pink light district

by tether (tothemoon)

Summary:

In which Kuroo oversees a moon on the edge of the galaxy (and Bokuto, the runaway, keeps crashing into his orbit).

Notes:

This is re-upload of an older bokuroo AU I did four years ago, which I'd taken down because I wanted to use the world for something original (but I ended up telling a completely different story there lol). Thank you again to Winny and Lark, who helped to beta this years ago; reading your notes in the old g-doc made me smile sksksodasd

 

 

moonscape, AKA the pink light district

35th Quadrant, Milky Way Galaxy

(the sixth and smallest moon to the left)

 

 

 

 

 

 

“One day, we're going to look up, see it come crashing into the moonscape, and that'll be the end of everything.”

This is the first thing Haiba Lev, delivery boy extraordinaire, has to say about diamond planets, and Kuroo nearly tunes him out to the sound of a motor come back to life. It's a Wednesday when he gets his beloved motorcycle up and running again on the outer limits, and he could be hard-pressed to care about cosmic anomalies; but he offers the most patience a captain can (maybe half of that, for people as consistently insistent as Lev), and grins, bobbing up with fingers pinched over the usual jumpsuit zipper. “Too bad that's never going to happen, I guess,” he says back to him, not one to contribute to the local folklore, and nearly faints on the spot when he sees a spark and smoke fly up by the engine.

A kouhai stays, undeterred by balled fists and a head thrown up high. Kuroo follows Lev’s line of vision right to the sky, watches how the stars cluster to feast on the night, away from the solitary confinements of some small and unwavering moon.

“But you don't understand, Kuroo-san. They say it takes twenty years for that planet to make its way to our view—”

“It's a rogue planet, Lev. It comes and goes whenever it wants.”

“Whatever! Aren't you at least a little scared of some sort of collision?”

Kuroo looks on, droll. When he begins to walk his bike back up the main road, Lev does, too.

“Nope,” Kuroo answers back, because he's more concerned about other things, like how it's an hour walk back into the heart of the city, and that he should get a head start before night comes. “How about you worry about getting your deliveries in time? Don't think I didn't hear about your mishaps with Ukai Keishin’s menthol cigarettes.”

“Aw, Kuroo-san, but delivering packages is boring. I want to be out there keeping the peace, like Tora-san, or investigating, like Yaku-san!” Lev bemoans this further with some weird little groan that only one of their youngest could muster, but Kuroo can't say he doesn't appreciate his enthusiasm. He just tips his head back, lets himself slow down, bike at his side, so Lev’s walking next to him. He lets the easy pace take over. Overhead, the last of the pink disappears for the day.

“If you want to be on guard, you've got to deliver the packages. Everyone starts that way,” says Kuroo. “Fundamentals and such. You learn how to talk to everyone in the district, and in turn they'll learn how to talk to you. It keeps everything flowing, you know?”

Lev quickens his pace, much to Kuroo’s chagrin. “But I want to be with the senpai out there!”

“Everything comes in time,” Kuroo reminds him, just when he notices his engine grumbling back to life. Another bike bell rings from up the dusted road—a fellow delivery boy—and Inuoka Sou waves with no hands on the handlebars.

“Ah! Inouka!” Lev calls, equally as exuberant—gods bless their hearts—and Kuroo takes that as a signal to get going. He mounts on his bike and revs the engine, feeling the smooth purr under him. Pure music. Might as well be a sonatina, Kuroo thinks, when he restrains himself from gushing about the endless horsepower.

“Tell Inuoka I said hi, all right?” he calls to Lev, unzipping the top half of his jumpsuit and letting his favorite white under-tee air out. “I've got some business to attend to in the city.”

“But Kuroo-san, what about the—”

“I'll be sure to join you guys for the cake cutting later,” Kuroo says, maybe half a lie.

“Got it!” Lev says with the most gaudy of salutes, and Kuroo mimics him halfheartedly. It takes him barely a second after that, to sprint up the road.

It's a nice enough evening, clear skies ahead, and Kuroo makes out the light of the makeshift city in front of him. Red-bricked tenements mingle with patchwork skyscrapers and work together to overshadow the low lying danchi housing clusters, while townhouses and cathedrals erupt along the climbing hills. Booming, blinking billboards, never really there to advertise anything new or substantial, crowd the airtime with images of cherry cola and touristy excursions to the next galaxy over. Another sort, always informational, rings with the most harrowing title: THE DIAMOND PLANET — WILL IT MAKE ITS RETURN? TIPS ON HOW TO SPOT IT AT TEN.

Kuroo ignores the bulletin, lets himself be swallowed by the moonscape’s piecemeal offerings, and rides on past a chaotic marketplace and the ever-vibrant amphitheatre. He parks his motorcycle by a series of vending machines beneath the underpass, gets himself two colas (because damn those billboards, always making him crave a bottle or two), and walks up the street to a certain house on the corner. He always knows how to spot it; Nekomata, the last captain, once told him it was the only so-called traditional house on the entire pseudo-planet, from a time when their ancestors lived on an island nation with grand seas on either side (“and that it should never, ever be missed, you know?”). It is with a leap and a hop that Kuroo scales the high walls, finds a swinging grip off an empty cherry blossom tree—the only one on the moonscape—and lands in the yard of the great coordinator’s house.

“Good evening, Kuro.”

“Evening, Kenma.” Kuroo sits next to him on the back ledge of the house, peering past the slid-open shoji panels and back at the wall of surveillance on the other side, all blipping on and off with the usual road cam footage. Setting down the two bottles of cola, he waits for Kenma to acknowledge the refreshments, and smiles something wry when he doesn't. “I see you're hard at work today,” he remarks, when Kenma’s got his head buried in a new video game, one circa what seems like a million years ago, judging by the beat-up plastic body and the strange felt cat stickers on the corner of the screen.

Kenma shoots him the flicker of a dirty little glare before gluing his sights back to his game. “Inuoka delivered it to me today, as a thank you for that petty theft case last week. Did you tell that obaa-san I liked vintage games?”

Kuroo shrugs. “I might've let that slip, yes.”

“Then don't try me with your remarks,” Kenma says, mashing the buttons in various combinations, “if you're the one who brought this on me.”

“Stuck on a level, aren't we?” Kuroo says, undeterred.

“It's horrible.”

“How about we take a break, then?” Kuroo gently lifts the game from Kenma’s grip and presses it into his pocket for later. “I want my daily traffic report. How did the roads look today?”

“Do we really have to?”

“We always have to,” Kuroo says, sympathetic.

With a yawn, Kenma stretches with fists balled up to the sky; this was usually their least favorite part of the day, too monotonous to even feign some fading inkling of interest—but it was necessary to know how the city was doing, and Kenma had been the finest watcher since, well, ever, according to training standards: he knew every street, tunnel, and backroad the moonscape had ever seen and built, and nothing ever got past him. So it was a comfort to hear Kenma drone past ward names, all paired with the assurance that everything was under control.

“Sangenjaya, all clear.”

“Saitama, all clear.”

“Shinjuku, all clear.”

When Kenma gets up to fiddle with all the modified television sets and dusty stock market terminal screens, Kuroo takes it upon himself to help out, too. Brevity had been a friend of theirs for as long as they could remember, the quiet an even older companion, and Kuroo often stayed much later after their nightly traffic reports.

“Your anniversary is today,” Kenma breaks the silence first, writing something down on his clipboard after seeing someone on an electric scooter steal an orange from a storefront on camera nine. “I heard the newcomers were throwing you a party for it.”

Kuroo casts a side eye about this, because it's just another reminder that he's getting older. “Ah, well, to be young, I suppose.”

“Don't talk like you’re dying,” Kenma scolds without taking his eyes off his notepad. “You're not much older than them.”

“Hm.” Kuroo presses down on one of the power buttons, accidentally turning one of the televisions off in the process. “You know how it is, though,” he decides to continue, because he had always been under the assumption that if he couldn't tell his best friend something, he wouldn't be able to tell anyone. Kenma raises himself, attentive. Kuroo shrugs like it’s nothing, before wiping the dust off a blackened screen. “It's just that I haven't seen him since then. Graduation, that is.”

Kenma frowns, small but aware. “I'm sure he's fine.”

“Oh, I know he's fine. Just a postcard would be nice, once in awhile. Too bad he's off hopping around the galaxy.”

“Stealing stars,” Kenma supposes rather casually, “and eating whole suns.”

Kuroo blinks. “How poetic of you, Kenma.”

“Again, I blame you. The game is full of that sort of talk.”

“Yeah?”

“Yes. The main character travels the universe, and the goal is to eat a galaxy’s worth of stars,” says Kenma, always a little more loquacious on the matter of handheld games. “But the thing is, if you stay too long in one place, you die.”

“Interesting. And why would he die?”

“He’s got the core of an unsettled sun in his chest. Movement is key.”

“I see.”

Kenma goes on taking notes without anything else to say about the matter, and Kuroo watches, dreamlike, against the hazy television sets. He really might be stealing stars, but Kuroo hates it when he gets himself caught in the usual post-work state of mind, head nothing but static and fuzz. Defenses wane to the point where he might be thinking of him. Oh stop it, why don't you? At once, he starts a game with himself, extinguishes any thought of him by guessing what sort of cake Lev might've gotten him today.

Kuroo surely hopes fondant is not involved.

(When he dares to dream of cheesecake, a whistle and a pop explode across the night sky.)

“Did you hear that?” Kenma asks, padding along to the back door, and Kuroo turns vaguely. He makes out the thin billow of smoke out from city lights not too far from them up the road, guesses that it's those pesky Karasuno kids playing with fireworks again, and rolls his eyes at the thought of sending out a patrol.

Kenma goes back to inspect the cameras and comes away with nothing; all the streets look clear of trouble, minus a few bewildered citizens pointing up at the sky and calling out for others to see. That's when Kuroo remembers to switch the blank screen from before back on, marked camera four. Kenma nearly drops his clipboard when he sees it.

 

 

 

/

 

 

Right in the middle of one of the moon’s great intersections, a plummeted ship has made a home, plenty in ruins.

“An escape pod.”

By the wreckage, Kuroo makes out the remains of a pilot’s seat, the name on the remaining metal sheet body, and turns to Yaku Morisuke, resident lead investigator. “The broken wing has a name attached to it. Owl, as in the particular craft brand,” Kuroo says. “Of course it’s Owl,” because they were the biggest economy-class ship builders in the galaxy, and it was hard to find someone who didn't drive one of those out in the established suburb planets.

“Excuse me?” Yaku asks, slightly miffed, and Kuroo stiffens.

“Ah, sorry, Yakkun. Just talking to myself. Please ignore me.”

Yaku does what he's told and goes back to inspecting the rest of the ship. “We didn't find a body anywhere. You think it burned up on impact? My analysis is showing nothing about ashes, though, or bone fragments.” He sifts through more of his notes. “Also, the parachute pack is missing.”

Kuroo sighs. “I guess that's our answer. Poor bastard was probably hurdling at the moon from some doomed ship in the asteroid belt above us. I mean, what have I said about that asteroid belt before?”

“Not to go near it,” Yaku repeats, deadpan. “But are you sure it's from that? People get caught in that all the time, you know. What are the chances of them landing here?”

Kuroo knows about all things infinitesimal. The sixth and smallest moon to the left. Still, Kuroo is tempted to chortle back, hey, now, weirder things have landed here before—because they certainly, certainly have—but never gets the chance when Kenma comes tapping him on the shoulder. He’s gone to tie his dyed hair into a ponytail in the back, a signifier of more-than-usual effort.

“Kuro, come take a look at this,” Kenma calls, and Kuroo can only oblige; past the wreckage and up the street sits an old record store they both liked to frequent sometimes, never particularly interesting save for the parakeet in a domed cage and the constant stream of some ancient classical from the speakers. But today—of all days—had to be different, and Kuroo wonders if it'd be in bad taste to skip his duties, the cake cutting, and go straight to bed.

Cup of something steaming in his hands, the stranger peers up from his fold-out chair. “Hello,” he says rather politely, with a head slightly bowed like he might know how much he's inconvenienced the moon. When Kuroo makes out a head of messy black hair, blood on a cheek, and a deflated parachute around the shoulders, he leans down and gets a better look at the owl logo on his jumpsuit. Name written in characters under it, Kuroo sounds it out for the whole moonscape to hear.

“Akaashi Keiji.”

“Assistant to the head test pilot for Owl Industries,” he finishes. “Nice to meet you.”

Kenma follows up on this. “He crashed through the record shop awning and nearly scared obaa-san to death, so I went to help him out. I think he's the one you're looking for.”

Akaashi turns to Kenma. “Thanks for the tea,” he says to him with another light bow of his head, and Kenma dismisses him with an even fainter wave.

 

 

/

 

The trip back to Kenma’s house is a quiet one, thanks to the company at hand, and Kuroo waits until they get behind closed doors to initiate any sort of interrogation. It starts off with the cutting of a cake and Lev’s note, which had promptly read the following:

I'm sorry that someone had to crash onto the moonscape today, and I think I might've jinxed it when I talked about collisions. I hope no one was hurt, and I left this cake at Kenma-san’s to celebrate. It's chocolate, in case you were wondering. Let’s have an even bigger party next time!

It's a beautiful ganache sort, pillows of mocha cream and raspberries on top, but Kenma says he'd much prefer an apple pie. Akaashi, in the meanwhile, takes small, refined bites. In between his second and third, Kuroo points the pronged part of his fork up at him, right at the silver Owl logo on his jumpsuit, and tilts his head, more curious than inspecting. “We usually don't have corporation types come around here.”

Akaashi looks around. “What do you mean?” Then comes another bite, this time less careful, and there's a flush on Akaashi’s cheeks like he really might be enjoying it. “This seems like a perfectly fine city. This cake is tasty.”

Kuroo glances over at Kenma before continuing. “You really don't know where you are?” he asks.

“Kozume-san told me you call this place the moonscape. What else is there to it?”

With hands itching over a game console, Kenma turns back to face his screens instead. “You're in a pink light district, Akaashi-kun,” he says, eyes sharp, glancing back, in the near-darkness. “I should've mentioned that before, I guess.”

“Pink light?”

Kuroo nods. “I know what you're thinking.”

“And what am I thinking?” Akaashi asks, equally a challenge. His stare is the pinpoint sort, dark but endless and not to be swayed.

But Kuroo tells himself not to get lost in it. “That, oh, Kuroo-san, Kozume-san, you must mean red light,” he finishes, light in resilience.

Akaashi puts down his fork, and his sights fall away to the floor. “Well, isn’t that what they’re usually called? A place for vice and other illegal dealings—”

“We run into a little trouble here and there, as all outposts tend to do,” Kuroo admits. “But it isn’t a bad place to be. You know, sometimes people judge way too easily, and exclude the kindest people from their planets. They’re all full of heart, maybe, if you’d like to see it that way. So yeah, pink light. Home to pachinko machines, stray cats, and slightly illegal activity. Do you like the name?” At this, Kenma turns back over his shoulder, making his disapproval known by rolled eyes and the small shake of his head. In turn, Akaashi smiles back, already in apparent sympatico with the great coordinator.

“Then maybe that’s why he punched these coordinates in for me,” Akaashi says, a little quieter than before. No, that's not it—Kuroo thinks the word might be somber, and he doesn’t like the sound of it. “Maybe he thought this would be the best place to get help.”

Kuroo leans over. “You didn’t land here by accident, then?”

Akaashi blinks before allowing himself the shake of a head. “I’ve run into many accidents with my captain over the years, but this was not one of them. We were testing a new ship from our wing fighter class before we ran into trouble.” Another bite comes, chagrin apparent, and Akaashi’s forced to excuse himself behind a napkin. “There was something strange on our radar, and we went to go see it.”

“Then, what?” Kuroo asks, more attentive than he’d like to admit.

“We ran into debris from a white hole,” says Akaashi. “The turbulence was too much, and he told me to escape.”

“And your captain?”

“I don’t know what happened to him.”

Silence sweeps across the room, ghost town worthy. Kenma pretends to fiddle with the faded stickers on his game, while Akaashi stares ahead, waiting for someone to say something next.

“Well, can we go back to your superiors? At Owl Industries?” Kuroo asks. “I’m sure they could get you help, with all their resources and all,” comes the suggestion, and he has to stop himself from sounding so indignant about it.

At this, Akaashi shakes his head. “We can’t.”

“And why not?” Kuroo crosses his arms, leans back from his place at the kotatsu.

“Well, because,” Akaashi swallows. “We had already stolen a ship from their yard. Their best ship, I think. It was as fast as I thought it would be, but I’m sure they’ll catch up to find us eventually.”

“Well, they’ll have one less person to look for,” Kuroo says in the start of a half-joke, “because I’m sure your captain’s a dead man.”

Akaashi frowns, light but cutting. Even Kenma notices, shoulders raised. Wide-eyed and watching.

“No.”

It is with a deftness, the nerve, that Akaashi refutes Kuroo. Sights go up, still half-shut but less so, and reflect someone who will not be deterred. Composed, Akaashi takes a deep breath. “No,” he repeats, “because Bokuto-san would not be the type to die so easily.”

Kuroo lets himself go slightly agape, before mashing his mouth closed.

“Wait. What did you just say?”

“He's still out there, somewhere—”

“Bokuto Koutarou,” Kuroo lets himself say. “Your captain is Bokuto Koutarou?”

Akaashi nods. “Yes.”

(And at once, Kuroo sees another life. They’re racing on the dusty roads and jumping off the fire escapes. The moonscape is limitless by his eyes, and Kuroo’s inclined to feel the same.)

“And I think he was trying to send me to you.”

 

 

/

 

[PLAYBACK 0985]

subject: kuroo

 

Akaashi. Hey, Akaashi!

Always calm, aren’t you? That’s good! Great to know you’re still alive. I need you to go to this address I’m about to punch into your escape pod. You’re going to go get us help from this guy named Kuroo, all right? Kuroo Tetsurou. He’ll know what to do. He always knows what to do. And...well, he might look like an asshole, and sometimes he kinda is, because he’s never once said thank you for any of those packages I sent him over the years, but he’s a good guy. A good heart. He’ll be able to help you out.

And well, as for me—I’ll figure it out, too. See you soon, and don’t you dare worry about me.

 

 

/

 

Kuroo had been fifteen when he joined the guard, and all guards of the moonscape started off as delivery boys. He wasn't a fan of the work—nobody really was when they first started—but he had nothing better to do, and it was better than slinging records with the obaa-san in the record shop, or selling newspapers on the corner like everyone else his age. He liked to walk, even if it meant going back and forth to the office infinite times to pick up new packages, and Nekomata often talked about the pleasures of talking to folks en route and during deliveries: “isn't it nice, Tetsurou-kun? Most of these people wander the galaxy all day, barely have any friends to their name, so they might walk around with the moonscape with a testy look on their faces. Try me, try me! It’s nice to make their days a little easier.”

Kuroo had always been neutral about Nekomata’s winding soliloquies, those extended metaphors about life and death itself, but this particular one had caught his interest. “Oh?” he’d asked at that time. “Do you really think delivering packages helps to make a difference?”

Nekomata had laughed that funny little laugh of his and continued feeding the alley cats, tabby and otherwise. “You don't necessarily have to be kind, but be welcoming in the way you know how. Melt the ice in their glass and form relationships. It's how you keep the air on the moonscape flowing.”

