Chapter Text
It’s the hottest July that Tokyo has seen in years, and Daishou is basking in the light. It’s finally summer break, and the sun is burning down on the pavement hot enough to burn the bottoms of his feet if he tries to wander down the concrete driveway without shoes on. The sun crawls over the prefecture in a dry heatwave that spreads like a hot, oppressive mold.
Daishou doesn’t care about the weather, about the way that the sweat pools at the backs of his knees, about the way that his hair is sticking to his forehead, about the way that the fans do nothing but toss the heat in circles around his bedroom, or about the way that the sun is drying up all of the grass into dead strings that lie flat in the backyard. He doesn’t care that the world is burning to death, because he feels so alive that it doesn’t matter.
It’s too hot for his parents to be doing anything but peeling themselves out of bed and going to work, and then coming home and gulping down ice water until it gives them some semblance of relief from the heat. It leaves Daishou to spend his summer alone, but he doesn’t even notice.
What he does notice: Kuroo has moved back in with his mother rather than his father— where he spends the rest of the year— and so July 21st is once again bringing him back to Daishou’s neighborhood. What he does notice: Kuroo has shot up several inches and his toothless grin has turned to a shining smirk and his hair is permanently disheveled and fuck, it makes the rate of Daishou’s heart sprint, and he’s not sure why.
He’s hesitant, the first few days that Kuroo lives in the neighborhood again. It always goes like this. Kuroo comes back to spend the summer with his mother, and for a few days, he and Daishou dance around the idea of going to see each other, too nervous to actually make the walk to the next street over, but wanting to with a hope that does not rest easy. One of them always breaks, after a few days, and knocks on the others’ door. By the end of that first week, they’ve always found each other.
The summer they are fourteen, it is Daishou who breaks first. It’s Daishou who knocks on Kuroo’s door, his hands stuffed in the pockets of his jeans to stop the shaking. He hasn’t seen Kuroo all year. Usually, they would at least reunite at a practice match or two, but their schedules didn’t line up quite right that year.
When Kuroo throws the door open, though, he’s grinning. Too tall and bright eyed and with a wide smile, Kuroo holds his arms out even as the door is opening. Daishou doesn’t hesitate before he throws himself into the hug, and Kuroo squeezes him tight, and no, no, he never had any reason to worry. There should never have been any doubt that Kuroo wanted to see him. There should never have been any concern that Kuroo wouldn’t want to spend his summer with Daishou.
This is, after all, how they always do it. Kuroo had moved away when they were eight and his parents got divorced, but that didn’t change their friendship in any way that matters. They don’t see each other as often, but when Kuroo arrives at his mother’s house every summer, it’s like they had never spent any time apart. It’s like nothing had ever come between them.
Daishou is only fourteen years old, but he’s absolutely certain that nothing can come between them. If the physical distance, if the lack of time, if their differing idiosyncrasies were not enough to pull them apart, then nothing can ever do so. Nothing can ever break what they have.
Except— that summer, the string that they walk on is pulled taut, and then it frays, and then it fucking snaps.
But for now— the heatwave crawls through the streets, and neither Daishou nor Kuroo notice it at all.
After that first day where Daishou gathers up all his courage just to get to Kuroo’s door, they fall into each other as if no time has passed at all. They tell each other about their first semester of their last year of junior high, about their teachers and their classmates and their volleyball teams. They tell each other secrets that no one else has ever heard before, and they promise to keep them forever. Even just a few days into summer break, they already have a dozen secrets between the two of them.
One of them is the weeping willow tree in the park nearby, the one that stands by the pond and sways when the wind blows. Daishou’s mother says that it’s a dangerous tree, that it looks like it’s going to keel over any day now.
“They should tear it down,” she says, every time Daishou mentions that he and Kuroo had gone there.
At some point, Daishou just stops mentioning that they sit under the tree every day. She gets stupidly worried every time, her brow furrowing and her eyes squinted at him like she’s trying to see into his memory and judge how much danger he had been in just by going near the tree.
