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Kenma isn’t jealous by nature. That being said, he’s quite envious of the Sun.
It’s bright, obviously—but it gives hope, strength, and life to everything in its reach. Kenma adores it. It’s hard not to, some kind of impulse that lingers in every crevice in his head. There’s some kind of longing for the sun that he can’t ignore etched into his bones. Although to be fair, he’s never tried to ignore it, to begin with.
Kenma has wings protruding from between the slopes of his shoulder blades. They’re flimsy and useless and he despises them.
He wants to fly. He wants warmth spreading across his cheeks, he wants to smile and feel the stretch and the glow of jubilance.
He wants to soar beneath the sun, arms reaching out in front of him, and feel alive.
But he can’t.
Deep down, Kenma knows that it’s impossible. And maybe this is why envy gnaws away at his insides every single day, because of the freedom he’s sheltered from.
Kenma wants to fly.
Kenma wants to breathe in the harsh rays and let them mold against the walls of his lungs.
He wants to feel the Sun. He wants to burn.
It’ll never happen, though, because Kenma lives his life locked inside of a tower. His home stands high by some sea he’s long forgotten the name of and he can’t leave. There have been times where he’s tried to break down the door, but the lock is something otherworldly, something crafted by a divine hand.
The window isn’t an option.
It just isn’t.
Every night, Kenma waits for the Moon to rise. When the crescent thing overpowers the sky, he’s free to walk outside. His wings have no chance of melting then, they’ll stay in place. It’s a safe time, night, but Kenma hates it all the same.
He’s growing tired of staying safe. He’s growing tired of the Moon and its irritating silvery glow. All the books and the poems focus so much on the Moon. Kenma knows this because he’s read every single book in his room and they all gush and pour their hearts out for the darkness and its controller.
Nobody ever talks about the Sun, though.
Nobody.
Kenma despises the Moon. And again, this isn’t some jealousy thing. Well, alright, maybe it is. The poets and philosophers alike write on and on about how the Moon and Sun are lovers. How they’re destined for eternity, overseers of the world.
Maybe Kenma wishes he was the Moon.
No, of course not, he definitely doesn’t.
He’d rather die than be the Moon, forever parallel to the Sun, unable to watch it shine and illuminate the world below it.
“You’ll go blind if you keep staring at it, y’know.” A voice breaks him from his thoughts. It’s the golden hour, Kenma’s favorite time of day and he’s sitting by the window, elbow digging into the stone there, his chin resting in his cupped hand, eyes trained on the Sun.
“I can’t go blind, Kuroo,” he says.
“You in the mood to test that theory out, Icarus ?”
Kenma winces at the name. If there’s anything he hates more than the Moon and this tower, it’s that name and the history that haunts it.
Kuroo’s role in his life is to always remind him of that history. He’s been Kenma’s guardian for years now and is the first of Kenma’s guardians that isn’t a direct descendant of the mastermind inventor. He’d been curious in Kenma’s eon-length past—along with the forgiving youth and endless days of life. Kuroo had been nothing more than nosy and poked his way into a responsibility not originally meant for him.
His job is to keep Kenma chained up, a flightless bird. To control him and keep his urges of flight at bay.
Kenma thinks Kuroo is shit at his job.
“Don’t call me that,” Kenma snaps.
“Why?” He hears Kuroo settle into the plush chair at his desk. “It’s your given name, is it not?”
Kenma’s shoulders tense up. “It’s not my chosen one, that’s what matters most.”
Kuroo shrugs with a sigh.
“Doesn’t matter, actually. Icarus is still who you are, even if you try to forget it,” he says. “And you’d better listen to me before the books get another stupid story. We don’t want you going up and burning, now do we?”
Kenma rolls his eyes. He’d rather burn than be stuck in this tower with someone as cocky and annoying as Kuroo.
And maybe he’d died years and years ago just to be reborn from the depths of the sea. He’d walked out of the water and trudged all the way back to the tower to find emptiness. Only the husk of a man he once knew.
The inventor himself—his father.
Kenma had been told the story of his ignorance by the shell of his father, some divine interference, no doubt. He’d been told of the desperation he apparently felt to be free from a tyrant king. How at the first breath of freedom, he lost all control and went higher and higher into the sky against his father’s orders. He had been prideful, according to this story.
Kenma thought it all lies.
Pride had nothing to do with his flight.
It had been love.