And as much as he still hates to admit it, Kuroo had taken that advice to heart. Fifteen was not a pleasant age for anyone, but it’d become a habit to take a deep breath every morning before the first drop off and another during late deliveries at dusk. Smile, but don't force it, and go on runs with Kai and Yaku (even if he was sure he hated Yaku at the time). He’d learned what kind of tea the obaa-san at the record shop liked to drink, made light fun of the way the fishmonger never got his own wares right (“what? Are you telling me that's NOT a giant tuna I'm selling?”); and he'd flirt—ever, ever so slightly, and ever, ever so subtly—with anyone who might need it that day, because the days on the moonscape were long and arduous and he'd rather live in peace than anything else. Even Kenma, the only person he'd keep these fronts to a minimum with, noticed the difference. “Kuro, you’ve been doing a lot of talking lately,” and he'd given him the most arduous look a fourteen-year old could muster at the time. “Are you trying to be an ambassador?”

Ambassador. A funny word for two kids back then, but Kuroo might take it at this point.

Back on the road, it's the early morning when he comes to a short stop, almost too caught up in dreaming to remember where he's supposed to be going. Past the outer reaches was the hangar where they kept all the ships for galactic travel, complete with its own dinky tarmac and resident air-controller-mechanic extraordinaire, Fukunaga Shouhei. He's early today too, quite unfortunate, because Kuroo had hoped to get out into the galaxy and find Bokuto without anyone knowing except Kenma, but it wasn't as if Fukunaga was a bad sort of guy anyway. Kuroo thinks to count some sort of blessings for himself, because at least it wasn't Haiba Lev, who would've begged to come along; Fukunaga just tilts his head, ever the silent type, and ushers Kuroo along with a paw-like sort of gesture, an alleycat hanging out by the spaceships.

“I'm going out to Sagittarius B2.”

Might as well not keep unnecessary secrets at this point, Kuroo surmises. Kenma had spent much of the night with Akaashi tracing what might've been Bokuto’s last known spot in the universe, and it turned out Akaashi was the most capable astronomer, probably more suited to sit at home with an old-fashioned telescope than co-pilot high-turbine ships. It was with the most nonchalant sort of effort the two of them announced, with dark (but unbothered) circles under their eyes, that Bokuto Koutarou was probably drifting in Sagittarius B2, the raspberry cloud. Kuroo had taken off not long after that, half-sighs on a sputtering motorcycle and burnt toast in his mouth.

Fukunaga writes something down on the clipboard on the wall and directs Kuroo to a decently-sized ship at the left end of the hangar. “That ship fits seven people, though,” Kuroo remarks, usually preferring to travel light; but he remembers the matter of engine sizes and warp drives and cutting days off his commute to mere hours, and that maybe a more powerful ship might help him out in the long run. “Ah, actually, it's fine,” he decides, and Fukunaga stops himself from eyeing the little two-seater sitting at the rear.

It never takes long for Kuroo to get situated. Seat belt buckled and intercom on, he waves to Fukunaga and the camera hanging off the lamppost, because Kenma and Akaashi might be up already at the house and watching by the walls.

Fukunaga nods his head forward without picking it back up. Aren't you going to go? he asks, in his own way. At this, Kuroo takes a deep breath; he can't say he's still nervous about flying, because he'd done this many times in many ships, but there was always something eerie about cutting the air and the sky and space without any semblance of consequence. Kuroo much preferred the ground, the resistance of something that needed to be maneuvered and worked on like the clearing of veins and the thinning of blood: track seventeen needs weekend repairs, or interstate Z should get some new asphalt. Keep the paths open. He wonders if he can forge new ones among the stars.

“Kuro.”

“Hey there, stranger.”

Kenma’s voice comes looming over the intercom fifteen minutes into his commute, on his way past a forming nebula and a black hole trying to be. “Kuro,” he calls again, mostly even but a bit grumbly, as expected of the morning.

“Hey, Kenma. I've taken off, if you haven't seen from the cameras.”

“I did,” Kenma says right back.

“What's up, then?”

“Hm, well, I was told to relay this message, but please beware of the other captain.”

Kuroo laughs just a bit. “Yeah? And why can't Akaashi Keiji tell me that himself?”

“Indisposed. He’s making breakfast in the other room.”

“Getting cozy, aren't we?” Kuroo teases.

“Shut up.” Kuroo hears a sigh on the other end (or was it a yawn?) and sits back, equally as drowsy in his seat. “Anyway, heed caution,” Kenma says with pseudo-sarcasm, the slightest hint of care, a lot by the usual Kozume standard, and Kuroo smiles with a mic to his lips.

“Will do. I imagine he's going to be hungry, sitting out there all by himself. It's not going to be pretty, I suppose.”

“What isn't?”

“Our reunion,” Kuroo answers, hushed like the rest of the galaxy ahead of him, and Kenma hangs up soon after. He flips a switch for auto-pilot, leans in his seat all the way back, and lets himself doze, visions sprawling, in the meanwhile.

It’s funny, the way light tries to seep past closed eyelids. Moats of color turn from blue to violet to an irrepressible rose, blooming across the hemisphere, and Kuroo smacks himself clean on the forehead for the unwanted memory.

 

/

 

“Testing.”

In another life, Kuroo supposes he could’ve been a radio announcer, the sort that might deliver late night sermons against the dangers of drag drift racing down main roads and stealing air-trolleys from the yard, slow and easy to the point where people might listen. It’d be easier, he imagines, than leading a bunch of delivery boys, or getting daily traffic reports, or rescuing old friends from the middle of the goddamned galaxy; but for now, he’ll settle for lulling the clouds of Sagittarius B2, the strangest space the milky way might be able to offer, and broadcast something only for Bokuto Koutarou to hear. “Hey,” he says, much too casual and just a bit drowsy. He keeps his nose partially pressed to the mic. He rubs the sleep, all grainy, from his eyes.

“You’ve caused a lot of trouble, you know? I know you’re out there.”

(It had been like this too, back when they were delivery boys. I know you’re out there referred to a warehouse full of shelved boxes waiting to be delivered, and Bokuto had taken to hiding at the very back with a broken vase worth six million yen; they were not very close then, just a finger on a handful of meetings, and Kuroo had wanted to strangle his new partner for reckless handling.)

“Answer me, why don't you?”

Back in Sagittarius B2, Kuroo watches the rest of the field light up in response. Faraway suns, light years away, say goodbye by the way of supernovas, sending rifts of fuschia haze across the stratosphere; horsehead nebulas tower and swirl, clouds like thick oil paintings. Nekomata had once told him that this part of the galaxy—a whole one hundred and fifty light years long—had had the particular taste of raspberries, and the same color of them, too, if you looked at it just right, and that it’d been a matter of the galaxy blushing back at them. Prone to cynicism, Kuroo liked to blame the ethyl formate in the air instead. Bokuto, on the other hand, claimed it was magic.

“I mean, how have you been, anyway?” Kuroo asks again into the microphone. “Dead, yet?” he follows up, jokingly at first, when the answer comes to him, apparent.

When he receives no response, Kuroo glances over at the pocket of pink in the sky, rosy more than electric, and lets himself remain; out in the sheen of it, it takes him a moment to spot the remains of a ship, much larger than his, floating on its side like a carcass on the high plains—a dazzling death, in all honesty, but one Kuroo had not expected to find. “Shit,” he even calls, accidentally, into the intercom, before telling himself to stay some semblance of composed; but it’s a heavy push to put the parking gear into acceleration, and an even heavier one to look up. What blinking stars he’d seen from afar were nothing but sparking wires from detached cubicles and cabin rooms, and the luster of shredded metal had reminded him of dormant glaciers, mangled most excellently.

“Bokuto,” he dares to say into the intercom anyway. “Hey, Bokuto.”

No answer comes. Kuroo sits back in the pilot’s seat, suddenly weary, and keeps his sights on the wreckage.

“You can't really be gone, can you?”

The control panel sounds for AN OPEN REAR DOOR. UNAUTHORIZED VISITOR.

“What? Do you really want to count me out so easily?”

Kuroo grins. Well, nice to see you, too. Neck craned forward, he bites down on a strong arm when he feels it try to wring around him. With a push against the control panel, he comes close, terribly so, and Kuroo can only help but laugh—because he should always know better than to let his guard down in the wild, and especially one with Bokuto Koutarou in it. He looks down at his arm in horror when he realizes Kuroo’s actually bitten him in the arm, adrenaline right on the verge of a rush when he decides, quite promptly, to charge at him back. Still snickering, Kuroo rolls out of the way with ease (mostly in the blind relief that, well, Akaashi Keiji was right: Bokuto would not be the type to die so easily).

“You bit me!” Bokuto hollers with that big mouth of his, fists flying, and Kuroo catches every punch with the heart of a comfortable palm.

“Oh, you'll live.” Kuroo lunges forward, presses back, so close their noses might as well be touching, when he takes the chance to land a knee right into Bokuto’s stomach. He goes back flying on the floor down the hall, and Kuroo grabs a fist-full of an off-white racing jacket, black by the lapels; wincing into a smile, he doesn't fret—never has—when they come face to face.

Kuroo can't help but mouth, “you bastard,” when he realizes how little he's changed: that Bokuto smirk, that Bokuto way he wears unfathomably light hair, slicked back—it's all there, the sort of miracle that would escape a fucked ship and right onto Kuroo’s, still raring to fight and say, I missed you along the way.

Because that's what he says, “I missed you,” and the honesty catches Kuroo off guard—Bokuto takes his chances then, to kick him right back towards the rear of the ship. Kuroo narrowly avoids the backspin of the next one, clipping one of Bokuto’s loose sneakers instead.

“Always the white trainers.” Rolling up his sleeves, Kuroo wipes the sweat off his brow and gets back up, just as out of breath as Bokuto; Bokuto, in turn, stares back, jacket flung off to the side, the rest of him ready to go. Kuroo motions on, a single nod like he might as well be saying, without fear, ‘come at me.’

So that's what Bokuto does. He charges on, throws Kuroo against the control panel, and heaves at him in his own sort of unfaltering gravity.

“Hey, Bokuto,” Kuroo calls, swallowing down a wince. It burns on the way down.

“What?”

“Missed you, too.”

Bokuto takes his turn at lifting Kuroo up by the cloth, takes one look at his jumpsuit, the palm barely resisting a closed and waning fist, and begins to laugh.

“I can't believe this.”

It's funny, the way he just stays there, shaking his head against Kuroo’s shoulder like they weren't just in a brawl in the middle of the godforsaken Sagittarius B2.

“I thought I wasn't going to make it,” Bokuto starts, in the smallest bit of a whine, as dazed as a straggler is bound to be. He dusts himself off and helps Kuroo off of mashed buttons. “You know, there's only so much of that weird whatever fruit taste you could take out here. I really wanted to die.”

“Well, you didn't,” Kuroo tells him right back, “and in all the five years I haven't seen you, I'm surprised you didn't already.”

Bokuto frowns back. “Well, you'd know if you actually bothered to check your mail!”

“What, like you've been sending me care packages?”

“Exactly!”

Kuroo takes his turn at tidying himself up, pulling the zipper of his jumpsuit back up to his collarbones. “Well, I’m not believing that until I see them in the flesh,” he says, sitting back in the pilot’s seat. “Don't think I don't remember the way you used to mislabel addresses.”

Bokuto wilts, if only by the slightest, and goes back to pick up his jacket, and notices the absence of any corporation insignia on it. “That was one time,” he even insists, leaning back against the motherboard, and Kuroo can't help but linger, uselessly, at the sight of him. Bokuto just grins, unbothered like they haven't just left the last five years awash, and peers out at the galaxy ahead. “We should get out of here, I guess,” he proposes, and Kuroo would be apt to agree—he figures there had to be a few sensors still kicking, and that it wouldn't take very long for the Owls to come looking for the wreckage.

Kuroo puts the ship back into drive. Sights still out at the expanse, glazed over a ship he won't mourn, Bokuto swoons at the sound of an engine come alive.

 

/

 

 

“So, where are you taking me?”

Kuroo smiles. “Pink light district.”

There's a silence, a recollection, and Bokuto laughs like something out of a memory.

“So you're still trying to make that name stick, huh?”

 

/

 

 

Bokuto had begun with a point to prove, a sixteen-year old fifth son from a family of rich boys.

By the first week since meeting Kuroo and starting his tenure as a delivery boy on the moonscape, he had been known to exercise three passing facts at opening functions and tell-us-about-yourself pleasantry sessions—

That one, he might as well be adopted, because he never had much in common with his brothers—

That two, he took offense to being called the fifth son—

And three: he had run all the way to the moonscape to start anew, to some place where he wouldn't have to be some fifth son, or god forbid, fifth best. And it had never been with any prolonged wistfulness that Bokuto laid down these facts, because he'd be that sort of person, new but undeterred, guzzling down a cherry cola and breaking out into the rest of the crowd first. “So, how's the rest of the night looking?” he'd say to the rest of the delivery boys in the warehouse, and it was palpable how much the room would light up for him in return.

“He's going to be a natural,” Nekomata had told Kuroo once in the corner at one of these gatherings, and Kuroo would just roll his eyes in return, just on the edge of comprehension.

Five years later, Kuroo still might not understand: Bokuto had been a fairly mediocre delivery boy in his year at the moonscape, sturdy against mammoth assignments and pesky walk-up apartments, but he was never careful enough with ones marked FRAGILE and often got addresses more wrong than right. He was an impromptu leader of sorts amongst the delivery boys though, a raiser of great forces when morale was low, and more often than not they complimented each other as co-captains: if Kuroo was the one to thin the blood, Bokuto was the one to thicken it; I’ll keep things flowing and you raise them for battle.

So the matter of whether or not Bokuto was a natural—still inconclusive. But then again, Kuroo thinks it might not be a matter of understanding at all. Maybe a glimmer, a grasp, might do, and they could go from there.

“Hello, Bokuto-san.”

This is what he thinks when Bokuto greets Akaashi Keiji at the front door with arms around him flung haphazardly, so happy he could cry.

“Akaashi, you're really alive!” Bokuto does not relent and Akaashi looks like he's made the worst decision in coming here, to Kuroo’s, and he just pats him on the back in return.

“Ah, yes. Apologies, Bokuto-san, but I can't breathe.”

Bokuto lets go instantly, unaware of his own strength, and settles for placing his hands on Akaashi’s shoulders instead. How intimate, Kuroo observes with the smallest annoyance.

“So how's the moonscape been treating you, huh? I was so worried up there, you know, that I'd never make it down here too, but then I remembered those meditation exercises you taught me, and it made floating around in that, uh, air pocket a lot easier to bear!”

“That's good to hear. You should do them more often.”

Bokuto nods vaguely. He never looked to be the type to keep up meditation exercises. “So? So?” he asks instead. “What have you been doing here at the moonscape? Join up with the delivery boys yet?” He is no less than a blitzkrieg of questions, leaning over the doorway panel, but Akaashi remains, perilously undeterred.

“Nothing like that,” he just tells with the shake of his head. “Kozume-san has been showing me around, though.”

“Oh? New friend?”

“Yes. We're going to the observatory soon, actually. I just wanted to check that you were still in one piece.”

“I mean, your ship definitely wasn’t back there,” Kuroo chimes in. “So if you were planning on bringing it back to your friends at Owl Industries, I’d reconsider. It’s probably all gone.”

At the news, Akaashi wilts noticeably. He shoots daggers by those dark eyes, pinpointed right at Bokuto for maximum damage.

“Well, I'm just perfect!” Bokuto exclaims in a nervous laugh, staring back into the apartment. Kuroo shakes his head at him, exasperated, and goes to scrounge around for his first aid kit in the dark; by coral hues, a mix of street light warmth and coolest violet undertones, he should’ve known that operation Rescue Bokuto Koutarou was going to take all day. Twilight was upon them. Traffic reports still had to be filed, and there was the matter of talking to Haiba Lev about those goddamned undelivered cigarettes and—shit. Kuroo takes a deep breath instead, stopping any sort of mind made clutter, and smiles graciously at Akaashi.

In turn, Akaashi says he’ll pick up a few souvenirs from the observatory. “Have a good evening, Kuroo-san,” he says, before turning to Bokuto. “And please lay low, Bokuto-san. The pink light district does not need you causing any more trouble.” He takes his leave after that, and Kuroo makes a mental note to ask Kenma about their trip later.

That leaves Bokuto. Kuroo stares over at him from the other side of the room, roosted over his too-small nightstand in a too-small apartment, and lets the other captain break out into the sort of laughter he’s never really liked to hold back. At Kuroo’s expense, he breaks out into something relentlessly jovial, a jack out of his box.

“I really can’t believe you still call it that! You even got Akaashi to use it!”

“Don’t start with me.”

“You used to tell me to write pink light district all over my outgoing address lines,” Bokuto says. “You’d get so mad when I didn’t!”

“But it fits! Before me and Nekomata, everyone thought this place was a dump. And I mean, it is, but it’s...home.” To resist breaking out into love songs, Kuroo shrugs this off, goes over to his wardrobe, and slides it down against the wall. “Not red light, but pink. A floating world.” He says this with the coolest sort of drama, like a subject in one of those old ukiyo-e paintings the con men liked to forge downtown. “But enough about that. Take the light for what it is.”

At Kuroo’s beckoning, Bokuto closes the door behind them, shut from the rest of the moonscape (and the noisy neighbors arguing outside). “No need to sell me on anything,” he says, with laughter dying down. “I know the story, and the real one, too—and wait, just what in the hell are you up to?”

Kuroo smiles, never quite nice about it when it comes to the likes of Bokuto, and takes a key out of his pocket. With nothing else to be said about pink light districts and other stories, he unlocks a door hidden in the wallpaper print, starts up the narrow spiral stairs, and invites Bokuto to join him on the third step.

“You kept it,” he says right back, steps made fast like he can’t wait, and Kuroo just wants to tell Bokuto, hey, settle down, it’s just the rooftop; but even he has to admit to the smallest pride in keeping it so pristine over the years, keeping it free from the other tenants in the building and grooming it like some garden he never even really meant to grow.

“I did.”

They make it up there with little fanfare, welcomed by the sort of silence that was natural of the moonscape: humming, mumbling by the city’s accord, and well—not very silent to begin with. Kuroo peers down to the street, where the record shop obaa-san’s playing some little candelabra tonight, and two antique shop owners are arguing about who sold the best mismatched ottomans. Up the way, Tora’s yelling about unpaid parking citations with some guy from Karasuno named Tanaka, and dares to compete with the drawl of the airbuses above.

But through it all, Bokuto just breathes out, a whiny little gesture of awe. The rooftop was no longer just a series of fold-up beach chairs, or an old mini-fridge where Kuroo liked to keep cola and milk for the occasional earl grey tea, but a place he might like to make a home. A proper apartment on a proper moon. A place he’d grown into and grown, all the same.

“Aren't you afraid of sudden storms though, Kuroo-san?” Haiba Lev once asked one afternoon, but Kuroo quite liked sleeping in the night air, crisp in the upper limits of a five-floor walk up. It was an open place, even then and even now, and it was safe to say he never prayed for rain. At the thought, Kuroo looks out over the boulevard veins, the floating lights; Bokuto might understand this, based on the way he just throws himself down on the four-poster bed in the corner, chest heaving up, the moonscape his comfy little hostel.

“So, you'll make fun of me for pink but you won't say anything about this?” Kuroo asks. He glides over to Bokuto, two steps behind him when he hops up and follows the procession of mementos on the roof ledge. Kuroo had started the collection when he was a child on another moon, and he was proud of the world he formed out of them; a benevolent god to tin robots and little plastic tigers, Bokuto finds proper affinity with the planes most of all, picking one up between his fingers and aiming a thin little wing at Kuroo.

