#tsukiken

He was too small for volleyball. Well--not really. Little players were pretty common in high school. Going pro was different, of course, but Kenma wasn’t interested in going pro.

No, and that was the odd part. Kenma was too short to play, didn’t seem to have much athleticism, and also didn’t really care about the game. Tsukishima got backed into it because he’d been born perfect to play. He was tall and athletic and good at the damn game without any effort. He didn’t care about volleyball really, not at first.

Neither did Kenma, seemingly.

He was a damn good setter, though. Tsukishima felt like the matches Karasuno had against Nekoma were his entire team versus Kozume Kenma. (Perhaps the same could be said for Nekoma; their matches were versus Kageyama, the freak.)

All of that was weird, yeah, but when Tsukishima considered Kenma odd, he really meant it outside of the game.

Tsukishima had been told, more than once, that Kuroo was Kenma’s best friend. Childhood friends. Attached at the hip.

But Kenma didn’t seem to care about Kuroo. Or the rest of the team. Or school? Or anything?

They had one conversation outside of volleyball, during his final year of high school, when Tsukishima visited Tokyo with Yamaguchi to tour some college campuses. Kuroo and Kenma met them for dinner at a diner near the station. It seemed likely that Tsukishima and Yamaguchi would attend XYX university next year--the school Kuroo and Kenma studied at--and they’d all wind up on the same team for the first time.

Well, not all of them.

Kenma didn’t play volleyball anymore. It’d been two whole years since his last match, supposedly. He was still trim as ever, though--Tsukishima noticed Kenma’s pale, flat belly when he reached up to accept a glass of water from the waitress and his sweatshirt lifted without his notice.

In recent months--since his eighteenth birthday, when someone on the team jokingly gave him a BL manga--Tsukishima found himself noticing things like abs, thighs, and, humiliatingly, on occasion, the shape of a man’s dick through his pants.

He was pretty sure he was gay. And like with volleyball, he really, really hadn’t asked for this.

It was in this silent moment of despair--the fifth time he’d had one of these moments that specific day--that Tsukishima found himself alone with Kenma for the first time ever, actually.

Kuroo stepped away to use the bathroom and Yamaguchi got a call from his sorta-kinda-girlfriend and had quietly slipped out the front door to chat with her in the half-empty parking lot.

Tsukishima stabbed a french fry into a pool of gravy, snapping it in half. He scoffed. Perfect. Now he had to fish out a fry from the sauce, getting it on his fingers, and then he’d have to go wash his hands, and--

“You don’t have to eat them,” came Kenma’s quiet voice.

Tsukishima jerked his head up and narrowed his eyes. “What?”

“You’re staring at the fries like you hate them. You don’t have to eat them if they’re bad. Kuroo will finish them for you.”

“I don’t hate them. What the fuck?”

“Why are you glaring like that, then.” It wasn’t a question.

“Maybe you should stop staring at my face and mind your business.”

Kenma didn’t reply to that. Instead, he turned to his gaming console, and began to click around.

“Why are you here?” Tsukishima asked.

Kenma didn’t look up from his game. Eventually, he shrugged.

“Why are you even friends with Kuroo? You have nothing in common. All I ever see you do is play some game when you’re with him. Or anyone else, for that matter.”

Kenma seemed to entirely ignore him this time.

“It’s rude.”

That got a reaction, and Tsukishima’s heart skipped a beat when Kenma’s honey-brown eyes snapped to him and he said, “I’m not the one being rude right now. Are you the one that doesn’t want to be friends with Kuro?” He looked back to his game, clicked a few buttons, and sucked his teeth as a game-over noise trilled quietly from the speakers. “Or me. You don’t have to be friends with me.”

“Great,” Tsukishima said, belatedly, after he found his voice again. “I’m so glad I have your permission.”

Kenma exhaled a sound that almost sounded like a laugh.

For some reason, the way Kenma’s eyes latched onto him in that moment--that stuck with Tsukishima for weeks. He revisited that big golden stare inside his own mind again and again.