Archive of Our Own

i. ENDLESS SEASON

The first heat wave of the season dawns in an odd-numbered day in July, hailed by the orchestra of cicadas that camps out on the backyard of Kenma’s house, Kuro’s ever-recurring, ongoing war against the mutant mosquitoes in the neighborhood (which he’s losing), and the arrival of Hinata Shouyou at Tokyo Station.

Kenma doesn’t believe in coincidences any more than he believes in things like fate or the existence of some higher deity. As he watches Shouyou’s blinding grin and flaming hair dash across the stairs to wrap him in a too-sweaty hug, though, piercing sun dyeing the back of his neck red, even he thinks that it’s a little too on the nose. 

It’s been raining for days, early and often; he’s used to summer storms in the late afternoons, sudden and booming with thunders and completely gone after a half hour, but it’s rained through the night for the past week. Kenma doesn’t mind it too much, because it gives him an excuse to not leave the house. Kuro minds it a lot more, because his ceiling is prone to leaks, but only in his bedroom. At least once a week, he wakes up to the incessant drop-drop-drop of water in the bucket he keeps near his bed. Or at least, that’s what he’s been texting Kenma ever since summer began.

“You didn’t have to wait for me outside!” Shouyou half yells into his ear, swaying them both side to side in the still too-sweaty hug. Kenma winces, but for once, the loudness is justified. Both the outside and inside of Tokyo Station is bubbling with people, an endless stream of voices that have risen to a deafening cacophony, elbows and limbs pushing into his ribs with murmured apologies. Kenma digs his chin a little into the crook of Shouyou’s shoulder. “I would have found you!”

“You would have gotten lost,” Kenma murmurs. God knows he’s done it often enough, getting distracted by almost passing a level in one of his games and then missing a corner, or going up the wrong set of escalators. Once he went up the stairs only to find out that the correct way to transfer lines had been downstairs, where he was in the first place, and he had to cross half the station to make his way back.

There’s a reason why they always take buses to practice games in different cities, even though the bullet trains are faster. Herding twenty teenagers through the busiest train station in the country is a safety risk that Nekoma High School isn’t too keen on bearing the consequences of. Lev would probably trip on those weirdly long legs of his and fall into the train tracks. 

“Are you implying I can’t handle myself in the big city?” Shouyou demands, pulling away from the hug to shake Kenma by the shoulders. He does so gently, though — he’s seen Kageyama be subject to the same treatment, and it involved a lot more head rattling. With Kenma, Shouyou just seems happy to be here. The smile hasn’t left his face. “Are you calling me a good for nothing city bumpkin?”

“Don’t put words in my mouth,” Kenma says, going for flat and sounding fond instead.

Shouyou’s face freckles in the summer, and his eyes, against the sun, look more honey than brown. Kenma doesn’t like eye contact, and Shouyou never seeks it. For some reason, that makes it easier to meet his gaze, even if it’s just for a moment. “I don’t have anything against country bumpkins,” Kenma says, trying not to smile. “I treat them as if they were regular people.”

Shouyou squawks. “As if? ”

It’s been a while since they’ve seen each other. Which isn’t that long if you consider that they live hours away from each other, in different provinces — considering that, they see each other quite often. Practice games stopped being few and far between, with how clear it became that Nekoma and Karasuno just made each other better. Coach Nekomata is yet to stop talking about the match they played during Nationals, his wrinkled cheeks pink with excitement, laugh lines creasing whenever the topic comes up. He often asks after the Karasuno players as if they were distant relatives, mostly through Kuro, who’s the only one who’ll answer. Kenma only keeps in contact with Shouyou; Kuro, on his part, has at least three separate group chats with Karasuno, each serving a different purpose.

Well, there’s the groupchat with all the captains from the practice camp, of course, Kuro had explained, when Yaku grew overly suspicious of why he was so in touch with a rival team. Dear old Daichi is there. Then, let me see, there’s the one with all the third years from Karasuno — you are in that one, Yaku-kun, but I think you either silenced it or you blocked me again. And there’s the Gym Three group chat! Love that one. Tsuki-kun sends such delightful memes.

He does not, Yaku replied, narrowing his eyes even further, as if the idea of Tsukishima Kei having a sense of humor that involved laughing with other people instead of at them personally offended him.

Kuro had sighed in defeat. He does not, he acquiesced. But Keiji does.

Akaashi Keiji does, in fact, send memes. Kenma was allowed to scroll through that particular chat once; he still can’t reconcile the image of Fukuroudani’s sharp-eyed, serious, cunningly collected setter with the same person who’d unironically rick-rolled the entire group chat, three years after rick-rolling got old. 

“He’s a bit outdated,” Kuro admitted, “but he genuinely thinks he’s funny, and not like, in an arrogant way, he just wants people to find him funny, so we do.”

Kenma doesn’t overly enjoy group chats. He has the Nekoma High School Volleyball Club group chat with their supervising teacher muted. He has the one without their supervising teacher also muted. He doesn’t like to be perceived or heard from outside business hours. He hopes he vanishes from people’s minds the second he steps out of the gym, like a distant dream or some weird cryptic. 

But anyway, he hasn’t seen Shouyou properly since spring — since Nationals, since Shouyou ran himself to the ground, since Kenma’s arms wrapped around his trembling frame, letting him press his feverish forehead against Kenma’s neck and cry like a little kid. 

Kenma wasn’t allowed to go to the hospital with them, since he was from a different team, under a different coach’s jurisdiction, but he would have if given the chance. The thought had surprised him, halfway through so-and-so’s match, his tablet somewhere else in Shouyou’s hands. Kenma had been exhausted, bone-tired and weary and slumped into his seat, dry sweat from the match on his neck, but he would have gone with them. He doesn’t think he would have made so much effort for anyone else, Kuro being the sole exception.

The sun’s too hot. It feels like his brain is cooking inside his skull, and even Shouyou seems affected; he’s got red splotches high on his cheeks, blinking lazily against the light. The weather in Miyagi isn’t all that different from Tokyo, but Tokyo feels hotter — the tall buildings don’t allow for proper air circulation, there’s too much concrete and asphalt and too few trees to disperse the heat. Sometimes in Ikebukuro he can see the air actually shimmering, like it does over live flames. 

“Let’s get out of here,” Kenma says, and his voice sounds muted, like his ears are clogged up. “We’re taking the bus home. Have you eaten?”

Shouyou shakes his head no, sweaty curls bouncing against his forehead. “I had breakfast, but I get motion sickness. I didn’t eat that much so I wouldn’t be miserable, and also so I wouldn’t throw up on anyone. Tanaka-senpai gets really mad when I throw up on him, but at least he’s not a stranger.”

Kenma presses his lips together. The bucket hat he’d stuffed over his head is coarse and black, and in hindsight, not a good idea to wear out underneath the scorching sun. His knees feel itchy, odd scrapes from practice now clammy. He looks this way and that, but all he sees is people, people, people. 

“We can go get ice cream or something before we go,” Kenma offers, before he can think twice. Any ice cream shop will surely be crowded to hell and back, but he has good rapport with the paths leading to convenience stores in forgotten corners — he’s not buying any overpriced shit when Melona will do just fine. “If you want.”

“I love ice cream!” Shouyou exclaims, like Kenma knew he would. Some people glance their way, and then double take. Ginger hair isn’t exactly common when it’s natural, and with Kenma’s dyed dirty blonde, they probably look like two idol trainees who just rain away from their dorms. 

Kenma’s head aches. He takes Shouyou’s wrist and drags him downstairs so they can finally stop blocking the flow of people, and to the relief of the security guard at the entrance of the station who had been glaring at them for the past five minutes.

“It won’t be anything fancy,” Kenma tells him, as they finally begin to walk away from the square. He has to keep glancing back to see if Shouyou’s following him properly; the odds of him getting distracted by something pretty on a shop window or by a fucking butterfly aren’t exactly low. “I’m on a budget.”

