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“Tetsu, get your ass off Youtube and finish up with your results.”
“Ah,” your fiancé drawled, his tone amused as he glanced over at you from across the living room. A sly smile danced across his lips as he wagged a finger in the air, his head shaking shrewdly. “But that’s where you’re wrong.” He propped his arm up onto the ledge of the sofa, resting his chin in his palm. “I’ve already finished the results section.”
“Yeah, of chapter two.”
“That’s an improvement from chapter one, I think,” Kuroo countered, his arm returning to his side as he slumped into the cushions of the sofa, the lid of his laptop now shut as his arms wrapped around the warm device. “Can’t get to two without one.”
“Yes, two is definitely an improvement from one,” you answered back, offering the man a sarcastic smile from where you were seated. You turned around in your chair at the dining table, your arm slung over the backing of the seat. “But I distinctly remember that you finished the second chapter two weeks ago and was working on chapter three.”
“There is no chapter three.” Kuroo shut his eyes, his palms pressed against the metal of his laptop. “There exists only chapter one and chapter two.”
“Tetsu, you’re seriously trying to convince me, who’s also written a doctoral dissertation, that your school’s going to confer you a doctorate degree with a one-chapter thesis?”
“Technically, it’s three if you include the introduction and conclusion,” he pointed out. “Oh, you know what, you’re right. There is a chapter three: the conclusion! My bad.” His fingers drummed along the surface of his laptop before continuing, “But there’s no results section in the conclusion, so I still win.”
“One real chapter,” you conceded with a roll of your eyes. You heaved a sigh at the childishness of the man lying on the sofa across the room, crossing your legs as you leaned into the back of you chair. “You know you can’t graduate with that.”
“Bold of you to assume I’m graduating.”
“When the choice is either to graduate or to look back and realize you spent nearly six years of your life in literal hell for nothing, I think I’ll take my chances.”
Kuroo’s eyes widened as he shot up from the sofa, his grip on his laptop tightening as he turned over to stare at you in disbelief.
“Six?” he sputtered, panic settling into his gaze as he glanced over at the calendar pinned onto the wall by where you sat. “Holy shit, my guaranteed funding’s going to be up — I’m going to have no income!” He rolled over from his spot, the soles of his feet landing on the hardwood flooring of your apartment with a light thud, and stalked over to the seat on the other side of the dining table. Kuroo pulled the chair out, paying no heed to the screeching of the ends scraping against the floor, and slumped down into the seat, slamming his laptop down in front of him in the process.
You stretched your fingers across the width of the novel you had been reading on the table, pressing lightly on the gutter to hold your page in place as you reached over to the mug to your right. Your hand wrapped against the side — your fingers slotting themselves into the crevice of the ear as your thumb hooked against the rim. Amusement adorned your gaze as you raised your mug to your lips and took a sip, quietly watching the motivation seep back into the man’s body at the realization of the financial consequences.
“There was that research council that suggested joining a multi-level marketing scheme or picking fruit to help you make ends meet if you don’t have guaranteed funding,” you offered, with Kuroo shooting you a deliriously bewildered look from where he was sitting in return. “Imagine Kuroo Tetsurou, researcher by day and pyramid scheme fruit picker by night!” Your feet kicked up excitedly at the mental image, prompting an annoyed scowl from your fiancé.
Kuroo paused, his hands no longer typing away on the keyboard and instead positioned under his jaw, holding up his chin with his fingers interlocked. “You know,” he began, the expression on his face the same as the one he wore when he wracked his brain over practice exam questions back during your old study sessions in undergrad, “a pyramid scheme would net me more income than the peanuts I’m being paid right now.” He lightly slapped his palm against the dining table, the same reflexive motion that always accompanied his genius deductions to the tricks behind problems sent his way — and had even gotten in trouble for it once during a final exam — as his face lit up in excitement. “(f/n), I got it. Will you be willing to—”
“I will absolutely not become your downstream distributor,” you answered with a smile, cutting Kuroo off before he could pitch his offer. You took a sip of the hot tea in your mug as you watched your fiancé deflate back into his seat, his face lying against the palm rest of his laptop as he pressed at the right arrow key on the side of his keyboard.
