Tsukishima Kei is fifteen years old, smart enough to acknowledge that he's learned his lessons the hard way and stubborn enough to let it make him apathetic. He's fifteen and wary of bright orange bouncing around at his side, wary of a buzz cut digging knuckles into his head, wary of a pint-sized ball of energy thumping him on the back when he switches in, wary of popsicles and pork buns offered on the walk home after practice. He is fifteen, and wary, and safe.
He's fifteen and confused as hell when spiky silver hair tells him that one day he'll be hooked on volleyball. He's fifteen and has half an inkling of what's going on when messy black bedhead watches him block, with intrigue lingering at the corners of his mouth. On the last day of the training camp, the bedhead pulls him aside, and later, he remembers the most minute details - a cicada droning somewhere in the walls, a pebble stuck in his left shoe, the softness around that quiet mouth that explains what Tsukishima already knows and then leans forward.
Tsukishima Kei is fifteen years old, smart enough to acknowledge that he's aching for soft lips and stubborn enough to turn his head away from them anyway. It might seem petulant and immature, but he will never forget two noisemakers across the gymnasium, still twisting like a knife. He's learned well that the gods have a cruel sense of humor. Let him be damned if he makes the same mistake twice.
Tsukishima Kei is sixteen years old. He has kouhais that he's not quite sure what to do with, he has senpais that are fond of him despite his best efforts otherwise. He has bright orange that bounces by his side with noisy chatter that's somehow become endearing, he has smooth black and sharp eyes that he's found an accord with, he has tiny blonde that's started offering him stumbling words of encouragement, he has soft brown and freckles that still know him better than anyone else. When the local university is on vacation, he has a friendly smile and a pat on his shoulder when he gets home after practice, and he's slowly stopped shrugging that pat off.
He also has, apparently, a pair of honey-gold eyes that cheer in the stands for Karasuno - far too frequently considering that the eyes in question go to college three hours away. He chooses to ignore the fact that he was the one to send those eyes Karasuno's tournament schedule when it was released at the beginning of the year. Instead, he gets off the bus back at the high school and sends a text while the rest of the team disperses to walk or bike home.
6:18 P.M.
We're back.
6:20 P.M.
cool, ill be there in twenty
Yamaguchi lingers in the parking lot, pretending that he's just making sure everyone is headed home safely. When it's just the two of them left, he has no excuse, but he stays anyway. He doesn't say anything - he never has to - but Tsukishima shifts uncomfortably anyway.
"Stop looking at me like that."
"Alright," says Yamaguchi. But his knowing smile doesn't fade when he looks down at his phone instead.
A decrepit car pulls up, with peeling paint and a coughing engine and one tanned arm draped lazily out the driver's window. Yamaguchi stands up and waves goodbye, his smile growing bigger as Tsukishima climbs into the passenger seat.
"This thing is going to fall apart if you come out here one more time," Tsukishima says to him as he fastens his seatbelt.
"Missed you too," he says drily.
"You're going to fall behind in your classes."
Long, elegant fingers hand him the aux cord, then put the car in drive. "Here, it's your turn to choose."
Tsukishima picks an old ballad that swells up in his chest and pricks at the backs of his eyes for reasons unknown. He isn't sure if keen ears have realized that Tsukishima always plays the songs that matter most to him in the world when they do this, or how he'd react if they did. He can't really help it.
"You can't just keep ditching things to do this, you know."
"Let 'em try and stop me." The words are joking, but the tone of his voice is dead serious. "Unless you want me to, I mean."
I don't, Tsuskishima doesn't say. Instead, they just drive, singing along soft and low and eating up the road ahead of them and leaving the rest of the world to be damned in the rearview mirror.
Tsukishima Kei is seventeen years old and the vice captain of a team he has allowed himself to be proud of. That's vice captain, not captain, and yet somehow he is the one who pays for pork buns after practice.
He points this out to Yamaguchi. Yamaguchi chuckles for a little bit too long then promptly excuses himself under the guise of rescuing their most timid first-year from Hinata's wildly exaggerated accounts of their first year going to nationals, which is clearly bullshit because the first-year is having a blast and they both know it. Tsukishima rolls his eyes, pays for the pork buns, and calls Kageyama over to help him distribute them amongst the team.
(He doesn't really mind.)
He's seventeen and it's January and they're on the national stage again - and he doesn't have to look to know who's in the stands. It actually makes sense this time, because Nationals are in Tokyo again, but Tsukishima thinks to himself wryly as they step off the court that Nationals could've been in Australia and he'd still be there.
