Chapter Text
prologue
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Tooru first gets the specialists when they’re in middle school.
Hajime remembers the day they come. The team is lingering around the court, sitting on the floor and the bleachers, but no one is playing yet. No one is sure they’re allowed to play yet. Hajime is watching the locker room door, waiting for Kageyama to come out. Next to him, Tooru is typing out paragraphs on his brand-new cell phone, then deleting the paragraphs, then typing new ones.
“Stop doing that,” Hajime says, without taking his eyes off the door. There’s no way Kageyama is going to miss practice, even if he ended up in the nurse’s office yesterday. Kageyama never misses practice.
Tooru huffs, dropping his phone in his lap. “Doing what?”
“I don’t know,” says Hajime. “Stop second-guessing yourself.” Tooru does this sometimes. Writes out things to say ahead of time, drafting and re-drafting his team pep talks, his insults, his excuses. Maybe this time he’s drafting out an apology, but Hajime doesn’t want to know. He doesn’t want to hear it.
“I’m not hurting you,” says Tooru.
“I didn’t say you were,” says Hajime, but Tooru’s words set him on edge, and he glances quickly around the gym. Of course Tooru isn’t hurting him. Tooru has never hurt him. Well, never on purpose.
“Just because you never think before you speak,” Tooru starts, but Hajime’s not listening to him anymore, because all along the bleachers, their teammates have begun to stand up. The doors on the other side of the gym have opened, and Coach is holding the door for two strangers, a man and a woman.
The specialists are wearing blue medical gloves. Their clothes are ordinary, their faces plain, but they’re wearing blue gloves and surgical masks and suddenly Hajime feels afraid.
He glances at Tooru. Tooru is staring ahead, at the man and the woman, his eyebrows drawing together. “Who’re they?” Tooru whispers to Hajime, out of the corner of his mouth, and then he grabs Hajime’s upper arm, hard. “Do you think they’re from the hospital? Tobio-chan isn’t hurt that badly. I know he’s not. I saw him in the halls earlier.”
Hajime doesn’t know how to respond. He doesn’t want to respond at all. All day, Tooru has been insisting that Kageyama isn’t hurt that badly, and Hajime can feel the guilt and fear in his words growing stronger each time. They did see Kageyama in the halls earlier, but Kageyama was pale and skittish and the way he hurried across the hallway to give Tooru a wide berth—Hajime knows it’s bad.
Hajime knows Tooru didn’t mean to do it. But it’s still bad, and Hajime squeezes his hands into fists on the bench.
The specialists are speaking with Coach now. The man moves his hands a lot but the woman just stands there, her surgical mask stark blue against her limp dark hair, and when she catches Hajime’s eye, she keeps staring at him. Hajime feels the fear crawling up his arms, bleeding out of Tooru’s body. The woman’s eyes slide to Tooru, and in that moment, Hajime feels a cold suspicion touch his stomach.
The specialists aren’t here to see Kageyama, he realizes. They’re here to see Tooru.
“What happened yesterday?” is the first question the woman asks when Coach leads the specialists over. Tooru looks frightened for a minute, his shoulders going rigid, but very quickly it becomes a scowl. Defensive, panicky, trying not to show it. It’s not a good look on Tooru.
“Nothing happened,” he says, his voice ringing through the gym. Tooru has been repeating this all day. “I didn’t even touch him!”
“Kageyama Tobio collapsed in this gym yesterday,” the woman says, harsh, clinical. “What did you do to him?”
“I didn’t do anything,” Tooru repeats, and then he elbows Hajime, sending a punch of emotion through Hajime’s body. Tooru’s desperation jostles the ions in Hajime’s bloodstream, but Hajime just clenches his jaw against the sensation. It’s not painful, it’s just strange.
It’s not painful, but the man’s eyes zero in on Hajime anyway, on the places he and Tooru are pressed together.
“Don’t touch him,” the man says sharply, and this is the first rule.
Don’t touch him.
