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the moon is high.
Kenma likes to chalk it up to the party, if he feels like lying to himself.
His first thought: I fucking hate parties . His second thought: why the hell am I here, anyway? His third thought, a response: because he asked if I would be here .
It was in the back of English class, maybe a week prior. A tap on his shoulder paired with Kuroo Tetsurou’s stupid, positively shit-eating grin, and suddenly translations were the last thoughts in Kenma’s mind. Kuroo’s choppy hair was falling over the wiry rims of his glasses, pencil tapping on the edge because it was first period and he had trouble waking up early. But he was smiling, so Kenma was paying attention.
“Hey,” the word was drawn out, stretched like taffy, and folded over itself in the silence between Kuroo’s smile and his eyes – and Kenma’s answer.
“Hi,” short, staccato, cutting off after the proper amount of syllables, thank you very much. It sounded curt and unwelcoming falling from Kenma’s lips, and how can someone make the word “hi” sound unwelcoming ? Kenma guessed, when you toss autism and gender dysphoria into one person, the only really likely result is contradictory greetings.
Kuroo, however, wasn’t deterred by his stilting, early morning attempt at speech. “So, you’re going to the party on Friday, right?”
It was quite a feat Kenma managed to stifle his laughs. Though, perhaps Kenma was aided by Kuroo’s glare and Lev two seats over staring at them. “You’re. . .serious?”
“I mean I guess I just figured–” and Kuroo looked like a puppy afraid of being kicked and in the past Kenma would’ve laughed and maybe even smiled as his face fell. But he’d grown since then, so maybe it was purely selfish and Kenma wanted to prove his own moral development, or maybe it was equally selfish and Kenma wanted to see Kuroo smile instead of frown because goddamn he had a pretty smile– either way, Kenma cut Kuroo off (he smiled as Kenma did this, but that didn’t provide either reason with merit, shut up ).
“I’ll go.” and then it was silent because Kenma didn’t intend to elaborate and, honestly, Kenma doesn’t think Kuroo really expected him to. But Kuroo was smiling because usually it was a hard, even “no ” without any second thoughts because parties really aren’t Kenma’s scene. But Kuroo was smiling .
It was only as Kenma slipped out of the cafeteria with an apple in one hand and a lemonade in the other that he realized he was smiling, too.
But then Kenma was in a room that didn’t really feel much like a room – rooms shouldn’t move and jostle and yell this much, but he digressed – and he was very far from smiling.
Kenma didn’t do well with noise. I know this. He’d never mentioned it explicitly; maybe Kuroo had picked up on it, maybe not (probably so). I agreed to this . It was loud.
It was loud and the ceiling lights were hazy, yellows blossoming from their fixtures into jagged, gauzy arrowheads across the ceilings and walls and people’s faces and there were voices, voices, voices. And then a new thought, a repetition: why the hell did I agree to this ?
His hands were flipping furiously, rapidly, madly at the colored paper clips linked and taut between them, one blue and the other green. Kenma hated the colors at first because they made the clips feel like plastic instead of metal. But then Kuroo took one and kissed its edge in a big, dramatic, very him show of things, and asked if he’d kissed it better, with a fake pout to sell it all.
The texture still wasn’t great, but at least Kenma had a reason to keep them around that was not just ‘ Office Depot didn't have any others. ’ It didn’t help all that much, the paper clips and flipping and twisting, but it was something grounding. Put something over nothing and guess at which one wins.
There was noise, noise, noise and voices, voices, voices and, oh, fuck, alcohol, alcohol, alcohol. And Kenma still hadn’t seen Kuroo. Maybe he’d just leave, slip out through the writhing, jolting mass of people, people, people. He’d tell Kuroo. . .tell him that Kenma got sick, that he got tired, held up with an assignment, or, or, or – but, Kuroo’s voice had a certain note to it on normal days, and when he was drunk it only got higher and softer, and then it was behind Kenma somewhere, and he couldn’t leave just yet.
And then Kuroo’s hand was on Kenma’s arm, in a friendly, nothing-of-it way and Kenma’s eyes were probably wide and the paper clip stilled and — found him . Or, Kenma guessed — he found me . Wide-eyed and drunk and looking more than a little bit lost, but Kuroo found him. That was another something. Two somethings over nothing, then.
“Hey,” and it was the same ‘hey’ from English class except it was not , there was a tilt to it, an imbalance and Kuroo’s eyes were out of focus. The lights were still sharp, glaring, moving and Kenma felt sure there was a porch or a yard somewhere and if not there was at least a road, so Kenma shifted to grip Kuroo’s hand and dragged him outside.
Kuroo stayed relatively silent, thank god , until they stumbled outside onto a well-kept, neat driveway. He tripped and caught himself on Kenma’s arms, fingers cold against his skin and the night air.
“Hi,” still staccato, equally short and uninviting, but maybe more breathless because Kenma had just escaped the suffocation of a fucking party, or maybe because he’d been wearing his binder for a bit too long.
