Chapter Text
“He—oh! Oh, uh… wow. Hi, Tsukki.”
It’s only a brief flicker of the spectrum of human expression, but Kei watches Tadashi’s face shift in real time. It starts with his usual easy, good-natured smile faltering into open shock, before shifting into something far less innocent.
Kei swears he can feel the heat in Tadashi’s gaze as it travels slowly down his body with an intensity that is wholly unwelcome. Tadashi traps his bottom lip between his teeth, worrying it plump and red before his eyes trail back up to meet his face once again.
Kei doesn’t miss the faint blush spreading across his best friend’s cheeks either, a wash of pink settling over those familiar freckles.
It’s deeply irritating and highly disturbing.
He’s never seen his best friend’s eyes darken like that before; there’s a hunger there that makes Kei feel slightly nauseous.
“Stop,” Kei says, disgusted.
Tadashi immediately averts his gaze, snapping his head to the side. The guilt is written all over his face.
“Sorry, Tsukki!” Tadashi says, rubbing the back of his neck sheepishly as he squeezes his eyes shut, like he’s trying to forget the fact that he just shamelessly checked out his childhood best friend. “When you called… I seriously thought, well, I thought you were joking.”
Despite that being the stupidest thing Kei has heard in the past hour, he doesn’t scoff. Not because the comment doesn’t deserve one, but because his best friend is still standing outside his apartment and the front door is wide open.
It’s far too compromising. And Kei is the one exposed—frozen on the threshold, painfully aware of how visible he is. Anyone could walk past. Anyone could glance down the hall and see straight in.
And no one can see him, not like this.
“Shut up, Yamaguchi,” Kei snaps under his breath, biting back the scoff that threatens to slip out. He seizes the thick sleeve of Tadashi’s worn sweatshirt and drags him inside.
“Close the door.” Kei adds, letting go once Tadashi is fully past the threshold of the door.
Tadashi turns to do so, but he’s too slow for Kei. So Kei juts his arm out and he pushes it shut himself with a firm click. He wants to slam it for emphasis, but he doesn’t want to deal with the nosy old lady next door asking him about it tomorrow.
“Sorry, Tsukki!”
They then move quietly through the entryway, past the narrow kitchen and into the main living space beyond. Kei closes the door between the kitchen and the main space of his home, sealing them deep inside his tiny, narrow apartment.
Tadashi drops to the floor with a quiet thud, shrugging off his backpack. He leans back on his palms and stretches his legs out in an easy sprawl—entirely too relaxed for someone responding to a crisis.
“So,” he says, tilting his head up at Kei, “what’s your plan?”
This time, Kei does scoff.
“I’m going to fuck Kuroo-san, obviously.”
—
“Kei-chan,” Tetsurou says, and just like that, Kei’s heart launches into a full Olympic-level gymnastics routine.
It’s a routine he should be well accustomed to by now. His heart has been performing it for years with Uchimura-levels of commitment. Flipping, spinning, hurdling into the air with a difficulty score that will surely win the judges’ favor.
“You look nice today. Did you cut your hair?”
Now his heart isn’t doing gymnastics; it’s swan-diving out of a plane without a parachute, because apparently we’ve moved on to a more extreme sport.
There’s no tandem instructor and no safety briefing. Just terminal velocity courtesy of Kuroo Tetsurou, workplace senpai, part-time volleyball coach, and full-time hazard to Kei’s blood pressure.
It’s Monday morning, and he needs to get a fucking grip.
But Kei is, if nothing else, a virtuoso of self-denial. He scowls so deeply he can feel his brow cast a dark shadow over his face; even as heat creeps up his neck and pools beneath his stiff, over-starched collar.
He turns back to his monitor at his desk.
“Kuroo-san,” he drawls, tone simmering somewhere between bored and annoyed, the perfect temperature for dealing with someone who feasts on agitation as regularly as Tetsurou, “don’t you have a meeting to prepare for?”
Tetsurou laughs and then, because the universe has a sense of humor and Kei is its favorite punchline, there’s a hand in his hair.