“And why would I laugh at a place like this?” Bokuto asks right back, plainly but always lacking in condescension. He pays a visit to the semi-dead plants by the doorway, the mini-fridge stocked with soft drinks, creamer for coffee, and a leftover bentou box that Kai made him the other day for an overnight patrol. “You'll never miss a thing like this,” Bokuto continues. “Might as well touch the sky itself.” Hands graze the string of lights above them when he says this, like the touch alone could make the townhouse grow another ten stories.

Kuroo scoffs. “Sure, I guess.” He sits back down on his bed, ready to pass out then and there. He holds up his first aid kit instead. “Now get here, so I can treat that bite of yours,” he tells Bokuto with a wag of the handle, a laugh under his breath. “I broke through the skin, didn't I? I felt it on my teeth.”

“Ah, I mean, I’ve had worse.” Bokuto rolls his eyes. He edges over to Kuroo anyway, rolling the sleeve up on his jacket. “Still—ah,” he says with the slightest wince when Kuroo applies the disinfectant. “I can't believe you'd have the nerve to bite an old friend.”

Kuroo takes in the way he says the last part, that hesitance, and pretends not to notice. “What can I say?” he just shrugs out instead, pressing his thumbs into the skin of Bokuto’s forearm, if not in the slightest revenge. “I can bring as much order as I can to this place, but at the end of the day, we’re still in the wild, aren’t we? I'd be an idiot, to let my guard down.”

Bokuto looks back at him, arm still bare and outstretched. Kuroo watches the way his hand unfurls at the contact, not a twitch but an opening of the gates, and Kuroo swallows down anything he'd be apt to call unease.

“Guess we've both been out here a while, huh?” Bokuto asks after a few beats of silence, and Kuroo just presses the gauze over him.

“Yeah,” Kuroo tells him, hushed. “How time flies, and all that.”

“Do you even remember the first day I came to the moonscape? I was a disaster.”

“Hardly,” Kuroo teases. Bokuto sighs in between his teeth, smile wide, unaware of the lie.

(Because the truth of the matter was well, Kuroo remembered plenty.)

It had been a regular day, the evening Bokuto Koutarou crashed into the moonscape. Get up, get Kenma for deliveries, make the deliveries, and go home: but the thing was, Kuroo hadn't gone home that day—at least, not right away. He had stolen one of Nekomata’s old mopeds for a test run instead, just the slightest bit rebellious, restless, maybe, and itching to get out onto the road. Every once in awhile, he’d been a fan of just getting his bike and testing the outer limits, of grinding the clay under his wheels and feeling the bob of a slightly-loose helmet. Getting out of the city was no small freedom for someone at sixteen, and Kuroo often tried seeing how far it’d take him to get to the morganite canyons.

The sky had painted a warmth that day, a bright and frothy champagne that cut you down in drunkenness the longer you lingered. That was then when Kuroo watched the vessel fall from the clouds, not the first by a long shot, but certainly the closest he'd ever been to one.

He remembers stopping too short either way, the only words he could mutter being “oh, shit” with his foot going back on the pedal. He had expected to find nothing but char and ruin from there, a sight he might’ve have to look away from altogether, but under the burning cockpit, a cruiser's clipped wings, emerged a miracle.

Bokuto fell from the sky that day, soot on his face and helmet cracked.

(Because the boy had always known a thing or two about stealing ships, and this was no exception. Kuroo would later learn that he’d started as young as six.)

“Hey, do you know anything about becoming one of those so-called delivery boys?”

This was was the first thing Bokuto had ever said to him, and that had been that. Kuroo shakes himself from the memory before it’s too late, and Bokuto waits, still standing before him. Audacious, Kuroo fills the silence with a touch instead, two thumbs sliding down to squeeze a strong and open palm. Bokuto doesn’t recoil, never has when Kuroo was the one to offer the shake of a hand, but this wasn’t a shake of the hand—at once, Kuroo feels something bubble in him, a nag and a disruption of flow, the pressing matter that he’s probably known this before, and lets the grip fall away. We were just kids, then. Bokuto steps closer nonetheless, heels kicking up under him to refute.

“You know, leaving that day, that was probably—not my best,” Bokuto starts, always quite the talker but never quite good with words.

Kuroo shakes his head, and the motions of it hang like the worst sort of momentum. Up above, new ships launch past the stratosphere, never to be seen again.

“No need to get into that. It was a long time ago.”

Bokuto stiffens up from there, pulled back from a sort of evil Kuroo would like to call dejection. He breathes in instead, paces around the rooftop with the rest of the moonscape in his care, and rises with the incoming night. “Show me the city, then,” Bokuto insists with a change of subject, but never the type to feign or malign; it just never takes him long to find a new good in things, to get back up again, and Kuroo can only be pulled by the notion of it. Like wind behind your ears. From there, Bokuto insists on taking the fire escapes, a quick shuffle up the street, and what’s done is done.

 

/

 

Bokuto hangs on, arms around Kuroo’s waist, when they tear through the streets on a favorite motorcycle.

“So—you really won't let anyone drive that motorcycle of yours?” Bokuto dares to ask past the rush.

“You're correct.”

“Not even me?”

“Definitely not you!” Kuroo revs on the gas, pops the front wheel up the ramp and onto the main road; he’s tempted to make it past the city limits this way, because it’d be nice to show Bokuto the open air, the near-clear horizon with nothing but gem-crusted canyons and the hangars along the highline—but he had a city to take care of, roads to patrol, people to oversee, and it’d be terribly irresponsible to leave on the spot. It is with the most tact that he disguises his daily duties as sightseeing adventures, but Bokuto doesn’t seem to care much in the first place—peering over evicted flat balconies and wandering through the terrace gardens, he just throws his hands up, proclaims the moonscape his absolutely favorite moon in the universe, and cheers on with all the locals.

“Hey,” Bokuto calls, still finding Kuroo anyway. By this point, they had made it to the moonscape’s famous amphitheatre, a little coliseum with hanging curtains off the open windows and the decaying frontage. Kuroo turns, alert; he’d wanted to stay for at least a bit of this bunraku show to spy, because he believed that visiting puppetmaster Oikawa Tooru was responsible for embezzling a ludicrous amount of money from a neighboring moon called Datekou, but he’d hardly attended to Bokuto all night, and it was only fair, to listen this time. Under the noise of an anxious crowd (“because Oikawa Tooru’s shows were both frightening and oh so intoxicating!” one spectator yells), Bokuto peers up, serious as a puffed chest will allow.

“Would you mind taking me somewhere?” Bokuto asks.

He hadn’t asked to go to anywhere specific for the last three hours, so Kuroo can’t help but nod, a relenting “sure” as his answer. They leave the show unwatched not long after that, bounding down stairs and past the folk of the night, their insistences to their beloved captain that even he needed a break sometimes; far from such things, Bokuto stops short at the mouth of the exit, bumping shoulders with a horde of friends in gaudy play masks. He simmers, open and determined about it.

“It’s just that I remembered something,” Bokuto says, turning.

“Yeah?” Kuroo asks, still coming down the stairs and putting a few coins into the donation box at the door. “Have some place you want to see?”

“No, it’s not that.”

“Then?”

“I remembered I was mad at you.”

“Mad at me?” Kuroo lets himself frown, more curious than anything else. “Even after I rescued you from the middle of nowhere?”

Bokuto shrugs. “I mean, it’s not—a serious mad, I guess.” His arms come up in maneuvering, as tangled as the words he’s trying to find. “But it’s the kind you sort of keep with you for a while, even if it’s at the very back of your head. I keep thinking about it. You. So, yeah, I’m mad.” He sticks himself to one of the crumbling walls of the amphitheatre, crosses his arms, and stares straight ahead at Kuroo.

“Okay,” Kuroo’s willing to play along. “About what, exactly?”

“The packages I sent you over the years.”

Ah. Not this again. Kuroo rolls his eyes. “For the millionth time, I never got any packages,” he tells Bokuto, hands open and insisting.

“But I sent them to you. Three every year, sometimes four!” Bokuto insists. “Maybe your delivery boys just aren’t doing their jobs—not everyone could be as good as us, you know?”

“Sure,” says Kuroo, not quite inclined to disbelieve; he just plops his helmet back on, beckons Bokuto to get his on, too, and sets the course for their next destination. Pointing out into some random point on the skyline, he says, “we can sort through every single undelivered package at the warehouse. It's not like you have anywhere to be, right?”

Bokuto rises to the challenge, crosses his arms under him, and makes his way back to Kuroo.

“Let's go, then!”

Kuroo can only oblige, even if it's mostly for his own amusement. The ride there is a drawling one, right on the verge of conking out altogether from that blasted engine again; but everything holds up, and Bokuto even has the nerve to rise up, standing at the back of the bike. Kuroo does not scold him to sit down. At this, Bokuto says, just a few decibels high enough to be barely heard, “we're here, aren't we? Delivery boys again!”

For all the moonscape's great stadiums, the slideshow billboards, and rooftop sanctuaries, Kuroo rides right to the place where they'd made their start as friends. The warehouse sits right on the southern end of the city, tall and plain as warehouses tend to be.

By the rear before all the five-story shelves, all as tall and proud as the city’s most resilient walk-ups, they go to the one labeled CAPTAIN KUROO TETSUROU and make out all the little trinkets and unopened letters sent from across the galaxy.

His mother from another moon has sent him a simple greeting card, congratulating him on becoming captain, and another message that says, ‘it's been two years, Tetsurou, so when are you coming home? At least give Kenma-kun my warmest regards.’ Nekomata, in his usual post-retirement cheekiness, has sent him a coconut shell mask from some hot-as-hell vacation spot in the Solar System, insistent on its capabilities in curing even the most irrepressible bed head (something of which Kuroo struggled with since he was a child). There's other things too, like good luck charms from hometown girls, written noise complaints from the next moon over (god damn those Nohebi snakes), and petitions to make the moonscape an actual, recognized planet—but nothing from the likes of Bokuto; Bokuto, who wouldn't write a single letter back at his days as a delivery boy; Bokuto, who wouldn't have been able to stay still enough these past five years to write Kuroo anything; Bokuto, who would've probably preferred to package something up quick instead, address barely legible and—

Oh.

“Well, you win this one,” Kuroo admits out of the quiet, not bothering to dwell on the pressing in his chest. He takes Bokuto by the wrist instead, leads him down the long load between perfectly stacked shelves and to-be delivered parcels, and shakes his head along the way. “Do you remember?” he asks, purposely vague. “Where did you always end up when the address wasn't specific enough?”

“Uh…” Bokuto thinks for a moment. “Oh, yeah! The undelivered mail room, right? Isn't that place a disaster?”

Kuroo nods, looking over his shoulder. “And you know what else is a disaster?”

Bokuto frowns, before grinning, chin tipped up, in the utmost pride.

“My handwriting,” he answers like it’s a world wonder; at this, Kuroo can't help but laugh too, even if it's more a cackle than anything else.

“So,” Kuroo goes on, coming to a short stop at a locked door, offering a respectful nod at all the postcards glued onto the door, “when you combine your shitty handwriting, an address that's too general to go anywhere, and a bunch of inexperienced delivery boys, what do you get?”

A hand-on-wrist becomes a hand-in-hand, and Kuroo turns it into a firm shake, fleeting, when he jams his way right inside. There had been an order to things on the other shelves, a certain sort of architecture that Nekomata had designed so many years ago, but not when it came to the never sent room: that might as well have been the void, because that’s what it usually was, compared to the relative order of everything else. Kuroo goes in anyway, even if he might be weary of the too-dim lamp in the corner, the half-opened boxes filled with contraband and love letters never sent, Lev’s mangled clipboard on the wall that reads: go talk to Kuroo-san about this (dated one year ago). He stops himself at the shelves and the little potted ferns Inuoka’s kept alive until their real owners come back, and lets Bokuto have his way with the rest of the room.

“Here,” Bokuto heaves with the quietest reverence. Picking up five boxes out of the mess, all of them with addresses too smudged or too illegible to read, he shakes his head when he realizes, “this isn’t all of them.”

“Hey, but, you win,” Kuroo relents again, sticking his hands in his pockets. “Everything good, now?”

“No,” says Bokuto, when he places the boxes side by side on the ground, sitting down with criss-crossed legs. “I think it’s because I guess I’m not actually mad at you. I’m...I don’t know.” He throws his hands up in the air. “Bah! Words!”

Kuroo nods, sitting down across from him. “I get it, maybe.”

“Yeah?”

“I guess,” comes the sigh, and Kuroo traces a finger against the edge of a poorly-wrapped gift box. “Words and all that.” At once, Kuroo lets the hand linger, palm over the top of the box; he blinks once, darkening, and he wonders if five years since has made the memory nothing but a fever dream. He sincerely hopes that they might be talking about the same thing, because it would be terribly, terribly embarrassing if they weren't—but Bokuto bobs his head up, slow and understanding and solemn, like they might be. He smiles, really at a loss for words, and Kuroo’s not sure whether or not to open his boxes.

Indiscretions, to be blunt, had been common in the never sent room. It was a rite of passage to least kiss someone in here, or at least say you did, and it had been the sort of thing to fuel the most common sort of rumors amongst the delivery boys. Kuroo had managed to avoid its pitfalls during the entirety of his two-year tenure at the warehouse, and it was something he took casual pride in. This was not out of shame, or prudishness, but rather a keen sense of privacy over his affairs—and even if he had mostly none to speak of, he was always under the impression that he could do better than some unspectacular tryst in a room no larger than two broom closets put together.

But things hardly ever go the way we want them to, and this hadn't been an exception for Kuroo, or Bokuto, who hardly ever talked about the people he liked in the first place; they were similar in a way about this, but Bokuto’s silence had come from a place of fleeting fancy—one day, he might like a girl with a heart shaped face at the corner, another day, a tenor at the men’s galactic chorus; it just wasn't very worth it, to ask him about these sorts of things, because Bokuto just wasn't very good at having an apple of his eye.

Kuroo thinks this might be the case even now, fingers hooked under the space where two box flaps don't quite close. Because it would be a disaster, to hope. Because this was Bokuto Koutarou they were talking about, and he'd be sooner to leave on a stolen ship than stay too long in one place.

“Here we go.”

Kuroo digs down and forces the boxes open one by one, anyway. They’re all kitschy little trinkets, not worth much by any sort of monetary standard, but he appreciates them like contraband when Bokuto tells his stories about them, like how he got the leopard statue bookend from some haunted shrine in the seventh quadrant, or how brass compasses were super popular amongst Owl employees three years ago.

“Oh, yeah, that one—”

Of all the items, random at the core but well-meant like beat-up baseballs and ill-tuned music boxes, Kuroo thinks he might like the smallest one the best. He pinches a ceramic black cat in between his fingers, realizes how he's never had one for his collection, and peers up to watch Bokuto smile.

“I got it ‘cause it kinda looks like you,” he says, and Kuroo just swats an empty box back in rebuttal. He presses it into the pocket for safekeeping, and they delve into silence again. Peering around the room, Kuroo just stares up at Lev’s chicken scratch notes on the clipboard once more. He can only laugh, when he thinks of that ridiculous chocolate ganache cake in return, and the scribbled writing on top of it: HAPPY ANNIVERSARY, KUROO-SAN!

“What's so funny, now?” Bokuto asks, ready to start himself. “Don't like any of my gifts?”

Kuroo shakes his head, taking a deep breath. “No,” he answers, still in a fit. “It's really not that. It's just, my kouhai just got me this cake yesterday, you know, for my graduation anniversary or something, and I was really sort of miserable about eating it, but…” He shakes his head, trailing off. “No, I can't tell you. I'm already too mortified as it is.”

“No.” Bokuto looks on, tilting his head to the side, a flash of recognition. “Tell me.”

“I’m telling you, it’s really stupid.” Kuroo keeps on, resilient enough, before Bokuto comes up close, bent over the criss-cross. He gulps down something thick. “I mean,” Kuroo lets himself start, “one day, we’re planning on running this place together, and then we’re in here, and I'm thinking, how the hell did I ever meet someone like you?” Kuroo begins to laugh again, but it's a minor and sad little sort, the type to make someone wince instead of grin along. “And then the next day,” he says, biting down on the inside of his cheek, “it’s our last day as delivery boys, and I'm wondering if I'll remember that day for a long time. And. Well, you know the rest.”

Bokuto wilts rather visibly, shoulders down, eyes to the ground. “I know. I wanted to stay, but—”

“You were never meant to stay,” Kuroo offers, getting up and gathering Bokuto’s trinkets in an empty knapsack. “Imagine us trying to lead this place together? We wouldn't even have a moonscape to speak of.”

“I should've said a better goodbye, at least.”

Kuroo scoffs, swallowing down the last of his laughs. “Now, don't get so sentimental on me,” he says to brush him off, about to leave the room; but this doesn't stop Bokuto from reaching over, hand latched around an ankle. Kuroo closes his eyes for a moment, shaking his head, before peering over a shoulder.

“Kuroo.”

The call of his name, not a challenge, or a call to race, makes the tip of his ears numb. Too quiet. “What did I tell you?” Kuroo forges on. “We were just kids then. Things change. So get off the floor, why won't you?” He turns around, offering a hand when Bokuto slides his off his ankle, lets the grip come around his palm—and despite everything, the seasons that change, the planets that rotate, and the stars that swell and grow only to wane, he realizes how light it is to bring Bokuto back up again.

“I'm up,” Bokuto says nonsensically.

“You are,” Kuroo nods along, feeling the heat prickle his face like newly formed freckles. The light in the corner flickers into brightness before dimming again, and Bokuto’s face changes along with it; dipped down, then up, blinking, then not, he settles for staring at Kuroo head on, pressing his hands on either side of him. He squeezes, thumbs scrunching up already-rolled sleeves, and Kuroo runs his touch up to Bokuto’s shoulders in return. It is a gentle knock, the way Bokuto pushes him up against the door, and Kuroo fakes a sigh like something hurts. He tips his chin up, half-expecting Bokuto to take a jumpsuit zipper into his hands and to drag down again, just like before in their case of a wild and fleeting youth, but he doesn't—swallowing, he keeps still, their toes at battle, and presses his head to Kuroo’s shoulder.

“I just realized something else,” Bokuto says. Kuroo feels him struggle with a starchy collar by his nape. “About...the things that stay with you, I guess. What might be the word for that?”

“Lingering, maybe,” Kuroo answers a little too quickly.

“Well, it's about that, then.” Bokuto stirs, but just a bit. He seems too sure to fidget. “I just—I just don't think it's about being mad, or thinking about things too hard. If something stays with you, it stays with you, and there's nothing you can really do about it.”

Kuroo comes between a frown and a smile he can't shake, because only Bokuto would have the audacity to say something like that. “Yeah?” he answers, not quite a refusal, but an urge to keep going, and Bokuto raises himself from Kuroo’s care.

“Yeah. Like, that time you beat me in a foot race to the hangar that one time, or how you let me have your extra yakiniku during dinner. Or how we stayed here that night. Or—well. Just a lot of things.” Bokuto smiles, true and strong with half a laugh. “Things stay with me, if they mean enough.”

Kuroo stares back, mouthing the words. Things stay with me. He wonders why Bokuto lets things come so readily, with so little care but not careless, like a crash landing for good reason. ‘You don't know how to hesitate for long, do you?’ Kuroo wants to ask, when he's the one to hover towards him in answer, noses terribly close to mashing together, the rest of them just past the point of blatant. Bokuto pushes Kuroo back against the door when he tries to get at him, arm wrung around his back, and nearly beats him to whatever they were always trying to beat each other at. There’s a warfare in their every move, from the little glares in the peripheral, the knocking knees, the held hands. Just do it already. Bokuto obliges and lips almost close in, a charge by two great legionaries, before parting the next moment. Bokuto breathes in, sharp. Kuroo gnashes his teeth in exhalation.

