Archive of Our Own ^beta

Tsukishima Kei is standing alone in the frozen desserts aisle of the convenience store when he hears the bells above the door chime, the owner’s greeting ringing over the low buzzing of the refrigerators. 

“Good afternoon,” the visitor greets back, voice a low murmur. Kei feels like he’s been pushed off a cliff into freezing cold water.

--

“Tsukki!”

“-shima,” Kei corrects. He stops, but he doesn’t turn around. “What do you want?”

“Since this is going to be our last training camp together,” and that makes Kei turn around, because he has over the past year accumulated something absolutely terrible called caring , “we thought we would all bully you into giving us your number.”

Kei blinks. Standing in front of him, Bokuto beams with all the luminosity and inconvenience of a phone screen turned up to max brightness in the dark, Akaashi is apologizing profusely through the power of his eyes alone, and Kuroo - well.

Kuroo is Kuroo. That’s all Kei has ever really been able to say.

“You can’t reject us now!” Bokuto says triumphantly. “We have the power of the guilt-trip on our side.” He says the words ‘guilt trip’ like they’re an ultra rare Pokemon. “So give us your digits! Give! Us! Your! Digits!”

Kei sighs. He really wishes Yamaguchi hadn’t done that stupid thing where he’d yelled at him about being uncool and gotten him to feel, admittedly, microscopically bad about his disinterest, because that tiny amount of character growth is what makes him hold his hand out and say, “phone,” in Kuroo’s direction.

In response, Kuroo crows (ha , Kei thinks, rooster hair joke ) in victory and all but slaps his brick of a cell phone into Kei’s hand. Bokuto makes a loud whining sound in protest. “No fair! You always listen to Kuroo more!”

“It’s just ‘cause I’m taller,” Kuroo says with conviction. 

“ Two centimetres- ”

“I’m turning in for the night,” Kei cuts them off, because it’s getting alarmingly late and someone is bound to come over and yell at them, given Bokuto’s complete inability to remain below 100 decibels. He slides the phone back into Kuroo’s outstretched hand. “Share, or whatever.”

Bokuto’s complaints (“Kuroo’s a dick, he’s gonna make me buy him lunch or something in exchange-”) follow him all the way down the cement path, fading only when he turns the corner and slips out of sight.

--

“Good afternoon.”

Kei freezes, his heart beating erratically. From what, he’s not sure - is he excited? Nervous? God forbid, scared ? He considers escaping through the freezer doors, then considers slamming his head into the display next to him. Should he say hello? Is he one hundred percent sure his voice isn’t going to crack like he’s a first-year in high school all over again? 

His thoughts are running a mile a minute, but his feet stay rooted to the ground, his back to the rest of the store. He watches the aisle behind him through the reflection in the door, tracking the bit of Kuroo’s hair that peeks above the tops of the shelves as he wanders. It’s just as messy and inconvenient as Kei remembers it, just with an extra sheen of polish.

Kei realizes, snapping out of his hair-centric trance, that Kuroo is rounding the corner into the aisle he’s standing in, Kuroo is going to see-

A pause, the squeak of expensive shoes against a worn-out floor. Then, soft, and just a little disbelieving: “Tsukishima?”

Something in Kei’s chest clenches. He turns slowly, in a way he hopes will come off unaffected, even as he thinks about that voice calling Tsukki! on a warm summer night. 

“Kuroo,” he says. “It’s been a while.”

Kuroo, for a singular moment, looks just as shocked as Kei feels, an expression that is strangely comforting. He’s wearing a sharp black suit, jacket slung over his shoulders, shirtsleeves rolled up against the stifling heat. He looks - well, intimidating , in a way that makes him seem taller than everyone else in the room. 

He takes a few steps closer, purposefully charismatic, measured in his carelessness. He’s a lot like the boy Kei knew all those years ago, just wrapped up in layers of polish and executive titles. 

But then he says, “I knew it was you,” and suddenly all those layers fall away.

Kei scoffs, because it’s his default reaction, and straying from the script now would only cause catastrophic damage. “Don’t try to sound cool, you could see my reflection in the freezer door.”

“Maybe,” Kuroo acquiesces. Kei gets to breathe a sigh of relief, because he’s re-treading the same path they’ve been taking for years - snarking at each other to cover up all the fondness brewing underneath. “Or maybe there aren’t a lot of people in this town that are blond and six foot five.”

Kei smiles very, very faintly. “Rude,” he says. “I’m an extremely average citizen.”

Kuroo laughs, sharp eyes turning soft. “I would have to disagree.” He walks over to stand next to Kei, long strides closing the gap between them until he’s right there, warmth radiating off his skin, leaning forward casually to inspect the frozen desserts. Kei thinks he must be doing this on purpose - some kind of psychological warfare. “So, ‘average citizen’, what do you recommend?”

The cold white light of the freezer is bright on the planes of Kuroo’s face. Kei very forcefully redirects his eyes to the row of popsicles sitting at eye level, and points at a box of assorted “fruit” - strong emphasis on the quotation marks - bars. They happen to be princess-themed. “They suit your image,” he explains.

Kuroo makes an indignant noise - the first thing, Kei notes triumphantly, he’s done so far that hasn’t been impossibly suave and rehearsed. “I am an accomplished businessman -”

“Doesn’t stop you from being a dumbass,” Kei says. He very carefully doesn’t admit that Kuroo actually looks pretty good in that suit. 

Kuroo throws his head back and cackles, which would be an idiotic sight if it weren’t for the smooth lines of his neck, the bob of his Adam’s apple as he laughs. Kei swallows hard,  distracts himself by opening the freezer door and retrieving two boxes of the aforementioned princess pops. 

“I can’t believe Daichi managed to deal with you for a whole year,” Kuroo says, amused. Kei freezes in his tracks.

“You still keep in touch with him?” he asks. His thumbs dig into the popsicle box, denting the cardboard. Damn it , he thinks. Damn it.

Kuroo, perceptive as always, pauses. Kei can feel dark eyes on him, but he just stares stubbornly at the bright colors of the box in his hands, advertising all the flavors. “Yeah,” Kuroo says, measured. “Not as often as I’d like to, but yeah.”

Kei swallows. “Sure,” he says, suddenly wishing he hadn’t said anything at all.

--

What they don’t talk about is what happens in the years after Kuroo graduates, Kei’s phone number saved to his contacts. 

They text. A lot. Kuroo sends him memes and complains about school and traffic and the crowded train ride - you’ve been living in Tokyo almost your whole life, why are you acting like you’ve just discovered congestion exists, Kei replies - and sometimes, on the rare nights they’re both free, they video call for hours on end. Both of them whisper, headphones plugged into their laptops so they don’t disturb the people living with them, Kuroo lying on his bed, Kei sitting upright at his desk. They talk about volleyball and watch bad movies and do homework in silence. It isn’t much, but Kei soon grows used to the sight of Kuroo’s dorm walls, the posters and the jersey and the scattered clothes; of Kuroo’s face in the foreground, heavy eyelids drooping even lower with exhaustion. 

Kei learns that, once Kuroo’s face goes slack, it means he’s on the last of his energy reserves. At that point, he says, “go to bed,” and coerces Kuroo into at least changing into pyjamas before passing out. Then he allows himself ten more seconds on the video call before hanging up and going about with his night.

What he doesn’t say is “good night.” He doesn’t say, “let’s do this again next week,” or, “I’ll talk to you later.” Kuroo says enough of that for both of them and then some, he reasons.

But it must be tiring, pulling that weight all on his own. So after a year and a half, they don’t talk at all.

--

Kuroo clears his throat. “Well,” he continues, “I’m in Sendai for the next week and a half. Maybe I’ll see you again,” and a smile slides back onto his face, just a little greasier and more disingenuous than before. Kei doesn’t know whether to be relieved or disappointed.

“Don’t go out of your way to see me,” he says. Kuroo just laughs, because he’s known Kei long enough to understand. “You still play on a team?”

Abruptly, Kuroo’s laughing becomes strained, and his eyes shutter. Blocking out the light. Great. Kei had managed to provoke the master of provocation himself, and he hadn’t even meant to. He feels like there’s a weight sitting on his sternum, preventing him from breathing properly.

“Ah,” Kuroo says, “I don’t really do that anymore.”

And if it had been anyone else saying those words to him - Hinata, maybe, or Kageyama, definitely - Kei probably would’ve said something about being a hypocrite, for giving up after all he’d said about being passionate. But something about the way Kuroo says I don’t really do that anymore makes Kei think that maybe it wasn’t his choice, so all he says is “A shame,” and leaves it at that.

Kuroo’s eyebrows skyrocket. Kei realizes, too late, that he’s made a mistake. 

“ Ohohohoho?” Kuroo says. “I didn’t realize you were so invested in my volleyball career, Tsukki.”

Kei groans. “Stop calling me that. And I’m not.”

“That’s not what you said ten seconds ago.” Kuroo leans back, pressing the back of his hand to his forehead dramatically. “ Oh, Kuroo-senpai, I don’t know what I’d do without you- ”

“I’m going to lock you in this freezer,” Kei threatens. Kuroo just cackles.

“You wouldn’t do that, you care about me.” Kuroo’s grin is as wide and as smarmy as ever. Kei is, unfortunately, a little relieved that the tension is gone from his shoulders.

“Eat shit,” he says. Kuroo cackles louder.

He looks like he’s about to say something even more gross and infuriating when his phone beeps from his pocket - since when did Kuroo leave his ringer on? He used to take hours to reply to Kei’s messages, because his phone was always on silent. He checks the Caller ID and grimaces. “Work calls,” he explains, and snatches one of the boxes of popsicles from Kei’s arms. “I’ve got high hopes for these. Let’s see each other again, yeah?” 

And then he winks ( winks ), turns on his heel, and leaves. Kei stands there, frozen, shivering in the cold air.

Let’s see each other again, yeah?

--

When he finally makes his way to the cash register to check out, the shop owner is grinning at him, all conspiratorial. “A nice friend you have there,” she says conversationally, in a way that sets off every single alarm bell in Kei’s brain. (The ones that are programmed to go off every time someone tries to set him up on a date.) “He told me to give you this. Paid for it and everything.”

She reaches behind her and pulls out a huge slice of strawberry shortcake, sitting neatly in its plastic container. Kei almost has a heart attack

--

He fully expects not to see Kuroo again. 

They’re both busy, after all - and Kuroo is the type of person to say let’s see each other again and I missed you and I knew you always cared about me without meaning it, not out of malice but because that’s just the way he is. Polite, and considerate, and above all, flirty.