“Annoying me isn’t going to convince me,” you laughed, leaning back against your chair as you picked up your book, a finger sliding under the pages to flip to the next sheet. The ping of the laptop stopped as Kuroo brought up both of his hands to his cheeks and delivered a loud slap to either side to wake himself back up.
“There’s no avoiding it I guess. The universe has willed me to finish this cursed dissertation,” he announced. Kuroo’s fingertips rested back onto his keyboard, a touch of a grimace lingering upon his face as he continued on the paragraph he had been writing up before he had stopped.
Truthfully, it wasn’t as if he didn’t have any direction in writing this chapter. He had met with his thesis supervisor just the other day to discuss the best way to narrate the chapter to synthesize the results in the bigger context of the dissertation. He had bullet points branching off bullet points to guide him through the figurative tree of the chapter, but somehow, it still wasn’t enough. It wasn’t enough to keep his eyes on the screen and to keep the words flowing from his mind down to his fingertips. It wasn’t as if he wasn’t disciplined — he had always been able to finish all of his drafts sooner rather than later. It came easily for the most part, with the mantra of “finish it now, and you’ll never have to worry about it later” drilled into his mind since young by his father. But no matter how loudly his old man’s voice played back in his mind, it couldn’t calm down the racing heartbeat pounding against his chest, and neither could it coax his fingers into putting words onto paper — into turning the conglomerate of thoughts in his heads into cohesive sentences. With his attention elsewhere, and his motivation badly misplaced, Kuroo really wanted to be doing anything rather than this in this very moment.
He lifted his hands off of his keyboard once again, resting hand atop hand on the table, and looked back over at you.
“(f/n)?”
“Hm?”
“What if I just become a house husband?”
You heaved a sigh, slipping your bookmark in-between the pages before closing your book shut.
“As nice as that would be, I think that’s a decision to be made for after you finish your schooling,” you laughed, reaching across the table to rest your hand over Kuroo’s. “Shouldn’t you be working?”
“It’s called a break, dear.”
“And this is how you’re choosing to use your break?” you asked, an eyebrow arched up in skepticism.
“I’m entertaining alternative career paths that are suitable to my skillset, that's all.”
“Dear,” you responded, reflecting the man’s affection back to him, “you’ve been ‘entertaining alternative career paths suitable to your skillset’ for six hours,” you pointedly said, framing his earlier words in air quotations. “And besides, housework’s always been split anyway. I quite like it, if I’m being honest. Feels like I’m pulling my weight in the house.”
Kuroo turned your hand over, sandwiching it between his palms as his fingers lightly traced patterns into the skin on the back of your hand. “I like it too,” he mumbled, his eyes focused on the invisible patterns he had been drawing, “I like it a lot. It’s a nice escape from reality.”
“You’re drawing an organic compound, aren’t you?”
A corner of Kuroo’s lips perked up as a smirk wrapped around his mouth, and he looked up into your eyes with a smile. “Butanoic acid, my love.”
“You drew the smell of stinky feet onto my hand.”
Kuroo sheepishly laughed in response, earning yet another eye roll from you, though not without a grin accompanying it this time. He raised your hand up, his lips finding your knuckles as he laid down a gentle kiss onto your skin.
“You know what they say,” he said, leaning back as his hands wrapped themselves around yours once more, “if you can get behind the smell of butanoic acid, then you know it’s true love.
“That is literally not a saying, and I would know that.” Your hand reached out to meet his, your grasp clamping down as a familiar competitive spark ignited in the depths of your eyes. “You might be a fake chemist, but I’m a real chemist.”
“Fake chemist in training,” he corrected you, letting go of your hands as he folded his arms across his chest and leaned forward on the table. “Won’t be a real fake chemist until I graduate…” His voice trailed off, and the look of agony marring his features returned onto his face. “Ah, shit. Did you say that on purpose?”
“Yes, of course. Everything I do is intentional. This is the learning outcome of a PhD, after all. Forethought and all.”
