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It is just under three hours from Japan to China, six hours from China to Singapore, and seven and a half hours from Singapore to Australia. Australia is ten hours from Japan by plane; Sendai is four hours from Tokyo by bus.
When you're used to distance, a few thousand extra miles doesn't seem any different; it's still the same voice in your ear, wherever you go.
China is busy streets and busy people, kanji he can't understand, food which is weird but tastes great, and historical sites so old they pre-date the existence of the English language. It's politics and history and stories around every corner, beneath all the glittering new buildings.
China is like Japan, in the jumble of the old and the new, the dislocation between time and space. It's disorientating, but that just means more walking until things make more sense.
He doesn't see many Japanese tourists here; not unsurprising, given the history between the two countries. The history of Japanese and Chinese relations is dark and horrific, and it makes him think about rivalries and bloodshed.
But there's Daichi's voice in his ear, reminding him not all rivalries have to end that way.
As he gets on the plane at the massive modern airport, he thinks of a little noodle stall with the smiling owner and the cheerful child that wouldn't have been out of place in Japan if not for the foreign sounds of another language.
Then he's in Singapore with its humid weather, and Kuroo can't help thinking about Daichi's descriptions of summer days in Miyagi: days of sweat and icy-poles, of volleyball training and nights spent under the stars. It was humid in Tokyo too, the kind of humid which weighs down the limbs, makes playing volleyball more a game of endurance than one of skill.
Singapore is quiet efficiency, a commercial and glitzy metropolis. It's almost like Japan, almost like home, but nowhere near.
There's a voice in his ear that doesn't quite say come home but Kuroo hears it all the same. Maybe that's the voice in his head. He's not quite ready to return home yet, not nearly. There are miles left in his legs, a restless tapping in his fingers.
He's still going to sleep with dreams of lands far off even as he misses home.
The flight to Australia is the longest of the ones he takes; three hours into the eight hours in the sky and with the world spread below him, Kuroo thinks the world is so wide yet we still managed to meet. There is only four hours between Sendai and Miyagi and still the only reason they met was a stroke of fate, based on volleyball and old rivalries.
High in the sky, above the clouds, Kuroo falls asleep thinking about Daichi and thinking about home, and wakes up in Australia.
When the plane lands, there's countries and borders, sea and land, which lay between the two of them. There's distances unimaginable to the human brain and there's time differences manufactured by the human brain, a two hour time difference which means little compared to the ten hours it would take to return home.
Kuroo misses Daichi, he really does. In the small, cramped coffee shops he thinks of Daichi's smiles. He thinks of Daichi when he sees all the sushi shops around, thinks of Daichi and Karasuno and Nekoma and bottomless stomachs. There's Daichi in the weird little tourist shops, full of stuffed toys and t-shirts with weird slogans, the voice in his head constantly amazed by the cosmopolitan.
Sydney is the rush of people and languages, the wide blue sea spread before the city; Melbourne is wide, blisteringly blue skies that turn to rain in seconds. Australia is so very different from Japan; even the countryside is different. There's nothing here which could be Miyagi, but everywhere he goes, Kuroo is reminded of Daichi.
These are days of walking, along concrete pavement and cold museum floors, cobbled alleyway streets and dirt tracks in forests. These are nights of calls, Daichi's voice in his ear, the wonders of technology bringing them together after a day apart.
There's a voice through a computer speaker, a face through a computer screen, and that's all he needs to remember that there's still someone out there waiting for him, an unimaginably long distance away.
I saw a wallaby today, it reminded me of Yaku, he says, and Daichi laughs.
There are so many crows here and it reminds me of Karasuno and you.
I finally saw a platypus they're so weird - almost as weird as the freak quick.
Australia is everything he had never imagined it to be; it was just another island, filled with people, of which none were Daichi.
Kuroo is three hours, six hours, ten hours from Japan but the voice in his ear is the same every time, and he can sit comfortable, wherever he is, listening to the sound of Daichi's voice.
Kuroo is travelling, and one day he'll travel to where Daichi is and listen to his voice in person. And when that moment finally comes, he'll think, I'm home.