Chapter Text
Tsukishima Kei never thought he would catch himself becoming a hopeless romantic.
As a matter of fact, he never even saw himself as a regular romantic.
As a kid, he never saw the appeal of romance the way others around him did. He would watch as his classmates in second grade walked around the playground parading their “boyfriends” and “girlfriends”, but Kei couldn’t understand just what made dating so special to all of them.
He saw the awkward hand-holding and pecks on the cheek as well as anyone else, but he would be the only one with an uncomfortable grimace on his face while all his classmates gushed and made long, drawn-out “ooo!’s because there was yet another declaration of love from a girl who didn’t even know her ten-times table.
And when Kei met Yamaguchi he didn’t expect these harsh opinions to change.
Their first impressions of each other were admittedly…rocky. To Kei, Yamaguchi was just a quiet kid he vaguely recognized from school who couldn’t stand up for himself, and to Yamaguchi, Tsukishima was a Godsend—if a cocky one.
Maybe it was because Tsukishima liked having someone that could handle his cold exterior, maybe it was because Yamaguchi took Tsukishima’s half-assed bullying intervention as a friendship invitation, or maybe it was because they both, deep down, just wanted someone special in their lives, but from their bumpy first meetings onward, the two grew into a pair of fast friends.
Yamaguchi would imitate pushing up “Tsukki’s” glasses whenever he would devolve into a ramble of biology facts, and Kei would scoff and mumble a “shut up, Yamaguchi” as he took off his headphones to listen to him nerd out about whichever new fact he learned about psychology.
They poked, prodded, and teased each other relentlessly, and their seemingly dysfunctional friendship was absolutely perfect to them both.
Tsukishima Kei never considered himself a romantic, regular or not, until a winter evening when he was in middle school.
“Hey Tsukki, can I ask you a little bit of a…weird favor?” He and Yamaguchi were at his house to “study”, the barely-excuse they gave to their parents whenever they craved the other’s company a little extra and wanted to hang out for a while. They were both alone in Tsukishima’s living room, with a movie neither of them particularly cared for playing in the background as they gossiped about their classmates unashamedly.
“Okay, so, no? What are you about to have me agree to?” Kei asked with a familiar shrunk to his face, trying to decipher what could be weighing on Yamaguchi so heavy as to warrant such an abrupt change of pace.
Yamaguchi throws his hands up in surrender as he lets out a forced, awkward chuckle, “Right, right…uhm, okay, so just let me explain myself before you jump to any, uh, conclusions about this, alright?” He can barely make eye contact with Tsukishima, opting to stare at the blanket shared between them instead.
“Alright..? My lips are sealed, just tell me what you need.”
“...uh. Uhmmmmm…how do I even put this? Can you uh, Can you…can we try kissing?” If the movie behind them was even a bit louder Kei was certain he wouldn’t have even been able to hear Yamaguchi, but he did, and he had mixed responses, to say the least. Part of him reasoned that Yamaguchi absolutely did not seem in the headspace to deal with Kei’s usual snarky response, and so the boy should take pity on him and give him a genuine answer, but the other part of Kei was utterly confused, and he had no nice way of articulating his scrambled mind.
Or anything, for that matter, as he stared at Yamaguchi with a very confused, slightly off put expression.
“Hey! Hey, wait, let me explain, I know it sounds weird, but I’m not trying to confess secret feelings for you or anything!” Yamaguchi desperately flailed as he tried to fill in the blanks left by Tsukishima’s silence. “I’ve just been…curious for a while, I guess. A week ago I overheard Toma-kun talking about his older brother and his boyfriend and I guess I was like ‘Hey, I never really thought about a guy liking another guy!’ and I was like ‘Well am I a guy who likes other guys?’ but obviously I don’t have the dating experience to know that so…”
Yamaguchi let his voice drift off as he craned his head down and picked at the fuzzies off a nearby throw pillow, doing anything possible to avoid Tsukishima’s face.
“So you wanted to kiss me, a guy, and see if you, like, felt gay by the end?” Kei fought hard to keep the judgement in his voice down because he knew it would seem like he was judging Yamaguchi for something very different, but he still caught notice of how he gripped the pillow a little harder with nervousness as he slowly and uncertainly nodded.
“...I mean, your idea is stupid as hell but worth a shot right?” Kei tried to ease back into his snarky quips in an attempt to dissolve some of the suffocating tension between them, and the slight chuckle that left from Yamaguchi could not leave him more relieved.
“Okay yeah, the idea is kind of shitty, but I don’t wanna be sixteen still trying to figure out if I like guys!” There was a bright blush on Yamaguchi’s face that spanned all the way up to the tips of his ears, but he was smiling and finally looked up to make eye contact with Tsukishima, so it was a win to them both in the end.
The two of them giggled as Kei scooted a little closer with Yamaguchi following suit as the worried tension between them shifted into a bubbling nervousness for what they were actually about to do.
“So, do I just..?” Kei said that but made absolutely zero effort to follow through with his body, showing just how clueless they both unsurprisingly were.
“Yeah, uhm, you would probably have to tilt your head a little, right? It would be so awkward if our noses bumped…”
“Oh, yeah, so uhm,”
“Wait, tilt your head the other way, your glasses might end up in the way.”
“Yamaguchi, my glasses are gonna be in the way regardless.”
At that they both burst into a small fit of laughter, with their faces only a few inches away from each other at this point. So close up, Kei could admire all of Yamaguchi’s freckles, the dimples that show up when he smiles wide, the way his eyes crease when he shuts them in laughter, and even how his breath tickled Kei’s skin as he laughed.
And in that moment, kissing Yamaguchi didn’t just feel like a “weird favor,” even if those feelings were buried deep, deep down.
“Here, just,” then Tsukishima leaned in to plant a quick peck on Yamaguchi’s lips, catching him mid laugh with barely enough time to process what Tsukishima just did.
“Wha— wait, that doesn’t even count, I wasn’t ready!” Yamaguchi said without a hint of real anger peaking through his remaining giggles.
“So you’re saying you wanna kiss me again? Wow Yamaguchi, you’re practically telling on yourself at this point,” Tsukishima teased once again as he leaned in, slower this time, for their first real kiss.
It was clanky and messy, and neither one of them quite knew when it would be time to pull away, but it was theirs, and they both loved it.
That evening, as the rest of the night devolved into more middle school gossip, Kei made a realization about himself that he was absolutely not expecting.
Tsukishima Kei had, without a doubt in his mind, been turned into a romantic. A complete, hopeless romantic, who secretly yearned for another clanky, messy kiss like the one he had tonight, and even more so, for his best friend Yamaguchi Tadashi.