At that moment, that first flight, that Kenma had actually felt the Sun in its entirety. Hot didn't even begin to describe it. He had been eaten from the inside out by embers with no leash, flames that found his skin to be gasoline. He’d loved every second of it.
Plus, there was someone up there, standing atop the Sun in the midst of fire. They had called out to him. Icarus . His original self.
They called and Kenma had gone to answer.
Back then, though, his wings were made of wax and not brittle bone. His wings had melted within the span of a minute and he’d plummeted into the sea.
Dead in darkness with no glimpse of the Sun.
The phantom of his father said that he’d prayed for Kenma to be reborn, to be given a second chance. This second chance became more a curse than anything. Protection, his father had called it. Kenma knew it was nothing but invisible chains around his wrist.
Since that day, since the cool ocean mist around his ankles and the flat of his feet, plush against the damp sand, vast golden wings spreading from his flesh—all haloed in the blinking rays of a falling sunset, Kenma has been cursed to a damnable eternity of loneliness.
Not so different from his first life, he spends his days in the tower, prohibited from leaving. He has no idea what year it is, how much time has passed since his rebirth and is sheltered from all society. His father had made sure that his guardians to come kept such knowledge from him.
And Kuroo is a shit guardian.
The others never teased Kenma or tempted him to try to escape. Kuroo thrives on seeing Kenma’s fingers twitch for the door whenever it’s open, loves pushing his buttons whenever he’s caught staring at the sun. There have been hundreds, thousands, maybe, of people who have watched over Kenma, and none of them have been as annoying as the sloppy haired moron sitting across from him.
“Why don’t you jump out the window for me, then? Since I can’t burn, maybe you can,” Kenma snaps, tearing his gaze away from the Sun to glare at his guardian, who just grins (more smirk, really) and shakes his head.
“No thanks. It took years of digging through ancient texts and praying to a handful of deities to even get this job,” Kuroo says, “I’m not going to fuck it up for your own pride and stupidity.”
Kenma doesn’t entirely understand why Kuroo would even want to do this, anyway. Living in the ghosted halls of the tower, bringing Kenma food, and sitting around on a laptop (Kenma thinks that’s what it’s called), doesn’t sound all that exciting.
“That’s your own fault.”
Kuroo shrugs and stretches back in the chair with an annoyingly loud yawn. “You’re one to talk about faults, Kenma.”
Oh, so now he knows how to use Kenma’s chosen name.
Around his fifth guardian, or so, Kenma had grown tired of the negativity surrounding his birth name. He wanted it gone. So, he’d picked a random book off one of the many shelves in his room and picked the first word his eye landed on.
Kenma.
Split into two parts—strong and genuine.
The sun had shone through the window, arced across the page, when he’d first said it aloud. The decision was approved.
“Kenma is my name now,” he’d told his guardian that night—some strict, but an oddly kind guy named Sawamura. “Make sure all the future guardians know this well. Icarus is buried.”
Icarus is dead.
Sawamura had only nodded before leaving him for the day.
When his next guardian, Akaashi, arrived, Kenma had been greeted with a calm, “Good day, Kenma.”
Things have stayed the same since.
Until Kuroo and his knack for unearthing old books and stories, his love for defying someone of myth and misfortune, someone who’s practically a god at this point.
“So, you’re Icarus, huh?” had been the first thing Kuroo ever said in Kenma’s presence.
Kenma ignored him for what felt like two years. He would never know the difference in time, anyway. But it felt like a long while.
He didn’t like the taste of silence, though, and Kuroo kept showing up to fulfill his position, so Kenma eventually cracked and constructed something of a bond with his guardian. That didn’t stop him from hating Kuroo, though.
“I can talk about anything I want to,” Kenma says, shifting his focus back to the sky. The Sun will set in a couple of hours and he wants to give it all the attention he can before it sets.
“Sure ya can, boss.”
“Why are you here right now, anyway?” Kenma asks. “Shouldn’t you be out doing whatever humans do these days?”
“Eh,” Kuroo says, “I prefer lounging around here, watching you stare out the window like some damsel in distress.”
That sounds more like an obsession than what Kenma has with the Sun.
It’s weird, Kenma thinks, how infatuated Kuroo appears to be with him. Everybody else has treated this as a job, but Kuroo treats it like a game, or maybe more like a friendship. Kenma isn’t all that sure, but he’s not fond of it.
