Work Text:
Kenma wakes cocooned in warmth, music still playing muffled in the distance just beyond the window. It takes him a moment to get his bearings, and in an effort to bury himself further into the comforter, his fingers graze a hand hanging limply over his waist.
It astonishes him, almost, how quick Kenma is to fight himself on this. He’s an expert at avoiding conflict, at figuring out how to angle the pick before tapping it into the ice and carving out an escape route before the whole thing shatters. Conflict creates noise, which attracts eyes, which creates a skewed version of himself for everyone else to ruminate over. So he’s not too keen on reckoning with a version of himself that he molds all on his own as he chews on his lower lip and figures out what to do.
He glances at the clock on the nightstand and sighs in relief. It’s only one in the morning, which means if he plays this right, he can slip out of Kuroo’s hotel room without waking him. He’s a medium sleeper at best, which makes Kenma’s odds at sneaking off and leaving Kuroo undisturbed about sixty to forty. He’ll take those.
Kenma does, however, allow himself an indulgent train of thought. He could stay, find shelter in the sheets and the body behind him and wake back up in a few hours as if he’d never brought the ice pick in the first place. He could stay, and Kuroo would let him.
But that would be a wretched thing. Kenma has been a lot of things to Kuroo over the years, and he’d rather not mark another tally next to wickedly selfish.
He turns in bed to face the ceiling, wincing as the sunburns on his forearms bloom with pain. He had meant to reapply sunscreen as the day had continued, but it was so easy to tunnel vision on playing volleyball after so long without it, especially playing alongside Hinata. He’s going to have a horrendous time peeling in the upcoming days, but despite the incinerating sun and the sand sticking to his skin, he’d do it again. It’s easy to say yes to volleyball, even easier to say yes to assisting Kuroo with his all-star match, with anything.
And perhaps even easier to get him to open his hotel room door so late in the evening. Kuroo’s snores compete with the rumbling air conditioning, which prompts Kenma to finally look at him.
When his gaze lands it collides with something that outweighs and outpaces him each time he has to consider it. Here Kuroo sleeps, his mouth a little lopsided and open, hair in that perpetual bedhead of his, arm still draped over Kenma like it belongs there. The familiarity of it is livewire, swaying and sparking back and forth as the current surges with nowhere to go. He’s missed the opportunity to look at Kuroo like this and how it shocks him.
Kenma should leave. He should get up and tiptoe through the room and the perennial plane of their dynamic since he could keep track of things like that, walk out the door, and lock himself into his own overpriced hotel room.
He continues to stare at Kuroo, though, at how the combination of resort lights and moonlight spill onto him like a muted spotlight. It’s relieving to see him so relaxed. Kenma recalls the before, when Kuroo would sleep with creases stamped into his forehead and a permanent furrow in his brow, when he would wake when Kenma couldn’t sleep, fatigue purpling the skin beneath his gaze. He’d still conjure the energy to smile at Kenma, to drape his arm over his waist and hold him close to his chest. Always the balm, the shelter, the cover.
It’s good to see him like this, to sleep so unbidden, or at the very least, less so. Kenma’s no fool to assume working for the Japan Volleyball Association is a simple thing. Kenma smiles, fingers itching at the sight. He mentally scolds himself for even entertaining the idea of caressing him, which is absurd considering the bruise blossoming on Kuroo’s neck is a result of Kenma’s impatient mouth. He surveys Kuroo’s chest, counts the bruises there, and resists tracing a path between them all. His cheeks flush in a way they haven’t in a long time, and he's thankful that Kuroo is asleep for all this. Small mercies.
For another moment, Kenma considers cocooning himself back into the sheets, back into Kuroo. But when he glances back at Kuroo’s peaceful expression, well, what right does he have to disrupt it?
Kenma carefully peels himself off the bed, gingerly taking Kuroo’s arm and slowly setting it down. It takes a powerful force of will to not squeeze his hand. He collects his clothes, which have been haphazardly thrown all around the room. Kenma isn’t sure his dignity will survive something like this, plucking his clothes off the ground as naked as the day he was born, but he figures his dignity has already tanked considering how he ended up here in the first place.
Once he’s properly dressed, he approaches the bed one more time. He only needs one additional moment, one extra glance so he can permanently stamp this relaxed Kuroo into his prefrontal cortex so he has something to reference when the itch to make things unfair spawns again. He breathes away the sting in his eyes and turns towards the door.
He only makes it three steps.
“Can’t believe you forgot how much of a medium sleeper I am.”
Kenma stops in his tracks and sighs. “I didn’t. Thought I was in the clear when the air conditioner didn’t wake you.”