“He didn’t hit Kageyama,” Hajime says, scooting away from Tooru hastily, watching the beginnings of an angry flush climbing Tooru’s neck. Every emotion radiates off Tooru’s body, burning through the thin skin on his face, burning through the air. Tooru’s emotions have always been this way, but Hajime has never felt afraid before.
“Then what happened?” the woman demands again.
“Tobio-chan just collapsed,” Tooru says. “I wasn’t even standing next to him. I didn’t touch him. There’s no way he was hurt that badly, because—”
“Stop,” says the woman, her voice louder, cutting through Tooru’s words. “What happened before he collapsed?”
Tooru clamps his mouth shut, the anger and fear burning off him. Hajime isn’t going to be the one to tell them what happened. Tooru is right, he didn’t touch Kageyama, he was standing several feet away. But Tooru yelled, exploded, his anger rocketing through the room like a bomb, throwing one of the volleyballs so hard it smacked into the wall behind Kageyama with a sound like a cannon. When Tooru yelled, his rage ripped painfully through everyone’s bodies. They all felt it, even though Kageyama was the only one to collapse.
Hajime isn’t going to tell them this. He keeps his mouth shut, but it doesn’t matter.
The specialists lead Tooru away.
.
part one
unseen
.
It isn’t until high school that they give Tooru an official diagnosis. The biomagnetic field around his heart is too strong, far stronger than should be humanly possible, and that’s why his moods fill the entire room the moment he walks in. That’s why it feels like an electric shock when you touch him. If you get within ten feet of Tooru, you can feel all his emotions, stark and obvious as if his ribcage is wide open, exposing his heart.
“You should have known, Iwa-chan,” Tooru says, lying on his back in the middle of Hajime’s bed, tossing a pillow up and catching it, over and over again. “Everyone can see how magnetic I am. It’s all in my charm. You wouldn’t know about that.”
“This is a medical problem, assface,” says Hajime, spinning around in his desk chair. “It means something’s wrong with you.”
Tooru heaves a big, over-the-top sigh, hugging the pillow to his chest. “Ah, I guess I have to have at least one flaw. But isn’t it nice that it’s something so romantic? The girls will love this.”
Hajime doesn’t see anything romantic about it, personally, but he doesn’t say anything because he knows Tooru is full of shit. He’s just puffing his feathers, trying to ward off Hajime’s concern. Hajime can feel Tooru’s desperation all the way across the room, where Hajime’s sitting at his desk. It reverberates through the air with Tooru’s pulse. That’s the biomagnetism, Hajime assumes—the specialists say the frequency changes with his mood, and in Hajime’s opinion, there’s nothing less romantic than having all of Tooru’s obnoxious moods thrust in his face every five seconds. Tooru’s already an extremely moody person.
“Doesn’t it make you—I dunno.” Hajime doesn’t want to make the desperation any worse, but he and Tooru have been skirting around the issue ever since the Kageyama incident last year. Now the specialists are downstairs with Tooru’s mother, and the issue is too big to be ignored anymore.
“Use your words, Iwa-chan!” Tooru says, beginning to toss the pillow again. “I can’t understand you when you just grunt.”
Hajime frowns. Tooru refuses to be serious about this, at least outwardly, but it is serious. The enormity of it is palpable. Tooru has been in and out of doctor’s offices for the past year and a half, but when the specialists sat them down today to explain the diagnosis, they seemed grim rather than relieved.
There’s no cure for what’s wrong with Tooru.
“Doesn’t it make you embarrassed? I don’t know.” Hajime is embarrassed to even bring this up—he can feel his neck warm when Tooru stops tossing the pillow. “Everyone can feel it when you’re angry.”
“Then they’ll know not to make me angry,” Tooru says. There’s a heavy, awkward pause, before Tooru starts rambling quickly. “After what happened, Tobio-chan never bothered us again. Wasn’t that nice? For the rest of my life, annoying people will know exactly when to stay away. And now Tobio-chan won’t try to come to Seijou, which’s a relief, I wouldn’t be able to stand having to see his ugly face at practice every day. I already have to see you, that’s bad enough—”
“You don’t have to pretend like it’s okay,” Hajime interrupts. “That’s what I’m saying. I can feel that it’s not okay.”
