Chapter Text
Kuroo Tetsurou has, in his twenty years, done several things one might deem ridiculous. His current situation m;standing in the middle of a convenience store, trying to reason with a six month old infant, has to be up there. Of course, previous ridiculous acts have included things such as attempting to take twenty shots to commemorate his twentieth birthday (Bokuto had bet that he could not take all twenty; he’d been right, and Kuroo had stopped after the fourteenth, but he’d definitely given it a valiant effort), filling Kenma’s room with no less than three dozen balloons on his eighteenth birthday, and staying awake three nights in a row during his first semester of finals in college.
Things have changed though, in so many ways both big and small. He has, for the most part, left behind many of those things — parties, his education, and, for the most part, his social life, all in favor of parenting his daughter.
That’s still so strange to him. He has a daughter. He has a miserable daughter, who is very unhappy to be in this tiny store with her father. Tetsurou doesn’t want to be here either, but he doesn’t have a choice. Eri is scarily close to running out of her diapers, they’re scraping the bottom of the can for formula, and Tetsurou doesn’t have anything that even remotely resembles dinner for himself.
“Almost done, Eri,” he soothes, though her insistent cries are anything but soothed. Tetsurou doesn’t know the last time he received so many dirty looks. He half wants to explain that he’s trying , that he’s her sole caretaker, that he’s just trying to be a good dad, but he doesn’t. Instead, he finishes his purchase and hightails it out of the store, crying baby and all.
She’s calmed if only slightly by the time they get back to the apartment. Tetsurou elects to leave his purchases on the counter in favor of feeding her and getting her down to bed. She sleeps with him most of these days, when Kenma isn’t sleeping over. He tried desperately for the first few weeks of her life to get her to sleep in her crib nightly, to no avail.
So, he’s never without somebody in bed next to him, be that his best friend or his daughter. A few times, it’d been all three of them, and Tetsurou’s heart had just about exploded seeing the two of them sleeping next to each other.
Kenma isn't here today, though – he will be tomorrow, and Tetsurou can’t say he’s not excited to see him – so he gets Eri settled on her side of the bed, praying that she’ll fall asleep so he can eat his own dinner while it’s still warm.
All in all, he manages; he only sleeps an hour before she’s awake, and then two more stretches, three hours each. All things considered, it’s not the worst night of sleep, not by far.
“You ready to get up, Eri?” he asks, turning to face her.
She doesn’t reply, naturally, and Tetsurou can’t help but laugh; all his attempts at communication with his child have been fruitless. She can’t reply, but she’s also the person he spends most of his time with, so he doesn’t have many other options.
As much as he might like to drift off, Eri is bright eyed and ready to go. Tetsurou doubts she’ll be patient much longer, so he might as well be ahead of the game.
It’s still strange, Tetsurou thinks, that this child is his. Obviously she’s his, a perfect mix of himself and her mother (though she does admittedly take more after him. She’s barely six months and already starting to mimic his smirk). Not to mention, he’s been the one taking care of her since birth, save for the first two weeks, when the three of them had stayed together, and save for the occasional weekend when she keeps their daughter.
Eri is his, but sometimes it doesn’t feel that way. It doesn’t feel like that long ago that he and Bokuto were in college. Furthermore, it really doesn’t feel like long ago that he was in high school, making frequent trips down to third gym.
He wonders, for a fleeting moment, how the others from third gym are doing. He keeps in pretty regular contact with Bokuto, and by extension, he knows how Akaashi is doing. Tsukishima is a different story, making exactly zero effort to keep in contact with Kuroo following high school. (Kuroo still calls him on occasion, much to Tsukishima’s dismay).
Thoughts of his high school friends – and Tsukki, who he couldn’t truthfully call his friend – get him through breakfast that morning. Eri is well behaved, and if Tetsurou weren’t so exhausted, he might actually be suspicious of her even temperament.