“Did you hear that?” Bokuto asks, still close. He presses an ear to the door while Kuroo shakes his head, trying to catch his breath. He claws his hands off Bokuto’s racing jacket, faux-silk fibers caught under his fingernails.

“It’s nothing,” Kuroo composes himself enough to say. “The delivery boys are probably just done for the day.” He takes that back when he hears what Bokuto might be talking about; a boom sounds, low and thunderous and just a bit creaking like a howl, and the floor vibrates under them in tremors. “Shit,” Kuroo revises, when he realizes that whole shelves are probably falling outside the room; he reckons thieves, or a few delivery boys too happy off the hard cider.

Bokuto parts altogether, grabbing whatever he can find to arm themselves. Breaking the heads off two push brooms, he gives one of them to Kuroo, and nods to him in a count: one, two, three.

The door is no match for either of them. Outside, Haiba Lev is battling what looks like a giant bat, all fast and screaming swoops to the ceiling. After a few futile shots with various unpackaged wares, Lev launches a decorative plate from the ground like a discus, right into the chest of some great beast. It cries for battle, sparks, before plunging to the ground, and Lev pays no mind to the carnage of it; he just lights up at the sight of Kuroo, eyes bright because maybe, just maybe, his senpai had seen.

Behind him, the warehouse is in disarray, toppled shelves upon toppled shelves, and boxes rest on their sides all torn and dented.

“Kuroo-san!” Lev runs over to them, as bright as ever. “I thought you might've been here!”

“What happened?” Kuroo asks, appropriately cotton-mouthed. He imagines the million and one notices he'll have to write up tomorrow, all apologies for the delay in deliveries and mangled packages.

“Oh, well, I'm not sure, really,” Lev answers. “I asked Kenma-san about your most current whereabouts, and his cameras showed the warehouse, and before you know it, I was being attacked.” He says the last part with great gusto.

Bokuto pushes past Kuroo to get a look at the mangled fighter, an android by the avian sort, and certainly not a bat. Kuroo makes out a big face, wide and curious eyes, still alive, and knows instantly. An owl. It springs back to life for a moment (all of them do, down the wreckage, when they sense their captain is close by), before perishing before him. Lev pulls Bokuto back last second, and goes to get a fire extinguisher when it goes up in flames. The eyes stay wide and glossy. Kuroo kicks them in until blind.

He makes out six in total, all the size of grown men. Soldiers. “You're telling me that you took down all of these?” Kuroo asks. “Why didn't you ask for help?”

Lev shrinks noticeably. “Ah, well,” he starts, pressing a hand at the back of his head. “I mean, I heard you guys talking in the never sent room, and there wasn't any talking—so I, uh, figured, you know—”

“Oh, no,” Kuroo says, mortified. “Nothing—” he looks over to Bokuto, who's equally agape, “nothing happened. You could've just—”

Lev waves his hands in front of him. “No, no, it's all right, Kuroo-san, you work too hard! Sometimes, you have to keep your systems flowing, too, and—”

“I'm going to make sure you get all the late night delivery routes, you little—”

“Hey, now!” Bokuto interrupts, getting in between them. Kuroo relents, and Lev’s face is still supremely red. “What matters is that we all have our health. And that we know.”

Kuroo straightens up. “Know what?”

“That they're after me!” Bokuto exclaims a bit too casually, lifting up the head of an android and revealing the all too common Owl Industries logo on the back of it. “We had a bunch of these flying on the ship we were testing before we got into trouble. They must've found their way here to me!”

“They found you?” Kuroo asks. “Doesn't that mean more could come your way?”

Bokuto shrugs. “I guess. I really didn't think they'd find me, though.”

“We need to go talk to Akaashi, then.”

Lev perks up. “Oh! Actually, I came here to find you because of that!”

“What?”

“Well, there was an emergency at Kenma-san’s house, and I was told to come get you right away. They're probably still waiting, and so you can talk to Akaashi-san then!”

“And why didn't you mention this first?” asks Kuroo, already pacing back up to the exit. “He could be dead by now, if we're dealing with this sort of shit.”

“Well, I know he's not dead!” Lev insists. He and Bokuto keep up down the path and out the warehouse, back to Kuroo’s motorcycle and an obviously stolen pick-up truck from poor Yaku.

“Yeah? And how do you know that?”

“Oh, please trust me, Kuroo-san! When have I ever done you wrong?”

With a sigh, Kuroo does not acknowledge Lev with any sort of answer. Fine, he thinks, when he climbs back onto his motorcycle and exchanges wearied glances with Bokuto along the way; he, in turn, goes to sit shotgun next to Lev in the truck, smirking the whole way from an open passenger’s window.

Bird of prey, you are. Kuroo smiles back, if not in light mourning, because they'd have to finish their business some other time. “Let's go,” he says more to him than anyone else, ever the tease, and sets off first on the road.

 

/

 

Kozume Kenma had not died in a blaze of glory.

This is apparent to Kuroo when his best friend shows up to his door with a cake, lit with the most unnecessary candles, and the sort of look on his face that could only mean, ‘kill me anyway.’ What follows next is something Kuroo describes as guerilla party tactics—the flickering of overhead lights, Tora jumping out from behind the shoji door, the clamoring to say HAPPY ANNIVERSARY. Fukunaga shows up with sparklers and the quiet insistence to light them all for the rest of the team, and Yaku and Shibayama show up with single servings of cherry cola and colored bendy straws.

Lev smiles, winks at Kenma for keeping all of this a secret, and ushers Kuroo inside. “Kuroo-san thought you died,” hejust has to say, and Kenma nods because he already knows.

“The camera at the warehouse detected an unusual amount of motion,” he states. “I saw the droids from the screen, and Akaashi did, too.”

Lev frowns. “Oh, but we spent all evening planning this.”

“We can have cake while we discuss,” Kenma says with an inkling of a frown. “But this is something Kuro needs to hear.”

“What is it now?” Kuroo asks.

Kenma sighs. “It's something anyone would miss, to be honest. Akaashi had to help me keep track.” Setting the cake down and not taking any for himself, he floats on over to the screen room instead, where Akaashi’s already set himself up with a notepad and the firm grip of a pencil. Bokuto sits down next to him, peering down at the numerous tally marks and other miscellaneous notes, stealing glances at Kuroo along the way.

“They're after Bokuto-san,” Akaashi puts bluntly, scribbling something else down. “After we lost them from our ship, the survivors must've tracked him down to the moonscape when they came to their senses.”

Kuroo goes up to the screens and catches them all over, roosting under park bridges and peeking out from trees; the creepiest part, Kuroo thinks, is how they're all staring straight at the camera like they might already know, peering and perfecting the time to strike.

“Are they trying to kill me?” Bokuto asks. “What are they doing? Biding their time?”

Akaashi shakes his head. “They don't want to kill him. They just mean to bring him back to the industries,” he explains, turning to Bokuto. “Bokuto-san, would you mind explaining?”

Bokuto shrugs, obviously peeved. “I mean, I don't really get it myself. I told them, I didn't need protection, but no one ever listens to me.”

“What he means to say,” Akaashi continues, “is that they're servants to Bokuto-san. Drones, droids, whatever the term—they’re landmines, essentially. Once they sense Bokuto-san is in danger, they'll destroy whatever they'll need to, to get him to safety. And it's not just the models you saw at the warehouse...unfortunately, I remember taking inventory of them, and there may be bigger ones lurking the moonscape as we speak.”

“Why aren't they coming after you, then?” Kuroo asks back to Akaashi. “You're with them too, aren't you?”

Akaashi shakes his head. “It's a lot easier for me to blend in. I may be Bokuto-san’s assistant, but I am no fifth son like he is. All eyes are on him, and I suspect they'll send reinforcements if he isn't back in due time.”

Kuroo frowns at this. “But you're not going to do that?”

“I believe Bokuto-san can make the decision himself, whether or not to go back,” Akaashi answers in the utmost diplomacy, nodding once at his captain. “And I trust that he'll do what needs to be done.”

With a hum, Kenma just looks over at Kuroo. “Kuro, I would prepare some damage reports ahead of time.” Bokuto perks up at this, but all in the worst way; eyes swell into a panic before falling half-shut and strained, but Kuroo holds steadfast, nodding back in full awareness. The most minor mishaps happened in the moonscape all the time, from brawls outside izakayas, the underground fist fights—there might be no telling how one of these owls might pick up all the city’s great commotion, and Kuroo just counts his blessings that people knew how to defend themselves on the moonscape.

“But what about the ones at the warehouse?” Kuroo remembers.

Akaashi shakes his head. “Faulty, perhaps. But we can't rule out the possibility that it probably picked up the tension in the area.” He looks up again, studying the two captains. “Did you two pick up on any trouble back at the warehouse? An argument?”

Kuroo glances over at Bokuto, wry dying into something serious when he doesn't return it.

Fists clenched and constantly caught in those roaring rapids of consciousness, Bokuto nods up, head held up high.

“I know what to do,” Bokuto says. He gulps down, shaking his head, leaving all notions of dejection behind. “I could leave.” Kuroo freezes at the suggestion. “I could get them to chase me elsewhere, and that'll be the end of that. So what if they catch me, huh? At least no one’ll get hurt here.”

Akaashi sighs. “Bokuto-san,” he says, “we ran away for a reason.”

“I know,” Bokuto says right back, trying to smile. “But I think I'd feel pretty bad if I got a whole moon blown up because of it. So what if they make me go back? Maybe I'll, uh, like it there this time around. The rest of my life with Owl Industries can't be so bad, right?”

“Don't exaggerate,” both Akaashi and Kuroo tell him at the same time, eyes rolled at different tempos. Akaashi goes on about how no security systems were any match for him anyway, while Lev breaks back in with Inuoka and round two with an ice cream cake and espresso shots for a somber crowd; hell, it's a full-on outrage when the other delivery boys clamor in with new music, an upswing made by electric guitar riffs and frantic sound, and Kuroo takes it like the overflow of some great river—let it flood, drown them in the meantime, because the delivery boys had the right idea.

 

“We can deal with this in the morning,” Kuroo declares, leaned over and right into Bokuto’s ear, feeling sixteen again, because sixteen year olds knew a thing or two about running on and smiling too wide, of sitting on overpass bridges with their levity on high. Let's join them, comes the jaunt, hands gripped, and Bokuto rises.

That night, the only cherry blossom tree on the moonscape blooms, and the boys at Kenma’s house unfold like the season’s petals; socks are thrown off and balled into the corner, legs outstretched on the floor; drinks are had with the intention of seconds and lights are strung up by haphazard hands; they even test their chops with their favorite urban legends, waving, flailing like branches by the table fan howl.

Kuroo even toasts Fukunaga at the end of it for his minimalist retelling of the slit-mouthed woman, made almost entirely by the most frightening shadow puppetry. Kenma’s gone to casually peruse an astrology book in the corner, with Akaashi sitting rather close to him and drawing out the constellations: “the libra system is really picturesque, if you've ever gone,” he says to the coordinator, and Kenma barely has the urge to rebuff him. Well, I guess I wouldn't mind finding out, he ends up saying back, and Kuroo serves the both of them a passing wink.

In the kitchen, Lev is pestering an officer, veteran Kai, about the merits of battling rogue automatons. (“Because I mean, that's gotta count for something, right?”) In the utmost wisdom, Kai shakes his head and keeps stern, even in the face of Lev’s constant enthusiasm—patience, he offers, surpasses all giant robot attacks, and Lev nearly trips over himself at the answer. Kuroo goes to catch him, in higher spirits than he might give himself credit for, and Lev just bounds back up.

“Bah, Kuroo-san, those owls have been watching the house all night,” he says with a peek out the window. “On telephone poles, the rooftops! It's giving me the itch to fight them again, don't you know?”

Kuroo leans against the refrigerator, taking note of the new planet magnets, and surmises that Kenma and Akaashi did have time to go to the observatory after all. “Well,” he answers, snapping back into attention. “They are a bit creepy, but I don't think it'd be wise to stir up trouble if they're just here to watch us. As long as we keep Bokuto happy, we might have a clean night on our hands.”

“Well, he didn't seem very happy when I saw him.”

“Oh, he'll come around,” Kuroo prods, more to convince himself, somewhat. “If you know him well enough.”

Lev shakes his head. “But I saw that look in his eye, Kuroo-san.” He tries imitating it, eyes wide and green. “And I might not know him as well, but I've heard all the stories about him in the warehouse. Never meant to be a delivery boy, never meant to stay on the moonscape, never meant to stay still.” He takes a deep breath, smile gnashing across his face. “I understand that. I like that.”

Kuroo smirks back. He doesn't blame Lev for what the others might call a first crush. “Well, loverboy, do you happen to know where he's gone, then?” he asks instead, peering out past the shoji doors and back to the empty screen room. Lev just replies with a shake of his head, back to normal. “He was mumbling about more cake, I think. Maybe getting some more for us?”

“Cake?” Kuroo scans the room once more, marking just about everyone else but Bokuto, and the realization sets in. Lev shuffles his feet on the ground, never meant to stay still, and Kuroo curses out loud. “Shit,” he swallows, bounding out the door. “Shit!” He goes to find his keys on the kotatsu where he left them last, knows they're missing when he hears the rumble of his bike engine take off down the road, and quickly asks Tora to borrow his. He bounds off from there, party unfinished, peace neverlasting with the likes Bokuto Koutarou, and lets the folklore find him at every press of the gas pedal:

never meant to be a delivery boy

never meant to stay on the moonscape

never meant to stay still—

And Bokuto lives up to it, never stopping, past all city points and towards the open lands.

 

 

/

 

 

 

“Kuroo, I want to challenge you.”

“To what?”

“A race. Right now.”

“Yeah? And why’s that?”

“I'm not sure you want me to answer that.”

“Go on. Try me.”

“If I win, I'm going to leave the moonscape, and you won't be able to stop me.”

(At this, Kuroo had laughed.)

 

 

“Sure, but don't count on me to go easy on you.”

 

 

/

 

 

Past the hangar and the promised flatlands, Kuroo picks up jewel dust on cloudy morganite slopes, tires nearly shot from the unmade roads and jagged little diamond hills. This was not a place Kuroo liked to be—it was much too pretty in its facets, covered with nothing but rose-colored stone—but here he was on the chase once more.

“Bokuto!”

Moon reflects an urgent pink on either side of the canyons, and Bokuto seethes over a shoulder when he sees that he hasn't lost Kuroo; he nearly misses the sharp curve when the other captain follows, right on his trail, and speeds up at the most perilous left lean, wheel side almost parallel to the road. Bokuto only straightens up, speeding up when the ground ends under him, the front of the bike kicking up like a rocket about to launch into space.

Kuroo lands on the other side after him, kicking acceleration into another gear, close enough to reach towards the back of his favorite bike. Overhead, meteorites race next to the shadowy reach of guardian birds, calling for a cease and desist by the way of full and hawk-like hoots—“damn it,” Kuroo mutters in return, before raising himself back up to Bokuto, one finger pointed up at the sky. “Call off those things, why don't you?”

Bokuto doesn't look back. “I don't know how!”

In a swoop as strong as the wind in the upper currents, one of them comes down, talons first and ready for blood; Kuroo barely swerves out of the way, nearly crashing into the canyon side in the process. “Bokuto!”

“Just let me go then!” he says, as if that could be an option. “Just—”

“No,” Kuroo yells back. “They respond to you! You're their captain! Call them off before they—” then comes another swoop, full of daggered feathers, “Call them off before they kill me, why don't you?”

Bokuto looks up, still riding on. Minor birds crash against forming the rocks, while the more agile sweep past for the hunt; one, large and white and haunting by yellowed eyes, comes to drop like a bomb on the moonscape, quick claws over Kuroo’s arm and ready to take him. Yanking upward, it does, talons digging into him, and he wonders if this might be payback for biting into Bokuto before.

Backwards, Kuroo goes, right off Tora’s bike; he watches it veer off into a crash off the cliff, splendid in the embers, and Bokuto stares back, horrified at seeing an old friend in the sky, away away away, and Kuroo, in flight, thinks of that day, what a horrible, no-good day—

(But one that must be remembered. It's their last race via retro wing cruisers, stolen right from the hangar on the outer limits. The moonscape is limitless by Kuroo’s eyes, a place of great possibility and uncarved roads, and he's in too good of a mood to count his losses for too long. You win this one. He looks to Bokuto in the aftermath, helmet thrown off, and they're the only ones on the dark side of the moon; but where one finds promise, the other finds a small and dingy box. Bokuto looks back at Kuroo this way, clouded, before breathing in deep and sunken. “I'm sorry,” he says, always honest, and Kuroo wishes he had seen it then.)

“Wait!” Bokuto stops his bike, kicking up dust in the drift. Up on the higher cliffs, the other owls all turn their attention, ever watching. An imperial bird remains at the canyon divide, suspended by the currents. Bokuto breathes in to gather the words.

“It's…” he trails off like he's forgotten how to speak. “Don't.” Mustering himself better, Bokuto comes off Kuroo’s bike and stamps his foot on the ground. “He's not my enemy,” he says up to Kuroo more than anyone else. “I think I just like to make trouble for him sometimes.”

Kuroo scoffs. The nerve of you. “I guess that's one way to put it,” he yells back, feeling the pinch in his arm.

“So why don't you let him go, then?”

“Wait. Shit—”

The drop from there is not a drastic one, probably no higher than two of the lowest-lying stories, and Kuroo has to count himself lucky, maybe, that Bokuto's always had faster-than-average reflexes. Arms out, already breaking into a sprint, he falls back just as Kuroo feels a claw open from its grip—what results is a tangle of limbs, the hope for no broken bones, and a lesson in muttering curses under their breaths. Bokuto just stays on the ground, a mess of groans, and Kuroo peels himself off him with the littlest urgency in the world.

"Bokuto," Kuroo calls, out of breath. "The next time you want them to let me go, don't say let him go."

Eyes closed, Bokuto can't help but laugh, hand sliding to cover his mouth. "Sorry. I caught you though, didn't I?" He peeks with one eye opened, and Kuroo just gets up to the sight of a smile. Reaching down to collect Bokuto off the ground, palm outstretched and partially forgiving, it takes a few moments for Bokuto to take it; from there, Kuroo marks the wilderness in his eyes, gleaming and ready to escape again.

Owls watch on overhead, in flight. Kuroo does not tighten his grip in return, but neither does he let go.

“Come on,” Kuroo nearly singsongs, keeping composure, because they weren’t the same people as they were at seventeen—back then, he might've lost his patience already, with threats to leave him here on the morganite canyons, because people skills could only go so far with someone like Bokuto. It was hard to have any fronts with him in the first place, but Kuroo thinks today might afford a different sort of honesty; kinder, but not forced, and hardly seen past cooler confines. Kuroo might liken it to the comfortable sort he was used to with Kenma, a childhood friend, or Sunday coffee runs with mentors like Nekomata, but—well. no, that probably wasn’t it, either: with the grip of fingers, a climb up the cliff sides and little gold foil deposits, Kuroo decides that this might be a different entity altogether.

“I just needed to clear my head, you know,” Bokuto finally admits, right from some mumbling edge of silence. Kuroo just scoffs at his claims, looking out to the rest of the moonscape, and the darker-than-dark side just past the horizon. “As much as I like parties, houses get too small, and I start overthinking things.”

