Chapter Text
One year later.
Y/N was working from home, laptop open on the kitchen table, a folder once titled own_project_maybe, had finally been renamed to something with a real title, when she heard Kenma's voice from the other room.
"—yeah, that's a good strategy. Let me show you—"
She smiled. He was streaming. Three times a week now, four hours max, exactly what he'd promised chat and himself the day he finally cut the schedule down for good.
She got up to make coffee, and her laugh must have carried, because she heard him pause mid-sentence.
"Sorry," he said to chat. "That's my wife."
Her heart did the same small flip it did every time he said it, a year in and still not used to it.
She poked her head into his office. Waved at the camera.
Chat exploded — WIFE APPEARANCE, LETS GO, WE LOVE HER — a wall of scrolling affection she'd never quite get numb to, no matter how many times it happened.
Kenma was grinning. "Yeah, that's her. Say hi."
"Hi, chat," she said, and blew him a kiss, and left him to finish.
Her phone buzzed on the counter. Nozomi.
Nozomi: hows married life
Y/N: good. weird. good.
Nozomi: any word from the family front
Y/N: aunt michiko sent a card. mom hasn't said anything since the call. i think that's just going to be how it is.
Nozomi: are you okay with that
She thought about it, honestly, before answering — a habit that still felt new enough to notice herself doing.
Y/N: mostly. it's not the ending i would've picked as a kid. but it's the one where i stopped performing for people who were never going to change the review no matter how good the performance was. i'll take it.
Nozomi: proud of you N/N
Y/N: thanks nono. love you.
She set the phone down and went back to the table, back to the game that had sat half-finished on her hard drive for six years before she'd finally shown it to anyone. Kenma had been the first. She'd shown him on a Tuesday night, braced for him to be polite about it the way people were polite about things that weren't very good, and instead he'd gone quiet in the specific way he went quiet when something actually mattered, and asked if he could see the next build when it was ready. It was still hers, still small, still unfinished, still nothing like the commercial precision of a Bouncing Ball title, but it existed outside a folder now, and that alone had taken her most of a year to get used to.
Down the hall, Kenma's own project sat in a similar state — the one Kuroo had needled him about for years, the one that had nothing to do with Bouncing Ball's next big release, quieter and stranger and more personal than anything with his company's name on it. He'd shown her the first playable build eight months ago, hands shaking slightly, the same nervous energy she recognized from her own reveal. It wasn't finished either. Neither of them were in any hurry anymore.
Later, after the stream ended, Kenma found her on the couch.
"Chat loved you," he said.
"I know. I was reading the comments."
"Of course you were."
He sat down beside her, and she leaned into him, the particular ease of two people who'd learned each other's patterns by now — when to talk and when to just be in the room.
Her phone buzzed on the coffee table. She glanced at it out of old habit — a notification, a tagged post, a stranger's opinion about a life that happened to be hers. She felt the familiar half-second drop in her stomach.
Then she turned the phone face-down and looked back at him instead.
It didn't vanish. She'd stopped expecting it to. There would probably be a version of that first ugly headline forever, somewhere, for someone new to discover and decide they had an opinion about. That used to feel like something she had to solve. Now it just felt like weather — present, sometimes loud, never the whole forecast.
They sat in comfortable silence, the kind that only came from years of knowing each other. The static hadn't gone anywhere. It was still out there: interference, noise, strangers with opinions, a version of her that would always exist to people who'd never actually meet her. But the static that had once lived in the space between the two of them, the two of them performing at each other instead of actually being seen, that part was gone.
Replaced by something clear and steady and sure, loud enough to hold its own against everything else.
"I love you," Y/N said.
"I love you too."
Kenma pulled her closer, and she closed her eyes.
Somewhere out there, the noise kept going. It would probably never fully stop.
She didn't need it to.
She just needed this frequency, the one between the two of them, to keep coming through clear.
It did.
Only this.
Only home.