“You’d think a huge resort like this would invest in something quieter,” Kuroo laughs. “If you thought I was getting any kind of quality sleep with the way steam was piping out of your ears from how hard those gears were turning, try again.”
“Sorry,” Kenma says, catching his bottom lip between his teeth again to refrain from visibly shrinking in on himself.
“You don’t have anything to be sorry for,” Kuroo whispers, “I’m always a medium sleeper with you.”
“I should go.”
“Why?” Kuroo’s voice is no longer gentle, but still not anywhere near a danger zone. It’s firm more than anything, but even so, Kenma doesn’t want to deal.
“I don’t—” Kenma shakes his head. “You don’t need this from me.”
“Try me,” Kuroo says. “You can leave if you want to, Kenma, but at the very least, can you look at me when you’re so close to the threshold of my door?”
Kenma holds his breath when he turns around, and he’s almost thankful for the collapsing pressure in his chest. Kuroo is sitting on the edge of the bed, the comforter draped over his shoulders. The lights from the window behind him reduce him to a bed head silhouette that draws Kenma in like gravity.
“Thank you,” Kuroo says, like Kenma has given him a gift.
“I shouldn’t have knocked on your door.”
“Are you saying I shouldn’t have answered?” Kuroo counters. “That I shouldn’t have mentioned my room number when it wasn’t even adjacent to the conversation you were having with Hinata? It’s okay if the answer is yes.”
“No, of course not.” Kenma reaches for his elbow and winces when he touches his sunburn. “I knew you wouldn’t say no.”
“Why’s that so unfair? As much as I tell you not to do things you don’t want to do, you’d think you’d understand that I also apply that to myself.”
Kenma pinches his skin to prevent himself from falling into his old habit of ducking behind his hair. “You gave me grace, which I took for granted.”
“You didn’t.” Kuroo heaves a big sigh, and Kenma braces for impact, eyes stuck on Kuroo. “Just so you know, I’m not gonna look back on this with even an iota of regret, if that’s what you’re hung up on. The responsibility of this partly sits on my shoulders, too.”
“It’s not that. I knew you wouldn’t regret it.” It’s difficult to discern Kuroo’s expression from across the room, but Kenma can feel that smirk of his he so rarely directs at Kenma with such an ache. “I’m going to leave now.”
“You can tell me if you regret it, you know, and I don’t just mean this.”
Now that cements Kenma in place. “How did you get there?”
“I don’t know,” Kuroo sighs and it feels like a sucker punch. “I’d be lying if I said it was easy going back to how things were after we were over, but it’s all honesty when I tell you falling into step with you, even as friends, is never seriously difficult.”
“Hold on—”
“But eight years later and our past relationship is still something that makes you gnaw on your bottom lip like it owes you money.” And that hangs there like a suspended pendulum where the chain stays pinched between Kenma’s fingers. There’s a slight twitch in the corner of Kuroo’s mouth that Kenma only catches because he’s trying to be better at confronting these things. They’re pushing thirty now, and despite the past eight years having flapped behind them like a cape in addition to the rest of their lifetimes, any kind of uncertainty is still foreign. The twitch in Kuroo’s mouth tells Kenma two things: Kuroo thinks he’s done something wrong, and he still trusts Kenma to have had a good reason to break up with him in the first place.
“You agreed so quickly to help me, which isn’t out of the norm or anything.” Kuroo closes his eyes and lets out a deep breath through his nose. Kenma can barely feel his elbow from how hard he’s been gripping it. “But when we spent time at the bar with Hinata earlier, and you glanced over his shoulder and looked at me I thought—” Another breath, and then, “It didn’t occur to me that our time together was still something you couldn’t look in the eye.”
“Stop,” Kenma says as he walks towards Kuroo until he’s right in front of him. It’s a strange thing to tower over him like this, and if the window were on the other side of the room, Kenma’s shadow would loom over Kuroo. He’s not sure how to feel about that. Kuroo looks up at Kenma like he can’t help himself, a concrete absolution, and Kenma doesn’t know what to do with it.
“You don’t have it right,” Kenma continues. “Not entirely, at least.”
“Where did I bury the mistake?” Kuroo’s gaze sticks to Kenma like tree sap, which encourages him to bandaid this as quickly as possible.
“I regret some of our relationship, but not in the way you think.” Confusion briefly twists Kuroo’s face like a screw, but Kenma quickly amends it and says, “There’s no mistake covered in dirt.”
Kuroo gently takes Kenma’s wrists in his hands and rubs his thumbs in circles on his pulse. Kenma has nowhere to hide, except in the comfort of Kuroo’s palms. He stares at Kuroo, at the minimal creasing in his forehead, at the absence of purpling skin.