This time, it was Kuroo who arched an eyebrow up in skepticism.
“The universe was on my side and by chance we circled back to the topic. There, are you happy now? You’re such a child sometimes,” you huffed.
“Tetsurou: 2, (f/n): 0. Score,” he laughed, throwing a thumbs-up over in your direction as a smile crept back up his mouth.
“Well,” you scoffed, your hand flying to your chest in faux disbelief, “personally, I’d say Tetsurou: two more full chapters to write up.”
Kuroo groaned loudly in response, his head sunken into his chest as his hands flew up to his temples. “I just have absolutely no motivation to write this thing,” he whinged aloud after a moment, lifting his head up from his hands and reaching out to slam his laptop shut once again. He clambered out of his seat as loudly as he had sat down earlier and crawled back over to his original spot on the sofa, laying flat down on his back.
“Hey!” You got up from your seat and walked over to the other side of the room. “Get back to work,” you chided, pulling at the man's shoulders.
“My back hurts,” he complained, turning around to lay on his side. “I’m old. Be kind to your elders.”
“We’re literally the same age.”
“By year of birth perhaps, but biochemically? By oxidative stress? By my spine? I am definitely a senior member of the geriatric population. A clinical chemist of your caliber should know that our reference ranges are vastly different. Incomparable, to be precise.”
“Are you really not going to work on your results?”
Kuroo turned back over, opening one eye to peek over at you. “I really do not want to,” he said, rolling back onto his side and pressing his face against the material of the sofa cushions. “Really, really do not want to.”
“Aren’t you supposed to be reviewing your finished draft of the chapter with your supervisor tomorrow morning?”
He paused, and then raised a hand up to rest the back of his palm against his forehead.
“I can crunch it out in three hours if I tried.”
“Have you tried?”
Kuroo paused.
“Touché.”
He quietly watched as you softly padded your way over to the kitchen and opened the fridge, peering inside for a brief moment before walking back over to where he lay the sofa, stopping by the dining table to pick up his laptop along the way.
“Here,” you offered, nudging the side of his arm with the can in your hand as you set down his laptop in front of him. Kuroo glanced up at your hand and looked back down, shaking his head lightly as he sat up.
“Take it,” you insisted, thrusting the drink closer to his face until the surface lightly grazed his cheek. He shuddered from the sudden contact with the chilled can, his shoulders rolling reflexively from the cold. Kuroo let out a sigh before grabbing at the energy drink from where he sat, his eyes never leaving the screen of his laptop, as incoherent grumbles of gratitude spilled out under his breath while he unlocked his screen.
“Hey, you’ve even got an outline,” you pointed out, taking a seat next to the man and leaning forward to get a better look at the screen. “You even have stats! See, not that hard.”
Kuroo glanced over at you, flabbergasted, as if you were inane or delirious to even fathom such a thought. “What kind of monster is out here writing their results section before doing their stats?”
You shrugged, relaxing back against the edge of the sofa as you grabbed Kuroo’s energy drink and took a sip. “Plenty of people from my department, actually. Couple in the lab next door.”
“Insane… You lot are completely insane, I tell you,” he gagged, his body cringing up at the thought. Writing the results before you did the statistics? What were you even supposed to write if you didn’t know what was going on? Preposterous!
His cursor hovered above the bullet point of the first paragraph and he clicked into the line. A significant result to start off the bat. Not that hard, just as you said. The blinking line of the indicator stared back at him — mockingly, almost — waiting in vain for his instructions to come for all Kuroo could do was tap lightly across the keyboard, never finding it in him to commit to the first word and press down on the keys to type it out.
It’s really not that hard, he repeated in his head. I already did the hard part with the numbers and the stats. He bit down on his lower lip as his hands curled up into tight fists, his shoulders tensed and frustration glazed over his eyes. Just write a shitty sentence, you can do this. You’ve written plenty of shitty sentences before. This is no different.