“You’ll have to behave so I can clean,” he tells the infant, who does little more than give him a blank gaze. However, when Tetsurou smiles at her, she mirrors the expression back, and Tetsurou just hugs her close.
It’s not over as fast as it would have been if he didn’t have her, since he has to stop and take the time to attend to her, but he gets his apartment looking presentable and has an hour to spare before Kenma is due to come over.
It’s short lived, though, because the always punctual Kenma shows up ten minutes before they’d planned, apartment buzzer waking Tetsurou from his light sleep. It doesn’t wake Eri, though, and Tetsurou is incredibly glad for small victories like that.
“Kenma! Good to see you,” he greets, as if his friend hadn’t been over two days prior. (Which, he had, but Tetsurou misses him, always does).
“It’s quiet,” Kenma remarks, stepping out of his shoes. “Is Eri— ”
“She’s asleep,” Tetsurou says, shaking his head. “She threw a monumental tantrum in the store yesterday, so she must have tired herself out.” He grimaces at the thought of Eri’s fit in the convenience store, and suddenly her sleeping face seems at least twenty times lovelier. “I think,” Tetsurou begins, stepping into the kitchen, “she’s going to sleep for a while. Knock on wood, though.”
He sets out two cups of tea; he doesn’t bother to ask if Kenma wants any these days, because his friend is always cold and will never turn down a hot drink. He holds it with both hands as he sips, and Tetsurou wants to tell him how cute he looks.
He refrains, though, leans against the counter and just admires Kenma in all his glory, rosy tinted cheeks and all.
“Nice outside?” Tetsurou finally asks once he’s half finished his cup of tea.
“Not especially. It’s cold.”
“You’re always cold.
“I’m not,” Kenma retorts, one eyebrow arched.
“Whatever you say.”
It’s all in good fun, though. Kenma is Tetsurou’s whole focus; that’ll be until Eri wakes up, but Tetsurou can’t make himself think about that right now. It’s just Kenma, leaned against the doorframe. Kenma, who shakes his head and mumbles, “ stupid, ” when Tetsurou points out the high pink flush on his cheeks.
It feels, for a moment, like old times. Like high school, or like Tetsurou’s first year of college. It feels almost like the way it had been before Eri.
It’s strange to Tetsurou, how he thinks of his life in terms of ‘before Eri’ and ‘after Eri’, but it only makes sense when he stops to think about it. Things have changed massively since her arrival and in the months prior. He likes to think he’s grown immensely as a person since becoming a dad, though at heart, he’s just the same as he always was.
Nighttime finds the three of them on the couch. Tetsurou is wide awake, defying all odds, but the one on his lap is definitely fighting sleep, and Kenma seems to be struggling to keep his eyes open. If only for purely selfish reasons (because Tetsurou likes the slight weight of Kenma leaning against him and he loves his quiet, even breathing, loves that he can faintly smell the laundry detergent that Kenma always somehow smells like and he loves the idea of falling asleep here with the two of them), Tetsurou doesn’t suggest that they go to bed.
The movie, a rerun of some Studio Ghibli movie that he doesn’t recognize, plays on in the background and casts a blue light upon the trio. It’s quiet, but it’s enough to lull Eri into sleep, and Tetsurou maneuvers her so that she’s in the crook of the arm Kenma isn’t lying against.
Kenma follows in her footsteps a few moments leader, head lulling slightly to the side. Tetsurou’s arms are both trapped, one holding Eri and one under Kenma’s arm, and he knows that because of the position he’s in, he’s bound to be stiff when he wakes up in the morning.
He falls asleep to pleasant thoughts, to the credits on the movie – he still never figures out was it is – rolling, and to his best friend’s and his daughter’s quiet breaths mingling.
He could stay here forever
Thursday is gray. It’s gray and cold, four degrees below zero, and it’s snowing. Tetsurou is going to be late for work.
