Work Text:
Monday nights are Shouyou nights, in some capacity or other. Some capacity or other, because a lot of the time, Shouyou is not actually within reach to spend time with Kenma in person.
Still, their standing Monday nights are an unchanging constant.
Kenma waits for their Skype call to connect, and Shoyou’s face grins at him from the screen, slightly blurry.
“Kenma!” he says excitedly, with the same exuberance he always displays. Shouyou is loud, excitable, and casually affectionate, and there is something soothing to that.
“Shouyou,” Kenma replies, and watches Shouyou’s grin widen. “How was your week?”
“Extremely GWAH!” Shouyou exclaims. “We had that match on Wednesday, right! And I tried out this new spike!!”
“Oh?” Kenma asks, and listens as Shouyou launches into a loud and lengthy recounting, at least half of which are strings of noises that have no given definition in any existing dictionary. This, too, is a constant.
Kenma goes over his planning excel spreadsheet while Shouyou talks. He’s trying to nail down a finalised streaming and video uploading schedule; at least one set stream each week, one set video upload to YouTube every couple of weeks.
The sporadic schedule he’s operating on so far still works, but it’s not going to keep working, if he wants to actually grow his channels; there are calculations of growth and revenue, considerations of making this a full career once he’s finished his degree. Kuroo might have something to say about that. A simultaneously disparaging and encouraging comment, probably.
Kenma’s eyes drift back over to Skype, the contacts bar on the left side, which he’s got open for some unfathomable reason. Shouyou is online, of course. So is Morisuke. Shouhei is, too.
Kuroo isn’t. He hasn’t been online in five days, not that Kenma has been obsessively checking. He only checks when he’s got Skype open anyways.
“Kageyama says I need to improve more,” Shouyou says, the Skype icon on their voice call distorting with his speaking voice. “He wants to have a proper match soon. So rude! I bet I could beat him now! Bakageyama!”
They’re still in contact, Shouyou and Tobio. They text every day. Not even moving to different places once they finished school could stop that. Kenma tries not to think about that.
“How soon is soon?” he asks, and looks back at his excel spreadsheet instead.
After Shoyou hangs up, Kenma gets up and walks into the kitchen, considering dinner. He feels tired; there is something low and aching sitting under his bones, a familiar hollow feeling of a bruise. Food will not fix this, but he still needs to eat dinner.
His pantry is full, but nothing in there looks appetising, or worth the effort. He could make rice; he has a rice cooker, the rice will basically make itself. That was always Kuroo’s go-to dish, rice and some sauteed vegetables and a simple sauce. Fried tofu or meat if he was feeling fancy. Still is, likely. It’s a good dish, simple and effective. Carbs and vitamins and protein to keep you fuelled, Kuroo would say.
Kenma doesn’t make himself rice. He contemplates the pantry some more, then the fridge. The fridge is not half as well-stocked as the pantry; mostly, it’s filled with energy drinks. Some leftovers from the takeout he got the previous day.
He takes out the leftovers and puts them in the microwave; leftover fried noodles are a dinner, and Kuroo isn’t here to judge.
He opens his laptop again, the planning spreadsheet, aimlessly clicks through the tabs while he waits for his food to heat up. Making a schedule shouldn’t be that hard. Maybe he’ll just use the first one he thought of; he can always make modifications later, or take days off. His followers likely don’t expect him to adhere to a schedule he sets up anyway.
Streams every Wednesday evening, YouTube uploads every second Sunday of the month. There, done.
He opens the file with all of the contact information of the artists he likes to work with; he needs to commission new info graphics, if he’s going to stick to an actual schedule. He opens his budget spreadsheet too, and his business e-mail account.
That still feels ridiculous: the business e-mail account. He’s doing responsible things, adult things. Kuroo would not be able to believe it, if he were here to see it. He’d mock Kenma for it, almost definitely.
He wonders if Kuroo will even recognise him when he comes back; or if he’ll talk to Kenma for one sentence and say, ‘that’s not my childhood friend. I don’t know this person.’ Will he like the new Kenma, care for the new Kenma?
The new Kenma is still the old Kenma, really. Only more organised, with a business plan and career ambitions, and capable of feeding himself.
The microwave dings, signalling his food is ready to eat.
He burns his tongue on the first bite.