There’s another pause, and then Tooru sits up suddenly, his perfect hair mussed from lying on Hajime’s pillows. “Don’t do that, Iwa-chan,” he says. His voice is weird, but he’s trying so hard to pretend it isn’t, except he can’t pretend, because Hajime can feel the insecurity building in the air. “It’s rude to try to sense other people’s feelings. It’s an invasion of privacy.”
“I’m not trying to,” Hajime says, raising his voice slightly. “I can’t help it. It’s all over the room.”
Tooru stares at him. Hajime feels his skin prickle. Now there’s a tinge of fear to Tooru’s biomagnetic field, the same fear he felt when Tooru answered the door earlier and it was the specialists, in their blue surgical gloves.
“Come here,” Tooru says, and in an instant his long legs are swinging over the side of the bed and he’s standing in the middle of Hajime’s bedroom, in a too-small sweater from last winter, a pair of Hajime’s sweatpants. Hajime stares at him, distracted by the piece of Tooru’s hair that falls into his eyes, before shaking himself.
“What?”
“Come here,” Tooru repeats, standing as tall as he can, raking his hair back and looking oddly lonely even surrounded by Hajime’s laundry. Lonely but determined. Hajime’s not sure if it’s the biomagnetism or just the firm press of Tooru’s mouth, but Hajime feels suddenly, uncomfortably warm.
“What for?” he asks, but he’s already standing up from the desk, because he knows Tooru won’t let it go. When he steps toward Tooru, two steps across the small bedroom, he can feel the build-up of electricity in the air, and the way Tooru’s trying to hold his panic at bay. When he takes two more steps, the fear and nervousness creeps under Hajime’s skin until he begins to feel nervous, himself.
It feels like all his atoms are standing at attention.
“Do you feel it?” Tooru demands.
Hajime’s arms prickle, and he wraps them around himself as Tooru takes another baby step forward, until they’re nearly toe-to-toe. Hajime hasn’t been this close to him since the Kageyama incident. The specialists told Tooru not to touch anyone until they figured out if he was dangerous.
Dangerous. Hajime understands why.
He can feel the biomagnetic field radiating between them. Every hair on Hajime’s arms stands up, and he can’t look away from Tooru’s dark eyes, his eyebrows drawn together in his intensity, the stray eyelash that has dropped to his cheek.
Tooru has always been a bit painful to stand near, even when they were kids. Hajime remembers the first time Tooru clung to him, crying, after falling out of a tree, and Hajime nearly began crying too. Later on he had chalked the feeling up to empathy, or a sort of telepathic ability that they developed after too many nights sleeping back-to-back, until Hajime could feel Tooru’s emotions and Tooru could feel Hajime’s.
But Tooru can’t feel Hajime’s. Not like this.
Hajime feels his breath stick in his throat as Tooru moves even closer, their toes touching, a tingle going up Hajime’s entire body. He thinks dimly that he hasn’t seen Tooru be quiet for this long in months, but the thought vanishes into pure shock when Tooru touches his arms.
The biomagnetism flows directly from Tooru’s body into Hajime’s like an electrical circuit, lighting up all Hajime’s atoms, and his whole body burns with the sensation. He can barely register where Tooru is touching him, because it feels like Tooru is touching him everywhere, inside and out, like Hajime has become Tooru. It’s not painful per se but it’s overwhelming, it’s touch and taste and Hajime’s eyes blur a bit, his mouth working over the sheer shock of it all. Because it’s not just the electricity—Hajime can feel Tooru’s emotions, all of them, so powerful it’s like he’s having a breakdown in the club room after a hard loss, rising anxiety and fear and insecurity over—over—over everyone knowing, insecurity so stark and whole and all-consuming there’s no room for embarrassment.
Tooru is terrified. Hajime is terrified.
“Stop,” Hajime gasps, pulling back, and he sees Tooru blanch, but even more he feels it, the spike in frequency, and Hajime has to grab the bedpost to stop himself from collapsing like Kageyama.