And that’s how two, three days pass - Kei goes to work and comes home and goes to practice. The slice of cake sits in his fridge the whole time, being eaten tiny morsel by tiny morsel (because he’s watching his weight, he tells himself, even though his BMI is as low as ever). He doesn’t run into Kuroo once.

His week wraps up with a weekend shift at the museum, giving group tours by appointment. It’s not his ideal job - he’d much rather be a curator or an archivist - but he’s lucky that he’s where he wants to be, and it’s not like he can’t work his way up. And he finds he has the strength to deal with screaming children and ignorant tourists when he’s talking about something he likes.

It’s his last tour of the day, a pair of couples on a double date. Kei hates these ones the most, but to the tourists’ credit they’re pretty subdued, quietly talking to each other when he leaves them alone to admire the exhibits for themselves. 

Which is what is currently happening when a very familiar voice whispers, right next to his  ear, “found you.”

Kei nearly screams - out of character for him, but in his defense that was extremely creepy - but catches himself at the last second and spins around, furious. In front of him, having seemingly appeared out of nowhere like a demon spawning from hell, Kuroo grins.

“I am at work ,” Kei hisses. “And I nearly had a heart attack. ”

Kuroo grins wider. “Out of joy?”

Kei doesn’t bother justifying that with an answer.

This, unfortunately, doesn’t deter Kuroo.  “You look good in uniform,” he says, referring to the button-down and pressed slacks Kei wears every day, despite the fact that he himself is in a navy blue tailored three-piece. (Kei pretends not to notice this). “But don’t let me distract you. I’ll be right here.” He pats the plaque next to him.

Kei narrows his eyes. “ Don’t touch anything,” he warns, like Kuroo’s a toddler. 

Kuroo just smiles, feigning innocence. Kei hates to admit it, but he looks really good in the soft lighting of the museum; less sharp and intimidating, more quiet and thoughtful. If only he were actually any of those things.

“Don’t move,” he tacks on just for good measure, and tries not to let his eyes linger as he turns back to the tourist group.

--

Kei, against his better judgment, seeks out Kuroo after his shift. True to his word, he actually hasn’t moved, and is just leaning against a wall in the corner scrolling through his phone. Kei walks up to him, ignoring the hushed whispers surrounding the handsome stranger in a business suit clearly waiting for someone.

“What do you want,” he says.

Kuroo looks up, and his face visibly brightens. Disgusting. He pockets his phone and claps his hands together. “Let me take you to dinner,” he declares.

Kei rolls his eyes. “I already had dinner.”

“Lies,” Kuroo accuses. “Your shift ends at 6, no way you had dinner at - what, 3pm?” He checks his watch, a loud silver thing that somehow doesn’t look obnoxious on Kuroo’s wrist. (Kei hates to admit it, but the man really can pull off anything.) “Let me treat you to dinner. Or at least drive you home.”

Kei eyes him warily, ignoring the way his ribcage feels full and light at the thought of a summer evening with Kuroo, years after the last one. “Why?”

“Because,” Kuroo says simply, like it’s the easiest thing in the world, “I missed you.”

Kei’s breath literally, actually, catches in his throat . He’s ruining his reputation as he speaks. “Lies,” he echoes. “You just want to show off how much money you make in your cushy office job.”

Kuroo laughs. “I never said that wasn’t the case,” he admits. “But I do miss you, and I do know a pretty good place a short drive from here. Come on. Let me take you?”

Kei frowns, racking his brain for an excuse, even as his stomach, wallet, and feet are all screaming say yes!!! (And his heart too, maybe, but it’s a little early for revelations like that). “You’re annoying,” he settles on. Weak.

Kuroo picks up on this, because of course he does. “Great,” he says, “it’s a date, then. Grab your stuff and I’ll meet you in front of the main doors.”

“Call it a date again and I’m not coming,” Kei says.

Kuroo’s already turned on his heel, crossing the exhibit in several long, languid strides. “Free food!” he calls over his shoulder.

He’s got a point.

--

It’s only when Kei is in Kuroo’s car (a sleek black Audi, of course ) that his brain processes the weight of what Kuroo has just said.

I missed you. I miss you.

Kei swallows, hard. When Kuroo had first given that vague offer to spend time together - let’s see each other again - he’d brushed it off as a pleasantry, a force of habit after years of being the captain, the charismatic one, the popular one. It’s the same way he’d brushed off everything else Kuroo has said, on those nights when Kei watched him fall asleep, when he reached out and checked up on Kei before a big test and remembered things Kei doesn’t even remember telling him. Just pleasantries, kind but meaningless.

But then there Kuroo was, showing up at the museum job he remembers Kei mentioning to him, extending an invitation to have dinner together, telling him he misses him like he’s telling him the weather. It’s raining outside. It’s hot today. I missed you .

Kei doesn’t know what to do. He doesn’t want to think about it any further, because if he does then every single justification he’s ever come up with these past few years will mean nothing - the comforting thought that Kuroo didn’t care, that he would probably feel relieved once they stopped talking.

That maybe it was for the best.

Kei risks a glance at the driver’s seat. Kuroo is staring intently at the road, one hand on the wheel, humming quietly to the radio. His tie is loosened and his suit jacket is unbuttoned, cufflinks abandoned in the cupholder. He’s here , driving Kei to dinner of his own volition.

Kei turns back to the window, settles for watching the city rush by. He tries to stop thinking about anything at all.

--

They have a nice dinner. Kei isn’t really surprised - conversation has always been easy with Kuroo, whether it’s through his laptop screen or in the back corner of a bustling hole-in-the-wall ramen place. He feels at ease, making jabs at Kuroo’s hair, glaring when he steals his food. 

Kuroo pays, and then drives Kei home. He waits until Kei’s in the elevator of his apartment building before driving away. A sweet gesture, thoughtful.

Kei takes a long, cold shower, refusing to figure out exactly why he feels warm all over.

--

Kuroo shows up again the next day. “Before you say anything,” Kei says, approaching him after his last tour, “I have practice tonight.”

Kuroo, to Kei’s disgust, doesn’t seem fazed at all. “I’ll drive you there.”

“Why?” Kei asks simply. Because there must be some sort of caveat, something Kuroo wants from him; there’s no way he would just do this for the sake of doing it. Because he, god forbid, enjoys Kei’s company .

Kuroo just shrugs, infuriatingly calm in the face of Kei’s questioning. “I want to.”

Kei raises an eyebrow. “Why,” he repeats.

At that, a part of Kuroo’s charismatic facade slips away, revealing something genuine and bright underneath. “Is it so hard to believe that I just want to spend time with you?”

Kei shrugs. “Yes?”

Kuroo steps closer. Despite not playing volleyball anymore, he’s still in as great a shape as he was in high school, broad and imposing. Kei has to remind himself that he’s the taller one. “Then let me prove it to you,” he says.

Kei can feel his cheeks coloring, the traitors. He figures all those years Kuroo spent wooing half the student population actually had some uses in the long run. “Well,” he says, “you probably made me miss my bus.”

Kuroo breaks into a grin.

--

This car ride isn’t as oppressively silent as the last one. Kuroo asks him about his team, and Kei ignores the wistfulness in his voice when they start discussing a new blocking strategy Kei has been working on.

“Maybe I’ll show up to one of your games,” Kuroo says. “I’ll buy a banner with your name on it and everything, I’ll be extremely embarrassing.”

Kei groans. “Please don’t,” he says. He still hasn’t recovered from that time Yamaguchi and Yachi came to cheer him on. If only they hadn’t met up with Akiteru, too, he thinks, mildly traumatized. Koganegawa hasn’t stopped calling him Tsukki.

Kuroo just cackles like the asshole he is.

They fall into a comfortable silence. Kuroo turns on the radio, leaving it at a low volume and humming along to it as he drives. Cufflinks in the cupholder, tie loosened. Kei hates to think about what he’d do if this becomes something he’s used to.

Five minutes away from their destination, Kuroo says, softly, “thank you for letting me do this.”

Kei blinks, taken aback. “Why are you thanking me?” he asks warily.

From the corner of his eye, Kei sees Kuroo shrug, the most uncertain he’s ever looked since - well, maybe ever. “I just thought you’d turn me down, is all. You’re pretty hard to get ahold of.”

Kei doesn’t know what to say. He thinks about waking up to Kuroo’s late-night rambling texts, about looking forward - although not admitting it - to calling him at the end of the day. About how Kuroo had bookended his life for so long, until he didn’t.

Something in Kei’s chest hardens, grows heavy. “So are you,” he says. “Are you sure you aren’t wasting your precious time doing this?”

“I’m the one who offered, aren’t I?” Kuroo’s words are sharp. Kei looks at him, but his expression is unreadable, his hand relaxed on the steering wheel. Poised as always.

“Right,” Kei says flatly. “How courteous of you.”

Kuroo lets out a breath. “Right,” he echoes. Kei feels himself getting drawn in, like that summer night when they’d practiced together for the first time, Kuroo egging him on until he felt like he no longer had a choice. “It’s all about courtesy.”

Kei scoffs, keeping his eyes fixed on the scenery outside his window, even though it’s a route he’s taken countless times. They’re almost at the gym. “Would you be here if you didn’t feel obligated to?”

Kuroo takes a sharp turn into the parking lot. Kei almost swears, gripping the armrest for support, ignoring the muttered apology he gets. Neither of them say anything else until Kuroo has pulled into the drop-off lane and Kei has one foot out of the car, gym bag already in his hand. He almost thinks they aren’t going to say anything, and that he’s just going to leave like this, in this heavy silence, all his Kuroo-centric regrets staring him right in the face.

Finally, Kuroo speaks up. “So that’s what you think this is,” he says, and the tone of his voice shocks Kei - the uncertainty, for someone who has always been so goddamn perceptive , and the genuine surprise. “Obligation.”

Kei thinks he should maybe look Kuroo in the eye, maybe risk being late to practice and say something meaningful. He feels like they’re standing at the edge of something unknown, something they’ve ignored this entire time. 

But he doesn’t, because Kuroo will leave in a week, and then he’ll go back to being a face pointed out in old photos and tracked on social media. “Thanks for the ride,” he says instead, and closes the door.

--

Kuroo doesn’t show up the next day. Kei takes the bus ride home, the lump in his chest growing heavier by the minute.

--

Kei spends the morning of his day off lying aimlessly around his apartment reading, before dragging himself to the gym after lunch. He’s been practicing his setting; ever since he saw Hinata casually fill in as setter in the Adlers game, so different from the clumsy boy in high school who could barely receive, the fire in him has grown hotter, pushing him to be better.

And he’s not the best, not by a long shot. But he still remembers the first time he’d dug what seemed to be a perfect spike, the screams of his team members and the sting in his skin after Kyoutani had slapped him on the back. All that really matters.