“You can stay if you want,” he tells Kenma, who is sitting on his couch. “I’m going to drop Eri off and I have to stay at work until — ”
“You should go,” Kenma says. “You’re frazzled and late.”
Tetsurou pauses.
His friend is unmoving. “Do you want me to bring her to your neighbor’s?”
“I.. Do you mind?”
In lieu of a response, Kenma takes the infant away from Tetsurou’s arms, urging him out the door.
Tetsurou doesn’t have too many tasks for that workday, which is somewhat relieving. As he walks to the train, the mental list in his head grows, though; he’s mostly wrapping up some loose ends, and if all is smooth sailing, he can probably be on the train home by three o’clock.
The knowledge that Kenma is waiting back at his apartment is enough to encourage productivity that is far beyond his usual level. Even his co-workers comment on his unusually motivated attitude, and he actually leaves the office around 2:30. It’s all small victories.
As Tetsurou rides the train home, his gaze wanders to the other passengers; a college-aged girl to his right, several others that look about his age, and a family — a mother, father, and child, who he guesses to be just around Eri’s age.
His smile is a bit sad, stays just at surface level. He half wonders if he and Aiko could have made it work, and then recalls the circumstances, recalls how they’d tried to make it work for the large majority of Aiko’s pregnancy, and comes to the ultimate conclusion that it was doomed from day one.
There’s Kenma, too, which is another reason that he and Aiko definitely can’t be together. His friend is responsible for the deep ache settling in Tetsurou’s chest, cushioning his heart, making him feel full and empty all at once. Tetsurou could never actually make things work with somebody else, not when Kenma is Kenma and not when Tetsurou loves him so much.
Things might have been different, had Tetsurou and Aiko never crossed paths (or - and he feels very guilty for thinking this - if they had never had a child). He and Kenma might have gotten an apartment together, might have gotten together themselves, might have had something… greater than what they do.
It’s not that their current arrangement isn’t enough, because it definitely is, and Tetsurou thinks he might just die without Kenma, in fact. He’s always aching for more, more touches, more closeness, more of everything.
The train lurches to a stop and Tetsurou lurches forward with it, steps off and onto the platform into the cold November air.
Eri is thrilled to see him when he arrives back to his neighbor’s apartment. She notes that Kenma came later than was usual for Kuroo; when he asks how late, he realizes that Kenma spent an hour with her after he left. He could die at that thought, if he tried hard enough.
He tucks her in the crook of his elbow, legs on either side of his waist, and presses a kiss atop her head. He makes every effort not to disturb her too much as he ascends the staircase to the third floor.
“Home sweet home,” he tells her upon walking into the empty apartment. The three throw pillows on the couch are neatly put away, two in one corner and one in the other, and the left side of the sink is full of clean dishes. Kenma did not have to do that.
Tetsurou is still dressed in his work clothes, sleeves rolled up to just above his elbows. He’ll change into pajamas later, presumably after giving Eri a bath, but it’s fine enough for now.
“We’re going to have a good night,” he promises his daughter, setting her down on the green playmat. She gazes up at him through blue eyes, and though he knows her eyesight is barely developed enough to make him out, he offers her a warm smile.
It’s lonesome, but he’s used to it. Eri makes a clumsy grab at one of the toys that dangles above her, though it just swings back into place. Tetsurou tugs it down within her reach, though after another moment, it slips away from her tiny hands.
Tetsurou just observes, legs crossed. Eri rolls so that she’s on her stomach (Tetsurou can’t help but feel proud when he thinks about how much difficulty she used to have doing that.)
It’s not having fun, exactly, but it’s something. Eri is months away from talking words, let alone sentences. Even then, it won’t be conversation. Nonetheless, he talks to her often.
“You’re pretty drooly, huh?” he asks. The fronts of her shirts, dresses, and bibs are perpetually wet. It’s the kind of thing Tetsurou would have found gross before he had her. Truthfully, he still finds it kind of gross, but it’s different. She’s his.
