Chapter Text
“Hey, Trashykawa. Are you ready for Saturday?” Iwaizumi asked.
“No! Iwa-chan, why is there so much material to cover? How can anyone remember all of this stuff?” Oikawa groaned into the phone, his eyes scanning over the piles of notes, practice exams, and textbooks that were laid out in front of him. He and Kuroo’s living area had looked like a tornado had hit it for the last week, with papers strewn around all over the floor.
“Well, if you were able to prepare for the college entrance exam in only a few months I’m sure you’re capable of passing this one,” Iwaizumi said. Oikawa could hear the smirk in his voice. “I feel bad for your roommate having to tutor you, though. At least there were three of us to split up the burden of having to put up with you back in high school.”
“Five minutes of break left,” Kuroo warned from where he was lying on the couch. Though it wasn’t even Kuroo taking the exam, Oikawa had noticed how the bags under his roommate’s eyes had grown darker in the last few weeks from all the nights he had stayed up helping Oikawa study. Oikawa bit his lip. He really owed Kuroo after this.
“Tell Kuroo I sympathize with him,” Iwaizumi said. “After all the time you’ve said he’s put in to help you, you better not fail.”
Oikawa nodded. “Yeah.”
“Good. I’m glad you’ve finally found something that you wanted to pursue, even if it took you a full year,” Iwaizumi said. “I’m proud of you.”
After that day Oikawa had asked Kuroo about transferring to the pre-med track, Kuroo had started preparing him for the transfer exam nonstop. Nerima College only allowed a certain number of students to transfer at the end of their first year through a competitive exam, citing that transferring any later than that would put them too far behind on the pre-med coursework. According to Kuroo, being admitted as a transfer was rumored to be even harder than being admitted as a first-year.
“I thought the general college entrance exams weren’t too hard,” Kuroo had said. “And I did pretty well on them. I honestly thought that I’d failed the pre-med exam to get admitted into the program, though. If the transfer exam is even harder, it’s probably best if you started preparing now.”
That was what had led to Oikawa studying with Kuroo every night after Kuroo’s volleyball practices. Sawamura would help him study for the classes he was in currently to free up more time to prepare for the exam, and even Iwaizumi would help to answer his questions when Kuroo wasn’t around. In return, Oikawa made sure that he was at every single one of Kuroo’s games and that no one, except for maybe Sawamura, cheered louder than him.
With the endless nights of studying, Oikawa’s only respite from school had become his Saturdays spent volunteering at the hospital with Kuroo. By the end of the year, he’d been helping to entertain the younger kids for long enough that he was allowed to assist the nurses with basic tasks. Though his job was mostly helping to prop patients up while the nurses took their vitals or bringing equipment from different parts of the building to where they were needed, being able to watch the nurses and doctors at work up close and their patients slowly recover only solidified his desire to pursue that path too.
Even with his new volunteer assignments, Oikawa still found time to visit the kids with Kuroo. After their shift, they would spend a few hours with the kids, agreeing to regale them with stories about college, Kuroo’s volleyball team, and even what Miyagi was like. He never failed to visit Hashimoto each weekend either, who would often ask him how exam prep was going. Oikawa had no idea why he had told an eleven-year-old that he was planning on transferring to pre-med, but Hashimoto had excitedly told him that he thought that Oikawa would end up being a good doctor.
‘Both you and Kuroo-san give up your time to help kids at the hospital feel better,” Hashimoto had said. “And doctors are supposed to make their patients feel better, right? So you’re already doing that!”
Oikawa didn’t exactly agree with his logic (the transfer exam really didn’t care about how “good” of a person he was compared to his knowledge of biology facts), but hearing the boy who’d inspired him to pursue this goal warmed his heart. Hashimoto had called him cool, but really, Oikawa thought that the title belonged to Hashimoto himself. If he managed to pass the exam, perhaps he would tell him that.
“Time for another round of practice questions,” Kuroo said, pushing himself up to a seated position. Oikawa sighed before saying goodbye to Iwaizumi and hanging up. Kuroo had a knack for choosing questions that he had a hard time with, and as good as that was for preparing, it was brutal to do it for any length of time. “You know, Oikawa, if you just knew the answers to all of the questions, I wouldn’t be able to choose the ones you got wrong over and over.”
“Easy for you to say,” Oikawa muttered when the doorbell rang. Not hesitating to stall, he quickly got up to answer the door before Kuroo could order him to start studying again.
It was Sawamura at the door, with two cups of coffee in his hands. “I thought you two might need it,” he said. “Kuroo tends to panic the week leading up to the exam, so I thought that he might be driving you a little too hard this week.”
“Hey, I don’t panic!” Kuroo yelled from the main room.
