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The walls close in around him and Kenma can’t breathe and he can’t think and he can’t move. People—his teammates, he recognizes, vaguely—are slapping him on the back, jostling him around, jolting his body so hard that he stumbles blindly forward. If he hadn’t been stiflingly hot earlier, when he was actually playing, he was now, with so many people pressing in from so many sides. The air is stale and he knows he’s just inhaling air that’s already been breathed by his teammates, and the thought makes his very lungs feel contaminated and dirty. It makes Kenma feel dirty and contaminated.
“Go,” He chokes out, voice lost in the cacophony of victorious shouts and wordless, triumphant cries. A sickly feeling the color of blackest pitch (fear, fear, fear) floods his chest, wrapping him in petrifying tendrils that he can’t seem to break, no matter how hard he digs his fingers into his arms. “Go,”
Eyes wide and startled like a deer in the headlights, Kenma whips his head around, the colors and shapes of the gym blurring together and swirling so fast. Too fast, too fast, too fast. The black rises like bile in his throat, threatening to force its way out and splatter on the floor, making a big stinking mess all over the shiny gym floors. It’s choking him, drowning him, dancing dots through his vision.
And then, he can breathe. He can breathe but there’s something so very wrong, very very wrong on his arm, on his wrist. It’s making his skin crawl all the way up to his shoulder, but he can’t make himself do much more than be pulled blindly away, towards the wrong feeling. Away from the huddle, away from the noise, away from that awful, awful blackness that had sunken its roots deep in the floor where Kenma had stood seconds ago. It tugs at him like ropes, weighing him down until he hears the familiar click of a bathroom door through the pounding in his head.
The air in public restrooms is cold and clean, which doesn’t make much sense, but Kenma doesn’t protest, he just gulps down gallons of oxygen. It cleans out the filthy, dirty feeling in his chest and blows some of the clutter from his head, making room for sounds to come in.
“...enma! Kenma, please stop crying, it’s okay,” the voice says, piercing the clouds in his mind. It’s familiar and warm and comforting.
“Kuro,” Kenma says, though he doesn’t mean it to come out of his mouth. There must not be enough room in his brain right now for the words to stay put. His vision is blurry, and Kuroo’s face swims through the tears welling up. A heavy presence settles on both of Kenma’s shoulders, sending sharp pangs of wrong spiking from the contact. A sound leaves Kenma’s mouth and he doesn’t know what it is, but he must have done something right because the presence leaves.
“I won’t touch you, I’m sorry, just please stop crying,” Kuroo repeats, his words edged with desperate razors and barbed wire. Kenma flinches away from them, hands rising to clamp down on the back of his head. His elbows jut forward like a horn to ward off the words threatening to slice him open, his wrists held tight over his ears to block out any sounds looking to cut into them. He backs up, shaking his head, trying to shake the cloudiness away.
Kenma’s back hits the line of sinks and the cold of the plastic bins seeps through his sweat-sticky uniform. He stumbles down, wedging himself as far underneath the sinks as he can go, among the darkness and the piping and the chilled tile walls. His head keeps shaking, shaking, shaking, because maybe if he does it enough he’ll shake out all the things that shouldn’t be there, like the blackness that creeps back in even when he’s safe from the eyes of the gym.
Eyes stinging something fierce, he squeezes them shut, then open again. In the small glimpse he gets, he can see Kuroo’s long, gangly, pale legs, the black kneepads standing out in stark contrast. The kneepads remind him of the stifling presence that takes his brain over and over and over, and he snaps his eyes shut again.
When he opens his eyes, Kuroo’s legs are gone. Kenma lets out his bated breath, peering at the sterile white walls just past the jut of his elbows.
“Are you okay?” a warm, soft voice says, just to the left of Kenma.
Kenma jumps, and his head cracks on an exposed pipe, and a blister of pain flares through his skull. Kuroo lets out a sharp “shit!” and reaches out to reassure Kenma, but he stops just a few inches away. Tears well up in Kenma’s honey-colored eyes, but this time it’s from the fiery pain radiating from his crown. Kuroo nearly cracks his own head as he tries to reconfigure his frame under the sinks. He has to fold himself nearly in half to keep under the sinks with Kenma, due to being almost double the size of him.
“Kenma,” Kuroo tries again, all the razors and sharp edges gone from his voice. “Kenma, look what I brought—here, just turn a little this way, please,”
Slowly, slowly, slowly, Kenma turns. He never meets Kuroo’s eyes, because he doesn’t know if he can deal with trying to place the look in his eyes as well as the catastrophe in his head. Kuroo’s hands are steady, and held gently in them is Kenma’s beloved PSP. It’s shiny and cold and smooth, and Kenma lowers his defensive elbow spike. His hands shake as he reaches for the console, taking it gently, reverently. The blackness leeches away, swirling sluggishly down the drain in his mind, and a pop of beautiful red (happy, happy, happy) and serene blue (calm, calm, calm) bleeds into him. He doesn’t even turn it on, just holds it in his hands, running his fingers over the round buttons and the slick screen.
Kuroo smiles a relieved smile when the console turns on, but Kenma doesn’t see it. He’s already thrown himself into the game, breath steadying and his shaking devolving into a gentle tremble. Kuroo wants to touch him so bad, he wants to hold him and help him, but he knows he can’t. He’ll just make it worse.
So he sits there instead, crouching uncomfortably, feeling himself calm as Kenma does, and watching with soft eyes as he absorbs himself in the game. He makes a mental note to ask Kenma once he’s calm what made this happen, and makes another note to make sure it never does again.