Shouyou’s keeping up, eyes wide. He’s hugging his backpack to his chest like Kenma told him to, so he won’t end up bumping it into people accidentally. “I still think it’s so cool that you’re home alone for a week,” he says, expertly dodging a toddler who’d escaped the clutches of their father. The sidewalk is so packed they can barely walk side by side. “That’s so long! ”

Kenma glances at him. “Your mom leaves you alone for work trips too,” he points out. Being home alone makes Shouyou bored; in a video call during one of those occasions, he had confessed that Kenma was one of the seven different calls with different people he had scheduled throughout the day, so time would go by faster. 

I talked to Bokuto-san before you, and I’m calling Kageyama after, he’d said. After that, Yachi-chan and I will have dinner together but like, separately, me at my place and her at hers, but we’ll call each other since we’re both alone. 

Kenma has no idea what it’s like to know so many people, let alone talk to all of them in the same day. The idea makes his skin crawl.

“Yeah, over weekends, ” Shoyou argues. “And not alone alone, I have to take care of my sister. So I can’t just do whatever, I have to wake up and make breakfast and lunch and dinner because she’s nine. ” He makes a face. “I have to take her with me to practice, and get home earlier because mom would kill me if I was out with Natsu after sundown.”

“You take your little sister to practice,” Kenma repeats, “on weekends.”

Shouyou blinks. “Yeah?”

He almost rhetorically asks if five consecutive days of practice during the week aren’t enough, but he ends up biting his tongue. Sometimes rhetorical questions are too rhetorical. Of course it isn’t enough for someone like Shouyou. Kenma wishes he could understand a little, but the mere thought leaves him exhausted. He can’t imagine what it’s like to be so entirely dedicated to something that your whole life orbits around it — and Kenma likes volleyball. He does. He said that to Kuro, slump-shouldered and exhausted after their match at Nationals: volleyball is fun. He’s glad he plays volleyball. It’s just… not his whole life.

But he and Shouyou are different people. Too different, maybe, but Kenma doesn’t stick around things that bore him. 

They turn a corner and then cross the street, dodging office workers rushing through their lunch break and other kids dawdling next to street food stands, on vacation and idle with it. The smell of something deep fried fills the air, alongside something sweet, something spicy. Someone’s selling a batch of takoyaki for two-thousand yen, someone else crows about authentic Korean tteokbokki. At the end of the block, an elderly man is blowing soap bubbles and selling colored cotton candy in unusual shapes, and Kenma has to very patiently talk Shouyou out of purchasing the triangle shaped blue one, with threats of denying him ice cream later on. Then, Kenma has to very patiently wait as Shouyou spends the next five minutes popping the soap bubbles as they come, before the wonder wears off and they continue.

He’s thankful he doesn’t live this deep into the center of Tokyo — his parents had the right idea to move to a more residential area after they had Kenma, where they live in a two-story house and buildings taller than five floors aren’t allowed. Even if Kenma was never the sort of kid who’d spend hours and hours outside, only coming back at the cusp of dusk with scraped knees and a dirty face, which is what his mom had hoped for when they decided to not raise a child in a two-bedroom apartment. Mom’s still happy enough that at least Kenma isn’t rotting in his room, and she owes that almost entirely to Kuro.

Even though he doesn’t get out much, he’d choose a quiet neighborhood a thousand times over the hustle and bustle of Ginza, it’s too-expensive coffee shops and department stores, hundreds of people on each side of the street. Not that he’d ever be able to afford living here, anyway. 

It’s another two blocks until they find the first convenience store that isn’t crowded, at least not from what they can see from the outside. The air conditioning is like a balm to Kenma’s soul, and he wonders if Shouyou would mind too much if he just. Layed on the tiled floor for a while. Just for a bit.

But Kenma’s supposed to be a good host. His parents hadn’t minded when he brought up the subject of having a friend stay over with him for the week, even if they had been surprised it wasn’t just Kuro, so long as he was a good host. Kenma’s mom talked to Shouyou’s mom before he was allowed to come, and apparently Shouyou had sounded like “Such a nice boy!” and Kenma sounded like “Such a responsible young man!” that there wasn’t any issue. Shouyou’s mom was assuaged by the fact that Kenma was a year older than him, too, because for some reason that granted him an extra degree of credibility.

They get their ice cream. Shouyou pays for it while Kenma’s too busy rehearsing in his head what to say to the cashier, and Kenma can’t even pretend to be annoyed when Shouyou grins at him, looking ridiculously proud of himself. He’s too soft for the kid. 

Fuck, that sounds like something Kuro would say. Kuro’s the kind of weirdo who calls people barely two years younger than himself “kiddo” because he was raised by his grandparents. Kenma is just the poor victim of having been around that loser every single day for the past ten years.

The store has a little outside part, with a few chairs and tables, the white awning shielding customers from the sun. The only customers are the two of them, really, and they elect to sit on the parapet wall separating the area from the rest of the street. Kenma’s popsicle is already melting, sweet melon-flavored sugar making his fingers sticky. He kicks the back of his feet against the parapet a few times, tilting his head back to look at the sky.

It’s not quite the beginning of summer, but it’s early enough that Kenma isn’t used to it yet. Which is an oxymoron, because usually it takes him the entire season to get used to it, and by then the leaves have already started falling. But summer in and summer out it storms, gray and stuffy, the heat from the blazing sun against concrete and asphalt condensing the water vapor and fattening the clouds dark-blue with rain. Kenma can see it now, just through the skyscrapers in the distance, coloring the gaps between buildings.

Every season has cracks where the colder months might leak through. In summer, the sky’s the one that cracks open.

“It’s weird how rain smells so different here,” Shouyou says, as if he’d been hearing his train of thought. Kenma isn’t in the habit of saying out loud anything that isn’t entirely thought through, but Shouyou’s just perceptive like that. His face is smudged orange with his mango Melona, and he looks like a three-year-old kid who doesn’t know how to properly feed himself, but is having fun with it. “You know I live faaar away from downtown in Miyagi, Tanaka-senpai always says that I live in the mountains like some kind of hermit. So I live more in like a farm… or maybe a cottage because we don’t have any animals and Natsu is afraid of chickens. But anyway, back home the rain smells green. Like the leaves of a tall tree!” He emphasizes his point by dangerously tipping his body back, then righting himself like he didn’t just nearly snap his spine. “But here, I can still tell rain’s coming, but it’s less green.”

“Mhm,” Kenma hums. The popsicle makes his teeth hurt. “It’s probably raining somewhere else in the city already. What you’re smelling is wet concrete. I don’t imagine that it smells very green.”

He is not good at metaphors. Shouyou, as far as he’s aware, is flunking Literature, so he should not be able to use metaphors like this. But then again, maybe the metaphors do suck and Kenma just can’t tell because he doesn’t know how to think in abstract.

Shouyou takes a bite out of his popsicle. “I guess rain can smell gray,” he says, as if he’s done something completely normal. Kenma’s entire mouth aches in sympathy. “But that’s just kind of sad. Rain’s already bad enough without being sad.”

It checks out that someone like Shouyou wouldn’t like rain, but Kenma still feels the need to ask, “Why’s it so bad?”

Shouyou shrugs. “Our house is old. It leaks a lot. It’s sturdy enough that that’s the worst of it, but sometimes it makes tree branches fall or whole trees fall and mom can’t go to work until someone comes to take it away from the road… and Kubunaki-san’s house — he lives just down the road — sometimes floods. So it’s not fun.”

Kenma hadn’t expected such thought out, reality-based explanations from Shouyou, and he’s a bit ashamed of himself for it. Of course, their lives are different, living so far away, one in the heart of the biggest city in the world and the other one in the provinces, far from even the town center. Feeling a bit cowed, even though Shouyou’s tone hadn’t been anything but friendly, Kenma murmurs out an, “Oh. Sorry.”

“You can’t know everything all the time, Kenma,” Shouyou chides playfully, taking another cheerful bite from his popsicle. “You setters are all the same, Kageyama is just like you when it comes to these things. You all think so much about everything, and then you get mad at yourselves for something you did or didn’t do, like, a thousand years ago. Is it a requirement?”

The sun dims a little, covered by a passing cloud. The tree-lined street seems to sway gently in unison with the breeze, and soon the cloud is gone, and the sunlight streams in through the gaps once again. 