“It’s only going to get more intense from here, you know. I was reading about this. You’ll get teeth , Eri! What do you think of that?”
Bemused, Tetsurou’s daughter lets her legs kick out behind her. She smiles at him, another offending string of drool falling from her bottom lip.
Tetsurou decides it’s bedtime, then, for both of them.
“He watched her the other day, for an hour, ” Tetsurou says, still half amazed by that fact himself.
There’s a hum on the other end of the phone, more uninterested than anything.
“Kenma,” he stresses. “Kenma doesn’t like kids, and he watched mine for an hour . That has to mean something, doesn’t it?”
The voice on the other end deadpans. If possible, he’s even less interested than he had been before. “It doesn’t,” he says. “And if this is a thinly veiled attempt to get me to babysit, I’m not going to do that.”
“You are no help,” Tetsurou says woefully, looking up momentarily to where Eri is sleeping across from him.
“Don’t you have a child to watch? Maybe you should do that,” Tsukishima suggests. Tetsurou is almost certain he hears a yawn at the end.
“She’s asleep,” he says, defensive. She has been for an hour and a half - Tetsurou doesn’t even know what to do with the spare time allotted, but the web article he’d consulted had explained that she was undergoing a growth spurt, causing her to sleep in much longer stretches than usual. (He’d be lying if he said he doesn’t appreciate the extra sleep allowed on his part.)
“I’m sure you have something you can do while she sleeps,” he says. “So, I’m going to go.”
“Harsh, Tsukki,” Tetsurou says, shaking his head. (And, as it turns out, Tsukishima doesn’t even hear it, because the line goes dead halfway through the sentence.)
“I can’t help but be nervous,” Tetsurou admits, worrying his bottom lip between his teeth. He crosses his legs, knee against Kenma’s thigh, and adjusts Eri so that she sits up across his other leg. He’s trying his best to keep her awake for the time being, just to make things easier on Aiko.
“She’s going to do fine,” Kenma reassures, tucking his hair behind his ear. “She’s Aiko’s child, too.” He says this matter-of-factly, probably not trying to be reassuring. (Even so, Tetsurou finds himself relaxing slightly.)
“She’s only been away from me overnight twice,” he says.
“It’s a good thing,” Kenma says, shrugging. “You probably need it more than Eri does, though.”
“I do not,” Tetsurou denies.
“You do, Kuro. It’s good for you to have a break from all this.”
“For two nights,” Kuroo sighs.
Kenma shuffles slightly, breaking the contact. “You liked her enough to have a baby with her,” he points out with an innocent cock of his head. He does not sound resentful — Tetsurou is definitely reading into his tone too much.
“I know I did,” Tetsurou admits. They both ignore the pink flush on his cheeks. He doesn’t often think about what lead to them having Eri, exactly. He’d barely dated her two months before they found out that they were going to be parents, and there hadn’t been an immense emotional connection there.
Tetsurou has only felt that immense emotional connection with one person, but —
The buzzer sounds, alerting him to a guest at the front door. Eri shifts, restless, and lets out a quiet whine.
“ Go ,” Kenma urges. “She’ll be fine.”
Tetsurou repeats this, mostly — no, definitely, trying to reassure himself.
Once more, the buzzer sounds, and Tetsurou opens the door, more uneasy than anything. The unease is useless, silly; that’s what he tells himself. Aiko is more than capable of caring for his child, their child.
“Hi, Kuroo,” she greets, stepping through the threshold and into the apartment. “Thanks for letting me take her on such short notice. I really do appreciate it.”
“It’s no problem,” Tetsurou says, as if he hadn’t spent the past two and a half hours in a state of unease. “I tried to keep her up for you, but she’s getting pretty cranky, so—”
“I’ll get her to sleep first thing, then,” Aiko promises, tucking a short strand of hair behind her ear.
