Archive of Our Own ^beta

Before we start, Kenma would like to clear up a few misconceptions about ghosts and death and all of that.

First of all—and he says this because he knows you’d ask—no, he doesn’t know what happens when you die. He has a guess, like the rest of us, but he isn’t positive. He can’t see that. So don’t come asking if heaven or hell exist, or god, or angels, or anything else like that. 

His jurisdiction lies in the little gray area between the reality of death and what we can perceive from our side of the wall. When you ask him about how your deceased loved ones are doing, it’s not like he’s dragging them back from the dead when he answers. It’s not like their ghosts are floating by him, feeding him words. It’s something different—more like an echo left over, that still bears some resemblance to the original, but which has no soul of its own. 

Kenma just wanted you to know beforehand. Ask away, if you still want. 

.

Kuroo finds him one day in the middle of the summer, when Kenma has the windows sealed tight and the air conditioning blasting on high. It had been a slow few days, and he‘s in the middle of his third game of Civilization for the day when he hears the knock. He closes his laptop and calls out, “Coming.”

Kuroo looks like any normal person off the street—neatly dressed, smiling, looking about in his mid-to-late-20s. Completely unassuming. But Kenma is completely frozen from the first glance. There’s something very wrong about him.

“Is this the residence of Kenma, the psychic?” 

Kenma considers lying. His instincts tell him to keep his distance. But his rationality kicks in—there’s a preorder that he wants that’s opening soon. Also food. Kenma shuffles backwards. 

“You can come on in,” he says. 

There’s a while of fussing with the teapot, of telling him he can take off his shoes there, of asking if he wanted black or lavender or green tea, of moving his laptop and placing a pad of paper and a pen in its place, of straightening coasters, of Kenma finding all these ways to stall to observe Kuroo out of the corner of his eye. 

By the time they’ve sat down, Kenma has a vague idea of who Kuroo is even before he introduces himself.

“I’m Kuroo. I’ve been backpacking through this area with a few friends—only in town for a while, but there was a guy at my hostel who was telling me about this legendary psychic in the neighborhood, so I had to take a look.”

This is a lie. Kenma pauses, weighing his options. In the end, he decides to play along. 

“Is there something you want me to do for you?”

“I’m not really sure—“ Lie. “I just wanted to meet you I guess, I’ve never met a real life psychic before. And he said you were the real deal.”

Kenma shrugs, because it’s true that he’s not a fraud. He isn’t good enough of an actor to be one. He watches as Kuroo slowly realizes that small talk also isn’t Kenma’s specialty. 

“Then...what are some things that you do?”

“If you know people that’ve passed, I can call on their shadows to chat.”

“Like speaking to the dead?” Kuroo’s leg is jittering just slightly under the table now. 

“Not speaking to. They’re still dead, and to my knowledge real ghosts don’t exist.” Kuroo’s leg stops. He’s still smiling. 

“Then what would you be speaking to?” he asks. 

“It would be less of a ghost and more of an afterimage.” Kenma is content with his response, but when Kuroo continues to stare at him, he digs a thumb against his kneecap and thinks of another way to put it. “People leave little hints of themselves when they pass over, and if you have someone in mind I can...interact with those hints. If you ask questions, they might respond the same way the real person would have. But it’s not that person.”

Kuroo nods slowly in understanding and sips at his tea. Kenma’s eyes wander over to the window, to the view of darkening clouds outside his apartment. It would rain soon. A crappy omen, not because Kenma was superstitious, but because that meant Kuroo might loiter if he didn’t want to get rained on. Kenma didn’t see an umbrella in his hands earlier.

“What would you need in order to talk to one of these afterimages?”

“Just a name,” Kenma says. “And fifty bucks.”

Kuroo bursts into a laugh. It doesn’t set Kenma at ease like other laughs do. 

“That’s pretty steep a price for a few words.”

Kenma shrugs. He needs to eat, and he’s a big fan of air conditioning. His bills in the summer get pretty hefty. 

“I don’t really have anyone in mind, I might have to think about it for a while.” Another lie. Kenma nods anyway. 