Kuroo hums. “Like how this moon got too small for you, too?”

Bokuto stops walking. Dragging him on is like trying to push a planet itself. He will move on his own.

“Yeah,” he answers honestly in turn. “Something like that.” Kuroo does not take any offense with this, and they walk on until they reach the top.

Over the rest of the moonscape, Kuroo breathes in deep and chilled and just a bit achy. He rolls his shoulder a few times before realizing that damned bird probably pulled a muscle or two, and their cliffside waltz ends indefinitely when Bokuto realizes, “oh, wait, you’re bleeding, Kuroo.” He runs up to him on the gravel, pulls Kuroo by a forearm, and lets himself stay close behind.

“I’m fine. It’s not that bad.”

At this, Bokuto just yanks Kuroo to sit down, right at the edge with legs dangling, and keeps the captain in his care. “I’ll just. Um.” Bokuto pauses when he realizes he’s got nothing to treat Kuroo with; he even starts yanking his jacket off when he mumbles something about things he’s seen in movies—but Kuroo stops him and insists, “really, there’s no use ruining it,” with peer down at the ravine. That's when he spots the peculiar flag hanging from the remains of Tora’s bike, still streaming with its GO GO MOONSCAPE x DIAMOND PLANET tagline in bold.

When he beckons, Bokuto follows his line of vision and knows immediately. “Ah, perfect,” he starts, hastily going down the cliffside, but Kuroo pulls him back at the last minute.

“Listen. How about you think about this first?” Kuroo says. “No use scaling back down and cracking your head open when you slip.” At this, Bokuto refutes Kuroo altogether, swatting a hand away and continuing down. “Or running away,” he adds, for good measure.

Voice raised and (maybe not so) surprisingly solid, Bokuto assures, “I'll make it down in no time. Look! Halfway already.” He finds solid footing between two rocks, holding up a peace sign, a poster boy for nothing in particular. “And I’m not going to!”

“Going to what?”

“Run away.”

“Then use one of your owl things to get it,” Kuroo nods toward the few automatons still staring back across the hills, forced into the worst glower when they tilt their heads at him like prey. “They've got to be more useful than looking at me like food.”

Bokuto shrugs, stopping again. “They probably can't help it,” he determines.

“Yeah? And why’s that?”

“I don't know how to put it,” Bokuto answers. “I mean, you do this thing, I guess. And it's not all the time, because sometimes, when I'm around you, I wonder if you even care—”

“I do!” Kuroo yells back, voice ending in echo.

“Oh, no, I know you do, in that weird gangly Kuroo-way. Weh heh heh heh, and all,” he says like he's some kind of witch, wiggling his fingers, and Kuroo thinks he might understand. “But I mean...there's something else,” Bokuto continues, eyes aglow again. “Like. When I know you really want to win something. When you really just...want something. It's, well, I don't know. A pressure, I think.” He raises himself up, shaking off something Kuroo can't place. “Yeah, that!” He makes it down another shelf of the terrace face. “It always gives me the shivers!”

When Kuroo feels one crawl up his system too, he resigns himself to letting Bokuto trail off. He leans over his bad arm, watches him run along the bottom of the canyon, unafraid of the flames of a motorcycle wreckage. A flag flies in the wind, reclaimed, before an owl comes down to take it. “Hey!” Bokuto shouts in a new sprint, while Kuroo counts its trajectory; he promptly stops when the bird comes bearing a gift, a makeshift bandage, and offers the nod of his head instead. He brushes off the dirt, realizes the difficulty of wrapping his own injuries with one hand free, and decides to be selfish for once: he's the whole reason I'm out here anyway, he supposes, so I’ll let him wrap it up. Kuroo waits this way, daring to be bratty about things, and watches Bokuto master the morganite hills in the meantime.

He makes it back up in just the tiniest sweat, a smile peeking up over the cliffside edge. Kuroo pulls him up, muttering, “idiot,” when he can’t help but laugh too, and the two of them let themselves peer out into the night. It never got too dark here, even as the hours waned on, because there was always this funny colored haze about the universe, littered with stars and the galaxies trying to form above them. It made for a dim but hopeful light, the sort one could trace unfounded constellations with.

Kuroo raises an arm to do just that, ignoring the pain shooting up his shoulder in the meanwhile, and Bokuto sets out to treat him when he remembers the blood on his sleeve. “Sorry,” he says again out of nowhere, like he's afraid of what Kuroo might think of him now; but Kuroo just lets it all be, chalks all their little bites and bruises and scars to one big happy accident. I found you in the clouds, and we got each other into trouble. He thinks there might be something melodious about that, like a kid’s favorite story, and certainly not the star-crossed kind. To the tune of potential legends, he leans back when Bokuto wraps the ribbon around him, tightly bound but always meant well.

“So,” Kuroo starts, not looking Bokuto in the eye. “Nevermind.” He thinks there might be something more intimate about sitting together here than any closet encounter they'd had before, and sentimentality was something he'd usually try to avoid; but because it couldn't be avoided, and Kuroo might be, in short, a sucker, he presses on anyway. “Actually,” he convinces himself to keep going, letting Bokuto tie a double knot over his forearm. “I mean, what were you even doing these past five years?”

Bokuto looks up from his handiwork. “I ran away from the moonscape,” he starts. “That part you know. And I was, I dunno, flying for a while. Went to other moons and planets. Smuggled stuff. Solved crimes. I guess the usual,” he says, not fronting with any sort of fake modesty. He really does shrug it off like exploring the galaxy might be nothing, and Kuroo feels like laughing at his lack of limits.

“At some point, my family managed to find me. And it wasn't too far from here, actually. Some outpost a few light years away,” Bokuto continues, keeping Kuroo’s arm in his lap. Hands come together in the hold. “They were really mad at me, I think. You couldn't even conquer a goddamned moon?” comes the mimic, and Bokuto finds the will to laugh about it. “That got me sort of down. I really did think I might rule here one day, but you had to get in the way.”

Kuroo scoffs again. “What?” he asks. “You want it? Take it all,” he jokes, waving his hand out to the horizon. He even shuts himself up with a bite of his bottom lip, letting Bokuto finish his story.

“Nah. It's all yours,” Bokuto answers with a shake of his head. “Whatever you've been doing works for this place, and you know, that's what I even told the rest of them.”

“You talked about me?”

“You should meet my friend, Kuroo! He's got funny hair but a good head on his shoulders.”

“Gross,” Kuroo mutters back.

“But anyway. I don't know. After a while, I just sort of fell into testing the new stuff Owl Industries was building, I guess, because no one else really wanted to. Some of the new ships were sort of dangerous, they said, but I didn't really worry about that.” Bokuto looks back out over the canyon, waving at a few of his birds. “So I flew as much as possible. Didn't think about anything. After a while, I got sort of good at it, and I got Akaashi as my partner.”

Kuroo peers up. “What? Have we got ourselves a love story here now?” he asks back, joking. Bokuto shakes his head, letting the motions dissipate into nothing when he meets Kuroo in the eye.

“No, nothing like that.” Bokuto smiles. “It really wasn't all bad, though. We went to a lot of fun places, and it was nice when the crew back at the station had movie nights and stuff.”

“But,” Kuroo interrupts. “There's always a but.”

“It's just, well,” Bokuto doesn't finish at first, stewing in his words, “it's not something that makes you say, ‘hey! I know that feeling’ right away. You get comfy at first, with your shiny new ships and the friends you make, and there's nothing wrong about them, but…” From here, Bokuto laughs over the lean, right into the heart of his palm. “But then it’s like—wait. Because you start to remember that you used to be hungry about stuff, and that your stomach’s been real empty lately. So I left after that.”

Kuroo glances over, thinking of ways to understand, until he thinks he might already. You are not selfish, nor a heart on a tear-stained sleeve. Bokuto Koutarou had come in wearing the core of a star like skin, and a drive to fold into something bigger and better. Even now, he thinks not to come up with his usual jokes and breezy ways of momentary reprieve, because there was nothing to be done about a boy with infinite drive. He comes up with his own theories instead, observes him with a cool and knowing eye, feels them burn at the corners when he tries to make it into law: an inward facing star will burn out if he stays still for too long.

(So you must help him escape the atmosphere.)

But these are the things Kuroo cannot bring himself to do. He thinks of delivered trinkets finally home, the hand held in his lap, the land under dangling feet. Because Akaashi had gotten along with Kenma well enough here, hadn’t he? He thinks of how well Bokuto would get along with Tora and Yaku and Lev too, all coming together under a team he’d built in the years since staying on this moon. Oh, those greedy little imaginings. Oh, the times he’d imagined Bokuto might come back in the first place, and how they might sit here, just like this.

“Bokuto,” comes the call, out of silence and a hesitance to keep things unsaid (but neither one of them was very good with unsaid).

“We should go, right?” Bokuto asks. “Before I get the wrong idea.”

“The wrong idea about what?”

“Whether or not you want to kiss me.”

The nerve of you. Kuroo swoops in, shoulder to lowered shoulder, tipping his head towards the surface of a clean cheek. “And you?” he asks against an ear, hand innocently skimming along Bokuto’s thigh in the hold, proximity a non-issue again. “Like you don’t want to?”

Bokuto turns, but barely, because even the littlest motions might result in something catastrophic; but Kuroo battens down the hatches either way, eyes closed but not shut clenched, a goner from some instinct of cool equidistance. In turn, Bokuto lets a laugh die on a humming mouth, the sound of it exchanged for the open gulf of pressed bold lips.

“Shit.”

“I know—”

Kuroo leans in too, landings fraught with the urge to separate and find better ones, better ways to kiss the hell out of him, and ends, most magnificently, in a mutual want: he just yanks Bokuto closer to him by the fistful of a jacket lapel, and the two of them settle in to find each other again, motionless than not, all looking than blind with eyes so nearly shut. That’s when Kuroo feels some strange and stupid little urge to ask, have there been others? other moons more amazing than mine? before realizing, quite quickly, that such things could never, ever matter.

Bokuto, Kuroo wants to say. Go to battle with me, instead.

 

 

/

 

 

There was a certain way the air hung afterwards. Those first two times, he had grasped it by a wavering hand and let it die, effortless, on the wind.

He had been thirteen at the time of his first kiss, lost to a lovely shop girl back on another moon, mostly forgettable in terms of specifics but good enough for the vaguest of life milestones. Kuroo remembered the way her lips tasted like cherry, and the three distinct moles right under her left eye, and how she’d promised to send him the telegraph the next day (she never did).

His second at sixteen belonged to the likes of bunraku star Oikawa Tooru, all casual and mostly a challenge over whether moonscape boys really did kiss like absolute garbage. Kuroo had felt particularly patriotic that day, especially because he’d been promoted to co-head delivery boy, and he was really beginning to feel that this might be home. So, no, we do not all kiss like garbage. (It was also the day where they both learned they had some work to do, but as Oikawa put it, “definitely not with you.”)

There had been a certain way the air hung afterwards both times after each kiss. Kuroo could not tell if it had to do with a rush of hormones or endorphins or adrenaline or what have you. It never lasted very long, but Kuroo felt it everywhere, like nerves racing to the top and leaning too far over the edge; veins that had frozen like winter rivers regained their currents, and breathing through his nose did not feel like a herculean effort. All that unwieldy tension of being with someone, he’d found, could be fixed with one kiss. Open the floodgates. Make or break.

It had been break, most times, and Kuroo could not be more satisfied. Make often made for muddled, untimely little pairings, and he didn’t feel like following the harrowing tales of heartbreak from the warehouse floor. (“Ah, so-and-so broke up with me today.” “Oh, really? I’m sorry, man.”) No thank you, Kuroo had always decided for himself upon hearing their horror stories. No thank you, he’d repeated often after that, when Bokuto Koutarou came crashing into his life with a smile that could stop whole planets from imploding.

No thank you. It is with wind in his hair and the block of a broad back that Kuroo’s ended up here, anyway. A motorcycle fights for its life on the morganite terrain, and another captain drives his precious bike. The night air, cool and crisp and everything he might need post-kiss, but it gives him no comfort. The floodgates do not open. The exhale’s gone useless.

Overhead, with night wearing down to pre-morning, the owls screech but don’t dive, flying on. Bokuto stares up like he might want to join them.

“So you do let other people drive your bike!” Bokuto laughs, glancing over his shoulder.

“Quiet, or I’ll hop right off.”

In truth, he wouldn't go anywhere at this point. Kuroo had declared himself too tired to drive before leaving the canyons, and Bokuto was rearing to do some kind of driving anyway; so here he was, half-asleep in the lean, thinking about the matter of firsts and lasts and the hovering in-betweens. He thinks of that first kiss with the shop girl again, then Oikawa Tooru, then Bokuto, then Bokuto again (and again and again). He knows he shouldn't want to kiss him in new places, right here and right now, like the back of his neck, or a shoulder blade, or a bitten arm over the handlebar. He holds on tighter anyway, careful in his movements, when he feels himself fold into a familiar beat within the body.

A forever seems to pass them by from there, mostly from an insistence on taking the long way home. Bokuto races up the winding roads, challenging the birds above to keep up; he even waves when they do, and just threatens to drive faster to beat them. “You could slow down,” Kuroo even suggests, not really meaning it. In turn, Bokuto stomps a foot down on the pedal. Never ever, comes the answer, and they drive.

The city finally comes up on the horizon, washed in red by urgent scarlet billboards. Getting closer, Kuroo guesses it's about that damned diamond planet again, another needless bulletin, and makes out a message from Kenma instead. “Hold on,” he says with a tap on Bokuto’s shoulder, stopping to point up at the message. Kuro, come to the observatory, please, it says, and he just kisses the thought of his bed goodbye. He beckons for the next left turn instead, mustering himself for whatever problems might arise.

“What's wrong?” Bokuto asks along the way.

“Kenma’s hacked the billboards,” Kuroo answers, still staring back. He points to keep driving down the boulevard, right up the hill to the highest point on the moonscape. “He doesn't do that unless there's an emergency and he needs to reach me.”

“Got it,” says Bokuto, speeding up on the bike. “And you’re sure this isn't another surprise?”

“No,” Kuroo says. “I know him. There’s something wrong.”

The rest of the drive is silent. It's not long before they make it out of the heart of the city again, right to the opposite edge of town and the moonscape’s most secluded hillsides. At the highest point loomed the observatory, a place civilians hardly ever came to, because urban legend always insisted it was haunted. Kuroo liked the folklore of it. It had been a haven for anyone on Kuroo’s staff, one of the few private places a city could really afford, and he often likened it to the sports team clubrooms or the curbsides of convenience stores one might find on more suburban planets.

Kuroo remembers the enormity of the observatory by Bokuto’s reaction, the gawking and the bright eyes, and finds a second to see it too. A silo made completely out of stained glass, it was more cathedral than observatory, a great basilica for stars antares and spica and every cosmic body in between. Nekomata had even once told him, “ah, did you know that there’s enough glass here to represent all the stars in the galaxy?”

A romantic thought, Kuroo always supposed, but nothing more. It had also been a popular place to bring dates as of late, according to Lev, which was something Kuroo didn’t learn until the party back at Kenma’s house. In the spirit of things (and masking a sad attempt to soothe the unease under his skin), he skims along the edge of Bokuto’s hand without taking it.

Up at the top of the hill, Kenma is already waiting at the doorstep with Akaashi.

“Kuro,” Kenma says with a small frown, negligible but noticeable by the likes of Kuroo. “What took you so long?”

Kuroo shrugs. “We got caught up in the canyons. Miiight owe Tora a new bike.”

Akaashi frowns over at Bokuto. “What did you do this time, Bokuto-san?”

“Why are you blaming me!”

“All right, all right,” Kuroo claps his hand once, in an effort to keep the peace. “What’s going on?”

Kenma looks back to Akaashi, sighs abound, before going back to Kuroo. “I think we should talk about this inside,” he says, already turning back to the doorway.

 

 

/

 

 

Kuroo and Bokuto follow from there, watching Akaashi get situated by the screens the same way an organ player might before sermon; fully reverent to the stars, he bows his head to video footage of forming nebulae and the neighboring moons, finger pointed to one camera in particular. “I hacked a few satellites in the quadrant with Kozume’s help,” he says. Kuroo raises an eyebrow at this, mostly at Kenma, who promptly ignores him in turn.

“There was interference on the usual traffic cams,” Kenma continues, hovering next to Akaashi on the workbench. “Static.”

“Static’s normal, though,” Kuroo refutes.

Kenma shakes his head. “There was a lot of this time. I know the difference when I see it.”

Akaashi nods along, going back to his work. “So we came to the observatory to get some readings. I thought it had to do with that rogue diamond planet everyone was talking about.”

“So it did have something to do with diamond planets.” With a roll of his eyes, Kuroo’s one step away from just going home and calling it a day.

“It's really not that,” says Kenma. “Akaashi saw something else.”

“What?”

Akaashi goes back to looking. Fingers trace, expert but light in touch. “There are some shadows that aren't native to the surface of that planet,” he tells them. “It's very easy to miss, but if you look closer you'll see this.”

Kuroo makes out the jut of a winged cruiser, chrome and pristine. A bird of prey in hiding. “Owl Industries,” he says, because it always had to be them. “So they're coming with the diamond planet?”

Akaashi shakes his head. “I think they'll dismount from there when the time is right and arrive before the planet does. The automatons probably gave Bokuto-san away, and I don't think they’re willing to wait much longer to take him back.”

“Shit,” Kuroo sighs out, rubbing at his temple. “Fine,” he follows, even though it's not. “Fine. Just—how much time do we have left?”

“I'd say about twenty four hours, judging by their trajectory. It'd be faster, if they didn't insist on pouncing on us.” Akaashi frowns, possibly annoyed, but shakes it away with the wave of his head, staring up at his captain, instead. “What do you think we should do, Bokuto-san?”

At the question, Bokuto sucks in an inhale, forgetting to let it out, and shakes his head. He opens his mouth, saying nothing at first. “I—” he finally starts. “I've got to think about this—”

“Bokuto-san, wait—”

Kuroo’s the one to reach out towards him, catching a glimpse of tumult in passing. Bokuto shakes his head the whole way up the winding stairs, eyes glued up at a giant telescope and the domed glass ceiling, squinted in something he'd like to break, anyway. Swallowing hard, Kuroo just thinks to give him his space, at least a few minutes of it, and resolve the beat under his own bones. “Shit,” he mutters under his breath, incredulous, meandering off to the side. He thought he'd have more time at least, a month, maybe a couple more, until he'd have to say goodbye again.

Running hands along the stained glass, Kuroo distracts himself with the sights ahead. A morning’s blessings, finally here, make the observatory glow like a garden in daylight, while darker blue panels from glass floors above create an illusion of a tree’s spotted shade.

“So, have you given any thought about visiting the libra constellation one day?”

“Hm. Not really.”

Under it, Kuroo finds an additional peace with Kenma and Akaashi. He normally doesn’t like to speculate on the matter of love lives, the great unsolved mysteries of attraction and people sticking together like refrigerator magnets, but it was the sort of distraction he sorely welcomed, and it was nice to see his best friend find such easy companionship; caught unaware, Kenma even dares to sit down next to Akaashi on the workbench, head bowed to make sense of the control panel. Akaashi, in turn, speaks easy to him in explaining, quiet enough so only the two of them would get to keep their conversation. Kuroo sees the look on Akaashi’s face, the mouthed remark of “beautiful,” and how Kenma can only nod along, not caught in a smile but certainly close enough. He wipes it right off his face when Akaashi goes back to glance at him, burying his mouth in the safety of a high collar.