“I wanted you to meet–” Kuroo froze, glanced around, looked laughably, comically confused. “–my friend! He was just here. . .” he looked genuinely puzzled. Glanced to the ground, then back up, and: “Oh! where did you run off too?” He turned to face empty space, “ This is the friend I– where–” and, oh god, he wanted to introduce Kenma to. . .Kenma?
Kenma took that as both of their cues to get home.
in the street.
If Kenma feels like allowing himself slightly more honesty, he’ll trace it back to elementary school.
Kenma had pigtails and Kuroo liked to wear Under-Armour athletic shorts and win playground volleyball games that meant nothing in the long run but everything to addled seven-year-old brains.
Kuroo would play recess volleyball with the boys and Kenma would sit at the lone, rickety picnic table and long to be participating, not because he cared about volleyball but because he cared about Kuroo , and the principle of the thing.
But girls weren’t allowed. It was a rule set, not by Kuroo and, really, not by anyone in their class, but boys in the years before them, long since having left their elementary school. But no one had thought to change the rule. The boys didn’t really want the girls to play with them and muck everything up, and the girls were perfectly content to make flower crowns threaded through with loose strands of gossip.
And Kenma would sit at the picnic table, with his nose stuffed in a game, pointedly ignoring Kuroo.
Kenma ignored the rest of them, too, because the girls thought he was too boyish and the boys thought he was too girlish and he couldn’t seem to win so he stopped trying after a while. It was mutual avoidance, which was fine, for everyone except Kuroo.
He pulled on Kenma’s pigtails once because everyone else did it but gave up when Kenma just glared and went back to scribbling something on the corner of their daily math assignment. When everyone else began to leave him alone, however, Kuroo kept showing up . He would sit next to Kenma at lunch time, abandon the crowned volleyball game to come ask Kenma if what he was playing was actually any good, anyway, and offer to trade snacks at snack time whenever Kenma got pretzels because Kuroo found out, somehow , that he didn’t like them.
And so, by some kind of fucked up elementary schooler logic, Kenma saw it only fit to ignore Kuroo, glare at him, and convince himself to hate you as much as a seven-year-old could manage. And if, occasionally, Kuroo pulled a laugh out of him or seemed to genuinely listen as he rambled about the same game Kuroo had asked about the day before– well, that didn’t matter.
But most of the time Kenma would glare and Kuroo would play boys-only volleyball and Kenma would sit on his stupid picnic bench, waiting to see if Kuroo would come talk to him that day.
It was, in retrospect, a tricky game of cat-and-mouse that really didn’t even make much sense because who was the cat and who was the mouse? Maybe it was more like a tug-of-war: constant imbalance, insensibility, and elementary naivety come to a head with a proxy-feud that would eventually cave and collapse and make way for shaky friendship.
even if it makes me blue.
If Kenma allowed the honesty to grow, it only got worse (better) in middle school.
They became friends of some kind, Kenma supposed. Glares became amusement and dismissive tones turned into phone number exchanges and late night calls, crackling audio betraying sobs and coughs and hurting.
Kuroo let him borrow shorts and shirts and other miscellaneous clothes when everything came to a point through screaming and crying. They would joke about stupid, immature shit and then Kuroo would sober and tell Kenma that yeah, the new haircut did look good, fuck what anyone else said , and the strangest part was that Kenma started to believe him.
One day, over the holiday break of third year in junior high, Kuroo needed help painting his brother’s bedroom wall a bright, horrid shade of royal blue, and Kenma needed to get out of his house, so they stood together painting themselves and the walls. And maybe the blue wasn’t so horrible after all.
“Hey,” Kuroo had said, the way he always seemed to, in that balanced lilt he must have practiced at some point because it was the perfect combination of almost annoying but not quite. He tugged on the sleeve of his flannel that may have once been Kenma’s and was now crusting over with drying blue paint.
There was a glimmer in his eye that should have sent Kenma bolting out the door, but instead led to him nodding when Kuroo asked, “ Hey, you wanna spend the night ?”
Kenma texted his mother and she said yes, and he hoped to every star in the sky that his father would get home too late to object.
Kuroo lent him more shorts and another shirt to sleep in, and then two sleeping bags were unrolled. Kuroo’s whispers and his palm brushing Kenma’s and his presence made Kenma temporarily forget about his too-high-voice and lack of a good name and being called she she she every day at school and at home and everywhere else but with Kuroo.
Maybe – maybe – it was the first time this thing , this Kuroo-and-Kenma existence began to feel like home. Maybe.
They were both stuffed full of heavy-sitting denial, thoughts and wonders shoved to the backs of cupboards and closets. Kenma knew that his hair had once been far too long and that he vehemently hated skirts, but they both ignored how maybe neither of them really liked girls that much?
It was almost funny how little they communicated back then for a pair of supposed friends.
It should have been funny, but more often than not, Kenma found himself crying instead of laughing.
And then, at three-fucking-am , Kuroo woke him up with a grip on his shoulder, shaking shaking shaking, with a smile and shining eyes. His hair tangled and wild and matching his eyes, somehow: I have an idea .