“People don’t always have people in mind to talk to, it’s a hard question.” He’s surprised by how talkative he is. Maybe it’s because Kuroo’s presence made him so nervous. With every minute, he wants to get out of that room more. He doesn’t like people with a lot of secrets. 

Kenma uses the air conditioning remote to turn it down. They sip their tea in silence for a while longer, Kenma tapping nervously on his knee and Kuroo’s eyes wandering around the apartment as he though, before he reaches into his pocket and pulls out a billfold. He fishes out two twenties and a ten, throws them on the table, and says—“Bokuto. Koutarou Bokuto.”

If your name was Koutarou Bokuto, we have someone here that’s looking for you. 

...

...If your name was Koutarou—

“Oh shit! That’s Kuroo!”

Kenma winces. “He‘s loud,” he grumbles, but pulls the pad of paper close and transcribes the words faithfully. Kuroo’s gaze on him doesn’t waver, but a corner of his mouth quirks. He leans forward to see the writing. 

“He was.”

“Do you have anything you want to say to him?”

Kuroo points to the words. “Are those from him?” Now, the skepticism is plain in his voice. 

Kenma nods. 

“Do I have to ask before he says anything?” 

He nods again. Kuroo is leaning forward now, more than before. 

“Can you ask him how he’s doing?”

This is normal—we can understand how people, once they get ahold of an afterimage, forget all of Kenma’s warnings from before about how it’s actually not the person, how no, Kenma didn’t pull them back from the dead, they have no free will so they can’t exactly initiate riveting conversation on their own etc. etc. He taps the pencil on the pad and tries anyway. 

Doing great, man. 

“That’s probably not true,” Kuroo points out. “Cause he’s dead.”

“Um, I know. You can ask questions like that but you won’t get any real answer...”

“What? Wh—oh, because of the whole not-actually-him thing?”

Nod. 

“So he doesn’t even know he’s dead?”

“No it’s—it’s more like he’s...he was never really alive. What you’re talking to. Like I said, it’s not actually him, it’s more like the...concept...of your friend...so.”

Kuroo frowns, and is definitely reassessing his approach, but he doesn’t look like he’s going to storm out like some of Kenma’s more hotheaded customers.

“Ask him what his favorite color is,” Kuroo says. So the test continues. Kenma asks. 

What? Why are you asking? Do you not remember my favorite color?

“No, I don’t.”

What? What do you mean you don’t remember?

Bokuto is eerily silent for a while. Kenma is confused. He’s about to ask Kuroo if there’s anything else he was interested in asking—maybe something a little more compelling, though he isn’t sure if Bokuto could handle anything if he can’t even seem to accept Kuroo asking about something as asinine as his favorite color—when Bokuto’s voice reemerges.

Wait dude, are you serious? Do you actually not know? You’re kidding right? 

“Nope, not kidding,” Kuroo says. He’d pulled his chair around to Kenma’s side to read better, and has a small grin on his face again as the voice in Kenma’s head starts gushing forward, almost tripping over its words. His handwriting turns into a scribble as he tries to keep up.

Okay, hold on, this isn’t funny. What the hell? How do you not remember this? Something so basic to who I am? To be honest I always considered you to be like a brother, man, I seriously can’t believe that you can’t even remember my favorite color—which, by the way, YELLOW. In case if for some reason you’ve actually forgotten. Straight up, we’ve had this conversation so many times—like really, the hell? This isn’t even a hard thing to remember. Is this like a prank or something? It’s gotta be a prank right? I’ve always told you I don’t find your bullshit pranks like this funny, especially not when you do them to me, save it for someone else cause I’m like—like I’m not saying I’m sensitive or anything but it really hurts my feelings when you—

“Okay, my hand is cramping up,” Kenma says. It’s kind of a lie, it hasn’t quite cramped yet. But he’s getting pretty tired, and Bokuto is talking too fast in his head with no signs of ever stopping. “Your friend sounds like he’s about to cry though.”

Kuroo is looking at the paper strangely. He’s dead silent. Kenma tunes out Bokuto and sits there, fiddling with the pencil. 

