Chapter Text
TO BE THE MOST beautiful girl in the world was a concept far past your concern. Those around you certainly saw the potential, but at 16 years old, you simply could not care less to capitalize on your natural beauty. (Beauty routines were exhausting in your eyes. You only washed your face so as not to feel filthy, taking a razor to your leg hair was far more trouble than it seemed worth, and you were quite sick of brushing your hair, so you did so as little as possible.) All you really wanted to do was ride your horse and pester the farm boy that worked for your parents.
Prince, as you had taken to calling the horse when he was just a yearling, was a loyal companion. Other girls your age grew attached to one of their herding dogs’ pups, or the kitten of a barn cat, but you had Prince. He always came when you called, steered where you told him even on a loose rein, nuzzled your face on bad days.
For all the time you spent taunting and bossing the farm boy around—“Farm Boy, fetch me this,” and “Farm Boy, take care of that,”—he always had one thing in common with the horse: he always did as he was told.
(Perhaps you knew that he was really a young man now—he was a year or two older than you—but he had been just an orphaned boy when he first came to work for your father, so that was what you referred to him as: Farm Boy.)
“As you wish,” he always replied, without fail.
Your father was fond of the farm boy, often remarking how he should leave him an acre of land in his will for all his hard work. These conversations never lasted long though, not before your parents would turn to you and chide you for needing to go bathe again and clean yourself up after spending the day in the barn.
Despite your disdain for taking care of yourself like a “proper lady,” as your mother liked to say, your natural beauty was still enough to cause the village boys to flock to you. Those dimwits always liked to badger you with stupid questions whenever you rode into town, offering silly favors and making awkward small talk, much to dismay of the rest of the girls in the village. The boys were always so annoying, and you often noted how much more tolerable Farm Boy was as you dismissed their advances. Eventually they took to making fun of you, laughing over snide remarks about you because they must have been embarrassed about being shot down. Sometimes the insults were too much to ignore, and when that was the case, Farm Boy took matters into his own hands. You always thanked him after he sent a village boy home bloodied and crying, and he always answered, “As you wish.”
You came to realize that Farm Boy was the only boy your age whose presence you seemed to enjoy. One night, you lied awake with the dim light from a full moon crawling through your window, thinking about how he was always kind and respectful to you, how he protected you and your honor, how he seemed to smile at you differently than he ever smiled at the other girls in town. (You also let yourself admit that he was quite handsome, with his amber eyes and ebony hair that was always in a perfect bedhead state, which was something you had never bothered caring about before.)
After that, your time was no longer divided between riding your horse and pestering the farm boy; now, ‘pestering’ was to be replaced with ‘falling for’. You let him join you on rides through the woods on Prince; you began doing your morning reading in the barn to keep him company while he fed the animals; you took it upon yourself to take out any extra supper your mother cooked to him. You even decided to stop calling him ‘Farm Boy’.
“What’s your actual name, Farm Boy?” you asked out of the blue.
“Why do you ask?” he had replied, and you snorted in mild amusement.
“Well, after having known you all these years, it must be quite rude of me to still call you ‘Farm Boy’.”
He paused and grinned that endearing grin of his, “Just call me Kuroo, then.”
Everything was so blissful for the year following. You loved Kuroo, and he loved you. Even on the day the royal Count and Countess of Aobajousai had strangely paid your family a visit, you both were sure of this; because while the Countess took Kuroo’s arm gently for him to show her the dairy cows and the Count watched you intently as you followed the small procession on your horse, you and Kuroo both stared at each other.
At the end of one year though, Kuroo unexpectedly showed up at your window in the middle of the night.
“I’ve come to say goodbye.”
You shot up straight in your bed, cocking your head incredulously, “What do you mean, ‘goodbye’?”
“I mean I’m leaving.”
“Leaving? Have I done—”
“I’m taking to the sea to seek my fortune,” he cut you off. “There’s a ship that sails out of Karasuno, to the new country of Inarizaki. There’s great opportunity there, so I’m going.”
You were shell-shocked for a moment. Leaving? Sailing to Inarizaki? Where was this all coming from?
“But why? What about the farm? What about us?” You finally said. Your voice was already beginning to quiver pathetically as tears brimmed in your eyes.
“I’ve been training at night, so I hardly need sleep or food, and I’ll get two 10-hour-a-day jobs. I’m gonna save every penny, and in just a couple years I’ll have enough to buy a big farm and build a brand new house just for the two of us.”
“For the two of us?” Your brows furrowed and your voice was meek.
“Yes, (y/n). I love you. All these years I’ve stayed here because of you. I’ve taught myself foreign languages, made my body strong, everything, for you. I’ve been head over heels for you since I was a kid. Do you understand what I’m saying, or should I keep going?”
(By now, Kuroo had squeezed his broad frame through your window, somehow landing gracefully on the floor and sliding next to you on your bed so he could wipe away your tears with his thumb. It was a good thing he was athletic enough to do so quietly, because if your parents caught him in your room, all hell might break loose.)