“Do you want me to show Oikawa how you’d text me or Bokuto the night before you had a big exam to freak out?”
“You promised you wouldn’t tease me about that!”
“Anyways,” Sawamura said, handing Oikawa the drinks. “I just came to hand these to you. Good luck, Oikawa!”
The coffees were warm against Oikawa’s hands. Good luck. The transfer exams were only offered at the end of the year, and this would be his only chance. He had to pass. If he didn’t, it would mean another who-knows-how-many-months of going through college aimlessly, not knowing what he wanted to do. His volleyball career had been stripped of him for reasons outside of his control, but whether he passed this exam was entirely up to him. Setting one cup of coffee in front of Kuroo, he sighed.
“Throw me your hardest questions.”
***
Oikawa thought he’d known what being nervous felt like. The day that he’d taken the college entrance exams, he hadn’t been able to keep his hands from shaking besides all of his friends’ reassurances. Taking the transfer exam was worse. He hadn’t been able to sleep the entire night, having been unable to shut his mind off. Kuroo had told him that he needed to sleep to be able to focus the next day, but Oikawa doubted that he’d slept for more than an hour straight that night. The bags under his eyes, even worse than Kuroo’s, showed it. Deciding that he would have to just do what he had to do to stay awake, he made himself a cup of coffee and drank it, hoping that it would be enough to keep his attention up for the duration of the exam.
“Well, you look awful.”
“Thanks.” Oikawa turned to see that Kuroo had woken up and was standing on the other side of the room.
“Couldn’t sleep because you were busy thinking about the exam?” Kuroo asked before chuckling. “Don’t worry, I bet that there won’t be anyone taking the exam that slept well last night. The day before my exam last year, I actually threw up from how nervous I was.”
“I feel like I’m going to,” Oikawa admitted. The churning in his stomach was even worse than how he had felt before the college entrance exams. Maybe he shouldn’t have forced a cup of coffee down?
“This probably isn’t going to make you feel better at all,” Kuroo said, thumping him on the shoulder. “But you’re going to do fine. You had me helping you, after all, and you’ve been studying nonstop since you decided that you wanted to transfer. You’ve done everything that you possibly could.”
Oikawa nodded. He knew that everything Kuroo was saying was true, yet that didn’t do much to slow his racing heartbeat. “You’re right, that didn’t help at all.”
“I don’t think anything I can say will help you at this point,” Kuroo said with a shrug. “But even if you somehow, even with all of my help, manage to fail, it’s not the end of the world. I’m going to keep taking you to help out at the hospital, and there are other courses of study that’ll let you help people one day. Just remember that how you do isn’t going to affect how Sawamura or I see you.”
It’s just like the college entrance exams all of again, he thought, only this time, it was Kuroo and Sawamura by his side instead of Iwaizumi, Matsukawa, and Hanamaki.
As he walked to the testing site, heart hammering in his ears, his phone buzzed. Glancing down, he realized that he had been wrong. The text from Hanamaki said, “Iwaizumi said your transfer exam was today. Don’t fail!” Matsukawa had simply written, “Good luck.”
Oikawa smiled when he saw Iwaizumi’s text. ”We all believe in you.” Just a year ago, it had been Oikawa’s job to say those words to his team before every match, reassuring them that he never doubted them. Despite all his time saying it, he’d never realized how truly comforting those words were. He didn’t only have Kuroo and Sawamura behind him now, he realized. It was Kuroo, Sawamura, Matsukawa, Hanamaki, and Iwaizumi, all believing that he could do it.
He couldn’t let them down.
***
“I already took the exam, so why am I even more nervous now?” Oikawa complained.
Kuroo laughed. “I mean, it’s not surprising. You are finding out how you did, after all.”
“I’m sure it was fine, Oikawa,” Sawamura said reassuringly. “You prepared well for it. Have a little faith!”
The three of them were headed to Nerima College together, after Sawamura had met them at their apartment. It was a week after Oikawa had taken the pre-med transfer exam, and the day that the passing applicants would be revealed. No one knew why Nerima made all of the applicants come to school to search for their number on a wall instead of emailing them all their results, but Kuroo had said that it was just a school tradition.
“Yeah, you sure are an overthinker, aren’t you?” Kuroo said. “There’s nothing you can do about it now, anyways, so just pray your number is on that wall and hope for the best!”
A crowd was already gathered in front of the large wall that the applicant numbers would be posted on. A rolled-up poster, which likely contained the results, was attached to the top with a staff member holding it in place until it was time. Oikawa glanced at his phone. Five more minutes. Why couldn’t they just show them the results now?