Kuroo Tetsurou had always been lauded as somewhat of a genius. Unconventional, perhaps, but a genius no less. It wasn’t that he had an eidetic memory, and neither did he possess some astronomically bizarre IQ — Kuroo Tetsurou had none of that. No, he was simply someone who always seemed to figure things out in the end. Patience, diligence, perseverance, foresight: they were all traits that had bolstered him to his current position, but the real talent that fueled his brilliance was none other than his willingness for the unorthodox: his tendencies to think outside the box and tackle problems from a different point of view. Kuroo Tetsurou was a problem solver by design and this situation was no different. He would find the solution to his predicament.
He squinted at his computer screen, dragging his fingers across the trackpad before giving his keyboard a few rapid taps. Kuroo leaned back against the sofa as his hands rested behind his head, a small smile growing on his face as he watched the stiff sans serif letters on the screen widen, its edges rounding as the space between the text grew apart.
Comic sans. The fool’s font.
His shoulders instantly relaxed, relief suddenly pouring into his body from above. His hands settled back onto the keyboard, and for the first time in the last 24 hours, he typed out his first sentence, the words flowing from his head to his fingers instantaneously.
Wait.
Kuroo’s hands suddenly stiffened up as his smile faltered.
If that helped, then…
The dissipation of his apprehension following the disappearance of the formality of the document that was accompanied by the existential dread that seemed to chain him in place… The automated stream of pen to paper — of thoughts to words — slowed to a standstill as realization struck him, figuratively, in the face.
Oh you have got to be shitting me.
Kuroo Tetsurou had been spiraling, and perhaps was still spiraling right this second. And to make matters worse, Kuroo Tetsurou, the renown genius problem solver that he was, could not, for the life of him, figure out a way to stop it.
“What use is it to be aware and not have a solution,” he groaned into his palms, bringing his knees up to his chest.
“That sweet, sweet grad school experience,” you simply answered back with a shrug from your spot on the couch. You raised your mug up at him, and took another sip of your tea. “Knowing so much only to realize you know absolutely nothing. The mark of a true doctorate.”
“Grad school’s the true pyramid scheme if you ask me,” he mumbled under his breath, his index mindlessly drawing circles onto the trackpad as his cursor dragged across the screen. He paused, his breath hitching in his throat, as his back straightened up and his hand reached out to slam his laptop lid shut.
“You know what? I’m going to drop out and become a firefighter.”
“Tetsu,” you began, leaning over to stare down your fiancé in the face, “Pardon my language, but where the flying fuck did that come from?”
“Think about it,” he rationalized, “I could help so many people. I could be out on the field and on the scene! Saving people…and their cats.”
“You’re allergic to cat hair.”
“I can take anti-histamines. Sell my IgE antibodies, donate my mast cells. It’ll be fine, trust me. I can save people and their cats.”
“Tetsu, if your heart so inclined to become a firefighter, you can be a firefighter with a PhD. You’ve just got your thesis left.”
“But think about it,” he shot back, this time more defensively. “I could be helping people right this second! With my own two hands! I could save lives — it’s all I’ve ever really wanted to do.” He paused, his eyes diverted down to his hands as he twiddled his thumbs. “Help people in my own little way, you know?” he added on in a hushed murmur a moment later.
You let out a sigh as you set your mug and novel down onto the coffee table, a worried smile settling down onto your lips. “Tetsu, what is this really about?”
“Dropping out to pursue my true passion in life. Fighting fires. Saving people…” His eyes stared blankly at the wall as he trailed off. “And their cats,” he added on, turning back to look at you.
With your posture unchanged and your expression unfazed, you continued staring at the man awaiting an honest answer. A loud groan from the man followed suit, and he pushed at your arm to distance himself as he inched further away.
“I really don’t think I can do this. A doctorate? Me? Now that I’m in the final stretch, it’s becoming abundantly obvious that I can’t do this.”
“Tetsu, I’m sure that you’d make a wonderful firefighter if you set your mind to it. B—”
“I’d make a great firefighter and I’d have biceps of steel,” Kuroo interrupted, flexing his arm as he shot you a wink, the worry and anxiety marring his face suddenly replaced by his usual coyness.
“Gross.”