“Never stop,” you mumbled dreamily.
“There hasn’t been a day—”
“You better not be teasing me, Kuroo, or I’ll have your hide,” you broke in this time. Kuroo loved to tease you, and it was normally all in good fun, but if that was the case now, then he was taking it way too far.
“I’d never joke about loving you,” he replied. “Remember all those years when you would tell me, ‘Farm Boy, do this, Farm Boy, do that’? What did I always say?”
“‘As you wish’.”
“Well, that’s just what you thought I was saying. I was actually saying ‘I love you’,” Kuroo smiled gently and ran his fingers through your hair.
All that time? You couldn’t even recall the first time Kuroo started saying ‘As you wish’ to all your commands, but apparently he had been in love with you. Before you had ever even noticed him, he was devoted to you. It sounded like a fairy tale.
“I love you too, Kuroo. I’ll never stop loving you, I swear,” you finally said.
“I’ll hold you to it, princess. I have to go now if I want to make it to Karasuno in time, but I’ll send for you soon. Promise.”
You nodded in understanding, but you couldn’t let him leave without one last kiss.
There had been five great kisses since the beginning of time. Though the precise rating of kisses is a bit convoluted and controversial (everyone knows that the formula for a great kiss is comprised of timing, affection, intensity, and duration, but there has never been a universal agreement on each element’s weight), there was no doubt that this kiss left every other in the dust.
The following morning, all you wanted to do was lay around and mope. It was perfectly justifiable, considering the love of your life had just left the country, and you wouldn’t see him for God knows how long. You wallowed in self pity for about an hour before realizing that Kuroo was out in the great big world now, and with as handsome as he was, he would surely have women throwing themselves at him.
What if all this moping destroys my beauty, and when he sends for me, I’ll arrive in Inarizaki, and he’ll take one look at me and send me back?
“Mother,” you ran downstairs, interrupting whatever petty argument your parents were having. “I need your advice. How can I better take care of my appearance?”
“You’ve never cared about your appearance, honey. Why are you asking this all of a sudden?”
“Well, I’m nearly 18 now. I figure it’s about time I start behaving a little more like a lady,” you lied. It was enough to appease your mother, and she grabbed your arm and began dragging you to the washroom in delight.
You quickly learned that taking such care of yourself was hard work; the saying, ‘beauty is pain,’ made an awful lot of sense now. But for Kuroo, nothing was too much. Every morning, you awoke at dawn to start the farm chores. You had to pick up all the slack left by Kuroo, so there wasn’t really any time for self-improvement until the afternoon, but once you started, you took it very seriously. Daily baths, simple exercises, and all the time it took to brush your hair out perfectly before bed.
If the whole town thought you were beautiful before, now they all knew you must be a contender for the most beautiful girl in the world. You, however, still had no care for how beautiful the rest of the world found you; as long as Kuroo found you beautiful. (In the coming years, you would learn that you were beautiful no matter what, and simplify your beauty routine to what you liked. As long as you felt clean and tidy, that was sufficient.)
Kuroo wrote you letters every few months, and you kept every one of them. Sometimes people would ask you how he was doing, which was a mistake unless they had a lot of spare time, because you could talk about him for hours. It was obvious that you were completely and utterly in love, and so the village boys eventually stopped trying, and the village girls warmed back up to you.
It made sense the way Kuroo’s death hit you the way it did.
The news reached your parents first. The Count (a new fellow named Iwaizumi, appointed by Prince Oikawa shortly after the last one’s death) was sent to your farm to deliver the news since it was Kuroo’s last known place of residence. You were returning from town on your horse when Count Iwaizumi was leaving your property.
“Miss,” he nodded politely as you crossed paths. You rode on in confusion, and the new Count watched you intently, much like the last one.
When you made it into the house, both your parents hushed up and looked at you with pity.
“What’s wrong?”
“It’s The Crow’s Wing, darling. It was attacked,” your mother told you.
Kuroo’s ship was attacked? You furrowed your brows, “What?”
“Pirates. In the night,” your father explained.
You knew the trip across the sea would be dangerous, but you never thought it would happen to him. Sliding into a chair, you decided it might be best to sit down.
The room was quiet until you managed to squeak out, “So Kuroo’s been taken prisoner, then?”
A long sigh from your parents, and then, a, “No.”
“It was the Dread Pirate Nekomata.”
You blinked, willing back tears. The Dread Pirate Nekomata was the most famous pirate in all the world, and he never took prisoners. In all these years in his reign of terror, no onesurvived an attack from the Dread Pirate Nekomata.
You went to your room, and this time around, you allowed yourself to mope. For six days, you sulked, and cried, and mourned. Not once did you come out of your room, so your parents took to leaving food outside your door, which you only ever picked at meekly. During those six days in your room, you decided you would never love again.