After a while, Kuroo finally speaks up, his voice mild—“Could I keep this paper, actually?” Kenma nods and tears it out of the pad, folding it up and handing it to him. Kuroo pockets it. Kenma thinks about telling him how he could still ask more questions for his fifty-dollar session, but before he can Kuroo continues, “This was really helpful—I’ve missed my friend a lot, so I appreciate you...doing...your thing. I have to run for today, but thanks—“

He’s out the door before Kenma has time to react and do much more than raise his hand to wave goodbye. The door isn’t closed entirely after him, and Kenma can hear the rain in earnest from outside. Humidity creeps in. He shuffles up, thinking about the encounter, and locks the door behind Kuroo. The rest of the day passes unremarkably. 

.

The reason why Kenma reacted so differently from how you or I would react is entirely because of the fact that he could sense, from the first glance, that Kuroo is cursed. It‘s something in his aura, about how he feels closer to one of the afterimages than to any living person, about how there‘s a heavy quality to his gaze that belies his true age. Proximity to death causes changes to the living in metaphysical ways that Kenma can sense. Kuroo’s aura feels like tar and smoke. 

Up until meeting Kuroo, Kenma had never thought that there would be anything sadder than death. After, he now knows that it’s much sadder to be stuck. 

.

It was as clear to Kenma as it is to us that Kuroo would come back someday soon. 

The sky is clear this time. Kuroo is less well-dressed than before—simple jeans, a white shirt, his hair looking a little more ruffled than last time. Something about his appearance this time, along with the amount of time that Kenma’s had to think about Kuroo and that paper he’d taken, makes him less intimidating. He isn’t quite as afraid of that fake grin. Kenma even gives him a little smile in return as he comes in. 

Kuroo’s questions gain a little more substance, but not by much. This time it’s Lev Haiba, a yappy little voice that whines about the time that Kuroo forgot about his birthday. When prompted to remember their favorite moment together, Lev rattles off an exciting story about how he and Kuroo had taken one of the grandest cross-country trains out from Moscow to the frigid countryside, and how they’d spent the entire trip wasted and learning songs from old Russian men. Kenma’s hand is actually cramping at the end of Lev’s story this time, but he’s too curious to stop writing this time. 

“Oh God—and then once we got off that one woman—what’s her name—“

It was Olga or something, I think—

“Right! Something like that, who lost her son in the station and was running around and how you got seriously carried away—“

Lev is overexcited, and Kenma’s pencil keeps scribbling even as Kuroo’s still speaking. The one who couldn’t find her kid or whatever, and it took us like three hours to find him, and when we did we found him in the coal car trying to hide cause he didn’t want to visit his grandmother cause she didn’t have a working toilet yet! 

“Yes! Christ,” Kuroo laughs, turning to Kenma. Kenma is fascinated with how his eyes are glittering, and how wide and genuine his smile is now. “It was so funny—that kid practically crawled into the coals with how badly he was trying to hide, and he kicked up such a fit screaming, coals went everywhere—and Lev tried to grab him, but he was so goddamn drunk he just fell right in himself—“

Okay now, hold on, I’m pretty damn sure you pushed me. 

“Exaggeration. I just didn’t try to grab you while you were falling in.”

Sure, whatever, Satan. 

They chat for a while longer. By the end of it Kenma feels like his hand is throbbing, but he’s happy. Things don’t usually get this lighthearted during this job.

“Oh, by the way,” Kuroo says after the conversation falls to a natural close, as Kenma is tearing out the sheets of paper transcribing Lev’s side of the conversation, “I understand that some of that conversation might have seemed a little weird—it would be nice if you didn’t bring that up to anyone else, I don’t really want any attention.”

Kenma knows what he’s talking about, but he’s too curious now to just let it go. He considers playing dumb, but his lack of surprise at the mention of Kuroo being on coal trains, long-since taken out of circulation, makes it too late. 

“I’ve never met anyone like you before,” he says instead, hoping that Kuroo might say a little more but unsure of how to draw it out of him. Kuroo is assessing him again—but just when Kenma thinks he looks like he’s about to open his mouth and spill, the silence is broken by a very long, loud grumble from his stomach. 