They bow to the victors and head to the bus, quiet for once. Some of the underclassmen are crying. Tsukishima leaves handling that to Yamaguchi, who has always been best at these things. He himself isn't concerned. Tsukishima is the smartest person he knows, and the most important thing he's ever learned, taught to him by spiky silver hair when he was fifteen and stubborn and wary and learned by him when he jumped higher than ever before and landed in a crouch with his fist clenched in triumph, is that tonight's tears are today's fierce love. Love of the game, love of victory, love of each other, love that'll be burning strong in their chests the next time they fight, whether it's tomorrow or next month or next year.
As for Tsukishima's own fierce love - well. There's Yamaguchi and Hinata and Kageyama and Yachi, there's the protectiveness he feels over his underclassmen, there's the squeak of volleyball sneakers and the thunk of a ball hitting the ground on the opponent's side of the court, there's Akiteru's easy greeting when he gets home, there's the swelling in his chest when he crawls out his window onto the roof at night and stares at the stars.
And - well. Maybe there's someone else, too. Maybe there has been for a while.
7:53 P.M.
hey, I can stick around if you want to meet up? walk for a bit?
7:56 P.M.
Sure. Give me a few minutes, though.
He gets his team back to the hotel they're staying in, helps Yamaguchi hustle everyone into the showers and out of the showers and into bed, and then hesitates for a split second in the doorway of the third-years' room.
Yamaguchi catches it, of course. He always does. "Go," he urges Tsukishima - and Tsukishima's face feels unreasonably hot, but he goes.
The new message in his inbox has the name and address of a late-night cafe, ten minutes or so away by train. At this hour, it's peopled only by students and graveyard shift workers and one pair of honey-gold eyes. Two hands full of coffee greet him at the door - Tsukishima can't handle caffeine after two PM, but he takes it anyway. And they walk until he has no idea where they are or they're going or anything about anything that isn't the pair of long legs strolling through the Tokyo night at his side.
Tsukishima is seventeen years old and the smartest person he knows, and yet he has no idea what the hell is going on behind honey-gold eyes - but whatever it is seizes him in the same intoxicating hold as the wind whipping around his hair and down his throat whenever he leans out the window of the decrepit car at a hundred and fifty kilometers an hour. They stop walking halfway across a bridge and look out at Tokyo, sprawling out across the earth and blazing through the night like a man-made Milky Way, and Tsukishima's standing still but he has never felt this exhilarated in his life.
Then he turns, and honey-gold eyes under impossibly long eyelashes are looking back - and this time, when soft lips lean forward, he meets them halfway.
Let him be damned. By any god and all its cruel humor, he doesn't care.
Tsukishima thinks that nobody who writes off romance as a gentle, fluffy genre has ever been in love.
It's feverish and dizzying. His heart is either soaring into his throat or throbbing raw with pain. He has no idea who he is anymore - his life has failed to have constants like composure and a sense of self. Instead, his constants are messy black bedhead, honey-gold eyes, and above all the words tumbling from soft lips and flooding Tsukishima's chest with swelling fire.
On Skype calls, over endless texts, and across the console of the decrepit car whenever the feverish and dizzying person in question is in Miyagi - always too often, for someone who goes to college three hours away- Tsukishima is sent whirling by the rivers that flow from his quick mouth. They've been orbiting each other for two years, but Tsukishima has never been held rapt like this. If asked what they talked about, he would have a million answers and none. Galaxies. Universes. Birth and death and rebirth. And the two of them, hurtling through it, inexplicably caught in each other.
He still doesn't have a fucking clue what's happening behind honey-gold eyes.
They're driving again, this time on a Thursday afternoon during the few short weeks Tsukishima has before he starts college. Outside the windows of the car, teetering right on the edge of complete collapse, they're passing split-second rice terraces and small houses. The source of aforementioned lack of composure has been driving faster and faster ever since they became a them.
"I don't know who I am around you," the driver's seat says suddenly, when the song is in the middle of an instrumental and they've both fallen silent.
"You are an oversized asshole," Tsukishima responds without missing a beat. Easy laughter says something along the lines of you're one to talk - and it's their usual back-and-forth. Tsukishima wonders who he is around him, and something squeezes with dread that he swiftly quashes.
They've spent so many afternoons lazy like this, and Tsukishima knows it. Let the gods laugh their asses off. Let him be damned. He'll think about it another time.