“Yeah, that’s good,” Tetsurou agrees. There’s an awkward pause, and he knows that he should be handing their daughter over, but he can’t quite bring himself to do that.
Kenma coughs from across the room, prompting Tetsurou to offer Aiko an apologetic smile.
“She doesn’t like to fall asleep alone, so you’ll have to stay with her until she does.”
“I’ll get her back to you in one piece,” she assures, settling the six month old against one hip. “Promise.”
“I’ll come get her Sunday morning, then.”
“Don’t worry too much,” Aiko says, eyes crinkled slightly at the corners.
“Is it strange to be worrying this much?” Tetsurou asks with a quiet sigh, settling his weight into Kenma’s familiar couch. The time Tetsurou has spent in this apartment has decreased greatly in the past six months, though everything is achingly familiar, almost painfully so.
“To an extent,” Kenma admits, shrugging. “Aiko is smart, so you have nothing to be worried about.”
When Tetsurou frowns, Kenma tacks on “But, it makes sense, since you’re with Eri so often.” He’s right. Of course he’s right, because he’s objective to their situation. He’s both reassured Tetsurou and given him some harsh (but much needed) advice over the past six months.
Tetsurou doesn’t reply, but tugs the throw blanket on Kenma’s lap so that it rests across both of them; Tetsurou also shifts closer to Kenma so that their shoulders touch, and lets his hand come to rest on Tetsurou’s knee.
“We could watch a movie,” Kenma suggests, already reaching for his laptop from where it sits on the coffee table. “I don’t know the last time we watched a movie without interruption.”
Tetsurou offers an apologetic smile, but it’s lost as Kenma sets the laptop up, the opening credits just beginning to roll. Against his better judgement, when Kenma leans back into the couch, Tetsurou lets his head rest against Kenma’s shoulder.
If Kenma minds, he certainly doesn’t say anything, and Tetsurou is certainly not going to take it back. It’s a consolation prize of sorts; he knows that it is infeasible for their relationship to progress beyond what it is, now, but this is nice.
Slightly dazed with sleep, Tetsurou laces his fingers in with Kenma’s, giving a gentle squeeze.
“Kuro,” Kenma warns. He makes no move to take his hand away, though, and Tetsurou lets his attention come back to the movie.
“Would you do this if Eri were here?” Kenma asks, quiet.
Suddenly, Tetsurou is all too aware of their contact points— thighs, fingers, Tetsurou’s head to Kenma’s shoulder.
“Probably not, no,” he admits. On screen, a sailboat sinks and Tetsurou’s heart does, too.
“Then—” Kenma removes his hand from Tetsurou’s grasp, lets his fingers splay out onto his knee. He elaborates, “You can’t pretend she’s not real just because she’s not here, Kuro.”
Tetsurou sinks back into the right side of the couch, effectively breaking those three contact points. “I know,” he says, voice barely audible over the movie.
Since he’d rather have Kenma here as friends than not at all, Tetsurou lets his focus fall entirely on the movie. (It’s difficult to understand, because he’d paid little attention to the first half an hour, but he still tries.)
When Tetsurou wakes the next morning, the first thing he does is reach out to see if Eri is asleep next to him. The second thing he does is sigh when he recalls her whereabouts and pull Kenma’s throw blanket up and over his nose, eyes still tightly shut. Kenma’s couch is comfortable, worn in, and his cat sleeps on the back, paying no mind to Tetsurou.
Water runs somewhere down the hallway, and Tetsurou knows that his friend is awake. His morning routine has had little variance since they were teenagers. At any moment, he’ll come down the hallway and start breakfast, no doubt.
Tetsurou stretches up, grimacing as his back cracks. He hasn’t noticed, necessarily, until having Eri, how much of a morning person he isn’t , though she’s forced him to adapt that aspect of his personality to accommodate her.
As if on cue, Kenma makes his way down the hallway, uttering a small noise of surprise at Tetsurou’s half awake state.
