It’s hard to mend something that was never fully broken.
Break-ups were supposed to be violent.
That’s what Akaashi had always thought.
It’s right there in the name.
Things should break.
Doors should be slammed, voices raised, anger and hurt bubbling over. Hearts should be smashed into a million pieces, ripped, stepped on.
That’s how everyone had always described it to him. But that’s not how it went.
Their hearts had never really broken. What happened instead was that they slowly shrank away from each other, like flowers aiming for a different source of light. Day by day, week by week he’d find himself just a bit more absent, the sharp edge of their closeness just a little more dull.
They’d start arguments over silly things, like dishes left unwashed.
There was hurt, and patching up, but a lot of their fights ended unresolved, an endless talking in circles without any conclusion. The cracks in their relationship were painted over, but never fully fixed.
He loved Kuroo. He knew he did.
He adored his quirks, the sly smile, the weird way his hair stuck up, but it was like the lesser parts of him, the ones he’d lovingly glossed over, became magnified over time.
Impossible to bury.
The way he’d wave things off. How he said he’d do something, how he’d fix things, make time, but then never did.
Dates became infrequent and cuddles a habit. The sex, while good, sometimes felt like a tick mark on a calendar.
Mostly, Akaashi steadily became aware that he was not the first thing Kuroo thought about in the morning. He was no longer the last thing on his lover’s mind in the evening.
At the same time, Kuroo had stopped being the reason Akaashi did what he did.
They’d lost track of each other, even when they were sitting on the same couch, watching the same movie.
So when Kuroo got his dream job on the other side of the country, they both decided that he should go, and that was it. A hug, a few tears and a relationship of six years over, nothing more now than the occasional text message or Facebook post.
And that was the thing with ‘soft’ break-ups, Akaashi thought, walking home from an evening out with someone whose features he was already forgetting.
It had hurt, but not enough.
After spending a few weeks on the couch feeling sorry for himself, he was back on his feet. He had hardly even cried.
Maybe that’s why it lingered.
You can’t stitch something back together, unless it was ripped apart.
Instead of a clean cut, a bandage ripped off, Kuroo’s presence was always there, just out of reach.
Instead of rage or pain, Akaashi merely felt a vague sense of longing.
He was a persistent, dull ache, easy enough to push down and ignore during the day, but never gone, dim and docile until it flared up. It burned at three on an Thursday morning when Akaashi couldn’t sleep, or manifested as a whispering voice in the back of his head when he tried to do any more than glue the pieces of his life together.
It had been two years, but Akaashi still painted any new men he met with the same brush, only to find that the picture wasn’t as beautiful as Kuroo’s.