He texts Yamaguchi, who drops by after work to help with his serves and hit his sets. “I can’t believe it,” he keeps saying, when Kei tells him about the past two days. “After all this time, your lives are still connected. Talk about lucky!”

“Lucky isn’t the word I’d use,” Kei mutters, tossing the ball up for a serve. It just barely goes out of bounds, skimming the back corner. Almost a good one. “I still ended up in the same place.”

Yamaguchi sighs, and Kei doesn’t have to look at him to know he’s rolling his eyes. Sometimes he wishes Yamaguchi hadn’t gotten so confident in high school, so he wouldn’t have to live with his judgment all the time. “Because you chose to,” Yamaguchi says.

Kei scoffs. “I’m pretty sure it was Kuroo who-”

“Who what?” Kei looks up at the sudden change in Yamaguchi’s voice, alarmed, but Yamaguchi doesn’t look like he’s about to grab Kei’s collar and shout in his face. He just looks annoyed, in that disgustingly understanding way that he has. Kei regrets their friendship. “Who went out of his way to spend time with you? Who paid for your dinner and drove you around and didn’t ask for anything in return?”

Kei starts, “That’s just because-”

“Even if you think he’s doing it because he’s polite,” Yamaguchi interrupts, “at the very least, you could repay him. Courtesy, right?”

Kei stops. He thinks really hard, but Yamaguchi’s right no matter how he tries to spin things. He sighs. “And Hinata says I’m the scary one.”

Yamaguchi laughs. “I’m just doing this because I care about you, Tsukki.”

Kei looks down, directing his smile at the floor. “Shut up,” he says. Yamaguchi knows what it means.

--

They play until it’s dark out, and then Kei treats Yamaguchi to dinner as a thank-you. Yamaguchi jokes that he should be the one paying instead; this is the only volleyball he gets to play anymore, he says. 

Kei remembers their argument in the summer before university, when Yamaguchi told him he was quitting volleyball to focus on his studies. Kei had called him a coward, yet another ugly thing he’d said in the blinding heat of the moment, and he hadn’t defended himself.

“So what if I am?” he’d said. Kei had looked at the ropy muscles on his arms, the calluses on his fingers from countless serve drills, and thought: Why? “I know I’m making the right choice. I just have to hope I won’t regret it too much.”

He thinks about this, the idea of accepting regret, on the bus ride home. He thinks about the way he’d felt, one foot out of Kuroo’s car, shying away from saying the right thing. He thinks about all those years of silence, how cold he’d felt every time someone mentioned Kuroo’s name in passing, deleting their conversation - two and a half years’ worth - because he didn’t want to know how long it’d been since they’d last spoken. He thinks about being given a chance to start again, and ending up in the same place.

Before his mind can even catch up, he’s getting off his bus kilometres before his stop and running across the street to catch a bus in the opposite direction. It’s been - what, five? Ten? Minutes since the museum closed. Usually they let visitors stay for longer, but if Kuroo is there and can’t find him, will he just go home? Will he stay long enough to get kicked out?

Kei thinks about calling, but he doesn’t know what he would do if Kuroo tells him he’d decided to stop showing up - if it really was just a courtesy thing - so he just checks the time every minute and hopes he’ll make it.

--

The closing receptionist, packing up her things for the day, greets him with a “you’re not supposed to be here.”

“I’m looking for someone,” Kei says. “Have you seen-”

She tilts her head to the ceiling thoughtfully. “Tall, messy hair, business suit? He walked in here ten minutes before closing. I think he’s on the main floor, the sword exhibit.”

“Thanks,” Kei says, mustering up an almost-smile, before ducking under the gate separating the main entrance from the actual museum. 

“You’re lucky, you know,” she says, just as he’s about to make a break for it. He pauses, a little irritated. She grins. “He seems like a real catch.”

“Thanks,” he says again, not bothering to think about what kind of misunderstanding that’s going to create, and takes off.

--

He finds Kuroo all alone in the exhibit, reading off a display. Under the lights, he looks as soft and warm as ever, and Kei has to take a moment to admire the lines of his shoulders under his suit jacket, hands tucked into his pockets, legs impossibly long.

“You’re still here,” he says, a little surprised. 

Kuroo spins around so fast he almost trips, and Kei hates himself for finding it endearing. “You’re here,” he breathes. “I didn’t think you’d be.”

Kei ignores the feeling of a weight lifting off his chest and rolls his eyes. “I had a day off today, dumbass. You should’ve just asked me for my schedule.”

“Sorry,” Kuroo says, not sounding very sorry at all. His eyes haven’t moved from Kei’s. “Did you run here?”

“Only from the lobby, don’t flatter yourself,” Kei says. Kuroo chuckles.

Neither of them say anything for a long moment.

“Why do you always insist on doing this?” Kei asks at the same time that Kuroo says, “I’m not just here for the sake of being nice, you know.”

Kei’s mouth hangs open, an embarrassingly uncharacteristic move. He promptly shuts it. “I wouldn’t necessarily call you nice,” he settles on.

Kuroo laughs and takes a long step closer, hands still in his pockets. His edges are all sharp, but his smile is soft. “You were right about one thing,” he admits. “I don’t have a lot of free time. I’ve got a demanding boss and some of the people I work with break deals if I’m even a minute late to a meeting. And yet,” he spreads his arms wide, “I’m still here. And it’s not because I was raised right, although I was .”

“You’re full of shit,” Kei says as the thing in his chest dissolves, leaving him feeling light on his feet. Kuroo is standing close, but he wishes he were closer, and although he pretends otherwise he knows exactly what that feeling means.

But it’s okay. He'll deal with that problem later. He is, after all, extremely good at compartmentalizing.

“Maybe,” Kuroo admits. “But I’m not bullshitting you when I’m telling you that I’m here for you .”

Kei is feeling lighter and lighter, until he feels like he should hold onto something before gravity lets go of him. “Why?”

“Because,” and Kuroo’s smile is small and intimate, not meant for anyone but him, “you make me laugh, and you’re cute when you actually care about something. Like when you willingly subjected yourself to exercise for me.”

Kei rolls his eyes. “What did I say about flattering yourself?”

Kuroo laughs. “I’m right, though,” he says, and his smile goes back to that familiar shit-eating grin. “So. Dinner?”

“I already ate.” It sounds empty, an excuse to get out of something he really, really doesn’t want to get out of.

“We can just drive, then,” Kuroo says. “I’ll even let you pick the music this time. What do you say?”

Kei rolls his eyes again. “How generous,” he says, but he follows Kuroo out of the museum anyway.

--

“Sorry I couldn’t come by yesterday,” Kuroo starts. Outside the car, autumn is approaching - the sky is greyer, the green of the trees more subdued. Some people are wearing thin coats over their t-shirts. “Meeting ran overtime. And I didn’t know if you would answer if I called.”

Kei would be offended, but he’s fairly sure he feels - felt? - the same way about calling Kuroo. “I wouldn’t have," he lies. It falls flat.

Kuroo asks, soft, “did you think I gave up on you?”

Kei almost chokes on nothing. He shouldn’t be surprised, though, because of course Kuroo knows him so well, of course he would’ve picked up on this. After all, he remembered where Kei worked from one awkward five-minute conversation three years ago. But he’s still a little surprised, because maybe he didn’t know Kuroo as well as he’d thought (and that thought hurts a lot too), so he’s off-guard when he says, a little frustrated, “you did give up on me.”

Kuroo turns to look at him. “What?”

And it’s not accusatory, or angry, or indignant. It’s just confused, and a little sad, like finding a broken relic of a fond memory. Kei keeps track of Kuroo in his peripheral view as he stares ahead, eyes fixed on the road.

Which turns out to be helpful, because the light in front of them turns red and Kuroo is still looking at him and he has to shout “Kuroo!” before the car goes straight into oncoming traffic and they both die.

“Ah shit, sorry!” Kuroo yelps, slamming the brakes and launching them both violently forward. Kei’s glasses go flying off his face and onto the floor. 

“Suddenly I feel very unsafe in this car,” he mutters, randomly groping around on the (thankfully clean) floor in front of his seat. His shoulder stings from where his seatbelt had dug through his thin uniform shirt and into his skin. 

When he finally locates his glasses and puts them back on, he risks a glance over at Kuroo to find the bastard full-on grinning  with open-faced glee, somehow completely unharmed by their near-death experience. “You said my name,” he said happily.

Kei narrows his eyes. “What?”

“You said my name,” Kuroo repeats. At least he’s looking ahead now, the idiot. “It’s been awhile since you did that. I missed it.”

Kei blinks at him. “You missed the sound of your own name,” he says slowly.

Kuroo flaps a hand around. “No, no, just the sound of you saying it.”

“Didn’t I say it a couple days ago?”

“Can you just let me have this one thing?” 

Kei thinks about it. “No,” he says. Kuroo sighs. Neither of them dare to say anything about what Kei had blurted out moments before, like playing a game of chicken to see who would break first under the stifling tension.

It’s Kuroo, because of course it is. “What do you mean, I gave up on you?”

His voice is more cautious than Kei’s ever heard it, which is maybe why he treads a little more carefully than usual when he says, “when you went to university and we stopped talking. Because you got too busy.” ( Because maybe you realized you didn’t like me that much after all .)

Kuroo doesn’t say anything for a long time. Kei is deciding how gutted to feel about this when he suddenly turns into a plaza off the side of the road and parks the car. Is he going to murder him? Is the last thing Kei sees going to be a family-owned dollar store and the inside of this shiny corporate car that smells way too much like Kuroo’s pricey after-shave? How does he even know what that smells like?

“What the hell are you talking about?” Kuroo demands.

Kei blinks. It takes a second for him to realize Kuroo isn’t asking him about the after-shave thing. “You didn’t have time, or you lost interest, or whatever,” he says slowly. “You stopped talking to me.”

Kuroo opens his mouth, then closes it, then opens it again, brow furrowed the entire time like he’s furiously erasing and re-writing his next sentence in his head. “Because you didn’t want to talk to me,” he settles on in the end.

Which. What . “What,” Kei says.

Kuroo frowns even harder. He’s starting to look a little like Kageyama, except about a thousand times more intelligent and emotionally aware. “You never texted me first, whenever I said ‘talk to you tomorrow’ you ignored me, and you left me on read all the time. What was I supposed to think?”

Kei was right. He really is going to die from emotional duress in this car parked in front of a dollar store, because Kuroo is sitting next to him and Kuroo offered him a ride home and Kuroo thought Kei didn’t want to talk to him.

Kuroo has said a lot of dumb things in the years they’ve known each other, but this has got to be, by far, the dumbest. 