“Can’t tell you,” Kenma says, crumpling the empty wrapping and putting it in his pocket. “Or then I’d have to kill you.”

“Woah,” Shouyou replies, eyes wide. “Akaashi-san said exactly the same thing when I asked.”

Kenma snickers a little, and categorically refuses to answer the rest of Shouyou’s increasingly shrill line of questioning about a (nonexistent) secret society of setters. 

There is no such thing, Kenma thinks, as he watches the patches of sunlight on the sidewalk, as certain personality traits, or similar worldviews, that attract people to a particular position in volleyball. He has played many games in his life, against many teams, and against many setters. He has played against setters too smart for their own good, and setters just reckless enough that they’d just might win. He has played against setters who knew every twitch of the eyebrow of their main hitters, but that floundered when someone from the bench was switched in. He has played against setters whose eyes he’d meet over the net and he’d have to look away, because it can be uncomfortable, seeing your own hunger reflected back at you.

Bad setters, good setters. Really good setters. If there’s a pattern, Kenma hasn’t spotted it yet — and he’s good at patterns. He knows what ties a story together, motifs and archetypes that built a world inside a screen. The hero’s journey, the inevitable loss that comes as a precursor for a happy ending. Kenma has played too many games to not be able to tell. He trusts the narrative.

But trusting the narrative is kind of difficult when you don’t know where it’ll lead you. That’s part of what keeps a story exciting, Kenma knows. Predictability is only as good as the author can use it to their advantage, make the reader feel like they’re discovering something, but not enough that they crack the code of the entire story at once. Heroes will be heroes, fantasy worlds will be fantasy worlds; but Kenma isn’t a hero, and the world is just the world. 

Stories are a good source of comfort because there’s a sense of predictability to them. It’s why Kenma plays his favorite games again and again, conquers the final level time after time. At least then he knows where he’s headed.

There’s the ringing noise of a bike bell, and something reddish blurs its way past them on the sidewalk, ringing all the while. It’s fast enough for a small breath of wind, Kenma’s hair being blown back from his face. Shouyou raises a fist and lets out a cheer for the kid, who’s already halfway down the block.

“I used to have a bike just like that when I was that age,” Shouyou says, letting his hand drop. He’s almost wistful, watching the kid’s figure disappear in the distance. 

“I bet you rode just as fast where you shouldn’t have,” Kenma mutters, watching his own feet as he kicks them. “It’s a wonder you never crashed into anything.”

“If you’re too fast for your own two feet you’ll just trip and fall,” Shouyou quips. He takes a final bite of his popsicle before popping the leftover stick back into his mouth, biting at it like a teething toddler. “Same things go for bikes! You should only go as fast as the wheels let you or they’ll fail and you’ll go flying.”

“Sure,” Kenma replies, as if he understands how to ride a bike. His parents never really bothered to teach him, and he never owned one. He thinks some members of his team ride their bikes to school, but most just take the bus. 

For some reason, his tone makes Shouyou turn to squint at him suspiciously. “I’ve never seen you ride a bike,” he says, as if it’s an accusation.

“I don’t know how to ride a bike,” Kenma replies, unsure of why it’s such a big deal. A myriad of emotions seem to squabble on Shouyou’s face, because he has never pretended to feel something other than what he does feel for a day in his life. Indignation and incredulousness quickly give way to something triumphantly determined, and Kenma feels trepidation bubble in his stomach. 

He knows what’s coming before Shouyou even says it. “Well, I’ll teach you!”

“No.”

“What? Why? Come on ,” Shouyou whines, taking Kenma by the shoulder and shaking him. Yup, there’s the head rattling. “We’re alone for the week! What other plans do you have! Why not use this free time to learn! A new! Skill!” He punctuates each exclamation by soft punches against Kenma’s arm. There are a lot of exclamations. His arm hurts.

Kenma rolls his eyes. “I’m seventeen, not seven. It’s easier for kids to learn things. Plus, I don’t have a bike for you to teach me.”

“Bike rental services,” Shouyou replies immediately. Kenma’s already given up in convincing him otherwise: those were all the arguments he had. “Come on, it’ll be fun. I’m a good teacher, I taught Natsu how to ride a bike too!”

“If I say yes, will you stop speaking in all caps?” Kenma asks. “Please.”

“Oh.” Shouyou quiets immediately. He does it with his whole body, resting fidgeting hands on his lap even as his eyes remain huge, pleading. “I will. I can be quiet.”

Kenma watches him squirm for the entirety of ten seconds before he sighs. “You don’t need to be that quiet,” he acquiesces. Too loud is sometimes too much for Kenma, but too loud is Shouyou’s default mode, and Shouyou can never be too much. He’s Kenma’s best friend. “There’s a park with bike rental service near Shibuya, we can go there.”

Shouyou punches the air. “Yes!” He springs up from the parapet, bouncing on his feet. Standing up, he’s still a couple centimeters shorter than Kenma sitting down. “Ah, I’m excited. I miss that red bike I had. I got a new one before I got into Karasuno, since I’d have to ride it every day to and from… and the red one was old. My dad gave it to me.” He looks over his shoulder, as if he could still catch a glimpse of the kid with the red bike in the distance, but they’re long gone. “It was like watching myself go by. Time is weird.”

Time is weird, Kenma agrees silently. He said he’s seventeen, but he feels anything but. Shouyou’s seventeen too; it’s that weird time of year before Kenma’s birthday but after Shouyou’s, where they’re the same age even though they’re a year apart. Kenma is in his last year of high school. Someone from his class started a Twitter account counting down the days until their graduation ceremony, and Kenma blocked it, because looking at it made him sick. Three-hundred and thirty-something days are all that separates him from the beginning of the rest of his life.

He was fifteen just a second ago, hands shaking as he scanned the school halls for Kuro after his first day at Nekoma, chest tight and clammy and a bit dizzy. And Kuro had come like a storm, out of nowhere, dropping a friendly arm over Kenma’s shoulder in what was supposed to look like a cool and detached manner, but was actually just shielding him from the rest of the world. Kenma had spent most of the bus ride back home with his head resting against the window, and his hand clasped tightly between Kuro’s.

But now it’s July. Summer’s rolling down his cheek, a drop of sweat and an irritated tear from air pollution. Kuro’s moving into his college dorm in the last week of August, and Kenma is, inconceivably, trying to picture a life in which Kuro isn’t a doorway, a glance out the window away.

The future is both a particle and a wave. Life’s a shore. Like a little kid watching his sandcastle be taken away by the tide, Kenma keeps trying to build something that stays, something that won’t get lost in the current.

Shouyou sighs, tipping his head back. The sunlight through the trees cuts shards through the shade, a sunny day in softer tones. The branches sway in the hot, pointless breeze, and the buildings and houses across the street seem to move along with it. Kenma looks upwards as well, squinting at the bright light streaming through, unsure what Shouyou’s seeing.

“This is nice,” Shouyou says, a smile in his voice. He nudges his shoulder against Kenma, and Kenma nudges back.

“It is nice,” Kenma agrees. I’m already missing it.

ii. SUMMER ROLLING DOWN A CHEEK

Initially, the idea of Shouyou spending a few days in Tokyo with Kenma started out as an inside joke. Ironically, it was an inside joke within the Nekoma High School Volleyball Club, and it did not involve Shouyou at all.

The Nekoma High School Volleyball Club harbors the same feelings towards the Karasuno High School Volleyball Club that one would harbor for those friends you make while on vacation somewhere far away from home. Some kid around your age whom you meet at the beach and you play together in the sand until you’re both worryingly sunburnt and crying in your parents’ arms because you don’t want to leave, you want to play some more. And then you’re confronted with the fact that you might never see them again. 

Nekoma and Karasuno see each other more often than Kenma sees his cousins in Hokkaido. Still, every time they leave whichever’s volleyball court it is, the feeling remains. I don’t want to go. I want to play some more.

But he digresses. The inside joke began because although that’s what the Nekoma High School Volleyball Club feels about Karasuno as a whole, the feelings harbored toward one Hinata Shouyou are more similar to how one would feel about a stray kitten that imprinted on their second shortest starting player. Their second shortest starting player is also known as Kenma.

