umisabaku:

Sometimes
Kenma feels like glass right before shattering.

Stress, some call it, or anxiety. Not a panic
attack (he knows what those feel like) but a bit like not breathing even though air
is still flowing and is it possible to drown on land he wonders. Can
you run out of oxygen even when breathing.

It’s people—sometimes
people are too much. Or it’s everything all at once. Because if it’s one thing
then it’s a million things all piled on top and so he retreats. He flees when
he can to a place where there are no people and he takes out a game and he
plays that game and he’s not playing so much as putting back a piece of himself
that somehow fell out along the way. Kenma has lost Kenma and he doesn’t
know where to find him. It’s not the game that’s important. (But the act—the
retreat, the remove, the playing. He doesn’t need the game he needs a process
that is solely his own.)

Somewhere in the
playing, oxygen returns. The glass that felt so fragile feels less like it’s
about to break. And he can be Kenma again; he can be quiet, and observant, and
he can interact with people, and everything can be fine.

What is it like, he wonders. What is it like not to be
this way.

But. He can take care
of himself. He has ways to cope, and he knows that’s more than some people ever
get.

And when the day is
done—school, volleyball practice, people and people and people, he can go home.
Sometimes that means crawling under the blankets and recharging, and sometimes
that means Kuroo.

When no one can see
them, Kuroo wraps his arms around Kenma, and sometimes Kenma continues to play
his game or read a book or do his homework, but sometimes he just leans in and
breathes in Kuroo’s air and all the pieces of Kenma that feel so fragile are
knit back together in the warmth of Kuroo’s body.

Kuroo doesn’t say
anything most times—and that’s the nicest thing about Kuroo, he understands the
value of silence—but sometimes, like today, he’ll murmur just nonsense things
that are gentle to hear.

“You’re
amazing, Kenma, you’re so amazing and so strong and incredible. I love you and
I love you.”

And somehow through
all that Kenma finds himself again.

A/N: *sobs* I have
been super stressed out lately, and needed to write some incredibly
self-indulgent stress-reliever self-care short fic with my favorite introvert.