To be fair, though, Kei has been pretty dumb on his end too. He risks a glance at the driver’s seat, but Kuroo isn’t looking at him; instead he’s staring at his lap, where he’s fiddling with his fingers. From this angle, it’s impossible to tell what he’s thinking, but it’s not like Kei needs to look at him to know.

To think - all of this was because they were both being stupid, Kei especially, even though they wanted the same thing.

“I thought-” he starts. “You were always tired, and you spent so much time talking to me, so I…” he swallows. “I didn’t want to push my luck.”

The truth. Finally. Yamaguchi would be proud.

There’s another long pause. Kei tries not to let the irrational part of his brain take this silence and run wild with it, but he can’t help but think - what if he’s misread all of this? What if Kuroo realizes what Kei has known all along, that he has never, ever been the kind of person who deserved a friendship like this? 

“Even if,” Kuroo starts, and Kei’s dumbass brain starts filling in the gaps, reaching conclusions before he’s even said another word, “even if the world was ending, I would still find time for you.”

“That is extremely stupid,” Kei says almost immediately.

And Kuroo has the audacity to look shocked , like he’s forgotten who he’s talking to. Kei has never been overtly sentimental in his life, and he’s not about to start now. “What?”

“What about your family?” Kei asks. “Kenma? He’d probably be pretty upset if the world was ending and you were just at the Sendai City Museum.”

Kuroo closes his eyes and sighs. There’s a hint of a smile on his face - well actually, there isn’t, but Kei can kind of tell. “Don’t ruin the moment, Tsukki.”

“Shima,” Kei corrects on instinct, which is weird, because it’s been a while since anyone but Yamaguchi has called him that. (Hinata tried it once. He’s never tried it again.)

Kuroo opens his eyes. “You can’t stop me from saying Tsukki now,” and ah, shit, there’s the grin, Kei is going to regret everything, “because you think I’m the coolest senpai ever .”

“No,” Kei starts, “I never-”

“Bokuto is going to be so mad when I tell him,” Kuroo says over him, turning the engine back on and pulling out of the parking lot, “we’ve had a bet going for five years -”

“You put money ,” Kei says, incredulous, “on who I liked more-”

“Now I just have to figure out when he has time to video call so I can see his reaction in person- HA!” Kuroo shouts, and Kei startles so hard he accidentally smacks his hand against the door. “So you admit that you like me more!”

“I’m going to push you out of this car,” Kei tells him very seriously, cradling his stinging hand.

Kuroo just cackles. Kei turns away so he won’t be exposed for smiling.

--

Kuroo teases Kei about this for the rest of the ride; Kei, for his part, resolutely faces the window and periodically threatens murder. (This doesn’t faze Kuroo, because of course it doesn’t.)

It’s late when Kuroo parks in front of Kei’s apartment building, the night completely silent, the full, uninhibited moon rendering street lamps useless. Kei feels strangely at peace, light on his feet as he opens the door and steps out of the car, his face warm even in the cold air. 

Then he realizes - he’s content. He’s happy , even.

Disgusting. Kuroo can never know.

Although maybe he deserves to know just a little bit - because he’s here, isn’t he? Despite everything, he’s here, dropping Kei off at his home, where he’ll inevitably wait until he’s safely inside before leaving. Maybe he should know how genuinely content he makes Kei, considering how much it clearly means to him.

And it does mean a lot to him. Kei might have a lot of self-loathing and cynicism bottled up in his lanky body, but he’s smart enough and emotionally attuned enough to know that everything Kuroo said to him was genuine. 

So he leans into the car and says, “I’ll talk to you later?”

Kuroo’s answering smile is warm, blinding. “I’d like that a lot,” he says quietly.

Kei nods and shuts the door, just a little reluctant to leave.

--

Later that evening, when Kei is sitting in his bed scrolling through the news, he gets a text. Turns out Kuroo never changed his number.

bro bokuto literally cried, this is the best day ever

Kei smiles. He types out a reply.

He stops smiling.

“Ah, fuck,” he says out loud.

--

So maybe he’s in love with Kuroo Tetsurou.

That’s fine.

He tells himself this throughout the next two days, as he gets dinner and a movie with Kuroo (ramen again, but he insisted on paying this time) one day and gets dropped off at practice the next. He tells himself this when they’re arguing over the movie they’d just watched, when Kuroo surprises him with strawberry cake at the end of a particularly exhausting shift, in the car staring out the window listening to Kuroo hum to the radio. He tells himself this when Kuroo sends him memes in the middle of the night, when he gets a periodic i’m so booooooooooored come rescue me ;) and can’t help but imagine Kuroo in a boardroom in the top floor of a sleek glass building, texting under the table like a teenager. Texting him.

It’s fine. Kei definitely doesn’t freak out when Kuroo’s knees touch his in the theatre (seriously, what is he, fifteen?) or when they’re leaning towards each other over the restaurant table or when they’re walking to Kuroo’s car after dinner, side-by-side, and Kei thinks that they actually look pretty good like this.

Together. Not together together, but, you know, platonically occupying the same space.

It’s fine. Things are fine. Kei is going to be in denial for the rest of his life.

--

Yamaguchi sighs loudly when he realizes. (Kei thinks he’s pretty subtle, but then again, you can’t really account for a decades-long friendship). 

--

On his day off, he checks into the gym for a full day of practice. Koganegawa leaps over to greet him, as he always does. He really takes this frog thing too seriously. “No chauffeur today, huh?” he shouts.

Kei downs the coffee in his thermos. “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” he says flatly, a little irritated - but definitely not over Koganegawa calling Kuroo a chauffeur.

“You know!” Koganegawa pushes his (ridiculous) hair up into a spike, and then pulls at the corners of his eyes so they’re narrower. “The guy! Nekoma!”

“He’s not my chauffeur,” Kei says, putting his bag down. “He’s just an idiot with too much free time.”

Except he really isn’t , but he really doesn’t want to get into that right now.

Behind him, having just arrived, Kyoutani scoffs. “Must be an idiot, if he wants to spend time with you.” 

“We’re on the same team ,” Kei says. “You spend a quarter of your week with me.”

“Who said I wanted to?”

Kei sighs internally. He remembers the first few weeks of Kyoutani joining the team, mostly silent, sitting in the corner alone during break times. He wishes he could go back to those days.

“Guys, guys, not this already!” Koganegawa says cheerfully. “At least wait until our first break like you usually do!”

“Fuck off,” Kei and Kyoutani say in unison. At least they can agree on this.

Kyoutani puts his hands on his hips. “I will toss even higher ,” he threatens Kei.

Ah, fuck.

“Do you have to make everything worse?” Kei mutters to Kyoutani, who grins, and they head off to practice together, the three of them.

--

About half an hour before the end of practice, Kei becomes very acutely aware of someone’s eyes on his back. He would turn around if he weren’t in the middle of a 2-on-2, but he is, so he shelves it into one of the neat square cubicles that form his consciousness and focuses on setting properly.

--

It’s Kuroo.

Kei knows this because he turned around and saw him standing there, leaning against the wall. The rest of the team knows it because the second practice was over, Koganegawa shouted “hey! It’s Nekoma guy!” loud enough to split eardrums.

“Why is everyone in my life annoying?” Kei sighs as he approaches Kuroo. He’s wearing casual clothes, a knit sweater and jeans and a long brown coat, all soft and warm and tall. It’s the first time Kei’s seen him in something other than a suit.

(He looks good, because of course he does.)

Kuroo grins. “Everyone except me, I’m sure.”

“No, you definitely take first place,” Kei says, lying through his teeth. He’s not sure anyone can top the near apocalyptic-level migraine Hinata and Kageyama give him every time they get together.

Kuroo, the asshole, isn’t even fazed. “You’ll admit your feelings to me one day.”

Kei swallows hard at the certainty in Kuroo’s voice, even though he knows it was just a harmless joke. There’s no way Kuroo can possibly know that Kei smiles to himself whenever they text, right? 

He turns away anyways, under the pretense of rummaging through his bag for his change of clothes, and says, “if you’re going to force me into spending time with you, you’ll have to wait until I’m done showering first.”

“Not a problem,” Kuroo says. When Kei finally locates his clothes and turns towards him, he’s grinning again. “Try not to think about me too much while you’re in there.”

He has the audacity to wink . Kei rolls his eyes and walks away, hoping Kuroo didn’t catch how red his face was becoming.

--

Kei showers in about five minutes, because while he is a grade-A asshole, he still has some sense of basic human decency and knows not to make Kuroo wait too long. When he makes his way back to the gym, Kuroo is in the same place he’d left him, scrolling through his phone.

He looks up when he hears Kei approaching, and waves his phone at him. “Your teammates seem nice. One of them remembered me from Nekoma and basically forced me to give him my email.”

Kei winces. “That’s Koganegawa. He’s going to email you. You don’t have to reply.”

“Don’t be absurd, of course I’m going to reply.” He smiles benevolently, placing a hand on his chest. “I am, after all, a kind and selfless senpai.”

“That was a lie in high school and it’s still a lie now,” Kei says.

“You wound me.” They walk out of the gym and into the crisp almost-autumn air, the skies grey. It’s alarming how quickly the temperature dropped, the air shifting into something a little more somber, a little less saturated. Kei doesn’t mind. He prefers colder weather. “It’s weird that he knows me from Nekoma, though. I didn’t think anyone would remember.”

This surprises Kei enough to make him glance to the side. Kuroo has stopped on the sidewalk, his feet almost hanging off the curb, head tilted slightly up towards the sky. His face is perfectly neutral, but there’s something about the curve of his mouth, the set of his jaw, that sets off an alarm bell buried deep within Kei’s brain. 

“Why wouldn’t people remember you?” he says. “You were a pretty notorious pain in the ass.”

Kuroo laughs. It sounds off. “I’ll take that as a compliment. Tsukki,” and he continues so quickly Kei doesn’t get a chance to correct him, “you know this is my last day in Sendai, right? I drive back to Tokyo tomorrow morning.”

Ah. Right. So there is a downfall to aggressively compartmentalizing everything after all - in his panic over his newfound feelings for Kuroo, he’d completely forgotten about their time limit. “Yeah,” is all he says.

There’s a brief moment of silence where they both ruminate over this before Kuroo claps his hands loudly, startling Kei out of his slowly spiraling thoughts. “Right! I’ll drive you home. Unless you wanted to go see a movie or something first?”

Something in his voice makes Kei examine his face carefully. His eyes are downcast, his smile doesn’t reach past his mouth - and then he realizes what’s wrong.

Kuroo is upset.