“You love it,” he smirked, leaning back towards you with his face inches away from yours.
“Moving on.” All you could muster was a simple eye roll as your fiancé drummed his fingers across his lips in faux amusement. “I’m sure you’d be great at whatever you put your mind to, but you’re so insanely talented at what you’re doing right now also. And it’s not like you to leave things unfinished when you’re nearly almost done.”
“Tell that to my CV,” Kuroo mumbled, leaning back away and burrowing his face in his arms. “I’ve been here for nearly six years and I’ve only got what, three measly publications under my name? Joshua from the lab next door’s easily got seven and he’s only in his second year.”
“Wasn’t he the fifth author or something on a good chunk of those? You’ve been the first author on all of yours.”
“Doesn’t change the fact that he’s got more,” Kuroo pointed out, throwing his head back to stare at the ceiling. “Numbers are all people look at these days anyway. Whether I’m the first author or seventh author. Whether it’s Nature or some other third-rate journal… Whether my co-authors actually enjoyed working with me, and whether or not I truly contributed to the work. None of it matters except for the sheer quantity.”
“Tetsu,” you breathed, placing a hand onto his cheeks and allowing your fingers to crawl up the side of his face to nestle in his hair. “You’re so much more than that, and you know it.”
“I just want to know that what I’m doing is making a difference. That I’m good at what I do, and that people think of me as someone who’s competent and skilled. God, why the fuck did I even choose this career path. It stinks. I should just become a firefighter. Better benefits, I get paid to workou—”
Your hands grasped at Kuroo’s, cradling them in the warmth of your hold.
“But would you be happy?”
“Yeah, I’d be the epitome of health instead of…” he paused, turning over to look at the canned drink sitting at the edge of the coffee table, “…sitting here drinking my sixth can of Red Bull today with nothing to show for it. God, I’m going to die at this rate.”
He lifted his hands out of yours and moved the can from the edge over to the center of the table before punching in his password on his laptop once again to wake and unlock his screen as if the pattern had been drilled into muscle memory. A moment later, a confused expression settled across his face as he moved his cursor absently across the screen as before, and he soon found himself turned back around to face you after returning his laptop to its closed state once more.
“I just want to help people, (f/n),” he confessed, the vulnerability in his tone matching with the slight reddening of his eyes. “You know that. And I can reap the rewards of my efforts instantaneously as a firefighter. It’ll be nice. Biceps of steel, washboard abs, free health and dental.”
He let out a sigh before continuing,
“Making a difference.”
You simply rested your hand onto his shoulder, your fingers delivering a reassuring squeeze as you did so. “We both know those aren't the real reasons you’re so fixated on this firefighter nonsense.”
“There’s just so much…” he said, his voice hoarse and worn down. For someone who had always seemed so steady on his feet, moments of vulnerability were rare and Kuroo resented the loss of control that seemed to accompany it. “There’s just so much uncertainty. And I don’t like it. I don’t like it when it feels like I’m squandering about blindly. I don’t like never having the answer to anything. I don’t like it when people ask me questions and I can’t give them a proper explanation. It feels like the more I read, the less I understand — that the more time I spend in academia, the stupider and more useless I feel. I…” he faltered, his head shaking as he fought back against tears. “I’m not cut out for this. I’m not smart enough, not talented enough. Nothing. I’m absolutely nothing. Just another washed out has-been in the field.” He looked back up at you with a trail of tears now making their way down his cheeks.
“I couldn’t even graduate at the same time as you,” he added on, his eyes crestfallen and his expression one imbued with sorrow.
He gritted down hard on his teeth. Jealousy and envy were ugly emotions, and while he was — and will never stop — being proud of you for what you had accomplished during your training, it was a sore spot nonetheless. It was the fact that he was the rate limiting step — that the two of you were engaged rather than married, renting rather than owning — that kept his eyes wide open at night, his sight dead-set on the ceiling above.
“Tetsu, you know that’s different. We’re in different fields — our timelines are different. It’s like comparing apples to oranges.”