“So what is it, then?”
“Dead weight,” Kenma starts. They were so ambitious then, their busyness testing their tenacity. That unbearable youth that accompanied them emboldened them to lift so much over their heads and run with it. World at their fingertips and all the accompanying adages. School, streaming, the woes of being eighteen and then nineteen had all harpooned Kenma through his neck, and it became increasingly difficult to take cover beneath Kuroo’s weight when the combined pressure of university and his job was grabbing Kuroo by the ankles as well. “I was dead weight.”
“I’m following,” Kuroo says, sifting through all six words Kenma was barely able to muster and finding the meat of them anyway. He readjusts his grip so that they’re holding hands. Kenma tries not to pull away, even as he recalls an eight year old memory of lying next to Kuroo, crumbling beneath the early pressure, and he imagines himself burying his fist into the cavity of Kuroo’s chest and tearing out everything that matters. He needs to better explain himself.
“I wasn’t as good at handling any of it, and you knew that and you compensated for me.” Kenma flits through the rolodex of his memories—the endless late evenings shifting into early mornings as Kuroo had comforted Kenma in lieu of managing his own hardships, Kuroo calling out of work and skipping class to ensure Kenma wouldn’t buckle at the knees, purpling under eyes and a wrinkled forehead—and an old and unmoving version of himself spawns.
“And I would do it again,” Kuroo interrupts. “I was your boyfriend, and even if I wasn’t, I’d still do it.”
“But I wasn’t reciprocating the same way.”
“Does it matter?” Kuroo interrupts. “There’s no exchange policy with things like that.”
“Of course it matters,” Kenma raises his voice. “Your grades could have plummeted, you might have lost your job.” Kenma couldn’t get a grip back then, and after moving everything forward and back, side to side, up and down, Kuroo’s only saving grace by Kenma’s estimations was to break it off, create and then augment the distance between them, just for a little while. Enough time to allow Kuroo to occupy himself with falling back into his routine without an added burden. “I thought about it for weeks, about how it could and couldn’t work.”
“So what, we were just some unfamiliar equation to solve in the end? That’s all?” Kuroo shakes his head. “That wasn’t fair to say, I’m sorry.”
“No, I deserve that,” Kenma says. “Especially since I knocked on your door.”
Kuroo snorts. “Did you have a good time, at least?”
“Tonight?” Kenma blushes when he glances at the bruise on Kuroo’s neck. “Yeah, it was good.”
“Good,” Kuroo parrots. “I wish you had talked to me about how you were feeling back then. Even after the fact. I hate that you were feeling so shitty about yourself and didn’t think to mention it.”
“I know, I miscalculated.” Kenma holds Kuroo’s gaze. “I’m sorry.”
“Me too, Kenma.”
Some of the resort lights shut off, dimming the room enough where Kenma really has to concentrate to keep staring at Kuroo’s face. There’s a shift in his expression, subtle enough that the only tell-tale is the slight dilatation of his pupils. It scares Kenma with all the possibilities it suggests.
“I should go, I think,” Kenma murmurs.
“What about now?”
“What?” Kenma’s palms are sweating now, but Kuroo just grips him tighter.
“I’m successful, you’re successful, we’ve got that part of things all sorted, and it only took us eight years,” Kuroo laughs. “Do you want to come back to bed?”
“Kuro,” Kenma says in disbelief, “I know it’s been years, but this doesn’t get magically fixed just because we’re at a better starting point.”
“Of course not.” Kuroo tugs on Kenma’s wrist until he’s close enough to wrap his arms around his waist. Kenma instinctively places his hands on Kuroo’s shoulders, who is still looking up at Kenma, has been the entire time. “Do you want to come back to bed?”
“I—” The simplicity of Kuroo’s question compounds with the finality of everything else. It’s so easy to fall back into step.
“Yes,” he breathes, “I want to go back to bed with you.”
Kuroo does not waste a single moment as he hauls Kenma into the sheets. Kenma wraps himself around Kuroo’s body, head on his chest, heartbeat steady, everything that matters singing in his ear.
“I still falter from time to time,” Kenma whispers into Kuroo’s chest, “I still look for shelter in your shadow sometimes. Are you—”
“Okay,” Kuroo says, and Kenma can hear the smile in his voice. “It’s a good thing we’ve had a lifetime’s worth of standing next to each other.”
“That’s so corny and embarrassing,” Kenma manages through a laugh.
“You’re used to it.” Kuroo presses a kiss to his forehead. “And you choose it, on purpose.”
“On purpose,” Kenma affirms before he dozes off to the murmuring of the music just beyond the window.