It's another time. Tsukishima has been in college for almost a year. The quick brain underneath that disastrous hair is about to graduate. They have spent so very many afternoons being lazy.
Tsukishima can't even remember what sets it off - his mind is too busy racing, wondering how long this has been building, wondering if there was ever a time when it wasn't building. There are tears forming in the corners of the eyes front of him, and Tsukishima watches - feeling bizarrely detached, as if his subconsciousness had always kept its walls ready just beneath the surface and it only took the slightest jostle for them to shoot up into place again, boxing his emotions into a neat protected bundle for the road.
"-and if you'd say a damn thing-" His frustrated voice hesitates for a fraction of a second, as if expecting Tsukishima to interrupt him. Tsukishima doesn't, true to the accusation, and he continues on his own, the words coming faster now. "I can't - I can't carry us both alone. I can't always be the one reaching out - I know it's easier for you this way, and god, Tsukki, I've always wanted to make you happy, but I need something, I need to know I'm not worthless to you, I-"
He falls silent abruptly, throat working to swallow its lump. Tsukishima doesn't say anything - fuck, what could he possibly say? Was there any word that could explain how he had always laid Tsukishima bare and open by his simple presence?
Fear, maybe?
"Okay," he whispers instead. Far above him, he's pretty sure the gods are laughing themselves senseless.
A flash of pure pain is swiftly masked. "Okay," bitter cold says back.
He walks Tsukishima to the station and stands on the platform, his hands jammed into his pockets. The train is already there, as if the entire world was ready and waiting for this. Tsukishima feels numb.
"We can still be friends," he says, token. Tsukishima doesn't believe it any more than he does.
"We were never friends in the first place," Tsukishima tells him, and gets on the train.
They're both too smart for this, he thinks to himself as he watches the landscape fly by outside the windows of the speeding train. They are two telepaths trying to play chess. People say that being in love makes you stupid, crazy, blind. Even when Tsukishima's head reels with disheveled hair and gentle hands, even when he forgets who he is, his vision has never been anything but clear.
Let him be damned. Let him be damned. Let them both be damned.
Piece by piece, he remembers how to live without black hair and honey-gold eyes, without feverish and dizzying.
It's not easy. He hadn't realized how much of time was taken up either by his presence or by texting him or by waiting for him at the train station. He catches up on homework for this week, then does his assignments for the next week, then finishes all his readings for the rest of the semester - and that's when it really sets in.
He hadn't realized how physical it would be. He hadn't felt like he as a person was missing anything before the training camp he went to when he was fifteen, and ever since then, the lazy grin and knowing eyes had been present in some capacity. Total absence leaves him moving through his daily routine in a numb daze, wondering why his chest feels like an empty room in a house that's just been moved out of, full of plaster dust and echoes.
Tsukishima hasn't made many friends at college, and certainly nobody close enough to notice the difference - he was never very good at making friends, always too blunt, too caustic, too sarcastic, too reserved. It doesn't help that it's a whole new conversation to explain that his breakup was with a boyfriend.
Yamaguchi notices, and does his best to help - he invites Tsukishima out with him, gently forces him to make an appearance at gatherings of their year of the Karasuno volleyball team, which has somehow kept in touch. The effort is comforting, even if the actual activities aren't. Akiteru notices, when they're both home, but he doesn't pry. This is unsurprising. There's only one person who has ever pried.
Tsukishima finishes his first year of college and starts his second with little fanfare. In his economics class, the girl who sits next to him has silky red hair and a quick smile, and asks him if he wants to be study buddies. Why not, he thinks. What the hell. Let him be damned. He meets her in the library study rooms, in the living room of the dorm they're both in, in the tiny cafe in the basement of the econ building. She's funny, and the first time she surprises him into snorting a laugh, she looks positively delighted with herself.
Near the end of the semester, she asks him if he wants to spend some time together where they talk about books and movies and their favorite songs instead of supply and demand. Tsukishima stills, explains quietly that his rejection isn't about her silky red hair or her quick smile but about the fact that she is a her. She nods understandingly, and then takes out her phone and shows him her girlfriend, and makes fun of him for a solid thirty minutes afterwards as they wait in line for pastries - and talk about books and movies and the songs they love.
Hana introduces him to her girlfriend later. The girlfriend is shy, but her warm smile reminds Tsukishima powerfully of Akiteru. They have another friend, a boy with a soft voice and a dry sense of humor and a collection of terrible movies for them to watch in the evenings, and suddenly Tsukishima's days are alive again. Slowly, like turning the pedals on a rusty bike, he remembers how to laugh.
