Chapter Text
Dating Hinata Shouyou wasn’t so different from not dating Hinata Shouyou.
He still managed to find Kenma during every free moment of his day, still texted him random pictures of cats, still found out which restaurants were doing well lately and dragged Kenma to wherever they were. He still talked about whatever was on his mind whenever it was on his mind and he still laughed with his entire body. He was still… Shouyou.
Kenma didn’t know why he was so surprised. After all, it wasn’t like pre-relationship Shouyou and post-relationship Shouyou were two different people—the only thing that had really changed was that post-relationship Shouyou was a lot more tactile and affectionate than he’d ever been. (Not that Kenma was complaining. For some reason, he didn’t seem to mind people touching him if that ‘people’ was Shouyou.)
Exhibit A: Shouyou currently laying his head in Kenma’s lap, fiddling with a piece of paper that he’d somehow gotten ahold of. The two of them were in Kenma’s room—another thing that had changed. Over the past few weeks, he’d found himself slowly warming up to his house’s atmosphere, and having Shouyou in his room almost made it feel like home.
A hand reached up to pull on Kenma’s hair, effectively dragging him out of his reverie. He made a humming noise at the back of his throat, pausing the game he was playing and focusing his attention on his boyfriend instead.
Boyfriend. God.
Shouyou was smiling up at him, and the sight made Kenma’s throat restrict. In a brief moment of weakness and a bubble of something else that he couldn’t quite name, Kenma unpaused his game and held it out for Shouyou to see.
The other boy was completely silent for a moment—enough time for Kenma to rethink all of the life choices that had led him to that point in life—before tearing his gaze away from the game and peeking up at Kenma through his lashes, mouth wide open in surprise. “You named your Pokemon after me?”
Kenma flushed, a bit taken aback by Shouyou’s genuinely touched expression, and nodded quickly. He had his head bowed over deep enough that his face was only a few inches away from Shouyou; his hair formed a curtain around the two of them, as if shielding them from the rest of the world. Kenma liked it.
“Why the grass type?” Shouyou asked, at last. He was still fiddling with the paper in his hand, but his eyes were trained firmly on Kenma.
He swallowed, unsure how to respond, exactly. He had the words in his head, but he’d always had a bad history with translating his thoughts into speech. Still, he replied, “Because you’re… comforting. You remind me of—gah—”
Shouyou leaned up to press their lips together before Kenma got the chance to release the frustrated sigh building up inside him. He melted against the kiss, as he’d been doing every other time they’d kissed over the past week, and Shouyou shifted from where he’d been lying down in Kenma’s lap to a more comfortable position in front of him.
It would have been easy to name Shouyou after a fire type, with how brightly and energetically he talked and moved and even kissed. But even though Kenma associated him with the sun, his warmth didn’t scald or burn—it was a caring sort of warmth, one that came from within and wrapped itself around Kenma like a particularly nice hug. He nurtured growth, sprouting like a bud through cracks and crevices against all odds, intertwining himself with Kenma’s life like he was always there. He was persistent and determined, but willing to take a step back and mold himself for change: he was the earth in its truest, purest form.
A hand dragging itself through his hair shifted Kenma’s attention back to his boyfriend, and all thoughts of the earth and the sun promptly left his mind. Who cared for metaphors when reality was worth so much more?
The forthcoming days all passed like this: little moments shared in togetherness, bubbles of contentment that Kenma stored in his brain’s pocket and called upon whenever he needed a smile. Their relationship didn’t feel like a big, scary change to him in any way: in fact, it was more the opposite. After all the time the two of them had spent together, it felt like the only logical next step. The physical affection, sure, but also the relief that came with emotional closeness. Kenma didn’t feel like he had to consider his words carefully before saying them anymore, because somehow, Shouyou always understood.
Neither of them were particularly hesitant about their relationship—Kenma didn’t care if other people knew, and Shouyou was excited that they did. Naturally, they didn’t shy away from sticking close together in school, too. A hand held in the hallways, maybe, or a kiss exchanged before running to their respective next class.