Transcribing for afterimages is an exhausting job. Kenma has been writing, nonstop, from early morning to the afternoon. Just because it’s understandable doesn’t mean it’s not mortifying. He feels the room grow cool around his face. Worse, the mood is gone, and Kenma can almost see Kuroo retreating back into himself. 

He laughs. “Sorry—I didn’t realize how long I’ve been here, I’ll see myself out. You should get some food. How much for today?”

“Fifty is fine.”

“Really? But I’ve been here for so long.”

Kenma folds up Kuroo’s papers quickly and pushes them towards him. “It’s per person.” More like people don’t usually stay for over two hours and Kenma isn’t good enough to think of another price on the fly. Kuroo pulls out his billfold again. 

“Well, alright then. Do you accept tips?” 

“Um,” Kenma says. “Not really.” More like no one’s ever offered before. 

Kuroo shakes his head. “You will today. Hold on—“ He tears an unwritten-on corner of Kenma’s transcription and grabs the pencil, scrawling something on it before looking around the room. “Do you have something that I could use as a container?”

“You don’t really have to do that,” Kenma says, thoroughly embarrassed. 

“I insist. Tape would help too.”

There isn’t much at Kenma’s place to use. Kuroo is moving at a speed that’s making him dazed, and he can’t decide between insisting no out of politeness and whatever other options he has in front of him. Just to get Kuroo to stop, he points to the cupboard with the cups. 

Kuroo picks out a plain beige mug and looks from his paper to the mug. Finally, he shrugs and licks the back of the paper before pressing it down. Kenma could barely read the word ‘TIPS’ scribbled onto it before it drifts off the mug and back onto the table. Kuroo, undaunted, grabs his wallet again, throwing a preprepared fifty onto the table and tucking another bill into the mug. 

“You’ll want to tape that down,” he says, grinning, as he grabs his jacket and his transcription. “Thanks for today again.” And he’s gone again, once more leaving the door slightly ajar. 

.

Two days later, he’s back. 

He has a bag in his hands this time—when Kenma lets him in, he pulls out two styrofoam boxes of fried chicken and catfish. Steam billows out when they’re opened, and the scent makes Kenma’s mouth water. 

Kuroo looks a little sheepish. “Sorry, I didn’t really know what you liked, but I didn’t want a repeat of last time. I felt pretty bad.” 

“How much was it?” Kenma asks, already rising for his wallet. The one-hundred dollar bill Kuroo left as a “tip” last time was already ridiculous enough. But Kuroo shakes his head. 

“On me. No really—you just need to eat, actually, you look starved.”

They sit down. Kenma has absolutely no idea what to say and still feels awkward about the entire thing, so he munches on a piece of catfish and tries not to meet Kuroo’s eyes. Kuroo, too, looks like he hasn’t caught up to his own good-will, and is also sitting there with his eyes down. That sight is a little funny to Kenma—of this person who had been so guarded and cautious just a week ago, suddenly barging in and buying him lunch. It’s almost like they’re friends. 

Kenma decides to bite the bullet. He’s had a week to mull over this mysterious not-really-anymore stranger, and it’s been building his confidence, even slightly. 

“I wouldn’t have expected that you need to eat,” he says. Kuroo chews slower. 

“Wow, we’re starting strong today.” Kenma fidgets. The confidence is gone. Kuroo seems unperturbed, and if anything looks a little more in his element. “Do you have any water?”

Kenma is grateful for the opportunity to look away as he gets up to fill two glasses with water. The movement eases his nerves, and gives him time to regroup. He knows Kuroo can see the curiosity plain on his face again when he sits down. Kuroo’s lips twitch upwards. 

“I don’t need to eat. I just like fried chicken,” he jokes. The break in tension surprises Kenma, and he smiles a little as well. Kuroo takes another bite, regaining his original pace. “You’re right—it’s only fair that I answer some of your questions, since you clearly already know, so go ahead.”

A green light. Kenma suddenly has too many things he’s curious about, and none of the social skills to ask them efficiently or comfortably. 

“If you didn’t eat you’d be fine?”