Rough fingers rake through his freshly cut curls, mussing what he had carefully styled just that morning. Tetsurou’s knuckles brush his scalp, tug just enough to sting, and Kei has to lock his jaw to keep from making a sound that would absolutely not be appropriate for open-plan office acoustics.
The pull sends a sharp, electric line down his spine, an unwelcome reminder of the extremely unprofessional fantasies starring one Kuroo Tetsurou (and significantly fewer layers of clothing).
Kei tightens his grip on his mouse and stares at his screen as if it has offended him, relieved and silently grieving the loss of his senpai’s touch all at once as Tetsurou’s hand pulls back.
Kei sighs, utterly defeated.
This is just how life works when you’re catastrophically in love with your straight coworker.
Yes, straight. Not everyone can be born flawless, evidently.
“I’m calling HR the next time you touch me.”
“You’re not cute at all. Has anyone ever told you that?”
Kei lets a smirk tug at his mouth, calibrated to look unimpressed. Internally, he is staging his own funeral. Cause of death: sustained exposure to Kuroo Tetsurou.
None of this is cardiologist-approved. If competitive emotional suppression were an Olympic event, Kei would be standing above Uchimura Kohei on the podium, gold medal glinting, national anthem swelling as he accepts recognition for his groundbreaking achievement in “Not Losing His Mind Around His Office Crush.”
“I don’t think being ‘cute’ was a requirement for this job, Kuroo-san.” Kei replies, eyes never leaving his screen. The comeback is weak, and he knows it because Tetsurou lets out a rough laugh in response, abandoning the conversation entirely.
Kei opens a new tab, opens his email, and then immediately regrets being literate. Thirty-two unread messages. Administrative work is proof that the universe lacks mercy.
There’s the distinct shuffle of fabric and the creak of a worn office chair as Kuroo drops into the seat beside him. He’s close enough that Kei can feel the faint warmth radiating off him; it's far too comforting to be, well, comfortable.
And maybe that’s the real problem. He’s convinced he’s the first person in history to contract lovesickness through osmosis.
Apparently, sitting next to Kuroo Tetsurou for nearly three years is enough to permanently alter a person’s chemistry.
Three years of shared airspace. Shared deadlines. Shared printer malfunctions. Work trips. Hours-long meetings where they sit shoulder to shoulder, trading covert smirks and glances and sending each other texts under the table while someone drones on about quarterly projections.
Three years of Kei pretending that his heart doesn’t attempt recreational skydiving every time their elbows brush.
The gods, if they exist, are not subtle. They engineered this seating arrangement personally. “Let’s see how long he lasts,” they probably said, placing Kuroo directly to Kei’s right like a perfectly carved marble siren—luminous and convincingly lifelike, yet not actually alive. Close enough to admire the detail. Close enough to imagine warmth beneath the surface.
Only to remember it’s stone.
Kuroo Tetsurou is straight. Kei has no chance in hell of breaking that barrier.
But the gods don’t care about that. And they were definitely the ones who did not provide a tandem instructor for his heart.
Just so when his heart inevitably throws itself off the cliff of unrequited love, it will do so alone—no parachute, no safety harness, just the sound of Kuroo’s breathing far too close to his ear.
Wait. Actually, that isn’t normal. Kuroo’s breathing isn’t usually audible like this.
Kei turns—
and nearly headbutts him.
Tetsurou is leaning in so far that the tip of his nose is only millimeters away from being pressed into the crown of Kei’s head. His fringe brushes lightly against Kei’s temple, and the warmth of his breath seeps through, down to his scalp. He then inhales, as if he has all the time in the world and their next meeting is not in exactly twenty-three minutes.
“Wow, you smell really good.”
The words are delivered casually, almost lazily, but the closeness makes them land somewhere far more dangerous. Kei feels a faint rush of dizziness; he really isn’t sure how he hasn’t passed out yet.
His grip tightens imperceptibly on his mouse. The office hum continues around them—keyboards clicking, phones vibrating, someone coughing—oblivious to the fact that Kei’s circulatory system is actively malfunctioning.
Tetsurou finally leans back after what feels like an eternity, straightening in his chair as if he has merely inspected an interesting document.
“You've gotta tell me what shampoo you use.”