It’s clearly not directed at Kei, otherwise he wouldn’t be putting so much effort into hiding it. But he looks more tired than usual, and there’s a hollowness to his words that makes Kei’s chest ache. He wonders how long it’s been since someone hugged him, since he’s gotten a chance to visit his family, since he’s let himself do nothing without feeling guilty about it.

“Do you want to stay over?”

Kei’s brain lags a little in processing the words that have just fallen out of his mouth. Once he confirms that, yes, he did indeed invite the guy he’s in love with to his home, his mind starts racing for ways to pass off the offer as a joke. Because there’s no way -

“Can I?”

That snaps Kei out of his trance. Kuroo looks so tired, tugging at the sleeves of his coat, suddenly looking a whole lot like a lost kid, getting his hopes up.

“Yeah,” Kei finds himself saying. He can’t bring himself to regret it. “Yeah.”

--

“So,” Kei says five minutes into an uncomfortably tense car ride, “do you wanna talk about it or are you gonna keep sulking?”

Kuroo’s mouth falls open in shock before he regains a sense of himself and snaps it shut. It was funny while it lasted, Kei figures. “You? Talking about emotions? Since when did this happen?”

Kei rolls his eyes. “I’m not fifteen anymore,” he reminds him. “I am able to process my feelings like an adult.” Wrangling a bunch of pubescent emotional first-years during his last year of high school had successfully beaten all the emotional constipation out of him, no matter how stubbornly he had tried to hold onto it. He has no idea how Yamaguchi survived. “And you still haven’t answered my question.”

Kuroo honest-to-God pouts . Kei tries very hard to feel annoyed at this, instead of just openly staring at his lips. “I wasn’t sulking.”

Kei sighs. “Kuroo.”

Kuroo looks like he wants to avoid the question again, but something visibly changes his mind and he sighs, shoulders sagging. “I caught some of your practice while I was waiting,” he says quietly. “It just got me thinking.”

Ah. I don’t really do that anymore , is what Kuroo had said. Kei is starting to understand where this is going.

“When I first started college,” Kuroo continues, “I thought I could handle it. School, being on the team and living alone for the first time. But my grades started slipping and I started to get benched more and more in games.”

Kei doesn’t remember Kuroo mentioning this to him back when they used to talk. This must’ve happened after they lost touch, he realizes, and that makes him feel infinitely worse.

“Eventually I had to make a choice and I- as much as I love volleyball it’s not like I could just throw away my entire future for it, right? So I quit, told myself I would rejoin as soon as I got my life under control but, well.” Kuroo’s laugh is dry. “Here I am.”

“You’re pretty on top of things now, though,” Kei points out. “There’s probably a dozen teams out there that would take you.”

Kuroo doesn’t say anything to that, giving a half-hearted shrug. Kei takes that as a sign that the conversation’s been forced to an end, and they spend the rest of the car ride in silence.

--

Kuroo parks behind the building and follows Kei into the lobby, through the doors and into the elevator. He’s quiet the entire six-storey ride up, quiet as they get off, quiet as they walk down the hall and Kei unlocks the door.

It’s only when they’re inside his apartment, taking off their shoes and hanging up their coats, that Kuroo finally speaks up. “Nice place,” he comments, padding towards the living room in his socks.

“Shut up, I know you have a penthouse apartment in downtown Tokyo,” Kei says, but he’s smiling nonetheless, a little relieved that the silence has been broken.

“It’s near Ginza, actually,” Kuroo corrects, because of course he would choose to live near one of the flashiest, busiest parts of the city. Kei follows the sound of his voice to find him in the kitchen, perched on one of the stools pulled up to the island that Kei barely ever uses. “And I’m being serious. It’s nice.”

Kei knows it’s nice. There’s a lot of plants and the furniture is all in matching sets and the walls are painted a pleasant cool grey, courtesy of himself and Yamaguchi, who had spent his first week here painting over the original ugly yellow-white. Still, it’s nice to hear someone appreciate his efforts once in a while.

Kei drops his bag on the unoccupied stool and opens the fridge, rummaging through its contents. “Are you hungry?”

“Aw, are you gonna cook for me?” Kuroo teases, because of course he’s still going to be a shithead even when he’s sad. “That’s so cute and domestic.”

“I’ll kick you out of my house,” Kei threatens. He pulls out the fish he’d thawed this morning and the ingredients for a potato curry. He vaguely remembers Kuroo mentioning that he liked fish back in high school and finds it completely unsurprising, considering the man is literally just a giant feral cat. 

Kuroo hops off the stool once Kei emerges from within the fridge, rolling up his sleeves. “Let me help.”

Kei raises an eyebrow. “In the interest of my own health and safety, define help .”

Kuroo smirks. “Regardless of what you think of me, Tsukki, I am capable of basic household chores.” He snatches the potatoes out of Kei’s hands and locates the peeler from where it’s hanging off a hook on the wall. “Where’s your garbage can?”

Kei points him to the compost bin under the sink, which he proceeds to peel the potatoes over, knees braced against the floor. Kei gives him a bowl to put the peeled potatoes in and tries not to wonder how someone could possibly look good holding a peeler.

Kuroo, true to his word, is pretty capable in the kitchen. They find a comfortable rhythm as they cook together, Kuroo washing the rice and preparing the vegetables, Kei standing over the stove throwing them all into a pan. Kuroo hums a pleasant tune under his breath and Kei tries not to glance at his tanned forearms as he turns on the rice cooker, the bend of his fingers as he cuts the green onion.

Kei thinks this whole situation might be dangerous for him, given his current, ah, predisposition, but he’s too distracted to care.

They eat dinner on the sofa in front of the TV, which is playing a random episode of Game of Thrones. Kei has never seen the show before but Kuroo watches it religiously, apparently, and is too busy getting emotional over scenes he’s seen before to explain anything that’s happening.

(They have a good time regardless).

It’s only after they’ve finished eating and the dishes have been loaded into the dishwasher that Kuroo checks his watch and says, “I should probably get going.”

Kei looks up from where he’s wiping down the living room table. “Oh,” he says, feeling inexplicably disappointed. What did he expect Kuroo to do? Stay? “Okay.”

“Okay,” Kuroo repeats. Kei is once again taken aback by just how soft he looks when he’s not in a suit, his hair soft and unstyled, the sleeves of his sweater stretched out past his palms. Or maybe it’s just a side-effect of how tired his eyes are, as he turns away and heads towards the closet to retrieve his coat.

Kei can’t help but remember their conversation in the car, left abruptly unfinished. Can’t help but think about Kuroo driving back to Tokyo alone in the cold light of the morning, tapping his foot restlessly in a harshly lit boardroom. 

He doesn’t like thinking about him there, in a place with white walls and glass doors; thinks he looks better here instead, in his living room. It’s already so late, the sky an inky black.

So he says, “Stay.”

--

Kuroo stays.

Well actually he drives back to his place first to pick up some stuff, toiletries and a change of clothes, and then comes right back. Kei spends half of this time frantically texting Yamaguchi and the other half obsessively cleaning his room.

They argue over sleeping arrangements - obviously Kuroo will take the bed, because Kei does actually have some semblance of good manners - and then settle in on the sofa, picking some random rom-com off the front page of Netflix.

Kuroo brought a box of princess-themed popsicles from his apartment. Kei has to fight the urge to smile with every ounce of power in his body.

They watch the movie with a popsicle each and a giant bowl of chips between them. Kei briefly considers breaking out some Kahlua as the heroine and two love interests are introduced, and Kuroo sighs. “Oh, to be around in the days of young Hugh Grant,” he says.

Kei squints at the screen, where a sleazy manager in a suit is charming the heroine. “That’s literally just you but white,” he intones.

Kuroo grins at him. “I’m glad you think I’m dashingly handsome and irresistible.”

“I wouldn’t describe you with any of those words,” Kei refutes.

Kuroo laughs and turns back to the movie. Kei thinks the conversation’s over until he speaks up a few minutes later, voice quiet and absent of all the mirth that had been there before. “Is that really what you think of me?”

Kei turns to look at him, but his eyes are glued to the screen. One of his arms is sprawled across the back of the sofa like the stereotype he is, but the other one is curled around the leg he’s got tucked up against his chest, and it makes him look much more - grounded, almost. Like he’s not actually some sort of impossibly charismatic god but is actually just a twenty-six year-old crashing at his friend’s apartment. 

“What do you mean?” he asks.

“Like that.” Kuroo points at the screen, where the aforementioned Hugh Grant is checking out the heroine’s ass in the elevator. “You know, some greasy businessman with no soul who’s sold himself to capitalism.”

Kei opens his mouth, about to say something like you said it, not me , but something about Kuroo’s voice stops him. The exhaustion from before is back, shining dully in his eyes, highlighted by the light from the TV. “No,” he says instead. “Is that what you think of yourself?”

“My hair is never greasy,” Kuroo says, indignant. He shifts a little. “I don’t know. I’m just so busy all the time that I don’t really get the chance to do some good old introspection, you know?” He laughs, tilting his head back to rest on the back of the sofa. Kei watches his throat move as he says, “this is the most relaxed I’ve been in months.”

Kei hums. Even with work and practice, he’s always found time to hang out with Yamaguchi or Facetime Hinata or read a National Geographic article or two before bed. It hurts, knowing Kuroo hasn’t had that in a while, even though he deserves it so much more. “You may be a filthy capitalist,” he says, “but you definitely have a soul.”

Kuroo tilts his head to look at him. The smile on his face is small, but it’s oddly intimate, an expression lacking any performance or pretense. “Thanks.”

Kei clears his throat. “Don’t mention it.”

There’s another lapse of silence, but this time Kei knows it’s coming when Kuroo says, “I didn’t rejoin a team because I was scared.”

Kei looks at him again, abandoning all notion of watching the movie. (Rom-coms aren’t really his thing anyways.) Kuroo stares back, like he was never looking anywhere else. “Scared of what?”

He shrugs. “Scared that I’d fallen behind. That it was impossible to catch up. That maybe taking such a long break meant I didn’t care enough and didn’t deserve to be playing at all.”

And that strikes something in Kei’s shriveled, stone-cold heart. Because the one who’d been there in the year where he thought caring meant risking everything, who’d told him to angle his arms forward and jump parallel to the hitter’s dominant arm, who’d pissed him off enough to get him to practice, was Kuroo . The same Kuroo who thinks he doesn’t deserve to play.

“Bullshit,” Kei says. Kuroo blinks in surprise, but before he can take it the wrong way and get upset Kei continues, “you just have to practice twice as hard as everyone else, then. And look,” he shifts to face Kuroo, tucking one leg underneath him, “you don’t get to force me to care about volleyball just to flake on it yourself. I’m still here, asshole.”

So why aren’t you?