“I’ve gone months without eating before, when I wasn’t in the mood for it.”

“Were you born like this?”

Kuroo, in the middle of drinking from his glass, shakes his head no. He then pauses—“Actually, I guess I don’t know. But I don’t remember really doing anything to get like this. It just happened.”

“Are there other people like you? That don’t really...” Kenma trails off, not really knowing how to word it. 

“That can’t die?” A pause, while Kenma nods. “I’ve never run into anyone else.”

Kenma is momentarily out of questions. He wants to ask about Lev and Bokuto, but he knows that’s imposing too much. Kuroo doesn’t seem openly sad yet, and Kenma doesn’t want to see him sad. 

“Do you call yourself immortal?” 

This one makes Kuroo think for a while. The silence, this time, is more comfortable. “I’ve never told anyone before. Since you’re the only one, you can call me that if you want.”

They finish eating. When Kenma asks if they should start, Kuroo surprises him by pulling out a list. “We can do Akaashi today,” he says, after scanning through it for a quick beat. He looks up at Kenma and smiles. “He was really close to Bokuto.”

At the end of the session, when Kenma is passing Kuroo the paper, he’s chided again for the missing tip jar. Face burning, Kenma rifles to the back of his cupboard for the beige mug, onto which he’d carefully taped Kuroo’s paper scrap. From then on, he leaves it on the counter, in plain sight, just so Kuroo doesn’t get on his case about it. 

.

A knock on his door. “Coming!” Kenma calls out, turning off the television. He takes a quick glance at his reflection in the bathroom mirror on his way, and opens the door. 

Not Kuroo. 

“Hi, um...are you the psychic that can talk to the dead?”

Kenma is surprised by his own disappointment as he nods and steps aside to let the woman in. She asks about her little sister, who had passed away from a traffic accident. Kenma realizes with amusement that he writes faster now, and that it’s easier to meet her eyes. At the end of the session, she drops a ten into the tip mug. 

.

“You didn’t come get the door for me today,” Kuroo says, pouting as he shuffles through the entrance, arms full of pizza boxes. Kenma shoots up from his laptop and feels his face burn. 

“I didn’t know it was you,” he says, hurrying to catch the door that Kuroo somehow still couldn’t figure out how to close all the way. 

They spend about thirty minutes making a secret knock for future visits. It’s three rapid knocks followed by two slow ones. Kenma has to spend a good amount of time convincing Kuroo that knocking the doorknob itself isn’t clever or effective, as he wouldn’t be able to hear from inside. They test Kuroo’s stupid theory, and Kenma finds himself smiling when Kuroo starts banging on the door after realizing Kenma has locked him out. 

“You’re cruel,” Kuroo says when Kenma finally lets him in. “I didn’t think you’d have it in you.”

“You made it too easy.”

This is the same day that Kenma realizes something strange about the air around Kuroo. He had grown accustomed to the dark, sticky aura of death clinging to him from the first few visits, but Kenma realizes now that there are suddenly moments where it grows lighter. Kenma‘s realization, at that moment in time, is that Kuroo still has hope. 

.

Kenma finds out that there are safe conversation topics for them—Kuroo loves talking about his old friends. In the way that he had chattered on about Lev and their Russian train adventures, Kenma also learned about the time that Kuroo had saved a stray kitten from barbed wire with Yaku or formed an impromptu rock band with Taketora. Kuroo is also an excellent storyteller. Gone is the cautious man that came in through the door all those weeks ago—when he speaks now, he speaks with broad hand gestures and those same glittering eyes. 

Kenma likes listening to him talk. He’s surprised when he realizes that he could listen to Kuroo talk all day, he isn’t usually someone that likes talking excessively. But Kuroo does this thing too, when he pauses and glances at Kenma in the middle of his stories and then smiles and says something out loud, like—“Right, that’s what I thought too—it’s a stupid move—” and Kenma only has to nod to agree that yes, that indeed was what he was thinking—

He wonders if this is something that Kuroo’s picked up along the years. He’s asked him before just how old he truly is, but never got anything close to a straightforward answer. And, to tell you the truth, Kenma will never find out Kuroo’s real age in his lifetime. He won’t even have much of a ballpark guess—he knows that the scope of what he learns through Kuroo’s stories is so little compared to every minute he’s actually lived, and Kenma eventually loses interest in finding out. To tell you the full truth, Kuroo himself doesn’t remember his own age.