Mostly capable of feeding himself, he revises mentally.
His first uni class on Tuesdays is at ten in the morning. Kenma always shows up right on time, which is to say, slides into the room with only seconds to spare, often only not late because the professor is, reliably, even later.
He sits down next to Taketora, who gives him an unimpressed look. This is one of only very few classes they share; usually, Taketora will save Kenma a seat next to him. Sometimes he doesn’t, just to see Kenma suffer. He’s a horrible friend, and his presence was one of the few things keeping Kenma tethered, after he’d graduated from school and started university.
“Late again,” Taketora says.
“Not late,” Kenma says, and gestures sluggishly towards the front of the room, where the professor’s desk stands empty.
“Almost late,” Taketora says. “Late according to the time.”
Kenma shrugs. “On time in all ways that matter,” he mumbles, puts his laptop on his desk, then sinks down in his chair. His jumper is warm and cosy, and he tugs his hands inside the sleeves so he can feel properly enveloped by it.
Taketora opens his mouth to make some kind of mocking comment, the snide tone of voice he intends to take obvious from the raise of his eyebrows, but that’s the moment the professor enters the room, and Taketora closes his mouth with an audible snap. Kenma slides deeper down into his seat, and stealthily stretches one hand out to rummage in his backpack for his thermos of coffee, ignoring Taketora’s rolled eyes with ease.
They have lunch together after the lecture; Taketora says, “Come on, Kenken, less laziness, more movement,” and something low in Kenma’s stomach clenches, because that nickname wasn’t Taketora’s, originally.
He packs up extra slowly, just to be annoying, and follows Taketora to the cafeteria, where Taketora gets himself some sort of curry dish with ridiculous amounts of meat, and Kenma sticks to a couple of yakitori sticks and all three of the desserts on offer: a small serving of vanilla pudding, a slice of cheesecake, and two daifuku with red bean paste filling.
Nobody is here to berate him for it, anyway.
They settle in at their favourite table, in the corner by the window, and Taketora makes a big show of stretching his hands before he dives into his food with gusto. Kenma nibbles on one of his yakitori and watches him.
There is a certain familiarity to this, one that settles heavily in his bones, because into its very nature, absence has woven itself heavily and unforgettably: to Kenma, that is. Every minute spent like this feels like missing a step on a flight of stairs, a subtle but jarring reminder of having lost one’s natural rhythm.
He does sometimes wonder if Taketora feels it too.
Taketora, across from him, gets his phone out and lights up ever-so-slightly. He says, “Kuroo-san just texted me,” and answers that unspoken question.
Kenma makes a noncommittal noise. His chest hurts.
“He’s probably coming back for a visit in a month or so!” Taketora says cheerfully, and Kenma makes another noncommittal noise, because he knows how this game goes.
It’s been four years, and Kuroo has yet to actually board a plane.
Kenma’s ribcage squeezes tighter, and he puts down his yakitori; appetite a distant concept at best.
Kenma powers up his desktop to set up his stream early. The only thing he’s ever early for, other than video game releases, Kuroo would joke; or maybe he’d be too astonished by this gained bout of punctuality to make any comment. Kenma wouldn’t know.
The Skype icon sits unassumingly at the bottom bar of his desktop, and Kenma navigates over to it almost without thought. His mouse hovers for a moment. He has no reason to open Skype. He double clicks.
Shouyou is online; so is Taketora. Kuroo, his icon a sunset over the London bridge, remains ever offline.
Kenma takes a deep breath in, a deep breath out. He feels wounded, and small: a ridiculous feeling to have over an online status on Skype. Either way, there is a time difference between them; either way, it’s not like Kuroo’s online presence would manifest as an actual presence: neither here in Tokyo, nor in Kenma’s life, generally.
He settles on playing an ego shooter game. That feels easy, accessible. Games like these don’t require too much thinking; and any of the games he really likes, the puzzle and strategy games, lie in a pool of complications. There is a list of games in his heart, organised and itemised by categories of feeling rationalised by categories of statistic, which he cannot touch. They feel like an open, festering wound, any accidental straying in their direction punished harshly by a pain only visible to himself. Ego shooters are fine. Ego shooters are safe. Best to stick to what works – and give in to the clamouring in the chat rooms to play his childhood favourites, the games he’s really good at, only on the rarest of occasions, when it’s very late, and in the nebulous state between dream and reality, his room clouded in darkness except for the light of the desktop monitor, his self-control fails.
