Work Text:
Bokuto and Kuroo are not soulmates but they are threads of a spool that intertwine and knot together in some wonderful tangle of love and life, some tighter than the others, some looser — some that just loop without touching more than that. There are some realities where the two don’t meet at all — where Kuroo grows up without someone who wholeheartedly and vivaciously supports him and rivals him at every turn, where Bokuto grows up without a scheming, dependable friend who would never plot against him. But yet there are others where they love each other — unabashed and unafraid, loud and bright. All-encompassing.
In this life, Kuroo is nine when he meets Bokuto at his neighbourhood park. The boy is short, skinny, almost looking like a plucked chicken or a drowned cat; he’s small and has scuffed knees and a bright, bright smile.
Bokuto comes to him first, his nose running, wiping it on the back of a sand-grey hand. “You!” he shouts, and Kuroo jumps a foot in the air, too used to Kenma’s quiet whispers to remember what being yelled at felt like.
“Yes?” he asks, warily, watching the boy jump up and down. He’s never seen him before; either he’s new to the neighbourhood or he’s just visiting, either he way he’s unsure of what he wants and debates taking steps towards him.
Bokuto looks at him, and then his face splits even wider. “Will you help me find some buried treasure?”
Kuroo blinks at him, then follows the gaze of his eyes to the sandbox, where it’s dug so full of holes it resembles something slightly akin to Swiss cheese, if Swiss cheese was grey, crumbling, and trodden. He meanders over to it with the overeager voice and shrugs off his slippers, curling his toes in the sand.
“You buried something in here?” he asks, peering into the holes — they’ve been dug all the way to the bottom of the sandbox.
“A notebook my parents gave me. It’s got wishes on it and everything,” Bokuto hands him a shovel and gestures at the sand expectantly. “I’ll even let you make a wish.”
“Will it come true?” Kuroo stabs at the sand, and Bokuto plops himself down on the ground next to him, helping him to scoop sand away from his burgeoning hole.
“Of course it will!” Bokuto declares proudly. “I wished for a friend, a pair of fuzzy slippers — the black owl ones from the toy store, y’know? And I wished for a kind setter! I play volleyball! Do you play volleyball? My setter is really mean. He keeps throwing the balls in my face and —“
“— I play volleyball too!” Kuroo leans forward excitedly, nearly knocking his feet into the hole. “What position are you?” He wonders what he’ll wish about. Maybe Kenma playing volleyball with him.
“Wing spiker!” Bokuto wriggles his toes and puffs up his chest. “I’m going to be the ace! Oh, and I got my slippers yesterday, and I know my mum is getting me a PSP for Christmas because I saw the box on the cookie shelf, so now all I need is a friend and a good setter.”
Kuroo pours water over the walls of their hole to steady the sand and pauses thoughtfully. “I can be your friend.”
“Really?”
“Yeah!” Kuroo throws his arms wide open and tosses his head back to look at a darkening sky. It’s almost time for him to go home. “You only share your treasure with your friends,” he nods seriously at the boy before him, with the bandaids over his face and his elbows. “That way no one will steal it.”
“Ehh,” Bokuto beams at him and kicks his feet in the sand. “You’re really smart!”
“I know,” Kuroo sticks his tongue out at him and they both laugh again. They dig until the lights in the park turn on — it’s seven at night, and time for Kuroo to go home, so he hands Bokuto back his shovel, dusts off his pants and waves goodbye, promises to meet again tomorrow ringing in his ears. When he goes to bed he uses the home phone to Kenma all about the loud boy in the park, with his bright eyes and long hair — but in this life, Kuroo never sees him again.
The next day, even the holes that they have dug have blown over and refilled during the storm in the night. It is almost like the boy never existed in the first place; but drunk on concern and brimming with impatience, Kuroo recovers the yellowed notebook of a boy named Bokuto Koutarou, and the ten wishes he’s made since he was seven, inside a plastic Ziplock back in the leftmost corner of the sandbox.
In his second life, Kuroo meets Bokuto at a coffeeshop. Bokuto is an exuberant barista with a personality so big it fills the entire coffeeshop and then some, spilling onto the streets an element of security, warmth and good food that attracted many a dead college student with hardly anything to live for but the next essay.
Kuroo leaves his name and waits around for his coffee, but when he gets it the name reads cheer up, you can do it instead. He holds the cup in his hands and strangely finds himself tearing up; the encouragement something Kuroo has rarely heard and even more rarely believed, but the barista who is now smiling at him; the smile reaching his eyes and crinkling them at the corners has managed to convey something entirely real about the sentiment.