Despite all of their closeness as the weeks creep on, it throws Kenma for a loop when Kuroo looks up from the little kitchen table and says, “Actually, it’s really late today, mind if I just sleep over?”

Kenma’s brain short circuits, and he just blinks.

“It’s fine, I don’t need anything special. Just like a corner of your room is fine—”

Kenma doesn’t have the heart in him to kick him out. Especially since it is early in the morning now, and by the sounds of the low rumbling in the air, might be pouring sometime soon.

And maybe he was a little happy, too. Kenma had gone without close friends for quite some time.

They come to an arrangement in the end, and Kuroo helps him pull his comforter off of his bed and around to the living room. Kenma stretches it out on the couch, tells Kuroo where extra blankets are in the closet, and together they make a little makeshift bed area on the ground next to the couch. Kenma throws down a few extra pillows and steps back, glancing up at Kuroo, who was appraising the area closely.

“I can sleep on the ground, if you want,” Kenma offers, not feeling sleepy at all anymore with the edge of nervousness in his voice.

“Nah, you get the couch—you’re already giving up a lot, I appreciate it.”

When they’re both under their respective covers an hour later, lights off, Kenma stays awake for a while, staring at the patterns of shadows that are cast onto his ceiling from the streetlamps outside his apartment complex. He’s smiling.

This, too, quickly becomes a norm. Kuroo eventually brings over a large, tattered duffel bag, and drops it in a corner of the living room. His little encampment at the bottom of Kenma’s couch becomes a permanent installation. And they continue down the list.

.

It’s 3AM. The only reason Kenma is awake is because he had a sudden and an unstoppable urge to pee. He’s so focused on his mission that he doesn’t notice Kuroo in the kitchen until he’s staggering back to the living room.

The lights are off, and Kuroo is bent over the table. When Kenma comes a little closer he sees the moonlight cast on balled up sheets of paper, peeking white through his clenched fists. They’re everywhere—spilling like hail onto the floor.

“I don’t really want to talk right now,” Kuroo says.

Kenma, who has by now felt himself grow accustomed to Kuroo like seaweed to ocean waves, sits down across the table from him. He slowly reaches forward and eases one sheet of paper out from between Kuroo’s fingers. He places it down on the table in front of him and starts smoothing it out.

He does this for all of the balled up papers, slowly and methodically. He stacks them into a rickety, jaggedy tower.

“When we die, we don’t take our clothes with us, you know,” Kenma mumbles. “Or our scars. Or our money. We only take our people.” He presses a hand down on the stack a few times, watching it compress like an accordion. When it’s a little smaller, he pushes it back towards Kuroo. “That’s why I can only talk to them when you’re here.”

Kenma gets up and goes back to the couch. It takes him a lot longer to fall back asleep—he spends hours watching the shadows on the ceilings.

.

This is kind of how it works, because Kenma understands your skepticism:

When a client asks for someone, Kenma has to feel for that person through his client. It’s kind of like pulling a loose thread from someone’s shirt. All he has to do is find it and pull a little, and suddenly that person is everywhere in his mind—filling it up with their voice and their shadowy humanness. And then they just talk, and he just writes. And then once his client leaves, the person goes with them. The people always leave with them.

It’s really pretty simple. Again, he’s too bad of an actor to fake it. Your call if you don’t believe him.

.

In his dream, Kenma is desperately trying to stay afloat in what he subconsciously knows is an enormous beige tip mug. Something black and viscous is charging up at him from the bottom, and he knows he needs to escape it. He tries jumping out of the water for the rim of the cup, but it slips repeatedly out of his grip. Terror builds in his throat and he tries screaming out, flailing his arms to get out—

A sudden jolt, and Kenma clutches at the dark in sheer terror at the same time that he hears a very solid and sleepy, “Oof.”