“But it’s still a comparison that I make in my head every single time. I—”
“If you say another word about how you’re not smart enough or not talented enough, I will shove this stupid rock up your ass, you understand?” you said, pointing at the diamond secured on your engagement ring.
“That was quite nearly my entire stipend for the year please recons—”
“No,” you answered, cutting in as you pressed a finger against his lips. “I need something concrete for you to really listen. We both know that intelligence and talent — and even skill for the matter — is all just relative. Even the smartest person can still get mycoplasma contamination in their cell culture.”
“Oh god, don’t remind me.” Kuroo shuddered at the sight from two weeks ago when he looked under the microscope. Mycoplasma contamination: the most dreaded words for anyone who’s had to grow cell cultures in the laboratory. Nasty little microorganisms who seemed to have it out for scientists across the globe; no matter how hard you tried to keep your environment sterile, one wrong look at the laboratory equipment and you would have the absolute displeasure of discovering contamination in your petri dish rendering all your findings irreproducible and obsolete. The past month’s worth of hard work gone just like that. Kuroo knew in his heart that he would never be able to emotionally recover from the sight of the bright blue fluorescence he saw under that microscope just two fateful weeks ago.
“I’m reminding you,” you laughed, your hands traveling down Kuroo’s face to rest on the side of his arms. “Research is failure. It’s from those failures that we start to piece together enough scraps to get a working theory out. You know why I think you're a good researcher? It’s because you don’t give up. You chase after something with everything you’ve got. You will willingly choose to graduate two years later to get more data in. You never choose the easy way out, and you’re there day in and day out, picking yourself right back up whenever you fall. That is why you’re a good researcher, Tetsu. That is why I have faith in you. That is what made me fall in love with you.”
Kuroo reached an arm up to the side, dragging you towards him into his embrace. He rested his cheek against your head, his hands now rubbing small circles into the skin of your hands. “Be honest, (f/n). Did my supervisor put you up to this?”
You chuckled with a small shake of your head. “No, he did not put me up to this, but he has asked in passing if you’re doing alright. The guy cares about you a lot, you know?”
“He’s in for a real ride when his long roster of impressive lab alumni pursuits ends with me being a PhD firefighter.”
“I’m sure he’d find it pretty cool,” you laughed, turning your hand around to interlock your fingers with his as you leaned closer into his embrace. “Though he seems eager for you to become a professor as well.”
“No one just ends up with a professorship straight out of school. If only it was that easy.” He untangled his hands from yours and ran his fingers through his hair, his eyes laden with deep contemplation. “Guess I’ll have to get that degree to keep those post-doc offers valid, huh?”
“I take it that you’ve decided against dropping out in that case?”
He chuckled, his laughter rumbling in his chest as he slowly nodded in agreement. “It was that cheesy speech of yours that convinced me.”
“My speech was not cheesy, it was motivational. Inspirational, even. I could host a Ted Talk if I wanted to.” You cupped his face in your hands, your gaze softening at the sight of the light smile that had found its way back to its owner. “But I’m glad it helped. Not that it was much. There’s only so much I can do, after all.”
“That mycoplasma bit really knocked some sense into me,” he joked, leaning down to rest his cheek on your shoulder with his nose grazing at the skin of your neck. His hands found their way to sit atop your hips before trailing up to press you closer to him by the small of your back. He paused briefly, before lifting his head up to stare you in the eyes, his lips just grazing yours.
“Your speech was really cheesy, you know that, right?” he whispered, his voice soft and humorous as he nuzzled your nose with his.
“Shut up.”
“Like, the kind of cheese you don’t ever recall buying, but somehow ends up in your fridge anyway.” His hands traveled further up, his fingers coyly picking at your shirt collar’s stitching.
“Kuroo Tetsurou, shut up before I shut it for you.”
“Are you going to shove cheese down my throat?” His question was soon answered by a light shove that pushed his body into the edge of the sofa accompanied by the shaking of your fist in the air. “I’m kidding! Please, that ring was expensive, don’t shove it up my rectum!”
“Who said I was going to— Oh, yes. I did threaten you with that earlier.”