Tooru stumbles backward, into the bedside table, and Hajime heaves air, clinging to the bed. He doesn’t understand what just happened, only that Tooru’s emotions suddenly became too much. Tooru hides his face in his hair, turning away, but Hajime can still feel the fear pulsing through the room. He can see the whiteness of Tooru’s knuckles on the table.
“Sorry,” Hajime gasps when he can breathe again, but Tooru shakes his head furiously. Hajime gets a glimpse of tears on his face before he turns away, grabbing his things off the bed. Or he’s pretty sure he saw it. There’s no way he could just— feel Tooru crying, especially from three feet away.
“I have to go,” Tooru grits out, but he doesn’t brush Hajime’s arm when he hurries past him. He doesn’t touch him at all. It takes a few moments to hear the front door slam and a few more moments for the biomagnetism to drain out of the room, and Hajime leans against the bed, ears ringing, trying to catch his breath, trying not to ache from the loss of all the emotion.
For three days, Tooru refuses to come back over to Hajime’s. He’s not at school, because the specialists are running diagnostics on him, so Hajime goes silently between classes and researches biomagnetism instead of paying attention. The research is shoddy and scarce. Scientists hypothesize that the biomagnetic fields around human hearts can allow them to sense each other’s moods, but only on a very small scale, nothing like the overwhelming obviousness of Tooru’s emotions.
On the third day, Hajime finally messages him, even though he has an unspoken rule that he never messages Tooru first. Tooru already texts him too much, any and every thought he has during the day. For example they’ll be sitting right next to each other at lunch, and Matsukawa will be telling a story, and Tooru just won’t be able to wait for a break in the conversation, so he’ll text Hajime, Did you see that hideous pimple on Mr. Yamamoto’s nose today? If you’re not careful, Iwa-chan, you’ll end up looking just like him ♥ ♥ ♥
But today Hajime messages him first, just once.
The girls are asking about you, Shittykawa.
Tooru doesn’t respond, not that Hajime expects him to. He just sends the text because he knows that wherever Tooru is, he’ll see it. Tooru’s always glued to his phone examining some volleyball lineup or telling Hajime that his horoscope has him doomed for some bad luck this week. Hajime just wants Tooru to see the text and know that nothing’s changed, even with the new diagnosis. No matter what does change, it will take more than a biomagnetic shock to get rid of Hajime.
Later that day, Hajime’s doing laundry when he hears a banging on the front door and knows it’s Tooru. He yells, “Give me a goddamn second!” and finishes throwing his towels into the drying before yanking the door open. He can feel Tooru’s barely concealed relief, still laced with the nerves and the anxiety and the exhaustion. The exhaustion is new, but Hajime is just glad to see Tooru’s worn Matrix t-shirt and curly hair.
“Iwa-chan,” Tooru huffs, like nothing is wrong, like he was over here just yesterday. “Don’t make your guests wait, it’s rude.”
Hajime rolls his eyes, holding the door open. “I have other things to do besides waiting on you hand and foot.”
“What could possibly be more important than me?” Tooru says, stepping around him into the house, careful not to touch.
They don’t talk about the touching thing. They just lie on Hajime’s bedroom floor and do homework together, and Hajime shows Tooru all the classwork he’s missed, and Tooru whines that it’s so much. When Tooru tosses a pencil at Hajime’s nose, Hajime smacks it into the ground with a loud thump, and Tooru gasps.
“No need to be so violent, Iwa-chan!”
“Don’t be such a brat, then,” Hajime snaps.
“You weren’t listening to me,” Tooru says. “I’ve been gone for three days, haven’t you missed having some intellectual conversation in your life?”
“I’ve been enjoying the peace and quiet.”
“Some of us have thoughts, Iwa-chan, not that you’d understand about—”
Hajime throws the pencil back at him, smacking him square into his forehead, and the split-second of pure surprise that flashes in Tooru’s wide brown eyes makes Hajime’s body go warm, for some reason. Something in his stomach squirms.