It takes a few beats for him to shake off the adrenaline and figure out what happened, and when he does, he sits upright. His elbow and knees sink into something soft, and there’s another, more upset, “Oof.”

“Sorry, I had a nightmare—“ Kenma mutters, his voice cracking from sleep. Kuroo groans from under him, comforter rustling as he tries to wriggle Kenma’s elbows out from where they’re digging into his ribs. Kenma ends up rolling off as best as he can and fits himself between Kuroo and the coffee table. The cushioning from his own comforter, which he’d tugged off in his fall, makes it a pleasant little nook. He feels himself growing drowsy again as his heart rate begins to slow back down. 

“Did you...did you roll off the couch? Are you okay?”

“I landed on you.”

“Am I okay?” Kuroo asks, still half-asleep. 

Kenma is too tired for the mental gymnastics required to vocalize a polite reminder to Kuroo that he’s immortal. “Yeah,” he settles for in the end. 

“Okay. Good,” Kuroo says. Another rustle, and then his arm emerges from the tangle of blankets to pat at Kenma’s face. “Now sleep.”

They wake up at around the same time the next morning—Kenma from the sunlight on his face, and Kuroo from Kenma’s stretching and wriggling. They crack open their eyes and assess each other, slowly reorienting themselves. Kuroo is the first one to crack a smile. 

“Haha. You fell off the couch,” he says. Kenma narrows his eyes and flops heavily back on top of Kuroo, effectively making him shut up. 

.

Kenma doesn’t know when, but at some point Kuroo began to take to giving him hand massages as he talked. They felt very nice but made him feel extremely embarrassed—he’d known from the stories that Kuroo never really minded physical contact, but it still made him flush when Kuroo sat across him, laced their fingers together, and pressed his thumbs into Kenma’s palm.

.

“You’ve got to have a few guesses about what’s after death.”

It’s dark in the living room, and Kenma can’t see Kuroo from where he’s laying on the couch. He doesn’t roll over to try and find him, either. Instead, he pulls his comforter a little closer up to his nose. 

“I have a few.”

“I have some too. Wanna share?”

A car drives by, and the headlights cast strong shadows against the living room furniture. 

“You go first.”

“Okay. One: an afterlife exists. It’s great. We’re surrounded by all of the people that we love, and we can party away for eternity. This theory is great because it means everyone I care about is all together and fine, and I’m the sucker that can never be with them.”

Kenma yawns. “No afterlife, that’s just something we made up to reassure ourselves with tangible, human measures of happiness. We lose everything with our brains. Our personalities were only ever chemical patterns. Being dead feels like nothing to us, because we can’t feel anything anymore. Eternity passes in an infinitely tiny second.”

“Dark. That’s option two, and I’m a little better off in that one cause I haven’t disappeared into nothingness. But also I’m not really a real person outside my brain in the first place, so now we’re both suckers.”

“Mmhmm.”

“It looks bleak.”

Kenma picks at his fingers from under the covers. “Or,” he says, so quiet that he’s not even sure Kuroo can make out what he’s saying, “We don’t really disappear, because there’s a soul in each of us, even outside of our body. We don’t go to a heaven with everything we want, but we go back instead to...to the same place where we all came from once, in the eternity before we were born. Dying takes a while, but afterwards eternity passes in the fraction of a second. And we’re at peace.”

Kuroo doesn’t respond for a long while. Kenma suddenly feels himself wide awake, and is very glad for Kuroo’s presence beside him. It makes the seconds stretch on. He understands this is what it means when people say they want a moment to last forever. 

He hears some rustling to his side, before Kuroo rolls over and meets his eyes. Kenma gets it. He bundles himself up in his comforter and stands up. This time he nudges out the coffee table with his shins to make adequate room before laying down on the floor. They shift around for a bit to get comfortable, and when Kenma feels a brush against the back of his hand he instinctually opens his palms, lacing their fingers together. 

They watch each other in the dark. Kenma further solidifies his theory of how it is that Kuroo ended up living for long, lonely and stuck. 

