lips with a swipe of the tongue, and he swallowed needlessly in the hopes that it would moisten his throat. Still, Ushijima waited, but you never picked up where you left off.

“Were,” he said, finally. It was a statement, not a question.

You nodded. With a heavy exhale, you were the first one to break eye contact, looking at your feet. Ushijima followed your gaze, watching how the tops of the hotel slippers dented with the skittish wiggling of your toes. It was only then that he noticed you were wearing your favourite Pompompurin socks. You only ever wore those on the days when you felt like you needed a little extra happiness.

It was a bitter realisation to Ushijima that you felt that way because of him. That you expected to be short on happiness, and it was his fault. It was because you were coming to see him.

You only moved your toes like that when you were feeling afflicted. He reasoned with himself that there was nothing here that should make you feel that way, but then he remembered how this conversation began. It began like a rubber band that was pulled too tightly, and it was only now he allowed himself to see how it was fraying and coming close to snapping with every second.

Ushijima wanted to say something to alleviate some of the tension between the two of you. You were slouching, curling in on yourself as you crossed your arms across your chest, like you wanted to disappear from his presence.

“You were my best friend once, Wakatoshi.”

It took him three seconds before the meaning of your words set in fully. It didn’t help that you were still visibly squirming just two long strides away from him.

“I just– I just felt like I was losing my best friend, the longer I was with you. And one day, he was gone,” you said.

You were running your hands back and forth, back and forth across your forearms. Your eyes were still glued to the open door behind him, and Ushijima noticed how your gaze flickered from the door to an empty picture frame beside it in your failed attempts to look him in the eye now.

You took a moment to breathe, and he mirrored it, taking in air when you were and then letting it out at the same time you did.

The sound of you clearing your throat made him look up from tracing the new wrinkles on the tops of the hotel slippers you were wearing.

“Maybe it’s me being sensitive. Or not understanding you as well as I thought I did,” you started, your shoulders bunching up as they rose. “Maybe you felt like you’re losing your best friend too. I-I wouldn’t know. But what I do know is there came a time when I wasn’t happy with you anymore. And that’s important to me, you know? It’s so hard to be happy. Harder still when I’m somewhere that makes me feel the opposite.”

The revelation that you weren’t happy with him crashed into him like a thousand bricks falling from the sky all at once. You weren’t happy with him. He didn’t make you happy. He made you upset, angry, frustrated, disappointed– Ushijima would’ve continued listing the words that came from your lips in his most recent memories of you, every single disagreement he’d had with you that he had all but put aside because he had to focus on volleyball. But what you just said to him was more than enough.

Why did it take you breaking up with him and leaving to know?

“I apologise, Y/N. I should have done better,” he said, and even to his own ears, he sounded like he was being strangled.

Your lips were pinched in a flat line, the fleshy part of them barely showing with how tightly you pressed them together. Ushijima could hear you breathing, how exhausted the sounds you made were. You shook your head at him again, but this time, he was certain he deserved it.

“Ushijima-kun, you had many chances to do better,” you said, your shoulders finally falling as you exhaled. It looked like you had given up on him, and that much was apparent to him, even before counting your words and your tone.

Even so, Ushijima wanted you to reconsider.

“I will do better, Y/N.”

You put a hand out, silently telling him that you didn’t want to hear it, that you already had enough.

“You–You can do better with someone new. I meant it when I said I’m done here,” you said.

He allowed you to walk around him and out of the room, out of the apartment, the last books on the desk that belonged to you safe in the tote bag hanging from your shoulder. When he found the strength to turn around, you were standing by the front door and tugging your shoes on, instead of taking the time to untie the laces and do them up again like you normally would.

It was impossible to misread how eager – desperate almost – you were to leave, and to leave for good.

“Y/N,” Ushijima said, savouring the feeling of your name on his tongue. This might very well be the last chance he had to say it. To call you by your first name as lovers do, and not by your last name as a stranger would.

Though, he was sure he would make that mistake the first dozen times he'd chance upon you.

Your sneaker squeaked against the dark tile of the entryway floor with the force you exerted to shove your foot in. You swung your head in his direction at the call of your name. He had many things he wanted to say to you, to thank you for the years you’ve been steadfast at his side and to give a final goodbye accompanied with well wishes for what would come next in your life. The tears that glistened at the corners of your eyes in the late afternoon glow choked him, and the words he had for you died.

Did you know how beautiful you were? So beautiful that it hurt that this would be the last time he was allowed to be with you, just him and just you.

A sniffle wrinkled the bridge of your nose, and this time, Ushijima could not help running to where you were to scoop you up in his arms. Bitter citrus flooded his senses as he came within an arm’s reach of you. He would’ve caged you to his chest, close enough that it would be difficult to ascertain where he ended and where you began.

But you put out a hand to ward him off. He abruptly came to a stop, his toes hanging off the edge of where the entryway and the rest of the apartment were separated, your palm just a mere whisper away from his chest.

Whatever transpired after that moment was a blur in his memory. You had left the apartment with your novels in a tote bag that you held in your arms but without the pink notebook you were looking for. There were tears in his memory. He couldn’t confidently place whose they were, yours or his. But someone had been crying, in that last meeting.

Ushijima had put the kettle on the stove and brewed himself a cup of your favourite tea after you left, as a consolation of sorts. Perhaps, a final goodbye to you, and all the memories in his head that were coloured by your presence, standing apart from the others that were grey.

It was the only thing he had left of you, after all.

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