Kei stares at him for a beat longer than necessary. Kuroo looks entirely unbothered, chin propped loosely in his palm, mouth curved in that faintly amused way it always is.
Kei says nothing. Too stunned to deal with what is happening. Again, it’s Monday morning. Dealing with this nonsense feels premature for this early in the day and week.
He turns back to his computer. He clicks open the next unread email. The screen blurs for half a second before snapping back into focus. He keeps his posture straight, shoulders squared, expression neutral.
Internally, he is already halfway through a formal complaint to the deities responsible for this whole mess in the first place—deities that clearly do not prioritize employee wellness.
—
Tuesday offers no relief.
Kei makes it through the morning by taking all his anger out on a spreadsheet and avoiding eye contact with every single coworker who is unfortunate enough to cross paths with him. It’s for their safety; if Kei has to look anyone in the face right now, he’ll erupt.
Lunch, however, leaves him wide open to attack. Tetsurou, of course, sits beside him in the break room as though that seat has been permanently assigned.
He smells faintly of vanilla and something else underneath, something unmistakably musky that lingers in the air between them and makes Kei irrationally aware of his own pulse.
Kei focuses on his sandwich with the intensity of a man defusing a bomb. He considers, briefly, whether it would be possible to swallow the entire thing in one bite and spare himself the ordeal. Maybe he’d even choke and simply perish right then and there.
There is more dignity in choking down a dry egg sandwich in a fluorescent corporate lunchroom than in having a crush on Kuroo, of all people, after all.
Across from them, Futakuchi and Oikawa are discussing something under their breath, most likely gossiping. Kei hears none of it.
He’s barely registered a single word Tetsurou has said in the past ten minutes, too far inside his own head to stay present during what is supposed to be his break—from everyone.
“And,” Tetsurou says, reaching into his bag with unnecessary ceremony, “I brought you something.”
He sets a small gift bag on the table in front of Kei.
Kei reaches for it immediately, opening it before he can stop himself. It’s rude, and he knows he should wait. He should open it later, privately. But he has a strong suspicion it’s dessert, and Kuroo always insists on watching him open whatever he brings in front of him, anyway.
Kei pushes aside the tissue paper and finds a smaller bag inside—plastic, bright yellow, with a drawing of a lemon printed on the front. The twist ties are green and shaped like little leaves.
Inside are two neatly packaged mini lemon cakes from Kuroo’s recent work trip to Hiroshima.
He shouldn’t feel this flattered. It’s a regional gift from a train station souvenir kiosk—generic, convenient, the thing people grab last minute when they don’t have time and they’re not thinking about you but want you to think they are thinking of you.
But…
“You said you liked lemon,” Tetsurou says, casual as ever, like it’s nothing.
Like it isn’t proof that he remembers offhand comments Kei made months ago and filed them away somewhere safe.
Kei stares at the cake. Then at Tetsurou. Then back at the cake.
“I like strawberry more. I said lemon is passable in a pinch,” he says dryly.
Tetsurou grins. “You’re welcome.”
Kei takes a bite, teeth cutting through a white sugar glaze and into a shockingly citrusy center.
It’s soft and bright and unfairly good.
—
Wednesday is the worst day by far.
It happens in the late afternoon when everyone is slightly irritable and pretending not to be tired. Kei rounds the corner of his desk too quickly, mind preoccupied with a looming deadline, and his foot catches on the leg of a chair someone neglected to push in.
There is a sharp, sickening lurch forward.
For one suspended second, he feels the drop—his center-of-gravity tipping, balance gone, palms bracing for impact.
And then there are hands on him. Strong, steady ones that Kei has definitely not been dreaming about for the past three years nearly every night, imagining them all over his body, pulling his pants down, slipping inside …
One arm wraps around his waist, firm enough to stop his fall entirely; the other steadies his shoulder. His back collides not with the floor but with the solid warmth of Tetsurou’s chest.
“Whoa,” Tetsurou says near his ear, closer than it should be in a shared office environment. “Careful.”
Kei freezes.
Tetsurou’s hand is splayed against his waist, fingers curved slightly into the fabric of his shirt, thumb resting just above his hip. The grip is secure, almost possessive in its tightness. Close enough that Kei can feel the heat of his palm through thin cotton.