He writes his number on the receipt and hands it to him wordlessly as he walks out, but he doesn’t get any further than a few steps away from the shop before a body slams into him. He trips and smacks into the wall with his left shoulder, and once he’s got his bearings is whirling around to face the man that did this —
and sees the barista with wide eyes and a toothy grin rubbing the back of his head sheepishly.
“Sorry!” he gushes, his hands coming up to dust something imaginary off Kuroo’s shoulders. “It’s just— I couldn't tell if this was a two or a five and I didn't want to not call you and then you’d be sad and maybe you’d stop coming because you’re? So cute? And you come in almost every day and —”
It’s understandable, Kuroo’s handwriting is atrocious — the man is still going, his name is Bokuto from his name tag that’s been haphazardly pinned onto his apron —
“Bokuto,” he chooses to interrupt instead, a hand on his shoulder. The man closes his mouth so fast you’d almost expect to hear an audible slam. “It’s a five.”
Bokuto blinks at him, then his face creases into a smile instead. “Really?”
“Really,” Kuroo pushes off the wall and readjusts the laptop under his arm, giving him a smile that goes further than it had for a long time; ever since he left Kenma and Tokyo and everything he knew behind to stand here. He wars with himself as he waves goodbye and walks away, then he’s hurriedly turning around and brisk walking back to where Bokuto the barista is still kind of staring after him with a dazed expression on his face.
“Kuroo?” he asks, sounding a little pleased but confused at the same time, but Kuroo ignores him in favour of leaning forward and pressing a quick kiss to his cheek. His skin is soft. He smells like vanilla and coffee.
Bokuto starts, then turns bright red, rubbing the back of head as Kuroo waves goodbye again and walks quickly away — why did I do that why did I do that why —
In this universe, Bokuto calls him five minutes after he’s rounded the corner and Kuroo laughs.
In the next life, he is a wily cat with a scar across his left eye from a fight he didn’t mean to get into, but got into it anyway and had to stick around for his pride. The kennel at the shelter is cold and small and stinks vaguely of dog; it pisses him off and makes him scratch at the plastic white and hiss at his handlers.
He’s becoming marked a problem cat, but really, he just wants out of here, to go home, leave, at once —but he doesn’t have a home, that’s here in the melting plastic of the summer heat.
That is, until a loud man bursts into the adoption centre, scaring half the animals to death. Soot looks up disinterestedly, so of course it is him that the overeager man bounds to, pressing his face against the cage and looking up at him with a wide, white smile.
He has very large eyes.
“Koutarou,” a man says tiredly in the background. He approaches the cage too and looks at Soot with a raised eyebrow, but the disdain isn't directed at him but at the man who has moved on from staring at Soot to fawning over the snow white one just below him. “You’re going to scare the animals.”
Snowball is an asshole. Soot feels like he should warn them, so he meows, ever so gently, and Koutarou’s head snaps back towards him, including the tired man who has a hand resting comfortably on his shoulder.
Sure, they’re loud. But — Bokuto requests for him to be let out of the cage and Soot winds himself around his leg and realises that he likes the way this man smells, and the other one — Keiji, he calls him — pets him with just the right amount of firmness to feel good.
“I though we came here for a dog,” Keiji says, with a sort of fondness in his voice.
“We did,” Koutarou lets Soot step into his lap and knead his thighs. “But look at this one! He likes me. Cats don’t like me, usually, but this one is so cute? And —“
Soot meows. Pay attention to me.
“And I’ve thought of a nice name for him! Kuroo!”
“Kuro?” Keiji murmurs. Soot turns his head towards them and butts it gently against Koutarou’s thigh.
“No, Kuro- oh ,” the other one corrects, a hand coming down to scratch at his ears. “Won’t Kuro be too stereotypical? I feel like this cat is unique! Look at him! I love him already~”
Keiji laughs. It’s quite a nice sound. “Okay,” he says, and Soot — no, Kuroo now, suns himself in their attention.
In this life, they are both drafted into the Second World War, a terrible time for the world and a terrible time for Japan. Kuroo knows what he’s doing is for the good and the glory of the emperor, but he can’t stand it — the sickly feeling that creeps under his skin as bombs go off left, right, centre, the Allies standing weak, or so they claimed. But they’re strong. They’re regrouping and hitting them hard and Kuroo has lost four men from his squadron today, he couldn’t even recover their bodies.