(Yaku rebukes any type of height-based identification. Kuro says Yaku would not have rebuked such an effective system if he were their second tallest starting player, instead of their shortest player, period. Yaku accuses Kuro of having a height complex. Kuro asks if Yaku has ever heard of projecting your own insecurities towards others. Kenma has a headache.)

“When’s Hinata-kun coming to visit us at practice?” Kai would ask, off-handedly, during their water break.

“You never bring him around anymore,” Lev would whine, flushed cheek pressed against the floorboards of the gym after Yaku was done with blocking drills, as if Shouyou was simply hanging around in Kenma’s house and not three hundred kilometers away in Miyagi.

“I am not his owner,” Kenma would reply. They all have cellphones and brain cells that theoretically have the capacity of connecting to each other and forming synapses; they could manage to find Shoyou’s Line handle in their, you know, shared group chat with Karasuno.

But this week, Shouyou is indeed simply hanging around in Kenma’s house, and not three hundred kilometers away in Miyagi. Which is why Kenma couldn’t really do anything when Yaku sent him a very politely worded message, cordially inviting both Kenma and Shouyou for a scrimmage at Yoyogi Park near Harajuku. The message made it very clear that it was not merely an invite, but rather an order, and Kenma wonders for the entirely of fifteen seconds how the hell Yaku even knows that Shouyou is in town and that Kenma hasn’t yet gone into his summer hibernation, before remembering the existence of Kuroo Tetsuro.

Fucking snitch. 

He did consider pretending he didn’t see the message, or simply lying and saying Shouyou wasn’t there, but Shouyou saw the (increasingly more frequent) notifications on his phone while Kenma tried to get their frozen, homemade pizza from the oven without burning himself, and he was immediately sold. 

“We have to go,” Shouyou had said. “It’ll be fun!” Shouyou had said. “When’s the next time you’re gonna be able to play with your senpais? It’s nearly August!”

That last one was kind of the straw that broke it. Shouyou had launched into a very heartfelt speech about how touching it had been to get together with his senpais back home before they all started packing their things to college, about how Sawamura-san had pretended not to cry but was definitely crying, how Sugawara-san had demanded that they all play just one last match against each other, but only if Kiyoko-san agreed to play setter. “I’m so sad they’re leaving but I’m so happy for them,” Shouyou had concluded, beaming.

Kenma had closed his eyes, and tried to swallow the sudden lump on his throat and the cold shudder licking up his spine with the realization that maybe he’s a terrible person, because he’s yet to find it in himself to feel happy that Kuro’s graduating, that he got into his dream college, that he’s going away.

But that’s the sad and summed up story of how Kenma finds himself in a park, with grass and bugs and the same sun that shines in hell, probably, at ten a.m. on a fucking Wednesday. He deserves some sort of prize or financial compensation. The Nobel Prize for Best Best Friend, for not simply giving Shouyou the instructions on how to take the bus here and let him figure it out on his own.

Instead, he’s trying not to squirm uncomfortably at the blades of grass making his skin itch even through the purple spread out towel he’s sitting on. His bucket hat is pulled as far down as it can go on his face, and every time he breathes he inhales sunscreen, because the last thing he could possibly need is a sunburn for his trouble. Kenma pulls his knees up to his chest and peers at the mess in front of him, silently thanking whatever gods there are that he hasn’t been pulled into it.

There’s nine of them. It’s an odd number, and Kenma decides he loves odd numbers because it means he gets to sit out on the scrimmage in order to keep the teams balanced. Inuoka had promised, wide-eyed, that he’d step out the second Kenma wanted to join. Yaku had actually laughed out loud, and told him to just focus on playing.

“I’m gonna beat his ass in a scrimmage at least once before my high school career is over,” Yaku had said, his best glare aimed directly at Kuro, who’d blown him a kiss.

“If you already have your diploma, doesn’t that mean your high school career is actually already over?” Lev asked curiously. Yaku drop-kicked him to the ground.

(“It’s pride month, folks,” Kuro yelled out at all of them, while Inuoka and Lev set up the net. “You know what that means.

There was a continued silence, in which everyone clearly expected Kuro to say something. He didn’t. He pulled out his phone and started typing away at it  with one hand as he chugged his water bottle with the other.

“What?” Yaku had asked, long-suffering. “What does it mean, Kuroo? Do you want us to play gay ball or something? What? ”

Kuro finished drinking his water and tossed the bottle to the ground. “Wouldn’t you like to know,” he’d said, and then went to help Inuoka from where he’d gotten tangled up in the net.

“We’re in July,” Tora had announced, to no one in particular. “It’s literally not pride month.”

“We should celebrate gay people every month!” Shouyou had chided him.

It’s a wonder they ever managed to start playing.)

Kenma thinks he’s supposed to be keeping score, he muses, as he watches the ball go up that way, down that way. The makeshift net had been a courtesy of Kuro; it’s made out of hard plastic, because it’s supposed to be a kid’s toy, and a little too small for half the people there, but it does its job. On one side, Tora lets out a call for Shouyou to go for it. Fukunaga’s playing setter, and Kuro’s… whatever. 

On the other side of the net, Yaku is so entirely focused that his eyes seem to shimmer; Kai’s all calm and collected, never anything else, and it takes the patience of a saint and a miracle maker to keep not only Yaku, but two over-excited, newly turned second years in line. It’s the third time Inuoka and Lev have ran into each other in their haste to not let the ball drop.

It’s beginning again, that feeling. When Kenma had first started high school, both his parents and his teachers had told him that it was time to start thinking about the direction he wanted to go as an adult. By then, he had been playing volleyball for about five years. He played all throughout middle school, but he had refused to play during elementary because he and Kuro hadn’t gone to the same school. One of his teachers in his first year of high school had asked if that was something Kenma thought about doing in the future, if he wanted a career in the sport. Kenma had looked at her like she was crazy.

If Kenma didn’t enjoy playing volleyball, he would’ve quit a long time ago. He wouldn’t even have continued after that first time, no matter how much Kuro insisted, because Kenma isn’t the sort of person who does things out of duty or obligation. He doesn’t do things because he should. 

He wouldn’t say he’s bad at the sport, either. And he’s not special enough that it’s noticeable, even if he’s smarter than some setters, if his way of seeing the court is wider than other teams can picture it. He’s not a genius like Kageyama, and he’s not a star like Bokuto. He could, conceivably, if he worked hard enough, have a shot at entering the minor leagues, if he wanted. Sometimes it’s not even a matter of “am I good enough to do it?”, but rather a question of “do I love it enough to be bad at it?”

Does Kenma love it enough?

Sheer reflex is what keeps him from a broken nose. His hands have snapped up to cover his face from the oncoming ball before he’s even processed the impact, and now his forearms are smarting. He blinks, almost bewildered, and looks up to see Yaku looking heavenward as if praying for patience. 

“You could’ve at least bothered to catch it,” Tora calls out, sounding winded, as he rushes after the ball down the slope they’re playing next to. In hindsight, not the best idea to play somewhere the ball can just roll away after every point scored. They’re lucky that the family having a picnic near that tree doesn’t seem to mind, or at least is distantly amused by a high schooler with undercuts and a dyed dirty blonde mohawk yelling apologies at them.

Kenma sighs. “I could have bothered,” he says, knowing Tora likely won’t hear, “to have done so many things.”

“I think it’s time for a water break,” Kuro calls out, leaning on the net for balance. His usually spiky hair is wind-tousled and swept back; he doesn’t use any of the hair products he usually does during summer, because he just sweats them out anyway. “If Yaku-kun doesn’t object.”

“Fuck off and die,” Yaku says vehemently, before stalking off the court and taking one of the water bottles that’s delimiting each of the four corners of it in the grass. He glowers even as he chugs it, grumbling as he flops down next to Kenma on the grass.

Shouyou skips over to them, a tired smile on his face as he sing-songs, “Water break, water break — ah, thank you!” He exclaims with a short bow as Kuro tosses him his own water bottle. He presses it to his flushed cheeks, and then drops to the ground right in front of Kenma, bypassing the towel entirely. 