“Kuroo-san,” Akaashi calls over shortly after, and Kuroo comes out of his trance. “Who runs this observatory?”

“Oh, well,” Kuroo starts, “Shibayama comes in sometimes, when he's not shadowing Yaku. I don't think he really wants to stay here though.” From there, he thinks of the delivery boy with the black middle-part and generally nervous disposition, all determined to make a difference on the moonscape, and how antsy he's gotten, just dusting telescopes and old history books on the upper floors. (Because the truth of the matter was, not many people were equipped to handle running the observatory in the first place; it took an agile mind, organized, too, for the bookkeeping and the various star charts, and the most recent classes of delivery boys hadn't shown much interest in its operations.)

Akaashi raises his chin, a head on the verge of a nod. “Would you say there might be a vacancy, soon?”

Kuroo raises an eyebrow. “Yes, but those interested have to go through the delivery boy process first.”

“Well, I never said I wasn't interested,” Akaashi answers with a single blink. Kenma even perks up at this before settling, and Kuroo just takes himself off the wall.

“Oh?” Kuroo asks, meandering closer to the two of them. “And what about Owl Industries?”

“They’re going to force me to resign, that's for sure. They fire anyone who can't keep their fifth son under control.”

“And what about your captain? Wouldn't it be a shame to abandon him?”

It is with an expected deftness, the nerve, that Akaashi does not waver.

“It's not a matter of abandoning him. You and I both know he can handle himself just fine.” He pauses for a moment, cogs running in revision. “Well, even if it does take a little time.”

Kuroo smiles at the answer, thinks he might make an alright delivery boy after all, and gestures to his best friend to deal with the logistics; Kenma returns nothing but a cool nod, not a mark of indifference, but the homey insistence, comfortable, that things would be all right in the end. With the tiniest wave of his hand, he even ushers Kuroo away towards the stairs, all to join Akaashi again on the bench.

A small competition arises between them over a console board, a deliberation over whose fingers were faster in finding the most majestic galaxies on screen, and Kuroo can only predict a stalemate when he watches the digits fly. When their hands accidentally graze in one of their matches, Kenma lets it linger before withdrawing, shoots a glare up at Kuroo like, “oh, why don't you get going already?”

Akaashi, in turn, goes back to studying the stars on the screen with him, a quiet maestro on the hillside. He laughs, light as can be, and Kuroo wishes he could steal such levity for himself.

 

 

 

/

 

 

 

As for Bokuto, Kuroo finds him on the topmost floor of the observatory, sitting alone on a cushioned bench by the windows. The sunlight had always been strongest here, incriminating against all the little fine lines of worry, and neither one of them could be deemed innocent from it—Kuroo supposes this might be natural though, especially with an armada on the way and nowhere to hide about the matter. “Hey,” he just says, as if the coolness of it might render all things just fine, but Bokuto looks back, more glum than he’d like to see. Not fine.

“Hey,” Bokuto answers back.. He neglects to hold his sights on Kuroo for much longer after that, burying himself in a jacket sleeve. To remedy this, Kuroo sits down right next to him, keeping at a close distance.

“We’ve gotten ourselves into a little trouble, haven’t we?”

The other captain does not answer this at first.

“Bokuto.”

Bokuto shakes his head at the call. “But we don’t have to be.”

“Yeah?”

“I mean, because I’ve been thinking.” He traces the stained glass along the walls, enjambed glass and stardust glued together. “Didn’t they leave me alone the first time? Because they thought I’d settled here for good?”

Kuroo sinks, when he knows how the next few seconds will play out, the questions to be asked. The needling thoughts come back to the forefront from there, thoughts about staying and keeping him and having him here, and it’d be good—so, so good—because no doubt they’d make the moonscape theirs. They could sit at bunraku shows and fool around in all the broom closets they wanted, guzzle down cola atop the morganite hills; Kuroo even imagines getting Bokuto a motorcycle of his own, so they wouldn’t have to wreck anyone else’s, and the sort of races they’d run until their wheels burned off. Good—they could be good here, permanently tangled and permanently content, with roads already carved, ready to run and ruin by new asphalt coatings. Nevermind about those twenty-four hours. Nevermind about fleeting. They’d be together, rest of the universe be damned.

So agree, why don’t you, he even tells himself, when he knows Bokuto will only propose the impossible.

“Should I stay here for good?”

Kuroo opens his mouth, but feels no answer come to him. Something comes to an overflow instead. A levee breaks against all restraint, against all the crossfires of stay and leave (but don't run away), and Kuroo can only think of one, irrefutable want: Bokuto. He had wanted him, wanted him in the way they'd been in the never sent room all those years ago, wanted him in the way that might surpass all those awkward and terrible declarations of I’ll love you forever and ever; but most importantly of all, he'd wanted Bokuto happy.

Some places, some sixth moons, were not places for that.

He wears this on shoulders like declaration, raised and ready. “Bokuto,” Kuroo starts, before the other captain comes to beat him first, a kiss on the lips all long and heavy.

Bokuto shakes his head, sinking down onto one of those raised shoulders when he says it. “Don't.” He says with the same staccato as written law. “Not yet.” And at once, Kuroo might understand his piecemeal words, the primal language: that they could allow themselves a small and selfish space, tinier than even the sixth and smallest moon to the left. A place just to be, with no beginning or end. Just you, for a fraction of halted time, with all other decisions to be made after. Just you.

 

 

/

 

 

 

“So let’s go,” Kuroo breathes against an ear, a secret, a confession, and the rest of the ride back is quiet, brimming, and expectant. Along the way, he hears a chorus of things not worth singing:

never meant to be a delivery boy

never meant to stay on the moonscape

never meant to stay still—

And Bokuto lives up to it, never stopping, when he can barely wait to kiss Kuroo at the doorstep.

 

 

/

 

 

We’ll keep you for a little while, says the city, and Bokuto, hands on the zipper to tear down, and Kuroo can't help but feel the tremor of every insistent pull. He dips again to kiss Bokuto again, all draping, greedy, and a little off-balanced, and Bokuto, in turn, just makes him feel like they've found themselves in another fight; onward, comes the insistence to hoist him up, then the nose first dive, right into the nape of Kuroo’s neck. Bokuto naturally fumbles with the top half of a favorite jumpsuit. Cotton pressed down and peeled off, Kuroo thinks to let him have this one, anyway.

“Fine,” Kuroo edges in before the next kiss, breathing another one for good measure when he practically collapses on top of Bokuto again. “Fine.” Revenge comes by the way of heavy hands, those needling tugs at either side of Bokuto’s racing jacket—I will tear you down, faux-silk and all—and Kuroo lives up to the ever-loving flow; hands run up an undershirt instead, tracing every bump and hard-fought line, and Bokuto tips a head back when Kuroo swoops in again for the kiss, whole system an exhale.

Being with Bokuto like this, Kuroo learned all those years ago, was unexpectedly, irrefutably nice, but not in a way that ran sweet or gentle to the touch. Nice came by the small bites on shoulder blades, the crashing knees, the sort of kisses that made mothers blush and children look away; their motions never waned or threatened to settle into ease. Nice was Bokuto deciding that he couldn't take lying back on the bed anymore, his snarl soft and indisposed, eyes nearly closed, when he decided to pin Kuroo down instead. Nice was Kuroo, fighting right the hell back by the way of small words, taunts whispered against the ear; things like “do you really dare?” and “try me” and most lethally, “Bo-ku-to.”

But this time, Kuroo decides, might be different. The first time they had come together, there had been a certain dread in digging back down for another kiss, an adolescent belief that things like this always ended in the worst of the worst; but the edge of seventeen was a time for making mistakes anyway, and Kuroo’s came by the way of Bokuto on a warehouse futon. But barring the things that might always stay the same—the rising under-tees, the hard time Bokuto always had pinpointing his kisses, the biting, gods bless the biting—Kuroo decides, most ardently, that keeping Bokuto this time could never be any sort of error in judgment.

So he goes. Toes dig and curl. Bokuto laughs at the thought of getting naked with him again, and the sound is like a favorite sonatina. “Do you have anywhere to be?” he asks after, just a little strained, trying to joke, and Kuroo just rolls his eyes back at him.

Because well, yeah—they both did: but Kuroo swallows the sentiment down with another kiss, and thinks to let himself have this. Just fine. He imagines Bokuto, staring up from the moonscape, never done tracing constellations.

Wide-eyed, Kuroo pauses, profanities caught between his teeth. “Bokuto,” he says, without having the words to follow, but he thinks he can’t be too far behind. “Bokuto,” he mouths the name again, shaking his head at the whisper of it, because wasn’t that the sound? Wasn’t that how people spoke to caged little things?

Like this, every star in the universe aligns. When Kuroo lifts himself off of Bokuto, brushing hands along his broad shoulders, too broad for a moon that was never really his, he realizes—knows—he shouldn't stay. Because Bokuto was not meant to settle in the pink light district, with the small beds and small supply closets, microcosms in the form of toy animal processions; because Bokuto should be having his own processions, large and grand and through boulevards, always a challenge to neighboring rival cities and the naysayers; because if Kuroo could find his bearings in this city, make a life and lead his way, so could he, away from here.

He raises Bokuto up by the grasp of fingers on fingers, sitting up all bare with legs crossed into each other. Spines straighten in the revival. And it’s like a comet’s landing, catastrophic, the way he says it, but Kuroo smiles into the declaration, anyway. “You can't stay here,” he tells him, effortless as one captain should be to another. Honest at all points.

(Because the universe is too big for you to play second fiddle, fifth son.)

Bokuto sinks for a moment. Kuroo prepares the speeches in his head, things about making your own moons and running your own courses, but Bokuto doesn’t need them today; like a challenge to keep going, he just rises back into that smile, gathers Kuroo in his hands, and kisses him all easy. It was just like Akaashi had said. “Fine,” Bokuto even tells him in the most annoying mimicry, rising into soft laughter along the way. “Fine,” he says, without even the slightest hint of sarcasm.

Kuroo closes his eyes, to wish for better days. He gulps down, sighs out, when he realizes this one isn't so bad.

“Doesn't mean we have to rush,” Kuroo says, relenting. “I won't chase you out yet.”

“You were going to chase me out?”

Kuroo shrugs back. “I might've, if you stayed here too long. Because I know you. After a while, you would've started complaining like, hey, when am I going to have my own city, too?” Another kiss. “No thank you.”

“Wow.” Bokuto flops himself back down on the bed, head pushed back on the pillow and exposed, and Kuroo wonders if he's doing this on purpose. “What else would I have done?” he asks next, more curious than anything.

Kuroo comes closer. “One, you would've challenged me to more races.” At this, Bokuto nods, and Kuroo arches in the lean over him, staring at the ruddy cheek and moving down to his neck, nose against skin and faded evergreen scent. “Two, you would've lost all those races, because you'll never ever beat me on the road,” he continues, saying this against goosebumps and the light hairs of his chest. “And three—of course there's three—you'd tell me, hey Kuroo, it's time to take it to the skies.”

“You think you know me so well,” Bokuto challenges in a shiver, a shudder, and Kuroo grins up, nodding.

“You're not exactly hard to read.”

“You didn't know I'd run last time,” Bokuto disputes. “You never even saw it coming!”

“But it’s not like I have to see you run this time around.”

“Why’s that?”

Kuro finds pause for a moment, mustering up all the appropriate bravado.

“Because I'm letting you go,” Kuroo says with a grin, and he lets it fade in favor of the loom—because that’s the funny thing about kissing someone important at moments like this; that no matter how much someone might want to smile into it, keep some semblance of levity, it’ll find a way to disappear in the closeness. Eyes close, breaths sharpen, and this is when Kuroo remembers: not even light can escape an event horizon, and it'd be best to relish in the sinking. Rivers must run and birds must fly, after all—but by god, how about I let you tear me apart first?

Five years ago, Kuroo would’ve called something like this a case of the nerves. Now, he’d prefer to call it a willingness to take Bokuto head on.

He closes the sheets over them, doesn't apologize for the bareness. They wane and wax at the touch, upward and out and uttered into ears, and the sheets are nothing but the tides they've rippled themselves. With Kuroo at the helm come the trancelike silences, the small conversations mid-collision, the laughs about the funny little moles and teases about hair not defying gravity. “Kuroo—” Bokuto even gnashes, right towards the end of things, like that could be a swan song at the river mouth; but swan songs always had a certain ring to them, and this was not the sound of finished.

(Because if they were to say goodbye, it would be to the fullest extent. This is something Kuroo had learned a long time ago, waiting on the dark side of the moon with dust in his eyes, Bokuto’s ship just a glint in the black and endless sky. You must leave nothing undone and unsaid.)

So “hi again,” Kuroo just mutters, conceding, when he finds himself against the sheets this time. A grin, daring to be cheeky, dies right on his lips when Bokuto does to kiss him, and heels raise at the press of a familiar weight and immediate warmth.

Warmth. Kuroo sighs at it, rolling his head back in useless reprieve. But maybe that was the thing about being Bokuto this way—because for every time Kuroo might tease and kiss down the line, pressure and lightness applied to all the right spots, Bokuto might be his opposite: honest at the core, he had a way of enveloping, of making someone feel wanted at every inch. He loved the quiet he kept in the midst of it, loved the sudden jerks and changes in rhythm, loved the way he breathed into his nape and bruised him with kisses—it made Kuroo want to go toe to toe with him, wrangle him in by bent arms and say, let’s really say goodbye. I didn’t mean it last time.

 

 

 

/

 

 

 

It was at dusk, the day Bokuto left the first time at seventeen. Kuroo always remembered this by the old alarm clock in the hangar, one that always went off at sunset to signal NO UNAUTHORIZED FLYBYS and other unsavory landings. He’d been nothing but a dreamer then, a near-graduate on the cusp of doing whatever he wanted in the city, and he'd often let himself drift at the front counter, a dance with possibility: he could join the investigative squad like Yaku, maybe oversee that empty observatory on the hillside—whatever he might end up doing, it was a delight to imagine that all roads were clear whatever way.

And it was also easy to think Bokuto might be at the ends of them, too. Of all the tiny details someone might keep in memory, the honest-to-god sort that always arrived in full clarity, he'd remembered having Bokuto at the forefront of his mind that day, still fresh off a foray in the closet. They had been pesky thoughts at the time, ones that elicited unwanted grins at random points in the day, made him trip up on cracks he usually didn't miss. Hell, even Kenma asked about it: “Kuro, are you coming down with something?” (And Kuroo had only been tempted to answer yes, but I will be rid of this fever soon.)

But the truth of the matter was—he could not get rid of Bokuto if he tried. Like graduation, or sunsets, or planetary alignment, Kuroo had begun to wonder if being with Bokuto was just a natural progression of things. Meet him, get to know him, kiss him, and well—other things; seventeen had been a trying time, a last stand for growth spurts and adolescence, and Kuroo had to admit to enjoying his company in the midst of it.

(And this was another part of the memory Kuroo might admit to recalling well, many years later: “just tell him, you dumbass.” It had been like a rain dance, the way he'd paced and paced around the hangar, looking for the right way to say it, and he could only count his lucky stars that Bokuto himself had come to interrupt.)

“Kuroo.”

He should've known, then. Bokuto usually had the habit of coming to the hangar already afloat, mouth agape at the winged cruisers he'd seen a thousand times, hands running along the airbuses, but he'd been oddly quiet on that last day. Kuroo had hoped the previous night might’ve fixed things, and sorely looked to keep things light.

But there Bokuto was, staring aimlessly out at the skyline in front of him. “Hey,” Kuroo had greeted anyway, forced perspective his friend, with a pinch of his fingers and the entirety of the city between index and thumb. “What are you doing here?”

Kuroo really should've known, then.

“Kuroo, I want to challenge you,” Bokuto had said, loud but shaky. An echo of strength, not quite found.

“To what?” Kuroo only replied, crossing his arms, more tightly bound than usual.

“A race. Right now.”

Kuroo had found this wildly inconvenient, especially a day before graduation. He had a suit to iron, thank you cards to write; even his parents were due to attend the ceremony tomorrow, and he’d really sworn to be on his best behavior until then.

“Yeah? Why’s that?” he'd asked anyway, because this was Bokuto, and he could not just leave things with the likes of him—because it was Bokuto, with his fists clenched at his sides; Bokuto, with wild, swimming eyes; Bokuto, who looked like he might burst into supernova. It was an image that still haunted Kuroo to this day, mostly on the fact that he could not pick up on any of it, then. The bird wanted to fly, and Kuroo had just walked into his open cage.

“I'm not sure you want me to answer that,” Bokuto had answered, high on his heels like he could’ve taken off right there. At the time, Kuroo had seen it as a sign of Bokuto lightening up.

“Go on,” Kuroo tested. “Try me.”

“If I win, I'm going to leave the moonscape, and you won't be able to stop me.”

At this, Kuroo had laughed. He was never any match for him in the winged cruisers, so this surely all had to be a big joke, and one last hurrah for two delivery boys on the cusp of brighter things.

“So, what do you say, Kuroo?”

With one last look at the clock and the reminder of NO UNAUTHORIZED FLYBYS, Kuroo goes to fetch the keys anyway. Two winged cruisers, ready for a race.

“Sure,” Kuroo had answered him. “But don't count on me to go easy on you.”

And if there was a part of the memory Kuroo remembered the most from that day, still nagging at the core, it was this: “if I win, I'll tell him.”

“If I lose, I'll tell him.”

“Either way, I'll tell him.”

But maybe some things were never meant to be said. This is something Kuroo had learned those five years ago, waiting on the dark side of the moon with dust in his eyes, mouth agape with the words he'd wanted to say, those awkward and terrible insistences. But Bokuto’s ship had become just a glint in the black and endless sky, racing further out of the atmosphere, and that had been that.

“Wait—”

Kuroo wakes up in a jolt in that instant. Head hazy from dreaming, he just settles to catch his breath, head in his hands for the recollection, and peeks through the gaps in his fingers to find Bokuto missing. “Shit,” he can't help but mouth when he thinks he knows what's happened; because Bokuto’s side of the bed had gone cold, and all that was left was a crumpled racing jacket at the foot of the bed. Everything else—Bokuto’s sneakers, his tee, the cuffed-leg pants—were all gone along with Kuroo’s motorcycle keys.

Climbing out of bed, Kuroo finds his own clothes on the floor and goes into the bathroom to get himself washed up. He finds a neatly pressed jumpsuit on a chair by the door instead—a small favor from Akaashi, it seemed, for saving his captain—and only drags it on by the pants. The rest goes tied around the waist when he goes to steal Bokuto’s jacket from the sheets, his to wear in the smallest revenge; but it hangs just a bit loose around his shoulders, and Kuroo can only settle for its paltry embrace.

Kuroo rolls up the sleeves like he would anyway, peering out the window through the filmy curtains. He'd be damned if he knew what to do next, and he knows it never proved useful to stand still, but there was always something mournful about his apartment at sunset, a perfect sort of near darkness that demanded to be seen and felt by heavy steps. Kuroo only imagines Bokuto, smiling from the other side of the cloth.

“You could've at least stayed for a meal, or something,” Kuroo mumbles to himself, all sighs. In search of comfort, he walks over to his shelf, still pushed to the side from last time. He finds his way back up to the rooftop, his favorite place whether Bokuto was here or not, and finds the door a little too easy to push open.

On the other side of it, a shaky record player whispers a sonatina. Plastic tigers and tin robots gather around a candle’s fire, praying for safe passage off a makeshift table island. Two mismatched chairs, no doubt stolen from dumpsters or outdoor seating areas, face each other in showdown, or heart-to-heart, or joking reprieve. Kuroo thinks it could be the matter of all three.