For a moment, neither of them moves.
Then Tetsurou adjusts his hold; pulling him upright slowly instead of letting go.
“You okay?” he asks.
Kei is suddenly acutely aware that he is still standing inside the circle of Kuroo’s arms.
Kei fails to suppress the sound that escapes him. It comes out somewhere between a cough and a choke, an undignified sputter that does absolutely nothing to preserve his reputation as the cool, objective office ice prince.
“I’m fine,” he manages, which is objectively untrue, and Kei has the sneaking suspicious that Tetsurou knows it too.
He’s smug like that, and Kei is certain he gets off on it—strutting around with that self-assured grin, fully aware of the effect he has and enjoying every second of it.
Kei would judge him more for it if he weren’t just as guilty of getting off on it too.
Kei steps forward too quickly, untangling himself from the arm around his waist. The absence of contact is immediate and jarring, but he does not look back. He cannot look back.
He makes it to his desk like an old woman fleeing from shoplifting at the grocery store for the first time—sweaty, flustered, and weirdly excited—and drops into his chair. The screen in front of him blurs as he wakes it with a sharp tap of the mouse.
“You’re welcome!” Tetsurou calls from somewhere across the office.
Kei doesn’t look up. He can hear the smirk in Tetsurou’s voice, can feel the curious glances from their coworkers settling on him. The humiliation burns hot, and for a fleeting second he wonders why he doesn’t just stand up and walk out.
That night, Kei deals with it the way he always does: efficiently and with zero dignity.
He shoves his face into his pillow and tries to stay quiet. But it does not go well. Every time he closes his eyes, it’s Kuroo’s hand at his waist, Kuroo’s breath in his hair, Kuroo’s voice low by his ear.
By the end, his grip is far too tight, and the sound he makes as he spills all over his sheets definitely exceeds acceptable volume for the middle of the night in a shitty apartment with paper-thin walls.
He lies there afterward, staring at the ceiling, feeling marginally less tense and significantly more pathetic.
In the morning, as he’s locking his door on his way out, his neighbor, a ninety-year-old woman who is far too nosy for her own good, pokes her head out from her open door.
Had she been waiting for him? God, he really needed to move.
“Did you get a cat?”
Kei raises a brow. “No?”
“Oh. I thought I heard yowling last night. Must’ve been a stray from outside.”
—
By Thursday, Kei is fairly certain he has lost his mind.
It’s nearly ten at night. He should be on the train home, jammed between other irritable commuters and pretending not to exist.
Instead, he is standing on a dimly lit side street in front of a witch’s shop.
Because yes, it’s come to this.
The store looks as if it were dropped there by mistake and then refused to leave; completely out of place in the business district in which it sits, not unlike a pile of wood wedged between tall gray office buildings that rise in flat, impersonal slabs of concrete and glass.
The lettering on the sign above the door is chipped and unreadable, flakes of paint curling away from the wood. If he hadn’t checked the address on Google Maps three separate times, he might have assumed the place was abandoned.
The sign itself hangs crooked. It tilts at the same angle as the storefront, which sits unevenly along the slope of the hill. The slant looks intentional, as if the building itself has decided to lean into its own strangeness.
He paces in a tight line along the storefront, the pavement uneven beneath his dress shoes. His work shoes pinch at the toes, made worse by the stupidly thin socks he wore this morning without anticipating an existential crisis detour. Each step rubs wrong. Each turn is sharp and irritating.
It only adds to the thick fog of irritation simmering beneath the surface of his psyche.
What he is about to do is so deeply humiliating, so catastrophically unhinged, that even he—who has spent three years in love with his straight coworker—can barely tolerate himself right now.
If anyone from work sees him, he will simply walk into traffic.
He stops pacing and stares at the door, old and worn from weather and perhaps the occasional attack from a disgruntled customer (witch businesses are targeted constantly; it feels like there isn’t a single week without some incident making the news).
He grits his teeth so hard his jaw aches.
Am I really going to do this?
He scoffs under his breath, a self-directed reprimand for even entertaining the question—for what must be the tenth time by now.