“It’s good to see Chibi-chan right here taking a break,” Kuro teases a few minutes later, after he’s granted Lev and Inuoka permission to go get themselves ice cream. It’s still unclear why they asked for permission, considering Kuro is just some guy and not their father, but Kuro seemed absolutely delighted by it, and even gave them some pocket money. Kai went alongside them with a kind smile, promising to be a good chaperone. “You live, you learn, huh?”

“Chibi-chan,” Tora echoes. 

They’re all sprawled around now, and Kenma had to scoot over until his back was leaning against the tree they laid the towel underneath. The bark is rough against his neck, and his hair does little to help, since he’s swept it to the side to try and stave off the sweltering heat. Tora and Fukunaga are laying on the grass, Tora belly-down resting on his arms, Fukunaga belly-up and squinting close-eyed against the sun. Kuro is leaning on his elbows next to Kenma, legs spread out, and Yaku sits crossed legged at the edge of the towel, watching as Shouyou does his routine stretching moves. 

It’s a new routine; he hadn’t been doing them at Nationals, and Kenma would remember. Shouyou explained that his Coach had helped him prepare one, because Kageyama had his own set of stretches before and after a match, and if Shouyou ever wanted to catch up, he needed to start somewhere.

Kenma wonders if it ever gets tiring, always chasing and chasing and chasing. He needs to catch up, Shouyou says, but catch up to what? 

Shouyou makes a face at Tora. “Oikawa-san came up with that nickname. I’m still not sure how Kuro-senpai found out about it, he and Oikawa-san don’t even know each other.”

“Don’t we?” Kuro asks, frowning as if in thought. Kenma is close enough to see the way his mouth twitches with mirth. “How can you be so sure?”

“I’ve never seen the two of you in the same room,” Shouyou answers, as if that were enough of an answer. He stretches out to touch his toes.

“Well, you’ve never seen me and Ushiwaka in the same room either,” Kuro points out. “That doesn’t mean we don’t know each other. We played against each other twice at Nationals. Lost twice, too.”

“Losing to Shiratorizawa must suck,” Shouyou tells him, pouting. “Sadly, can’t relate.”

“Oh God, he’s created an ego,” Kuro says, distantly horrified. He grabs Kenma’s shoulder to turn him around, shaking him until his head rattles, and honestly, what is it with people and shaking Kenma these days? “Kenma, how could we let that happen?”

Kenma bats him away, and when Kuro insists on keeping a hand on his shoulder, Kenma hisses at him. The sound makes Fukunaga blink his eyes open, startled, and then immediately make a wounded noise as he stares directly at the sun. Tora pats him on the back when he burrows his face on Tora’s stomach.

“Confidence with no experience to back it up is just talk,” Kenma says, ducking from Kuro when he tries to reach for him again. “But Shouyou has experience. And he did win against Shiratorizawa.” He glares at Kuro. “Which you never managed to.”

“ Me! ” Kuro yells. Then he yells it again, three times in sequence, getting louder and louder. “Last time I checked,” he continues, “volleyball was a team sport. Why didn’t you win against Shiratorizawa? Why didn’t you, Yaku?”

Yaku takes another sip from his water bottle. “I have a starting offer to play on the same major league team as Ushiwaka,” he says, and it’s so off-handed that the words don’t even compute for a couple seconds. He seems to know it, too. His shoulders are just a tiny bit tense, and he’s not looking at any of them as he says it.

The baffled silence that follows makes Kenma draw in a shaky breath. Not for the absence of noise, but for the anticipation of it. As everyone explodes, Tora surging forward to tackle Yaku in a hug as he repeatedly asks, What?, Shouyou bouncing from excitement in place as he and Fukunaga make happy noises at each other and at Yaku, who’s red-faced with embarrassment but seeming pleased, Kenma just… pauses. And when he looks askance, he sees Kuro staring at Yaku with an odd look on his face, something like wistfulness, something oddly pained. Something that probably tastes a little bit like misplaced jealousy, and Kenma knows it, because he feels it too.

Here’s the thing: Kuro’s not playing volleyball after high school. It’s not something he’s ever directly told Kenma, only ever off-handedly mentioning that he planned on taking on more than one major, probably, and that he’d get started on work studies and internships as soon as possible, and Kenma can read in between the lines. College volleyball isn’t something you do just to fill the time, to get your extracurriculars. People in college teams are hoping to get scouted. People in college teams have already gotten scouted, but decided to finish their degree before accepting the offers.

He didn’t know Yaku was getting scouted or receiving offers, but then again, there’s probably some confidentiality agreements he had to sign. That, or he just didn’t want to say. Kenma doesn’t know what he would have done in his place, and as he watches Shouyou scream excitedly at Yaku about how he’ll be a professional player, that’s so cool, Kenma knows he never will have to figure that out. Because he won’t be playing volleyball after high school either.

His chest feels tight yet loose at the same time. He wonders how his days will feel in college, getting home from classes and not having anything he needs to do after school except for coursework. How it will feel getting home for lunch, instead of taking the packed bentos he makes from last day’s dinner. How it will feel to not play. 

He likes volleyball. He says it in his head again and again, as if trying to convince himself. Kuro needed to be convinced of it too, after Kenma’s breathless declaration on the court’s floor. Did I hear it wrong? he’d asked when they were up in the stands, later. His tone hadn’t been teasing like Kenma would have expected, and he was looking down at the court, chin resting on his hand. And Kenma had replied, No, you didn’t. Kuro had hummed, already knowing Kenma isn’t the kind of person who wastes his breath saying things he doesn’t mean. That had been it.

Kenma is a logical person. There is nothing logical about loving something inherently unable of loving you back. 

And yet.

The first time they went to Nationals, Kenma was dizzy. The gymnasium is always bigger when you’re at the center of it, and though Nekoma never got to play center court, from all sides, the cheering of the crowd and squeaking of shoes roared against the too-high ceiling. Both going and coming back from that tournament always takes some getting used to. Kenma remembers going back to practice last year afterwards, and thinking, This court’s starting to look too small.

“Well, if you’re going to be playing in Ushiwaka’s team,” Kuro calls out to Yaku, who’s currently getting smothered by a hollering Tora, “then you’re never going to beat him, are you?”

All the odd emotions Kenma had spotted have already been wiped off his face, replaced by the same carefree, teasing smirk he wears like a second skin. Kenma tucks his legs to his chest, wondering if he should say anything.

Yaku elbows Tora in the stomach in order to get free, and then points a finger at Kuro. “I said I got an offer, not that I accepted it!” He stands up and brushes off the grass and dirt from his shirt. “And believe me, that’s something I’m taking into account. It’s not my only offer, either.”

Kuro hums. “So you’re not going to college,” he says, conversationally. Kenma watches from the corner of his eye as his fingers tighten next to him, hidden by his body’s position. 

“No,” Yaku replies, but he’s not looking at Kuro anymore, and instead at something over his shoulder, far ahead. “That was never the plan, anyway.”

Shouyou, who’d been too busy looking at Yaku like he hung the stars in the sky, looks in the same direction as him and then brightens, springing up to standing too. “The ice cream boys are back!” he cheers, fists pumping in the air. “And they have ice cream for us!”

“Oh, you gorgeous humans,” Fukunaga murmurs. He follows Shouyou, who’s already sprinted in their direction, and a bunch of blades of grass flutters through the breeze in their wake. Yaku and Tora go after them as well, albeit in a more moderate pace, and then suddenly only Kenma and Kuro are left in their makeshift court, the net hanging from where they’d loosened it so it didn’t pull at the stands, distant squealing from children down in the playground. All the water bottles that had been marking the limits of the inside of the court have been discarded near where they’re sitting, empty.

A cloud goes over the sun, and Kenma feels like it’s safe enough to pull the bucket hat from his hat, crinkling it against his chest. He likes the fabric. Kuro is humming some tune in the back of his throat, head tipped as he looks through the branches of the tree, up to the sky. A sudden cold breeze makes goosebumps rise on his arms, and Kenma wonders if it’s going to rain.