Kuroo’s bandaging up his arm, which got caught on a tree branch after an explosion threw him, when his commander comes around and sits on on the floor next to him. They’re both covered in a sheen of sweat and grime that sticks to them more than their clothes do at this point, and somewhere along the way in the war Kuroo has forgotten what it is to be clean, what it is for there to be silence — his left ear has a continuous ringing noise that irritates the hell out of him.
HIs commander’s name is Bokuto, and he is strong, brave, and heroic. He is the ideal Japanese soldier, with his strong arms and broad shoulders and effortless grin, his charisma kept their special elite team from falling to pieces. Loyal to a fault, the man commanded with effortless ease.
Actually, to be honest, saying that Bokuto was the ideal Japanese soldier is a bit of lie. See, he would the model soldier, the epitome of what the emperor wants — if, and only if, what is about to happen doesn’t happen, but it does.
Bokuto leans in, tilts his head, and presses a soft, chaste kiss to Kuroo’s chapped lips. He almost weeps at the tenderness of it all, of how gentle Bokuto really is — his arms were not made for holding a gun nor are they supposed to hurt, his is the warmth of a fire on a cold winter's night, the glare of the sun off glass, the sound of a bird in a faraway tree.
His is the light and the beauty and the life.
Kuroo holds onto him and pulls him in for another secret, stolen kiss, pressing them tightly to Bokuto’s lips like a promise. One day, he says, as he kisses his forehead. We’ll have everything we’ve ever wanted. I’ll have you and you’ll have me, he kisses Bokuto’s eyelids, watches the way they flutter beneath him like fragile things.
And it is. Being alive is so rare and fleeting and wonderful.
Bokuto kisses him again, and then they hold each other, like they were anchors, or perhaps reminders of better times. Kuroo presses a kiss to the inside of his neck. Bokuto holds his waist and runs his calloused hands over his bare skin as they pull off clothes and put them aside.
Kuroo’s dog tags are cold against Bokuto’s chest.
He kisses a bullet scar and one from a bayonet; he drags his tongue over his collarbones and nibbles on an earlobe and Bokuto breathes beneath him, warm, living, real. Their wandering hands leave marks on each other that mean more than the faded white, their eyes memorise the sloping lines of their bodies and their skin remembers the way their kisses feel, soft and sweet, like butterfly wings.
But this is war, and war is never kind, not to the loving or the evil, not to the good or the bad. This is war; and war is alive too, a desperate, feeding monster that delights in the ability of men to be cruel.
You see, in this life, they don’t quite make it out together.
In this life, Bokuto dies a week later — Kuroo sees it happens and screams, for now he knows what it is like for the heart to die, to crumble to melt to turn to ash, and everything he’s lived for — a life of peace — is ripped from him in the second it takes to pull the trigger. Bokuto dies with a grimace on his face.
But Kuroo joins him a month after. He dies with both his and Bokuto’s dog tags on, the metal rusted and faded; and the next day, the Japanese surrendered to the Americans, and somewhere, two dark-haired men throw flowers into rivers for two soldiers who won’t come home, and though they loved each other very much, they just couldn’t quite live that long.
After all, this is what happens when the bomb drops.
This time, they meet a little later.
Kuroo feels something is quite lacking in his life, a feeling of emptiness, or loneliness, like there’s someone supposed to be sitting next to him, only there isn’t. The bench in the third gym is empty.
That empty feeling stretches, he takes it out of the third gym and back to Nekoma, he watches spikes with listlessness and feels an urgent sort of feeling beneath his skin, like an itch he cannot scratch. It burdens him. It overwhelms him. It rushes through his head and weighs on his shoulder and turns good things sour, tinges everywhere he looks with distaste.
At night, he dreams of warm hands and a fierce hug and a desperate scream of someone before him — a gunshot — a silence. Kuroo cannot pin his dreams down so he takes it out on the court, he blocks everything that comes his way and fights to the death to hold his ground, to stay in the place where he forgot about the clenching in his heart and the aches in his bones.
He overworks himself. He sprains things. Kenma tells him, worriedly, “Kuro, stop it,” but he can’t.
On the other side of the court is an exuberant man with white-grey hair that's spiked upwards in a a way that suggests both meticulousness and a lack of care. He grapples with his emotions the way one struggles to hold a slippery glass plate in the sink — and then smacks the next one down right in front of him.
There’s silence. A muscle in the other boy’s jaw twitches. Throughout the entire game, all his crosses were being blocked, and his straights were badly timed. Nekoma held the upper hand in this game.