Kuroo, thank God, is eternally perceptive and reads between the lines with fluency, breaking into a wide smile that quells Kei’s fear of being misunderstood. “Are you really going to bully me into playing volleyball again?”

Kei shrugs. “As long as it works.”

Kuroo laughs. Kei thinks, cheesily, that it lights up the whole room. “Pay attention to the movie, Tsukki.”

“Shima,” Kei corrects. But he smiles to himself, too, when Kuroo nudges his shoulder with his own, a silent gesture of gratitude.

--

Turns out missing the first twenty minutes of a movie to have a heart-to-heart with the person he’s quietly in love with is pretty detrimental to the overall viewing experience. Kei is almost dead asleep by the time the end credits roll around; Kuroo, on the other hand, is almost in tears.

“Why are you crying,” Kei says flatly as they clean up, tossing their popsicle sticks in the garbage and rinsing out the chip bowl. “They got together in the end. Isn’t that what you wanted?”

Kuroo sniffles. “It was just too perfect. When will I be loved like that?”

Kei ignores the lump in his throat and says, “in your underwear in the snow?”

Kuroo elbows him. “Sometimes I think you’re just being dense on purpose,” he says. “I meant unconditionally. You know, ‘I like you just the way you are’.”

“You’re the most unlikeable person I’ve ever met,” Kei says, even as the sight of Kuroo in his kitchen makes his heart heavy.

--

Kei does his nightly news reading while waiting for Kuroo to finish in the shower. (He doesn’t have any shower-related thoughts). When Kuroo emerges, his hair damp, in a threadbare t-shirt and basketball shorts, he’s not sure whether to be relieved or disappointed that he’s fully clothed. 

When a few minutes have passed and Kuroo makes no motion to move away from the bathroom door, Kei is forced to acknowledge his presence. “What, are you gonna complain about my water pressure or something?”

The sound of his voice seems to snap Kuroo out of whatever trance he’d fallen into. “I grew up in a village, you know,” he points out. “Just because I make decent money now doesn’t mean I’m used to the kind of stuff it entails.”

Kei had not, in fact, known that. “You did?” he asks, trying not to sound too curious.

Kuroo shrugs, walking over to sit down next to Kei on the sofa, careful not to drip water anywhere. It’s a small gesture, but a deeply appreciated one nonetheless. “I moved to Tokyo when I was eight. Before that, my house barely had running water. My idea of playing was chasing our chickens around.” He chuckles wistfully. Kei wonders how long it’s been since he went back. “Sometimes I wake up and I think I’m back there.”

Kei hums. “Did you like it there?”

Kuroo shrugs. “About as much as I like my flatscreen TV and my internet plan. The air is a lot cleaner, though, and the stars are really beautiful at night. And everyone knows each other so it feels more like a community than just a bunch of strangers stuffed into a small space.”

Like Tokyo , he doesn’t say. 

Kei doesn’t reply to that, just lets the words marinate in the air. As he watches, the twist of Kuroo’s mouth goes wistful, his downcast eyes unfocusing. Remembering and regretting, as all children who grow up and move away are destined to do. It makes Kei want to call his parents, get on the next bus and go home.

“What about you?” Kuroo’s voice drags Kei back to his living room. His smile is teasing as he asks, “have you been a small-town local your whole life?”

Kei rolls his eyes. “Sendai is not a small town, you pretentious ass. But yeah, up until graduating from university I lived in the suburban part of Miyagi.” He shrugs. “I like the quiet. Living here gives me a headache sometimes.”

Kuroo hums. The shoulders of his shirt are damp from his hair, and Kei wants to nag at him to dry his hair off - but he’s not sure whether that would be crossing one of the many invisible lines in the sand between them. “I prefer louder places. It’s hard to be lonely when you’re surrounded by so much, you know?”

Kei scoffs. “I don’t know how anyone like you could ever be lonely.”

“ Oh ?” At the suggestive tone of Kuroo’s voice, Kei’s stomach immediately drops to his feet. “And what is that supposed to mean?”

“You know exactly what it means.” Kei gestures at - all of Kuroo, really, his broad shoulders and long legs and dazzling smile. He’d be hard-pressed to think of any reason someone wouldn’t want to keep him company, himself included.

He doesn’t say that, of course, because he’s not an idiot.

Kuroo grins at him. “No, I think I’m going to need a detailed and thorough explanation - hey, where are you going? You can’t just escape into the bathroom! I need answers!”

--

Kei is dreading the interrogation as soon as he steps out of the bathroom, but it never happens. Instead, he finds Kuroo still on the sofa, one leg tucked up against his chest like before, scrolling through his phone. 

He looks up at the sound of the bathroom door opening. “Hey,” he greets softly. Somehow, in the twenty minutes it’d taken Kei to shower, he’d gone from capitalist douchebag to overgrown housecat. Kei is still dealing with the whiplash when he continues, “I’m looking at a few local teams based in Tokyo. Next free weekend I get, I’m going to try out.”

And it takes Kei by surprise, the overwhelming amount of genuine joy and relief that those words bring him, that his defense lowers for a fraction of a second and he breaks into a smile just as quickly as he wipes it off his face. “So the bullying was a success, huh,” he says, hoping Kuroo missed the slip-up.

Kuroo tilts his head but mercifully doesn’t say anything. “You’re way too good at this,” he says. “You should look into becoming some kind of self-help media sensation. Like a really rude motivational speaker.”

“I would rather die,” Kei says. He makes his way across the apartment to get his spare set of sheets out of the closet, which Yamaguchi had forced him to buy his first week after moving in and then used as an excuse to stay over multiple nights. He drops by his bedroom, too, just to make sure nothing had moved from when he’d cleaned it.

Kuroo looks up when he dumps the sheets onto the sofa. “So you’re serious about sleeping here, huh?”

“I’m always serious,” Kei intones. He makes a shooing motion that Kuroo obeys with surprisingly little resistance, and starts setting up the sofa bed (another one of Yamaguchi’s ideas with clear ulterior motives). “Did you need anything else?”

“Just you,” Kuroo says, because he is the absolute worst. “And a glass of water, but I can get it myself.” True to his word, he disappears into the kitchen and reappears a few moments later with aforementioned glass in hand. It’s a little alarming, how quickly he memorized the layout of Kei’s home.

He follows Kei into the bedroom, an amused smile immediately curving his lips as he takes in the dinosaur figurines on the shelf, the record player in the corner of the room, the books piled on the desk. “Cute,” is all he says.

“Another word and I’m kicking you out,” is what Kei replies with. Just like before, Kuroo’s praise has an inexplicable effect on him, making him feel warm all over despite being a reasonably confident and secure adult. 

“ You’re cute,” Kuroo has the audacity to say. “When you smiled because you forgot to be a dick for, like, one second. That was pretty cute.”

Kei freezes. So he had noticed. He suddenly wishes the floor underneath him was a little thinner so he could crash into the apartment below, with people who’ve never seen him smile before. “Mention this to anyone and you don’t leave my apartment alive.”

“Come on, Tsukki,” Kuroo says with an easy smile, leaning against a wall with his arms crossed. “You’re not gonna kill me just because I saw you experience joy. I mean, that freckles kid is still alive.”

“Yamaguchi’s like a cockroach,” Kei explains, even as the dumb, soft part of his brain does flips at Kuroo remembering ‘that freckles kid’. “He won’t die no matter what.”

Kuroo scoffs. “Wow, rude. Yamaguchi seems like a nice kid.”

Kei shrugs, inspecting the floorboards underneath his feet. It’s not like he doesn’t know this, but hearing Kuroo say it makes it hurt regardless, a reminder that Yamaguchi is a nice kid who should be spending time with other nice kids. “I guess.”

“Hey.” Kei senses rather than sees Kuroo lean a little closer. “Why’d you say it like that?”

In the midst of all these dangerous heart-to-hearts, Kei had forgotten about Kuroo’s extremely annoying and inconvenient perception skills. “I don’t know what you mean,” he says, schooling his voice back into a flat monotone.

Which doesn’t fool Kuroo, because of course it doesn’t. “Why’d you say it like it was a bad thing?”

“It’s not a bad thing. He’s nice and I’m not.” Kei starts to back out of the room, closing the door behind him. “See you tomorrow-”

“Hey, no, wait,” Kuroo says, grabbing the door just as Kei’s about to shut it, and what is this, some sort of high school drama? This shit just doesn’t happen in real life. He pulls it open, leaning on the doorframe, his dark eyes searching. Kei feels hot under his skin as Kuroo stares at him, the silence dragging on for just a little too long before he says, “you are nice, you know that, right?”

And that notion is so absurdly stupid that Kei momentarily forgets about how close Kuroo is. “Did that movie drain all of your brain cells?”

“Don’t drag Bridget Jones’ Diary into this,” Kuroo says, and the glint in his eyes provides a short reprieve from the sheer intensity of holding eye contact with him. “And I know exactly who I’m talking to. As much as you don’t like to admit it, Tsukki, you’re actually a big softie.”

 “I’ll kick you out,” Kei threatens again, willing his cheeks not to color, seriously, is he fourteen years old? What is happening?

“You wouldn’t,” Kuroo prods his chest, and Kei physically retracts in on himself out of surprise, “because you’re a big softie who invited me for a sleepover and watched Bridget Jones’ Diary with me and you read Nat Geo articles before bed, there are princess-themed popsicles in your fridge, you are the biggest softie-”

“Get out of my house,” Kei says, but he can feel his face heating up because no one other than Yamaguchi was supposed to know these things about him. And then to make things worse Kuroo pokes him again while he’s admittedly caught a little off-guard, and an embarrassingly high-pitched noise escapes his mouth before he gets the chance to reel it in.

“Holy shit.” Kei sees his life flash before his eyes as Kuroo’s face splits into a broad grin. “You’re ticklish ?”

“Don’t you fucking dare,” Kei warns, but it’s too late because Kuroo is poking him in the sides, too, and his body starts working against him as a laugh forces its way out of his throat. He tries to protect his sides, but Kuroo’s fingers are long and his reflexes are fast from years of read blocking, and Kei is out of breath by the time he relents, tears in his eyes.

When he finally feels safe enough to look up, it’s to find Kuroo looking at him with a strange look in his eyes, his mouth curled up at the corners. 

“See?” he says quietly. “Cute.”

Kei realizes that he’s still smiling and quickly wipes all emotion from his face. “I’m leaving,” he says briskly. 

“Hey, wait,” Kuroo says again , and honestly, how many times does Kei have to be mildly emotionally vulnerable in one night? He’s starting to regret letting Kuroo open up to him in the first place, if these are the consequences he has to suffer. (He doesn’t mean it, though. He doesn’t regret it at all.) “I’m sorry.”

Kei just glares. “No you’re not.”