Because there is only one answer, and it arrives in the form of Kuroo’s hands on his waist.
He sighs again and twists his torso, retracing his steps along the same short stretch of pavement. Back and forth, back and forth, pacing the invisible track his anxiety has worn into the ground in front of the shop.
It had been years since he had last consulted a witch. Since highschool.
Back then, his priorities had been simpler. He had wanted to take his team to nationals so badly it had bordered on delusion. He’d walked into a narrow storefront that smelled of incense and old paper and asked, with complete sincerity, for protection from injury.
The witch—a tired, sharp-eyed middle-aged woman with permanent lines etched between her brows—had stared at him for a long moment before sighing.
“I can’t do that, bouya,” she had said. “It’s cheating.”
Kei had blinked at her. The thought genuinely had not occurred to him. To him, it had simply been preparation, risk management.
She had waved him off, disappeared into a back room cluttered with jars and stringed charms, and returned with a small tin of tea.
“This will help you sleep,” she’d said. “You’ll practice better in the morning if you’re not exhausted. Go home, sleep.”
And that had been it.
No bending of fate. Just regulated, disappointingly ethical magic.
In hindsight, she had been a good witch.
Which is precisely why Kei had not returned to her.
Instead, he had spent his entire lunch break yesterday scrolling through obscure forums and glitchy, poorly formatted websites, filtering out obvious scams and aggressively wholesome practitioners. He had searched for keywords like flexible and discreet. He had followed a chain of increasingly questionable recommendations until one name kept resurfacing—Akaashi Keiji.
Apparently, according to the ever-reliable sages of obscure internet forums, if anyone can help Kei, it’s him.
Kei takes one last shaky breath and steps inside.
The door, heavy and broad as it looks, swings open with almost no resistance, clearly aided by some sort of false wind that picks up and then rises at his back, nudging him forward, as if ushering him in.
It’s annoying him, how stereotypically magical it feels already.
“Sorry for the intrusion,” he says automatically. He is technically a customer, but it feels appropriate. Something about the space seems to demand formality, respect.
The floorboards creak under his weight as he moves farther in, each step echoing faintly. His gaze travels slowly across the room.
It’s cramped—much smaller than the exterior suggests. It has the unmistakable atmosphere of a family business that’s been passed down: worn counters, retro light fixtures, the quiet lack of any real branding. It goes along with the little Kei knows about witches. Magic, like most trades, is usually inherited.
Shelves line every wall, sagging slightly under the weight of their contents. Several narrow display tables crowd the center of the shop. Kei glances over them without touching.
Bundles of dried herbs tied with twine. Dark glass bottles filled with opaque liquids. Powders. Twisted roots. Things suspended in oil.
Charms dangle in the window beside bundles of dried herbs, their brittle leaves casting thin, spindly shadows under the shop light. Among them hangs something white—bleached pale like seashells, but curved and jointed in a way that feels far too… anatomical.
Kei looks away quickly, swallowing down a prickle of unease.
“What can I do for you today?”
Kei startles at the sound of a voice behind him. He turns, eyes widening as they land on a man standing behind the counter.
The first thing he notices is the color of his eyes—blue like the Pacific at its deepest, somber and heavy. In the dim light they look almost black, until he shifts slightly and the overhead lamp catches them, revealing the blue current beneath.
Perched on his shoulder is an owl. Its grey feathers lie dense, its body compact but steady. Its eyes are a piercing yellow, nearly as vivid as the witch’s blue, unblinking as they fix on Kei.
Kei feels immediately embarrassed, though he can’t justify why at first. He’s a customer. He walked into a shop. He intends to request a service. There is nothing illegal about that, nothing inherently shameful.
And yet the way those two pairs of eyes hold him in place makes something tight pressurize low in his stomach. It’s unsettling; the way they seem not just to look at him, but through him. A thin wire, slicing cleanly through the flimsy clay of his rationalizations and exposing the real reason he’s standing here.
He clears his throat, pressing his knuckles lightly to his lips—thumb and forefinger brushing there for a brief second—before dropping his hand back to his side.
“Do you offer physical transformation services? Temporary would be preferable.”