“Why is this so hard for me?” Kuroo whispers, so quiet that his voice is a baritone rumble across Kenma’s bones. “Isn’t it supposed to get better the older you get? I feel like it’s getting worse.”

Kenma feels Kuroo’s thumb working against the back of his palm. It feels very natural to move in closer, tucking his nose close to Kuroo’s collarbones. 

“It’s okay to be scared,” he mumbles. 

He doesn’t consciously realize the moment he falls asleep, but he knows it’s after he hears Kuroo’s breath slow to a lull. 

.

The light is on in the kitchen again, and it wakes him up from his position on the couch. Kuroo’s little nook beside his couch is abandoned, and the blankets are strewn around on the floor. Kenma squints for a bit, looks around the living room, all the furniture throwing long cast shadows. He notices he light in the kitchen, and staggers up to take a look. 

He hears papers rustling. Kuroo is at the table, all of Kenma’s handwritten transcripts around him. He’s curled over them, hands interlocked and forearms on the table, his neck bent. There is an intimacy to his matted, sleep-flattened hair that reaches Kenma even through the haze, and he doesn’t have to see Kuroo’s face to know his expression. Kenma watches him shift papers around, his eyes tracing each paper from top to bottom before setting it to the side, each time moving minimally. 

After a while, Kuroo finally notices him and looks up. His smile is one that Kenmas never seen before—it’s sweet. He gets up and turns off the light.

“Come on. Back to sleep.”

When Kenma wakes up back on the couch, Kuroo snoring on the floor, he tries to remember if that whole episode was something that actually happened, or if it was just a dream. He sidesteps Kuroo’s body and tiptoes into the kitchen. The papers aren’t thrown around the table like he remembers. They’re stacked in a neat pile, with the list on the top. Kenma walks over to take a peek. Out of all of the scribbled lines on the page, there are only two or three left.

.

Kuroo rubs his back, wincing. “I think sleeping on the floor for so long has been doing bad things to my spine.”

Kenma doesn’t know what comes over him, but he says it instinctively.

“My bed is softer.”

.

“Can I talk to Bokuto again?”

Kenma nods. He gets up from breakfast to grab the pad and pencil, and calls out to find Bokuto. Kuroo looks preoccupied today, and is pushing his eggs around with his fork. 

It’s not like the first time they spoke with Bokuto. Everything in the air feels different. It puts things into perspective for Kenma—how far they’ve come as friends, how much trust is between them now. Kuroo clearly has something on his mind.

“I miss you a lot, man,” he finally says. 

I miss you too, dude.

“It’s not the same without you around.”

Aww, don’t say that. You’ll make me cry. Is this because you’re still shit at making friends?

“I didn’t used to be shit at making friends.”

Okay, yeah, sure, mister emo-sitting-alone-in-the-dark-corner-of-a-cafeteria-before-I-came-along-and-showed-him-what-real-friendship-feels-like.

Kenma already feels his hands starting to grow stiff from Bokuto’s endless dashes. Kuroo reaches out absentmindedly to grab his hand, rubbing at the middle of his palm as he speaks. 

“I have a friend now that’s really, really great. He’s been helping me with a lot of stuff, like with how I’m so fucking sad about losing people but I’m so scared of...” He trails off, unsure of how to word it. 

I get the sad and the scared of dying—yadda yadda, good for you for sorting out that stuff, didn’t know you felt that way—but um I’d like to address this new friend guy. He better not be replacing me, man. 

“He’s not replacing you. I think he’s something different.”

What. Not cool, Kenma writes, feeling how hot his face is against the air conditioning. His eyes bore holes into the page as he does everything possible to looking up towards Kuroo. How could you do this to me, man? Bros forever!

“Yeah, dude, but then you died.”

Okay. Fair enough. 

Kuroo doesn’t look like he has much else to say for a while, so Kenma starts drawing little circles on the corner of the page. They sit like that in silence for quite some time, to the point where Bokuto’s thread trails away from Kenma’s mind.

“He’s gone now,” Kenma says, when he notices.

Kuroo looks up. His expression is neutral, but there is something new there.

“Yeah.”

. 

And they don’t end—they continue.