So really, it didn’t come as a surprise when most of the school figured out they were dating almost immediately. The two of them hadn’t really told anyone (except their respective best friends, of course—Kuro had wrapped Kenma in a bear hug before proceeding to cackle maniacally and yell, “I told you so! ” at the top of his lungs), but high schoolers notorious for finding out things without being told what they were: Kenma himself being a prime example.
The news was also surprisingly helpful for his matchmaking business (if one could even call it that, since he did it all for free). Kenma had more people come up to him asking for help in the following week than he’d received in a month, but he wasn’t complaining. Shouyou seemed intrigued by the whole thing too, and readily agreed to help in every way possible—Kenma had lost his mind for a little bit at that, because pairing his own observation skills with Shouyou’s communication skills was the surefire way to boost their operation. (Alright, so maybe Kenma liked treating it like a business.)
In fact, he knew his matchmaking game was at its peak when Kuro asked him, “Think I should try asking Yaku out?”
They were in Kuro’s room, as was custom, and he’d tried to make his tone as nonchalant as possible—not that it was going to fool Kenma, who was currently staring at his best friend as if he’d grown a third head.
“Tetsurou,” he started, and suddenly, he thought he might understand what his friends had gone through when he’d still been oblivious to his own feelings for Shouyou. It was not fun. “I’ve been fucking saying .”
Kuro groaned. “Yeah, you have.”
That wasn’t the end of surprises for Kenma, though. Not by a long shot.
Kenma’s first thought upon seeing Lev waiting by his classroom was to run away, but he somehow managed to steel himself enough to go talk to the other boy face-to-face. He figured he owed him that much. (What did he owe him for? He wasn’t quite sure, but guilt was an ugly emotion, even when it didn’t quite make sense. Especially then.)
“Congratulations,” was the first thing that Lev said to him when he was within earshot, and Kenma could tell that he was being fully earnest. There wasn’t any trace of bitterness in his tone, which made Kenma wonder why he was there in the first place.
“Thank you,” replied Kenma, softly. There was no need to ask what he was being congratulated for; after all, what other business did Lev have with him? He didn’t really know what else to say after that, though, but the other boy wasn’t done talking.
“I, um,” Lev started, reaching up to rub his neck awkwardly. “I just wanted to make sure that we’re still friends, you know! No weird stuff!”
Huh. What?
Lev must have noticed the incredulity on Kenma’s face, because he hastily followed it up with, “Like, because of the whole Hinata thing! I don’t want it to get between us!”
“Uh,” Kenma said, intelligently. He really wasn’t stocked up on enough caffeine for this conversation.
He wasn’t so much surprised by the fact that Lev was trying to make amends than the fact that he thought he had to make amends—even more so that he considered the two of them ‘friends’. Lev had always been a sort of background presence in Kenma’s life, like the chatter of a television left on low volume. He’d always exhausted him to the extent that he found it hard to care about anything he did. But now, with the other boy standing in front of him in all his sincerity, Kenma thought that he might have genuine respect for Lev Haiba.
“It’s okay,” he said, at last. “You don’t have anything to worry about.”
Lev breathed out what looked like a sigh of relief, and Kenma felt strangely relieved himself. “You’re the best, Kenma-san!”
Kenma only nodded in response, and after a moment’s hesitation, asked, “You’re okay?”
“Huh?” Lev furrowed his eyebrows in confusion at first, but seemed to understand what he meant by the question. “Oh, yeah! It was just a little crush, it’s fine! You both seem a lot happier than you were before, anyway.”
Kenma blinked, a little startled by the last sentence, but Lev was already moving away, cheerfully yelling something about “getting to lunch on time”. That got a small smile out of Kenma, who shook his head in amusement.
People really weren’t as predictable as he thought they were.