And maybe Kenma was supposed to say no, to force his expression into passable neutrality and flip over inside the slippery plastic-fabric-hybrid of the sleeping bag with sharp dissent, but he didn’t. He nodded and stood up and followed Kuroo out the door.
They ended up by Kuroo’s pool, which should have been covered because it was the middle of December and Kenma was fucking cold ; why didn’t I grab a jacket before leaving? The pool wasn’t covered, though, and it wasn’t yet cold enough for it to freeze, just to develop an icy sheen on the surface.
“So. Idea?” Kenma’s hands were crossed relatively futilely over his chest and Kuroo’s shirt was far too big so the arms really went down to his elbows and the borrowed shorts were beginning to hang off his waist, but that didn’t matter, not really, because Kuroo was still smiling and gripping his arm and Kenma was still in a blurry, messy state of half-asleep and the night was frigid but the stars were bright.
“Idea,” Kuroo confirmed, before his grip on Kenma’s arm disappeared completely and then he were in the goddamn pool, oh god, but he were still smiling and his hair was plastered down onto his face and cutting over his eyes. Maybe that’s why Kenma followed him. Maybe he wanted to feel alive, to feel some kind of infinite, if the light shone a certain way. Maybe he didn’t want to see Kuroo stop smiling.
without all the exes, fights, and flaws.
All this to lead back to one goddamn party .
The drive home was almost silent, save for the creak and shudder of his car’s ancient air conditioning unit. Kenma felt as though he was choking on unsaid words, that they were clawing up his throat like venom to be spit into empty silence and then driven away from, tires screeching and windows rolled up.
The silence was amiable, however, so Kenma kept his mouth shut, lips pressed together, until he felt Kuroo’s hand on his arm. Kuroo was still smiling, but now it looked hesitant and quiet, bordering on sheepish.
Kenma pulled into Kuroo’s driveway, the shadow of his house looming over and casting the grass and shrubbery into relative darkness. “What’s up, Kuro?”
Kuroo was still drunk enough, of course, but his eyes looked more serious. Maybe. He pulled something from his pocket and pressed it into Kenma’s hand and – oh god – he made Kenma a paper ring. As in, a folded Post-it Note in a strangely familiar shade of god-awful royal blue. And he’d drawn a smiley face on the front.
“I meant to. . .I meant to give this to. . .to you when I, uh, asked. . .you to go to this, but I. . . forgot.” Kuroo’s words were slurred and coated in probably a few too many red solo cups worth of drinks and he kept forgetting and backtracking and starting again, but: he got the words out and they fell, in a mockery of insignificance, into the space between them, over the stick-shift in Kenma’s old car. They stuck like honey and they were sweet like it, too.
Kuroo was still smiling. Kenma was staring at the ring in his palm and his eyes flashed up to see that Kuroo had one on, too. On his left ring finger, in the same sickly shade of blue. Oh god .
Kenma looked up and their eyes met and he wondered: what does this mean? It was a ring, but made of paper. With a smiley face drawn on. That Kuroo made. For him. So they could match.
Kenma looked up and he wondered and he thought .
He thought about Kuroo, stumbling into class on bleary-eyed Monday mornings, asking for Kenma’s notes because he was five minutes late and stopped to get both of them coffee on the walk there, conveniently forgetting that Kenma hated coffee.
Kuroo took both coffees and offered a hug or a high five or a kiss instead– all jokes meaning nothing but his eyes lost their fogginess and began to gleam as he joked and Kenma said “ Whatever, just take it, idiot,” before they got yelled at by another first period teacher.
Kenma considered their respective family struggles and complications and how, maybe, Kuroo felt more like family than the people he went home to every day because what was a family if they didn’t even know his name?
He remembered all the drives they’d been on together – pointless and late-night, in a desperate search to find an area less polluted by light, or even just a drive to the nice store that’s too far to walk to – and he thought about the music and rolled-down windows and lyrics screamed and lost into the wind, but what made it all was that Kuroo was in the passenger seat, always.
Kenma wondered how two people, who craved precision and repetition amidst upturned lives boiling over with chaos, ended up as a reckless pair of friends who gave each other paper rings at midnight.
And he thought, for the first time (or maybe the second, or the third, or–), that he wished Kuroo was serious about those coffee-payment-apology-hugs. Kenma leaned across the gearshift and hoped that, maybe, secretly, Kuroo wished he would say yes one of those days, anyway.
with paper rings.
When Kenma wakes up, the clock on the wall reads 2:47 and Kuroo is next to him, breathing consistent and peaceful as he sleeps.
On their nightstand is a ring, silver body gleaming gently in inky pools of moonlight that make it appear to be molded and modeled out of satin and gossamer. Next to it is a worn scrap of blue paper, fraying at the edges and along fold lines after ten years of wear, curved into a circle with faded pencil markings along one side.
Tetsurou, you idiot, Kenma thinks, but he’s smiling. I would’ve married you with those goddamn paper rings.