Chapter Text
People like to say that things like love never die. Love lives on in your heart, in your body, in your muscle memory, even after the object of your affection has long since disappeared. Love continues its flame even after the soft embers of life have been snuffed out. This is a cliché that Daiki Kuroo despises.
The thing about love is that it does die. Love does die: it turns from a high so bright and warm that it would give you wings into a low so deep and dark and wet that it is just grief. It turns from something you crave, something you hunger for more of, into something that leaves you aching. It leaves you with a vast emptiness in your heart that you cannot give up.
Love doesn’t live on in your heart, it turns to a grief which you are incapable of pulling away from your body.
When his wife, Misaki, dies, Daiki doesn’t know what to do with himself.
He doesn’t know how to get out of bed in the morning because she isn’t there, humming her way around the kitchen as she makes them both black coffee. He doesn’t know how to go to work because she is not there to kiss him goodbye. He doesn’t know how to return home from work because home has always been a feeling more than a house, and the empty feeling has taken over one of comfort. He doesn’t know how to make dinner, because she is not there to taste test the food. He doesn’t know how to go to sleep because he knows that he will not wake up next to her.
Misaki dies, and there is nothing left of Daiki.
Except— there is his son.
There is Tetsurou, who is eight years old and should not know anything of death and grief. If there is anyone that Daiki loves as much as he grieves for his wife, it is his son.
So he gets out of bed. He makes two cups of coffee, though only one mug is ever picked up. He manages to leave the house because someone needs to walk Tetsurou to school and no one but him is around to do it anymore. He goes to work because his is now the only source of income and they have a funeral to pay for. He gets home from work and he makes dinner because Tetsurou needs to eat three meals a day with proper proportions.
Daiki makes himself function, because he has a son whom he loves, and a wife who would be all too disappointed in him if he let his grief turn into neglect. Or, he had a wife who would only let him grieve for so long. The past tense is deeply important.
There is a kind of strength, he finds, in managing to get out of bed in the morning. It used to be so easy, but now it’s something that he has to force himself to do with everything that he has in him. Making and eating breakfast used to be so simple, but now it’s less something he enjoys and more something he just does to keep living. Sometimes he wonders if it’s worth it, but then Tetsurou asks for a second helping of pancakes, and he decides that it must be worth it.
He will not make his son grieve for a second parent.
Tetsurou is, after all, trying so hard to be strong. Daiki can see that as easily as he can see his own weakness. He can see the grief that is building up in his son’s body like oceans filled to the brim, spilling over onto the sand. He can see the way Tetsurou looks at Daiki’s bedroom door in the morning, as if he’s still half expecting his mother to come through the door. He can hear, sometimes, Tetsurou crying in his bedroom, trying to be as silent as Daiki’s own cries.
They are both trying so hard to be strong. Neither of them know what else to do, how else to handle it. Misaki had loved them both so well— they must be strong for her sake.
Even without her, they will have to survive. Love turns to grief turns to pain turns to strength.
Still, though, Daiki feels weaker than he ever has before. Without his wife by his side, he doesn’t know how to get through the world. Most of all, though, he doesn’t know how to raise a child. Neither he nor Misaki had been prepared to have a child; Tetsurou was a surprise to them as much as he was to the rest of the world. A pleasant surprise, but a surprise all the same.
Misaki had always been better at the whole parenting thing. He had been struggling through it, but it wasn’t exactly easy. Daiki cares about Tetsurou with everything that he has in his body despite not knowing how to do so. He loves Tetsurou, so much, but he doesn’t know what the best way to do that is.
Misaki seemed to have that parenting instinct that people sometimes do; she had gotten her footing right away, seeming to naturally know what to do in every situation. She knew how to kiss a scraped knee better, she knew how to talk to teachers, she knew when and how to enforce a ten minute time out, she knew how to do everything that Daiki was now trying to figure out on his own.
But even with every instinct she had that Daiki was somehow missing, she had relied on him in some moments. They had relied on each other. The whole parenting thing was maybe impossible to do perfectly, but they were fumbling their way through it, and Tetsurou was turning out to be a good kid. They were learning how to do it together, as a team, as one.
Now that she’s gone, Daiki is lost. He loves his son, and he will get up in the morning to take care of him, and he will do everything that Tetsurou needs— but he doesn’t know how.
He misses his wife like he himself is the ghost. He misses the parts of himself that she had taken with her when she died. He misses the parts of the world that used to be colorful, the pieces of their house that had been home, the memories that used to be so kind to him.
He will make new memories. This is an unavoidable fact. His life will go on, his earth will continue to spin, his universe will continue onwards, even if Misaki’s world does not. He will keep going, even though she cannot. This is not something he has a choice in— he tells himself this again and again. Tetsurou will not be made an orphan, and he will not be the neglectful father he sees so many of his coworkers being. He will be better than that. Tetsurou deserves better than that.
Besides, Daiki has an extensive network of friends and family who are all doing their best to support him: a distant cousin who offered to come to Tokyo to take care of him for a while; coworkers who have given him enough food to last two weeks; friends who have babysat Tetsurou more times than Daiki cares to count; his mother, who welcomes him back to his childhood home when he finally, finally admits that he can’t do this alone.
Tetsurou deserves the world, Daiki thinks, and he cannot provide that in this lonely apartment, full of memories and of ghosts. They both need a fresh start.
He requests a transfer to a different branch of his company, and they move to the other side of Tokyo. There are a lot of things that Daiki will miss, if he’s being honest with himself, but there are more things that he wants to leave behind. All of the memories of his wife are haunting him more than they are comforting him, his entire life weighed down by grief more than anything else. He cannot keep getting up in the morning like this.
Tetsurou throws a fit when Daiki tells him that they’re moving. He slams the door to his bedroom closed and shoves a chair up against the handle, something he had seen in a movie once. Daiki leaves him alone to let the news sink in, but he can hear Tetsurou crying and he knows that it’s about more than just moving. It’s about all of the things that he’s lost and all of the things that he’s losing and all of the things that he’s going to lose. It’s about his mother and his father and his friends.
But moving away isn’t an argument to be had. Daiki made this decision without talking to Tetsurou first— and maybe that was a mistake, he doesn’t know anymore— and it was made final as soon as his mother had started setting up his childhood bedroom for Tetsurou to move into and the guest bedroom for him. There’s no turning back now.
He does most of the packing, letting Tetsurou yell at him every time that he sees Daiki doing it. It feels, sometimes, like Tetsurou thinks that if an object goes into a moving box, it’s never coming back out. Maybe uprooting his entire life wasn’t the greatest decision he’d ever made for his son, but this will be better in the long run, Daiki thinks. All of the things that he’s packing into boxes will come back up, and all of the grief that lives in the walls of this apartment will be left behind.
Moving into his childhood home with his parents brings a different kind of grief, a new one that he hadn’t really expected. It makes everything feel just that much more real. He doesn’t know if it ever sunk in that he really is moving away and leaving everything behind until he’s standing in front of the door of his childhood home.
He squeezes Tetsurou’s hand tightly, and smiles when his mother opens the door. It’s a sad, tired smile, but it is there all the same. Tetsurou hugs her, and she laughs as she holds him.
There, they start over.