One night - slowly, like peeling plastic off new furniture - he tells Hana about honey-gold eyes.
She swats him upside the head when he's done. He stares at her in utter shock as she scolds him for waiting so long to tell a single soul, and then she drags him off and buys him six different pieces of cake from the tiny cafe, which he hesitantly identifies as her brand of sympathy.
Tsukishima finishes his second year of college busy as hell with exams and with the friends he seems to have made. The three of them come to the train station with him to see him off. Ryo thumps him on the back and helps him carry his things onto the train. Hana and Midori, hand in hand, wave goodbye as the train pulls away.
He couldn't say anything sappy or lean into their hugs on the platform, but ten minutes later, he sends Hana a text.
3:18 P.M.
Thank you.
Tsukishima Kei is twenty years old. He sits on the train and thinks about the sweets that kept showing up on his desk for a week after he told her. Then he thinks further back, where his memory starts to ache, about all the afternoons he was lazy.
And he sends another text.
They meet at a late-night cafe. Tsukishima can't remember if it's the same one as that hundred-and-fifty-kilometer-per-hour night - has it really been two years? it all happened so fast - but even if it is, something has changed. Something about the way the cashier doesn't seem to glower at him anymore, something about the way he can look up and greet messy black hair with a small smile and the beginnings of his apology on his lips.
Honey-gold eyes sit down across from him. They're unreadable as always, but Tsukishima is braver now, and he knows what he needs to say.
He tells him about Hana and Midori and Ryo. About how his studies are going, and about the other things he's learned. The impassive face across from him doesn't react, but he doesn't move away either.
"I know a little more about myself now," Tsukishima says finally, and it's hard - it'll never be easy - but let him be damned, it's now or never. "If you want to, um…"
"Try again?" supplies a tentative smile.
Tsukishima nods, and then there's a black leather glove twining with his bare fingers.
One month later, Tsukishima is rediscovering his childhood habit of crying when he gets frustrated.
The swift lips in the driver's seat of that dilapidated car have started speaking to him again, but this time around, he's feeling goddamn illiterate. Somewhere in their discordance, Tsukishima and the driver's seat started speaking a different language. Tsukishima's words are raw and bare, baby steps on freshly turned earth. The crooked smile's words are still galaxies and universes, as ethereal and confounding and untouchable as always.
He'd been an idiot to think that it would be as smooth as it was with Hana's easy smile. There's always too much going on behind unreadable honey-gold eyes - too fast, too keen, and right now, too confused and upset by the hot, angry tears that Tsukishima never would have let spill when he was fifteen and wary and safe.
"This isn't working," Tsukishima finally bites out, and where there used to be vitriol, there's only raw pain. "I don't understand you at all."
"I love you," says the promise. "I swear to god, Tsukki-" and there's that old nickname again, twisting like a knife - "I've never loved anyone like I love you, I'll never-"
"Love's not enough," Tsukishima cuts him off, bald-faced.
Seeing his flinch hurts, but they both know it's true. At least, Tsukishima knows it's true, and somewhere behind the wince, hopefully he does too.
He pulls over at the curb next to Tsukishima's apartment. Tsukishima leaves him sitting in his car, hears but doesn't see it speed away even faster than before.
Let him be damned.
He shows up a year later with a ring.
Tsukishima rejects him without ceremony. It's not easy, but they still aren't ready to be a we. But he also invites him into his small apartment and offers him tea and a chance.
"Kuroo," he says aloud, and sits down in the chair across from him at his kitchen table. Kuroo looks up from his cup, half-guarded, half-hopeful. "Let's talk."
It's rusty and halting at first, but they talk. They talk about Tsukishima's brand-new college degree, Kuroo's fledgling career, the latest Star Wars movie. They talk about their old teammates and friends, how Bokuto is well on his way to a pro career, Akiteru's recent engagement to Tanaka's older sister. Small talk, Tsukishima once would have called it, with a note of derision in his voice.
It is small. It's not electrifying like he remembers. It's not hurtling through galaxies. It's not one hundred and fifty kilometers per hour.
Tsukishima makes them two more cups of tea, then two more, and when he gets up to put the water on again, the window of his kitchen is dark. "It's late," he observes. "You should get home."