Kuroo comes closer to the little set-up, admits to a smile when he sees the two cracked dessert plates, the paper cups, and shakes his head at the gesture. “Fucking Bokuto,” he whispers, trying not to smile, when the devil himself comes running up the stairs, out of breath and hands full.

“Oh!” Bokuto says, positively beaming. “Hey!”

Kuroo takes a seat at the table. “You came back,” he lilts, all casual, and Bokuto starts unpacking the things from his bags.

First comes the cola, poured into paper cups, imprecise and slightly spilled. “You were sleeping for a really long time,” he starts, “and some point, I thought you were dead, but when I figured you weren't, I, um. Well, I thought of this!” He goes to sit down in the opposite seat, careful not to knock over the toys on the table with the whole cake he's gotten for whatever occasion this might be.

“I see.” Kuroo likens this to a first date mixed with farewell party, and he's not sure he quite likes the sound of either, but he can't say he doesn't appreciate the effort. He just leans back in his seat, closes his eyes for a moment, and takes in the sound of clinking utensils and a city preparing for the rest of the night. The sonatina ends, only to edge into the next one, and Bokuto hums along like he might know the tune.

“So you couldn't really sleep, then?” Kuroo follows up, sights cast at the two slices of cake Bokuto’s laid out for the both of them. Raspberries on top. Vanilla ganache. Kuroo takes the first mouthful and deems it a perfectly acceptable meal.

Bokuto shakes his head. “Maybe a little, but...you know how sometimes you have a million things rushing through your head, about how things might go? And soon you just, I don't know, think way too far ahead?”

“Sure.” Kuroo hated those nights, and how much they threw him in for a tailspin the next day. It was like walking around in a haze, but here Bokuto was, bright-eyed and alert like some star at sunrise. Kuroo thinks about how they were sitting in the opposite of that, Owl Industries, to arrive by the end of the night, their time together winding, winding down. Bokuto looks out past the city, then back at his cake, before settling right on Kuroo.

“Hey, Kuroo,” Bokuto calls.

“Bokuto,” Kuroo singsongs right back. He tips the cup to his mouth, smiling, and waits for him to find the words.

“So you know...those million things,” Bokuto starts, shaking his head, determined to not trail off. “It really does feel like a million, at some points, like your head’s gonna explode from it, but some thoughts pass just once while others pass by, like, a thousand times.”

Kuroo imagines it in terms of rogue planets, then by the sorts that keep a steady, circular motion. Thoughts that revolve and revolve and revolve. “I get it,” he says, leaning a cheek on a hand and smiling. “And what are the things that cross your mind?”

Bokuto shrugs. “I don’t know. Things like, getting my next ship. And packing a bag. And where will I go next? Is it gonna be another moon? A whole other galaxy? Because that’s, that's really far, you know, far from, well—” he stops suddenly, smile wiped off like a landslide on the hills, “you.”

Kuroo does not let the smile fade off his face, but the pang sounds loud and deep in his chest. “It can be a matter of light years, if your ship isn't fast enough.”

A palpable quiet comes for them after that, before Bokuto finds a way to kill it for Kuroo to see. “I've been thinking,” he says.

“You've been doing a lot of that, lately.”

“I get ideas.”

“I know,” Kuroo says back. “Believe me, I know.”

“So?”

“So, what?”

“Would you want to come with me?”

Kuroo gives pause, sights averted to a city he'd come to on a teenage dream. He gets out of his seat and makes it to the edge, looking out over major avenue arteries, the varicose sort at dead end alleyways. All was well today, air humming over the coming of diamond planets, and he could rest easy knowing that everything was in order.

Bokuto joins him by the ledge, leaning over the empty spot where he'd evacuated some of Kuroo’s trinkets. He sighs, grinning up, anyway. He knew the answer as much as Kuroo refused to say it.

But he'd be lying, if he said he didn't at least think about it, because he had over the years, at various volumes. Sometimes he imagined finding Bokuto randomly on supply runs to other planets, ambassador’s trips to neighboring moons, running and never looking back. Sometimes Bokuto came back to the moonscape just to collect him, and Kuroo would take him by the hand and join him on some feigned and incredible ship. Take me away from here, he'd say to him either way, like he was in some noir drive-through classic, when things got particularly hard on the moonscape and the growing pains of being a new leader had come to set him straight.

But for better or worse, he couldn’t just leave. As much as Bokuto sought his own sort of captaincy, Kuroo had grown into his through the years, too. He, dare say, loved his town, loved the way it ran between wholesome and wholly terrifying, with its touristy amphitheatres and sneaky little underbelly. His team, far from immaculate, not free from the occasional squabble or locker room bickering, had come together in genuine connection—because despite the riots that threatened to rise, the sick days, the car trouble, he'd come to a group that held their heads high throughout anything. “For the team,” they all seemed to say without meaning to, from the quiet daily duties, to the deliveries, to the drop kicks in alleys. Kuroo could only count himself fortunate to be any part of it.

“You know I can't,” Kuroo answers.

Bokuto laughs. “I don't know if it's can’t,” comes the rebuttal. “Because I think you can do anything,” he says, with nothing joking about his tone. “I think it's…” He swallows at this. “I think it's because you don't want to. And that's okay. I wouldn't either, if I knew how much work I still had left to do here.”

Kuroo folds his hands together in the lean, looking out over the city. “What?” he asks, nudging Bokuto in the side. “You telling me this moon isn't good enough for you?”

“No,” Bokuto insists with the slightest sort of singsong, “but what’s that thing you always liked to say to the other delivery boys? Keep it flowing like blood, or whatever? So go do that! Keep it going! Young blood! Build the galaxy’s tallest skyscraper!”

Kuroo’s not sure how any of those things might be related. Still he coos back, “yeah, like that's ever going to happen,” settling into the fold of bent arms. He whirls his head up, expecting Bokuto to share in the farce of it, but wipes the smile off his face when he sees.

Bokuto, who could never lie to save his life, stares right on with nothing held back. He leans in closer towards him, like he might be trying to kiss him, but looms in a frown and presses a pointed finger to Kuroo’s nose instead. “You,” he says, poking him, “can do anything.”

Waving him away, Kuroo just keeps his hand wrapped around Bokuto’s finger, and snakes it toward a palm for the full hold. “I got it,” he says, all in sighs. “But—well.” He looks out again, chin tipped down and swimming in the thought of years past; oh, how he’d paced in the hangar back then, devoid of the right things to say.

“You can too,” Kuroo just says, swallowing down. The words come plain, but true. “You can do anything, too.”

This seems to bring Bokuto to life, more so than ever before, and his eyes blink into brightness. ‘ Really?’ he asks, all without having to. Because while most people took things to heart, Bokuto had no problem swallowing it down and rush across his entire system; the rest of his face erupts into nebulous glee, like they could name whole planets Gush, Grin, and Glint after him.

But Kuroo welcomes it either way, and holds on tighter by the hand before finding a more lenient grip. In the midst of this, they find silence, heads full of imagining and great, unadulterated plans, while a faraway sun decides to set. The rose sky reigns again, that familiar edge between a blush and the proceeding fade, and Kuroo welcomes the heat on his face.

“Hey, Bokuto.”

(And at once, he sees another life. The same place. They’re sitting together at the edge of the rooftop, sharing canned coffees and laughing at hijacked billboards, far past any point of breaking the ice. With a newfound friend, a sure-fire friend, Kuroo holds a hand up, finds the rose-colored sun between fingers, and explains his ideas for new names. ‘What do you think of the pink light district?’ he asks. The Bokuto of then laughs at this, infectious, and Kuroo pushes away the thought of keeping him for good.)

The Bokuto of now leans over in a laugh, too, ever light, when Kuroo tells him about it again.

“Don't forget what you're seeing,” Kuroo proclaims, just the slightest bit selfish, “because you'll never have a sunset like this anywhere else.”

(But still a blessing, he'd say. A call to a million other worlds.)

 

 

/

 

 

“So, will you help me, then? When the time is right?”

“Are you sure they’ll even hear him?”

Kuroo smiles back at Kenma, lighting sparklers for the both of them. “I’m sure,” he says, and Kenma seems satisfied with the answer.

They make their official pacts by the hand-off of fireworks, and the two of them just stare out at the rest of the plains between hangar and city. The diamond planet was set to arrive by morning, but the people of the moonscape were determined to make whole parties out of it the night before; by raised lanterns and tent colonies, sprawling picnic blankets and lit sparklers, it seemed like everyone was here to mark the occasion, and Kuroo would be damned if he were to miss any of it. Turning to Kenma, he raises an eyebrow when he sees Akaashi isn’t around, and settles into something of a jaunt.

“Hey, so where’s Aka—”

“Don’t you dare start with me,” Kenma interrupts, as keen as ever. “He’s busy being hazed by the other delivery boys, and I want nothing to do with it.”

Kuroo eeks out a laugh, too comfortable to take it anywhere past half-hearted. “Isn't it weird for a bunch of teenagers to haze a delivery boy in his twenties? Age difference and all that?”

“A novice delivery boy is a novice delivery boy,” Kenma shrugs out; still, he does peek back into the hangar to make sure Akaashi’s still alive (and to both their reliefs, he hadn't died in a blaze of glory); Lev, Shibayama, and Inuoka have coaxed him to a fortune telling session in the garage instead, and Akaashi just stares down at gossip magazine snippets like he'd like to die. Kuroo even hears him explain, and probably not for the first time, that there was a pointed difference between astrology and astronomy, but no one seems to hear him. From there, Akaashi’s forced to make something up about how scorpios and virgos were going to have a rough time this month, but not to fret—because they'd always find a way back to each other in the end. Gross, Kuroo thinks. Lev follows the same sentiment with a tongue stuck out, declares the hazing over, and officially welcomes Akaashi to the crew.

Kuroo watches Kenma sneak in a smile from there, but not step forward. With a small nudge, Kuroo does it for him, and all the other delivery boys raise themselves in a frenzy. “Kenma-san, Kenma-san!” Lev calls. “Are you here to haze Akaashi-san, too?”

“No,” Kenma answers plainly, “because you're one to talk, Lev. You skipped out on your initiation last fall. I saw it on the cameras.”

The other delivery boys give up hushed little laughs, Akaashi included, and Lev just dashes out of the hangar before anyone else says anything about it. He makes it down the plains to where Kai, Fukunaga, and Yaku have been setting up picnic blankets for the festivities, and gets the other delivery boys to join in pitching the tents.

Looking back, Kuroo sees that Kenma’s reunited with Akaashi again by the hangar, hearing him talk about the itchiness of new jumpsuits (and how he might welcome it, anyway). Hands skim close when they stroll, not quite touching, and Kuroo surmises it'll only be a matter of time; until then, they look content enough in just lighting fresh sparklers, enjoying the quiet, and forging something new along the way.

“Hey, Kuroo.”

Kuroo turns, finding Yaku behind him with a microphone.

“I figured you'd want it for later,” he says. “As the captain of this place, it'd only be right for you to make a speech about this, right? Momentous occasion, and all that?”

“Yeah,” Kuroo says.

“And, other things. If we have to,” Yaku follows with a cross of his arms, a glare, and Kuroo guesses he's been informed about the whole Owl Industries fiasco. He says, “you've talked yourself out of trouble before, so you might have to again,” but Kuroo just shakes his head at the suggestion.

“I won't,” he goes on to say instead. “I know I won't have to.”

Yaku frowns. “And how can you have so much faith in that?”

“Because I know,” Kuroo answers. “And because you'll see.”

At this, Yaku just rolls his eyes and tosses the mic to Kuroo for safe-keeping. To the delivery boys, he declares a party underway. The rest of the moonscape seems to follow his orders, hectic in the night. The bonfires go up in billows and the bands begin to play.

 

 

/

 

 

Aimless and ambling for what feels like forever, Kuroo just walks along the picnic blankets and barbecue celebrations. Some of the team has spread out here, too: Fukunaga’s taken to putting on shadow shows at a makeshift stage, while Lev and Inuoka’s taken to foot racing a few kids from the danchi tenements; Kai and Shibayama sway along to a rogue shamisen while Tora and Yaku’s gone to write up a citation for illegal cracker fireworks (and stick a few in their pockets for later).

But Bokuto’s nowhere to be seen in the crowd. They'd come here together on his motorcycle just after sunset, insistent that they'd find each other later, but it'd been at least an hour without a word from him. This is when Kuroo wonders, briefly, if he's run again.

“Akaashi,” comes the voice. Kuroo spins around to see Bokuto greet his co-captain, looking at his jumpsuit up and down. “Did Kuroo put you up to this?” he asks.

“I'm afraid not, Bokuto-san. The observatory here needs someone to watch over it, and I volunteered,” Akaashi explains.

Bokuto sighs, but keeps his chin up. “Well, they really did get the best man for the job,” he laughs out, and the sound of it rings out hearty from the crowds. “Are you going to be okay, though? Doing all those deliveries?”

“I hope so. But I think I'll be fine. Kozume says it’s not too bad, and that he'd help me find the best drop-off routes later.”

“Good!” Bokuto exclaims, maybe a little too theatrical. “Good,” he says a second time, so quiet it's almost lost under the crowd.

“Bokuto-san,” Akaashi calls, and Kuroo takes that as a cue to hide himself behind a makeshift booth for carnival games. “What's wrong?” he asks.

“It's just—I’m gonna miss having you as a partner, you know?” Bokuto confesses. “All those times we got lost out in the quadrant, complaining and stuff. What am I going to do without you, huh?”

There's a silence between the two of them at first, before Akaashi’s the one to break it first.

“Amazing things, Bokuto-san,” he tells him. “Amazing things.”

“Ah. Well. I've gotta thank you, anyway.”

“Oh, I mean, there's no need but—ah,” Akaashi stops, and Kuroo guesses they've stopped to hug (and Bokuto always gave the bone-crushing sort, no matter who he was with). He smiles at this, decides not to keep eavesdropping for too much longer, and walks on. He finds Kenma by the end of the stalls a few minutes later, listlessly tackling some cotton candy.

“Hey,” he says to him. Kenma decides he’s done dealing with dessert and tosses it elsewhere.

“Lighten up, Kuro,” he says right back without hesitation, blinking up.

Kuroo frowns at the order. “What do you mean? We’ve got this huge party going! I’m light as can be.”

Kenma blinks.

“Okay,” Kuroo interrupts, before Kenma can chide him further. “Fine.” Shaking his head, he looks on elsewhere, rubs a sudden prickliness on his neck. “It’s just weird, I guess. It’s always weird to say goodbye.”

“Not like you had a chance last time,” Kenma says, letting the hair fall in his face like it might hide him from the crowds. “And last time, you were even sulkier. That was a nightmare.”

“What?” Asks Kuroo. “I thought I hid it pretty well last time.”

Kenma shakes his head. “Not from me.”

“Fine. Never from you,” Kuroo repeats back like tradition, before falling back into some semblance of tranquility. “But anyway,” he continues, glancing back at Kenma, “I’ll be better than last time. I promise.”

From there, Kenma nods, and Kuroo takes this as an accepted pact. From there, they both watch Akaashi turn the corner and offer the slightest sort of wave; Kenma offers the same sort back and goes to greet him first. He even goes as far as to tie his hair back, getting it all out of his face, and Kuroo just watches the way they fall into an envied sort of ease. Well, I’ll leave you to it, Kuroo muses, and lets himself walk the opposite way.

Up the dust fields, Kuroo makes out the absence of food carts and game stands. Sparklers rule amongst the disheveled picnic blankets, raised up and waved like the coming of newborn stars. Bokuto, the runaway, the crash landing embodied, keeps himself in the midst of it, a titan amongst all bright things, and Kuroo has to wonder why it’s always like seeing him for the first goddamned time.

Feeling smaller than usual, Kuroo waves to him anyway. He plasters a smile onto his face, hopes Bokuto will see him without a need for hello, and settles into something like peace when he does. The pangs across his body beg to differ.

Bokuto jogs over from there, his calls of “Kuroo!” already faraway. Kuroo, in turn, practices the syllables to throw back right at him, too. Bokuto, Bokuto, Bokuto, he mouths without making a sound, and he settles for not saying it at all; because it was a funny thing, letting the name become synonymous with all things goodbye, and farewell, and I’ll see you up there in the stars.

Overhead, the automatons soar in V formation, cutting across an incoming diamond planet. Beams light the sky in unnatural splendor, with ships out of hiding, ready for their prey.

Bokuto looks up, eyes aglow in horror, and Kuroo can’t help but follow, too. They come together, hands held tight. Kuroo yanks him towards the hangar, jumping over picnic baskets and smoldering bonfire pits, and remembers the microphone in his pocket. On the way, he beckons to Kenma, “sorry, but it’s time, turn the broadcast on,” not stopping to stay. He even calls to Yaku and Tora, too, to make sure the other delivery boys are ready for standby.

Tora revs a bike he's loaned from the shop. “No officers?” he asks. Overhead, another squadron of ships has come over the city, and warning shots edge ever closer to the party grounds.

“Keep them close,” Kuroo orders back. “But warn them that I want no one firing the first shot.”

Yaku shakes his head. “I played with your little games before Kuroo, but honestly you're asking us too—”

“Trust me,” Kuroo shouts back to Tora and Yaku, to Bokuto. “Trust me,” he breathes, looking back before breaking into a new dash.

“Kuroo,” Bokuto screams, ships approaching fast and low. Warning shots singe the dirt at their feet. “Kuroo, what are we doing?”

Behind them, a city’s skyline goes dark. Bonfire towers smoke into nothing, and devoted owls fly up at foreign ships.

“They’re going to listen to you,” Kuroo yells back, eyes back to the front, grip refusing to let up. He practically throws Bokuto inside the hangar garage, digging out the keys to switch on the consoles inside. “You’re going to talk to them. You’re going to stand up to them, and then you’re going to steal one of my ships and get out of this place.”

“Kuroo—no—”

“They’re going to listen to you,” Kuroo says with a gnawing grin, still out of breath. “And I don’t care how bad you are with words, because it’ll be enough, just to see you.” From there, he snarls down at a blinking motherboard, the green lights for go, and runs toward the ladder to get to the rooftop. Bokuto follows, hesitant before stamping on, too.

Bokuto shakes his head, doubt creeping to meet the both of them. “What do I even say?”

(“He's going to be a natural,” Nekomata had told Kuroo once, and Kuroo would just roll his eyes in return, just on the edge of comprehension. “And one day, he's going to find his moment, and no one will ever be able to stop him.”)

Kuroo thinks he might understand it, now.

“What you want,” Kuroo urges on, and hands exchange a microphone, already on and screeching across the plains by Kenma’s expertise. Let the whole moonscape hear them.

“What you’ve always wanted,” Kuroo finishes in a challenge, fighting words almost lost under the downwind of intruding crafts. Under them, the hangar rumbles from the sound of a ship come alive, Fukunaga at the helm of the fastest wing fighter the pink light district will offer them.

“Go,” Kuroo commands. Bokuto does not move.

The people wait on below. Ships stop quaking across the atmosphere when they spot their fifth son. Up ahead, the horizon ahead breaks through the night, piercing the sky with the edge of new day.

“Go.”

Bokuto emerges from his slump, clutching onto the microphone with shoulders raised, alert, and growing into a fight. The last warning shot fires when he takes a deep breath, face right at the sky he’d landed from. A gust picks up beneath them, swooping up and threatening to take Bokuto altogether.

“Hi,” he starts regardless of gales, taking a pause when he hears his voice boom across the entire outer limits. Kuroo watches all the heads down below turn to meet him, too.