In the end, they won. The other team with the boy with the bright eyes stalks off the court with a clenched jaw and fist, and Kuroo thinks that’s the last he’d see of him, of the boy with the determined eyes and the quirk to his lips, with the mood swings and loud, random shouts.
When they do meet again, the boy wins. He’s perfected his straights and they zoom past his team and slam onto the floor and they’re pretty damn amazing, so when they lose, Kuroo feels bad but can’t feel pissed about it.
They talk, just before they leave. It’s a shout of, “you really picked yourself up!” from across the corridors of the sports centre.
The boy — Bokuto, he’s been called, turns around to beam at Kuroo. “You really pissed me off the last time,” he laughs, and it’s like the sun. Kuroo wants to call out to it.
“Did I?” he muses, and makes a peace sign with both of his hands while sticking his tongue out. His eyes crease shut. He feels happy.
“Yeah!” Bokuto shakes his fist at him and laughs again. “I’ll see you around, Kuroo,” he waves and rushes to join his school that has already filtered out of the centre.
Kuroo lasts a day before googling Bokuto and finding his school, and a week before he turns up there after what he presumes would be the club's end time in his school uniform, an unwilling Kenma by his side, a nervous twitch to his fingers. He catches Bokuto as he walks out of the school together with a dark haired, pretty man. Bokuto looks at this one with undisguised fondness. His eyes drop. His heart stops. He turns to leave —
and then Kenma is tugging on his sleeve.
“Kuro,” he says, the sort of small voice one uses when they’re trying not to appear insistent but they are. “I didn't come all the way here for nothing.”
Kuroo blinks at him, swallows around the lump in his throat. He turns back to look at Bokuto and says, “yo! Number four!”
Bokuto stops short. He turns around as though he can’t quite believe that voice is calling him, and when he sees Kuroo standing there with his hands in his pockets and an anxious twitch to him, his smile is wider than Kuroo has ever seen it.
“Kuroo!” he shouts, and Kuroo laughs and yells something unintelligible in return.
“I can’t believe you’re here!”
“I can’t believe I came here,” Kuroo rubs the back of his head and beams in spite of himself, and then he’s nearly being bowled over as Bokuto engulfs him in a hug that feels exactly like one from his dreams — warm, tight, secure. He smells like deodorant and sweat; not necessarily pleasant but undeniably real.
Later on in life, Kuroo would say, “I think I dreamt about you when I didn’t even know you,” and Bokuto — now Koutarou — would kiss the golden band around his finger and say, “well, of course you did.”
In the next reality, they don’t get together at all. Kuroo stands painfully in the gym as Bokuto corners him after practice, gushing about Akaashi and his hair and his laughing eyes, his lack of a smile and how he uses his words to do so.
“You should ask him out, bro,” Kuroo urges him, one hand on his shoulder, the other spinning him around so that he can gawk at his pretty setter, because his setter is extremely pretty, and Kuroo has to give it to him. Bokuto yells, hops around, bangs his head on the wall, much to his amusement, before he settles again. “I know he likes you.”
“You do?” Bokuto looks at him with wet eyes and a dopey smile. “You sure? I’m loud and obnoxious and difficult to handle and Akaashi might be getting tired of me because I’ve been told I’m exhausting to be around and —“
Kuroo will and wishes he could punch anyone who told this beautiful boy that he’s exhausting to be around. He will. He’ll end them.
“Don’t be stupid,” he smacks his head and rolls his eyes. “Go on then,” he pushes him towards Akaashi and smiles supportively. “Ace.”
The use of ace has it’s desired effect — he blinks, grins and pumps his fist in the air. He takes stumbling steps towards Akaashi, and suddenly the third gym feels hot and burdensome. The air weighs down heavily on his shoulders, but he stays and watches, out of some…masochistic tendency and pure concern for his friend.
Bokuto yells, “Akaashi!” and then claps his hands over his mouth. His face turns red. They exchange words with awkward touches and glances — Bokuto’s eyes wander from the slant of his eyes to the curve of his jaw to the way he moves his shoulders —
“Wannagooutwithme?” Bokuto bursts out, and Akaashi blinks at him.
“Out of the gym?” he asks, head tilted, his hair rustling as he moves.
Bokuto gapes at him, then turns beet red, and as Akaashi studies the sudden change — the hand coming up to hide his face, the downturn of his shoulders as he struggles to bounce back — and promptly turns so red, it rivals Kuroo’s jersey. Even his hair seems to floof up a little, like a startled bird.