He just wants to be left alone, honestly, but Kenma’s positive that Kuroo even spends the night at the tower sometimes. There isn’t a rule written against it, but Kenma just doesn’t like it. It’s bad enough that he has to deal with the Moon at night, let alone his guardian.
“Well,” Kenma says, cold, “I’d like it if you left.”
“You might be, like, a million-year-old guy, but that doesn’t mean I have to listen to you.”
“Without me, you wouldn’t have a job.”
The Sun starts to fall below the line of the sea and Kenma heaves a sigh. Another timeless night. Days always go by faster than Kenma likes, but nights–night never seems to know when to end.
“This is hardly a job, Kenma,” Kuroo says, pushing himself out of the chair. He walks over to Kenma’s bed and pulls the sheets back, knowing that Kenma does nothing but sleep once the Sun’s down.
He doesn’t need someone to fix his bed like he’s a prince, and Kenma’s told Kuroo this a few hundred thousand times, but he keeps doing it anyway. It’s become a ritual—Kuroo pulling back the blankets and Kenma crawling into them. For all the reasons he hates Kuroo, all of his snide remarks and knowing smiles, Kenma should hate it, but he doesn’t. It’s a bit domestic, even, and comforting in an odd and unknown way.
“G’night, boss,” Kuroo says once Kenma’s in bed. He finds his place back in the chair at Kenma’s desk and crosses his feet beneath him.
“Goodnight,” Kenma replies. He doesn’t say anything about Kuroo curling up in the chair or staying the night. It’s fine, he supposes.
Well, it’s fine until Kenma ends up not getting a wink of sleep.
He knows that it’s because Kuroo is still there, dozing in the chair in a disgustingly uncomfortable fashion. Kenma stares at him from his bed, grazing his eyes over the slope of his nose and the straight line of his jaw.
If this were another life—if Kuroo were divine and not some mortal—Kenma might think him to be beautiful. But Kuroo is like all the others who’ve come into his room and he’ll leave sooner than later.
There’s a difference between Kuroo and the rest of his guardians, though, and it’s not the fact that they aren’t related by blood. Kenma’s well aware of what he does to his family. His father may have cursed Kenma to eternity in the room, but at the same time, his father had cursed his own family to eternity with Kenma.
And Kenma never made it easy.
He pushed Sawamura out of the window one chilled morning. The sun hadn’t risen yet, but Sawamura was already there, shoving food in his face and instructing him to read, to do something other than lie around. Kenma didn’t want to do anything and Sawamura kept pushing and pushing until Kenma couldn’t handle it anymore. The blood had pooled around his broken body in the snow. Kenma ate his breakfast and went back to bed.
The others all fell the same way Sawamura did—Akaashi, Iwaizumi, even the one brutish guardian, Ushijima, couldn’t defend himself from Kenma’s undiluted rage.
It’s not like any of them stood a chance, anyway. They were all mortals, regular people who would never be able to fight off the boy with golden wings, the boy who felt the Sun pounding in the marrow of his bones.
Each and every one of his guardians, he hated them. They held him back from grasping the only thing he’s ever wanted and there was no reason for them to live. If Kenma couldn’t get the one thing he’s wanted, then did they deserve to live? If their only position was to hold Kenma back, then there’s no reason why he shouldn’t get rid of them to go after his dreams.
“Kuroo,” Kenma calls out.
His guardian flinches awake in his seat. Kuroo blinks a couple of times before honing in on Kenma. “Hm?”
“Do you ever wonder what happened to the others?” he asks, wrapping his arms around his knees.
“The others?” Kuroo asks, voice gravelly with sleep. “I don’t really care about them.”
“I killed them,” Kenma states, fact-like. “Every single one of them.”
An obsidian lull spreads between them and Kenma can feel Kuroo’s eyes burning into his head.
“You what ?” he asks, voice full of disbelief.
“Killed them,” Kenma answers with a shrug. “They all bothered me, so I got rid of them.”
He’s used to it by now, facing the morbidity of his actions. Long nights in isolation made it more than easy to come to terms with the fact that he’s killed thousands of people.
“What the fuck .” Kuroo exhales.
Kenma hears the shakiness in his voice, the questioning of whether he’s next, and truthfully, Kenma doesn’t even know if he has plans to get rid of Kuroo at this moment. Sure, he’s been the most annoying of his guardians, but they had all been traced through his family line. Kuroo isn’t anyone to him, there’s no curse crawling through his veins. He had wanted this— wants this.
