Work Text:
It starts like this.
He’s nine, and you’re ten, and the world is the size of a football field. In other words, it is both very, very small, and very, very big. In other words, his outstretched hand, his moon gold eyes, are enough to make you trip right over the skittering syllables of your own name.
In other words, you fall in love.
Which is silly, because you’re ten, so you have better things to do, probably, like practicing volleyball receives with Kenma, or missing the last turn at the intersection and getting lost on the way to the supermarket (again), or that last bit of math homework still gathering dust on your desk. You have a whole mountain’s worth of things to do.
But it’s Saturday morning, ten a.m., and there’s a beautiful boy on your front doorstep. He just moved in next door, where the Hiraide’s used to stay, with their stuffed animal-sized chihuahua that would scream dog-profanities at every passing car. He’s smiling at you like you’re made of stars.
“Nice to meet you! I’m Tsukishima. Tsukishima Kei.”
He’s smiling at you, so you can't look away.
::
Flash forward and you’re fifteen, with too-long limbs and rain-pricked skin and a glass heart that you don’t know how to handle yet. You’ve just made a girl cry. She wears black-rimmed glasses and a magazine model smile, and she can sprint faster than you. She has a voice like wind chimes.
It’s barely four in the afternoon, but the sun sets earlier during the winter months, so you can’t really make out the expression on her face anymore. All you know is she’s crying, because you can hear it, because she’s wiping furiously at her eyes. Her small, shivering silhouette is painted orange in the dying light.
She says I’m in love with you, and you think of Tsukishima Kei.
Perhaps the situation is more complicated than you imagined it to be; perhaps it’s not. Fifteen is a funny place to be, all this awkward, seesawing laughter and these scribbled foolscap love letters waving like white flags in the wind. You grew up listening to 2000’s love songs, daydreaming about the dimly lit bars and the Capri-sun beaches. You are familiar with a different brand of feeling.
And this— this is— you don’t have a word for it yet. You don’t know a lot of things. At fifteen, the world is still no larger than a city, a Tokyo-sized universe full of winking green men and zebra-striped sidewalks.
You’ve just made a girl cry. Her name is Ibara, and she beat you in sprints during the annual sports festival. She opens the front door of her heart, and asks you in a faltering, swanlike voice to look into your own. Am I in there? She’s looking for an answer. Is the person standing in that hallway me?
So you do this. The empty classroom is candlelight-faint and most of the students have gone home; your throat is dry. You turn the key in the lock of your own stupidly-whole glass heart, and you look inside, and oh.
Oh.
You tell her you’re sorry, so she cries. You’re so sorry you almost wish you were in love with her, but, really, you’re too selfish for that, so you don’t. Fifteen year olds are always selfish. You have never been an exception.
Afterwards, when you duck back out into the hallway, Tsukishima is there, leaning against the notice board with the recruitment poster for library volunteers pinned up above the crown of his head. He’s got his white headphones on, and his bag is slung over his shoulder. His eyes are closed.
He doesn’t smile at you like you’re made of stars anymore; reality has long since worn away at the sheen of fairy glitter on his front teeth. But he still plays volleyball, still lets you barge into his bedroom in the morning and drag him out of bed, still walks home with you most days. He still chooses to wait for you after school, when a beautiful girl tugs on your shirtsleeve and smiles at you and says I have something to say to you alone, Kuroo-kun, do you have a minute?
You want to thank him for waiting, but you know he wouldn’t like that. He doesn’t like a lot of things, like bell peppers, and enthusiasm, and the sound of violins in an enclosed room.
I’m in love with you, Kuroo-kun.
You wonder if he’d hate it if you reached out and touched his cheek right now. If it would be cold, or soft, and the gesture storybook sweet. You let the thought go. The sun sets earlier during these months, the temperature dipping like the retreating tide slipping away from the shoreline, and Tsukishima didn’t bring a scarf.
“Hey.”
At the sound of your voice, he looks up, something unrecognizable flashing past his eyes for a sliver of a second. He inclines his head in the direction of the staircase, and together you begin the lonely walk back out.
Later on, you look up at the canvas of the night sky, bruised like the exposed flesh of a peach.
“She cried. I wasn’t expecting that. She cried a lot."
He doesn’t say anything, but you know he’s listening. For now, that’s good enough for your Tokyo-sized universe and the paint-splattered mess of your head. For now, that’s good enough for your Tokyo-sized heart.
::
Or maybe it starts like this:
The sound of helium singing in the silver threads of his laughter at ten. The sharpness of starlight in his eyes at thirteen. The way he learns to ignore all your bullshit by fifteen.
Or maybe it starts like this. The line of his jaw, the slender curve of his wrist, the way the light falls across his cheeks, scattering petals of gold across his apple-white skin. You’re fifteen, and you can’t look away. You’re sixteen, and you can’t look away. You’re seventeen, and you can’t look away.
In every part of this story, on every page, is a little shard of moonlight. And underneath that, your star struck smile, your eyes glued to the ceiling of the sky, his name thrumming like a heartbeat between your ribs.
In every story, someone falls in love. Every night, you dream.
::
He kisses you when you’re eighteen.
When you’re young and stupid but older-young and older-stupid, and he’s figured out enough about himself to realize he’s allowed to want things from life, and the supermarket is no longer several magical adventures away from your front door, he kisses you.
It’s Monday, five p.m., the sound of the track and field team’s chants echoing through the half-shut windows. You’re hidden behind a crowd of chairs at the back of your classroom like a secret.
Without you realizing it, your old uniforms grew to be too small for you, and the football-field world swelled to the size of several galaxies. Without you realizing it, you outgrew the Capri-sun beaches, the seesawing laughter. Suddenly, it is summer again. Suddenly, you have to look up to meet his eyes. Suddenly— Suddenly—
When he pulls away, his ears are tinted pink, and his knuckles are bone-white where his hands are clenched around the collar of your shirt. He lowers his gaze gingerly.
You can still feel the ghost-sensation of his lips on yours, his breath on your skin, the dizzying smell of summer clinging to your bent elbows and crooked knees. Your heart’s beating so fast you wonder if it might have broken.
He punctures the silence, uneasy.
“I’m sorry if I made you uncomfortable, Kuroo, we can pretend it never happe—“
“You’re not taking that back.”
“Huh?”
You gently pry his hands off your collar, rubbing circles into his knuckles with your thumbs.
“I said, you can’t take that back anymore, Tsukki.”
He tilts his head to the side, ears still very, very red, and stares at you.
“Why?”
“Because I’m not letting you.”
“I—“
And then you kiss him again, because you’re eighteen and he’s seventeen and something’s beginning all over again in this stuffy washed-up classroom, like a held breath being let out into the cool morning air, like a spring breeze washing over you at the tail-end of winter, like a heartache you never knew you had fading away into the soft static of the background. Your stupidly-whole glass heart is so full, you think it might just break apart. Your heart is so fucking full.
You’re eighteen when a beautiful boy kisses you, and he looks at you like you’ve painted the canvas of the night sky full of tiny, twinkling stars.
You don't know how to tell him that he's the one who gave you enough moonlight to paint by in the first place.
“Okay,” he says quietly, his hands still caught gently between yours, not protesting. “I can live with that.”
::
In other words, you fell in love. You fell in love.