“Bullied everywhere I go,” he heaved, shaking his head as he pulled you back into his embrace. “Even in my own home. Almost always in my own home. By the love of my life of all people.”
“You literally asked for it.”
“No, I literally asked if you were going to shove cheese down my throat. Technically, I figuratively asked for it if you wanted to really get into the semantics of it all.”
“Would you like to be literally punched in the face, or figuratively punched in the face?” You smiled, your hands resting on either side of his neck as you pulled his face closer towards yours.
“You wouldn’t punch me in the face.”
“Oh yeah? What ma—”
“If you punched me in the face, then I can’t kiss you anymore, now can I?”
Your lips pursed into a straight light as you lowered your hands back down to his waist, leaning into his chest. “Touché,” you conceded, making a mental note to get back at the man’s win later with an unsuspecting witty remark. Perhaps tomorrow at breakf—
Your thoughts were cut short as Kuroo slipped a hand under your jaw, his thumb resting against your cheekbone while the rest of his fingers brushed up your ear. The warmth of his touch paired with the familiar feeling of the callouses that decorated his palms like medals from his time playing volleyball struck you by surprise as he tilted your head to the side and leaned in closer until you could feel his breath on your skin. Your eyes fluttered shut as the subtle scent of citrus lingering in his breath from the can of Red Bull grew stronger in intensity until you could feel the taste dancing across your tongue. Kuroo’s hands traversed across your back as he pulled you in closer, timing each stroke with the soft movements of his lips. Your arms found themselves wrapped around his neck, your fingers knitted in his hair, as you chased after the citrus aftertaste that coated Kuroo’s kiss.
It had been how many years now? Nearly a decade since you first met the man in your first year chemistry class, and six since the two of you had started dating. Two years spent engaged, and though you would never admit it to the man himself, eight years since you had first felt your heartbeat quicken at the mere thought of his touch. It was bizarre how even after so long that something as simple as a mere kiss would still be able to make you feel this way — as if everything would be okay, that everything would work out the way that it was supposed to. It was nothing grand like fireworks erupting from the shoreline, and nowhere near as romantic as being presented with a thousand red roses in a bouquet as big as your face. No, it was simpler — more mundane, even. It was the feeling of home — the feeling of warmth and comfort. It wasn’t that your worries would melt away at as little as his touch, but it was rather an amalgamation of your shared troubles and frustrations brought out into the open for the two of you to solve together. The feeling of another person unconditionally by your side: that was the feeling that Kuroo brought to you, and you had hoped that you had brought upon that feeling back to Kuroo as well.
“Thank you, (f/n),” he whispered, finally breaking away from the kiss as he wrapped his arms around your waist.
“For what?”
“For knocking some sense back into me. I needed it.”
“Oh, anytime,” you laughed, leaning in to peck him on the side of his jaw. “I’m always here for you. Through thick and thin, and through heaven and hell. Science needs you more than you think, Tetsu. You’re great at what you do.”
The reality was that it would always be easier to console than be consoled; that it would always be reminders and never true resolutions. Self-doubt and insecurities would not magically disappear with a simple goodbye: it was equal parts work as it was blind belief. Hypocrisy would always be laden within empathetic words of comfort and reassurance, but that was simply the reality of it all.
Because change came from within and it came down to himself to pick himself back up. But the reinforcement that he didn’t have to do it alone — that there would be people around him that would encourage him as he raced along — reassured him nonetheless.
And while he knew that there was only so much you could do and so much he could do, it was enough to him that you stayed around with your thumb mindlessly rubbing circles into his palm — that you would be there to smack some sense back into him when the lies being fed into his head by his own mind became too heavy to hear. It was enough to him that someone existed by his side to experience the fleeting moments of both success and failures with him.
It wasn’t much, but it was enough for him.
“I have a question I urgently need an answer to.”
“Shoot,” you invited.
“You were attracted to the whole bicep of steel idea, right? Me, in that jumpsuit? You were into that, weren’t you?”
“Holy shit. Kuroo Tetsurou, I swear to whatever is out there that I will punch you in the face.”