“I’ve made a schedule for future streams,” he tells his viewers, meandering through virtual catacombs and mindlessly mowing down enemies. “It’ll go up soon, probably sometime next week. I’m waiting for the new graphics to do the announcement, but it’s basically set.” His voice is quiet, closer to a mumbling than the booming boisterousness most streamers tend to show; he wondered if he needed to change that, at first, and only didn’t because that seemed an unnecessary amount of effort for something that was basically a hobby. He figured out eventually, though, that his viewers like his calm, subdued energy. That’s good for him; he hasn’t felt loud and boisterous in a long, long time, not that those were ever words he’d have used to describe himself.
Sometimes, he thinks he’s getting quieter by the week. There was a time in his life when he was starting to come more out of his shell rather than retreating; but that was years ago. He could set a date to the day that trend changed, if he wanted to: a circled red number on calendar paper comes up in his mind when he thinks about it. But there is no reason to think about it. It doesn’t matter much, anyway.
His chat is a fast-moving mess of exclamations and surprise, and he offers them a small shrug. “No more unexpected surprise streams for you,” he says. Considers this. Adds, “Maybe sometimes.”
Doesn’t add, on the bad nights, when feeling alone is too large and all-consuming a thing to give room to it. Doesn’t add, that’s the reason I started streaming in the first place. Doesn’t add, Please don’t leave me alone. I never thought I was much a person for company, but please don’t leave me alone.
Much later that night, after the stream has concluded, when midnight has crept into the room without his notice and left again in favour of the passing-by hours of a new day, Kenma finds himself opening Skype again, and looking at Kuroo’s icon.
It is a gorgeous picture of the sunset. Offline, Skype tells him.
Offline, offline, offline.
Kenma watches the status until the day ahead offers him to trade sunset in for sunrise, and then he gets up, tired and exhausted, a pressure behind his eyes that announces the coming of a headache, and gets ready for uni.
Drifting off to sleep is easier on some days than it is on others. It is easiest on days like these, coming home exhausted, on forty hours of wakefulness, his movements slow and sluggish, his head filled with cotton.
He decides cup ramen constitutes a meal, somehow makes it through a shower, and falls into bed limply; and then, still, sleep doesn’t envelop him immediately, as though it can feel that he’s waiting for it.
It’s in moments like these, so tired he’s losing his grasp on time, of present and past and future, of the distinction between this ache he’s carried around with himself for four years and all the older, more forgotten pain, that some of the memories he’s tried to let go of float back to him.
Kuroo, seventeen years old, lanky and wide-shouldered and sounding much more like the insecure child Kenma had first met, bending over a half-asleep Kenma, and asking, voice quiet, “Are you awake?” Kenma didn’t answer, because sleep felt too tempting, and speaking like too much effort. He made no noise; lay utterly still as Kuroo’s hand stroked through his hair, and Kuroo said, still so very quiet, “Kenma, I think I like …”
Neither the Kuroo in Kenma’s memories, nor the one that feels unbearably present in Kenma’s sleep-hazy state, finish that sentence.
Kenma does not dwell on it: the memory, or Kuroo; or pretends he doesn’t. His chest hurts, but he’s starting to forget that chests aren’t supposed to do that.
He does not get a full eight hours of sleep that night either; but he gets three, and that’s good enough for the hollowed-out feeling in his guts.
Two days later, Kenma opens his phone to a text message from Morisuke.
There’s a Nekoma team reunion coming up! Two weeks from now, on Saturday. Time and place to follow. Your presence is expected and required. Don’t think about bowing out! You’d best believe I’ll sic Yamamoto on you.
He stares at it for a long moment. Almost without his own say-so, he finds himself scrolling down the list of his Line chats. Down, down, down: and there is Kuroo. The last message in their chat is Kuroo’s, from almost two years ago. A simple, sorry, things are a bit busy, on the heel end of months of silence. Kenma never figured out how to reply in a way that wouldn’t split his torso wide open and reveal his barely-beating heart; Kuroo never sent another text.