Taking a few more moments to clear his thoughts, Kenma hoisted his backpack higher up on his shoulder and headed to his own lunch: another Shouyou-powered change in his routine. He no longer sat with just Kuro and Yaku in their classroom during their breaks, instead opting to sneak up to the rooftop with Shouyou whenever they could. It was fun to stare down at the seemingly endless drop below them, cold wind hitting their faces and laughs carrying across the breeze.
Of course, it hadn’t been long before their respective friends found out about their hiding place and promptly gatecrashed all their dates, but Kenma had found that he didn’t really mind.
He’d ended up meeting Shouyou’s friends, too; the blonde and the gremlin. Yachi had been a bit awkward at first, and Kenma had known from Shouyou’s previous descriptions of her that she took time to warm up to people. It had only taken a few more lunches for the two of them to start talking to each other like friends, though, and Kenma liked her company. She reminded him of Shouyou, minus the characteristic energy that he’d come to associate with the other boy. He could see why the two of them were good friends.
Whatever she lacked in intensity, however, the gremlin made up for readily. Kenma had learnt his name upon their first meeting, when Shouyou had excitedly introduced the two of them. “You both play setter! You should get along great!”
Kageyama had immediately trained his eyes directly on Kenma, and the earnestness of the other boy’s gaze made him feel like he’d been laid bare naked. It didn’t take long for a barrage of questions to come pouring out of Kageyama, all muttered in the same serious tone of voice that made them sound less like conversation and more like threats.
“How long have you been playing volleyball? Who taught you? How long have you been setter? How do you train? How—?”
It hadn’t taken long for him to piece together that this was the grr and bwah setter that Shouyou had talked about earlier, and he’d been left at a loss for words after the seemingly endless interrogation that Kageyama had sprung upon him. Deciding against better judgement, Kenma had slowly backed away instead, heading towards Kuro and trying to hide the fact that his ears were red with embarrassment.
After that awkward first meeting, though, Kageyama had started relaxing more whenever all of them were hanging out together, and Kenma thought that he might see them becoming friends in the future. Scratch that, he already considered him a friend—just as he considered everyone else in their impromptu group his friend.
He looked around at all of them, then, breaking away from his thoughts for just a moment. Yaku and Kageyama looked like they were in a heated discussion about something that Kenma couldn’t quite pick up from where he was sitting, but Kuro was looking at them with an amused grin on his face, so he assumed that it couldn’t be something that serious. Shouyou was talking animatedly to Yachi about something that had taken place in class that day, and she responded with time-appropriate oohs and aahs . Kenma smiled at the sight, despite himself.
Kuro caught his eye from where he was sitting across from him, and grinned knowingly. Kenma’s smile only widened, which earned him a single-eyebrow raise from Kuro. He raised his own eyebrow in return, prompting Kuro to start wiggling both his eyebrows at him. Show-off. (Kenma lamented the loss of control he had over his eyebrows every single day.)
It didn’t take long before the others caught sight of what they were doing, and the entire group ended up engaging in an impromptu battle of “Who can wiggle their eyebrows the most?” Kenma was forced to sit out after losing his first round against Yachi, who was somehow a secret eyebrow-wiggling genius. He’d like to say that he didn’t pout at his loss, but unfortunately, that would be a lie. Because he did. Heavily.
Shouyou had laughed at him, and tried to move his own eyebrows in an attempt to one-up Yachi. He failed miserably—the most he could achieve was a weak eyebrow twitch that looked more like he was having an allergic reaction than anything else. The sight made Kenma giggle, and Shouyou looked like he was having trouble deciding between mourning his loss or beaming at his boyfriend.
The rest of lunch continued like that, with Yachi emerging victorious after she defeated Kuro in an intense wiggle-off that lasted for almost three whole minutes. They all ended up losing track of time completely, and missed nearly half of their next class: but even while getting reprimanded in front of the entire class for his tardiness, Kenma found that he really didn’t care. His friends’ laughter was still ringing in his ears, and Shouyou’s grin was firmly etched in his mind—and, honestly?
That was all he really needed.