He stops telling her about the tree because he hates that look on her face, but he doesn’t stop dragging Kuroo there every time they want to escape from the sunburns gathering at the backs of their necks. They crawl under the branches and sit at the base of the trunk; Daishou leans back against the bark and closes his eyes, and Kuroo talks about whatever is on his mind that day.
This is one of Daishou’s most precious of secrets, one of Daishou’s most secret of loves. The tree; the tree, and Kuroo.
Sitting there in the shade of the weeping willow, hidden by a curtain of leaves, it’s like nothing can hurt them. No one can find them there— no one can see them. It’s not like they have anything to hide, but it’s nice to know that, should they want to, they have somewhere to escape to. It’s nice to know that, should the need for escape arise, they would have a meet up spot before they made their getaway together.
Because this is how it has always been, in the summers— they find each other again, and nothing will have changed, and if they need to escape from the world, they are going to do it together.
Kuroo is talking about nothing again, as they sit there. He has a tendency to ramble when he gets bored or gets nervous, but Daishou has never minded listening. He has his eyes closed, just sinking into the sound of Kuroo’s voice. He doesn’t really process much of what Kuroo is saying— something about his teacher, who is kind and smart and lets him fidget with a piece of clay she had given him one day— but he likes the sound of Kuroo talking.
He likes the way that his words drift through the air; the way that his voice turns up at the end of every other sentence, like it is a question and Daishou is the answer; the way that his words come out with a slight slur, still, despite the speech therapist he’s been seeing for a few years now. He just likes the sound of Kuroo speaking, because they are words that are meant only for Daishou. It makes him special, in a way.
Kuroo has always had a way of making him feel special. When summer rolls around, and Daishou abandons his other friends in favor of hanging out with Kuroo most days of the week, Daishou doesn’t spend a single minute ever feeling inadequate. He can’t say the same for the time he spends with anyone else.
Daishou doesn’t really know why, can’t put a word or a name to it, or pinpoint what it is that makes him want to be around Kuroo all the time. He doesn’t figure it out, not really, until Kuroo figures it out first. He has never been good with words or feelings and so maybe it makes sense that this is how it goes. With Kuroo asking and Daishou answering.
The question, the moment, the light— it comes on that day, with Daishou leaning against the tree trunk and his eyes closed, and Kuroo drawing a flower in the dirt with a stick, one arm wrapped around his knees.
Kuroo is talking about his teacher, about anxiety over talking in class, about the other students who make fun of him sometimes, and does Daishou feel this way, too, like sometimes everything is all too much or is not nearly enough at all? Does Daishou feel this way, too, like when they look at each other, it is magnetic and burning? Does Daishou feel this way, too, like when their hands brush, there is some instinct pushing him to twist their fingers together?
It’s the last question that gets Daishou’s attention. He had been listening, but there hadn’t been any need for him to do much talking in the past few minutes. It’s then that Daishou comes back into himself and turns to look at Kuroo.
Kuroo isn’t looking at him, just staring determinedly at the flower he’s drawn in the dirt. He’s not glaring at it, but there’s something fierce in his eyes, something that dares the flower to question him. He’s taking deep breaths, struggling to get enough air with his legs pressed so close to his chest. He doesn’t say anything else, just lets the spoken and unspoken questions hang in the heat between them: do you feel this way about me, too?
Daishou has never really thought about it before, about loving someone. He’s never really needed to think about it, because there had never been someone he loved. He doesn’t think that he knows what it means to love someone, or what it means to feel the way that his other friends have described having a crush. Crushes never made sense to him because every box that someone had on their list is just something he feels for Kuroo, and Kuroo is just a friend. The two cannot be the same.
But here is Kuroo, saying that they can be the same thing, if he wants it to be. Here is Kuroo, saying that he feels about Daishou the way that Daishou’s friends talk about the girls in their class. Here is Kuroo, saying that he is an option.
Daishou never considered it before, but now that Kuroo is asking, he knows the answer. The answer is vast and grand and absolutely fucking terrifying, but it is a truth. Daishou has always told the truth to Kuroo, and he sees no reason to start lying now.