“You slept okay?” he asks. After a moment of fiddling with the speaker, music begins to fill the kitchen, and the apartment seems to come alive.
“I did, yeah; your couch is absurdly soft.” He knows Kenma’s bed is softer, though; he’s spent many nights in that bed, arm draped over Kenma, sleeping into the late hours of morning.
Last night is the first time he’s slept on the couch. By no coincidence, last night is the first night he’s slept over since having Eri. Tetsurou would be a fool or painfully oblivious or something, not to see the correlation between the two.
“And you?” Tetsurou asks, finally standing from the couch. Kenma looks so young, so soft, that Tetsurou could just melt into a puddle then and there, probably, never to be seen or heard from again.
Kenma’s hair is gathered into a bun at the top of his head, though a few pieces stick out from the hair tie, and his old volleyball t-shirt hangs off his shoulders, ‘ Kozume’ emblazoned across the back in red lettering. It’s almost like when Tetsurou used to meet him before school. Almost .
Tetsurou does a poor job at stifling a yawn, and shuffles across to where the mugs are kept. Upon opening the cabinet, though, he’s met with a stack of dinner plates.
“Two cabinets to the left,” Kenma says. His voice is slightly muffled as he stands in front of the fridge, but Tetsurou makes it out fine. “I moved some stuff around.”
Tetsurou retrieves two and sets about making coffee for both of them. It’s almost monotonous, the way he does this, but he supposes that it’s only normal. He’s probably made hundreds of cups of coffee for Kenma alone over the years.
“I’m taking Eri to the museum next Saturday,” Tetsurou says over breakfast. The sunlight, however minimal, highlights a golden halo around Kenma’s head as he nods. “If you’d like to come, you’re welcome.” The unspoken, ‘you’re always welcome,’ lingers unsaid but understood.
“Maybe,” Kenma answers, nonchalant.
Tetsurou doesn’t expect Kenma to come, exactly, but it’ll be a welcome surprise if he does. It allows for Tetsurou to maintain this carefully constructed pseudo-family illusion he’s built up over the past six months,
He maintains it, just so, so that it doesn’t crumble. Eri is his, completely. Kenma has never had any interest in, nor has he ever pretended to have any interest in being any sort of a father to Eri. Tetsurou would only ever be setting himself up for disappointment if he placed this expectation on his friend.
“You’re a good dad,” Kenma says suddenly, voice slightly muffled by the mug in front of his face.
Tetsurou lets out a slight laugh at that. “Not many people seem to think so, lately.”
“But you keep going. That’s what makes you good.”
Tetsurou is not shocked— moreso relieved —when Eri returns to him just as happy as she’d been when he’d handed her over begrudgingly. It was a mere two days apart, but when Aiko hands her back, Tetsurou doesn’t think he could handle putting her down for a month, maybe even two.
Loving someone this completely has, for most of his life, been completely foreign to Tetsurou, which is likely part of the reason he steps back from Aiko when she explains that she’d like Eri next weekend as well, because of her school’s semester break. He can’t reasonably turn her down, since there’s zero feasible reason that she can’t take Eri. Still, Tetsurou can’t help the lingering sadness in his chest when he agrees to her proposition.
It dawns on him later that night (when he’s in the middle of changing Eri on the floor, nonetheless), that part of the reason for his sadness is that they won’t be able to go to the museum as planned. Weekends are a much needed break from his job, allowing him to spend more time with Eri than merely getting her awake and getting her ready for bed.
And Aiko certainly doesn’t mean harm in the slightest; it’s good that she wants Eri, too, but Tetsurou wishes that she’d do it at a time more conducive to Kenma accompanying both Tetsurou and Eri to the museum — to anywhere, really.
Tetsurou quickly snaps back into reality when Eri gives a particularly excited squeal, attempting to roll mid-change. He quickly finds it within himself to wrap up and get her situated. They could both use an early night, anyway.