“So violent,” Tooru whines, his pretty face scrunching up into something pouty, and Hajime tries to shove away the squirmy feeling, unsuccessfully. “My face is extremely valuable. You shouldn’t attack it.”
“Your face is hideous,” Hajime tells him, glad that Tooru can’t sense his own biomagnetic field. Of course Tooru knows he’s pretty, but he doesn’t need to know that Hajime thinks so.
Tooru waves that away, like he always does, the biomagnetism around them settling again. It’s not uncomfortable to be so close to him, not today, until Tooru purses his lips and says, “I want to try something.”
Immediately Hajime’s whole body goes alert. His brain flashes back to Tooru saying “Come here,” and the almost irresistible pull that drew Hajime across the room to him. “What?” he says, cautious.
“I want to see how close you have to be,” Tooru says. “To feel my emotions. I need to know the range of the biomagnetic field.”
“I can feel it from here,” Hajime says, still careful, and Tooru makes a face.
“Well—” He bites the inside of his cheek. “Alright. Let’s see how far away you have to go before you stop feeling it.”
Hajime doesn’t say that he could feel Tooru’s biomagnetism from through the door earlier, he doesn’t say that he could feel Tooru’s impatience and anxiety before he even let him inside the house. “Okay,” he says instead.
So Tooru sits on the bed against the wall, Hajime’s pillow in his lap, and Hajime tries sitting at the desk, then standing by the door, then standing at the top of the stairs. The problem is that Hajime knows Tooru so well. He’s been sensing Tooru’s emotions his whole life, in one way or another, and no matter how far he gets, he can still guess how Tooru’s feeling. He’s not sure if it’s the biomagnetism or just intuition, and it’s a little worrying to think that even if the specialists fix Tooru’s biomagnetic field, Hajime will still have a front-row seat to Tooru’s emotions.
It’s bound to get exhausting. Scratch that, it already is exhausting. Everything about Tooru is exhausting.
Hajime doesn’t want to examine that particular train of thought.
“I think it’s sort of faded now,” Hajime says, once he’s standing on the middle of the staircase. Tooru blinks owlishly at him from the bed, through Hajiime’s open bedroom door.
“Sort of?”
“I don’t know, dumbass, it’s not like I can see the air vibrating.”
“What if I get angry, though?” Tooru muses. “That’s supposed to make the field stronger, so you’d need to be further away if I was angry.”
“You want me to piss you off?” Hajime’s already thinking of things he could say to make Tooru mad—he could say they saw a UFO at school while he was absent, or that he showed Tooru’s fangirls a photo of his bedhead. Or he could bring up Kageyama. But Hajime’s not sure he wants to bring up Kageyama.
“Stop it,” says Tooru. “I know that face you’re making. You’re coming up with ways to be mean to me!” He throws the pillow toward Hajime, hard enough that it sails across the hallway and skids towards the stairs, rolling down to his feet. Hajime grabs it and bounds back up the stairs, heading into the bedroom.
“It looks like I have to be about a few rooms away before I stop sensing things,” he says.
Tooru twists his mouth to the side. Hajime can tell this isn’t what he wanted to hear, and he wonders why the specialists hadn’t told him this already—what have they been running diagnostics on, exactly?
“But the further you are the more the feelings fade,” Tooru says, and Hajime nods. Tooru sighs. “Okay,” he says. “I’ll just have to be careful, then. It will be hard keeping the paparazzi at arm’s length. You’ll have to be my bodyguard, Iwa-chan.”
“I’m already your babysitter,” Hajime says. “Against my own will.”
“Rude.” Tooru clicks his tongue. “If anything, I’m your babysitter. Well. Maybe your personal coach. Or the dog trainer. After all, someone had to domesticate you.”
Hajime shoves the pillow down over his face, muffling Tooru’s wails of protest, but he’s careful not to touch him, he’s careful to step back once Tooru shoves him off, he’s careful not to get too close.
This is the second rule. Don’t get too close to him.