He has known Kuro for so long. He thinks he knows what every emotion looks like on his face, all of his silences. Any tenderness Kenma knows, Kuro learned alongside him. For the better part of his childhood years, they saw each other more than their own mothers. Latchkey kids, threads tangled before they could even understand it, grown where they could, no neat guide except for each other; Kenma learned how to draw the kanji for Kuro’s name before he could manage to write his own surname. The first time he saw Kuroo cry was when a tricky serve had Kenma twisting his ankle while attempting to save it, during their one on one matches, aged seven and eight.

Aged fifteen and sixteen, Kuro had snuck into the backyard of Kenma’s house and threw pebbles against Kenma’s window until he appeared. Well, Kenma had actually been wearing headphones the whole time, and Kuro had to text him to let him know where he was. Kuro had some convenience store rice cakes, a blanket, and the goal of watching the comet he’d read would cross the sky that night. Kenma hadn’t had the heart to tell him that, due to light pollution, the chances of them actually seeing anything were slim to none. 

He hadn’t had the heart, not when Kuro had beamed at him. “Did you know we originated from the belly of a star?” he’d said, spreading his arms around his head, legs kicked out in front of him on the short, spiky grass of the yard.

The stars in the sky had not been many. They do not live in the cluster of buildings of the most populated neighborhoods, where micro particles dye the night sky hazy, but they were still close enough to civilization that a starlit sky was a distant dream. Still, Kuro hadn’t seemed to mind. His eyes had been wide and shiny, the light from the back porch painting his skin a warm, golden shade.

Kenma, elbows propping his body upright in the grass, which poked at him with cold fingers, had hesitated. And then he had shuffled himself downward, until he was flat on his back, and until his head had been resting on the side of Kuro’s chest.

He wonders, now, if he should do something of the sort. Kuro’s such a tactile person. Kenma has to try so hard to offer him comfort, when neither touch nor words come easily to him. 

In the shade of the tree, he links their pinkies together. I’m scared too, Kenma thinks to himself. I’m scared.

He runs into Kai in the bus stop, where he’s playing a game on his phone while he waits for Shouyou to come back from the restroom so they can go home. 

His elbows and knees are red and itchy from sweat and grass, and each time he scuffs his shoe against the sidewalk, it comes out brown with earth. He’d actually kill someone for a shower, but preferably a hot one, and not whatever those looming clouds in the distance have in store for them if Shouyou doesn’t hurry up.

“Hi, Kenma,” Kai says, smiling slightly. His voice is so soft that it doesn’t even startle him, and Kenma looks up from his seat to find him divided between being nice to Kenma and looking out into the street for an oncoming bus. “I hope you had fun today.”

Kenma hums, glancing down at his game again, typing away at the screen. “That’s a word for it.”

“Kuroo went home?” Kai asks. “He didn’t say. It’s weird to not see you two leaving together.”

“He had to go over to his aunt’s place, it’s his little cousin’s birthday,” Kenma replies. He frowns, clicking his tongue. He lost the match. He’s cleared this level before, but he decided to restart the whole thing and now he’s stuck. “I’m waiting for Shouyou.”

Kai nods, crossing his arms over his chest. There’s a messenger bag slung over his shoulder, and Kenma notes that he’s switched his shorts for clean jeans. Maybe he has somewhere to go. There’s no one else but the two of them at the stop; it’s an odd hour of the day, and it’s summer, so no one’s going to school. “It’s good that Hinata-kun was here, too. It’s fun playing against him.” Kai looks out onto the street again. “I’m gonna miss it. The kid’s gotta hurry up and graduate soon. But in two year’s time, the major leagues will be falling over themselves to sign him. And Kageyama, too.”

Kenma blinks. He hadn’t considered it, he thinks, that Shouyou is going to continue playing after high school, even though it’s stupidly obvious in hindsight. What else would Shouyou do? Kenma has talked about some options he has for college, some courses he’s interested in; Shouyou has only ever replied with I’m sure you’ll be great at whatever you do! , and followed up with another thing he learned in practice today, or something he realized during a game.

“I guess,” Kenma replies, because it feels like he should say something. “In two year’s time.”

Kai looks at him. The sunlight is streaming right from behind where he’s standing, a golden thread sneaking into the bus stop, a brightly lit square on the ground over Kenma’s feet. It kind of shadows Kai’s face, but his brown eyes still glimmer. “It’s difficult, right?” he asks, and Kenma doesn’t answer. Kai continues anyway. “It’s easier now that I’m all the way through, but I remember how anxious I was all throughout my last year. You think you have all the time to figure it out, but you’re graduating soon. You just keep thinking that you’ve got to catch up, but nobody ever tells you to what.”

“I mean,” Kenma says, starting a new match on his phone. “You don’t need to have everything figured out just yet. Just pick a college and if you don’t like it, transfer. Or stop. Go do something else.”

Kai laughs. “I wish I had that mindset a year ago. I know a little better now, but it would’ve saved me a lot of sleepless nights.”

Kenma sighs as he loses yet another time. He locks his phone but doesn’t put it away, twirling it in his hands for something to do. “But it is,” Kenma says, hesitantly, a non-sequitur. “Scary. Like… there’s no more ground underneath your feet.”

Great fucking metaphor, Kenma. But Kai is kind, and he just nods, understanding. “Like a cliff,” he says.

Kenma nods. “Yeah.”

“Well, if you’re at the cliff’s edge anyway, why not take the leap?” Kai asks, face soft and earnest. His hands are stuffed deep in his pockets, and Kenma realizes with a certain amount of surprise that he’s never really seen Kai wearing casual clothes, pajamas during overnight games and training gear notwithstanding. He looks a bit older, like a college student he would see on the subway. “The ground might be soft enough to catch you.”

“Or,” Kenma says, “you would go splat on the ground and die, which is usually what happens when you jump off a cliff.”

Kai gives him a close-lipped smile. He’s the only one who’s ever made the gesture look nice. “Not from a metaphorical cliff’s edge, though sometimes it may feel like it’s not metaphorical at all. But if the ground’s not soft enough, and you do crash… there will always be more cliffs, more edges.”

“And I should keep looking for cliff edges,” Kenma says, over the sound of the bus that’s just left the stop. He hopes it’s not either of theirs. “Instead of going the safe route. Because that’s the brave thing.”

“What safe route?” Kai asks, looking amused. “There’s no such thing. It’s not even about bravery at all.”

Kenma scuffs the floor with the tip of his shoe, staining the sidewalk again. “I’ve seen people saying that being alive means being brave.”

“Maybe it’s just me,” Kai says, after a pause. He always chews his words a lot before saying them, and they come out slow and soft. “I never liked when people told me I was brave. When my dad got sick, that’s all anyone would ever say. You’re being so brave. You’re so strong. As if it would have been a bad thing to not be those things, even though I was ten, and I wasn’t supposed to be brave. So I guess it just feels a little condescending to me…” He frowns a little. “It’s like, there’s no currency to being alive, it isn’t a transaction. There’s no reason to be here, and I don’t mean there’s no purpose, just that there’s no need to feel like you owe the world something just because you’re in it. You can just be.”

“I don’t owe the world bravery,” Kenma sums up, looking at his feet, “but I should jump off the cliff?”

Kai sounds like he’s smiling. “Well, why should you climb the dangerous mountain?” He tips his head back against the side of the bus stop, and the sun makes his skin glow, darkish brown. “Because it’s there. ” His eyes widen, and then he’s scrambling to the side of the street, arm signaling for the oncoming bus that’s gliding down the street. “And that’s mine. Okay. Ah, it always startles me to almost miss it.” Kai grins at Kenma, who’s watching him through the bangs of his hair. The bus slows to a stop with a huff of warm air, ruffling his clothes. “See you, Kenma. Don’t be a stranger after summer’s over. No one’s going that far away.”

Then he climbs into the bus. The doors close behind him, and he’s gone. As Kenma watches the bus leave, he realizes he could have taken that one home, too. But Shouyou isn’t here yet, and they’ll have to wait for the next one.