“No I’m not.” Kuroo still has that small, soft curve to his lips, and the honesty shines in his eyes when he says, “Yamaguchi is lucky to know you, Tsukishima. And I am too.”

And- fuck. Kei swallows hard, because what is he supposed to say to that, when Kuroo looks so achingly open and sincere? When Kuroo is standing in the door of his bedroom in a plain t-shirt, telling him he was wrong all along, that maybe he wasn’t stretching his luck by having Kuroo in his life?

“What,” he finally says, “no Tsukki this time?”

Kuroo shrugs, grins boyishly. “I’ve got plenty of chances for that later.”

Who says there’s going to be a later ? Is what Kei would’ve said in any other situation, but this seems like a special one. So he says “good night, Kuroo,” instead, and if his voice is much softer than it usually is, he can just blame it on being out of breath from the tickling.

Kuroo chuckles low in his throat. “Yeah,” he says. He sounds happy. Kei’s not sure why - he just said good night, is all. “Good night.”

--

Kei doesn’t go to bed expecting that he’ll wake up the next morning ready to dish out hugs and giggles to all of his casual acquaintances, nor does he expect Kuroo to abandon his career in Tokyo to pull a Hinata and play beach volleyball in Brazil. These things don’t happen overnight, after all.

But he goes to bed thinking a little differently than before. And that’s as good of a start as he could’ve asked for.

--

Kuroo is in the washroom brushing his teeth when Kei walks in, and one quick glance at his hair confirms that, yes, it really is just his bedhead. “Good morning,” he mumbles, and oh, Kei had completely forgotten to emotionally prepare himself for the morning voice.

Kei comes to stand next to him at the sink. Due to the nature of a single-bedroom bachelor pad, the bathroom is way too small for two men over six feet tall, their arms pressing together as Kei fills up his cup and puts toothpaste on his toothbrush. Kuroo had opened the blinds, the pale morning light streaming in like ribbons. “You slept in, didn’t you?”

“‘S not my fault.” Kuroo’s words are muffled around the toothpaste still in his mouth. Kei doesn’t find it nearly as gross as he should. “Your bed is way comfier than mine. You should let me sleep in it more often.”

“Not a chance,” Kei says even as his dumb heart beats faster at the mere concept of Kuroo in his bed. “How are you going to reach my bed when you’re in Tokyo?”

Kuroo spits the toothpaste out of his mouth before answering, “who says I’m going back to Tokyo? I’m staying here to marry your mattress.” The fucker has the audacity to wink , tapping his nose, his collarbones nearly gleaming in the light from where they’re poking out past the too-loose collar of his t-shirt. Kei shoves his toothbrush in his mouth before he can do something dumb like kiss him.

Kuroo waits for him to finish washing up, presumably because he doesn’t know enough about the layout of Kei’s kitchen to make breakfast by himself. They have a brief discussion about what to eat - as in, Kuroo says “I’ll make French toast” and Kei says “as long as I don’t have to help” - and then it’s a repeat of the previous evening, the two of them working to the sound of Kuroo’s quiet humming. A scene fitting for an aesthetic moodboard, or the cover of a lo-fi music playlist.

The toast is frying and Kei’s setting down a bowl of chopped fruit on the island when Kuroo says, “I never got to thank you for letting me stay over last night.”

Kei doesn’t know what to say for a long moment. How does he tell Kuroo that the invitation came to him like an instinct, that he looked into Kuroo’s eyes and believed he had no other choice? What heterosexual explanation is there? So he just takes the well-worn path and acts like an asshole. “I wouldn’t do it again.”

Kuroo laughs. “Oh come on, was it such a terrible experience?”

“Is that even a question you have to ask?” Kei mumbles, even as his entire body screams no .

“This is no way to treat your senpai,” Kuroo says in mock offence. Kei had hoped he’d forgotten about the favorite senpai thing by now, but as usual Kuroo does exactly what's most inconvenient for him. “But seriously, I was dreading going back to my hotel. I’m glad I got to spend my last night in Sendai here.” With you , is the implication that Kei ignores.

“It was my pleasure being at your service,” Kei deadpans. Kuroo just laughs louder.

--

Kuroo leaves after helping with clean-up yet again, because underneath all the snark and the shit-eating grins he is actually an incredibly nice person. “I’ll text you, yeah?” he says at the door. He’s in a simple dress shirt and pressed slacks, the leather of his shoes impeccably shiny, the bag he’d packed last night slung over his shoulder. He looks like he could model for a high-end perfume brand or something. 

“You’re going to call me even if I say no,” Kei points out. 

Kuroo chuckles. “I can’t say you’re wrong. Talk to you soon, then.” He opens the door and takes half a step outside, face still turned to look at Kei. “Don’t be a stranger.”

With that, he winks again and shuts the door behind him.

Kei stands alone in his very empty apartment and fails to suppress his emotions.

--

True to his word, Kuroo texts him to let him know that he’s reached Tokyo safely, and then spends all of the time after that very actively not being a stranger. 

They text every day, even if it’s just a quick ‘good morning’. Kei starts looking forward to reading the texts he missed from Kuroo when he gets off from work, and to the selfie Kuroo sends him every morning, usually taken in the full-body mirror in his apartment to show off another one of his seemingly endless collection of tailored suits. Bookending his days, just like before.

Except this time, Kei says things like “tell me tomorrow” and “get some sleep” and doesn’t live in fear that Kuroo will suddenly decide that talking to Kei isn’t worth his time anymore. This time, Kuroo video calls him a few weeks after his return to tell him he’s made it onto a local team, his eyes shining with excitement even as he tries to play it cool. Kei says “of course you did,” and doesn’t realize he’s smiling until a few minutes later.

He’d forgotten how legitimately happy talking to Kuroo made him, after years of repressing and rationalizing. He’s funny and he’s incredibly smart and he knows just what to say to soften Kei’s barbed-wire personality, sweet and thoughtful and caring in a way that’s comforting and genuine, not cloyingly sweet. Even the sight of his bedroom, which Kei grows accustomed to over a month of periodically Facetiming, is absurdly comforting, covered in the same posters as his college dorm.

Yamaguchi tells him he looks happier, in that satisfied way that means he saw it coming all along. Kei isn’t really surprised, and he doesn’t deny it as vehemently as he should.

--

When the coach tells them they’ve booked a short-notice exhibition game with a team in Tokyo, Kei’s brain doesn’t make the connection at first.

It’s only when he’s said the words “Tokyo Metropolitan Gymnasium” and Koganegawa has started cheering that Kei realizes - he’s going to be playing an exhibition game 20 minutes away from where Kuroo lives. They’re going to be less than a half hour drive apart from each other, for the first time in a month.

His first instinct is to tell Kuroo.

So he does, fast enough that his brain can’t over-analyze just why he wants to tell Kuroo so badly. As soon as practice wraps up, he finds a quiet corner to sit in, away from Koganegawa’s prying eyes and Kyoutani’s snickering judgment. Judging from the time, Kuroo should be on his way home by now, if he isn’t working overtime. 

Kei doesn’t think about what that means either, the mere fact that he knows Kuroo’s schedule like the back of his hand.

Sure enough, Kuroo picks up on the third ring, the sound of traffic rushing by in the background. “What’s up? Everything okay?”

They don’t call that often. The sound of Kuroo’s voice after at least a week of only talking through text makes Kei unconsciously relax a little, his shoulders loosening as he slides lower on the bench. “I’m fine. I have an exhibition game coming up.”

“Sounds exciting,” Kuroo says, genuine. “If I have time I’ll drop by and cheer you on. I did say I would.”

Kei fiddles with the hem of his shirt, remembering Kuroo’s joking half-promise - I’ll buy a banner with your name on it and everything . “It’s at the Tokyo Metropolitan Gymnasium.”

There’s a long pause. Kei has gotten used to long pauses by now, a natural by-product when talking to someone as thoughtful and deliberate about everything as Kuroo is. “So that’s why you called, huh?”

“You don’t have to come watch,” Kei starts, a little discouraged by the question. “Especially if you’re going to show up with a banner. I’d rather not be embarrassed.”

Kuroo laughs. “Nah, I’m coming whether you like it or not,” he says. Something about that makes Kei feel warm all over, because his body is weak and traitorous. “What day is it?”

Kei tells him. It’s about a week and a half later, a week and a half that Kei suspects is going to go by agonizingly slow. 

Kuroo says he wouldn’t miss it for the world. Kei is inclined to believe him.

--

The following days, contrary to Kei’s prediction, fly by in a whirlwind of daily practices. Kei packs a separate gym bag every morning before leaving for work and takes the bus directly to the gym after his shift, getting home late into the night and barely managing to shovel some food into his mouth before passing out. It’s exhausting, but the kind of exhausting that feels good , the ache in his muscles proof of how hard he’s worked. He’s starting to understand why Hinata went halfway across the world to chase it.

The day before the game, the team meets up at the entrance of the gym, bundled up in coats against the early morning chill. If Kei closes his eyes, he can almost imagine himself in high school again, with the old team.

“Whoa, dude, stop smiling. It’s freaking me out.” Kyoutani’s voice yanks him back into his twenty-four year-old body. It’s been nearly ten years, but he still has to put up with the same dumbasses. 

“Are you thinking about your Tokyo boy?” Koganegawa asks, way too loud for the time of day.

Kyoutani throws his head back and cackles. “Shut up,” Kei snaps, and buries his face in the depths of his coat.

--

Yamaguchi calls him halfway through the four-hour bus ride; it’s still early-ish morning, which means he’s on the bus to work. “Are you gonna go see him?” is the first thing he says when Kei picks up.

“I’m doing fine, Yamaguchi, thank you,” Kei says. 

“Sorry Tsukki, but you were obviously thinking about it. You should go see him! It would be super cute and romantic and stuff.”

“I would rather die,” Kei says flatly, even as part of him thinks Yamaguchi’s right. Not about the romancing, obviously, because Kei is going to keep his feelings to himself unless they’re forcefully pried out of him, but it seems like something Kuroo would appreciate. Something Kuroo himself would do, even, if their roles were flipped.

Yamaguchi hums. “His favorite food is grilled mackerel, by the way. I got Hinata to ask Kenma for you.” Kei can hear his grin through the phone. “You’re welcome.”

“Shut up, Yamaguchi,” Kei replies, because that’s as good of an expression of gratitude as he can give. 

Thankfully, Yamaguchi is always there to pick up the slack. “Have fun!” he says cheerfully, and hangs up without saying goodbye. Annoying as always, but Kei feels a little lighter as he settles in for the rest of the ride.