“First of all, I’m—” Bokuto breathes into the microphone. “ I’m sorry,” he says, shaking his head. “I’m sorry for stealing that really expensive ship and...running again, and—” he stops again, looking back at Kuroo. Kuroo mouths back a “go on,” offering the ease of a smile too wide for his face. And don't look back at me.

Down below, the rest of Kuroo’s crew stand by a ship ready to launch. They all hold a thumbs up while Akaashi nods softly, urging him on with a simple smile.

“But actually...no,” Bokuto continues, folding his hand into a fist beneath him. “I’m not sorry. I can’t be sorry,” he corrects himself, in half a laugh, nervous but still willing to go. “Because I don’t want to go back with you. I don’t want to be with the industries, anymore. I want—”

Kuroo shuts his eyes, hears the sound so clear he might as well sing to the rest of the universe. Because watch out, world—

“I want to be great!”

(Because you’ll never see him coming—they’d never see Bokuto Koutarou, with a head over a shoulder and smiling, never one to stare back for too long; Bokuto Koutarou, with fighting words spread across his lips; Bokuto Koutarou, with the penchant to crash and rise and rise and rise again—)

“And I will be great! And I want you to watch me be great!”

(Bokuto Koutarou, and how words could not explain him, failed him endlessly—)

( So “Bokuto,” Kuroo whispers instead, like that could be some great phenomenon in itself, bigger than solar flares and black holes and the biggest celestial beings. A big bang for everyone to see. The end and some great beginning—)

“So give me that chance!” Bokuto’s practically yelling by now, voice cracking but held for the sixth and smallest moon to hear. “Or I’m going to have to take it myself!” He folds into himself after that, heaving into the microphone over the great rush of quiet.

Whole bonfires go out below and ships spin in the greatest suspense above them. Bokuto doesn’t turn back to anybody for reassurance—not Akaashi, not the owls, not Kuroo—and waits, triumphantly, for the answer.

A strange hush erupts across the entire moonscape from there, broken only by the quiet of Bokuto’s breathing. Kuroo hears it: slow, ragged, and ready to go, and keeps the sound of it like seconds ticking on a clock.

A scream emerges from the crowd. The first and biggest ship leaves by the greatest reluctance, firing warning shots into the sky and towards an unbothered diamond planet. One by one, the others follow not long after that, strangely listless in the ascent, hovering low amongst the partygoers before blasting back into the atmosphere.

“Hey, guys,” Lev yells out, waving his arms down below. “Come look at this!”

Below, Tora reads a message from Kenma’s laptop, loud enough for everyone to hear: “fifth son, if you are still here by sunrise, we will turn right back and destroy this moon. Otherwise, have a pleasant morning. Please come home once in a while, or else your mother will miss you!”

Across the rooftop, Bokuto does not look back. His back stays lifted. He stares on, entranced at the sky, like he might be picking where to go next.

Kuroo does not intrude. Instead, he just swallows down the thought of dying anytime soon—because that wouldn’t be fun by any standard—and lets himself come down from the rooftop, still dark in the hangar despite the oncoming suns. He goes to the motherboard when he thinks he’ll get to be alone for the next few moments, and presses a few buttons, mic on his lips for a message to record.

“Hey, Bokuto—”

He whispers it, quick and intimate, and scrambles to send it off when Bokuto himself comes down the ladder to meet him.

“Bokuto—”

Caught unaware, and always a flash fire of surprise, he falls into Kuroo for a hug, arms wrapped atop shoulders. He breathes a million things into his nape from there, things heard and not quite, things like thank you and I can't believe this and I'm going to miss you. In slowest motions, Kuroo just returns the embrace right back, hands settled on a solid, ready spine. “Ready to go?” he asks, closing his eyes, and stays to have this moment instead. Let’s really say goodbye. I didn’t mean it last time.

The sun rises past fogged windows and an open garage door, never failing in duty. It graces the moonscape with a light vermillion sky, all to line the horizon, committed to the morning after and a brand new day. At this, Kuroo just shuts his eyes: “let’s go,” he whispers, and Bokuto does not flinch at the call. Still close, he just nods with forehead pressed to Kuroo’s, turns for one more kiss. My kind of finale, he thinks, when he just goes to meet him in the middle, the inhale sharp and gutting and not quite ready—

“See! What did I tell you? I knew it! I knew they were together!” comes Lev’s call, and Kuroo raises himself out of the near-kiss to see half his team, agape.

“Hate to interrupt you,” Yaku is the first one to step up, all in the throes of glee, “but I'd rather not test Owl Industries on whether they've got enough firepower to destroy a small moon. We’ve got to get going.” He tries not to laugh but ends up failing horribly, directing his attention to the ship instead.

Both Kenma and Akaashi nod along to this. Tora and Shibayama give the thumbs up behind them, while Kai and Inuoka get a head start towards the makeshift tarmac.

“Fine,” Kuroo mouths in an ear, mocking their previous morning together, and Bokuto smiles right back, helping him off the console. “It'll be just fine,” Kuroo says, more for himself than anything else, and Bokuto takes him by the hand to lead.

By the tarmac, a ship welcomes its pilot by the mouth of an open ramp. Bokuto rises at the sight of it, unsure until he's not, and turns back to grin at Kuroo.

“You're letting me go.”

Kuroo sighs into a smile, too. “I'm letting you go.”

From behind, Kenma and Akaashi show up with two sets of helmets, and Kai rolls up from the garage on an identical wing cruiser. When the ramp falls on that one too, Kuroo walks over to it, and takes the helmet from Kenma.

With mustered courage, he raises it in the air, and dares Bokuto to take his, too. “But first, we race,” he amends, and the other captain raises himself on his heels, ready to go without question.

 

/

 

So comes the new memory. It's morning on their last race via retro wing cruisers, taken right from the hangar on the outer limits and skimmed along the morganite and the dirt. The moonscape is limitless by Kuroo’s eyes, a place of great possibility and uncarved roads, with cities to raise and places still to go. In daydreaming, he almost forgets he is racing. In full clarity, he sees Bokuto ahead, cutting against the sky.

You win this one. He looks to Bokuto in the aftermath, helmet thrown off, and they're the only ones on the other side of the moon; but where one finds promise, the other finds a pit stop. A limbo. Bokuto looks back at Kuroo this way, proud and lifted, before exhaling.

“I'm ready,” he says, always honest, and Kuroo keeps his promises in losing. Because he’d made the pact with himself long ago—if I win, I'll tell him, if I lose, I'll tell him, either way, I'll tell him—and it would be the worst, to keep waiting.

“Hey, Bokuto,” Kuroo calls him from the other ship, just the two of them together, the universe ahead. He ambles over, finds Bokuto at the ramp, and closes his fists under him. Now or never. Now's the time. When he beckons Bokuto to come closer and take his helmet off, distance remains nothing but a whisper to the ear, and volumes hush into things he’ll only be able to hear. “Bokuto,” he starts again, mustering all his courage not to be cool. He bites his tongue when he's not sure how to proceed, and he wonders if this is karma for making fun of Bokuto all these years, for never having the right words and carrying sentiments on rolled up sleeves.

Bokuto lives up to this, ever the surprise, and ever on whim, when he turns against the doorway to kiss Kuroo first. He smirks into something winning from there, laughing and giddy out of his mind, and Kuroo can't help but share in his victory; but it's the short-lived sort, flung away by the most momentous occasion—there's a lifetime in the way Bokuto breathes out, how slow he raises himself out of the huddle. Eyes go blinking and wide like he's uncovered the moonscape’s worst kept secrets.

“Kuroo,” he mouths, like it’s the first time he's saying it, and buries himself in a bent arm when it all comes to him. He comes out of it in complete horror, like they hadn't just raced along the moonscape, or saved it, or been so irrefutably together the past two days and all this time. He shakes his head, eyes wide; in them, every star falls out of orbit, only to realign.

“Kuroo,” comes the hallelujah, the absolute swoon, and every fear of leaving seems to stay at lowest tides. Bokuto rises into the smile after that, bright and squinting like that might be enough to make up for the last five years, and wastes no more time in being honest.

“I think I might love you, Kuroo.”

At this, Kuroo can only laugh. He stares on, incredulous, before breaking into a smile, and some strange and needling urge to cry. Took you long enough, he wants to say, but he knows this is no time to tease.

“You want to know a secret?” Kuroo just asks instead, head tipped up to the rising sun, the gradient sky. Darkness into day. On the other side of the moon, everybody waits.

Bokuto nods back, hopeful.

“I think I do, too.”

Kuroo knows there's no taking things back from there. He knows by the way Bokuto tugs at his hand, how he swells and keeps him close in that Bokuto Koutarou way; Bokuto, who was often too flighty to keep anyone for long; Bokuto, who moved too fast to know of love; Bokuto, who might just stumble right towards it, anyway. But when all was said and done, he'd get up with scrapes on his knees, bruises like fine art, and say it back.

And so the words play in Kuroo’s head when Bokuto leaves him with one last kiss for the road, engines firing under him, and the words remain when Kuroo runs after him on the empty plains. He laughs at the declarations, dust kicking up under him, the ship just nearly out of sight. He waves to it anyway, sure enough that Bokuto might see him, and gets to have his goodbye.

Hand in the air, Kuroo clenches a fist, and catches the last of some fading night.

 

 

 

 

 

/

 

 

[PLAYBACK 1368]

subject: only for you to hear

 

Hey, Bokuto.

We’ve had a strange couple of days, haven’t we? Trouble always seems to follow us, wherever we lead, and I think it’s been enough to put me in a coma for the next five thousand years. But I won’t sleep as much as I’d like—not when you’re out there too, conquering other moons and planets and whole galaxies, and I hope you never rest on your laurels, either. Because you were right when you said I said a lot of work to do here. It’s enough to never let me stop.

So I’m leaving this message for the both of us. Just click the farthest left button on your motherboard, whenever you think you’d like to hear me, and I’ll be right in your ear, ready to make fun of you.

Because you are too easy to make fun of.

But, well—in all seriousness—

I’ll see you soon, I think. May you always come crashing into my life, again.

 

 

 

/

 

 

 

Kuroo spends the next few weeks in old haunts, buried in paperwork, a so-called spring cleaning, and anything else that might be called the most apt distraction.

“Kuro.”

It’s a Wednesday when Kenma comes to him on the rooftop with a spare key in hand and mini apple pies to share, chagrin masked over a hotter-than-usual day on the moonscape. Akaashi hasn’t followed him today, unusual considering the amount of times he’d seen their newest delivery boy as of late; and though he wouldn’t call the two of them inseparable, Akaashi had a knack for showing up at the quieter places on the moonscape like the observatory, or the opera boxes at amphitheatre, or Kenma’s house, and Kuroo had marked the rooftop the next stop for a visit. But Kenma’s come alone today, apple pies as an offering, and this is when Kuroo understands that this is no joking matter.

“Kenma,” he says to him back. “Nice to see you.”

“You haven't shown up to collect your traffic report in three days. I caught seven people run red lights.”

Kuroo doesn't catch the last part, finicking with the plastic toys on the roof ledge. He decides he isn't hungry enough to have pie.

“Another committed first degree murder,” Kenma continues.

Kuroo perks up at this before acknowledging the ruse, apologetic by the sigh. “Good one,” he says, and Kenma joins him in a crouch by the zoo animals.

“Kuro,” Kenma just calls again.

Kuroo smiles. “Yes, Kenma?” he asks right back.

“I came here to save you the trouble.”

“Of what?”

“Of Lev throwing you another surprise party,” Kenma tells him quite plainly, still partially distracted by Kuroo’s trinket collection. “In five minutes, he's going to send an emergency flare into the sky for you from the outer limits.”

“Great.” Kuroo rolls his eyes, chin tipped up to the sky. “How many times have I told him not to set off those flares without having an actual reason?” From there, he trails off into thoughts about keeping him as a delivery boy forever, but that'd be wrong, because he really did mean well, but—

“Kuro,” Kenma starts once more. “You're drifting off again.”

“Sorry.”

“Anyway,” Kenma starts again. “I think you should go when he fires them.”

Kuroo frowns back at him. “I'm not exactly in a party mood, Kenma. Can't you tell him I'm sick or something?”

“I don't think so,” Kenma answers.

“And why not?”

At this, Kenma turns up with the tilt of his head, jabbing Kuroo with the paw of a plastic cat.

“Because the team would like to see you, Kuro,” he says, a simple enough reason, a voice, unbothered; but Kuroo understands the gravity of it at once—you've been moping around too much, they all tell him by apple pie offerings and guerilla surprise parties, and he can only stand up to say, all right, all right, I’m here now.

And just like Kenma said, the flare goes up to meet the sky, frantic in ascension. It breaks into bloom, disappearing amongst the clouds like it’d never graced the moonscape in the first place, and Kuroo pretends he doesn’t see Bokuto in the drift of it.

 

 

/

 

 

When Kuroo arrives at the outer limits, beloved bike on its last leg, a whole team comes to greet him, gift boxes in hand and a cake for good measure. Lev comes up to him first with it, chocolate cream on his face, and declares this a good sort of day: “because it seems you've been having a few bad ones,” he says, and everyone can't help but nod along. At this, Kuroo just takes a swipe of frosting and a raspberry for the taste.

“What are all the boxes for?” he asks next, peering down at each one, noting the difference in each, all hastily wrapped and taped.

From there, Shibayama steps up. “A-ah, you see,” he starts, “Lev told us about, um, Bokuto-san and weren't sure how to cheer you up, and Inuoka’s a master at reading terrible handwriting you know, like the really bad sort, and a found a few with your name on them all over the warehouse and—”

“We all decided to send you off with them!” Lev shouts.

“Send me off?” Kuroo asks back.

From there, he feels someone tap his back. When he turns, Akaashi’s standing there with Kenma, envelope in hand, fingertips red at the very edges.

“I've just finished tracking Bokuto-san’s whereabouts,” Akaashi tells him. “It was hard at first, seeing that he hates staying still, but it seems he's landed himself on the diamond planet.”

Kuroo shakes his head, taking a deep breath. He should know by now that Bokuto wouldn't be the type to die so easily. “That's great for him, but—”

“Kuro,” Kenma interrupts.

“Kenma,” Kuroo calls back, before looking up at the entire team; to Yaku and Kai, to Fukunaga and Tora, to Shibayama, to Inuoka, to Lev. “Everyone,” he revises, when old man Nekomata, of all people, comes rolling out onto the plains with a brand new ship, ready to go.

“Go,” Kenma says, Akaashi still offering an envelope next to him. “Go see him,” he continues, and Kuroo takes the directions into his care.

“But—” Kuroo starts. “I can't just leave.”

“Hey, now,” Yaku shouts back. “What kind of team do you think we’ve put together, huh? Such little faith.”

Lev laughs. “We can handle ourselves here! Promise!”

“Just be back within a week,” Kenma revises. “Or else Lev really might burn the city down.”

“Hey!”

From there, Kuroo eyes the ship, then the rest of his crew, one foot already off the moon. He sees the delivery boys, right on the verge of better and brighter things, the seniors with cool heads and hot heads and the insistence to keep going either way; he sees Kenma, hair tied back with link of fingers grazing Akaashi’s, proud on the small insistence that they might watch this place together.

And this is when Kuroo thinks the district has always been in good hands. From there he looks down at the envelope in his own, breaks the seal in good faith, and grins at the thought of closing the gap between unwavering moon and rogue planet.

 

 

/

 

 

 

[PLAYBACK 1369]

subject: only for you to hear, ii

You know, I've been thinking.

What if we just called it a matter of long distance?

What if we could be together, you in one place, and I, in another?

Just a thought.

Let's see if I survive this, first.

 

 

/

 

 

 

If a crash was the price for lying, then Kuroo might accept his fate. Because if he were to die, right here, and right now, at least he wouldn't have had to admit to the vicious little want: that he'd thought about going with him many times, and in many ways. That for all the times he ever wondered what it'd be like to keep him in the pink light district, he'd sought after stepping off the moon, too.

This is the thought he has when the ship alarm sounds for mayhem, a blinking red like rose over a smoking console. It taunts him into absolute truth, and the truth of the matter was, he'd thought about going with Bokuto many times. Past the moon, past the galaxy, and into the ever-expanding universe. Because if there was something about teenage talk and the way he thought the world might end at seventeen, there was also some senseless, far-flung hope that it wouldn't. From there, he'd run, and imagine seeing it all with him.

Hurdling into the atmosphere, towards some diamond planet he's never dreamt of going to, Kuroo might admit to other things now, too: that he was probably never cut out for space travel in the first place, and that he missed the moonscape dearly. But he'd longed for it in the language of ifs—if he were to die right here, and right now, who would sanction those new roads? Those new danchi clusters? The cathedrals?

If he were to die, would the moonscape miss him? Maybe not, he thinks, because cities always had a way of getting on, but Kuroo figures he had too much work to do there anyway, and he it’d be a shame, to be away for too long.

Thoughts like this pass him in a matter of milliseconds, and he recalls a life he's lived so far. He feels his ship burn up around him, but those little milestones remain: growing up on some other moon, and meeting Kenma there, moving to the pink light district and becoming a delivery boy at fifteen. He sees Bokuto two years later, right on the cusp of something great. You and I are made for different paths, he thinks, and that's okay. The roads diverge from there.

“Hey, Bokuto,” Kuroo speaks into the emergency intercom. “Are you out there?”

No one answers, and he wonders if he's gone too far this time. When he meets a different sky on entry, Bokuto’s sky, all clear and blue, Kuroo declares the plausibility of crossed paths, anyway. The universe had to be small enough for that. May you always come crashing into my life, again, he even muses, pressed against the glass as potential last words. And may I always crash into you.

(And this is what he does, impact a dull thud rather than thunder, or boom. He thinks he might hear Bokuto in the whir of it, “Kuroo, Kuroo,” like he'd said to him on the moon.)

 

“Hey now, you’re not going to die that easily, right?”

 

Amidst the sparking engines and rising flames, Kuroo wakes up against the motherboard, head in immense ache. The ship of his—or Tora’s, he should say—sounds for the evacuation, a last call, a warning, to make it away unscathed. You're not going to make it, if you stay. Kuroo takes no chances with this, grabs a racing jacket from the seat, and makes a mad dash across down diamond planet hills. The ship combusts shortly after, leaving no trace.

Ahead of him, the slopes threaten to swallow him into the valleys, wildflowers poking out of thistles to greet him. This was a cliffside country, it seemed, with a million abrupt edges and the soaring mountains up ahead. Off heavy branches, the birds take flight and land as they please, while the trees sway but don’t uproot from the ever-changing winds.

“Kuroo,” the voice calls again, down the way. “Kuroo,” it challenges, and Kuroo cannot help but fall prey to the taunt. He sprints towards it, past all the soot in his lungs, the frazzle in his brain; “Kuroo” remains, when worlds keep shifting and he’s not sure where he might find Bokuto again.

At this, Kuroo keeps running. A new world bombards him; all in full technicolor, all in natural wonder, air so thin he might as well be lifted away. None of this deters him. He protests with kicked heels instead, a deep breath, with chin tipped back towards the empty diamond plains.

“Hey, Kuroo, are you there?”

Sitting atop a familiar winged cruiser, top down with back to Kuroo but not completely, Bokuto turns, intercom dropped from an open mouth.

“Yeah,” Kuroo breathes in, so light-headed he might faint. “I am.”

Bokuto immediately spreads into a smile, rid of all doubt.

 

Notes:

at @sixthmoons (i'm suddenly remembering why i chose this handle lmao)