Kenma scrolls back up and opens the chat with Morisuke again. No reason to dwell on Kuroo.
fine. but i’m not staying longer than 1 hour
I expected nothing else, Morisuke texts back, and Kenma stares at his phone until the screen goes dark.
The reunion is held at a small, tucked-away izakaya just outside of Tokyo’s bustling city centre. Kenma was told seven pm. When he arrives at seven thirty, the reserved tables are already full to bursting.
His eyes glide over the faces to look for Taketora or Shouhei, or maybe Morisuke; and then a strong arm gets thrown around his shoulder. He ducks out of the touch and glares at Taketora, who stands, grinning, next to him.
“Come sit,” Taketora says, and takes Kenma over to a table. Kenma follows, ducking his head ever-so-slightly, in the hope of not being noticed too egregiously. His eyes bounce off of people, not willing to settle on anyone for long enough to make them look at him in turn. Taketora presses him down onto a pillow, and Kenma folds his legs under himself obediently. He looks up, and then blinks harshly as all of the noise and light in the izakaya seem to fall away at once.
Across from him sits Kuroo: hair still a mess, eyes still warm and brown, looking just like he did the last time Kenma saw him, four years ago. Kenma didn’t think he’d see him here, didn’t think he’d see him again in Japan at all this year, despite what Taketora said.
“Kuro,” Kenma says, his heart beating over-fast.
“Hi,” Kuroo says: and looks away.
Kuroo doesn’t talk to him. He doesn’t ask a single question. Kenma sits on his pillow, fidgeting with his hands, not eating because his stomach feels abruptly queasy, not drinking because his throat feels too tight; and Kuroo doesn’t look at him, or talk to him.
Aren’t you my best friend? Kenma wants to ask. Weren’t you my best friend?
Any moment now, he’ll get up and drag Kuroo outside and ask him what’s going on, why he’s back, why he hasn’t texted Kenma in almost two years, why he hasn’t replied to Kenma in a timely fashion since the moment he boarded a plane. Any moment now, he’ll ask Kuroo why he can’t even look at him.
He clears his throat. His chest feels tight, his head swimming.
“I think I’ll say hello over there, I haven’t seen anyone here in ages,” Kuroo says with a tight smile and gets up. Kenma watches him leave. There is a familiar hollow ache spreading out from under his ribcage: only not familiar at all, because the low-level pain he’s gotten used to has turned into something sharp and acute.
“Yo, what the fuck is up with you two?” Taketora asks, confused.
Kenma doesn’t have a reply to that. “I’m going home,” he says instead. “See you at uni.” He gets up quickly, before Taketora can stop him, steps away from the table under Taketora’s befuddled protests. Without his own say-so, his eyes swipe through the room – and come to rest on Kuroo, one table over. Kuroo looks up, and their eyes meet. Kenma’s heart gives a painful lurch; and Kuroo looks away, his entire body twitching as if electrocuted.
Kenma goes home.
His place is dark when he gets back. He doesn’t turn the lights on. He just walks over to his gaming set-up on socked feet, sits down on his chair and tugs his legs up, wrapping his arms around them. He stares at the dark desktop monitor for a moment, then powers his computer up. His position stays largely the same: legs tucked up, himself bent over them, chin resting on his knees.
He navigates to start a stream before he really knows what he’s doing. He doesn’t turn the lights in his room on, or set up his camera. Voice and the shared display are all he offers to the greedy audience all over Japan, watching him play instead of sleep for their own, unknown reasons.
He doesn’t really talk to them, either. The microphone is on, but his own voice feels strangely foreign to him, an entity disconnected from himself. Instead, his eyes come to rest on the chat from time to time, a couple thousand people, number slowly rising even without a post proclaiming that he’s streaming, holding conversations among themselves. And Kenma, a willing conduit for those conversations, and ever-so-slightly less lonely for it.
The hollow ache beneath his ribcage stays.
And with it, a low, mournful: oh. I’m still in love with him.
“Barbecue at my place. Tonight,” Taketora informs him on Monday.
“Pass,” Kenma says.
“Nope,” Taketora says. “You’re coming.”
Kenma sighs, and buries his head in his hands. He doesn’t want to. He wants to flee. He has the uncomfortable premonition that Taketora might want to talk about The Kuroo Thing. Kenma doesn’t want to talk about The Kuroo Thing.