--

OG SQUAD!!! (5)

chibi: good luck on the game saltyshima~!!!!!!

milkman: don’t die or whatever

yams: get some ;))

yacchan: what is he getting?

yacchan: OH

yacchan: yes get some!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

saltyshima: yamaguchi i am going to kill you

yams: :D

--

The sky is clear and bright when they arrive at their hotel. Koganegawa takes pictures of literally everything as they check in and drop off their stuff in the two communal rooms they’ve booked. “We meet back here in an hour, but until then you’re free to do whatever you want,” the manager says once they’ve reconvened in the lobby. “You’re all adults, but still, try to make it back in one piece, okay?”

“Okay,” they chorus before scattering, breaking off into groups to explore various parts of the city. Kei, for his part, puts his headphones on and starts looking for places to eat.

He locates a family-owned restaurant about a five minutes’ walk from the hotel, and sets off. (If the restaurant just so happens to be in the direction of the Japanese Volleyball Association headquarters, then well, so be it). The restaurant is dimly lit but well-decorated, brimming with customers on their lunch breaks. He orders tonkatsu, and is asking if he can get grilled mackerel in a takeout box before his brain can catch up with his mouth.

He has no idea what’s gotten into him. He just has to hope that Yamaguchi never finds out, or he’d never live it down.

--

The food is, predictably, delicious. Kei feels warm and satisfied as he pays the bill and leaves, with a little over half an hour left before their meeting time. Normally he would go back to the room and pass the time on his phone, but it’s not everyday that he gets to take a couple days off work and visit a place like Tokyo, so he makes his second uncharacteristic decision of the day and takes the scenic route back.

He doesn’t really have a plan. He roams in a zig-zag pattern in the vague direction of his hotel, dipping into streets that look interesting and pausing in front of particularly appealing storefronts, the music from his headphones drowning out the sounds of the city around him. 

He feels a little tense as he walks, but he’s never been nervous before an exhibition game before. He briefly considers the possibility that it’s because he’s so close to the JVA headquarters, but quashes the thought as quickly as it rises, even he holds the box of takeout close to him to prevent it from getting cold before-

Before what? What, exactly, was he planning to do with a box of grilled fish? It’s the middle of the day, there’s no way he could somehow miraculously catch Kuroo out of the building on his lunch break or something, and he isn’t going to see Kuroo otherwise until tomorrow, at which point the fish is for sure going to smell and taste awful. He thinks about eating it - he’s not a huge fan of mackerel, and his appetite is notoriously small, but it’s better than letting it go to waste.

And then he spots it.

The building looks just like all of the surrounding ones - blue glass and concrete, towering above the sidewalk. But it’s the logo on the door that catches his eye - a blue, red, and black volleyball.

“Are you serious?” he can’t help but mutter to himself.

--

According to the building directory, the JVA headquarters are located on the fifth floor. Kei gets into the elevator and spends the entire ride convincing himself not to back out, avoiding the pressing issue that is what the hell is he going to say to Kuroo when he gets there?

‘Hey, I just happened to be passing by your workplace with a container of your favorite food, which I got because Kenma told Hinata who told Yamaguchi who told me. Why did he tell me, you ask? Well, it’s because I’ve been secretly in love with you for a long-ass time. Enjoy.’

Kei winces internally. Yeah, he’s just going to cross that bridge when he gets there.

The sight that greets him when the elevator doors open isn’t nearly as sleek and polished as he’d thought - there’s a bit of water damage in some corners, and the carpet is stained and faded. But the receptionist is impeccably dressed, and the computer monitor she’s busy examining looks almost brand-new. She looks up at him when he approaches the counter, mouth turned up into a textbook customer service smile. “Hello sir, how can I help you?”

Kei inhales, and takes the plunge. “I’m looking for Kuroo Tetsurou?”

“I’m sorry, but he’s in a meeting right now,” she says, typing something. Kei exhales slowly, unsure whether to feel relieved or disappointed. (Mostly disappointed, but he’s not going to admit that.) “I can take a message?”

“That won’t be necessary,” Kei says quickly, because he knows any message he could come up with in the moment would be extremely embarrassing. “I just came to give him this.” He sets the takeout box on the counter. “Thanks for your time,” he says quickly, and almost books it back to the elevator.

“Sir, I didn’t get your name!” The receptionist shouts after him, but the elevator doors close before he can do anything about it.

--

Kei spends the rest of the day and a half leading up to the game thoroughly distracted. Any time he’s not playing or actively thinking about playing he’s wondering whether Kuroo received the food, what his reaction was, whether it still tasted good despite being cold. He doesn’t reply as quickly or as sharply to Kyoutani’s jabs as usual, and he doesn’t tell Koganegawa to shut up even once, even as he’s blabbering about a particularly attractive member of the gymnasium staff. 

The bleachers are half-full when they arrive, a solid turnout already for a Division 2 game. With the game approaching, Kei refuses to let his eyes wander the seats in search of a familiar face, focusing instead on taping his fingers and making sure his body is in good condition. 

And it is in good condition, he notes with satisfaction as the other team arrives and they start their warm-ups. His jumps feel light and easy, and his knees don’t hurt when he does receive drills. “You’re jumping higher than ever today, Tsukki!” Koganegawa crows, and Kei’s answering “Shut up” is half-hearted.

The game starts. They’re at a disadvantage when it comes to the crowd’s support, being the away team, but Kei has never been affected by anything outside the court. He reviews the data he’s memorized about the players on the other side of the net as they get into position, quickly thinking of possible plays he could pull off given the current formation.

A coin is tossed. The whistle blows. Kei braces his hands on his knees, and everything else just falls away.

--

They win. That doesn’t really matter, though, in a pre-season game that’s meant for little  more than riling up fans. What matters is that Kei is getting better at serve receives, better at digging, and he’d pulled off a near flawless set in the middle of a rally. There’s that familiar ache again, the exhaustion that tells him he needs to do more, settling into his bones as he grabs his things and heads out of the gym.

It’s only when he’s out of the doors and into the cool air of the lobby that he stops repressing any thoughts about the one thing that posed a threat to his in-game focus. And, like a dam that’s built up too much pressure and has finally cracked, the thoughts come rushing in - is Kuroo here? If Kuroo isn’t here, why did he break his promise? If he is here, will he be offended that Kei pretty much completely ignored him the whole time? Where is he?

“Tsukki!”

And just like that, all of his questions are answered at once.

Because here he is with the rest of his team after a narrow victory, flushed and sweaty and still in his jersey, and Kuroo is standing right in front of him, grinning like a proud father. Holding bright green pom-poms. With Kei’s name slathered on his forehead in green paint. He’d even worn a green scarf, just to drive home the fact that he is here . And he’s here for Kei.

And Kei, despite having spent a week and a half growing accustomed to the sight of him in tailored, designer suits, is knocked breathless by just how attractive he is.

“I saw that receive you did in the second set.” Kuroo’s eyes are bright and he looks so proud , coming over to stand close enough that Kei can see the bit of paint he’d gotten in his hair. “When were you gonna tell me you’d gotten so good?”

I couldn’t have done it without you , Kei thinks openly, because if he can’t say it to Kuroo he can at least be honest with himself. “I told you not to come if you were going to be embarrassing.”

Kuroo laughs. It’s a little overwhelming, just the sight of him. “A promise is a promise, right?” 

“I don’t remember ever agreeing to this.” But Kei can’t help but let himself smile just a little, too, the combination of the rush from a game well played and Kuroo’s dizzying presence nearly bowling him over. He has to remind himself that his coach is here, and his teammates, and Kyoutani would never let him down if he did something dumb like kiss Kuroo full on the lips in front of all of them.

Kuroo reads his mind - unsurprising, because he is alarmingly fluent at decoding everything Kei says - and says, “meet me in the parking lot when you’re done? I’m parked near Entrance C.”

“Yeah,” Kei says, and if he showers and changes a little faster than usual, it has nothing to do with the wink Kuroo sends him as he leaves.

--

Kuroo is leaning against his car when Kei finds him, still holding those ridiculous pom-poms, the paint still stark on his forehead. He glances up from his phone when he hears Kei approaching and immediately breaks into a grin that makes Kei take a step back instinctively, sensing that he’s about to be in danger.

And he’s right, because the first thing Kuroo says to him is “so someone left me a gift at work yesterday.”

Kei’s flight instinct immediately activates. “Why are you telling me this?” he bluffs.

Kuroo’s grin widens. “Because the receptionist told me it was dropped off by someone you might know. Tall, blonde, pretty? Ring any bells?”

Kei crosses his arms, even as internally he’s screaming about Kuroo calling him pretty. (Not the adjective he would’ve chosen for himself, but coming from Kuroo he can’t really complain.) “Don’t flatter yourself,” he says. “It was just leftovers.”

Kuroo raises an eyebrow. “You just so happened to order my favorite food for yourself and left it completely untouched?”

Kei stays silent, sensing that he’s going to lose no matter what. Kuroo sighs and closes the space between them in one smooth stride, almost invading Kei’s personal space. He should look ridiculous in his green getup, but of course he doesn’t. “So why did you do it, Tsukki? Were you just being nice? Or was it something else?”

Kei, abruptly, realizes what he’s trying to say. 

He knows it’s not just about the mackerel, just like how their conversation in Kei’s bedroom all those weeks ago wasn’t just about Kei and Yamaguchi. He thinks he’s been good at hiding it, the way he sees Kuroo and just wants , but of course Kuroo would find out. It was only a matter of time.

It was only a matter of time. And there’s green paint in Kuroo’s dark hair, and Kei is so, so tired of pretending his conversations with Kuroo aren’t the best part of his day, so he lets all the barbed wire around him come apart.

He says, “I think you know why.”

Kuroo kisses him.

It’s a little embarrassing, really - so many weeks of pining, and yet Kei hadn’t been the one to initiate it. But he can’t really complain when Kuroo’s hand is warm and calloused on the back of his neck, and his lips are soft, and all he can think is finally .

“Sorry,” Kuroo mumbles, leaving Kei feeling infinitely colder when he pulls away. “I know you hate public stuff like this but - I was worried I was wrong.”

“You’re wrong about most things,” Kei says, and lets himself reach out and fiddle with the ends of Kuroo’s scarf. He figures he’s been holding back for long enough. “I guess you just got lucky with this one.”

Kuroo beams up at him, a little of his high school self shining through, boyish and honest. “ Very lucky,” he says.

Kei immediately groans, because Kuroo is actually the nastiest person alive. (He lets himself believe it, though. Because he can.)

--

A few months later, Kuroo, Akiteru, Yachi and Yamaguchi meet up to watch Kei’s first official game of the season. It’s every bit as humiliating and awful as he’d feared, but he smiles to himself a little, watching them cheer him on.