“You’re number seventy-eight, right?” Sawamura asked him. He nodded, too tense to speak. The crowd seemed to grow quieter as it grew closer and closer to the time that the poster would be unveiled. Everyone here wanted their number to be on that poster as much as he did, he thought. It would come down to how well he’d prepared compared to them and whether that had been reflected on his exam.
The sudden rattle of paper pulled him out of his thoughts as he watched the poster being unfurled. The crowd seemed to surge forward, moving closer to read the results. Nerima College Annual Pre-Medical Track Transfer Exam Acceptances, the title read.
His eyes seemed incapable of reading the numbers out of order. He glanced down the list. 009, 014, 027. The sounds of celebration surrounding him as the few people who had left silently indicated that they all found their numbers, or had realized it was missing, before he had. 035, 048, 049, 067….
“Congratulations, Oikawa!”
A hard slap against his back as Sawamura and Kuroo’s voices filled his ears weren’t enough to tear his eyes away from the poster. He needed to see for himself. 070, 074...078.
“I...passed?” he managed in disbelief. The triumphant looks on Sawamura and Kuroo’s faces confirmed what he knew. Somehow, he’d managed to do it. He couldn’t slow the smile from spreading across his face. He’d done it. He’d made it onto the pre-medical track.
“I knew you could do it,” Kuroo exclaimed proudly. “I can’t wait until you tell the kids at the hospital that you passed, especially Hashimoto. He’s going to freak out!”
Oikawa nodded. Yeah, he definitely needed to tell Hashimoto that he was even cooler than him for being the reason that he’d wanted to transfer to pre-med to begin with.
“I guess all of that studying paid off,” Sawamura said. “You and Kuroo definitely have a lot of sleep to catch up on after this.”
“Absolutely true,” Kuroo agreed, letting out a massive yawn. “I think I missed out on at least a month’s worth of sleep thanks to this guy. Not that I wouldn’t do it all over again.”
“Thanks, you two,” Oikawa said, looking at his friends. “I really couldn’t have done it without you.”
“There he is!”
Oikawa’s jaw slackened at the voice behind him. Whipping his head around, he blinked once, and then twice. He had to be seeing things. The three figures that were standing there couldn’t be real. There was no way that they could be in Tokyo.
“Makki, Mattsun...Iwa-chan?”
Matsukawa grinned at him. “We told you that it wasn’t goodbye, right?”
“What?” Oikawa still couldn’t believe what he was seeing. “Why are you here? How did you-”
“We invited them to come,” Sawamura said from behind him. “Iwaizumi goes to college with one of my former teammates, so we got his number and told him to bring your friends from Miyagi so we could all celebrate together.”
“What? But it takes hours to get here from Miyagi! What if I failed?”
“That’s why we texted you that you better pass,” Hanamaki said.
“We fully believed in your ability to make it,” Kuroo said. “And even on the off chance that you didn’t, then we thought your friends from Miyagi might be able to do a better job of comforting you than we could.”
Oikawa turned back to his former teammates. It had been a year since the three of them had pulled him out of the hopelessness he had felt after his injury and helped him find a new direction in life. Though they were no longer teammates and didn’t even live in the same prefecture anymore, his friends were supporting him all the same.
“All of you...Thank you. For everything.”
“You’re never going to stop getting so sentimental all the time, are you?” Hanamaki complained, though he was grinning.
“I thought we agreed that “thank you” was unnecessary,” Matsukawa agreed.
Oikawa’s eyes landed on Iwaizumi, who had yet to speak. Out of all of his friends, Iwaizumi had been there for him the longest. He’d dragged him up when he felt like he had no purpose, had forced him to stop running away from volleyball, and always seemed to know what Oikawa needed to hear the most.
“Congratulations, Trashykawa.”
“Iwa-chan…” Oikawa started, though Iwaizumi quickly cut him off with a disgusted look on his face.
“Don’t start thanking me now. I didn’t come to Tokyo for you. I always wanted to visit the prefecture, and Hanamaki and Matsukawa happened to be coming to see you at the same time so I dropped by too. That’s it.”
“I’m sure it is.”
It had taken over a year, but just like Iwaizumi had said he had found his path without volleyball. He didn’t think he could ever feel as happy and alive as he did on the court alongside his teammates, but now, surrounded by his friends with a new path opened to him, Oikawa knew that he’d been wrong. The life he was living was nothing like he’d thought it would be back when he’d been in high school, but it was every bit as fulfilling as he’d imagined a volleyball career being. Though he’d thought that he’d never truly get over his inability to play volleyball anymore,Oikawa realized that he didn’t need it to be happy. Standing there, surrounded by his friends, he knew that he could finally truly bid farewell to the sport that he’d once thought would stay in his life forever.
Goodbye, volleyball.