He also, two years ago, made a pact with Taketora. For Kenma’s own good, Taketora is allowed to insist on Kenma coming to things, and Kenma has to oblige for at least an hour. If they hadn’t made that pact, Kenma would probably never leave his house, other than for his uni classes, so Kenma can’t complain.
He wants to complain.
Kenma shows up at Taketora’s place at eight on the dot – the earlier he’s there, the earlier he gets to leave.
He walks in through the front door, and wishes he could just leave: because there, right in front of him, is Kuroo. On Taketora’s sofa, in Taketora’s living room, staring at Kenma in the entryway, and Kenma realises, horrified, that this was an ambush.
It turns out not to be a very successful ambush. Kuroo successfully manages to avoid talking to Kenma in the horrifically small space of Taketora’s living room and balcony, for the entire hour Kenma is forced to be present. Taketora tries to start a conversation for them: to no avail.
At one point, Kenma himself tries.
“How was it abroad?” he asks, feeling ridiculously nervous in front of a stranger so familiar. The ground under his feet is shaky.
“Good,” Kuroo says only, destabilising the ground further. He isn’t looking at Kenma; his jaw is clenched.
Are you back for good? Is this a visit? Kenma wants to ask. Kuroo should be done with his bachelor’s degree now. Maybe even a master’s, if he was exceedingly fast about his studies. He could, feasibly, be back for good. Maybe he’s staying with his parents; maybe he got his own place. Maybe he has a job, or an internship – or maybe this is a short visit, and come next week, he’ll be back on a plane to the UK.
The questions get stuck in Kenma’s throat. He doesn’t ask. Kuroo’s eyes stay averted, his jaw clenched. He doesn’t offer up another word.
The clock ticks down to nine, and Kenma ducks out of Taketora’s place with little fanfare.
Don’t do this again, he texts on his way out.
Then he calls Shouyou. Monday nights are, after all, Shouyou nights.
Things fall back into their usual normalcy after that. Kenma has a stream schedule, and a friendship hang-out schedule, and he sees Taketora at uni, and he sometimes stares at Kuroo’s Skype status or Line chat, but never sends a text message, and once a week, he lets the soothing lull of a busy twitch chat help him pretend that he’s not lonely, and that he doesn’t desperately miss his best friend.
It doesn’t matter whether he misses Kuroo or not, anyway. The friendship is dead: Kuroo could not have been any clearer about that. And Kenma is not in the habit of dragging around dead weight.
And if his chest hurts at night; and if sleep feels more like an elusive beast than a companion; and if seeing Taketora, and Shouyou, and whoever else stays around regularly doesn’t make him feel any less lonely; it does not matter.
It can’t matter, because Kuroo doesn’t want it to, and so Kenma cannot let it; and anyway, he has already learned to live with the hollow ache under his ribcage.
Kenma isn’t in the habit of going to events that can be boiled down to a rich person’s excuse for socialising, if he can at all avoid them, especially not for his streaming career. But sometimes, needs must; which is to say, this particular event is a who’s who of sports entrepreneurs and sports video game entrepreneurs, and Kenma has received an invitation by both letter and e-mail, and if he wants to be considered for early access to the entire library of upcoming games of some game dev studios which also happen to produce sports games: well, this is his chance. He would be foolish not to attend. He doesn’t do socialising, usually, but he does foolishness less, if he can avoid it: so he goes.
He manages maybe thirty minutes of introductions, aimless small-talk, and empty platitudes, before he extracts himself from the crowd and wanders over to the buffet table, which is less of a buffet and more of a strange but fascinating selection of canapees. Some of them look like they should be horrendously sweet, which is to say, exactly like Kenma’s thing, and a million times more appealing than yet another guy with a vision.
He’s in the process of attempting to pop an entire clementine-sized chocolate football into his mouth when someone steps up next to him, and bypasses the canapees entirely to grab a flute of champagne.
Kenma looks at the man: tall, mid-twenties, oddly familiar black hair – and does a double take. Because next to him, wearing a pinstripe suit and a tie and a lanyard around his neck proclaiming him to be an intern for the Japanese Volleyball Association, hair in the ever-same style it’s been in since he was a child, is Kuroo.