“Yes,” he says quietly, “I feel the same, I think.”
He doesn’t think, though. He knows. He knows that he feels the things that Kuroo is asking him about. He is fourteen years old and he still believes in true love. If true love exists, then it is this wire that ties them together. If true love exists, then it is the invisible red string that wraps around their pinky fingers as soon as July runs around them and the heat sneaks on them like a sunrise.
Kuroo is staring at him, wide eyed, like he didn’t expect that answer. Maybe he hadn’t. Maybe he had been expecting to confess and hear nothing in return. Daishou doesn’t really know what to make of that; he doesn’t know how Kuroo could ever doubt that Daishou loves him. Daishou has given every summer to Kuroo, and this is not a time— a sun, a light, a heat, a smile— that he gives away lightly.
“Can I kiss you, then?” Kuroo whispers.
There’s no one around to hear them, but Daishou gets the awful sense that the whole of the world is watching them. There are eyes crawling up the back of his neck, even if there is no one behind him. But he has no fear of sharpened gazes, not at twelve years old and loving someone for the first time.
There is no hesitation when Daishou says, “Yes, yes, yes—”
He doesn’t have any words other than yes, please. He doesn’t know how to tell Kuroo that he may not know how long he’s wanted this, but he knows that he’s been waiting for it. He doesn’t know how to put into words that, yes, nervous and anxious as he is, he wants this.
Kuroo drops the stick he had been drawing with, and moves his hand to Daishou’s cheek. It’s a jerky movement and his fingers are trembling, and he almost misses Daishou’s cheek to land on his jaw. He recovers, though, and then Daishou is leaning in closer and closer and closer and and and—
Daishou is pretty sure that his mind whites out for a moment. He doesn’t know what happens or how he does it. He just knows that their lips are pressed together, a chaste and innocent and gentle kiss, a short touch more than anything else.
Then they’re both pulling away. Daishou wonders what the other boys in his class were talking about when they laughed at how gross kissing must be, because nothing about the way Kuroo is smiling right now could ever be gross. He wonders how anyone could ever think that the way that Kuroo is grinning is not something to be treasured.
He has only had one kiss, Daishou thinks, but he knows all of the boys were wrong when they said kissing gives you cooties. The only thing Daishou feels is the sun.
Though, they were talking about girls; so, really, this is entirely different anyways. Maybe that’s why he feels like this, all warm and embarrassed in a good way.
“Was that okay?” Kuroo asks, something worried in his voice.
Daishou grins back at him, bright and happy and unafraid. “Perfect, Tetsu.”
“Good,” Kuroo says, his cheeks flushing.
He looks back at the ground, where he’s scuffed over the flower that he had drawn. He picks the stick back up again, and they don’t talk about the kiss for the rest of the day.
But they go back to the willow tree again the next day, and they share the kind of kiss that can only be defined as sweet, and they don’t have any reason to question it. They just keep going to the tree, and they kiss hello and goodbye, just like Daishou’s parents do. They chase after butterflies and birds and worms and the sunset. They play volleyball and badminton and catch. The heat keeps coming strong.
That July is one of the best months of Daishou’s short, short life so far. He files each memory with Kuroo under the category of things to think about when he’s sad. He keeps them in little boxes in the back of his head to return to every now and then, when Kuroo goes back to his father’s house and they don’t see each other for the rest of the year. He’ll have to live off of those memories for the year, after all, so he has to treat each of them with care. He can’t forget a single detail.
He can’t forget the way that the shade of the willow tree brushes over them and casts shadows over Kuroo’s face, making him look much older than he is. He can’t forget the way that the sun beats down on them when they ride their bikes to that park, and the way that Kuroo’s arms are getting steadily redder as the summer goes onwards and as the heatwave refuses to dissipate. He can’t forget the way that Kuroo laughs with him, all straight teeth and a smirk and a joke always on his lips.
There is nothing about that July that Daishou wants to let go.