The specialists call Tooru “patient zero.” A prototype. The first known instance of whatever-the-fuck is wrong with him, an anomaly, a medical miracle. Hajime feels restless when he hears them use the nickname for the first time— “Keep an eye on patient zero”—first of all because Tooru has a name, he’s not just a patient in a study. And second because, well. Tooru is already such a lonely person. He has crowds and crowds of acquaintances and fans, sure, but Hajime’s one of Tooru’s only real friends, the only one who has seen Tooru cry and sleep and eat chocolate and cuddle with his mom.
It seems unfair for Tooru to be alone in this, too.
Since that first day, no one has told Hajime any new information about the biomagnetism, but the specialists bring Tooru in every Sunday afternoon for testing. On Sundays, Tooru used to hang back after practice and keep serving across the net to a reluctant Hajime, so Hajime can tell that the testing is frustrating for him. And a few weeks later, the specialists begin to show up at school, too, to “observe” the way people interact with Tooru’s biomagnetic field.
Today, they’re eating lunch in the classroom and the specialists are lurking in the back of the room, taking notes on their clipboards and snickering with each other. Hajime is sitting next to Tooru with his back to the specialists, but he can feel their eyes on him, his neck prickling every time he imagines he can hear them whispering. Tooru feels restless, too. Tooru loves attention, but this isn’t the good kind of attention, and Hajime can tell from the too-loud tone of his voice that Tooru’s trying desperately to perform for the specialists. Except he’s not sure how to perform. No one knows what the specialists are hoping to see.
“Let me guess first,” Hanamaki says, unwrapping his bento box across the table. “Angry?” He and Matsukawa have made a game out of trying to put a name to whatever Tooru’s feeling, but even though everyone can feel the moods bleeding off him, Hanamaki never manages to interpret the emotions exactly right.
“You always guess angry,” says Matsukawa. “There are different emotions, you know.”
“I dunno,” Hanamaki says, shrugging. “He always feels angry to me.”
“I’m not angry,” Tooru says. “Anyway, this isn’t a fun game, you guys have no emotional intelligence. The only emotions you feel are volleyball and food. ”
“You forgot about tits, ” says Hanamaki wisely.
Tooru sniffs. “You’re never going to get a girl with the emotional range of a sea sponge,” he says. “Women like sensitive men. You need to get more in touch with your feminine side or you’re going to be alone forever.”
Hanamaki bickers back, and Hajime focuses on his food, trying to block out Tooru’s annoying voice. Hanamaki and Tooru like to talk about girls a lot—who in their class is dating who, who confessed to Tooru this week, things like that. Hajime sometimes catches them discussing this dating reality show they both pretend not to watch. Matsukawa actually has a girlfriend right now, although she goes to another high school and Hajime has only met her once.
In middle school, Hajime kept waiting for his own interest in girls to crop up. But it hasn’t, and Hajime is beginning to have a horrible suspicion as to why. It’s like staring at the sun so long you go blind, or feeling cold so long you get desensitized to it. Hajime grew up curled under covers with someone ethereally beautiful, and Tooru has ruined his eyes.
“How was your doctor’s appointment yesterday?” Hajime asks, once Tooru has finished nagging Hanamaki about being in tune with his emotions. Tooru glances at him, a piece of his hair falling into his eyes, the sun from the window illuminating the halo of his curls, and Hajime wants to throw something at Tooru for ruining his eyes, but then Hajime would have to explain himself, and, well. He’ll wait until practice when he has a better excuse for his violence.
“It was fine,” Tooru says, sounding suspicious. “Why?”
Hajime shrugs. “Just wondering.”
“They’re all the same,” Tooru says, picking up his chopsticks. “I walk in, blah blah blah, they put wires all over my body, they give me x-rays, they leave and gossip about me where I can’t hear. It’s very dull.”
“What have they learned?”
Tooru squints at him. “What do you mean?”
Hajime feels thrown for a loop, like Tooru is purposely misunderstanding him, purposely trying to be difficult. “They’re running all these tests,” Hajime says, feeling a bit stupid. “What are they learning? What are they telling you?”
“They’re not telling me anything,” Tooru says.