Kuroo takes a sip from the champagne, looks over at Kenma: and then visibly does a double take as well, mirroring Kenma. His eyes are wide, and very brown.
Kenma misses him, terribly, but that feeling is a low echo buried under a hollow sort of acceptance: the last remnants of dropped dead weight. As long as he does not touch it, the bruising does not spread.
“You know,” Kenma says, the words tumbling out wrapped in an oddly a dull and yet oddly present sort of pain, not looking at Kuroo as he says it, “I never expected that out of all the school friendships, ours would be the friendship that wouldn’t last.”
He turns around and goes: because what else is there to say? And a strong hand wraps around his elbow.
His eyes wander down to the hand. Slightly tanned, big, callused fingers, well-kept fingernails. He knows that hand. He turns to look at the owner of the hand: and finds that Kuroo’s face has cracked right down the middle.
His eyes are so, so wide. He looks desperate: maybe as desperate as Kenma feels. And abruptly, Kenma’s entire careful analysis of the last four years crumbles in on itself, and he doesn’t understand anything anymore.
“Kenma,” Kuroo says. “Kenma.”
By the buffet at the edge of a large room filled with important business people is not the correct place to have this conversation, Kenma thinks vaguely. Probably, he should say that. There is a prickling under his skin, the same kind of prickling that always shows up when he thinks people might start paying attention to him in a short while.
What he says is, “Kuro?” with all the confusion and pain that tumbles through him.
“Our friendship isn’t over,” Kuroo says. “It’s not – of course we’ll last.” His voice is trembling.
And then Kenma is the one who cracks. “You’re the one who hasn’t sent me one earnest text message for the past four years,” he says, and vaguely notices two men in horrible dark brown suits turning around to look at them. He looks at Kuroo, then at the room, and then puts his own hand on the hand Tetsurou still has clamped on his elbow and yanks, dragging Tetsurou out of the room, and down the first hallway he finds, until finally, they’re alone.
The ground is grey linoleum, and the walls are a horribly sterile white, and the lamp above them is way too bright, and he has no idea where they are in the building. Kuroo’s hand is still on him, and Kuroo is still staring at him.
“You’re the one who stopped caring about our friendship!” Kenma snaps at him, to get him to stop staring and start talking, because he doesn’t know what’s going on, but he does know that he’s been staring at a Skype status that cheerfully proclaims Offline for four years, and that Tetsurou is pressing his hand right into the tender, aching part of Kenma’s ribcage, and the bruising is spreading, spreading all over: his entire body feels black and blue with pain.
“I didn’t want to end our friendship!” Kuroo snaps back, his breath coming in a quick, trembling staccato. “I just thought it would be better if we… didn’t talk for a while.” His whole body slumps, and he looks, abruptly, miserable.
Kenma doesn’t understand. “I don’t understand,” he says.
“I just – I couldn’t talk to you,” Kuroo says. “I thought it was best if – I had to – I thought if we didn’t talk for a while, and I got some distance, then maybe by the time I came back… But then I did come back, and you looked at me, and – and. And.” His voice is trembling along with his breath. “And I thought, maybe I just hadn’t tried hard enough before, so maybe, if for a little while longer – and then eventually we could – I don’t know,” Kuroo says. Tetsurou says. A tumble of disjointed words.
Kenma just wants him to speak clearly, but he thinks that maybe, maybe he’s starting to understand.
Tetsurou, seventeen and sounding scared, voice quiet in the dark room as he tries to say something to a not-actually sleeping Kenma knocks at the back of his mind, and Kenma asks, “Why couldn’t you talk to me?”
Tetsurou slumps even further, and looks down at the ground. “I just couldn’t,” he says. He looks very small, suddenly. Kenma’s chest aches.
“That’s not good enough,” Kenma says. “You ignored me for four years. Why couldn’t you talk to me?”
Tetsurou lifts his head, looking at Kenma again. He looks scared. “Because I shouldn’t! Because I didn’t – I didn’t want to be your friend! I couldn’t be your friend. I was – Kenma, there’s something wrong with me, and I can’t make it stop. I can’t – I’ve tried. But I want to – every time I look at you, I still want to –”
“Oh Kuro,” Kenma says, very softly, as the final puzzle piece slots into place, and the bruising wraps, achingly, around his heart: but a different kind of bruising altogether. He asks, voice as gentle as he can make it: “Didn’t you ever think that maybe I would have been okay with it? That maybe,” he swallows, hard, and then continues, “I might want, too? That maybe I might want you?”