That’s right, Kenma thinks, blinking at his own reflection on the dark screen of his phone. It’s not only Kuro who’s graduating. Yaku will be playing for the major leagues. Kai is going to college, and he’s already tried out for his university team. All the other third years he’d seen on the bench these past year will be going their own ways too. Kenma is now one of the oldest in the team, just after Fukunaga.

Sometimes he’s afraid he’s the only one who hasn’t realized something is over. That he’ll blink and turn around and realize that all the seats around him are empty, because the movie’s already ended, and he’s all alone in the deserted theater, everyone’s already left. And he didn’t realize because he was waiting for a sign, something that would tell him that it was over, but that’s not how life works. There are no signs. You can’t tell when the last time is the last time. It’s what makes endings so sad. You just can’t tell.

He wishes summer weren’t already halfway past. He wishes he could go back. He doesn’t know where exactly.

Kenma closes his eyes and rests his head against the back of the stop. Summers never last long. As he waits for Shouyou to come back, he thinks that they’ll just have to dream of a longer one.

iii. WHERE SHALL WE GO TOMORROW?

“I’m going to die,” Kenma tells Shouyou. “I’m literally going to fucking die.”

“You’re not going to die!” Shouyou yells, because he gets loud when he’s excited. The volume makes him wince. “You can do it!”

Kenma is not excited. Kenma didn’t realize just how terrified he was at the prospect of this until the actual day of, and by the time they make it to the park, his stomach is already up in knots. If Kenma doesn’t crash and die, he’ll die of a heart attack instead, and the blood will be in Shouyou’s hands, and Shouyou will never be able to handle the emotional toll of having indirectly killed him.

“Kenma, we’re not even moving,” Shouyou says. He’s trying very hard to be nice about this, and it’s working, because Shouyou is very nice about everything. There’s not even a trace of him looking like he’s about to laugh at Kenma; his eyes are wide and earnest, and he really believes Kenma can do this. “Both of your feet are still on the ground!”

“Glad you noticed, ‘cause they won’t be going anywhere,” Kenma says through gritted teeth. “This was a terrible idea.”

Shouyou watches him squirm for another full minute before he sighs a little. “We can take a little break if you want to,” he allows, poking Kenma’s shoulder blades. “But neither of us are leaving this place before you’ve done at least a lap around the green area. You promised.”

Kenma wishes he could go back in time and slap his past self, who’d naively made that promise, without knowing that Hinata Shouyou is someone who takes promises and oaths very, very seriously. It’s almost childlike, but not necessarily in a bad way. He’s sure that if they had linked fingers for this, Shouyou would be just as outraged about the idea of breaking a pinky promise. And now Kenma has to live with the knowledge that if he really doesn’t go through with this, Shouyou will be disappointed.

He dismounts from the bike as if it had burned him, and it would have clattered to the ground if Shouyou hadn’t caught it. They’d rented two bikes at the entrance of the park, one red and one blue, and walked with them all the way to a secluded area where Kenma would be able to learn without being too embarrassed about it.

Those are Shouyou’s words. When initially confronted with the idea of learning how to ride a bike, Kenma had not considered the underlying horror that comes with being a beginner at something, the inherent shame and vulnerability of putting himself in a position where someone else will watch him fail, again and again. Kenma was too young to comprehend such a complex emotion when he was seven and learning about volleyball for the first time. It was the same thing with videogames; by the time was old enough to understand it, he was already too good to be embarrassed at whatever he did.

Not immediately being good at something is so damn embarrassing, and Kenma hasn’t even managed to take both feet off the ground yet. The back of his neck feels uncomfortably hot, and for once, that has nothing to do with the sun. 

He follows Shouyou towards the treeline, where the grass sits nicely outside the concrete bike path and there’s nobody else around. Neither of them mention how Shouyou walks with both bikes, while Kenma just shoves his hands in his pockets and stomps behind him. 

“You don’t need to be so tense, you know,” Shouyou says, slowing down to a stop next to a wooden bench. “It’s just me.”

Kenma sits down with a huff. The bench is creaky and uncomfortable, but he doesn’t care about that right now. He wants to go home. “I don’t know what you mean,” he says flatly, hunching down until his shoulders are up to his ears. “I’m so laid back I’m basically horizontal.”

Shouyou crouches down to open the kickstand on both bikes, making sure they’re out of anyone else’s way. “I know it’s kind of scary, especially if you start on hard ground like this,” he comments, sitting down beside Kenma. “Honestly, the best place to learn how to ride a bike is at the beach. It’s where my dad taught me when I was little, we were on a trip during Christmas and I got the bike as a gift. I was so excited!” He kicks his legs out. “I fell so many times, I was black and blue. But the sand softened it.”

The talk of being black and blue isn’t really helping. “Did you take your sister to the beach to learn too?” Kenma asks, just to fill the silence. He doesn’t know much about Shouyou’s family, other than Natsu, whom Shouyou adores. His mom works a lot. He only ever talks about his dad in past tense.

Shouyou lets out a sad little hum. “No, we did it in the grass, behind our home. I haven’t been to the beach since before she was a baby. The grass is better than concrete, at least.” He looks over his shoulder at the green area, where spare trees cast shadows on the field. “But the sign says no bikes are allowed on the grass.”

Kenma tilts his head back so it’s resting against the back of the bench. The tree branches are low, heavy with green. It’s that type of tree where the leaves look like curtains hanging from a clothesline, thinly dancing at every gust of wind. He doesn’t know what it’s called. He thinks it has something to do with weeping.

“Shouyou,” Kenma says. “Were you sad when your senpais graduated?”

He’s not looking, but he imagines the curious head tilt he gets in response. “Why?”

“I just want to make sure,” Kenma continues, feeling his voice grow a bit thin, “that I’m not overreacting.”

It’s quiet for so long that Kenma closes his eyes, feeling unendurably vulnerable. He doesn’t really do this kind of friendship, where he talks about what he’s feeling in such a direct manner. Shouyou is probably his closest friend next to Kuro, and no one will ever know Kenma like Kuro does, but they don’t really talk . If Kenma bursts into overwhelmed tears while studying for a test, Kuro sits with him in silence until he stops hiccuping, and then brings him a cup of water. If Kuro storms into Kenma’s house because his mother and grandma are fighting again, Kenma just makes space for him on the bed. 

But his friendship with Shouyou is different. Since they live so far away, talking is kind of a prerequisite — they can’t exactly just hang out side by side. And they talk a lot . Shouyou doesn’t like texting, and is probably the only person in the world that’ll make Kenma pick up a phone call. It’s easy to talk to him, too. Kenma never feels like a bother, and Shouyou’s always so excited to hear about how Kenma is doing, how he feels, what he thinks. It’s nice. It’s one of the nicest things Kenma has going on in his life at the moment.

Quietly, Shouyou says, “I cried so much during their graduation day. The whole team did. I think the only people who cried more than me were the second years — third years now. They’d known our senpais the longest, and I felt kind of bad that I needed so much comfort, when I barely knew them for over a year…” Shouyou bites his lip. “But we got to know each other during a really important time, you know? I mean, we got to Nationals with that team. Not the one before it, or the one before that. We did, all of us together. And that meant something.” When Kenma turns to look, Shouyou’s resting his head on his hand, elbow on the backrest of the bench. He’s looking down somewhere in Kenma’s knee. “I remember I went to hug Suga-senpai, and he told me he’d be coming to see all our games, so I’d better show up for it. And I just burst into tears again. He looked terrified.” Shouyou smiles a little. “I kept apologizing for Nationals, too, then feeling bad he had to comfort me, when he’s the one who suffered the most for it. It was the last game the third years ever played with us.”

“What happened at the game with Kamomedai wasn’t your fault,” Kenma chides, softly. Shouyou has almost refused to talk about that, other than offhanded mentions or thanking Kenma for lending the tablet that day. “You overworked yourself. It could have happened to anyone.”

“But it didn’t,” Shouyou replies, meeting Kenma’s eye for a moment. “It happened to me.”

Kenma holds his gaze for a few seconds, before looking away first. “It won’t happen again.”

“Mm,” Shouyou agrees. He drums his fingers on the seat between them.