Hanamaki and Matsukawa both go quiet. Hajime furrows his eyebrows, watching Tooru turn back to his lunch, picking up his chopsticks with tense fingers, the anxiety in his biomagnetism rising. Tooru doesn’t want to talk about this. Hanamaki and Matsukawa might not be able to read Tooru’s moods perfectly even though he’s a walking feelings broadcast, but Hajime can, and he knows this one: Tooru is putting up walls, pushing them away.
“That’s bullshit,” Hajime says, and Tooru’s frequency spikes quickly, his shoulders tightening. Hajime isn’t going to let him get away with it, though. “Do you just not want to tell me? I can ask your mother if I want, you know.”
“They’re not telling her anything either,” Tooru says, his voice tight, irritated. “I told you, they go behind closed doors to gossip. They keep saying they can’t answer any questions until they have conclusive evidence, whatever that means.”
“So they won’t tell you anything?”
“That’s what I said, Iwa-chan, maybe try to keep up.”
Hajime glares at him and raises his hand automatically to flick Tooru’s temple before he remembers: don’t touch him. Hajime drops his hand on the table, feeling even more annoyed. “Well, you never tell me anything. You just disappear off to this mysterious doctor’s office, how do I know they’re not testing illegal drugs on you or something?”
“Maybe the biomagnetism thing isn’t even real,” Hanamaki suggests. “And the doctors just want fame from publishing a paper about it.”
“That could be possible,” Matsukawa agrees.
“But we can feel it,” Hajime says. Of course there’s something wrong with Tooru—everyone was in the gym when Kageyama collapsed. Tooru’s kept his emotions reigned in better since then, but it’s impossible not to walk into a room and immediately know whether he’s happy or sad, the energy radiating off him like heat.
“Well, yeah,” says Matsukawa. “But maybe he’s just, you know, really expressive, like he was saying.”
“Yeah,” says Hanamaki. “Maybe that’s why all the girls like him. It’s just the emotional range or whatever.”
“Stop,” snaps Tooru, and they all look at him, surprised—normally Tooru loves hearing about his fans, but Hajime can feel the anger rising off him, his face red, his mouth twisted. Too late, Hajime sees his hand clenched around the chopsticks, knuckles straining. “Stop talking about me like—like I’m not here. I’m sitting right in front of you. I’m not a fucking test subject.”
“Sorry,” says Matsukawa immediately, but the red doesn’t fade from Tooru’s face. Hajime is just about to say fuck the rules and touch him, even if Tooru’s anger hurts Hajime—burns him, shocks him, whatever—just to calm Tooru down.
But before Hajime can reach out, the specialists are there, pushing Hajime’s chair to the side.
“Oikawa,” the woman says, touching the base of Tooru’s neck with her gloved hand, and the man takes Hajime’s shoulder and pulls him out of his seat.
“Oi,” Hajime says, but the specialists already have their blue gloves on both of Tooru’s arms, pushing the chairs out of the way to pull him away from the table. Tooru’s hair is in his face, and the classroom has gone silent again. Hajime can hear his heartbeat pounding in his ears, his thighs pressed to the back of the desk, as the woman puts a metal sensor to Tooru’s heart and it beeps once, loud and piercing, into the silence.
“He’s a liability,” the woman tells the man. “Get him to the car, immediately.”
“Don’t touch me,” Tooru starts, but the man snaps,
“There are people in this room, Oikawa, do you want to hurt them?”
Hajime feels it flash through Tooru’s boiling anger then:
Fear.
The emotion is gone as soon as it comes, because the specialists have hurried Tooru out of the room, into the crowded hallways, shouting at students to get out of the way. Their voices leave a ringing silence, and when Hajime manages to look over at Hanamaki and Matsukawa, they’re both red, sitting stiffly in their seats.
“I didn’t mean,” Hanamaki begins, but he doesn’t finish. Hajime doesn’t expect him to. He’s still reeling from the suddenness of it—how quickly it all blew out of proportion. Hajime knows Tooru’s not dangerous. But he feels that same heart-sinking fear that he felt on the day the specialists first showed up, that oh, god, no.
This is the third rule.
Tooru is not allowed to get angry.