“Kenma,” Tetsurou says, and his voice breaks on Kenma’s name: and then he’s tumbling forwards, folding himself into and around Kenma, until he’s kneeling on the ground, arms wrapped around Kenma’s waist, face buried in Kenma’s stomach, and sobbing.
And Kenma realises that it’s been four years: and while Kenma had his streams and Shouyou nights and Taketora’s never-ending dumb comments, he doesn’t think Tetsurou had anything but himself and his own self-hatred, and the occasional text message he didn’t trust. He wraps his arms around Tetsurou’s shoulders, and holds him tightly.
They end up at Kenma’s place, on Kenma’s sofa, wrapped around each other, a cautious silence between them.
Tetsurou is the one who finally breaks it and asks, voice brittle and careful, “So what now?”
Kenma doesn’t know that he has an answer. Forgiveness doesn’t negate four years of absence, and even in his wildest dreams – the ones where he allowed himself to believe that maybe, eventually, Tetsurou would come back into his life – he didn’t expect a reciprocation of feelings. He’s not really certain what to do with it.
“What do you want to happen now?” he asks, no less careful than Tetsurou.
Tetsurou is quiet for a moment. Finally, he says, “I could crush you at Mario Kart?”
Kenma sits up, just so Tetsurou can get the full effect of Kenma raising his eyebrows at him. “You? Crush me at Mario Kart? Are you aware I’ve got a full career as a video game streamer now?” And then his voice breaks off uselessly, because – is Tetsurou aware? He might not be. He’s been gone so long that the entire trajectory of Kenma’s life has changed in the meantime, and he might not even know.
But Tetsurou laughs. A small huff of a laugh: but a laugh nevertheless.
“Oh, I’m aware,” he says. “I watch your streams.” Kenma doesn’t have the time to deal with that information, before Tetsurou forges on, full speed ahead: “And I think you could use some pointers on how not to suck at Rainbow Road.”
“You’re on,” Kenma says, eyes narrowing, and slinks out of Tetsurou’s hold to get the controllers and turn on the console. “I’m going to demolish you, Kuro.”
It’s later, much later – several hours, three full Mario Kart tournaments during which Kenma handily demolished Tetsurou, and some takeout and anime later – when they’re in Kenma’s bed, Kenma resting against Tetsurou and wondering at the fact he has this, their proximity, back, that Tetsurou says, voice barely more than a whisper: “I’m still scared. This scares me. Being in England helped a bit with the fear, but now I’m back here, and I want you so much, and – I don’t know. I don’t know how to want you and not be scared, and not feel like it’s wrong.”
“Did you have any gay friends in London?” Kenma asks, in lieu of a good reply.
“Not friends, but one guy from my study group was,” Tetsurou says. “We barely mentioned it, though. I kept waiting for it to come up in casual conversation, or for him to bring a boyfriend around, or – something. Something to make me feel like maybe it was fine.”
“But he didn’t?”
“No.”
“And now you’re back here.”
“Yes,” Tetsurou says.
Kenma wishes he knew what to say. The truth is, the being gay of it all doesn’t really scare him, largely because he never thought it would matter: the priority was his dissolving friendship, and before that, he was so certain that his feelings would never be reciprocated, and he couldn’t really imagine himself falling for anyone else; was still largely uncertain when and how he fell for Tetsurou, even. There was no reason to dwell on being gay, when the mere idea of a romantic relationship itself felt utterly out of reach.
He doesn’t know what it must have been like for Tetsurou, for his feelings to be so present and unignorable that he left the country over them. He certainly doesn’t know what to say now to take that fear away from Tetsurou, because even if Kenma doesn’t care, it’s not like Tetsurou is wrong to be scared of what this’ll mean for his life.
But: “Let’s just take it slow,” Kenma says. “We don’t have to figure it all out now. We have time. As long as you don’t leave again, we have time.”
Tetsurou’s arms tighten around Kenma. “I won’t,” he says. “This time, I’ll stay.”
“Good,” Kenma says: and feels himself fully relax for the first time in four years.