They gape at each other, then make various noises that could be words but are also not, too panicked are they in their desperate attempt to make their feelings connect. Some part of Kuroo, some mean, twisted part of him wants Akaashi to say no, to tell him off, to run out of the gym to leave — but Bokuto always smiles brighter than the sun when Akaashi is around, he leans into his touch and fawns over him and Kuroo is a bad person but he’s not evil.
Akaashi holds up a shushing hand and Bokuto falls silent, as always. “I’m free on Friday, Bokuto-san. We don’t have club on that day too,” and here he smiles, faint, but real.
Bokuto cracks a smile. “Yeah? You wanna…go out for —“
“There’s a new dessert place that opened nearby,” Akaashi continues, fiddling with his fingers. “I’ve wanted to go.”
“As a date??” Bokuto takes an eager step forward and Akaashi doesn’t pull away.
“Sure,” he says, softly, and Bokuto throws his hands up into the air and cheers. He whirls around, and his bright smile falls on Kuroo’s gaze, and he gives him two thumbs up.
Kuroo smiles, nods, and leaves the gym out of the backdoor. Once outside, he falls against the rough walls and heaves. Sliding down it, he hits the floor, drawing his knees up to his chest.
He takes a deep breath. He tastes acid in the back of his throat.
The sound of the crickets gets louder and louder till it’s an incessant drone in his ears, it’s screaming and loud and brutal, it’s harsh and overwhelming. A constant scream.
From inside the gym, he hears Bokuto laugh and shout, “Aghkaashi!” in the way he always does, butchering his name, really, but Akaashi has never seemed to mind.
Kuroo blinks open his eyes. He stares at an ant that crawls along the concrete and with a long, drawn out exhale, he lets him go.
In his current life, Bokuto is next to Kuroo as they walk to grab dinner together. They’re not really sure what they’re going to eat; they’re just milling about in a comfortable give and take as they study menus and turn away because they’re way out of budget and they’re both broke.
Eventually they find a small little Western place, where the tables are so tiny for them they bump knees and knock each other with their reach. Eventually they tangle their feet together and wind them around each other in something that has it’s roots in familiarity and comfort and a breath of intimacy.
Bokuto’s legs are strong like the rest of him, hard lines of muscle can be felt clearly through his jeans, Kuroo takes the moment that he has, this…almost forbidden moment to relish in the touch that borders platonic and not.
Bokuto orders spaghetti. He eats messily, but somehow none of the sauce ends up on his white shirt, and Kuroo admires this. He points out the sauce moustache though and they laugh about it while Kuroo stabs his lasagne and…it occurs to him as Bokuto is animatedly talking about something that happened this other day that he loves this. This dynamic, this setting, this tiny table with two big men sitting at it, the sound of a fork scraping a plate.
He loves the quirk of Bokuto’s mouth as he talks and the way he raises his eyebrows and the gleam of his eyes.
They start a knife fight and it escalates and they switch to spoons because Bokuto nearly slices the skin off his wrist — the clacking of cutlery and their boisterous laughs fill the room. The threads of life wind themselves around Kuroo’s neck in a way that does not feel dangerous.
It’s Bokuto who stops the fight, giggles, and says, “is this a date?”
Kuroo’s heart stops working, and he drops his spoon.
Bokuto blinks at him, the light air turning serious, and Kuroo realises he’s waiting for a response, uncharacteristically patient.
He can’t quite find the words, though — and then he realises he does.
Because it’s simple. It’s always simple with Bokuto.
“Yeah,” he swallows thickly and looks up at him. “Yeah, it’s a date.”
Bokuto’s face splits into a grin. He leans forward across the table — it’s so small he doesn’t have to lean very far — and — kisses him.
It’s very quick, just a firm press of pursed lips against his, but the pressure twists his heart and the closeness goes to his head, making him feel almost drunk. It’s intoxicating, isn’t it, to love and be loved in return?
Kuroo’s fingers come up to touch his lips and he finds, in spite of his usual coolheaded, suave, persona, his face is burning. Clearing his throat, he looks away and scuffs his feet.
Bokuto asks, softly, “that alright?”
And Kuroo says, “yes.”
Because it is.
This story is not finished, for Kuroo still lives; but when he does not, and when he comes back — he will find Bokuto again, in the trees the sun the sky, and the thread will loop, knot, and tighten again.
They aren’t soulmates — they’re not perfect, not for each other — they have flaws and mistakes and problematic parts of themselves, but they’ll find each other, over and over again, the way the sun always meets the edge of the world, or the sea ebbs on the sand of a beach.
The thread tightens.
The light brightens.
And a new Kuroo asks, “what’s your name?”