“It’s not their fault,” Kenma says, “I’m cursed. They’re cursed. That’s how it’s meant to be.”
“That makes absolutely no fucking sense.” Kuroo jumps up from the chair and Kenma’s eyes follow him across the room until he’s at the door.
“They didn’t do anything to you,” he adds.
In a grander view of things, maybe they didn’t do anything to him, but they still played a part in his entrapment, in his anguish and grief. All of his guardians tried to keep Kenma happy and they failed. They only managed to piss him off until he got fed up with them and pushed them from the window.
But Kenma didn’t care, still doesn’t care. He hadn’t asked to be brought back to life and his guardians hadn’t asked for death, it’s just how life has played out for them.
“You’re brainless,” Kuroo snaps, “and selfish. Nobody wanted to take care of you, they were all forced to.”
Kenma rolls his eyes, forced. Nobody had to take care of him. They could’ve ignored their responsibilities, they could’ve left. Nobody had locked them from even touching the goddamn door handle, they had free will to come and go as they pleased. Kenma wasn’t blessed with that in his rebirth.
“And what does that make you?” Kenma yells, pushing himself out of bed. Kuroo backs himself into the door, the wood creaking under his weight, and Kenma makes no moves towards him. The stretch between them is good, Kuroo doesn’t have to fear falling out of a window and Kenma doesn’t have to give in to his history and push him out of one.
Because in all honesty, Kenma doesn’t want Kuroo’s life to end. Not right now, not in that way.
“Hell if I know!” Kuroo throws his hands up. “I thought this would just be a fun way to waste time, taking care of some immortal dude. I hadn’t expected him to be an obsessed murderer.”
“Don’t call me that,” Kenma seethes.
He’s never yelled like this in his life. He’s not even sure he’s ever yelled before, actually, but the screams are ripping from this throat because he’s exhausted.
Everyone has only ever seen him in one light—consumed, hubristic, greedy. They’ve never once considered what Kenma yearns for, nobody has ever cared . The myth set Kenma’s position in stone. The chains, although invisible, have been tight around his wrists, have bound his wings together, and he’s done with it. He’s done with it all.
“What? Obsessed or a murderer?”
“Either,” Kenma says. “You can’t even start to understand what I’ve been put through, Kuroo.”
“You were given a second chance and you’re letting it go to waste,” Kuroo says. He stomps across the floor and grabs Kenma by the shoulders, his hands rough and unforgiving. Kenma doesn’t flinch in the slightest. “Not everyone is that lucky.”
Lucky is a funny word to categorize Kenma’s life. Lucky connotes good things, happy endings, beauty, and deep breaths of fresh air. All Kenma knows is locked doors and dust and old age. He’s never known luck in his life.
“Not everyone has to stay hidden in the middle of who the fuck knows where. I’ve been here longer than you’ve been alive, longer than anyone , and I am sick of it,” he counters, his voice nearing something like a growl. “I am sick of this curse and this room and you .”
Kuroo has nothing to say to that and Kenma knows he should feel the tiniest bit of remorse for being so harsh, but he doesn’t. If anything, he feels better having let that all out, all the words that have been locked up in his mind for countless days.
“I’m leaving,” he says, then. He shoves Kuroo’s hands off of him and takes a few steps back. “I’m leaving and there isn’t a single thing that’ll keep me here.”
Kenma perches himself on the windowsill, hands gripping both sides of the wall, and looks out at the horizon. The Sun will rise within the next few minutes. He can feel. He always feels it. It’s something like a second heartbeat, intertwined with his, but still separate.
A few more minutes and then he’ll be free.
“Don’t do this,” Kuroo says from behind, his voice falling quiet. “Come on, listen, we can… we can just forget this, okay? I know that this sucks for you, I can see that now, but don’t—don’t do this to yourself again.”
Kenma hardly hears him, he keeps his eyes trained on the open sea. Hints of orange and yellow start to spread across the faint blue sky and Kenma smiles wide. Only a few more moments.
“It was fun, Kuroo,” he whispers, “for some of you, I think, but not for me.”
Kenma digs his fingernails into the stone and bounces on the tips of his toes on the window. The Sun arches across the sky and it beats down on Kenma’s skin. It’s time.
He feels Kuroo’s hands press against his back before he realizes that he’s been pushed out of the window.
And maybe it’s an accident on Kuroo’s part, or maybe it’s an intentional action. It doesn’t matter anyway, because Kenma’s finally falling.