Kuroo nods and stands up to go, then pauses with his coat half-on by the door. "Want to go for a drive?" he asks, hesitant like he never is. "I have a new car. It's not as fast as the old one, but I can count on it to start when I put the key in the ignition, so…"
Tsukishima shakes his head. He's standing at the counter next to the refrigerator, bent over the notepad he uses to write his grocery lists. "Not tonight."
Kuroo nods, and then he doesn't move - waiting.
Tsukishima finishes writing, crosses the room, and presses the piece of paper into Kuroo's hand: a phone number, an address, an email address, in Tsukishima's angular, spindly script. He's a few inches taller than Kuroo now, and Kuroo looks up at him from under impossibly long eyelashes. "For when you need them."
Kuroo nods mutely, still unmoving. Tsukishima raises an eyebrow at him. "I hope you're not expecting a kiss."
Kuroo laughs aloud at that. "Nah, I know a little more about myself now."
The next day, Kuroo texts him a picture of his cat and an invitation to some tiny Greek restaurant he likes. Tsukishima sends him a picture of the flowerpot on his windowsill and accepts.
After that, all the small things in the city are theirs. They go to parks, just because, and Tsukishima learns that Kuroo hates the outdoors as much as he does. They go to six different churches and ignore every service to talk quietly in the balcony, and Tsukishima learns that neither of them is particularly religious but neither of them can quite dismiss the notion of a higher power either. They go to terrible concerts, and afterwards Tsukishima learns that Kuroo snorts sometimes when he laughs, like he does when Tsukishima is sarcastically mocking the ridiculous faces the drummers always make.
They go to that month's karaoke night at the seedy bar on the ground floor of Kuroo's apartment building, and Kuroo belts out an awful rendition of My Heart Will Go On and Tsukishima doesn't try to hide his laughter before joining him to duet Time Of My Life.
They go to karaoke night the next month too, and the month after, and after, and after.
At one point, Tsukishima takes a call from Akiteru while they're playing pool together in the basement of the seedy bar, and ends it with "Sorry, I can't stay to talk, I'm with a friend." Kuroo's lips curve up in a smile as Tsukishima hangs up.
"I told you we could still be friends," he says.
"That was seven years ago," Tsukishima says, characteristically blunt, and Kuroo falls quiet.
Too late, Tsukishima realizes what he's done. He stays quiet for a moment too, floundering inside for something to say.
"I'm… glad," he says finally, picking his way through unfamiliar territory. "That you found your way back to me."
Kuroo shakes his head, smiles crooked. "Forward, really."
"What do you mean?" Tsukishima asks, like he never would've before.
"I had some growing up to do too," Kuroo explains. He lines up his cue, curses as the cue ball barely glances off his target.
"It's okay," Tsukishima tells him, handing him the chalk. "You can try again."
That night, there's a full moon hanging low in the sky and something slow and warm in Tsukishima's chest as they walk home. He invites Kuroo in and offers him tea, pours a glass of milk for himself - he could never handle caffeine after two PM. They sit and talk, sipping slowly.
The conversation is inevitable, but it takes them an hour and a half to reach it. They're in no hurry.
"Can we make this official?" Kuroo asks when they're both ready. Tsukishima tilts his glass up to drain it of the last of the milk. "Because I never stopped being in love with you, and I think we have the rest of it too now."
Tsukishima is silent, thinking. Kuroo watches him over the rim of his mug.
"We can't go back," Tsukishima says finally, and Kuroo nods. "It's not - it can't be fast anymore, okay?"
"Yeah, I get it. Like this," Kuroo says, and gestures around Tsukishima's little kitchen. There's an egg timer on the counter, a few plates in the sink, Tsukishima's cat winding her way through the legs of the chairs and tables.
"Like this," Tsukishima agrees.
Tsukishima is twenty-five and Kuroo is twenty-seven, and they can't go back to a hundred and fifty kilometers per hour. But maybe - maybe there's something else. Maybe there's zero kilometers per hour, with an egg timer and plates in the sink.
Maybe there's love.
Tsukishima is twenty-five and he knows exactly who he is, he knows exactly who loves him, he knows exactly whom he loves. He looks across his kitchen table into Kuroo's honey-gold eyes, and he could tick off on his fingers the emotions he sees there. Anxiety. Understandable caution. Familiar guilt. Growing hope.
Deep, flickering love.
"Okay," he says. "Okay."
Kuroo is smiling wide. Tsukishima doesn't kiss him - right now, his smile is enough. There will be time later. Right now, they can go slow.
He reaches for Kuroo's hand.
"Like this," he says one more time.
The joke's on the gods this time around.
Let him be saved.