Yesterday, Shouyou convinced Kenma to take him to Shibuya, which is probably Kenma’s least favorite place in the world. But Shouyoy was a tourist, and he couldn’t just come back from Tokyo without having at least crossed the street at Shibuya Crossing, otherwise what would he tell his mother?

So they went. They got iced sugary drinks at an overpriced cafe and took some selfies with cosplayers, then waited for the pedestrian sign to cross the street. There’s always hundreds of people doing exactly the same thing in Shibuya, so Kenma made Shouyou hold on to his arm the whole time so he wouldn’t get lost. Walking was made difficult because Shouyou decided to step on every crack he came upon, in the direct opposite manner of what superstition says one should do.

“It’s like a measure of space,” Shouyou had explained. “If cracks are really far from each other, then I have to jump a lot between them, and I get places faster! Each crack leads somewhere else, somewhere else.”

Blue sky in Shibuya, the warmth of sunburn on his cheeks, his purple slushy sweating freezing ice chips onto his fingers. Shouyou had made a happy sound at the taste of his own drink, orange as his hair, and then bleeped his tongue at Kenma, showing the way the artificial color has stained it.

Somewhere else, somewhere else. The words had buzzed like bumblebees in his head.

“We’ll see each other at Nationals this year,” Kenma says, with some finality to it. “It’ll be my last one, so you better make it good.”

The odd wistfulness in Shouyou’s expression clears, like clouds after a storm. He grins, orange hair bouncing alongside him. “Yes!”

Kenma didn’t know it was possible to miss something preemptively, but he does. As he sits right here and thinks about eight months from now, next spring, next National Tournament, his last one. His-last-one. The words themselves are odd to think about. Only one more left, he thinks. Only one more left.

Kuro’s moving in no time at all, and that means something Kenma doesn’t want to think about. When you’re in high school it’s incomprehensible that high school will end. And then you have a diploma in your hand and you’re being pushed into taking a picture with the sixty odd kids in your graduating class and then you’re being pushed out into the rest of your life.  

His teachers say that all the time. You’ve all already got one foot out the door. You’re  almost somewhere else . Kenma thinks they probably mean it in an encouraging manner; but Kenma doesn’t trust in the future’s integrity enough for the promise of it to soothe him. 

He thinks he understands what Kai means. He’s got to catch up to something, but to what? Kenma’s never been someone to suffer in anticipation; his social anxiety rarely spills into the existential horror he’s heard originates from a regular anxiety disorder. He just takes things day by day. If he likes something he likes it, if he hates it he hates it. 

Kenma feels as though he’s spent most of his life carrying stones in his pockets, running his fingers over their surface, trying to hand them over to other people, trying to explain the heaviness. He doesn’t think he’s been successful so far.

The human condition is a convoluted, intricately woven web that Kenma has neither the expertise not the patience to ponder about; it’s hard work being a person, and he’s very selective about the things he puts effort into.

But the human body makes a surprising amount of sense, rule upon rule, chemical reaction upon chemical reaction. There is a wisdom in human cells: you can’t let anything out without letting something back inside. Endocytosis, osmosis, a displacement of nutrients and oxygen. Nothing’s lost forever. It kind of sounds like a metaphor, and maybe it is. Kenma doesn’t know much about metaphors.

He thinks about catching up, and he thinks about Shouyou, at every second bright eyed and ready to go, looking over his shoulder, looking past Kenma at something Kenma can’t see. He thinks of him and Yaku running in Kai’s direction, going on ahead.

And Shouyou will be a third year soon enough. Kenma’s second year went by in a rush, month upon month until he forgot to cross so many missing days on his calendar that he had to throw it away. He doesn’t need to be a genius to know what’s going on in Shouyou’s head, but he remembers the way his friend had looked tiny on that court, legs trembling, unable to stand upright by himself. His blotchy, tear-stained face, made all the more red and heartbreaking by his fever.

“Hey, Shouyou,” Kenma says, glancing at him. “It’s okay to pause, you know.” Shouyou blinks bewilderedly at him, and Kenma plows on before he can change his mind. “You don’t need to run without knowing where exactly you’re headed. you’re not running out of time. You’re seventeen.”

Instead of looking comforted by it, or really having any sort of reaction Kenma expected, Shouyou just smiles. “You know, Kenma,” he says, “you’re my best friend, probably. If you don’t count Kageyama, but don’t tell him we’re friends. You’re one of my favorite people in the world, but we’re so different. It’s kind of crazy, isn’t it?”

Kenma can read between the lines. I don’t agree with you, is what he’s saying. But Shouyou is too nice to voice things like that out loud.

“It is crazy,” Kenma murmurs. Is there even a scenery, when you’re so out of breath from chasing a dream? He thinks, but doesn’t say. Doesn’t it get tiring? “But that’s what keeps you interesting. It wouldn’t be fun if we thought all the same things. I already know all of my opinions.”

Shouyou laughs. Kenma watches his eyes flash a bit defensively, and accordingly changes the subject. He should have known, he thinks a tad fondly as Shouyou stretches himself up to standing, that any prodding wouldn’t have been welcome. Being witnessed in your hunger can feel too much like vulnerability. And Kenma has never seen anyone as hungry as Shouyou.

The sky is a dizzying blue, but the horizon is growing speckled with clouds. The further away, the darker they are; they’re in the same park as they were yesterday, which is about half an hour by bus from Kenma’s place. It’s probably where the rain is right now.

Shouyou follows Kenma’s gaze. “It’ll rain soon,” he says, turning back to him. He glances at the bikes. “If we don’t start now, it’s better to put them back and try again tomorrow. But I’m leaving the day after, so…”

So this is your chance, Kenma concludes the thought. 

He looks up at the tree and its weeping branches. He thinks of the look on Kuro’s face as he watched Yaku go down a path he wouldn’t follow. He thinks of the hollowing in his own stomach, the sand slipping from underneath his feet with the force of life’s current, time getting swept away from him. He thinks about Kai and the late afternoon sun, about cliff edges and cracks on the sidewalks in Shibuya. He thinks about the summer, which felt endless in childhood, which is rushing by him as if it’s in a hurry.

Kenma stands up on steadier legs than what he feels. He kicks off the stand from the red bike and throws a leg over it before he can second guess himself, and desperately wishes he’d bought something like a helmet or elbow and knee braces. 

Shouyou is very quiet, like he can tell that encouragement isn’t really what Kenma needs. There’s the sound of his own stand being closed, and then the tracking sound of Shouyou bringing his bike to Kenma’s side, settling down on it also. He looks at Kenma, patience written into his freckled face.

“I’m scared,” Kenma admits. His knuckles are white on the handles of the bike, knees trembling slowly in odd jolts, feet shooting out to the ground every couple of seconds to keep his balance. 

Shouyou reaches out from his own bike and squeezes Kenma’s shoulder. “Then do it scared,” he says.

Kenma squeezes his eyes shut. “This is going to take about six hours, with the way I am,” he says, trying not to sound on the verge of tears with how embarrassed he is that this is so difficult for him.

“That time will pass anyway,” Shouyou says. “You can do it. I’ll be just behind you the whole time.”

Kenma takes a deep breath.

He recalls what Shouyou had told him, about keeping a steady pace, not letting the bike tip sideways. Looking straight ahead to keep a center of balance.

He takes his foot off the ground and surges forward on the pedals. If he goes just fast enough, he thinks, he won’t fall.

And by some miracle, he doesn’t, at least not immediately. The trees rush by like a river, air like a warm bath. arms and legs pumping, getting more and more out of breath. The sun is getting low, ripe orange in the sky, like the fruit, splitting the horizon open. Kenma’s stomach gnaws with hunger.

He hears Shouyou cheering, growing louder as he grows closer, likely not having expected Kenma to just take off. But Kenma’s too focused to pay attention to that: all his brain is thinking is just forward, forward, forward.

Shouyou keeps pace with him until he’s sure Kenma won’t be losing balance, that he’s found his rhythm. And then he does the thing he said he wouldn’t, and passes Kenma in speed, until he’s racing ahead instead of behind.

And, as the rushing wind makes something like exhilaration race down Kenma’s spine, he finds that he doesn’t mind it quite so much.