He’s falling and it’s all too much like the first time—the drastic drop in his stomach, the rapid thumping of his heart. But this time, Kuroo’s there, leaning out of the tower window, arms reaching out for him as if Kenma’s close enough to grab and lift back into the tower.
And even with the distance between them, Kenma can see a single tear roll down his cheek, can see the waves of guilt rushing across Kuroo’s face.
“I’ve read so much about you,” Kuroo had told Kenma one night. “It literally took me years to hunt you down, let alone to find texts that taught me how to get to you.”
He had been sitting at the edge of Kenma’s bed, stars filled the dark in his eyes.
“Why?” Kenma had asked, but Kuroo only shrugged.
“Dunno. I just thought you were interesting.”
Interesting. The word was strange to Kenma. His story was tragedy wound up in a burning culmination of gas—the final breath of a star that had spent too many years in the galaxy. He wasn’t interesting. He wasn’t anything.
“You’re strange,” Kenma said.
Kuroo had only shrugged and gotten up from the bed.
"Goodnight, Icarus," he whispered before placing a delicate kiss on Kenma's forehead.
Kenma had stayed up all night, skin tingling from the pressure of Kuroo's kiss, but never said anything of it. He kept it locked beneath his tongue, a secret that even the myth lovers won't want to hear—how Icarus had felt something for someone that wasn't the Sun, that doesn't fit in their books, and it doesn't fit in Kenma's life.
Now, he'll never have the chance to talk about it, and maybe that's for the best. To leave it all like this—moving out of impulse with no thought, no second guesses.
Kenma closes his eyes and he smiles.
The wind’s rushing against his skin and he’s out of that archaic hell. The cage has been broken and the flightless bird has found his wings once again.
With a loud woosh , Kenma’s wings come to life around him. His eyes shoot open and he flails for a bit, arms moving awkwardly to try and act as wings, but then he realizes. These wings aren’t wax and feather. These wings are part of him. They are him.
And then he’s flying.
Kenma stands on the Sun. He’s there, he’s really there, and it paints his entire body, but that doesn’t matter, because he’s still alive . And there’s a boy, all orange curls and glittering, golden skin.
He’s beautiful , Kenma thinks, no , more than that . Ethereal . All of the air in his lungs is ripped away at the sight of him.
“I’ve been waiting for you, Kenma!” he calls out, waving his arms and bouncing with excitement.
And Kenma isn’t sure as to why, but he runs towards him. He runs across the sun, feet lit on fire, and once close enough, wraps his arms around the stranger, the Sun.
“Shouyou,” he says.
The name comes from nowhere and everywhere.
It’s nothing and everything.
Shouyou.
The Sun.
Arms wind around Kenma’s waist and he can feel Shouyou’s laugh trembling against him, chest to chest.
“I’ve waited so long, Icarus, so long.”
For once, the name isn’t sickening. It doesn’t leave this moldy taste in the back of his throat. It’s sunlight. It’s freedom. It’s forgetting the tower and Kuroo’s lone tear when he leaped from the window and everything he’s ever known.
It’s all Kenma’s ever wanted, and he’s waited too many years for this, too.
All this time, Shouyou was in the sky, waiting for Kenma, for Icarus, and he had been trapped and alone, looking up at him from the gloom encompassed space of his bedroom. But no more, no more, they’re together now. They’re together.
Kenma buries his face in Shouyou’s neck and lets the tears of eons pour from his eyes. The tears sizzle on Shouyou’s golden skin and immediately dissolve. Kenma squeezes him tighter, pictures them melting into one singular form, and the tears keep coming.
“I love you,” Kenma says—firm and final, it’s out in the air. He’s waited two entire lives to say those three words.
“I know.” Shouyou runs his fingers through Kenma’s hair, twirls a strand around his index finger, and presses an incinerating kiss to his temple. “I’ve always known, Icarus.”
The end comes shortly after.
Flames swirl around the two of them, but only scorch Kenma’s skin, and this time there’s no sea, no chilling embrace of a new life, of forgiveness—only fire.
And Kenma had wanted this.
He still wants it.
“I’m sorry,” Shouyou whispers, the press of his fingertips searing Kenma’s back.
But Kenma doesn’t want any apologies, he doesn’t need to hear them. This is everything he’s ever yearned for. This is happiness.
Kenma shakes in Shouyou’s arms, sobbing against his skin.
He cries, and he loves, and he burns.
He cries, and he loves, and he melts.